Sammy Braddy

On Twitter.

And here and here.

Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child

At Amazon, Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.

The Radicalization of Ted Cruz (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Ted Cruz Walks Back January 6th 'Terrorist' Comments in Heated Exchange with Tucker Carlson (VIDEO)."

From Amanda Carpenter, at the Bulwark, "Ted Cruz’s Humiliation Isn’t the Worst Part":

By now, you’ve heard about the clip of Ted Cruz groveling for Tucker Carlson’s approval on Fox News. Every last member of the punditocracy has taken a turn dunking on the Texas senator whom everyone loves to hate.

Hope they enjoyed it.

Because once you really understand what Cruz is apologizing for, it’s not all that funny.

The worst part of that interview wasn’t Cruz’s abject humiliation, but his radicalization. And yes, that’s saying something considering that Cruz was one of the leaders of the charge to object to the Electoral College count on January 6, 2021.

At issue is Cruz’s use of the phrase “violent terrorist attack” when talking about Jan. 6th protesters who assaulted police. For this, last Thursday Carlson accused Cruz of “repeating the talking points Merrick Garland has prepared.” Burn. Lord knows, the worst thing a potential 2024 GOP presidential contender could do is be on message with the Biden administration about Jan. 6th.

It’s worth remembering that when Cruz was coming up in Republican politics, being tough on crime was a good message. He likely clings to the notion that the typical GOP voter wants to “back the blue” and that a successful politician should be consistent in denouncing criminals on the left and the right.

Hah.

That’s just not true of Carlson’s Trump-obsessed, conspiracy-driven viewers. And the fact that Carlson created a three-part series titled “Patriot Purge” that describes Jan. 6th as a government “setup” and jailed rioters as “political prisoners” should have been a clue.

Carlson said the attack could be called a “riot” but “it was not a violent terrorist attack. Sorry.”

He went on:

So why are you telling us that it was, Ted Cruz? And why are none of your Republican friends who are supposed to be representing us and all the people have been arrested during this purge saying anything? What the hell’s going on here?

You’re making us think maybe the Republican Party is as worthless as we suspected it was. That can’t be true. Reassure us, please. Ted Cruz?

Cruz decided to come on Carlson’s broadcast the next evening, so he could help make clear how eager he is to represent the people arrested during the “purge.”

Right out of the gate, Cruz was all concessions and backpedaling. His phrasing, he said, was “sloppy” and “dumb,” and he claimed that he only meant the word “terrorist” to refer to “the limited number of people who engaged in violent attacks against police officers.”

I’ve drawn a distinction. I wasn’t saying that the thousands of peaceful protesters supporting Donald Trump are somehow terrorists. I wasn’t saying the millions of patriots across the country supporting President Trump are terrorists, and that’s what a lot of people have misunderstood.

He thought that distinction would be acceptable.

Nope...

More.

 

The Republican Party in 2022

 From Amanda Carpenter, at the Bulwark, "What It Means to Be a Republican in 2022":

What does it mean to be a Republican in the year 2022? Being hated. Yes, by the left—but more importantly, also by members of your own party.

Here in the bad, red place, hardly anyone gets along. Especially after January 6th. Why? Consider this a simple question: Whom does Donald Trump actually like?

In the old days, all a Republican had to do to make Trump happy was kiss his ass with some cheap flattery. Say he’s the biggest, strongest, handsomest, smartest, richest dude in history and that would be enough. But today, being on Trump’s good side requires accepting his 2020 election lie and endorsing his various schemes to overturn the results.

And if you’re not gonna do that? Then GTFO. Trump doesn’t want you around. As long as Trump is in charge, your future in the GOP is dead.

Just ask Mike Pence.

Pence spent four years as vice president gazing adoringly into Trump’s profile and swooning over his broad shoulders only to be cast out when he refused to block Joe Biden’s certification as president. Trump told Pence, “I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.” When Pence didn’t, he was promptly sentenced to death, political and otherwise, by Trump’s troops who chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they marauded the halls of Congress. Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that his supporters wanted to hang Mike Pence “because it’s common sense, Jon.” Trump recently described Pence as “mortally wounded.”

Likewise, after Attorney General William Barr told a reporter there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election, Trump fumed at him: “You must really hate Trump.” Similarly, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger lost any goodwill they might have felt from the former president when they informed him they could not “find” enough votes for him to win that state. Ditto Arizona Governor Doug Ducey.

Heck, the number of Trump’s own cabinet officials whom the former president can’t stand—and who can’t stand him in return—is remarkable.

Because here’s the rub: To the former president, being “Trump’s friend” means never saying no to him. Even when it comes to acting on lies that caused an insurrection.

It’s the friendship of the mob boss: Do what he tells you and there won’t be any trouble. Which explains a lot of the behind-the-scenes grumbling in Republican politics. The guys paying protection money never actually like the mob boss...

Keep reading.

 

As Train Bears Down Full Speed, Last Second Rescue of Single-Engine Cessna 172 Pilot (VIDEO)

This is your ultimate nightmare.

At CBS 2 Los Angeles, "Train Slams Into Downed Single-Engine Plane on Pacoima Tracks."

