A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the seeming “punt” of the reconciliation bill and how Democrats can still generate forward momentum.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

TPM Reader TD fled the country under Trump and isn’t coming back anytime soon:

Hi, Josh. I agree with your post. The country’s in a bad way, and Dems generally and Biden specifically need to find a better way to talk about it. I wanted to add my thoughts about where we are, how we got here, and where we’re going.

TPM Reader PT checks in on Manchin, BBB, and the current swoon:

For pretty much the entire time of the Biden Administration legislative activity, I’ve been of the opinion that the whole issue of the BBB was best understood as a kind of culture war. The problem that the Manchin caucus really has with the BBB is that it represents a Democratic Party in which the moderate / conservative / Manchin caucus is not firmly in the driver seat all the time, for all things.

I start with the proviso that we are in a radically better position than we were two years ago. Most of the population is vaccinated. We have experience treating COVID. We have effective antivirals coming online. But this morning in New York City has a feeling of déjà vu. My inbox is filled with a rush of cancellations: school holiday events; a journalists’ drinking get-together that had just restarted after a two year hiatus postponed the morning of; lines outside testing centers snake around the block. It all has the feel of Spring of 2020 when everything was normal and then on a dime it wasn’t.

Let me share a couple more thoughts on boosters.

The UK is currently in a mad dash to get boosters into the arms of as many people as possible. We’re certainly pushing boosters here too. But it’s a singular focus there in a way that is not the case here. That’s the first, second and third part of their strategy basically. They’re advising work from home and universal masking. But basically it’s to buy time for getting boosters in as many arms as possible over the next two to three weeks. They’re deploying the military to set up pop-up clinics, advising hospitals to suspend routine care to focus on booster administration. They have a goal of getting every adult in the country boosted by the end of the month. So really they’re pulling out all the stops.

We have the first study (still un-peer-reviewed) that advances an evidence-based hypothesis for why Omicron COVID may actually produce milder disease. I want to emphasize this is a single study, which has not undergone peer review. The gist is that Omicron was much faster at taking hold in the air passage leading to the lungs but much less efficient in replicating in lung tissue. The surmise is that this makes it much better at jumping from host to host – which is demonstrated by rate of spread in multiple countries – but much less efficient at creating illness once it gets into the lungs.

I don’t really know what it means to “punt” BBB until next year. I’m serious.

We’re going to hear that phrase a lot, with a certain baked-in assumption that it means something. But it’s not like the assurance that I’m going to finish my homework tomorrow, or complete my term paper this weekend, or turn in this client project by the end of next week. There’s no certainty that this will ever get done.

NBC sparked a flurry of discussion a couple hours ago when it reported that Democrats were “shelving” the Build Back Better bill and switching to passing voting rights legislation.

So many people involved in the “voter fraud” sham are simply stone cold liars or the types who play act believing things with some winks and nods to themselves. But the movement also has lots of people who genuinely believe. And now one of them has been indicted for running a guy off the road and putting a gun to his head back in October 2020.

Mark Aguirre is a former Houston PD captain who was hired by a straight-out-of-central-casting “conservative activist” named Steven Hotze. They were operating as what Aguirre identified to police as the “Liberty Center,” which seems to have been a self-styled private Big Lie-centered investigation. (It’s full legal name is The Liberty Center for God and Country, because of course it is.)

I’m sorry I’ve done less posting than usual over the last week or so. I’ve been trying to put together my ideas about the last 5 or 6 years and the way America often today seems embattled and besieged in a global system and media landscape that she herself largely created. How did we get here from the breezy global primary America enjoyed in the 1990s? What broad lessons can we draw or what connections can we make connecting our current moment to the beginning of our era in 1989, 1990 and 1991?

It’s a challenging topic in itself. But it’s also challenging for me because my writing muscles aren’t really trained for writing at length. TPM has given me a lot of practice writing a rapid fire thousand words or even closer to two thousand. I can do it multiple times a day if the need arises. But much over that length is where writing shifts from the dynamics of a sprint to something more like distance or endurance running. There’s more pacing involved, more strategy and organization than just run absolutely as fast as you can until the finish line. Anyway, it’s giving me a chance to flex some of these muscles. So I’ll report back when I can.