David Brooks/NY Times:
Zoë Carpenter/The Nation:
WPRI:
This thread covers the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that met yesterday and ended the J&J vaccine pause. Click on the timestamp to see the whole thing:
Tom Frieden/USA Today:
Will Wilkinson/Substack:
Benjamin Parker/Bulwark:
Seth J. Hill, Daniel J. Hopkins and Gregory A. Huber/AAAS:
More on that Arizona story here.
Tom Sullivan/Hullabaloo:
The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse
Trumpians are having a venomous panic attack.
It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.
What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swaths of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.
If David Brooks is scared of the GOP, respectable white people are, too. That, my friend, is a good place for a republican democracy to be. THREAD. https://t.co/LXfMEtWwl3
— John Stoehr's Editorial Board (@johnastoehr) April 23, 2021
Zoë Carpenter/The Nation:
Misinformation Is Destroying Our Country. Can Anything Rein It In?
Trump is gone, but the right-wing media is alive and well—and will further undermine our democracy if we let it.
The Capitol insurrection threw into relief the real-world consequences of America’s increasingly siloed media ecosystem, which is characterized on the right by an expanding web of outlets and platforms willing to entertain an alternative version of reality. Social media companies, confronted with their role in spreading misinformation, scrambled to implement reforms. But right-wing misinformation is not just a technological problem, and it is far from being fixed. Any hope that the events of January 6 might provoke a reckoning within conservative media and the Republican Party has by now evaporated. The GOP remains eager to weaponize misinformation, not only to win elections but also to advance its policy agenda.
Biden has the highest favorability among 18- to 29-year-old Americans of any first-term president over the 21 years the @harvardiop youth poll has been conducted. https://t.co/RpGcrNEETY pic.twitter.com/qA9FvXB11K
— Michael Kruse (@michaelkruse) April 23, 2021
WPRI:
Poll: Vaccine opposition in RI, Mass., among lowest nationwide
Rhode Island and Massachusetts residents are among the least skeptical in the country about the COVID-19 vaccine, according to new survey data.
The new Morning Consult data shows Massachusetts is tied with Hawaii for the lowest rate of COVID-19 vaccine opposition nationwide, with only 11% of residents in those states saying they will not get a shot. Rhode Island is tied with Maryland for fourth lowest, with 15% unwilling to get one. Connecticut is tied for second lowest, at 13%.
Residents in Mississippi, Idaho and South Dakota have the highest rates of opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine, with nearly one in three of their residents saying they won’t get immunized.
This thread covers the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that met yesterday and ended the J&J vaccine pause. Click on the timestamp to see the whole thing:
To those who say "why not just give it to men" or "just use it in older people," these are the reasons why that's not a simple solution: pic.twitter.com/X5a0fLFfMT
— Beth Skwarecki (@BethSkw) April 23, 2021
Tom Frieden/USA Today:
Former CDC chief: Think diners, dentists and dollar stores. Make COVID vaccines easy to get.
Extend hours, allow walk-ins and give COVID shots everywhere from doctors' offices and pharmacies to workplaces, shopping malls, bars and churches.
Vaccine equity is not just about what’s right ethically but also about what’s essential for pandemic control. To succeed, we need maximum impact from vaccination: to reduce cases, hospitalizations and deaths, and to reduce the risk that even more transmissible and deadly variants will emerge. Aiming our shots — by getting the vaccine to where transmission is highest and to disproportionally affected populations — can achieve these goals
Right now, Black and Latinx people are being vaccinated at only about half the rate of other groups, despite having higher rates of COVID-related hospitalization and death. We must focus particularly on the more than 40 million unvaccinated people over age 50, who are disproportionately people of color and lower-income people. Vaccinating them will prevent many more deaths than vaccinating young people.
"A 60 percent majority say the country should do more to hold police accountable for mistreatment of Black people, while 33 percent say the country is doing too much to interfere in how police officers do their job." The anti-woke are a minority.https://t.co/EpI6PKB8bv
— Vinod Sreeharsha (@VinodSreeharsha) April 23, 2021
Will Wilkinson/Substack:
The Anti-Majoritarian Mistake
Jonah Goldberg thinks liberal societies don't need much democracy. He's wrong.
Jonah begins with a response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s argument that there’s something wrong with a system that allows nine judges (five, really) to overturn popular legislation that managed to survive the demanding gauntlet of the American legislative process. He notes that “the left’s most prized political baubles,” such as Roe v. Wade, were “imposed” by Supreme Court majorities, suggesting that Democrats are fine with judges legislating from the bench except when Republicans do it.
