WaPo:
When you limit yourself by not seeing power as an end in itself, you write wrongheaded stuff about policy.
Jennifer Morrell/WaPo:
AP via NBC News:
Clint Watts/Substack:
AP via News10:
Ipsos:
Medpage Today:
Nature:
Axios:
Dr Susannah Hills/USA Today:
Republicans struggle to define a new governing coalition as Trump closes grip on party
A new generation of Trumpist acolytes — such as Missouri attorney Mark McCloskey, who became famous for drawing a gun on Black Lives Matters protesters — have announced their intention to run for high office with a set of Trump issues that motivate them. McCloskey has announced plans to run for the Senate.
The moves pose a threat to the party’s efforts to reclaim moderate, largely college-educated voters whom were turned off by Trump, while muddying the party’s efforts to shift the national focus to the less popular parts of Democratic policies. They also mark a continued repudiation of the orthodoxy that last restored Republicans to power and governed the party for two generations.
Republican leaders have been alarmed by GOP-leaning voters moving away from the traditional conservative political conversation. Some even showed early support for parts of President Biden’s policy agenda, including another round of government checks for Americans, which Trump also supported, and plans for a massive infrastructure spending bill paid for with tax increases.
When you limit yourself by not seeing power as an end in itself, you write wrongheaded stuff about policy.
Jennifer Morrell/WaPo:
I watched the GOP’s Arizona election audit. It was worse than you think.
Cyber Ninjas is hunting for bamboo fibers and cheese dust.
I also observed other auditors working on a “forensic paper audit,” flagging ballots as “suspicious” for a variety of reasons. One was presidential selection: If someone thought the voter’s choice looked as though it had been marked by a machine, they flagged it as “anomalous.” Another was “missing security markers.” (It’s virtually impossible for a ballot to be missing its security markers, since voting equipment is designed to reject ballots without them.) The third was paper weight — the forensics tables had scales for weighing ballots, though I never saw anyone use them — and texture. Volunteers scrutinized ballots for, of all things, bamboo fibers. Only later, after the shift, did I learn that this was connected to groundless speculation that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea.
The financial risks from climate change are massive. President Biden took a tentative first step toward tackling it with a sweeping executive order yesterday. My latest: https://t.co/QiTTMQHdU1
— Naveena Sadasivam (@NaveenaSivam) May 21, 2021
Biden’s climate agenda is far from sure to pass congress, @LFFriedman explains. That’s crucial context for last week’s order pushing corporate disclosure of climate risks — an alternate avenue for changing companies’ behavior, by nudging investors. https://t.co/PBynVJ3U20
— Christopher Flavelle (@cflav) May 24, 2021
AP via NBC News:
County tells Arizona Senate to keep files, threatens lawsuit over deleted election data claim
The demand came after the auditors refused to back down from their claim that the county destroyed evidence. The county says auditors just didn't know where to look.
The county made the demand in a letter after the auditors refused to back down from their claim that the county destroyed evidence by deleting an election database. The GOP-controlled Board of Supervisors and Republican Recorder Stephen Richer, one of the top election officials, say the claim is false.
County officials earlier this week said they might consider filing a defamation lawsuit if the Senate President Karen Fann and the auditors don't retract the allegation files were deleted.
“Because of the wrongful accusations that the County destroyed evidence, the County or its elected officers may now be subject to, or have, legal claims,” the county's chief litigation attorney, Tom Liddy, wrote in a letter to Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican from Prescott.
People who expected scientists to reach immediate consensus on topics that mattered were in for a nasty surprise this pandemic. We need to explain better that's actually a feature of science, not a bug
— Maarten van Smeden (@MaartenvSmeden) May 22, 2021
Clint Watts/Substack:
Why Does Social Media Lead Us to Believe Things That Are Not True?
Overcoming vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. - Part 1
For manipulators, these three biases provide easy pathways for employing social media to overwhelm one’s ability to clearly assess reality. As more manipulators converge in pursuit of the same objective, their combined efforts exponentially warp the perception of information consumers who unknowingly are locked into news and opinion feeds of reinforcing propaganda, strategically placed disinformation, and reciprocating misinformation.
The end results of years of enduring manipulation campaigns have hit America squarely in the face in 2021 resulting in two major issues undermining U.S. democracy and America’s rebound from the pandemic. First, political partisans and extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 over an election that wasn’t stolen. Second, Americans upset over mask mandates, lockdown orders, and the economic impacts of a pandemic are refusing to receive a vaccine that would end mask mandates, lockdown orders and the pandemic. Both of these issues are national embarrassments, based on broadly disseminated fictions that are not only facilitated but empowered by social media. I personally do not believe either of these devastating phenomena would have occurred prior to the advent of social media.
AP via News10:
Shock of Jan. 6 insurrection devolves into political fight
In one of the most chilling scenes from the Jan. 6 insurrection, a violent mob surged through the halls of the U.S. Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence.” But when the House moved this week to create an independent commission to investigate the tragedy, the former vice president’s brother voted no.
