Crooked Media - What A Day: An arm and a Greg

Mark your calendars and prep your finest injection-wear for eight months after your fully-vaccinated-versary. Or, if you haven’t been fully vaccinated yet: WTF, yo???
 

• The CDC will reportedly recommend that vaccinated Americans (vaxo-Americans, you heard it here first) should plan on getting booster shots in the coming weeks or months to better protect them against the Delta variant. Seniors and others who received their second mRNA jabs this past winter would be eligible for boosters starting next month. Johnson & Johnson recipients will also likely be advised to get a booster, depending on the results of clinical trials.
   
• The Biden administration will be taking a page from Israel, where the overwhelming majority of the population received the two-shot Pfizer regimen. It has reportedly shown diminished effectiveness against infection in seniors, due either to the adaptations of the Delta variant, waning immune responses, or both. In early July, CDC said “fully vaccinated Americans do not need a booster shot at this time,” but noted “we are prepared for booster doses if and when the science demonstrates they are needed.” That was before Delta surged in unvaccinated communities and the rate of breakthrough infections increased.
   
• Between boosters, continued uptake among the unvaccinated, and acquired immunity, the updated guidance could help reduce the risk of breakthrough infections and a winter surge in low-vax pockets of the northern U.S. But it may not come soon enough to reduce the fallout from outbreaks stemming from in-person schooling. Children under 12 remain ineligible for the vaccine; most children aged 12-17 remain unvaccinated; and uptake in communities remains uneven, leading to spikes in child infections and hospitalizations, community spread, and schools shutting down days after reopening.

Fortunately, support for non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccine mandates to protect children and their families remains strong; unfortunately, Republicans have returned to their pro-COVID status quo.
 

• Overall 69 (nice) percent of adults surveyed say they support mask mandates in schools, and 55 percent support making vaccination a requirement for returning to workplaces, according to an Axios/Ipsos poll. Both policies enjoy support from an overwhelming majority of Democrats but divide Republicans, which should make them perfect wedge issues. Alas, in the face of little partisan pushback, the GOP response to being wildly outnumbered is (to paraphrase) Fuck U, Moar COVID.
   
• Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) has signed an executive order allowing parents to opt out of school mask mandates. Under orders from Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX)—aka America's newest COVID-positive vaccinated-but-anti-vax Republican—the Texas Alcoholic Beverages Commission has threatened to suspend the liquor licenses of restaurants that require proof of coronavirus vaccination. And a quick scan of the @GovRonDesantis feed shows the Florida governor tweeting infomercials for monoclonal antibody infusion, without urging Floridians to get vaccinated so they can avoid this much more expensive, post-infection therapy. 

This week on America Dissected, host Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is joined by the one and only, Dr. Anthony Fauci. To hear his honest thoughts on going toe to toe with Rand Paul and why many are still hesitant to get the vaccine, subscribe to America Dissected on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

After a day of chaos and harrowing, tragic images, the evacuation and withdrawal of U.S. and allied civilians and military from Kabul has settled into an orderly if fragile equilibrium. 

• U.S. and Taliban forces have seemingly reached an informal understanding that has allowed U.S. troops to retain control of Karzai airport, where Pentagon leaders say they’ll soon be able to airlift thousands of people a day to safety. 

• The acting U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson announced that he and embassy staff are still on the ground in the country to facilitate the departure of thousands of Americans and “vulnerable Afghans.”  

• A Taliban spokesman (so, grains of salt) announced an amnesty for the toppled government and its fighters, and promised not to interfere with the operation at the airport, under threat of U.S. retaliation.

Still unresolved: Getting at-risk Afghans out of the country, and figuring out whether this was more “botched execution” or “unavoidable fiasco.” To that end 46 senators, including three Republicans, have called on Biden to create a “humanitarian parole category” for them so they can be resettled in the U.S. and three Democratic committee chairmen have vowed to conduct oversight hearings. An improvement over yesterday, though the situation obviously remains unstable. Anyhow, here’s Don Jr. agreeing with the Taliban that right-wing authoritarians should have unfettered free-speech rights on all private platforms, even as they outlaw public speech they don’t like.

