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Tag: weeks

  • A Final Chapter Unbefitting an Extraordinary Legacy

    A Final Chapter Unbefitting an Extraordinary Legacy

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    Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died last night at 90, braved one of the most remarkable political expeditions in American history—and also one of the grimmer spectacles at the end of her life and career.

    Is it too soon to point this out? Yes, perhaps. With the official notice of her death today, Feinstein received her just and proper tributes, hitting all the key markers: How Di-Fi, as she is known in Washington shorthand, had stepped in as mayor of San Francisco after her predecessor was assassinated in 1978. How she was a fervent proponent of gun safety, the longest-serving woman in the Senate, and the chamber’s oldest member. How, as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she presided over the preparation of an incriminating report describing the CIA’s torture of suspected terrorists in secret prisons around the world. How she was a trailblazer, stateswoman, powerhouse, force, grande dame, etc. Give her her due. She deserves it.

    But Congress can be a tough and ghoulish place, with its zero-sum math and unforgiving partisanship. Over her last year, Feinstein’s declining health became a bleak sideshow—her absences and hospitalizations, shingles, encephalitis, and bad falls; the lawsuits over her late husband’s estate and the cost of her medical bills and long-term care.

    Feinstein’s insistence on remaining in the Senate—and the uncertainty of her schedule—complicated life for Democrats, making it harder for them to hold votes, set strategy, and confirm judges. Her colleagues and White House officials whispered their frustration. And she became the latest exemplar of a basic, egalitarian principle in lawmaking: Even the most legendary figures ultimately amount to a vote. Often your most important job is simply to be available, show up, be counted.

    Franklin Foer: Dianne Feinstein and the cult of indispensability

    When that is in doubt, patience can wear fast. Questions about “fitness” arise. Such is the price of continued residency in the senior center of the Capitol. Feinstein resisted quitting for years, and only grudgingly said she wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, leaving the race to succeed her in a kind of morbid suspension.

    Politics, of course, runs on its own schedules and follows its own rules. A few weeks ago, I asked Adam Schiff, one of the California House Democrats running to succeed Feinstein in the Senate, whether she should step down. In other words, was she fit to serve? Again, maybe this was harsh, but it had become a standard question around Washington and California, and perfectly germane, given the tight split in the Senate. “It’s her decision to make,” Schiff said, a classic duck, but also practical. “I would be very concerned,” he continued, “that the Republicans would not fill her seat on the Judiciary Committee, and that would be the end of Joe Biden’s judicial appointments.” (Politico reported today that Republican Whip John Thune, of South Dakota, said he expects that his party will not resist efforts to fill committee seats left vacant by Feinstein’s death.)

    Schiff added that he had continued to have a productive working relationship with Feinstein’s office, despite her health struggles. He was a proponent of business as usual, for as long it lasted, and Feinstein was still there. The pageant continued, the government heading for another shutdown, House Republicans tripping toward an impeachment and over themselves.

    In the hours after Feinstein’s death was announced, Washington took a brief and deferential pause. Statements and obituaries were dispatched, most prepared in advance. Then it was on to the next. Who would California Governor Gavin Newsom pick to serve out Feinstein’s term? How would that affect the race to succeed her next year? Who would replace Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, and when would they be seated?

    Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?

    The hushed questions about how long the nonagenarian senator could hang on finally had their resolution. Far too many people in power resist the option of a restful denouement. The stakes can be high, even harrowing, for the country. These sagas can be distressing to follow, but there’s no shortage of dark fascination. Stick around too long, and you risk losing control of the finale. It can happen to the best, and at the end of the most extraordinary careers.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Trump Said the ‘Wrong’ Thing on Abortion

    Trump Said the ‘Wrong’ Thing on Abortion

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    Updated at 9:00 a.m. ET on September 22, 2023

    A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion.

    “There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.”

    But after hearing Trump’s abortion comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dickson, who is one of the architects of Texas’s so-called heartbeat ban, feels differently. He’d been helping plan a big Trump rally in Lubbock. Now he’s worried. “What I want to do is get up onstage and brag about Trump. But at this point, his statements do not represent what we have worked for for 50 years,” Dickson said. “The goal of the movement was not overturning Roe v. Wade—it was ending abortion in all 50 states.”