Frightening cell phone video of first responders pulling a pilot to safety seconds before a train slams into the plane that crashed onto the tracks near Whiteman Airport in Pacoima. @CBSLA #BreakingNow #news #crash #kcal 📸 Luis Jimenez https://t.co/NWGu2HhBUM @composerluis pic.twitter.com/D4VhNPGYID

— JASMINE VIEL (@jasmineviel) January 10, 2022

Foothill Division Officers displayed heroism and quick action by saving the life of a pilot who made an emergency landing on the railroad tracks at San Fernando Rd. and Osborne St., just before an oncoming train collided with the aircraft. pic.twitter.com/DDxtGGIIMo

— LAPD HQ (@LAPDHQ) January 10, 2022

There's No Evidence That Vaccines Are Reducing Infections from Omicron

Things are completely breaking up for the Democrats. Quite simply, people are fed up.

At WSJ, "Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete":

Federal courts considering the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates—including the Supreme Court at Friday’s oral argument—have focused on administrative-law issues. The decrees raise constitutional issues as well. But there’s a simpler reason the justices should stay these mandates: the rise of the Omicron variant.

It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Both mandates—from the Health and Human Services Department for healthcare workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for large employers in many other industries—were issued Nov. 5. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both agencies appropriately considered Delta at length and in detail, finding that the vaccines remained effective against it.

Those findings are now obsolete. As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.”

The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday’s oral argument, all the justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale. But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death). As the World Health Organization puts it, “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.” For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence.

The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection. Confirming this negative efficacy finding, data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people.

Meantime, it has long been known that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are highly contagious, and preliminary data from all over the world indicate that this is true of Omicron as well. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it last summer, the viral load in the noses and throats of vaccinated people infected with Delta is “indistinguishable” from that of unvaccinated people, and “what [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”

There is some early evidence that boosters may reduce Omicron infections, but the effect appears to wane quickly, and we don’t know if repeated boosters would be an effective response to the surge of Omicron. That depends among other things on the severity of disease Omicron causes, another great unknown. According to the CDC, the overwhelming majority of symptomatic U.S. Omicron cases have been mild. The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain. As Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the U.K.’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said in a recent interview, “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four or six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable.”

In any event, the vaccine mandates before the court don’t require boosters. They define “fully vaccinated” as two doses of Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech or one dose of Johnson & Johnson. Even if boosters would help, the mandates would leave tens or hundreds of thousands of unboosted employees on the job, who have zero or negative protection against Omicron infection, and who would be highly contagious if they become infected. In other words, there is no scientific basis for believing these mandates will curb the spread of the disease.

Still more.

The Pending November 'Shellacking' for Democrats

At the Los Angeles Times, "Democrats face a tough slog in midterm battle to keep Congress":

Democrats have long known history is not on their side in the 2022 midterm elections. But as they enter this campaign year, the steep climb to keep their majorities in Congress appears even more daunting with the COVID-19 pandemic stubbornly persistent and voters concerned over inflation and crime.

The unsettled national climate — if it holds in November — will likely favor Republicans, who need just five additional seats to take control of the U.S. House and only one more for a majority in the Senate.

The sitting president’s party almost always loses ground in midterm elections — doing so in all but two such contests since the end of World War II. And Democrats hoping to buck precedent have few easy fixes for the problems on voters’ minds or for President Biden’s underwater approval ratings.

“Sometimes you have a messaging problem, and other times you just have a problem. In this situation, [Democrats] just have the latter,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who ran communications for the GOP’s House campaign arm in 2018. “No slogan or single policy achievement can turn around a broader environment. There would have to be a seismic shift.”

Democratic campaign officials reject predictions of a gloomy November, saying they’re confident they’ll have a solid pitch for voters.

“Democrats are going to hold the House because we are delivering for the American people,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He pointed to millions of jobs created in the last year, as well as vaccine distribution and efforts to lower healthcare costs.

“Kevin McCarthy and his band of extremist House Republicans have yet to present a single realistic idea to move this country forward,” he said, referring to the congressman from Bakersfield who leads the GOP in the House.

There are some silver linings for Democrats.

The party probably avoided a worst-case scenario in the redistricting for the House. Though the GOP had an overall advantage in drawing the new congressional maps, so far they’ve mostly tried to shore up existing red districts instead of aggressively creating new ones, experts say.

In the Senate, Democrats are defending seats in battleground states that Biden won last year, albeit by the barest of margins in places like Arizona and Georgia. Senate races can also depend more on individual candidates, making Democrats slightly less vulnerable than their House counterparts if there is a wave election against them.

Still, “it obviously takes unique circumstances to redirect a midterm election,” said Stuart Rothenberg, senior editor of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political newsletter. “I don’t know whether there’s anything that’s going to happen that’s so shocking to people, so stunning that it will give the Democrats the ammunition they need to change the election.”

Privately, Democratic strategists acknowledge the difficulties ahead, particularly after losing the Virginia governor’s race in the fall and barely escaping a similar defeat in deep-blue New Jersey. Those off-year races often have served as early indicators for the direction of the midterms.

