JustOneMinute

Nuke The Debt Ceiling!

Joe Biden gets on board with an idea whose time is coming - use the Senate 'nuclear option' to put debt ceiling legislation beyond the filibuster. Both parties have done this with judges and Cocaine Mitch says he is fine with raising the debt ceiling as long as there are no Republican votes backing it.

Prior to the crushing defeats in the Georgia Senate run-offs that gave Sen. Schumer 50 votes in the Senate, Republicans warned that in such a scenario Democrats would end the filibuster entirely and squeeze through bills on DC statehood and an expanded Supreme Court with 50 votes plus VP Harris. Sen. Manchin has rejected that concept but he was apparently silent on nuking the filibuster:

Senate Democrats discussed carving out the exception at their weekly lunch on Tuesday. No conclusions were reached, but notably, according to participants, the two strongest opponents of filibuster changes, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, did not speak up in protest. They also did not speak up in support.

This debt ceiling stand-off will be resolved with a gimmicky trick play. My current guess ranks the nuclear option at Number One because it is quick and no more politically painful than reconciliation. Reconciliation is my second guess - its cumbersome and uses a scarce resource since per the current Senate "rules" (LOL) the Dems can only use it twice per session. (Their current plan is to use their second Reconciliation Card on the shrinking $3.5 trillion Social Justice and More bill, but they may do that next January in a new session.)

My third choice is a gadget play to be named later. The fourth choice last gasp is the Trillion Dollar Platinum coin. I don't think the coin is "legal" within the spirit of the law but in the current environment the real question is, can Treasury and Fed lawyers agree its 'legal enough', given the dire alternatives? As a recent example of this mentality, Biden extended the CDC eviction moratorium knowing the courts would eventually shoot it down (The Supreme Court did so, three weeks later.)

As to the platinum coin, I agree with this from Krugman:

Would any of these approaches basically mean using silly gimmicks to avoid catastrophe? Possibly yes. But given the stakes, who cares if the approach sounds silly?

Would using any of these gimmicks involve violating the spirit of the law even if they technically obey the letter? Of course — but Republicans are already doing that through their abuse of the debt ceiling.

Would any attempt to do an end run around the debt ceiling face court challenges? Yes. But the legal process would at the very least buy time to devise a better solution.

Well, yes - the trillion dollar coin is a terrible idea (per SecTreas Yellen!) but maybe not compared to the other terrible ideas on the menu. As to legal challenges, there is a real question about just who might have standing to sue if a coin were issued.

We should find out soon enough. My money is on nukes.

ERRATA: Rohan Grey, a young progressive professor, has a solid piece on the legal background to a platinum coin. We chatted on Twitter and I came away agreeing that the coin is legal enough that Federal Reserve lawyers could make a political decision to go either way. On the one had, I'd say that accepting the coin calls into question their independence. OTOH, rejecting it puts them in the role of refereeing a partisan Executive-Legislative showdown during a bond market meltdown. Both paths are perilous.

 

Clash Of Titans

Brady v. Belichick! And by the time their Sunday night game begins MLB should have settled the AL wild card races and the NL West title.

Drama In DC!

Debt ceilings, government shutdowns, trillions in spending and taxes - AND playoff positions up for grabs in Major League Baseball. Something for everyone.

A Majority Of Republicans HAVE Been Vaccinated

David Leonhardt of the Times:

Red Covid

Covid’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme.

During the early months of Covid-19 vaccinations, several major demographic groups lagged in receiving shots, including Black Americans, Latino Americans and Republican voters.

More recently, the racial gaps — while still existing — have narrowed. The partisan gap, however, continues to be enormous. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 86 percent of Democratic voters had received at least one shot, compared with 60 percent of Republican voters.

The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state:

At one time the Red/Blue divide based on vote share was blurred by Black hesitancy in the (Red) southern states. Headline-grabbing NBA athletes notwithstanding, it has turned out that by and large Blacks were hesitant but persuadable. Hard core Trumpers, not so much.

Leonhardt is interesting on messaging:

How might more conservative Americans be persuaded to get vaccinated?

One intriguing anecdote involves the football team at the University of Mississippi, which is entirely vaccinated even though the state has one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. Coaches there emphasized the tangible, short-term costs of getting Covid, rather than the more remote chance of death: The players might have to miss a game, and the team might have to forfeit it, if they tested positive.

A related message is duty, Timothy Carney has written in The Washington Examiner. If Carney had refused to get vaccinated, he explained, he would have risked loading more work onto his wife, his colleagues and his partner in teaching Sunday school, as well as forced his children to miss school.

Getting vaccinated to help out your family, friends and community?!? Whoa! This is breakthrough thinking!