Pressed to explain his decision, Rep. Greg Pence of Indiana praised his brother as a “hero” and turned his ire on Democrats, calling the commission a “coverup about the failed Biden administration.” He was even more aggressive in a baseless statement labeling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a “hanging judge” who “is hellbent on pushing her version of partisan justice complete with a hand-picked jury that will carry out her predetermined political execution of Donald Trump.”
Pence’s swift pivot to attacking Democrats and defending the former president about a riot that threatened his brother’s life is a stark measure of how the horror of Jan. 6 has been reduced from a violent assault on American democracy to a purely political fight.
New: Trump is sliding towards online irrelevance, and his new blog isn’t helping. Online talk about him has plunged to a five-year low. And Trump’s website in the last week saw fewer estimated visitors than Petfinder and Delish https://t.co/etdmQHXQQM w/ @jdawsey1
— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) May 21, 2021
Ipsos:
Over half of Republicans believe Donald Trump is the actual President of the United States
Donald Trump's claims of election fraud has Republicans doubting the legitimacy of Biden's presidency
Former President Donald Trump’s stronghold over the Republican party remains. His refusal to concede the 2020 election and calls of widespread fraud have raised doubts about the integrity of its results among his Republican base. Consequently, 56% of Republicans believe the election was rigged or the result of illegal voting, and 53% think Donald Trump is the actual President, not Joe Biden. Only 30% of Republicans feel confident that absentee or mail-in ballots were accurately counted, compared to 86% of Democrats and 55% of independents. As a result, 87% of Republicans believe it is important that the government place new limits on voting to protect elections from fraud. Finally, 63% percent of Republicans think Donald Trump should run for President again in 2024, compared to only 8% of Democrats and 23% of independents.
Medpage Today:
IDSA Sees 'Widespread' Confusion, Frustration Over CDC Mask Policy
— Guidance was a surprise that came too soon, and will be hard to implement
The CDC's announcement last week that people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer have to wear masks came as a surprise "bombshell" for infectious disease experts and policymakers across the nation, top officials of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) said during a Thursday news conference.
The interim announcement on May 13 from CDC director Rochelle Walensky, MD, was "abrupt, and I think as you see, was misinterpreted by many as 'mask mandates are over,' and even to some that the COVID-19 outbreak threat is over," said Jeffrey Duchin, MD, a member of the IDSA board of directors and a public health officer for Seattle and King County in Washington.
Lot of folks out there confuse "history" with "stories from the past that make me feel good about who I am in the present." Most of the time, when somebody's whining about "rewriting history," what they mean is "this knowledge about a real thing that happened makes me feel bad."
— Patrick Wyman (@Patrick_Wyman) May 22, 2021
Nature:
‘It’s a minefield’: COVID vaccine safety poses unique communication challenge
Poll on vaccine hesitancy demonstrates the extraordinary predicament researchers face in transmitting risk information during a pandemic.
Public-health specialists must always strike a careful balance when communicating about vaccine safety, but the enormous scale of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out means that safety data are evolving fast — so researchers are scrambling to share developments transparently and clearly with the public. And they worry that with the rise of anti-vaccination movements, their messages might be used or interpreted to fuel misinformation campaigns. Those who spoke to Nature say that because the stakes are so high for COVID-19, explaining vaccine risk has been especially fraught. “It’s a minefield,” says Bastian.
Kathryn Edwards, a vaccinologist at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has been a vaccine-safety consultant for 40 years, agrees. “I have not worked harder in my life,” she says.
Trump continues to do the work for the DSCC in #AZSen, first attacking Ducey and now Brnovich, another potential challenger to Mark Kelly https://t.co/gxrDcJtjOs
— Jessica Taylor (@JessicaTaylor) May 23, 2021
Axios:
Two in three Americans — including the majority of moderate and liberal Republicans — favor creating a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a new SurveyMonkey poll for Axios reviewed by Margaret Talev.
Why it matters: Conservative Republicans hold enough influence to block criticism and investigations of Donald Trump in Congress, but that stance could put them at odds with many suburban and college-educated Republican voters ahead of next year's midterms.
Dr Susannah Hills/USA Today:
There’s a new vaccine but not for COVID. It's for the other deadly pandemic – malaria.
I felt sicker with malaria than cancer and chemo. I had a high fever, vomiting, chills, pain and an excruciating headache. I was delirious for a week.
Now, amid all of the amazing vaccine advances for COVID-19 in recent months, results from trials of a new malaria vaccine – R21 – were just released in preprint from the Lancet. The randomized trial of 450 children in Burkina Faso showed the vaccine to be between 74% and 77% effective in preventing malaria, depending on the vaccine dose used.
This is no small feat. Scientists have been trying to develop a vaccine since 1910, and more than 140 vaccine candidates have been tested in humans to no avail. The only other vaccine recommended for use by the World Health Organization is the RTS,S – only 40% effective and only recommended for limited use in three countries.
Marjorie Taylor Greene's comparison of Democratic mask mandates to the Holocaust is obviously reprehensible. But I think it's symptomatic of a larger tendency. Many on the right have untethered themselves entirely from any obligation to reality in depicting the leftist menace: https://t.co/f7XNIPibmB
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) May 24, 2021