A NATO official tells Reuters that 18,000 people have been evacuated from Kabul since the Taliban took over the city on Sunday. Yesterday Axios reported that the US has aircraft capacity to airlift 5,000-9,000 people out of the country per day, that 7,000 had been flown out since Sunday and that 2,000 of that number had been in the previous 24 hours.
Every day is a good day to try out a two-week free trial of Prime Ad Free (AF). But today is an especially good day. Just click here to give it a test drive – super easy, free, no obligation. We’re hoping to get to 700 members trying the trial by the end of today – as of this morning we’re at 640.
Being vaccinated is now a condition of employment in all Washington state schools. And that includes public, charter and private.
Join
In this video from early Tuesday morning, retrieved from Facebook by TPM, Capitol bomb suspect Ray Roseberry refers to himself and those like him as the “last generation” willing to stand up for America. He then says that Trump will be reinstated as President once Joe Biden is driven from office and Democrats are imprisoned. He says Trump will then pardon everyone and he hopes for a pardon himself.
Read More
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss a group of House centrists trying to decouple the infrastructure bills, the start of the redistricting process and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
For the last hour I’ve been watching videos created by the suspect in the Capitol bomb threat situation. He explicitly references the fall of Kabul in an August 16th video, claims Joe Biden has given US military hardware to the Taliban.
In another video from early on August 16th he says that once Biden is driven from office, Trump will become President again. He says he expects Trump, once he becomes President again, will pardon him – presumably for whatever crime he commits coming to Washington.
“It’s time to quit Biden.”
Repeatedly refers to himself and those like him as “the last generation”. He appears to have originally planned something for Labor Day. He references having people rendezvous at a local park the Friday before Labor Day before heading north to Washington, DC.
In a video from last Tuesday night, the suspect said it would be his last video until Labor Day weekend. But in a video early this morning he seems to suggest that over night he decided to move up his schedule.
More to come.
New data out of Israel appears to suggest substantial increased protection after a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine. I say ‘appears’ because like a lot of the real-time information emerging out of Israel it’s made up of current statistics rather than a study per se. And at least in the news accounts one has to read between the lines since some points are not stated explicitly.
The National Association of Secretaries of State is trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Join
Over the last few days I’ve been collecting information and thinking through a few more posts on the progress of the Delta-driven 4th COVID wave. One of the conclusions I’ve been ruminating on is that the CDC has been doing a pretty good job in 2021 on what the CDC is designed to do. (It is important to remember, and bewildering to remember, that the CDC actually wasn’t posting COVID case, testing or mortality data through 2020. It fell to a DIY journo collaborative.) But it’s clear that we need an entity that is capable of and empowered to do a lot more. In the current moment there is just a lot of data about the current shape of the pandemic that we simply do not have. We do have that data, or a lot of it, for the UK and Israel because they have centralized health care systems that have all the data. We will come back to that. But for the moment I wanted to flag for your attention this week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from the CDC. It contains three new studies which go directly to the most critical questions we’re facing.
A sign of the times update. Politico Influence, Politico’s newsletter on the lobbying industry, is reporting that the US Chamber of Commerce is now requiring proof of vaccination for anyone who enters their DC offices. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable are also instituting vaccine mandates.