The Democrats’ challenge partially lies with the nature of midterms: Supporters of the party in power are often disappointed that the president’s campaign promises have not yet been fulfilled, dampening their enthusiasm, while the opposition is motivated by unhappiness at being out of power.

Republicans, meanwhile, have a more basic task: keeping the focus on the majority party.

“The strategy for Republicans is a pretty simple one: Don’t screw it up,” said Ken Spain, former spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Don’t make yourself the issue and allow the election to be a referendum on Democratic control of Washington.”

Distilling the party’s campaign message, Emma Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, kept the focus tightly on Biden.

“Biden has lost all credibility — he has failed to ‘shut down the virus’ like he promised, pushed Americans out of work with unconstitutional mandates, overseen a rise in crime, presided over skyrocketing prices for everyday goods and promoted trillions more in reckless spending,” she said...

 

Good Morning!

From Paige Spirinac:

Why the U.S. Military Isn't Ready for Civil War

A huge platter of food for thought.

At Foreign Policy, "Why the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready for Civil War":

The unimaginable has become reality in the United States. Buffoonish mobs desecrating the U.S. Capitol building, tanks parading down the streets of Washington, running battles between protesters and militias, armed rebels attempting to kidnap sitting governors, uncertainty about the peaceful transition of power—if you read about them in another country, you would think a civil war had already begun. The basic truth is the United States might be on the brink of such a war today. Americans must now take the proposition seriously, not just as a political warning but as a probable military scenario—and a potential catastrophe.

The United States, of course, is not just any country—it is the world’s most enduring democracy and largest economy. But ever fewer Americans believe its size and power are going to save it anymore. In the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s election, Thomas E. Ricks for Foreign Policy asked a group of national security experts to assess the chances of a civil war over the next 10 to 15 years. The consensus stood at 35 percent. A 2019 poll from Georgetown University asked registered voters how close to the “edge of a civil war” the country was, on a scale from 0 to 100. The mean of their answers was 67.23, so almost exactly two-thirds of the way.

There are plenty of reasons to trust this assessment. The United States, as is stands, is a textbook case of a country on the brink of civil conflict. The political system has been completely overwhelmed by hyperpartisanship that renders each political decision, at best, representative of the will of only half the country. The legal system is increasingly a spoil of political infighting. The Oath Keepers, one of the largest anti-government militias, have effectively infiltrated police forces and the Republican Party. Elected officials have opened the doors to vandals who desecrate their own legislatures. It has now become perfectly normal for political representatives to call for acts of violence against their political opponents. “When do we get to use the guns?” is an acceptable question at right-wing rallies. Political violence is on the rise, and the response of the courts has been to legitimize vigilantism—see the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.

Only a spark is needed, one major domestic terrorist event that shifts the perception of the country—an anti-government patriot who takes his rage against the federal authority and finds expression in flying a drone loaded with explosives into the Capitol dome or a sheriff who decides to take up arms to defend the doctrine of interposition. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that a left-wing rejection of the police, like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, might force military action. Retired U.S. Army Col. Peter Mansoor, a professor of military history at the Ohio State University, is a veteran of the Iraq War who now studies the insurgencies of the past. He doesn’t have any difficulty picturing a contemporary U.S. equivalent to civil wars elsewhere. “It would not be like the first Civil War, with armies maneuvering on the battlefield,” he said. “I think it would very much be a free-for-all, neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion. And it would be horrific.”

For the U.S. government, an outbreak of widespread political violence inside the country’s borders would necessarily become a military operation. U.S. militias are significant enough that the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security would simply be insufficient to deal with them. Only the U.S. military could be capable of dealing with insurgent forces. And from a tactical point of view, any engagement between U.S. forces and a militia (or any insurgent force of any kind for that matter) would be entirely one-sided. Despite the preparations of right-wing militias, and despite the sheer number of weapons available in the United States, the U.S. Marines are still the U.S. Marines. No militia or organized group of militias could compete with them in battle.

The real problems would be legal and bureaucratic, and these problems, in turn, would quickly take on a military character. The U.S. military isn’t culturally or institutionally designed to be an adequate domestic actor—rather, the opposite. Its role in American life has been specifically designed to make it ineffective in domestic operations. The use of the military would not be, in itself, a constitutional crisis; there are legal precedents and explicit executive orders governing the use of military force on U.S. soil. But any military response to civil unrest is highly likely to spin out of control into extended insurgency. And for all the U.S. military’s prowess, the outcome would be entirely uncertain.

Occupying forces in foreign countries are, almost without exception, seen as illegitimate by local populations. Would a U.S. force on U.S. soil face the same fundamental resistance? American forces would, after all, be American. But the United States is not like other countries. It was born in resistance to government. Its history has been filled with state resistance to federal authority. And it has experienced resistance to occupation by its own forces before. The United States currently contains a diverse assortment of anti-government movements, from groups that are little more than survivalist hobbyists to neo-Nazi accelerationists and sovereign citizens. They are armed; several members of these groups have been caught with the materials needed to build low-grade nuclear weapons. A significant portion of the American public is actively pursuing the destruction of political authority as such. What happens if they continue to enact their stated goals of overthrowing the federal government and imposing their vision of liberty by force of arms, as the events of Jan. 6, 2021, have shown they are already beginning to do?

