Politico:
A frenetic 24 hours in Biden land
The president had to balance a lot on Thursday.
[NYC Mayor Eric] Adams did his part to play up the partnership, declaring himself again “the Biden of Brooklyn,” and adding that he and Biden were “on the same page.” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) said Biden was “smart” to align himself with Adams, whom he described as both a former officer who is clearly supportive of police but also someone who from a young age has been behind police reforms. Suozzi also said Biden was wise to get out of the White House and speak directly with the voters, noting that once Biden dropped his scripted material and spoke freely about crime and guns, “the audience really warmed to him.”
“Between Covid and some of his handlers, the president has been too walled off from the people,” Suozzi said. “The challenge for Democrats … is they’ve got to talk about what the people care about. And in New York right now people care about crime, and they care about taxes, and they care about the economic recovery post-Covid. They don’t want to hear about this esoteric, theoretical, crazy far-right and extreme far-left debate.”
The White House, Suozzi noted, has “gotta let Biden be Biden.”
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
Does Biden Have a Second Act?
The experience of three recent predecessors shows why it’s too early to count him out.
After a difficult first two years in the White House, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama each rebuilt enough public support to win a second term—not long after many observers had labeled them fatally damaged by their early setbacks.
Although the specific environment and challenges confronting those three presidents diverged in many ways, the trajectory of each man’s first term followed the same broad arc. Each was elected at a moment of great unease about the country’s direction, particularly in terms of the economy. Each saw his approval rating tumble over his first two years, as voters concluded that conditions were not improving as fast as they had expected, or at least hoped. For all three, that decline culminated in big losses during their first midterm election (especially for Clinton and Obama). But in the second half of each man’s first term, public attitudes about the country’s direction improved, lifting the president’s approval rating. Just two years after their midterm reversals, all three won reelection, Clinton and Obama by solid margins and Reagan by a historic 49-state landslide.
Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:
The RNC Joins the Insurrection
So nothing was accomplished and nothing changed. Except . . . it all turns out to be worse than you thought.
This is how the Republican National Committee will describe the investigation into the violent attack on the Capitol that left at least five dead and hundreds — many of them police officers — wounded: “Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse….”
Nota bene: “persecution.”
“Ordinary citizens.”
“Legitimate political discourse.”
That’s bad enough. But they go on to broaden the condemnation by declaring that they are also helping “to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes.”
So let’s not put too fine a point on this: The Republican National Committee is fully embracing the Trumpian retconning of Jan. 6th as a peaceful protest and, in the process, has gone all-in on the insurrection itself.
Zoe Tillman/BuzzFeed:
Jan. 6 Defendants Keep Losing Challenges To A Felony Charged In Hundreds Of Cases
Obstructing an official proceeding carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Judges are united so far in greenlighting it in Jan. 6 cases.
Prosecutors have often paired the obstruction count with separate charges that a defendant committed other serious crimes at the Capitol, such as assaulting police or conspiracy. They’ve also charged it in cases where they contend the evidence is more robust about a person’s intent to disrupt Congress, or that their presence played a more direct role in halting the joint session. It’s cropped up in cases where defendants are accused of verbally confronting police or joining a crowd that pushed against law enforcement. And it’s appeared in cases where defendants are accused of making their way into the Senate chamber — like the case of Paul Hodgkins, sentenced to eight months in prison after pleading guilty to obstruction — or explicitly searching for lawmakers.
The government has also pursued the charge in some, but not all, cases where defendants allegedly spoke publicly or posted online about the reasons they went into the Capitol. One high-profile example was the case of Jenny Cudd, who livestreamed from outside her hotel that evening and described how she and other “patriots” decided to “storm” the Capitol after learning former vice president Mike Pence had “betrayed us” and would not seek to overturn the election. She took a deal to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge — prosecutors have extended similar offers to a handful of defendants indicted for obstruction but no other felonies — and is scheduled for sentencing in March.
John Stoehr/Editorial Board:
When it comes to Supreme Court picks, just remember that we are living in a period of white backlash against Black progress
Moral panics are an American tradition.
Liberals can accuse the Republicans of hypocrisy all day. It won’t matter. They don’t care. Neither do their supporters. They’d have to care about the truth to care about looking hypocritical. They don’t. All they care about is winning. They win when the liberals accuse them of hypocrisy. The liberals are missing the forest through the trees.
The Republican goal isn’t stopping Biden. They can’t. Their goal is making the nomination of a Black woman seem like an assault against white people. That goal is part of something larger still: the white backlash we have been living in since the death of George Floyd.
Clare Malone/New Yorker:
Is There a Market for Saving Local News?
Jump-starting journalism in smaller, economically depressed places requires a degree of patience, and some tolerance for risk.
A U.N.C. Hussman School of Journalism and Media report found eighteen hundred communities that had a local-news outlet in 2004 had none at the beginning of 2020. Two-thirds of the nation’s counties don’t have a daily newspaper, which drives residents to social media or far-off regional TV stations for their daily news. Thirty newspapers either closed or merged in April and May of 2020, at the height of the pandemic’s first wave. That decline has been linked to reduced civic engagement and political competition, and increased government corruption. In a 2018 article in the Journal of Communication, a group of researchers argued that the loss of local news also contributed to more polarized voting. In a piece explaining the work, one of the paper’s authors, Joshua Darr, cited the political scientist Lilliana Mason’s concept of “cross-cutting identity.” Local news, Darr noted, offers Americans a connection beyond party-line issues. “When people read news about their neighborhoods, schools and municipal services, they think like locals,” he wrote. “When they read about national political conflict, they think like partisans.” Local coverage allows readers to fight over the best deer-population-control methods or property taxes in their town rather than the latest Supreme Court nomination battle.
Bloomberg:
The U.S. Is Expanding Its Hunt for Early Warnings of Covid in Sewage
The samples stink, but the data are good
The U.S. struggle to track Covid in real-time has been one of the biggest frustrations of the pandemic. Early on, testing capabilities were only a fraction of what was needed. At-home tests, now more plentiful, mostly don’t get reported to health authorities. And even when local health departments and health care providers do get data, consolidating it for real-time analysis has been a challenge.
But with wastewater, the sewage – and the data it contains – keeps flowing.
Paying attention to that data can alert health officials to prepare medical surge teams, send out mobile testing units and to arrange for adequate supplies. It’s also a useful tool for health officials to help confirm what they’re seeing from other sources.
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