A Restart Coalition

The Jerusalem Post is an English-language Israeli paper which is probably best described as center-right-ish, though it’s hard to use these terms in a way that maps clearly to the way we use these terms in the US. It’s current editor-in-chief is Yaakov Katz who in a addition to being a journalist was at one point a national security advisor to Naftali Bennett, a key player in the current dance over the next Israeli government.

As I mentioned yesterday, the current crisis – really several overlapping crises – has been a boon for Prime Minister Netanyahu. At least in the short-term it short-circuited all efforts to form a government to replace him. A key part of why is the aforementioned Bennett. Bennett is an erstwhile Netanyahu protege or junior ally. He’s part of the Israeli right and comes out of Religious Zionism, basically Revisionist Zionism koshered with Orthodoxy. Before the last week’s cascade of violence he was negotiating joining a government created by opposition leader Yair Lapid. It likely would have involved the two sharing the Prime Ministership and Bennett taking the position first. (Not bad for a guy whose party garnered only 7 seats out of 120.)

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Two COVID Americas

COVID vaccination, for all the slowdown, remains fast moving across the United States. It seems likely we’ll see a brief surge in shots as parents bring their 12-15 year olds in for their shots. But we’re already seeing the emergence of what in the later months of 2021 is like to be two separate Americas as defined by COVID.

This is a map from the CDC vaccine data portal.

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The Longterm Toll of COVID

I had missed this article about a very sobering study about the post-acute-illness impact of COVID. Most of us are now familiar with ‘long COVID’, people who continue to have various health problems long after they are past the period acute COVID infection. Some people simply don’t fully recover. Other have various knock-on symptoms or what appear to be recurrences of COVID, even if these are not actually new infections and illness. This study catalogs the likely impact of this phenomenon at scale. They say it will be a protracted health crisis for years to come, both in the US and around the world. The study also found that even people with mild cases of COVID have an elevated risk of death in the six months after they recover. This risk increases with the severity of the original illness.

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Daily Beast Has New Wild Story Involving Gaetz, Greenberg, And A No-Show Contract

Former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg is expected to share with investigators the identity of a woman who attended a GOP fundraiser with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) in 2019 as one of more than a dozen young women Gaetz paid for sex, the Daily Beast reported on Friday night.

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Miller Muddied The Waters, But Politics Were At Play In Jan. 6 National Guard Delay

During a week of congressional committee hearings seeking to clarify why and how things went so wrong on Jan. 6, the officials testifying passed the buck and confused the particulars much more often than they shed light on what happened that day.

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DHS Warns BLM That Protests Are ‘Likely’ Target Of Far-right Extremists

The Department of Homeland Security released a new terrorism bulletin on Friday, warning that far-right extremists are likely to consider attacking protests against police brutality.

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GOPer Made Staffers Buy Him B-Day Gifts And Let Son Sleep In Capitol Basement, Bonkers Lawsuit Alleges

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) was truly a nightmare of a boss in a number of ways, according to an eye-popping lawsuit by his former adviser.

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Senate Dems To Garland: Release DOJ Mueller Memo That Inspired Fiery Rebuke From Judge

Senate Democrats, in a letter Friday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, weighed in on a judge’s recent opinion accusing the Trump-era Justice Department of misleading her about the purpose of an internal memo related to the Mueller probe.

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100% Owned By Trump and the Big Lie

There’s a lot of stunning and yet not at all surprising information in a new big poll out from Democracy Corps. In short, in battleground states Republicans are pretty much totally united and energized behind Trump, the Big Lie-centric posture of congressional Republicans and well-positioned for 2022. That doesn’t mean Democrats won’t also be united and pumped up. But any questions you may have had about Republicans being divided, demoralized or any essence having second thoughts about the events of the last six months … well, they’re not.

Here’s the overview from Democracy Corps and here’s the whole report. The fine points are a bit more nuanced than I put it above. But not much …

We conducted a large, mostly cell phone survey with an oversample of Republicans in the 2022 battleground for the U.S. Senate, governorships, and House, and it is painfully clear Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, and Kevin McCarthy know their party. The Trump loyalists who strongly approve of him are two thirds of those who identify as, “Republican.” And they are joined by the Trump aligned to form a breathtaking, three quarters of the party in the electoral battleground states and districts that will decide who leads the country.

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