    Trump confounded Dickson and the rest of the anti-abortion coalition when he told NBC’s Kristen Welker not only that a federal abortion ban would be low on his to-do list during a second term as president, but also that six-week abortion bans like the one in Florida are “terrible.” The outrage from the movement was predictably ferocious. “This isn’t just evil, it is absolutely delusional,” the conservative podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey wrote. Live Action’s founder, Lila Rose, tweeted that “Trump should not be the GOP nominee.” In an email to supporters, Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, said, “Trump just broke my heart.”

    Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion

    Dickson felt equally bruised. If Trump really thinks Florida’s six-week ban is so bad, he mused, “then what does he believe about Texas outlawing abortion from the moment of conception?” If he thinks that’s terrible too, Trump “is going to lose a whole lot of Texas support.”

    A few advocates say that, like Rose, they’re writing Trump off. Others have called on the former president to retract his comments. Neither reflex does justice to Trump, who has on occasion demonstrated savvier political instincts than his GOP opponents. What appears to be his current operating assumption—that talking about abortion bans is a turnoff for many voters—is a smart one: Most Americans support access to abortion. Trump is the only real contender among Republican presidential candidates acting in a way that acknowledges this fact. The question is: Will it hurt him?

    The MAGA faithful have so far seen nothing to make them withdraw their support from Trump—after each of his multiple criminal indictments, their devotion has only deepened. Trump’s remarks about abortion seem similarly unlikely to damage his standing. In a general election, they might even help.

    That’s because of Trump’s unusual capacity for shape-shifting. “He can say, ‘I gave you the Supreme Court,’ but also ‘I’d look for a compromise on a national level,’” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump political strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. He can sound moderate, in other words, “in a way that Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence would not.”

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    The Meet the Press interview with Welker did not immediately ring alarm bells in the pro-life camp. Although Trump refused to commit to any federal anti-abortion legislation, he did appear to embrace some form of restriction. He said he’d work with Democrats to come up with a number of weeks that will bring “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.” Standard fare for Trump: vague, noncommittal, self-aggrandizing. But then he brought up the six-week ban that his main primary rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, had signed into law as the Heartbeat Act.

    “Would you support that?” Welker asked.

    “I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” Trump replied. And, well, that was that.

    Right away, Team DeSantis had campaign staff posting assurances that, as president, DeSantis would “NEVER sell out conservatives to win praise from corporate media or the Left.” Other Republican primary candidates jumped into the fray too. “President Trump said he would negotiate with the Democrats and walk back away from what I believe we need, which is a 15-week limit on the federal level,” South Carolina Senator Tim Scott told a crowd in Mason City, Iowa. On CNN, former Vice President Mike Pence accused Trump of wanting to “marginalize the right to life.”

    The right-to-life activists certainly saw it that way. “Heartbeat Laws,” Hawkins wrote in an open letter to Trump, “should be an absolute minimum for any Republican candidate committed to protecting many from death by direct abortion.” I spoke with Steven Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life. “Any time a leader of a national party throws pro-life conservatives to the curb, it’s extremely disappointing,” he told me. “I hope that his comments were a temporary aberration from an otherwise excellent record.”

    One can’t help being a little surprised at their surprise. This is Donald Trump, after all—a man not noticeably wedded to any principle but self-interest, and who, in a previous life, was an abortion-rights-supporting New York Democrat. No one would mistake Trump for a true believer in the vein of, say, Pence. Even Trump’s attempt to throw some red meat to the movement in 2016 when he expressed support for punishing women who sought abortions was clumsy and counterproductive, flouting all of the anti-abortion movement’s best practices. Not that this blunder seemed to faze voters, either.

    Read: The abortion absolutist

    Trump has continued to exercise stubborn independence on the issue. Last year, he blamed the GOP’s disappointing midterm losses on “the abortion issue” and the extreme positions held by some Republican lawmakers. At the time, this mainly looked like an attempt to shift blame, given the poor performance of several high-profile candidates he’d endorsed; with hindsight, it also begins to look like a foretaste of how he’ll campaign in 2024.

