There’s roughly 720 hours before that guy is gone. His embedded minions will take a while more to root out.
Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin/NY Times:
A President Who Can’t Put Aside Grudges, Even for Good News
The past week served as a preview of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency: no leadership on debates within his party, but keen attention to waging personal vendettas and cultivating his supporters.
It was among the most consequential weeks of President Trump’s tenure: Across the country, health care workers began receiving a lifesaving coronavirus vaccine. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers closed in on a deal for economic relief aimed at averting a deeper recession. And on Friday, federal regulators authorized a second vaccine.
Yet Mr. Trump was largely absent from those events. It was Vice President Mike Pence who held a call with governors on Monday to hail a “medical miracle,” and who received the Pfizer vaccine at week’s end on live television. Legislative leaders were the ones working late into the nights on a stimulus deal eventually reached on Sunday.
Jelani Cobb/New Yorker:
African-American Resistance to the COVID-19 Vaccine Reflects a Broader Problem
Inequalities abound in the narrative of this pandemic. Black people and Latinos have disproportionately lost their jobs in the covid recession, but they are also more likely to perform the kinds of labor deemed essential, which accounts, in part, for the higher infection, hospitalization, and death rates found among these populations. For this and similar reasons, the fact that, on Monday, Sandra Lindsay, a Black nurse who works at the Long Island Jewish Hospital, became the first American to receive the Pfizer vaccine, and that it was administered to her by Dr. Michelle Chester, a Black doctor with Northwell Health, was laden with significance. Just forty-two per cent of African-Americans are willing to receive the vaccine, despite the fact that they are more likely than white Americans to be infected with—and die from—the virus. Last month, the N.A.A.C.P., in conjunction with two other organizations, released a report, “Vaccine Hesitancy in Black and Latinx Communities,” which found that just fourteen per cent of African-Americans surveyed “mostly or completely trust” the vaccine’s safety. On Wednesday, Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, who last month ran for a county commissioner’s seat in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, posted her doubts on Instagram, asking, “I really want to trust the scientist but why do they have a vaccine for covid-19 so fast but not cancer or aids?”
Juleanna Glover/ USA Today:
Don't cut in line for the COVID vaccine. Elites who do will be named and shamed.
The optics of the privileged jumping the COVID vaccine line ahead of essential workers will be terrible and should be damaging.
There are already rumors of executives seeking special dispensation to have their workers newly designated “essential” in order to cut in line. Any new designations should be carefully examined, and governmental agencies should sequester their decision-making processes from undue political influence. The lives of those who have been risking theirs to care for our sick, work in our drive-thrus and stock our grocery stores and drugstore shelves should come first.
I am not a fan. there are many reasons she just needs to move on.
NY Times:
The Coronavirus Is Mutating. What Does That Mean for Us?
Officials in Britain and South Africa claim new variants are more easily transmitted. There’s a lot more to the story, scientists say.
The British variant has about 20 mutations, including several that affect how the virus locks onto human cells and infects them. These mutations may allow the variant to replicate and transmit more efficiently, said Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a scientific adviser to the British government.
But the estimate of greater transmissibility — British officials said the variant was as much as 70 percent more transmissible — is based on modeling and has not been confirmed in lab experiments, Dr. Cevik added.
Michael Luo/New Yorker:
An Advent Lament in the Pandemic
COVID-19 has held a mirror to Christianity, just as the epidemics of the past did.
It has been, to a distressing degree, an ignominious year for the church in America. In the midst of a global public-health crisis, many Christians certainly took seriously Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of Matthew about how he would separate believers from unbelievers on Judgment Day: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” My colleague Jonathan Blitzer profiled Juan Carlos Ruiz, a fifty-year-old Mexican pastor of a Lutheran congregation in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who tirelessly delivered meals, arranged discounted burials with funeral homes, and answered calls for help at all hours from undocumented members of the community. Legions of Roman Catholic priests donned personal protective equipment and ventured, at great personal risk, into hospital rooms to anoint the dying with oil. Churches have operated food pantries, distributed rent-relief checks, and provided housing during the crisis. But white evangelical Protestants, once again, overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the election, despite his denialism about the pandemic, which has now killed more than three hundred thousand people in the United States, and his utter lack of compassion for its victims. Many churches, particularly conservative ones, fought lockdown orders and rebuffed public-health warnings about large indoor gatherings. The virus has swept through houses of worship across the country. In the end, the lasting image of the church in the pandemic may very well be that of an unmasked choir at First Baptist Church, in Dallas, led by the pastor, Robert Jeffress, a staunch Trump supporter, singing in front of Vice-President Mike Pence at a “Freedom Sunday” service, as the county where the church is located reported a record high for covid-19 cases.
WaPo:
Here’s what’s in the new $900 billion stimulus package
Jobless benefits, aid to small businesses, stimulus checks and money for vaccine distribution are in. Aid for local governments and corporate liability shields are out.
The bill comes at a critical time for the recovery as the coronavirus pandemic is overwhelming the nation’s healthcare system and scores of Americans were set to lose federal aid by the end of the year. Two separate bill summaries released by Republican and Democratic congressional leaders late Sunday, as well as reporting by The Washington Post, confirmed some details of what’s in and out of the bill.
Erica Newland/NY Times:
‘I’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department
No matter our intentions, lawyers like me were complicit. We owe the country our honesty about what we saw — and should do in the future.
Still, I felt I was abandoning the ship. I continued to believe that a critical mass of responsible attorneys staying in government might provide a last line of defense against the administration’s worst instincts. Even after I left, I advised others that they could do good by staying. News reports about meaningful pushback by Justice Department attorneys seemed to confirm this thinking.
I was wrong.
Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed….
No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.
We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.