Editors’ Blog
The Rest of the Story
The Washington Post has written up this story of an Alabama man who needed an ICU bed to treat a cardiac issue and none could be found for him in his home state. His home town hospital in Cullman, Alabama contacted 43 other hospitals in the state but none had room for him. He was eventually airlifted to a hospital in neighboring Mississippi where he died. The story garnered attention because his family included a plea for people to get vaccinated in Ray DeMonia’s obituary.
But there’s one detail about this story – or at least arguable tied to the story – that the Post doesn’t mention. Cullman, Alabama was the site of what the Alabama state GOP billed as the largest political rally in Alabama history just a couple days before DeMonia went to the hospital. The state GOP claimed 50,000 turned out for the rally in Cullman. Few if any seemed to be masked.
Remembering 9/11 Before ‘9/11’
So here we are 20 years later. I saw someone ask a couple days what was your most mundane memory from 9/11. I realized I don’t have any mundane memories from that day. This isn’t to say my day was especially traumatic, especially compared to so many others. I wake up to the TV I had left on to CNN the night before (I was single at the time) and see the first tower on fire and trying to make sense of it. Not in some deep existential sense – I was half asleep. What am I seeing? Then the second tower gets hit. (I’m still not certain if I saw the second tower hit live or a replay from a few moments earlier. I think it was the former but it’s all a jumble.) Then I’m talking to my then girlfriend in her office on Capitol Hill on instant messenger who’s telling me ‘we’re next, we’re next’. Then they get a call to evacuate. My most jarring memory from that day was seeing military vehicles on the streets of Washington, DC, something that seemed simply unimaginable. I don’t remember what kind precisely, some kind of APC, I think. Not being moved from one place to another but on patrol.
In some ways that was the most jarring thing for me. After getting my initial bearings I went outside to make sense of what was happening to report on it. I was still trying to make sense of what any of it meant. I had literally just rolled out of bed, remember. Seeing military vehicles patrolling the streets of the American capital. I understood deeply and intuitively that that meant something terrible and unimaginable had happened.
In the twenty intervening years I’ve become mostly accustomed to seeing national guard troops in fatigues carrying automatic weapons in train stations. If you’re old enough to remember, this was simply unimaginable before 9/11.
Biden’s Vax Mandate is Good Politics In Addition to Good Public Health
President Biden’s new vaccine mandates are not only good public health. They’re good politics. We hear constantly how we’re divided as a country, polarized into two roughly equal camps. On vaccinations though that’s not true. Epidemiological vaccination rates are not the same as electoral vaccination rates. Already an overwhelming percentage of adults are vaccinated. Roughly 65% of Americans over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated and over 75% have had at least one shot. What’s more, the older you are the more likely you are both to be vaccinated and to vote. So if anything that 65%-75% benchmark understates the voting majority of the already vaccinated.
If you’re vaccinated, requirements and mandates don’t seem burdensome. In fact they seem to have widespread support since the vaccinated, who make up the overwhelming majority of the country, are losing patience with the voluntarily unvaccinated who they blame (rightly) for keeping us stuck in the pandemic. Biden spoke for a lot of Americans yesterday when he said: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us, so please do the right thing.”
Where Things Stand: Proud Boys Leader Is Hung Out To Dry 
Ooof, you can’t make this stuff up.
Manchin’s Big Threat
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Joe Manchin’s new bargaining position on the reconciliation package and fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Texas abortion law.
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.
Joe Manchin, DC Insider Culture and the Long Derply Hand of Mark Penn
In yesterday’s episode of the podcast Kate Riga and I were trying to make sense of Joe Manchin’s various feints and positions and un-positions over the last eight months. It’s sort of a parlor game to try to make sense of the motives of people you disagree with or frustrate you. Maybe it’s not that complicated? Maybe the reason they keep doing X is because they want to do X. The fact that you don’t like X doesn’t make it that hard to understand.
Yet there’s something a bit more to it with Manchin. His notional arguments for the ‘strategic pause’ on the President’s agenda doesn’t really add up. He says we need to worry about ‘runaway inflation’ when inflation is lower than it was in the 80s after Paul Volcker had tamed it. He says we need to keep our powder dry in case COVID gets worse and we need more massive relief packages. But actually what’s being discussed is spending over ten years. If COVID turns out to be catastrophically different in a year we could just change the plan. Even diehard inflation hawks like Larry Summers don’t think the spending over a decade is an issue on this front. And none of these things are really different than 6 or 7 weeks ago when Manchin gave all signs that he was at least broadly on board, subject to some hacks and shaves, with the $3.5 trillion package.
Where Things Stand: Jan. 6 Lawyer Who Went AWOL After Possible COVID Infection Reemerges
Scenes from the Culture War in New York State
This isn’t new news. It happened more than a week ago. But I’d missed it. So maybe you did too. The Chief Judge of the New York State court system, Janet DiFiore, announced on August 23rd that court employees would have until September 7th to get vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing.
In response Dennis Quirk, President of the New York State Court Officers Association, published the addresses of DiFiore’s two homes and called for protests outside her homes. He was suspended for doxxing the Chief Judge. But as he pointed out the state can’t suspend him as President of the union.
Where Things Stand: Backlash To Extreme Texas Abortion Law Is At A Slow Burn
The backlash to the new anti-abortion law in Texas is only slowly coalescing, and it remains unclear whether it will manage to put any kind of serious economic or political pressure on the state.
Case in point: the city council in Portland, Oregon is set to vote Wednesday on a measure meant to punish Texas for the ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
So What Was Jason Miller Doing in Brazil?
I have no insight into why arch-Trump toady Jason Miller was stopped and questioned at the airport in Brazil on the way back to the United States. But he and a lot of other US right-wingers were there for something called “CPAC Brazil”, which as the name suggests is a CPAC event held down in Brazil. But given that that event is another example of the Trumpite International, which has US and Brazil as two of its dominant players, it’s important to see the Brazil event – which has been embraced by most all Trumpers – through the prism of what’s happening on the ground in the country.