    Rose, from Live Action, was disgusted with Trump in November; this week’s comments were the last straw. “He takes us for granted, and treats us like a punching bag,” she told me. “I think that’s a huge error on his part. The pro-life movement is one of the most important voting blocs, especially in Iowa and South Carolina.”

    She’s right that because Republican-primary voters are more socially conservative than general-election voters, they are more likely to oppose abortion access. And it’s possible that Trump’s position on this single issue might spur some of those voters to change their allegiance to a DeSantis or a Pence. But Rose’s assumption about the anti-abortion movement’s clout seems wishful. Trump is up by about 40 points in the latest national polls—and by about 30 in Iowa. So far, no signs point to any imminent Republican realignment, let alone one led by the anti-abortion set.

    Many of Trump’s opponents have imagined that they can beat him by exposing him as a fake conservative, like Velma ripping the mask off a Scooby Doo villain. The problem with this strategy is that it has never worked. Trump doesn’t talk or campaign like a conservative, even when he governs like one. And traditional conservatives, including many anti-abortion activists, have supported him because he promised to appoint judges they favored to the U.S. Supreme Court—and did.

    Mary Ziegler: Roe was never Roe after all

    None of this is great news for Democrats. As I wrote recently, Joe Biden’s party would very much like the 2024 campaign to center on abortion. They believe that the path to victory lies in framing Republicans as fanatics who want to ban abortion completely; they’re probably right, given how unsuccessful attempts to restrict abortion have been since the fall of Roe. v Wade—and how salient the issue is for voters who support abortion rights. But Democrats will have a harder time tarring Trump as an extremist if he’s talking mostly about compromise and accusing his own party of extremism. Trump may end up “muting some of the intensity of the issue,” Longwell said, “because he will sound like a moderate in a way that Ron DeSantis, Pence would not.”

    That could explain why, since Trump’s Great Betrayal on Sunday, not all anti-abortion groups have adopted the bitter tone of the most zealous activists. Some have done no more than call half-heartedly for clarification—or, in the case of the Susan B. Anthony List, issue a tepid plea for the candidates to please stop attacking one another. In other words, alongside the anger of the movement’s radicals is the realism of its mainstream.

    Everyone is keenly aware at this point that Trump is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. And when he does, he knows he’ll have their votes.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • How Bad Could BA.2.86 Get?

    How Bad Could BA.2.86 Get?

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    Since Omicron swept across the globe in 2021, the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has moved at a slower and more predictable pace. New variants of interest have come and gone, but none have matched Omicron’s 30-odd mutations or its ferocious growth. Then, about two weeks ago, a variant descended from BA.2 popped up with 34 mutations in its spike protein—a leap in viral evolution that sure looked a lot like Omicron. The question became: Could it also spread as quickly and as widely as Omicron?

    This new variant, dubbed BA.2.86, has now been detected in at least 15 cases across six countries, including Israel, Denmark, South Africa, and the United States. This is a trickle of new cases, not a flood, which is somewhat reassuring. But with COVID surveillance no longer a priority, the world’s labs are also sequencing about 1 percent of what they were two years ago, says Thomas Peacock, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute. The less surveillance scientists are doing, the more places a variant could spread out of sight, and the longer it will take to understand BA.2.86’s potential.

    Peacock told me that he will be closely tracking the data from Denmark in the next week or two. The country still has relatively robust SARS-CoV-2 sequencing, and because it has already detected BA.2.86, we can now watch the numbers rise—or not—in real time. Until the future of BA.2.86 becomes clear, three scenarios are still possible.

    The worst but also least likely scenario is another Omicron-like surge around the world. BA.2.86 just doesn’t seem to be growing as explosively. “If it had been very fast, we probably would have known by now,” Peacock said, noting that, in contrast, Omicron’s rapid growth took just three or four days to become obvious.