 

Saturday Afternoon

Are you ready for some football?!? Or baseball!!!

How about some yard work...

Scandal Watch

Captain Ed Morrissey keeps a weather eye on a couple of scandals the media would rather bury.

First, the Durham indictment of Clinton attorney Sussman may - I say MAY - be the start of something from Durham, finally. The notion that the Russian Collusion scandal was launched as a Hillary dirty trick and carried by sympathizers in the FBI, CIA and mass media is not a story the mass media has been eager to probe.

We all spent a lot of time waiting for Durham. Maybe he has more.

And, in other non-surprises, a Politico reporter is confirming the obvious - the Hunter Biden e-mails financially implicating "the big guy" look legit. Yet another "not in front of the kids" moment of infamy for the media, bith social and mainstream.

Here We Go Again

Are you ready for some football?

On the college side, a weary and divided nation once again wonders - can anyone beat Alabama?

There Are No Adults

I'll say this - if Team Trump had handled the submarine deal with Australia so clumsily we'd be hearing talk of Russian collusion and Impeachment III. And politicizing the science by announcing what the FDA would decide before the data was in? OMG and LOL. And let's not even mention Afghanistan.

I did not expect much from Sleepy Joe but I thought he brought with him an experienced team that had been together for years and could deliver a professional sheen to the operation. Ooops.

When You Have To Deny It...

Probably not helpful:

Justice Amy Coney Barrett argues Supreme Court isn't 'a bunch of partisan hacks'.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In the wake of a controversial decision on abortion rights, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a crowd of more than 100 here that she doesn't believe the highest court in the land is politically driven.

“My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she told the guests at a Sunday celebration of the 30th anniversary of the opening of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville.

Barrett, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020, spent much of her talk at the Seelbach Hilton Hotel arguing the court is defined by "judicial philosophies" rather than personal political views.

"Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties," she said, noting that she identifies as an "originalist" and citing fellow Justice Stephen Breyer as an example of the other main school of thought, "pragmatism."

Yet fifty years of bi-partisan shouting about Democratic judges and Republican judges and here we are.

No word on whether the justices have stopped beating their significant others.

9/11 Twenty Years On

Open thread to get started.

Biden Backpedaling On ATF Chief

Senate to Biden - Send less crazy crazies.

I like these occasional reminders that Biden campaigned as a moderate. Nice to see his Dem colleagues in the Senate remember too.

Gain Of Function, Loss Of Credibility

The Intercept has used the Freedom of Information Act to pry documents from the NIH. The topic is NIH grants to study bat viruses in a partnership of EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some of the "news" is old since the grants were mentioned in already-published studies. But some details ave been added.

Its a bit of a blow to Dr. Fauci's remaining credibility on the question of whether the US funded 'gain-of-function' research conducted by the Chinese. I'll gloomily guess this won't matter - the battle lines around Fauci have been clear for a while and I doubt there are many willing to shift sides. Just to recap, back in May Sen. Rand accused Dr. Fauci of approving gain of function research and Fauci denied it, vehemently. Over time the gist of his defense seem to be, it couldn't be gain of function research because the NIH review board OK'ed it. The BBC and the WaPo explain (I'll come back to the WaPo below.)

Still, here is Caroline Downey at the National Review:

Newly released documents appear to contradict Dr. Anthony Fauci’s repeated claims that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The internal documents detail the work of EcoHealth Alliance, an American research non-profit which used NIH funding to research novel bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. Among the documents, which were obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request, is a previously unpublished EcoHealth Alliance grant proposal filed with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which is run by Fauci.

...

Fauci has repeatedly insisted during his Senate testimony that the research being funded by the NIH at the WIV did not qualify as “gain-of-function” under the NIH’s current definition. But critics, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have accused Fauci of playing semantic games by excluding research which makes bat coronaviruses more transmissible — the commonly accepted definition of “gain-of-function” — from his more convenient definition.

Dr. Richard Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, has also disputed Fauci’s claims. Primarily, he has rebutted Fauci’s chief declaration that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV]” as “demonstrably false.”

Ebright told National Review that the NIH-financed work at the WIV “epitomizes” the definition of gain-of-function research, which involves working with “enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (PPP)” or those pathogens “resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility and/or virulence of a pathogen.”

We'll see if these latest revelations move the needle.

BACK TO THE WAPO: They are very intent on defending Fauci and nod along to what I find to be an utterly convincing explanation about gain of function research. The emphasis is on intent rather than results, which seems to me to be beside the point:

Update, May 19: The National Institutes of Health issued a statement to The Fact Checker which in part said: “NIH has never approved any grant to support 'gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans. The research proposed in the EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. grant application sought to understand how bat coronaviruses evolve naturally in the environment to become transmissible to the human population.” When gain-of-function research was paused, “this grant was reviewed again and determined by experts to fall outside the scope of the funding pause.”

