Politics

While President Trump was in office, White House staff periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet and came to believe the president had personally flushed documents. So reports the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, based on anonymous sources. Why should a literate media consumer think the story is garbage? Read it like an intelligence officer. Start by applying some of the same tests intelligence officers do to help them evaluate their own sources. Thinking backwards from the information to who could be the source is a good start when evaluating credibility. For example, is a source in a position to know what they say they know, what intelligence officers call spotting?

For a party that claims it wants to move on, the Republicans are doing a remarkable job of turning the national spotlight back onto one of the worst days in their history. Last week, the GOP returned to its circular firing squad, issuing a statement that censured Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, the only two Republicans serving on the House January 6 Committee. At the same time, it suggested that the actions of rioters who stormed into the Capitol constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Such a statement from a national political party is unusual. Almost as unusual as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issuing a rebuke of his own party apparatus.

We begin today in the Canadian Parliament, which has its own version of prime minister's questions. And while it isn't as entertaining as the famously unruly UK Parliament or the gem that is the Australian Parliament ("the honorable membah is a grub, Mistah Speakah!"), it can still get pretty rowdy. So it was that last week, Candice Bergen, the interim leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, rose to ask a simple question of the ruling Liberals: would they work with the truckers who have been protesting Covid restrictions in Ottawa to resolve the impasse? She may as well have been talking to a Speak & Spell. The Liberal minister Chrystia Freeland chided and patronized. She condemned swastikas and Confederate flags. What she never did was to answer the question.

Last stand in the mask wars Across blue America, the masks are coming off. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy announced Monday that the state’s mask mandate in schools will end on March 7. Connecticut governor Ned Lamont changed state level guidance to recommend that mask mandates in schools are lifted by the end of February. Delaware’s statewide mask mandate will end later this week. Oregon has announced that school mask mandates will be gone by the end of March. Even California governor Gavin Newsom, who has enforced some of the strictest pandemic regulations (on others if not himself), has announced he will lift mask the state’s indoor mask rule next week. (Here in DC, there is no end in sight to the indoor mask mandate.

The die against conservatives opposed to the Iraq war was cast by David Frum in a now-infamous essay for National Review back in 2003. Not only were the right's antiwar sorts unpatriotic, Frum charged, they were defeatist and conspiratorialist appeasers. “They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe,” he wrote. As one can imagine, this made it quite difficult for this small but active faction of the conservative movement (which included the American Conservative magazine and libertarians like Texas Congressman Ron Paul) to penetrate the mainstream, or build trust with their compatriots across the aisle.

Today’s school-aged students are in grave danger. A murderous virus is ripping through the population, leaving a tragic body count in its wake. We need aggressive preventative measures. Classes need to go online, indefinitely if necessary. The experts must be heeded. The science must be followed. This epidemic is simply too dangerous; we cannot afford to play games with our children's lives. I’m talking, of course, about the preeminent public health crisis of our time: lawnmower deaths. The threat that lawnmowers pose to our nation is no joke. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance system, 90 Americans die every year from lawnmower accidents. Over the past decade, 3.

A new Johns Hopkins systematic review cuts in two the narrative that government-imposed mandates meaningfully prevent coronavirus deaths. The review looked at 34 different studies analyzing business and school closings, shelter-in-place orders, and international travel bans. It included data from US and European Covid mitigation efforts, along with endeavors in India, South Africa and China. Almost two dozen of these studies were peer-reviewed, while the other 12 were working papers. The results of this meta-analysis are striking. Lockdowns reduced Covid mortality by an average of only .02 percent. Shelter-in-place orders were slightly better at a 2.9 percent average, but nothing worth crowing about.

Jeff Zucker and the boys in the bubble “If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing,” Matt Gaetz, the scandal-plagued Florida congressman, writes in his memoir Firebrand. As Jay Caruso reports in our February cover story, the ultra-loyal Trumpist and inveterate controversy-seeker grew up in the house used to film The Truman Show. Given that Gaetz embodies the blurring of the lines between reality and fiction, entertainment and politics, performance and action, that biographical detail is almost too good to be true. But how much of an outlier is Gaetz, really?