Editors’ Blog

Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci has a good column this morning running through a number of key Omicron related pandemic issues, especially the continuing poor messaging and guidance on rapid tests and masks. This is more detail and commentary on issues we’ve discussed – how do you know which mask is best to use, shouldn’t we be using rapid antigen tests to tailor shorter isolation periods, how is it that we’re still facing widespread test shortages two years into this?

Thanks to Peter Navarro’s new memoir, we now have a first-person account of just how President Trump and his closest friends planned to do a coup on Jan. 6.

But it’s not, Navarro claims, the one we saw violently come into fruition.

TPM detailed some of the latest reports on Navarro’s new book as well as recent interviews with the former White House trade adviser here. But a reasonable conclusion to draw about the purpose of Navarro’s latest press tour is a relatively simple one: He’s attempting to signal that Trump and his team couldn’t possibly be blamed for the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection because that attack actually scuttled their plans for a different, friendlier coup.

This again? After months of categorically ruling out any changes to the Senate legislative filibuster, Manchin is now saying any changes to the filibuster would be a “heavy lift” and that his “absolute preference” is to get Republican buy-in for making changes that would prevent Republicans from preventing any Democratic legislation other than budget reconciliation bills from coming to a vote. (Got that?) This comes after Democrats seem back to negotiating over the President’s Bill Build Back better bill which died back in December but is now back as some kind of zombie legislative discussion with Joe Manchin. The only thing that makes me think this might be kind of something real is that Mitch McConnell thought it was necessary to roundly denounce the idea today.

So is this real? Are we back to this?

Just last month GOP activist and Orange County Deputy DA Kelly Ernby was speaking at an anti-vaccine rally put on by local Turning Point USA chapters in Irvine. “There’s nothing that matters more than our freedoms right now,” she told the small but enthusiastic crowd. “Our government for the people and by the people is not going to exist without action of the people.” In 2020 Ernby had run unsuccessfully for a state Assembly seat as a Republican.

This week Ernby died of COVID-19 at age 46.

I wanted to share this note from TPM Reader CD (not their real initials). The person’s background will become clear through the note itself. I do not and am not in a position to endorse the viewpoint. But this is one of those readers backgrounders I pass along not because I’m in a position to vouch for all the viewpoints but because they are knowledge and providing an informed personal perspective that helped me deepen my understanding of an important issue – in this case the evolution of the CDC in recent decades.

It’s hardly the main point of it. But I was intrigued CD‘s point that the “CDC, unlike FDA, operates through soft power—making clinical recommendations and setting up surveillance and case definition systems that often are adopted by professional orgs, international bodies, other federal agencies etc.” This wouldn’t be a new point to people like CD who come out of this world. And it’s actually an implicit in most of the reporting on the pandemic over the last two years. But I hadn’t quite understood this point before or had it explained to me in that way. This must be in large part due to the firmer statutory footing of the FDA which goes back to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The CDC has a more evolutionary or agglomerative history, as we noted here.

It probably doesn’t look like yours, though.

Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) home state was devastated by natural disaster in the waning days of 2021. But his primary focus heading into the New Year is not on federal disaster relief or combatting climate change (he’s never really believed in that hoax to begin with), but rather the most important news of the hour: dismantling Big Tech’s Big Bias against conservatives.

PBS Newshour and Marist have a poll out headlined as “Americans don’t agree on what to call Jan. 6 attack.” Unsurprisingly the actual details of the poll tell a somewhat different story, which might be summarized as “Republicans now mostly support the Jan. 6 insurrection.” The data show a less wishy washy verdict. About half the public, overwhelmingly Democrats and left-leaning independents, call it an insurrection while 25% says it was 1st Amendment-protected protest. The critical segment in the middle, 19% of respondents, agrees that “it was an unfortunate event, but in the past.” I’d call this the “not great but let’s not rock the boat” group.

Over the holidays, you may have missed this important new reporting from Josh Kovensky.

Happy New Year! With Omicron sloshing around this great country, I’ve been asked by more and more people what mask they should be wearing. Or they have a health-compromised loved one and they’re asking for them. I’ve put a lot of time into researching this question – both as a journalist and a breather – and if you didn’t see it last week I put together a primer on the basics. You can read it here.

Back in 2016 there was a knowing social media go-to about how 2016 was the year from hell – one that would come to an end when Trump was defeated in November. Of course, that didn’t happen. It was followed by 2017, the beginning of Trump’s dismal and destructive presidency. Then there was 2020, a year of historic disruption, mortality, economic displacement and social chaos and unrest, which was to be followed by renewal in 2021. And well, here we are. We’ve run through a succession of ‘hell years’ beneath which rumbles a growing trepidation or assumption that maybe none of this stuff is the exception. Maybe this is just a downward trajectory with no snapback to something more normal, something more on a progress toward betterment.

On the eve of a new year where do we fall on this terrain of doomism?