Now, it’s interesting that AOC focuses on the court overturning democratic legislation, but Jonah focuses on the court assuming the power of a legislature and imposing policy. In my opinion, they’re both right because I believe that legislative supremacy is good and judicial supremacy — which is enabled by America’s queer, arbitrary, over-powered version of judicial review — is bad. My guess is that AOC also believes something along these lines. But Jonah clearly doesn’t. He is what I call an “ideological constitutionalist” of the right.
The ideological constitutionalist treats his contested ideological conception of justice or the best regime as a condition for the legitimacy of government and argues that, therefore, it must be constitutionally codified and sheltered from democratic revision.
Pew poll: 61% of Americans support automatically registering all eligible citizens to vote 70% support allowing people convicted of felonies to vote after serving their sentences 78% support making early, in-person voting available for at least two weeks prior to Election Day
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 23, 2021
Benjamin Parker/Bulwark:
Anti-Anti-Chauvinism
Conservative trolls are the REAL victims!
We all saw it. It was captured on video. It lasted nine interminable minutes. It ignited our righteous indignation—an oil fire floating on an ocean of grief.
Most people felt this way about the video of the murder—yes, murder—of George Floyd last year. The officer responsible, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of three counts on Tuesday for snuffing out a man’s life over the course of those nine excruciating minutes.
Some observers, though, seem less concerned about the murder of George Floyd and more concerned about—well, it’s hard to say what they are concerned about. Some of them are claiming that the trial was a set-up. Rigged. That the jury had it in for Chauvin. Or that Chauvin didn’t really matter because the real villains were Joe Biden and Maxine Waters and Don Lemon, who somehow managed to pressure the jury into convicting Chauvin on all counts. Probably because they were afraid of cancel culture.
Malaria vaccine hailed as potential breakthrough https://t.co/ZPWwJbcek2
— Aviel Roshwald (@RoshwaldAviel) April 23, 2021
Seth J. Hill, Daniel J. Hopkins and Gregory A. Huber/AAAS:
Not by turnout alone: Measuring the sources of electoral change, 2012 to 2016
Changes in partisan outcomes between consecutive elections must come from changes in the composition of the electorate or changes in the vote choices of consistent voters. How much composition versus conversion drives electoral change has critical implications for the policy mandates of election victories and campaigning and governing strategies. Here, we analyze electoral change between the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections using administrative data. We merge precinct-level election returns, the smallest geography at which vote counts are available, with individual-level turnout records from 37 million registered voters in six key states. We find that both factors were substantively meaningful drivers of electoral change, but the balance varied by state. We estimate that pro-Republican Party (GOP) conversion among two-election voters was particularly important in states including Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where the pro-GOP swings were largest. Our results suggest conversion remains a crucial component of electoral change.
We’re asking @FannKfann for immediate access to observe this recount as members of the press, take notes as we would during any Senate procedure and provide a shred of objective accountability as the Senate puts Arizona’s elections on trial. pic.twitter.com/OR5klh8H0s
— Greg Burton (@gburton) April 23, 2021
More on that Arizona story here.
Tom Sullivan/Hullabaloo:
[Laura] Field distinguishes between conspiracy theories and conspiracism, “more a habit of mind, a tendency to unshackle oneself in a way that permits a kind of open-ended indulgence in fabulism,” [Greg] Sargent continues:
The latter is common among QAnon sympathizers, but Field argues that a conspiracist tendency is becoming distressingly common even among some right-leaning intellectuals, particularly ones who saw President Donald Trump as a necessary disruption of our politics, and his defeat as a cause for political anguish. But their through line concerns their depiction of the left.
In too many cases, Field argues, empiricism is entirely absent. This tendency sometimes attacks the political legitimacy of the entire left by conflating liberals and Marxists into one monolithically tyrannical political force. Or it attacks the legitimacy of institutions which have fallen under the left’s cultural spell (such as the media or “woke” corporations, never mind the latter’s pursuit of a distributive agenda the left hates). Or it attacks the political system itself (which the left has manipulated, rendering elections illegitimate).
New Right intellectuals, Field writes, “share a fundamentally conspiratorial view of the left — a view that is often deeply cynical and/or detached from reality.” Indeed, “conspiracism is increasingly detaching itself from any obligation to justify its connection to reality in any way,” Sargent writes.
This @AnnieLowrey piece is great. I'd add that "low-skill" often refers to skills girls learn at home rather than at college (eg patiently helping a toddler calm down) https://t.co/tD5kdIYP2Q
— Livia Gershon (@LiviaGershon) April 24, 2021