Bloomberg:
Add PA and MO to that list. Assume that by next week it’s documented everywhere. With luck it’ll be milder and/but crowd out Delta.
Eric Lutz/Vanity Fair:
Perry Bacon, Jr/WaPo:
Haaretz:
Nicquel Terry Ellis and Eva McKend/CNN:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
While we avoided a shutdown, this reminder thread is helpful:
Omicron Up Close: South Africa’s Experts Tell Their Stories
- “While people are freaking out, the other thing to stress is that if you look across the variants, the vaccines have protected against severe disease, hospitalization and death. And really, looking at the omicron mutations, though there are an awful lot of them, there’s nothing really to indicate that the ability of vaccines to fight this is going to be affected to a very great extent.”
More vaccines administered yesterday than in any day for the past six months, per @POTUS
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) December 3, 2021
7 U.S. states have confirmed #Omicron cases (as of right now). They are: ? California ? Colorado ? Hawaii ? Maryland ? Minnesota ? Nebraska ? New Yorkhttps://t.co/yqAn2hVQ0X + https://t.co/7EvJkhmYVC
— Jorge A. Caballero, MD (@DataDrivenMD) December 3, 2021
Add PA and MO to that list. Assume that by next week it’s documented everywhere. With luck it’ll be milder and/but crowd out Delta.
"Our problem is Delta ... I mean, we’re going through a second major delta surge. We never recovered from the first one! ... 130,000 plus cases yesterday ... over 2,000 deaths. We have 57,000 people in the hospital again, and we’re heading north."https://t.co/9rywVwhDGT
— Nick Judin (@nickjudin) December 3, 2021
Eric Lutz/Vanity Fair:
GUTTING ROE MEANS 2022 WILL BE ALL ABOUT ABORTION RIGHTS
With the conservative-majority Supreme Court expected to roll back abortion rights next year, the danger in handing even more power to Republicans should be front and center in the midterms.
That it has gotten to this point, where they’ve gotten Roe on the ropes, speaks to the extent of that political power and the persistence of the anti-abortion movement. But it should also be a wake-up call—to the Democrats, who must show the same level of urgency in protecting the right to choose that their counterparts have shown in attempting to take it away, and to voters, who should recognize the danger in handing even more power to the GOP. “There are American women who have lived their whole lives with the knowledge that their personal health decisions were protected,” Democratic Representative Val Demings wrote Wednesday. “We cannot go backwards.”
I’m so tired of this but I’ll say it once more: If #omicron turns out to be as dangerous as it well might and we once again do little to prepare for it with the time we have, then we are compounding the biggest collective political failure I have witnessed in my lifetime.
— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) December 3, 2021
Perry Bacon, Jr/WaPo:
We may have already missed our last, best chance to bolster American democracy
Instead, Biden won decisively but not overwhelmingly, Democrats lost seats in the House and barely won the Senate, and made few gains at the state level. That limited victory had three huge negative implications for American democracy.
First, the Republican Party felt no need to change course. In terms of following democratic norms and values, Donald Trump was one of the worst presidents ever, and the Republican Party defended him all along the way. Trump lost in 2020, but he received 11 million more votes than he had in 2016, including a higher percentage of the Latino vote. The narrow margin in a handful of swing states suggested that Trump would actually have prevailed if not for covid-19.
It’s easy to see what message the GOP took from that.
The extraordinarily brief window in 2009 when there was a Democratic super majority was spent working on the ACA. As nice as it would have been for every Democratic platform policy to have been brought to fruition, it was not possible. Why are we pretending otherwise? https://t.co/a6Xsd1Afgi
— Mx. Amadi (@amaditalks) December 3, 2021
Haaretz:
'Worse Than the Holocaust': Why Phone Numbers Frighten Israel's ultra-Orthodox Rabbis So Much
Ultra-Orthodox rabbis are in crisis mode over a looming change in regulations over mobile phone numbers, frantically trying to constrict their followers in an off-grid ghetto. They’re fighting a losing battle
At first glance, it may seem odd that the critical issue that triggered this meeting is about mobile phone numbers, and the 'kosher' phones that are rabbinically approved for use by the Haredi community. But this is not just about numbers. It’s about the rabbis controlling the free flow of information into their communities. Without that control, their power over their followers is greatly diminished.
NEW: Risk of dying from Covid-19 in red states 50% higher than in blue states since vaccines became widely available, according to CNN analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
— Ana Cabrera (@AnaCabrera) December 2, 2021
Nicquel Terry Ellis and Eva McKend/CNN:
Black parents say movement to ban critical race theory is ruining their children's education
When Danielle Atkinson's daughter brought home a second-grade assignment that highlighted Christopher Columbus's explorations, Atkinson said she began to notice inequities in the curriculum being taught in the school district.
There were plenty of lessons about Columbus and other historic White figures, but the contributions of Black Americans were largely missing in the coursework at Royal Oak Public Schools in Michigan, she said.
Atkinson and other Black and brown parents felt the students weren't learning enough about the civil rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the desegregation of schools and the importance of Black History Month so they formed the Royal Oak Multicultural Parents Association in 2016. They demanded more culturally diverse curriculum from the district, but Atkinson said she's seen little progress.
"Our children are not having the education around race and history that they should, and it's to our detriment and it's a disservice to our children," said the mother of six, who is also founder of the Michigan-based Mothering Justice, a group that advocates for Black and brown moms.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Abrams and Trump both questioned elections, but evidence is different
While Abrams said 10 days after the election that she wasn’t conceding, she also said in the same speech that Republican Brian Kemp was the victor. Trump only admitted he had lost the day after a riot at the U.S. Capitol as the Electoral College confirmed his defeat.
While we avoided a shutdown, this reminder thread is helpful:
Once more, we're unnervingly and unnecessarily close to a shutdown of the federal government. Such an event can feel distant and has been purposefully spun to minimize the impact; this thread instead tells to the story of the many potentials harms of a shutdown 1/
— Loren DeJonge Schulman (@LorenRaeDeJ) December 2, 2021