Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

There were lots of vaccines coming through the pipe when Mr. Trump was president.

The shortfalls only came when Mr. Biden took over.

Did President Biden stop it other countries?

How did the first president to be impeached twice influence the production?

Michigan health officials expect to receive 120,900 doses of COVID-19 vaccines each of the next two weeks, The Detroit News learned Monday.

The increase in doses over last week's allotment comes as Michigan is now scheduled to receive shipments of the Michigan-made Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine as well as the newly approved Moderna vaccine, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

However, Michigan officials say the number of doses is still well below what was previously indicated by the federal government. The state received 84,825 doses in the first shipment of the Pfizer vaccine last week.
.....
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has urged the White House to explain why Michigan and other states are receiving a fraction of the coronavirus vaccines they were promised. She said answers from the Trump administration about vaccine availability were nonexistent.

"We have Michigan hospitals and nursing homes ready to administer this vaccine and the bottleneck appears to be the White House and I can’t get an answer why," she said Friday.

Whitmer has said Pfizer, which is manufacturing the entire North American supply at its flagship facility in Portage, indicated last week that it hasn't received the information it needs from the federal government in order to ship vaccines it has in stock.

As he faces his second impeachment trial, Donald Trump has been unusually quiet.

Ensconced in his private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., the former president has spent his days golfing. He has rolled through his phone, calling old friends and allies simply to check in. He has dined on the patio of his lush retreat, often accompanied by a coterie of political aides still on his payroll.

And, as Congress on Tuesday took up a second Senate trial for Trump almost exactly a year after his first, Trump has remained sanguine that an evenly divided Senate will acquit him of a charge of inciting an insurrection by egging on an angry crowd that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Yet despite his overall confidence, Tuesday’s opening arguments did not unfold as Trump or his allies had hoped. Trump was especially disappointed in the performance of his lawyer Bruce Castor, who gave a rambling argument, wore an ill-fitting suit and at one point praised the case presented by the Democratic House impeachment managers, two people involved in the effort said. The former president — monitoring the trial on television from Florida — had expected a swashbuckling lawyer and instead watched what was a confusing and disjointed performance.
.....
In self-imposed exile in South Florida since leaving office on Jan. 20, Trump has created a gilded bubble around himself — a protective shield further enforced by the decision of Twitter and other social media companies to ban the former president from their platforms after the Capitol riot, which resulted in the death of a police officer and four others.

He is adrift, friends say, with no clear sense of what comes next for the first time in his political life. They add that Trump is calmer than they expected as he faces down another historic indictment in a career littered with them. Four former senior Trump administration officials independently described the former president as “chill” or “chilling.”
.....
This portrait of Trump in this moment is the result of interviews with 11 advisers, allies and confidants, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details.

It was only when Mr. Biden took office that the supply of vaccine slowed to a trickle.

There were lots of vaccines coming through the pipe when Mr. Trump was president.

He funded the rapid development of many of these vaccines.

You make it sound as if he came up with the idea himself and paid for it out of his own pocket!

Some of the biggest supporters of the Trump-inspired insurrection, like Holy Hawley, wouldn't even look at the prosecution's presentation.

Opinion: The most devastating piece of evidence at the Trump trial

At the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, there is no real dispute about what actually happened. Trump's effort to undermine the legitimacy of the November election, his inflammatory words to the crowd on the Ellipse in Washington, DC, on January 6, and the violent attack on the Capitol by many of his most ardent supporters -- they're all memorialized, on video, for the world to see.

Trump's lawyers can't change what happened on that day, or before. Instead, they are trying to make the case all about Trump's subjective intent, which can be less tangible and more difficult to discern. Trump's lawyers have argued that he did not intend for the attack to occur and, they claim in their pretrial brief, he was "horrified" at what he saw his supporters doing inside the Capitol.

But House impeachment managers have one devastating piece of evidence that decisively refutes Trump's attorneys' claim about their client's state of mind: Trump's tweet January 6 at around 6 p.m.

In the tweet -- sent hours after the Capitol insurrection had occurred and since deleted by Twitter -- Trump wrote: "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"

Ask yourself: Are those the words of a person who was genuinely "horrified" by what he saw, to quote Trump's attorneys? To the contrary, in my view, the tweet establishes beyond any real doubt that Trump was pleased at what his supporters had done. He called them "great patriots," and urged them to "(r)emember this day forever!" Those are unequivocal words of empathy with the mob -- even exultation -- not regret.

Not sure how this works out. But my contempt of that element of our society is so strong, I am in a quandary. I have never before dealt with contempt at this level. Not sure how to do it.

But my contempt of that element of our society is so strong, I am in a quandary. I have never before dealt with contempt at this level. Not sure how to do it.

The mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol may have been a fringe group of extremists, but politically motivated violence has the support of a significant share of the U.S. public, according to a new survey by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

The survey found that nearly three in 10 Americans, including 39% of Republicans, agreed that, "If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions."

That result was "a really dramatic finding," says Daniel Cox, director of the AEI Survey Center on American Life. "I think any time you have a significant number of the public saying use of force can be justified in our political system, that's pretty scary."

The survey found stark divisions between Republicans and Democrats on the 2020 presidential election, with two out of three Republicans saying President Biden was not legitimately elected, while 98% of Democrats and 73% of Independents acknowledged Biden's victory.

The level of distrust among Republicans evident in the survey was such that about eight in 10 said the current political system is "stacked against conservatives and people with traditional values." A majority agreed with the statement, "The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it."

The survey found that to be a minority sentiment — two out of three Americans overall rejected the use of violence in pursuit of political ends – and Cox emphasized that the finding reflected "attitudes and beliefs" rather than a disposition to do something.

"If I believe something, I may act on it, and I may not," Cox says. "We shouldn't run out and say, 'Oh, my goodness, 40% of Republicans are going to attack the Capitol,' But under the right circumstances, if you have this worldview, then you are more inclined to act in a certain way if you are presented with that option."

The AEI survey found that partisan divisions were also evident along religious lines. About three in five white evangelicals told the pollsters that Joe Biden was not legitimately elected, that it was not accurate to say Trump encouraged the attack on the Capitol, and that a Biden presidency now has them feeling disappointed, angry or frightened.