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TIME:
Biden’s Been Counted Out Before—And Loves To Prove the Haters Wrong
It’s been an easy idea to hold over the years, a tempting one at times, really: Joe Biden is dunzo and isn’t coming back from this setback. The 1972 death of his wife and daughter, before he even got sworn into office. The plagiarism scandal that ushered him from the 1988 presidential race. A less-than-1% showing in Iowa 20 years later. The death of Beau Biden. A “gut punch” of a fourth-place finish in Iowa in 2020. And yet Biden got up off the mat every time. Joe Biden doesn’t always win, but he certainly doesn’t quit.
Dana Milbank/WaPo:
This is the worst economy we never had
Fox News told viewers that “Christmas presents for your kids may not arrive on time or even at all” (Sean Hannity), that the president is “the Biden Who Stole Christmas” (Laura Ingraham) and that Biden is “facing a nightmare come Christmastime,” when “gifts are going to cost a fortune, and that’s even if you’re lucky enough to snag anything” (Jesse Watters).
And then — a Christmas miracle!
Holiday retail sales were the highest ever, jumping 8.5 percent from last year and nearly 11 percent from pre-pandemic 2019, as “consumers splurged throughout the season,” Mastercard reported Sunday.
Retired general warns the U.S. military could lead a coup after the 2024 election
How worried is he on a scale of 1 to 10?
I see it as low probability, high impact. I hesitate to put a number on it, but it’s an eventuality that we need to prepare for. In the military, we do a lot of war-gaming to ferret out what might happen. You may have heard of the Transition Integrity Project that occurred about six months before the last election. We played four scenarios. And what we did not play is a U.S. military compromised – not to the degree that the United States is compromised today, as far as 39% of the Republican Party refusing to accept President Biden as president – but a compromise nonetheless. So, we advocate that that particular scenario needs to be addressed in a future war game held well in advance of 2024.
Anatomy of a death threat
Trump supporters have waged a campaign of intimidation against the state and local officials who administer U.S. elections. This visual analysis explores hundreds of menacing messages – and explains why they’re difficult to counter.
About 110 of the 850 messages Reuters collected appear to meet what law professors and attorneys say is the federal threshold for prosecution. That would make them so-called true threats, generally defined as those intended to put a person in fear of death or bodily harm or to inflict severe emotional distress. In many other messages, harassers call for violence without threatening to act themselves. Arrests for threatening election workers have been rare, even in cases of true threats.
WaPo:
‘Crazy’ omicron surge could peak soon, but the virus is unpredictable as the pandemic enters its third year
Columbia University researchers estimate infections could top out during the week of Jan. 9
But this has always been an unpredictable virus, going back to when it first appeared two years ago, on Dec. 31, 2019. The virus had probably been spreading for a month or more, but that was the day infectious-disease experts around the world began hearing by email and text about an outbreak of a mysterious pathogen causing pneumonia-like respiratory infections in Wuhan, China.
No one on that day could have known that this pathogen, initially called the “novel coronavirus” and later named SARS-CoV-2, would trigger the most brutal pandemic in a century. And no one today knows when it will be over.
Forecasts of how the pandemic will play out have repeatedly been incorrect, to the point that some modelers have stopped trying to make caseload projections four weeks out, instead limiting their forecasts to one week ahead.
Because beyond a week, who knows?
James Hohmann/WaPo:
Biden should stop pretending his resistance to a vax-to-fly rule is about public health
The same authority that allows Biden to require passengers to wear masks on domestic flights, which he has extended through March 18, also allows him to require vaccinations. He told ABC News last Wednesday that he has considered doing so but has been told by staff that it’s not necessary. “Even with omicron,” Biden said. “That’s the recommendation I got so far from the team.”
This is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. Public health experts inside and outside government have favored requiring vaccinations to fly since the summer. In September, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said that a vaccine mandate for flying might be unnecessary because the administration’s mandates for employers to require vaccination would be a more effective way to achieve the same result. But that rule has been put on hold pending Supreme Court review.
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