Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Which was the point of my original post.

Sycophantic adulation is more the correct descriptor.

Explain your point about praise not indicating a valued opinion. Obviously someone values the opinion if they praise it,

Today the Biden administration opened the website to apply for relief from student debt, a policy that is expected to benefit 43 million Americans directly and others tangentially as debt relief frees up family resources. The administration also announced that the Food and Drug Administration’s final rule concerning Biden’s Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy went into effect today, making hearing aids available over the counter and thereby lowering costs for the devices by as much as $3,000 a pair.

The administration has also recently achieved a historic diplomatic victory by brokering an agreement between Israel and Lebanon, two countries that have been formally at war since 1948, to establish a maritime boundary.

But all that news got drowned out by the continuing drama coming from the Republican Party. As Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell wrote in The Bulwark today, the Republican Party is facing an “extinction event,” having been taken over by former president Trump to become the right-wing MAGA Party. As Longwell wrote, “In the Republican party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump.”

Longwell explains that Republicans have been stuck in a “Triangle of Doom,” in which Republican base voters want their media to confirm their biases. Fringe media outlets confirming those biases gain traction. In order to reach voters, Republican politicians have to go on those fringe outlets, and that, in turn, normalizes fringe media. Over time, this triangle radicalized the party until 70% of Republicans now believe the lie that Democratic president Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election.

“Say goodnight,” she writes. “The party’s over.” All but the MAGA Republicans have left. “The Good Republicans are gone,” Longwell writes. “Probably for good.”

Today, Fox Nation began a mock trial of Hunter Biden, with reality TV personality Judge Joe Brown saying that “something’s way wrong here, way wrong,” and suggesting that the legal investigations into Trump and the lack of them into the Bidens give the appearance that Trump and Biden “don’t live in the same country.”

Hunter Biden is not in the government, of course, and is not under indictment; Trump and the Trump Organization are embroiled in a number of lawsuits that suggest the former president and his associates saw government service not as a way to improve American lives but as a way to make money. Ginning up a show trial for Hunter Biden seems an attempt to rile up the base and undercut the many legal issues in the news concerning the former president. But such a show trial is also a fundamental rejection of the rule of law, suggesting that the law is simply a political tool to use against enemies rather than a body of laws before which we are all treated equally.

There is a reason Trump supporters are trying to undermine the rule of law. In New York, Trump’s wealthy friend and financial backer Thomas Barrack is on trial for selling his access to Trump to the leaders of the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investment money. The U.S. government says that Barrack fed confidential information to UAE leaders while permitting them to shape Trump’s speeches and policies. In the first three years of Trump’s term, Saudi Arabia and the UAE invested about $1.5 billion in Barrack’s real estate company.

In Northern Virginia the trial of Igor Danchenko for making false statements to the FBI, led by John Durham and other holdovers from the Trump Justice Department, suggests the Trump administration played fast and loose with national security in an attempt to undermine the Russia investigation. Witnesses in the trial have testified that the “highly unusual” decision by Trump attorney general Bill Barr to declassify an interview with Danchenko and share it with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) hurt national security. Graham promptly made a summary of the interview public to bolster the argument that the Russia investigation was “corrupt.” But that release meant that internet hobbyists quickly figured out who Danchenko was, exposing a key FBI informant as well as his friends and family in Russia.

This exposure for political reasons not only burned a key source, it weakened the ability of the U.S. to cultivate informants.

Last week, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post broke the story that Will Wilkerson, an executive who had been in on the ground floor of Trump’s “Truth Social,” filed a whistleblower complaint against the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission last August 28. Wilkerson alleges that Truth Social and the special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) enlisted to finance the media company behind Truth Social violated federal securities laws. The Trump Media and Technology Group and one of those SPACs, Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC), have been under criminal investigation since the summer; Wilkerson’s cooperation should advance that case.

Without laws, governmental office can be used simply as a way to amass money and power. Today the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis issued the third installment of its report. This one detailed how the Trump administration “engaged in an unprecedented campaign of political interference in the federal government’s pandemic response, which undermined public health to benefit the former president’s political goals.”

Angry that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for masks and lockdowns, Trump and his aides attacked CDC scientists and suppressed reports. Political operatives downplayed the risks of the novel coronavirus and used the power of the CDC to achieve Trump’s political goal of shutting down legal immigration across the southern border. The administration also used “hundreds of millions” of dollars of CDC funds to “what amounted to a celebrity vanity campaign to ‘defeat despair and inspire hope’” before the 2020 election.

Today, Carol D. Leonnig at the Washington Post wrote that records obtained by the chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), show that when Trump was in office, his company charged Secret Service agents as much as five times the government rate to stay in his hotels while providing protection for Trump and his family. Secret Service supervisors frequently asked for special waivers to enable them to pay rates higher than approved government guidelines.

Leonnig noted that billing documents representing “a fraction” of those expenses show that U.S. taxpayers paid at least $1.4 million to the Trump Organization for rooms at Trump properties, which he visited more than 500 times during his presidency and continued to visit with security after he left office.

Eric Trump took issue with the story, saying that the Trump Organization provided services to the Secret Service at the agents’ request, and that services were provided “at cost, heavily discounted, or for free.” “The company would have been substantially better off if hospitality services were sold to full-paying guests, however, the company did whatever it took to accommodate the agencies to ensure they were able to do their jobs at the highest levels.”

Praise is no indication at all that your opinion is based on an actual intelligent appraisal of anything.

It's the basic premise of Fox News.

CLAIM: Pfizer admitted to the European Parliament that it had not tested the ability of its COVID-19 vaccine to prevent transmission of the virus before it entered the market, proving the company lied about this earlier in the pandemic.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Janine Small, president of international markets at Pfizer, told the European Parliament on Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its COVID-19 vaccine prevented transmission of the virus before it entered the market in December 2020. But Pfizer never claimed to have studied the issue before the vaccine’s market release.

