Raleigh News & Observer Editorial Board:
WaPo:
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Ron Filipkowski/WaPo:
Francis Collins/NIH Director’s blog:
Tressie McMillan Cottom/NY Times:
Eleanor Janega/Slate:
Mark Meadows is an embarrassment to NC. Congress should take a hard line with him.
Here’s a question that might make Sen. Richard Burr smile: When will the N.C. Republican Party censure Mark Meadows? The answer, of course, is never. But that won’t hide the embarrassment that Meadows is for his party or for the state he represented in Congress for seven years. He left Congress in March of 2020 to become President Trump’s White House chief of staff.
The fact that Mark Meadows did his business, including the insurrection-planning, with his private email account is just exquisite https://t.co/7DdnQry4ua
— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) December 14, 2021
WaPo:
House poised to vote on Meadows contempt charge for refusing to comply with the Jan. 6 committee subpoena
Ahead of the full House vote, the Committee on Rules met Tuesday morning to discuss the resolution and set the parameters for the House debate.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the Jan. 6 committee’s vice chairman, had stunned the proceedings Monday night by reading several of the texts. She read several more on Tuesday before the Rules panel. These, she said, were from Republican members of Congress to Meadows.
“It is really bad up here,” one said. Another one texted, “The president needs to stop this ASAP.”
“Fix this now,” another lawmaker urged Meadows.
“As we saw last night, dozens of texts — including from Trump administration officials, from members of the press, from Donald Trump Jr. — urged immediate action by the president,” Cheney said. “But we know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes.”
I don't do a ton of original reporting — I'm an opinion writer — but I made an exception for this because it's incredibly important. The post-Roe abortion environment will be very pill-centric. That is both a blessing and opens to door to real risks. https://t.co/sAH3S8mL3d
— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) December 13, 2021
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Mark Meadows has already established a coup plot. Do we care enough to save the republic?
Multiple pieces of evidence have emerged pointing to a deliberate effort to overthrow our democracy. And it is former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows who is key to piecing them all together.
Now, we just need to see if the country cares enough to hold all those involved accountable.
For those bearish on Trump’s long term control of the party, there’s news of… 1. His endorsed Senate candidate in PA dropping out 2. His endorsed candidate in AL losing ground against establishment fave 3. Meh turnout for road show 4. Endorsed candidate lost in TX
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) December 12, 2021
Ron Filipkowski/WaPo:
I monitor Trump’s die-hard base. They’re still plotting out in the open.
The same activists behind Jan. 6 are moving into local, grass-roots organizing now
No one can draw a straight line from Trump’s tweet to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, but the events of Jan. 6 were born on social media — which makes it a good place to discover what the activists, influencers and organizers of the MAGA movement are up to on the ground. Then, they were charting a course to “stop the steal” on a national stage. Now, they have taken their disparate causes and motives to the local level, refocusing on softer, more vulnerable targets such as local government agencies, because, according to the new motto of one of their ubiquitous leaders, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, “Local action has a national impact.”
I began using social media several months before the election to monitor the extremist elements that were taking control of the Republican Party — a party I had spent my life in but no longer recognized. My goal at first was to share what I observed with moderate Republicans who may have been persuaded to vote for Joe Biden and not Trump. I wanted to show them that what was once a fringe element of the party was now on full display and spreading. After the election, however, it became clear that much of the MAGA movement was not going to accept the outcome — not with all of the conspiracy theories and the constant sentiment of mistrust in our institutions coming from its leaders.
To understand Fox News and the modern Republican Party, you have to understand professional wrestling and the concepts of "kayfabe" and "shoot." What Fox airs is kayfabe, or performance. Those texts from hosts to the White House on January 6th were "shoot" and behind the curtain
— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) December 14, 2021
Francis Collins/NIH Director’s blog:
Latest on Omicron Variant and COVID-19 Vaccine Protection
So, what does the science show? The first data to emerge present somewhat encouraging results. While our existing mRNA vaccines still offer some protection against Omicron, there appears to be a significant decline in neutralizing antibodies against this variant in people who have received two shots of an mRNA vaccine.
However, initial results of studies conducted both in the lab and in the real world show that people who get a booster shot, or third dose of vaccine, may be better protected. Though these data are preliminary, they suggest that getting a booster will help protect people already vaccinated from breakthrough or possible severe infections with Omicron during the winter months.
It's funny that Hannity and Ingraham texted Meadows to get Trump to call off the rioters. Because guess who fed the lies about 2020 that helped inspire those rioters? Hannity and Ingraham did. The rioters operationalized what Fox News wrought. New piece:https://t.co/a01lgHm78V
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) December 14, 2021
Tressie McMillan Cottom/NY Times:
Why We Need to Address Scam Culture
In our exploration of scams, this is the definition I will be drawing on: A scam is a strategy or arrangement intentionally designed to benefit a few participants by obscuring the risk or cost for other participants.
Some scam artists often do this by making a fundamental claim about what they’re trying to sell you on (something like “There is an endless supply of new customers”) that implies a natural truth that cannot be violated. In “The Dream,” a podcast about multilevel marketing that I listened to, as promised, one of the co-hosts, Jane Marie, says that in multilevel marketing and pyramid schemes, this claim is called the endless chain — you can never run out of recruits. It is a truth claim that cannot be supported and that someone in the scheme knows to be false. It is a norm violation. And when we realize that this norm has been violated, it makes us feel tainted and maybe a little angry. Every scam plants a small seed of social distrust. That brings me to the reason it is important that we talk about scams now.
So much of everyday life seems rigged against us. That is reflected in studies, like a 2018 Pew Research survey of Americans and social trust, that support the claim that we just do not trust our institutions or one another. There are the big things, like the outsize role that money and influence play in electoral politics. When I do fieldwork at public political events, I hear over and over again from people across the ideological spectrum just how unheard they feel. How is it possible that an elected representative can get away with meeting with lobbyists but rarely, if ever, talking to his or her constituents?
While heartbreak lingers, Friday's killer tornadoes also ripped a roof off 2 merging American crises: The everyday hazards of low-pay work in the warehouse economy, and the new risks of climate change We must act on this Katrina-like moment. My new column https://t.co/IZGs4V0iu3
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) December 14, 2021
Eleanor Janega/Slate:
Why Our Fantasy of a Dark and Bloody Middle Ages Is So Hard to Shake
A new history makes the case for light.
There’s a reason for this misunderstanding. The medieval era we historians know—a time when Europe thrived, despite not yet being aggressively imperial or expansionist, and where the Catholic Church drove extensive scientific and philosophical invention—simply doesn’t fit with the narratives that American and European society wants. We need the Middle Ages to have been awful, to justify the reintroduction of empires built on slavery in the centuries afterwards. Religion has to have been the enemy of science, or we can’t explain the tension between the two in our own society. Medieval Europe must have been completely isolated from the rest of the world, or our fantasies of white ethnonationalism aren’t grounded in history. Myths about the medieval period as the “Dark Ages”—a thousand-year period devoid of growth, delight, art, and pleasure—persist largely to make us feel better about ourselves.
“These texts—which are devastating in their detail, and reveal Fox hosts acting more as crisis communications consiglieres to the president than as journalists covering his administration—were revealed at a contempt hearing for Meadows.” https://t.co/4AARXGSR3K
— Tim Miller (@Timodc) December 14, 2021
What Fox News hosts said privately vs. publicly on Jan. 6 pic.twitter.com/cXc1uU2L2F
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 14, 2021