    Scientists aren’t totally willing to go on record ruling out Omicron redux yet, if only because patchy viral surveillance means no one has a complete global picture. Back in 2021, South Africa noticed that Omicron was driving a big COVID wave, which allowed its scientists to warn the rest of the world. But if BA.2.86 is now causing a wave in a region that isn’t sequencing viruses or even testing very much, no one would know.

    Even in this scenario, though, our collective immunity will be a buffer against the virus. BA.2.86 looks on paper to have Omicron-like abilities to cause reinfection, according to a preliminary analysis of its mutations by Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Washington, but he adds that there’s a big difference between 2021 and now. “At the time of the Omicron wave, there were still a lot of people out there that had never been either vaccinated or infected with SARS-CoV-2, and those people were sort of especially easy targets,” he told me. “Now the vast, vast majority of people in the world have either been infected or vaccinated with SARS-CoV-2—or are often both infected and vaccinated multiple times. So that means I think any variant is going to have a very hard time spreading as well as Omicron.”

    A second and more likely possibility is that BA.2.86 ends up like the other post-Omicron variants: transmissible enough to edge out a previous variant, but not transmissible enough to cause a big new surge. Since the original Omicron variant, or BA.1, took over, the U.S. has successively cycled through BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.5, BQ.1, XBB.1.5—and if these jumbles of numbers and letters seem only faintly familiar, it’s because they never reached the same levels of notoriety as the original. Vaccine makers track them to keep COVID shots up to date, but the World Health Organization hasn’t deemed any worthy of a new Greek letter.

    If BA.2.86 continues to circulate, though, it could pick up mutations that give it new advantages. In fact, XBB.1.5, which rose to dominance earlier this year, leveled up this way. When XBB.1.5’s predecessor was first identified in Singapore, Peacock said, it wasn’t a very successful variant: Its spike protein bound weakly to receptors in human cells. Then it acquired an additional mutation in its spike protein that compensated for the loss of binding, and it turned into the later-dominant XBB.1.5. Descendents of BA.2.86 could eventually become more transmissible than the variant looks right now.

    A third scenario is that BA.2.86 just fizzles out and goes away. Scientists now believe that highly mutated variants such as BA.2.86 are probably products of chronic infections in immunocompromised patients. In these infections, the virus remains in the body for a long time, trying out new ways to evade the immune system. It might end up with mutations that make its spike protein less recognizable to antibodies, but those same mutations could also render the spike protein less functional and therefore the virus less good at transmitting from person to person.

    “Variants like that have been identified over the last few years,” Bloom said. “Often there’s one sample found, and that’s it. Or multiple samples all found in the same place.” BA.2.86 is transmissible enough to be found multiple times in multiple places, but whether it can overtake existing variants is unclear. To do so, BA.2.86 needs to escape antibodies while also preserving its inherent transmissibility. Otherwise, Bloom said, cases might crop up here and there, but the variant never really takes off. In other words, the BA.2.86 situation basically stays where it is right now.

    The next few weeks will reveal which of these futures we’re living in. If the number of BA.2.86 cases starts to go up, in a way that requires more attention, we’ll know soon. But each week that the variant’s spread does not jump dramatically, the less likely BA.2.86 is to end up a variant of actual concern.

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    Sarah Zhang

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  • I have obtained a dog

    I have obtained a dog

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    Only 4 weeks but the former owner left her out in the cold. Coonhound. Apparently coonhounds were bred to chase prey up trees and then howl real loud so the hunter can tell where they went, then shoot the animal in the tree. That’s where the phrase “barking up the wrong tree” came from.

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  • The basics

    The basics

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    After some seriously hard days and lean weeks, God does it ever feel good to open the fridge and see fruits in the drawer, eggs on the shelf and even some hot sauce. (Valentina black label if anyone’s interested, highly recommend).
    Feeling thankful. Can’t wait for my first pay cheque from the new job. I got a little advance Friday just for food.
    Huge thank you to the FJ users who helped me out with a bike lock, and a pair of boots that will actually fit. You guys rock. I’d tag you but I’m not sure if that would be cool. Happy Sunday, faggots. Find something to be thankful for.

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