THE FACTS: After Small testified before the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic, misleading claims about whether Pfizer knew the impact of its COVID-19 vaccine on preventing transmission spread widely on social media.

Rob Roos, a Dutch European Parliament member who asked Small a question about transmission at the hearing, tweeted: “BREAKING: In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission. ‘Get vaccinated for others’ was always a lie. The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated. The world needs to know. Share this video!”

The tweet, which included a video showing the exchange between Roos and Small, had received more than 232,000 likes and more than 166,000 shares by Thursday.

Other social media posts about the hearing used the hashtag #PfizerLiedPeopleDied.

At the hearing (which you can watch by clicking here), Roos asked Small whether Pfizer had tested its COVID-19 vaccine for its ability to prevent transmission of the virus prior to its market release. Small answered: “No. We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.” She went on to explain why Pfizer moved quickly to develop a COVID-19 vaccine as the virus spread worldwide.

While Roos and many others framed this as a new revelation, Pfizer never claimed that its clinical trial, upon which the vaccine was authorized for use, evaluated the shot’s effect on transmission. In fact, shortly before the vaccine’s release, the company’s CEO emphasized that this was still being evaluated.

A study funded by Pfizer and German vaccine maker BioNTech published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Dec. 10, 2020, a day before the Food and Drug Administration gave Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine emergency use authorization, did not include data about the vaccine’s effectiveness at reducing transmission of the virus.

Instead, it reported that two doses of the vaccine provided 95% protection against contracting symptomatic COVID-19 in people 16 and older. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla also said in a December 2020 interview with NBC News that it was still unclear whether vaccinated individuals could carry the virus and transmit it to others.

“I think this is something that needs to be examined,” he told the network. “We are not certain about that right now.”

The FDA stated in a Dec. 11, 2020, press release announcing the authorization of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that “at this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.”

A Pfizer spokesperson told The Associated Press that its clinical trial was designed to evaluate the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine in preventing disease caused by the COVID-19 virus, including severe illness.

“Stopping transmission was not a study endpoint,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Asked for comment, Roos told the AP that he was not making a point about Pfizer, but about government mandates for the COVID-19 vaccines.

“I take fundamental rights seriously,” Roos wrote in an email. “For governments to infringe on them, they need a massive amount of evidence to prove the necessity. In this case, it was not even a part of the Pfizer trials.” He said that such mandates were based on “no evidence.”

But experts and research say that the COVID-19 vaccines have provided benefits in terms of limiting infections and transmission, at least with earlier variants of the virus and for a period of time after being vaccinated.

Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the vaccine center at Emory University, told the AP that the fact that Pfizer did not address the vaccine’s impact on transmission during clinical trials is not unusual, because transmission is a complex metric to measure.

“It’s much more difficult to evaluate impact on transmission,” Orenstein, a professor of infectious diseases at the Emory School of Medicine, wrote in an email. “What is usually done is a randomized placebo controlled study, in which the recipients are ‘blinded (i.e., do not know whether they received placebo or vaccine.’”

Public officials have suggested on multiple occasions that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission, but that’s an overstatement. For example, in an October 2021 speech in Illinois, President Joe Biden said: “We’re making sure healthcare workers are vaccinated, because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that…the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you. ”

While the vaccines do not eliminate all transmission, they can help. Studies done after distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines began, including research by Pfizer, did find that the company’s shot reduced asymptomatic infections in addition to symptomatic cases with earlier variants of the virus. Researchers in the United Kingdom reported in a February observational study that Pfizer’s vaccine helped cut transmission of the alpha and delta variants.

“Our study from earlier in the year shows that the Pfizer vaccine reduces transmission from people with breakthrough infections, at least in the 3 months post vaccine which we studied,” Dr. David Eyre, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, wrote in an email.

Experts have told the AP that while the original COVID-19 vaccines provide less protection against infection with the highly contagious omicron variant, they still protect against serious outcomes.

The CDC stated in an August report that receiving only the first one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine “provides minimal protection against infection and transmission” and that being up to date on all recommended booster doses “provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.”

Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, explained that while the vaccines do provide neutralizing antibodies, which help protect against infection, those kinds of antibodies quickly wane — even as protection against serious illness continues to last.

“It is fair to say that when you get a vaccine that clearly decreases your chance of getting infected, it does,” said Offit, who is also the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “And therefore it decreases your chance of spreading it to others. But it’s not in any way absolute.”

Offit added that messaging to the public around the vaccines early on was flawed and should have been focused on their core benefit — preventing serious illness and hospitalization — since many would later cast doubt on the vaccines’ success because of “breakthrough infections.”

You've already been called out on this. You need to quit basing your opinions on misinformation you're fed by the alt-right and the Q-anon conspiracists.

I don't know if you are aware of the origins of the term "woke".

I just wanted to provide some context. So often the right bastardizes something that was intended to be uplifting and freeing into something to be used as a cudgel. Like the way the "I have a dream" speech morphed from being just one of the most well-known of MLK's speeches into a punchline used by conservatives to scold any minorities who weren't being true to the warped ideal of colorblindness.

I would just include the caution here that no one be fooled into thinking for a moment that "both sides" have equally active, or equally destructive, extremes.

You can say [the joke] but I think it might be a little solipsistic to think that your intention is more important than the effect of the joke.

The irony that attends the strange tendency of today's "Liberals" to project their own authoritarian failings on their opponents is fast becoming evident to all.

Me too. It was a careful discussion (I think). And the subject is tricky. It's rather like heading out into a field of landmines where some of the mines have been planted by our own side.

I do indeed find it very ironic.