Joint Publication 3-27 defines the armed forces’ role in homeland defense as protecting U.S. “sovereignty, territory, domestic population, and critical infrastructure against external threats and aggression or other threats, as directed by the President.” So which is it? Is the Army there to protect against “external threats”? Or is the category of “other threats” broad enough to include rebel militias?

The Insurrection Act stipulates the latter. Originally enacted in 1807, it provides for the suppression of an insurrection against a state government at the request of the governor. There is also Section 253 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which allows the president to use the armed forces to suppress insurrection or domestic violence if it (1) hinders the execution of the laws to the extent that a part or class of citizens are deprived of constitutional rights and the state is unable or refuses to protect those rights or (2) obstructs the execution of any federal law or impedes the course of justice under federal laws. There is precedent for such direct engagement: Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War; President Dwight D. Eisenhower calling troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce desegregation; the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

But the rules of force issued to the 7th Infantry Division during the Los Angeles riots specified minimum levels of force in response to levels of civilian violence. Today’s political violence threatens to be far more organized. The question is, what would happen if the U.S. military were obliged to respond in kind? ....

*****

Sixty years of U.S. experience has taught the same lesson about counterinsurgency: If you lose, you lose. If you win, you still lose. At present, the official U.S. counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy remains a version of Petraeus’s 2006 “clear, hold, and build” strategy. In the current edition of Joint Publication 3-24, which provides the U.S. military with a doctrine for counterinsurgency operations, it is outlined as “shape, clear, hold, build, and transition,” part of a suite of COIN strategies that include the generational approach (engaging with youth who are most likely to join insurgencies) and network engagement (through social media). All of these strategies have the smack of desperation in their operating modes. The military holds on to these strategies because at least they are strategies, not because they work. For decades, the U.S. military has been defined by its ineffectiveness against insurgencies in foreign countries. Why would it do any better at home?

The central problem is that it is impossible to build legitimacy as an occupier; the process of holding, even with the best of intentions, is humiliating and disruptive. The illegitimacy of any occupying force—the French in Algeria and Indochina, the Russians in Afghanistan, the British everywhere—would meet greater opposition than ever in an American-on-American context. The defiance begins in a claim to the illegitimacy of federal authority. If you are occupying an anti-government patriot stronghold, any state-building, of any kind, will be forced. The locals don’t want government. That’s the point. But how could any force “address the underlying causes of violence,” as JP 3-24 states, without the machinery of legitimization?

You don’t have to look very far to find an example of a failed occupation on U.S. soil. The South, under Reconstruction, spawned the Ku Klux Klan, Red Shirts, and White League—terrorist organizations that beleaguered the Northern administration until it abandoned the project of reconciliation. The resentment of the occupation after the Civil War survives to this day. Many in the South have not forgotten the abuses of Sherman’s March to the Sea, nor forgiven the Northern authorities for the humiliation of subjugation. The occupied Americans hated the occupying Americans. That hatred endures.

It’s in the nature of insurgent conflict that violence builds on itself. Symbolic horrors echo. Resonance compounds. The most recent COIN manual has digested, or at least acknowledged, the problem of perception. Insurgencies and counterinsurgencies are engaged in competitive storytelling. “Insurgent groups harness narratives to communicate grievances, goals, and justifications for actions to both internal and external audiences,” JP 3-24 reads. “Insurgency narratives have three elements or components: actors and the environments in which they operate, events along a temporal continuum, and causality—cause and effect relative to the first two elements.” The key word here is “audiences.” And how good can any military force be at playing to audiences?

The tactical considerations of battles between the U.S. military and any domestic militia forces would be completely irrelevant. No one with any tactical expertise can imagine anything other than a one-sided engagement. Professional military forces are professional...

RTWT. 

Maria Bartiromo, The Cost

Maria Bartiromo, The Cost: Trump, China, and American Revival.

The Week America Called in Sick

Things are bad. Awfully bad out there. 

And the administration appears helpless to do anything about it. 

People are saying it's "2020-2." It may even be worse than that. We're not going to lock down again, so everyone's in the atomic freak-out mode. It's not pretty. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "Omicron and the Week America Is Calling In Sick":

Hundreds of first responders in Los Angeles are out sick or quarantined due to Covid-19. A hotel staffing company is flying housekeepers to Florida and Texas to fill in for absent staff. A medical laboratory in Denver doesn’t have enough staff to send people to nursing homes to take blood samples.

The first full week of 2022 was supposed to signal a return to work after the winter holidays. Instead, America called in sick. Employers have been hit by a global wave of Covid-19 illnesses and people missing work because they or their family or co-workers have been exposed to the fast-spreading Omicron variant. School closings and child-care issues are also keeping some workers at home.

“We have gotten to the point this week where there are a number of shifts that nobody can fill,” said Lena DeGloma, owner of Red Moon Wellness spa in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Six of 25 employees were out Thursday, with two having just come back. Ms. DeGloma returned to work Thursday after quarantining for 10 days because she tested positive for Covid-19.

