Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Politico:
David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:
German Lopez/Vox:
Walter Shapiro/Roll Call:
Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:
James Pindell/Boston Globe:
James Joyner/Outside The Beltway:
And a remarkable report out this morning about the international public health system:
The Telegraph:
The United States bears plenty of that responsibility. This was a near complete failure on the part of the former administration, with the possible exception of the vaccine program, which is not in itself enough of an answer (see death toll).
David Jolly/Medium:
Trump Isn’t the Biggest Republican Threat
It’s not fear of their defeated nominee that’s turning the GOP into the party of subverting elections.
Third, and most important: Whatever the motives, what Republicans are up to is a huge threat to the republic. I’m mostly not talking about making it harder to vote, although that certainly weakens democracy. The real threat is that Trump, joined by many other elected Republicans, attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election result. And that since then, those in the party who stood up for the rule of law have been marginalized. That’s why the Georgia election law is a big deal; that’s why purging Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from the Republican House leadership is a big deal. That’s why the joke of an “audit” of election counts in Arizona is a big deal. It’s the single most important story in U.S. politics right now.
Jan 6 happened. Keep that in mind as the GOP gets rid of Liz Cheney in a leadership role for saying it did. https://t.co/LO6j7Theex
— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) May 11, 2021
Politico:
Could McCarthy face a Cheney backlash?
And no, we’re not just hearing this from ADAM KINZINGER types.
McCarthy has sought to cast doubt on Cheney’s leadership ability, arguing that it is essentially selfish to call out Trump instead of prioritizing GOP unity. But other House Republicans question his own leadership qualities.
One of them — a Republican long seen as an ally of leadership — told us Monday night he may oppose McCarthy for speaker because of all the recent drama. This person accused McCarthy of having no moral compass as he moves to punish Cheney while allowing members like Reps. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-Ga.) and MATT GAETZ (R-Fla.) to run wild.
“Kevin McCarthy has pissed off enough members of his own conference that he’s going to have to go back to his former days as a whip to try to figure out where his votes are” to become speaker, said the member, who is neither a member of the Freedom Caucus nor a moderate. “I’d be worried if I was him. … You have people like me — who are here to do the right thing for all the right reasons and have an expectation of leadership — that are, shall we say, disgusted with the internal squabbling that results from having weak leadership. And it is weak leadership. Straight up.”
A senior GOP aide to a conservative member put it this way: “He’s flip-flopped on [Jan. 6 and whether it’s] Trump’s fault, it’s not Trump’s fault. … It seems like he doesn’t have the backbone to lead. He bends to political pressure. It’s tough to do when you’re speaker. You have to lead.”
“There are worse things than losing a job in defense of principle. If telling the truth reduces the number of one’s friends, it also exposes the depth of the cowards” ~ @kathleenparker https://t.co/XE5Ru5DdOB
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) May 12, 2021
David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:
Trump’s Big Lie Isn’t About 2020 but All the Elections to Come
It is about rejecting demographic change, the mechanisms of a free press, equal justice under law for all of us, and the very idea of pluralism.
The big lie about the Big Lie is that it is just one lie. It is instead a kind of cluster bomb of deceptions, prevarications, distortions, untruths, fabrications, falsehoods, misrepresentations, and other forms of Trumpist mendacity.
The Big Lie, of course, refers to the myth, promoted by former President of the United States Donald Trump and his supporters, that he actually won last November’s election. It is based on the demonstrably untrue assertion, rejected by more than three dozen courts, that President Joe Biden’s victory was the result of widespread election fraud.
Criminal hackers attacking one of the largest US oil products pipeline have issued an odd apology. They just wanted to steal money. Apparently, didn't want to be mistaken as geopolitical activists. https://t.co/pehw6Ute4A
— Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) May 10, 2021
German Lopez/Vox:
Got the vaccine? You can relax about your Covid-19 risk now. Really.
I asked experts about their post-vaccination lives. Most no longer worry about their own risk of Covid-19.
All of this can make it seem like getting vaccinated may not be enough to liberate people from the fear of getting sick and the precautions they’ve taken to avoid the coronavirus in the past year. So I posed a question to experts I’ve talked to throughout the pandemic about Covid-related precautions: How worried are you about your personal safety after getting vaccinated?
They were nearly unanimous in their response: They’re no longer worried much, if at all, about their personal risk of getting Covid-19. Several spoke of going into restaurants and movie theaters now that they’re vaccinated, socializing with friends and family, and having older relatives visit for extended periods.
“I’m not particularly worried about getting ill myself,” Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University, told me. “I know that if I do somehow end up infected, my chances of developing serious symptoms are low.”
The Republican Party has a problem: Its attack lines against President Biden aren’t working. https://t.co/iw5p242uOP
— The Hill (@thehill) May 12, 2021
Walter Shapiro/Roll Call:
Can victory over the pandemic bridge the trust gap?
Breakdown in Americans’ trust in government dates back to Iraq War
Pop-up vaccination sites are sprouting all over the nation as governments at all levels begin to move into the difficult phase of mass inoculations — reaching those who are hesitant, fearful or skeptical of authority figures.
Yes, it is uplifting that almost half of American adults have received at least one injection and roughly one-third are fully vaccinated. But it is also chilling that 26 percent of Americans, according to a recent CNN poll, say they have no intention of ever getting the vaccine.
This stubborn resistance is the part of the pandemic story that was never envisioned by the authors of science fiction novels and the creators of movies. The miraculous appearance everywhere in America of three safe, effective vaccines was supposed to be the end of the tale — and not just a chapter in the muddled middle.
