Prime
The Self-Immolation of (Not So) Young Matt Gaetz 
When I saw the first reports of the Gaetz story I figured he was hooked up with some sleazeball who kept a coterie of young women on hand for his male pals enjoyment. Gaetz partook and got swept up in the investigation of the sleazeball associate. Some version of that seems broadly true and the friend is a disgraced GOP rising star named Joel Greenberg, who was the tax chief in Seminole County before getting indicted for stalking, child sex trafficking and more.
But Gaetz’s performance on TV and Twitter last night makes me think his legal predicament is significantly more serious. Sex with a minor, with money involved and crossing state lines, is certainly bad enough. But these wild claims about good guy and bad guy factions at the DOJ, feds pressuring various friends to testify against him, denials about photographs with underaged girls that no one had at least publicly accused him of yet – these are the flounderings and flailings of a guy wrapped up in something considerably more serious.
Where Things Stand: Preparing For The Next Pandemic
The global community has taken significant steps in the last week to try to properly arm the world against the inevitability of another pandemic. In a letter published in newspapers around the world, 24 world leaders — including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, German chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron — made the case for some form of a global treaty for pandemics, arguing COVID-19 was “a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe.”
Trump is Floundering and Unheard
I hear again and again that people shouldn’t ‘amplify’ Trump now that he’s lost power and his platforms on social media. This is a theory and understanding of politics and speech that I have always thought was more or less bankrupt. It crops up again now when Trump releases one of his Twitter-esque statements “from the office of” the 45th President, which he distributes to reporters. This happened again yesterday when he released a lengthy – quite lengthy – tirade against Drs Fauci and Birx. The idea is that journalists posting these on Twitter or discussing them somehow does Trump’s work for him rather than keeping him bottled in what really must be a personal hell of exile from the social media platforms which were so central to his political rise and the supply of endorphins in his bloodstream. But really these blasts only underscore how distant he has become from the centers of power, both literal and figurative. He used to yell in our faces or live in our heads. Now he’s reduced to nailing his rants to a public bulletin board way on the outskirts of town.
It’s like he’s barking into a pipe deep in a mine shaft and you can only faintly hear him out of the exposed pipe end sticking up out from the ground.
As we’ve discussed in various contexts over recent months, a big, big question is whether mRNA vaccines prevent COVID infection itself or the just illness that the virus causes. If the vaccine keeps you from getting a severe case of the disease or dying that is obviously a huge benefit. But the initial efficacy studies could not rule out one possibility: that vaccinated individuals were still getting infected and that the vaccine was pushing their cases into the asymptomatic category. That may not be a huge difference for individuals. But it’s all the difference in the world in terms of stopping the on-going spread of the disease through the population.
Now we have a study that seems to address this question directly.
Where Things Stand: The Sad Wedding Guest
It’s a Monday in the new Trump-free world and most days it’s best to keep it that way. But we thought this particularly sad weekend news was worth flagging.
Amid Georgia Furor, Other States Look at New Ways To Make Voting Harder
Now that the COVID relief bill has passed the nation’s politics are stuck in an uncanny pause or floating space. I can’t think of any analog to it in my living memory or any obvious one in the decades of previous history. Democrats have a big and fairly dramatic legislative agenda. They appear to have buy-in for much though not all of it from all fifty senators in their caucus. The question is whether they’ll make some basic change to the rules of the senate to make it possible to pass legislation with majority votes.
COVID Status Check
After more than a year of crisis we can all taste the end of the COVID pandemic. The rapidly accelerating rate of vaccinations secures that hope firmly in reality. For the moment though we remain in a standoff with the virus. In key parts of the country we’re actually losing ground.
There’s no question that COVID cases are now on the rise in the Greater New York region and have at least plateaued in much of the Northeast. Michigan, particularly metro-Detroit, is in the midst of surge. Cases there have more than doubled in the last two weeks. New York and Michigan are among 22 states where the number of COVID infections have gone up at least 10% over the last week.
Netanyahu May Finally Be Down for the Count
The final results of the fourth successive Israeli election are now in and the verdict is clear: Netanyahu lost. Or to put the matter more precisely, the results make it almost impossible for him to form a government. His bloc, which includes his Likud party and a group of far-right and religious parties, gained 52 seats. You need a minimum of 61 to form a government. Another natural ideological ally, the Yamina party led by an erstwhile Netanyahu lieutenant named Naftali Bennett, has resisted sitting in yet another Netanyahu government. But at the end of the day they probably would. But even that’s only 59 seats, two short of the bare minimum to form a government.
Where Things Stand: Militias And Other Right-Wing Groups Get Particularly Worked Up About Red Flag Laws
After back-to-back mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder in the past week, gun reform advocates are once again hoping to see an expansion of red flag laws, which allow authorities to confiscate guns from individuals deemed to be particularly dangerous. They’re one of the few gun control measures that some members of the pro-gun lobby will get behind due to their case-by-case enforcement.