Politics

No Omicron overreaction When Joe Biden delivers his speech today on his administration’s response to the pandemic, he will be acknowledging that the clear cut “victory” over the virus of the sort he has talked about for months, is unachievable. He will tell Americans that we must learn to live with pestilence. And he is set to explain that vaccinated and boosted Americans can be confident in their protection against the highly contagious but seemingly less virulent Omicron strain. The centerpiece of Biden’s new Covid effort will be 500 million free rapid tests. My uncharitable side wants to point out that in a country of 350 million people, that’s not as big a number as it sounds.

BBB, RIP The end is never pretty. But Senator Joe Manchin put Biden’s Build Back Better legislation out of its misery with striking efficiency on Sunday morning, delivering a decisive “no” not behind closed doors with an apologetic pat on the other Joe’s back, but live on national television. Democrats are working their way through the first two stages of grief: denial and anger. White House spokesperson Jen Psaki provided both in spades in a response to Manchin yesterday.

Joe Manchin was never going to vote for Build Back Better. Now that he's declared himself a "no" and all but killed President Biden's titanic spending package, it's time for Democrats to admit as much. To be sure, Manchin has played well the role of centrist negotiator. He's furrowed his brow and raised pragmatic concerns over renewable energy and inflation. He's huddled with his fellow Joe at the White House and won plenty of concessions. He's provided chum for bored (and boring) political analysts, as analyzing him and his fellow holdout Kyrsten Sinema became a kind of Kremlinology for the Twitter-addicted. But such breathless parsing forgets one simple fact: all politics is local.

Language about insulin is supposed to be one of the bigger selling points of the Build Back Better Act. Democrats say prices would be capped at $35, which is true from a certain point of view. Insulin co-pay prices get capped at $35 — starting in 2023 — for Medicare Part D and Medicare Advantage plans. Individual and private insurers face different rules, however, only having to charge $35 for either a vial or a pen. They can also pick one kind of insulin to cover. Insulin price controls are a hot topic right now for good reason. Over the last twenty-three years, Humalog brand insulin has gone from $21 a vial to $275. The generic version of insulin called Semglee costs almost the same.

The idea that what happened at the Capitol of January 6 was an “insurrection” was always a ridiculous and malevolent exaggeration. The passage of time has exposed that politically motivated lie and sent the rats scurrying for alternative explanations. Right on cue, we find a hobbyhorse leftist taking to the pages of the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos’s onshore publicity organ for the Democratic Party — to warn us against calling the protest at the Capitol an “insurrection.” The memo to Scribes and Pharisees has gone out. It’s no longer an “insurrection.” It’s been rebaptized a “sinister” act of “vigilantism.

The Ghislaine Maxwell trial resumed today with the defense’s presentation of its case, beginning with a procedural loss for the Maxwell team. The judge rejected the defense’s unusual request to allow some of their witnesses to testify anonymously. Maxwell’s attorneys claimed three witnesses feared they “might get a lot of unwanted attention.” Judge Alison J. Nathan ruled that because the defense did not claim the witnesses were victims or sexual assault survivors, no special exemptions applied to the general rule that witnesses in federal court must be publicly identified.

Biden needs to learn to live with the virus The writer Matthew Walther caused something of a stir yesterday with a piece in the Atlantic about attitudes towards the coronavirus in the rural corner of Michigan he calls home. “Outside the world inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in major metropolitan areas,” he writes, “many if not most, Americans are leading their lives as if Covid is over, and they have been for a long while.” Anyone who doesn’t live in or near a big, blue city — or any city-dwellers brave enough to don their safari jackets and venture out into rural America — will recognize Walther’s description.

Last night was Liz Cheney’s breakout moment. As Cheney read the various text messages from various Fox News luminaries and Donald Trump Jr. to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she milked the moment, lingering over memorable phrases such as "he’s got to condemn this shit ASAP." And yet Sonny boy's plea was ignored. The old man reveled in the feculent mayhem. Once seen as a neoconservative ogress, Cheney has now achieved full redemption, morphing into the darling of the mainstream media for her refusal to dismiss the mob on January 6 as a bunch of tourists who had accidentally strayed into the Capitol. This is Cheney’s High Noon.