The recent surge in employee absences is the latest strain on public and private sectors already worn down by the pandemic, supply chain snarls, labor shortages and rising prices. Many employees are reporting mild symptoms as a result of Covid-19, employers say, but must still miss multiple days of work, leaving employers to grapple daily with the question of who will be in and who can’t make it.

An inability to get Covid-19 tests is also a challenge for some people figuring out whether they can work outside the home, travel and congregate with others.

The fresh disruption to the global labor market at the start of the third pandemic year is both familiar and foreign. In the U.S., the seven-day average of daily cases reported surpassed 500,000 for the first time since the 2020 pandemic declaration. Omicron infections are resulting in fewer hospitalizations than earlier variants but the volume of people testing positive or exposed is taking its toll on workplaces—which are already stretched by the tight U.S. labor market.

More than five million Americans could be stuck at home isolating over the coming days, according to Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. While more people have worked from home since the start of the pandemic, many jobs can’t be done remotely, and though the economic effects of the latest Covid-19 surge could be temporary, he wrote in a report Wednesday it could “deal a significant hit to the economy over the next month or two.”

U.S. health officials have shortened quarantine times for individuals who test positive and have no symptoms. And some employees might be able to work from home while sick. Still, staffing shortages disrupted some essential services this week, from airline flights to in-person learning. New York City’s public transit system operated some bus and subway routes at reduced frequency. A hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., temporarily stopped taking new labor and delivery patients.

Los Angeles officials said Thursday they had adequate staffing for emergency services despite having more than 400 police officers and roughly 300 firefighters and emergency medical personnel who were sick or in quarantine.

“What is so difficult about this illness is you don’t know if you’ve got it until you take a test—and that takes time,” said Terry Bell, co-owner of Salon ILO in Washington, D.C.

Revenue fell by about 50% at Mr. Bell’s business during the pandemic, but no one got sick until mid-December, when the salon had to close for two weeks and cancel about 400 appointments. Fifteen of 18 staff members were diagnosed with Covid-19 following the annual holiday party. All 18 had been vaccinated, and only one hadn’t received a booster shot, said Mr. Bell, who tested negative.

The salon, in business for 41 years, reopened a few days before the New Year’s holiday. Then, this Tuesday, one hairdresser, who had been ill in December, called in to report a sore throat, forcing the salon to cancel another 45 or so appointments.

The hairdresser ended up testing negative, he said, and returned to work Thursday.

Greg Casten, a partner in four family-owned Washington restaurants, now begins his mornings with a health update from his management team. “Every day, there is at least one surprise,” said Mr. Casten, who estimates that, since mid-December, about 35% of his employees have called out because of Covid-19 or a Covid-19 exposure.

At one of Mr. Casten’s restaurants, Nick’s Riverside Grill, two of six employees are out. At Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place, managers waited tables and cleaned dishes this week because so many other staffers were ill or in quarantine.

Mr. Casten said he was relieved to close his restaurants on Monday in response to a winter snowstorm, a step he wouldn’t normally take. “I am strung out and tired,” he said. “We were very happy not to open because of the weather.”

At Rocky Mountain Labs, an independent clinical laboratory in Denver that began offering Covid-19 tests early in the pandemic, Omicron has brought a surge in demand for the tests at the same time that it has taken staff out of commission. Three of the lab’s nine employees were out sick with the virus this week, said co-owner Amy Hicks, and another just gave notice, citing burnout.

To fill all the requests for Covid-19 tests, Ms. Hicks and her husband, a physician and co-owner, have had to pull staff from their second location, a lab that does traditional pathology work. And they have had to reduce some services, such as sending phlebotomists to nursing homes to draw blood and bring the samples back for testing. “We’re so short-staffed we have to tell clients we can’t come out,” she said.

Dan Kesic, president of Chicago-based Hospitality Services Group, contracts with clients including hotels and resorts to provide housekeepers, servers and cooks. Mr. Kesic said at least 30% of the company’s more than 1,000 hourly workers are dealing with Covid-19 this week, either from infection or exposure.

“This week, it’s just like there’s no fix,” he said. ”As you fix something, something else breaks. There’s these expectations from people that you can’t meet.”

To fill the gap, Mr. Kesic said his company is subcontracting work in markets where clients are located, including Florida, Texas and Arizona, as well as paying bonuses to people who can even work up to two weeks on some jobs.

He said the company in recent weeks also paid to fly staff across the country, similar to traveling nurses, to fill hotel housekeeping or other roles. But Covid-19 is also upending those plans, with the recent spate of flight cancellations.

The Omicron variant has battered many businesses that until recently had been able to keep Covid-19 at bay through masking, vaccinations and other safeguards...

 

Ted Cruz Walks Back January 6th 'Terrorist' Comments in Heated Exchange with Tucker Carlson (VIDEO)

This was going around on Twitter yesterday. Cruz is looking more and more like a buffoon.

At Politico, "The senator brushed off his previous phrasing as “sloppy” and “frankly dumb.”

Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War

At Amazon, Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.

Flying Marines

This is hard to beat:

Sure we could've chosen to vaccinate the world and thus dramatically reduce the chance of variants like delta and now omicron from having emerged but, c'mon, why would we do that when we can make Marines fly! FLYING MARINES! C'mon, why would we not put all our money into this?! https://t.co/hpC8nwC6Fk

— Stephen Miles (@SPMiles42) January 7, 2022

Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper January 6th Special (VIDEO)

This was the best thing I saw all day yesterday, "CNN PRESENTS LIVE FROM THE CAPITOL: JANUARY 6TH, ONE YEAR LATER."

The segment with the Capitol Police Officers was heartbreaking. 

But Rep. Jamie Rakin's interview, with his daughter and son-in-law, was heartwarming. I'll post the video if it comes available later. 

Groundbreaking Career of Sidney Poitier (VIDEO)

When I was in elementary school, my dad had me and my sisters sit down and watch 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Poitier was BIG for black America. Pathbreaking figure of the 20th century.

At Deadline, "Sidney Poitier: A Groundbreaking Career In Pictures."

And at the New York Times, "Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94":

The first Black performer to win the Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field,” he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”

Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of resolute heroes in films like “To Sir With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, has died at 94.

His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No other details were immediately provided.

Mr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle.

Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.

“It’s a choice, a clear choice,” Mr. Poitier said of his film parts in a 1967 interview. “If the fabric of the society were different, I would scream to high heaven to play villains and to deal with different images of Negro life that would be more dimensional. But I’ll be damned if I do that at this stage of the game.”

At the time, Mr. Poitier was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood and a top box-office draw, ranked fifth among male actors in Box Office magazine’s poll of theater owners and critics; he was behind only Richard Burton, Paul Newman, Lee Marvin and John Wayne. Yet racial squeamishness would not allow Hollywood to cast him as a romantic lead, despite his good looks.

“To think of the American Negro male in romantic social-sexual circumstances is difficult, you know,” he told an interviewer. “And the reasons why are legion and too many to go into.”

Mr. Poitier often found himself in limiting, saintly roles that nevertheless represented an important advance on the demeaning parts offered by Hollywood in the past. In “No Way Out” (1950), his first substantial film role, he played a doctor persecuted by a racist patient, and in “Cry, the Beloved Country” (1952), based on the Alan Paton novel about racism in South Africa, he appeared as a young priest. His character in “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), a troubled student at a tough New York City public school, sees the light and eventually sides with Glenn Ford, the teacher who tries to reach him.

In “The Defiant Ones” (1958), a racial fable that established him as a star and earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, he was a prisoner on the run, handcuffed to a fellow convict (and virulent racist) played by Tony Curtis. The best-actor award came in 1964 for his performance in the low-budget “Lilies of the Field,” as an itinerant handyman helping a group of German nuns build a church in the Southwestern desert.

In 1967 Mr. Poitier appeared in three of Hollywood’s top-grossing films, elevating him to the peak of his popularity. “In the Heat of Night” placed him opposite Rod Steiger, as an indolent, bigoted sheriff, with whom Virgil Tibbs, the Philadelphia detective played by Mr. Poitier, must work on a murder investigation in Mississippi. (In an indelible line, the detective insists on the sheriff’s respect when he declares, “They call me Mr. Tibbs!”) In “To Sir, With Love” he was a concerned teacher in a tough London high school, and in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a taboo-breaking film about an interracial couple, he played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Throughout his career, a heavy weight of racial significance bore down on Mr. Poitier and the characters he played. “I felt very much as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made,” he once wrote...

Still more.

 

The Placeholder President

 From Matthew Continetti, at Free Beacon, "When Trump is the issue, Biden wins. And Biden's troubles begin":

The most impassioned speech of Joe Biden's presidency was about events that took place before it began. I'm talking about the president's remarks on the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The energy, force, and direction of Biden's delivery have been missing from practically every address he's made since his inauguration. The Biden who spoke from Statuary Hall on Thursday was not his usual self—listless, reactive, defensive, and confused. This Biden was angry and purposeful and on the attack.

True, it was a partisan speech. How could it not have been? The driving force behind the events of January 6 was a Republican president who remains the most important figure in his party. Many Republicans will accuse Biden of divisiveness. They will say he ignored the faults of his own side. Well, sorry, but what did you expect? Biden was lively and pointed because public opinion is with him. A majority says the 2020 election was legitimate. A plurality blames Trump for the mob assault on the Capitol. Fifty-nine percent of adults don't want Trump to run for president in 2024. When Trump is the issue, Biden wins.

And Biden's troubles start. Trump for now is the least of his worries. Trump is on the sidelines. He's out of office. He's banned from social media. He doesn't figure in the everyday lives of most Americans. He won't be on the ballot this November. A White House midterm strategy based on portraying GOP candidates as Q-Anon shamans ready to storm the Capitol won't work. The hundreds of state and local campaigns will be too diverse. The candidates will be too distinct. And public anger over the economy, the pandemic, the schools, the border, and the cities will matter most of all.

