Editors’ Blog

“Even with your adversaries, I do think that you have to have the capacity to put yourself in their shoes,” Barack Obama told The New York Times in 2015 in explaining his overture to Iran. The Biden administration needs to do this in its negotiations over Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) introduced a resolution today, asking the House to kick Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) off her committee assignments for repeatedly and brazenly attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) with racist and hateful anti-Muslim remarks.

It’s the culmination of weeks of frustration for Omar and fellow progressives, as congressional leadership does next to nothing to discipline the far-right Boebert for making racist jokes about Omar, who is a Muslim, and insinuating that the Minnesota Democrat’s religion somehow makes her a terrorist.

You’ve probably heard reports that Omicron COVID in South Africa has generally been causing milder forms of the disease. The caution on these reports is that they are early, anecdotal, haven’t given enough time to generate severe outcomes and have been disproportionately among the young. Each of these points remains true. But over the last couple days the data has become sufficiently detailed that it does seem like people presenting with Omicron COVID are relatively less sick than those who presented with Delta at the same point in earlier waves. So, definitely still too early to say for sure but probably too far along to dismiss it as merely anecdotal or just an artifact of distorted early data.

So doesn’t that suggest that Omicron is a milder version of COVID? Here’s why it doesn’t.

Earlier I flagged two studies on Omicron vaccine evasion which were released last night. Now we have an additional study conducted under the auspices of PFIZER/BIONTECH which appear to show complementary results. I say ‘complementary’ because they test a different question but the results appear broadly consistent with those other two studies. I’m told that this study was done in the BioNtech labs and looked at a pseudo-virus version of Omicron against samples from people who received two doses and three doses.

The gist is that protection against Omicron goes down a lot if you’ve just had two doses. But with three doses it’s much higher. The key line is this: “According to the companies’ preliminary data, a third dose provides a similar level of neutralizing antibodies to Omicron as is observed after two doses against wild-type and other variants that emerged before Omicron.”

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You’ve probably been hearing that we’re waiting on the first lab studies of the Omicron variant’s transmissibility and immune evasion. Yesterday evening two of the first of those studies came out. Given the urgency of the situation the lead researchers released details immediately on Twitter while also publishing pre-print versions of the data. You can read one of the threads here and the second here.

But he’s also not willing to plant a flag in any particular place.

The once-novel divide between various flanks of the Republican Party during the earliest days of the Trump era was a ripe area of fascination for many in the media, as various scandals forced longtime conservatives to speak out — and coin him or herself a Never-Trumper — or as old guard lawmakers flocked to the faux-populist corners of the party’s once-fringe Trumpian movement. Now that divide has reemerged, as establishment Republicans grapple with the future of their party and pundits hand-wring about how far-right the GOP’s ideology and messaging must go in order to win elections in 2022.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) has tried to have it both ways for some time. And he’s still squirming to this day.

This is probably obvious to many of you. But Donald Trump’s new ‘Truth Social’ media company, formed with a blank check SPAC vehicle, is essentially an open invitation to foreign bribes and payoffs. It’s no surprise the investor list is secret. The one constant in Trump’s business history is that investors get screwed and he walks away unscathed. Given Trump’s political following a social and media venture seems like it could be quite profitable. But most people can succeed with casinos too. Just not Trump. And those were the days of formal investments, prospectuses, business plans, formal commitments. A SPAC is a blank check. Invest now. Find out what you’re investing in later. No one with big money would invest in such an enterprise with the hope of financial returns.

It looks like Donald Trump put his foot down and told Mark Meadows to stop cooperating with the January 6th committee. Is this an effort to get back into Trump’s good graces after the COVID positive test revelation that had Meadows calling his own book “fake news”? Presumably Meadows can now expect an indictment imminently.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lit a fire under some of his colleagues today, stating in a letter to colleagues his ongoing expectation that the Senate will pass the Biden administration’s sweeping Build Back Better package via reconciliation “before Christmas.”