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intends to call the centrist-Dem bluff and hold a vote to advance a budget resolution, the Senate infrastructure bill, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, then sit on ye olde BIFe until the House can vote on it in tandem with the rest of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. 
   
• Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) unveiled the updated version of H.R. 4 at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
   
• The Taliban will not be able to access any reserves held in American bank accounts, while the U.S. grapples with its sanctions policy toward Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, in the aftermath of occupation.
   
• New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern imposed a nationwide lockdown on Tuesday after detecting one (1) new case of COVID-19 in Auckland, the country’s first (1st) confirmed coronavirus infection in six (6) months. At least we have our freedoms?
   
• New York Proud Boy Eduard Florea has pleaded guilty to threatening to kill then Sen.-elect Raphael Warnock (D-GA), earlier this year, posting "Dead man can't pass s--- laws. ... I will fight so help me god," on a right-wing message board.
   
• Nevada’s Republican attorney general, Adam Laxalt, has launched a campaign for Senate against Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV). 
   
• While you weren’t looking, the chair of the Minnesota GOP allowed a donor into the inner sanctum of the state party and—whoopsie daisy!—he has just been indicted along with an accomplice on charges of child-sex trafficking, sending the Republicans there into disarray. As always, trust the plan…
   
• Prominent anti-vax State-Sen. Andre Jacques (R-WI) has been hospitalized after contracting COVID-19.
   
• Federal authorities have declared a first-ever water shortage at Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, which sits on the Arizona-Nevada border, and abuts the Hoover Dam, due to a long, climate-change driven “megadrought” in the southwest.
   
• A sharp early January uptick in traffic to the obscure tourist website washingtontunnels.com, which includes maps of the underground system of tunnels connecting wings of the Capitol campus, prompted the site’s administrator to alert the FBI, allowing agents to pre-empt the insurrection sit on further evidence that Trump supporters intended to overthrow the election by force.
   
• Baltimore police will no longer be allowed to claim overtime pay and regular pay simultaneously by signing up for extra duty shifts while on paid “vacation,” which raises the critical question of why I never thought of that.
   
• Serial propagandist and (thus) Republican icon James O'Keefe will play the farm boy Curly in a production of Oklahoma! cast entirely with canceled artists, well, except apparently for O'Keefe himself who is neither canceled nor an artist, but apparently does have a hidden passion for theatre.

The Federal Elections Commission’s internal watchdog has warned that foreign money in American elections threatens U.S. national security, in an investigation that stems (you’ll be shocked to learn) from Donald Trump’s corruption, and news reports that a Trump-loyal senior manager in the FEC's Reports Analysis Division subverted the commission’s oversight of donations to Trump’s inaugural committee. Although the investigation ultimately found that the Trump loyalist delegated the oversight to career analysts, and did not interfere with their work, the report also implies that informal FEC practice and federal law are ripe for abuse by corrupt actors. Together they allow inaugural committees to operate on a kind of honor system for verifying that their donors are U.S. citizens; they then subject donation reports to a highly error-prone FEC review system; and finally shield inaugural committee expenditures from FEC oversight. Given how lousy the Trump campaign and administration were with foreign influence, and how greedily he directed campaign, inaugural committee, and federal dollars to his private businesses, the system practically facilitated foreign bribery and will again if Trump runs for a second term and Congress doesn’t fix these vulnerabilities.

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A rarely used, affordable anti-depressant seems like it might be a pretty decent COVID-19 treatment.
 

The Department of Veterans Affairs has reached out proactively to veterans feeling despondent about their service in Afghanistan given how the war there has ended. 
 

Public scrutiny after the killing of Breonna Taylor and a federal pattern-or-practice investigation of the Louisville Metro Police Department have effectively ended the practice of forced entry in the jurisdiction.