Biden's January 6 speech was a reminder that he's a placeholder president. He's in office because independent voters in the suburbs rejected Donald Trump's personality and Donald Trump's response to the coronavirus. No one expected—or wanted—Biden to be a world-historical statesman. Biden himself said he's a "transitional" figure with a singular goal: Keep Trump away from the White House. He accomplished that task, which is why he began his presidency with healthy approval ratings. The electorate didn't sour on him until he took on additional employment: live-action role-playing FDR and LBJ, dismantling immigration protocols on the southern border, deferring to public health experts and regulatory bodies, and midwifing the Taliban reconquest of Afghanistan. Now Biden is at 43-percent approval in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls.

Biden's dilemma is that "I'm not Trump" is a winning message only when Trump is on the ballot, holds office, or is tied to a major event such as January 6. The message doesn't work on the other 364 days of the year. If Biden had grasped why he became president, he would have pursued a modest agenda directed at the independents who elected him. He would have sounded and acted more like Governor Jared Polis than like Senator Elizabeth Warren. Instead, Biden has catered to the left at the expense of the center. He's at odds with the median voter as he fails to control the coronavirus, inflation, the border, and events overseas. His domestic agenda is stalled. And the Democratic congressional majority is at risk.

But not all is lost. A GOP Congress in 2023 may provide Biden with a rationale to shake up his staff, work with Senator Mitch McConnell, and distinguish himself from the cultural left. And the 2024 cycle may not be as good for Republicans as the 2022 cycle is shaping up to be. The last two Democratic presidents won reelection during periods of divided government. The mix of issues may be different. And Biden will be able to play his "I'm not Trump" card if the former president enters the presidential race and wins the GOP nomination...

Keep reading.

 

January 6th: Biden Made No Call to Sooth Americans' Frayed Nerves

 From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "Biden’s January 6 Anniversary Speech - and His Big Lies":

Vice President Kamala Harris set the stage yesterday for the Left’s exploitation of the first anniversary of the Capitol riot one year ago with incendiary remarks that outrageously compared the events of January 6, 2021, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and the Islamist terrorist attacks on America’s homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. This morbid comparison dishonors the thousands of lives lost on both of those catastrophic days and is a declaration of war on the millions of Americans who reject her corrupt administration.

When Biden took his turn, the self-proclaimed unifier delivered an angry, divisive January 6 anniversary speech, falsely accusing former President Donald Trump and his supporters of placing “a dagger at the throat of American democracy” by questioning his legitimacy. Evidently, in Biden’s version of the Constitution, the right to protest is reserved for Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but not for Americans.

The only dagger at the throat of democracy is Biden's renewed effort to take over and rig national elections under the false flag of voting rights and manufactured emergency because polls show there is no other conceivable way he could win the 2024 presidential election.

Biden asked: “Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation.”

When rioters were burning their way across the country, Kamala Harris and other future members of the Biden administration were raising bail money so they could go out and burn, loot, and beat more police officers.

After leftist radicals attempted to destroy a federal courthouse in Portland in July of that year, setting fires and breaching the courthouse doors, then-candidate Biden’s response to these clear acts of insurrection was to blame Trump, not the rioters.

“We have a president who is determined to sow chaos and division,” said Biden. “To make matters worse instead of better.”

Biden has refused to condemn either Antifa or Black Lives Matter by name. He will not condemn any of the Democrats, including his own vice president, who fundraised for the rioters. And he has met with Black Lives Matter leaders instead of prosecuting them for terrorism.

Kamala and Biden claim that they care about police officers. Where are they on the over 2,000 police officers injured in the summer riots?

Most Americans would agree that political violence is wrong. Yes, prosecute any Capitol rioters who actually engaged in criminal behavior, but what about the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other leftist rioters who so far have mostly escaped any consequences for their political violence across the country in the second half of 2020? Their anarchy resulted in immeasurably more destruction, fatalities, and injuries than occurred on January 6, 2021.

This is not to excuse the criminal behavior of those who entered the Capitol illegally and engaged in destructive acts, but only to highlight the clear double standard in how the Left views the January 6th riot versus the long hot summer of leftist riots in 2020.

Biden added: “We need a president who will bring us together instead of tear us apart, calm instead of inflame, and enforce the law faithfully rather than put his political interests first.”

He is certainly not that president.

Biden's speech is the embodiment of tearing Americans apart, of inflaming tensions, and of putting his political agenda ahead of the law.

In his January 6th anniversary speech, Biden used Trump and his seventy-four million voters in the 2020 election as foils to divert attention from his own administration’s miserable failures at home and abroad during his first year in office. The COVID-19 pandemic, skyrocketing inflation, surging crime, and illegal immigrants flooding into the country in record numbers are crises still plaguing the country as 2022 begins.

There was no call in Biden’s speech for an end to political violence on the Left as well as on the Right. He made no effort to soothe the American people’s frayed nerves or look forward with a positive agenda to solve the problems his administration has created. Instead, the Divider-in-Chief chose to look backward and hype last year’s Capitol incident as a mortal threat to democracy and the rule of law.