Zeynep Tufekci, a University of North Carolina sociologist who has been one of the smartest analysts throughout the pandemic, made a telling admission in a weekend essay for subscribers on Substack.
“Sociologically, I am shaken,” she confessed, before going on to explain, “The group-think, the institutional resistance and inertia, the cognitive biases, the social dynamics … I know about them all! But [what] I’ve been truly surprised most is how much stronger than I thought these dynamics were, even in a crisis.”
A Republican lawmaker in Arizona who originally supported the goofy 2020 election "audit" now says he's embarrassed by the whole thing and that it makes him and his colleagues "look like idiots." https://t.co/yS2XrCVhAb pic.twitter.com/Iequl2Vc9f
— Nick Martin (@nickmartin) May 10, 2021
Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:
Kevin McCarthy's 1/6 Problem
The details of the story have been reported, but a very smart friend connects the dots.
In March - Kevin McCarthy hired Brian Jack to run his political operation. Jack had been Donald Trump’s White House political director….
Brian Jack was directly involved in helping set up the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. Rep. Mo Brooks said that Jack called him and encouraged him to speak at the 1/6 rally, while Jack was still working for Trump.
Cheney:"We face a threat America has never seen before.A former President who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans the election was stolen from him.He risks inciting further violence."
— Craig Caplan (@CraigCaplan) May 12, 2021
James Pindell/Boston Globe:
All Republican headlines around the country have the same origin: Trump’s Big Lie
Consider some of the biggest political headlines lately, particularly as they concern Republicans. All of them, though different and spread out over the country, have the same origin: The Big Lie about a stolen election.
Arizona Republicans have spent weeks haphazardly trying to recount votes from a single county from the presidential election seven months ago. One Republican state senator called it “embarrassing.”
On Thursday, a Facebook committee announced that former President Trump will continue to be banned from their platform for now.
On Friday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new bill into law that would reduce voting access. Texas lawmakers are about to follow suit. They are continuing what Republican legislators have already done in Arkansas, Georgia, and Iowa.
This has been a problem with all the "labor shortage" reporting. Every single quote is from an employer seeking workers, with lots of "theories" to explain hiring troubles. Naturally, "too much UI" is the excuse. But NO quotes from actual unemployed workers. Terrible journalism. https://t.co/vyT0qtNt39
— Aaron Astor (@AstorAaron) May 10, 2021
James Joyner/Outside The Beltway:
The Vaccine Hesitant are Primarily Non-Voters
New polling provides useful insights into the problem.
To be clear: former President Trump and other Republican politicians absolutely made this problem worse by downplaying the disease and making supporters suspicious of countermeasures and the advice of the CDC and other experts. And that at least partly explains why the Hell No group is disproportionately Republican. (There’s of course a chicken-egg problem here, in that those who are suspicious of government and experts are more likely to vote Republican.)
But there’s something else going on as well [from Harry Enten]:
There isn’t going to be a single ideological message that appeals to a majority of the vaccine hesitant group. They’re of all political stripes.
The March Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows us another issue: Traditional political type messages may not work on them either. That poll asked respondents whether they were registered to vote and for whom they voted for in the 2020 election. The overwhelming plurality (48%) were people who either didn’t vote, voted third party or weren’t willing to disclose who they cast a ballot for. The rest were split 31% for Trump and 20% for President Joe Biden.
The poll gets at the fact that the efforts to vaccinate the population isn’t a political campaign to reel in voters. If we use traditional election tactics to reach the vaccine hesitant group, we’re likely to lose.
And a remarkable report out this morning about the international public health system:
The Telegraph:
‘Chernobyl moment’: The Covid-19 pandemic may have been prevented had the world acted a month earlier
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR), led by two former heads of governments and a host of international experts including former UK Foreign Secretary David Milliband, says the international health system led by the World Health Organization (WHO) is “clearly unfit” to prevent another outbreak and calls for radical reform.
“Covid-19 is the 21st century’s Chernobyl moment,” says the report. “The system as it stands now is clearly unfit to prevent another novel and highly infectious pathogen, which could emerge at any time, from developing into a pandemic”.
...
“February [2020] was a month of lost opportunity to avert a pandemic. Most countries chose to ‘wait and see’, rather than take firmer measures that could have contained the virus,” said Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and co-chair of the Panel.
“For some, it wasn’t until hospital ICU beds started to fill that more action was taken – and by then it was too late.”
The independent report was commissioned last May by the WHO at the behest of member states and calls for radical reform, including a shift towards acting early on the “precautionary principle”, rather than waiting for proof of an emerging threat.
The United States bears plenty of that responsibility. This was a near complete failure on the part of the former administration, with the possible exception of the vaccine program, which is not in itself enough of an answer (see death toll).
David Jolly/Medium:
A New Center-Right Party Won’t Work.
The cowardice of the GOP is on full display. Donald Trump lost the popular vote in each of his bids for the presidency, lost the House and the Senate for his party, and directly influenced a violent anti-democratic attempt to invalidate the 2020 elections. But in today’s Republican Party it is Cheney on the way out while others with richer Trump bona fides are on their way in.
For disaffected Republicans, the deep hope is that this moment — finally this moment — is the needed inflection point that will cause an abrupt course correction within the party we once knew. Patriotic voices will be heard on both the left and the right about the sincere need for a healthy two-party democracy. And a small but vocal group of Republicans, many of whom I admire and call friends, will use this week to declare a great rebirth of conservatism, a reclaiming of the Republican Party, or if all else fails, the creation of a new center-right party.
I applaud my colleagues for trying to save the party we once all knew, but I believe their effort reflects all the wrong lessons learned.