A new bonus episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! Today, Josh and Kate discuss the end of the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan.
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.
A few of you have asked why we’re doing our Prime Ad Free (AF) trial. So I wanted to explain. In this drive we need at least 1,000 Prime members to upgrade to Prime AF. We know there are at least a thousand who – once they try it – will want to upgrade just because they prefer it. Believe me, it’s a lot better. So our two week free trial is really just a diabolical plan to figure out who those 1000+ members are.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who has distinguished himself with his incredibly lax approach to handling the COVID-19 outbreak in his state, has tested positive for COVID-19.
JoinJosh Kovensky talks with the Georgia couple whose property was raided by the FBI last week as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.
You have seen the news that Gov. Abbott of Texas has tested positive for COVID. It adds a new element of drama to the battle he’s currently waging to ban school masking and vaccine mandates in Texas. But there’s another element I wanted to mention. Because when I saw it yesterday it confused me.
The governor’s office reports that he tested positive after one of the tests for the infection he takes each day. They report he is fully vaccinated, in good health and as yet has no symptoms of the disease. At 63 he is approaching the age when people start to have more adverse outcomes. But fully vaccinated there’s every expectation he will have a mild course of the illness if he has any symptoms at all and probably not need to do more than do the duties of office in quarantine.
But the statement from the Governor’s office also noted that he has begun taking the Regeneron antibodies treatment.
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A sign of the times update. Politico Influence, Politico’s newsletter on the lobbying industry, is reporting that the US Chamber of Commerce is now requiring proof of vaccination for anyone who enters their DC offices. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable are also instituting vaccine mandates.
Over the last few days I’ve been collecting information and thinking through a few more posts on the progress of the Delta-driven 4th COVID wave. One of the conclusions I’ve been ruminating on is that the CDC has been doing a pretty good job in 2021 on what the CDC is designed to do. (It is important to remember, and bewildering to remember, that the CDC actually wasn’t posting COVID case, testing or mortality data through 2020. It fell to a DIY journo collaborative.) But it’s clear that we need an entity that is capable of and empowered to do a lot more. In the current moment there is just a lot of data about the current shape of the pandemic that we simply do not have. We do have that data, or a lot of it, for the UK and Israel because they have centralized health care systems that have all the data. We will come back to that. But for the moment I wanted to flag for your attention this week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from the CDC. It contains three new studies which go directly to the most critical questions we’re facing.
The National Association of Secretaries of State is trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
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New data out of Israel appears to suggest substantial increased protection after a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine. I say ‘appears’ because like a lot of the real-time information emerging out of Israel it’s made up of current statistics rather than a study per se. And at least in the news accounts one has to read between the lines since some points are not stated explicitly.
For the last hour I’ve been watching videos created by the suspect in the Capitol bomb threat situation. He explicitly references the fall of Kabul in an August 16th video, claims Joe Biden has given US military hardware to the Taliban.
In another video from early on August 16th he says that once Biden is driven from office, Trump will become President again. He says he expects Trump, once he becomes President again, will pardon him – presumably for whatever crime he commits coming to Washington.
“It’s time to quit Biden.”
Repeatedly refers to himself and those like him as “the last generation”. He appears to have originally planned something for Labor Day. He references having people rendezvous at a local park the Friday before Labor Day before heading north to Washington, DC.
In a video from last Tuesday night, the suspect said it would be his last video until Labor Day weekend. But in a video early this morning he seems to suggest that over night he decided to move up his schedule.
More to come.