Biden said repeatedly in his speech that he intended to separate the truth about what happened on January 6, 2021 from the “big lies” he claimed were being told by Trump and his supporters. “We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie,” Biden declared. But the President spouted at least three big lies of his own during his speech.

First, Biden falsely accused Trump of trying “to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.” Trump was certainly vocal about challenging the suspicious results of the 2020 election, but he did and said nothing to prevent the transfer of power. Biden assumed office peacefully on January 20, 2021.

Second, Biden claimed that Trump had “rallied the mob to attack.” False. During Trump’s January 6th speech at his peaceful “Save America” rally, Trump said to the attendees: "We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." (Emphasis added) Trump is not responsible for the violent actions of a fringe breakaway group.

Third, Biden exploited the first anniversary of the Capitol riot to promote the Democrats’ power-grab, voting “reform” legislation. He distorted what states are doing to protect the integrity of their election processes, claiming that “new laws are being written not to protect the vote, but to deny it. Not only to suppress the vote but to subvert it.”

Georgia’s new voting law, for example, has been a frequent target of Biden’s verbal attacks. But that law is actually more liberal in allowing no-excuse mail-in voting, as opposed to the more restrictive requirements of New York and Biden’s home state of Delaware where voters must have a valid reason for not voting in person.

Finally, to put things in perspective, it is worth remembering a far more dangerous attack on the Capitol and on members of Congress than the January 6th riot. On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalist radicals invaded the Capitol and began spraying the place with bullets. They shot five congressmen, injuring at least one seriously. Former President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentences of the Puerto Rican terrorists well before the end of what would have been their full sentences.

Despite their hysterical claims of fearing for their lives at the hands of Trump supporters, no members of Congress were injured on January 6, 2021. The only violent fatality at all that day was that of an unarmed protester, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed at point-blank range by a Capitol police officer.

The January 6th breach of the Capitol was no Pearl Harbor. It was no 9/11. Such disgusting comparisons are a brazen appeal to raw emotions in a cynical attempt by Democrats, from the President on down, to push their plan to federalize elections for partisan gain and for permanent one-party control.

 

Paul Lockhart, Firepower

At Amazon, Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare.

Democracy Isn't Dying

I've been saying this all year. Basically, despite the disruptions and violence, the system worked.

The rest is just politics.

At WSJ, "Jan. 6 was a riot, not an insurrection, and U.S. institutions held":

The Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, was a national disgrace, but almost more dispiriting is the way America’s two warring political tribes have responded. Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem intent on exploiting that day to retain power, while the Donald Trump wing of the GOP insists it was merely a protest march that got a little carried away.

We say this as a statement of political reality, not as a counsel of despair. Our job is to face the world as it is and try to move it in a better direction. So a year later, what have we learned?

*** One lesson is that on all the available evidence Jan. 6 was not an “insurrection,” in any meaningful sense of that word. It was not an attempted coup. The Justice Department and the House Select Committee have looked high and low for a conspiracy to overthrow the government, and maybe they will find it. So far they haven’t.

There apparently was a “war room” of motley characters at the Willard hotel and small groups of plotters who wanted to storm the barricades. But they were too disorganized to do much more than incite what became the mob that breached the Capitol.

The Justice Department says some 725 people from nearly all 50 states have been charged in the riot, linked mainly by social media and support for Donald Trump. About 70 defendants have had their cases adjudicated to date, and 31 of those will do time in prison. The rioters aren’t getting off easy.

They also didn’t come close to overturning the election. The Members fled the House chamber during the riot but soon returned to certify the electoral votes. Eight Senators and 139 House Republicans voted against certifying the electoral votes in some states, but that wasn’t close to a majority.

The true man at the margin was Mike Pence. Presiding in the Senate as Vice President, he recognized his constitutional duty as largely ceremonial in certifying the vote count. He stood up to Mr. Trump’s threats for the good of the country and perhaps at the cost of his political future.

In other words, America’s democratic institutions held up under pressure. They also held in the states in which GOP officials and legislators certified electoral votes despite Mr. Trump’s complaints. And they held in the courts as judges rejected claims of election theft that lacked enough evidence. Democrats grudgingly admit these facts but say it was a close run thing. It wasn’t. It was a near-unanimous decision against Mr. Trump’s electoral claims.

None of this absolves Mr. Trump for his behavior. He isn’t the first candidate to question an election result; Hillary Clinton still thinks Vladimir Putin defeated her in 2016. But he was wrong to give his supporters false hope that Congress and Mr. Pence could overturn the electoral vote. He did not directly incite violence, but he did incite them to march on the Capitol.

Worse, he failed to act to stop the riot even as he watched on TV from the White House. He failed to act despite the pleading of family and allies. This was a monumental failure of character and duty. Republicans have gone mute on this dereliction as they try to stay united for the midterms. But they will face a reckoning on this with voters if Mr. Trump runs in 2024.

As for the Pelosi Democrats, the question is when will they ever let Jan. 6 go? The latest news is that the Speaker’s Select Committee may hold prime-time hearings this year, and the leaks are that they may even seek an indictment of Mr. Trump for obstructing Congress...

Still more.