We spent a good chunk of last week covering various school districts in Florida, Texas and elsewhere that are standing up to their governors’ bans on mask policies in schools. The defiance has been interesting to watch play out — most are maintaining their mask policies, despite ongoing threats from the state level.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott just issued an executive order that looks like another escalation of that battle.
JoinWe’ve noted a number of times that we are in a period of great uncertainty about the outlines of the COVID Pandemic. How vaccines are holding up over time and how well they protect against the Delta variant are both uncertain, with limited and contradictory data. Yesterday I noted new data out of Israel which appears to show a dramatic improvement in protection with a third shot. But that scale of improvement rests on other data out of Israel suggesting that effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine had dropped significantly since early this year, especially against infection.
Yesterday the CDC published a new report that is at least directionally in line with Israeli data on vaccine effectiveness against infection, albeit showing a less pronounced drop.
The topline news is that the House select committee on Jan. 6 is targeting the Trump administration in a series of sweeping new records requests as part of its probe. But the more reassuring aspect of this is that they seem to be looking for records beyond the events of Jan. 6 that encompass the entire Big Lie. From our latest piece:
Throwback to simpler times, when I was given the greenlight to spend many a TPM workday covering which Twitter farm animal Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was suing next.
JoinI wanted to revisit the question of COVID vaccine booster shots, or rather third doses of the vaccine which are now being administered in Israel and will be in the United States starting next month. (Those with compromised immune systems have already been approved for third doses in the United States.)
The short version is that initial data out of Israel appears to show dramatically increased protection both against infection and disease from a third dose. But there are at least some questions about the data and what they actually mean.
One thing I’ve been wanting to address over the last week is what remains the background premise for the Afghanistan mission: denying a safe haven to al Qaeda or other similar groups from which to mount attacks on the United States. I have already seen numerous analyses claiming that al Qaeda will soon be setting up shop again under Taliban protection. Sometimes it is necessary to grab hold of a bad argument by the root.
Let me address this at a few levels.
In retrospect – and perhaps at the time – the entire ‘safe haven’ argument was greatly overstated. Let’s take the actual 9/11 attacks as our example. As many note, most of the plotting was done by people who weren’t even in Afghanistan. They were mostly people from the Gulf living in Europe or the United States. At a basic level the whole premise was wrong from the beginning. But this critique misses a non-trivial part of the equation. There’s only so much time in the day. If you’re running an international terror group, time spent on the run is time not spent plotting attacks. Obviously terrorist and guerrilla groups have managed to do both throughout history. But it certainly makes sense and I think is borne out by history that if you have a base of operations which is basically protected and secure that’s an advantage. This is the premise on the strategy of ‘pressure’ wrapped up in aggressive surveillance, drone strikes, throttling access to the international banking system, special ops raids and more. Time spent running is time not spent plotting.
Here’s an update on the definitely failed evacuation and abandonment of everyone who ever worked for us in Afghanistan. According to the White House, 21,600 people were evacuated over the last 24 hours bringing the total number to 58,700. I know a tone of sarcasm is a bit jarring in what is a very serious and dangerous situation. But in addition to a story of great significance and human drama we’re coming off one of the biggest and most revealing press tantrums I’ve ever seen. Yesterday I said I thought we were only days away from pundit-bewailers shifting to taking credit for turning the greatest military debacle in history into a historically successful airlift. But I was wrong: it’s already happening.
If you’re enjoying our coverage of the situation in Afghanistan and the great school-masking war across the American South please consider trying our free, two-week Prime Ad Free (AF) trial. If you end up upgrading to Prime AF it helps support TPM and gives you a much better reading experience.
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On the Sunday shows yesterday and across newspaper editorials you can see repeated claims of a military debacle for the US in Afghanistan, perhaps the worst in decades, perhaps the worst ever. Seriously, look at the quotes. And yet as far as I know not a single member of the US military has died or even been injured in this operation. In fact, it doesn’t appear that a shot has even been fired in anger against them. We don’t judge military victories or defeats by body counts or casualty lists. But surely this figures into the equation. The US withdrew its forces according to plan. It then reoccupied the civilian airport in Kabul. Since last weekend the US military operation at Hamid Karzai International Airport has overseen the evacuation of more than 40,000 people, and it continues at a rapid clip. So about 36 hours of confusion and then a fairly orderly and rapid airlift over the last week.