Yesterday the United States passed the threshold of 500,000 fatalities from COVID19, right about one year after we started this. You’ve seen the number in many places. I wanted to be sure you saw it here too. This chart illustrates the per capita death toll by state. Unsurprisingly New York and New Jersey still lead the country. New Jersey is actually first at 258 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants. New York comes in at 239.

If you’re familiar with the geography this makes sense. New York’s epidemic was focused on New York City and the Greater New York City Region. And a greater percentage of New Jersey is in that region than is the case with New York state. Other nearby states are close – Connecticut (212), Massachusetts (230) and Rhode Island (233).

But outside the Northeast the next state is probably not one you’d think of: Mississippi. I struggle to think of a single national news story I’ve seen about the COVID pandemic specifically in Mississippi, where 220 people have died for every 100,000 inhabitants. That’s ahead of South Dakota at 211 and Arizona at 213 and neighboring Louisiana at 204. Those are all the states which have seen more than 200 inhabitants per 100,000 die of COVID in the last year.

Of the many lessons of the last decade, one of the most salient is that good policy does not make for good politics. Not automatically. That’s simply not how it works. It was one of the underlying premises – intertwined with much else – that led to the disappointments and failures of the Obama years. Ex-President Trump got grief when he wanted relief checks to go out with his name on them. That’s not at all legit. But he had the right idea. You need to tell people when you’re doing things for them. No one else is going to do that.

This belief that good policy will take care of itself is deeply rooted in the technocratic, meritocratic mentality that animates so many professional Democrats. There’s a lot to that worldview that is good and we should celebrate. This is one of its blindnesses. There is no good policy that isn’t conjoined to good politics. You just have to do the politics because there’s no good policy without building, nurturing and sustaining constituencies for good policy. That’s the only way good policy can be sustained over time, from election to election. Because the most ingenious and humane policy is a failure if it isn’t sustained, if voters don’t know that it happened, why it happened and what they need to do to make it keep happening.

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We’ve been following the story of South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg’s fatal hit-and-run incident for some time now. And new video footage of interviews between the state AG and investigators raises questions about what truly happened on that September night — and the extent to which Ravnsborg might have known that he hit a human being, not a deer.

Like, for instance, the fact that the victim’s reading glasses were allegedly found inside the vehicle that Ravnsborg was driving when he hit him.

I’ve mentioned a number of times that to avoid the errors of the Obama years Democrats must make a firm commitment not to engage with bad faith arguments or bad faith actors. “This to me is the greatest negative lesson of the Obama era: the willing engagement of good faith with bad faith in which bad faith is, by definition, always the winner.” This necessity has cropped up again with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to create a commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection against the US capitol.

Congressional Republicans are doing everything they can to scuttle the idea. They’re opposing Pelosi’s plan to give Democrats a 7-4 majority on the panel (that’s not an unreasonable argument in the abstract) and more tellingly insisting that they can only support the idea if it also looks at violence during the summer protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In other words, the Republican response is to whatabout the insurrection at the Capitol and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election by force. The latest gambit comes from Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who says he could agree to the whataboutist model – Capitol insurrection but also antifa and everything that happened last summer – or a much narrower commission focused solely on Capitol security procedures.

Manhattan DA obtains Trump tax records (not just the returns). Manhattan DA zeroes in on Don Jr. Don Jr. deposed by DC Attorney General in lawsuit alleging misuse of inaugural funds. Like snow melting with the warming spring the Trump family’s immunity from the law is disintegrating.

The antifa card has been dealt repeatedly this week. And it’s only picking up more steam among the GOP as a vague but ready excuse for all manner of things.

Tucked into a recent Politico report on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to push back on the House’s bid to conduct a bipartisan review of the Jan. 6 insurrection was a clue as to the staying power the actually-it-was-antifa lie will have.

There’s a big scattering of news these days. But I want to recommend that you check out Cristina Cabrera’s updates on the denouement of the Jason Ravnsburg story. Ravnsburg is the Attorney General of South Dakota. Back in September it was reported that he’d been in an auto accident in which there had been a fatality. It quickly emerged that this was, while technically true, a bit different than what the announcement suggested. Ravnsborg had struck and killed a 55 year old man named Joe Boever driving home from a political fundraiser. He left the scene, later claiming he thought he’d struck a deer.

Earlier this week Ravnsborg was charged with three misdemeanors. But the evidence that came out at the conclusion of the investigation makes it seem that Ravnsborg got incredibly lucky not being charged with negligent homicide or hit and run. A witness said Boever was walking with a flashlight, which deer seldom carry. Forensic evidence strongly suggests that Ravnsborg was browsing RCP reading up on some Biden hit pieces when he struck and killed Boever. And perhaps most damning and horrifying, Boever’s glasses were found inside Ravnsborg’s car. In other words, this means almost to a certainty that Boever’s face slammed, with the full impact of the collision, into and through Ravnsborg’s windshield.

Cristina has the details here.

We’ve been following closely this week as new details have emerged about a hit-and-run by South Dakota’s attorney general. A Republican politician, who was charged with a mere misdemeanor after being involved in the fatal accident, is now facing a bipartisan impeachment push as it starts to look as if his “I thought I hit a deer” story might be Swiss cheese.

I’ve been wrestling all day with this claim that Vice President Harris has the unique ability to overrule the Senate parliamentarian on this ruling about the whether the minimum wage hike can be included in the COVID relief bill. Critically, it’s claimed that while the Senate can overrule her it could only do so with 60 votes. That makes all the difference in the world since while all fifty Republicans and Manchin or Manchin and Sinema could overrule her with 52 votes there’s basically no way they get to 60 votes.

But is that 60 vote rule real? Is that what would be needed to overrule Harris?

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I want to take a moment to unpack the positioning, politics and parliamentary rules behind this confrontation over including the minimum wage hike in the COVID relief bill. It’s quite complicated. And at least some of the advocacy is significantly misleading.

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the minimum wage hike doesn’t qualify to include in a reconciliation bill – i.e., one that cannot be filibustered. Parliamentarians can be fired or overruled. But there’s a major hitch. At least two Senators – Manchin and Sinema – say they don’t support overruling the parliamentarian or including the minimum wage in the COVID relief bill. Indeed, neither currently supports hiking the minimum to $15 at all. (There’s some question about that with Sinema. But Manchin is clear and he’s enough.)