The gist of the controversial experiments was to mix and match different segments of different existing bat viruses to see if any of the resulting combinations could be dangerous. Its a fair and relevant questions since bats, and consequently their viruses, tend to co-mingle. But their defense, roughly paraphrased, amounts to 'this is not gain-of-function because we didn't know whether these recombinations would be infectious or not'. C'mon, man. "I wasn't playing with explosives, I was playing with random chemicals and never guessed they'd explode." No Nobel prizes there.

To be fair, the viruses the Chinese have told us about don't look enough like SARS-Cov-2 to be a smoking gun. But have they done undisclosed, unpublished work? Ah, well...

 

Ivermectin Horse Manure

Careful readers often wonder - is it true, or just something I read in the Rolling Stone?

No American Left Behind, Except For A Few

The AP comes for Joe Biden. Gently.

But let's give Tired Old Joe some credit. He can do for Republicans what Trump (and Bush before him) did for the Democrats - let them set aside their differences and unite in their loathing.

Fires Burn Out (Unless They Don't)

The Times ponders a Covid mystery - why have surges faded after about two months?

Has Delta Peaked?

We investigate Covid’s mysterious two-month cycle

By David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu

Has the Delta-fueled Covid-19 surge in the U.S. finally peaked? The number of new daily U.S. cases has risen less over the past week than at any point since June, as you can see in this chart:

 

There is obviously no guarantee that the trend will continue. But there is one big reason to think that it may and that caseloads may even soon decline. Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has followed this pattern.

Sadly, there is no particular explanation. And in any case, there is an obvious issue of aggregation - even if Florida and Texas have peaked that does not assure that New England, relatively calm so far, has also peaked.

They serve up some speculation:

Two possible stories

We have asked experts about these two-month cycles, and they acknowledged that they could not explain it. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

But two broad categories of explanation seem plausible, the experts say.

One involves the virus itself. Rather than spreading until it has reached every last person, perhaps it spreads in waves that happen to follow a similar timeline. How so? Some people may be especially susceptible to a variant like Delta, and once many of them have been exposed to it, the virus starts to recede — until a new variant causes the cycle to begin again (or until a population approaches herd immunity).

The second plausible explanation involves human behavior. People don’t circulate randomly through the world. They live in social clusters, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, points out. Perhaps the virus needs about two months to circulate through a typically sized cluster, infecting the most susceptible — and a new wave starts when people break out of their clusters, such as during a holiday. Alternately, people may follow cycles of taking more and then fewer Covid precautions, depending on their level of concern.

Mr. Leonhardt had more at the end of July, including a "Stay Humble" message - since we don't know what's going on its hard to be sure how helpful our various interventions (other than vaccines!) have really been:

A more plausible explanation appears to be that Delta spreads very quickly at first and, for some unknown set of reasons, peters out long before a society has reached herd immunity. As Andy Slavitt, a former Covid adviser to President Biden, told me, “It seems to rip through really fast and infect the people it’s going to infect.” The most counterintuitive idea here is that an outbreak can fade even though many people remain vulnerable to Covid.

That’s not guaranteed to happen everywhere, and there probably will be more variants after Delta. Remember: Covid behaves in mysterious ways. But Americans should not assume that Delta is destined to cause months of rising caseloads. Nor should they assume that a sudden decline, if one starts this summer, fits a tidy narrative that attributes the turnaround to rising vaccination and mask wearing.

“These surges have little to do with what humans do,” Osterholm argues. “Only recently, with vaccines, have we begun to have a real impact.”

I don’t want anyone to think that Osterholm is making a nihilist argument. Human responses do make a difference: Masks and social distancing can slow the spread of the virus, and vaccination can end a pandemic.

The most important step has been the vaccination of many older people. As a result, total British deaths have risen only modestly this summer, while deaths and hospitalizations remain rarer in heavily vaccinated parts of the U.S. than in less vaccinated ones.

But Osterholm’s plea for humility does have policy implications. It argues for prioritizing vaccination over every other strategy. It also reminds us to avoid believing that we can always know which behaviors create risks.

Humility is in short supply these days.

Should We Stay Or Should We Go Now?

Peter Baker of the NY Times ponders possible alternatives to the Biden/Trump framing of Afghanistan as a choice between full withdrawal or significant escalation. Sure, to (mis)quote a genius SecState, at this point what difference does it make? But this factoid suggests the unpopular stalemate was achieving some US national security goals with a low level of casualties:

After drawdowns beginning under Mr. Obama, just a fraction of the troops there at the peak were left, yet military strategists said they had an outsize impact in keeping Afghan security forces in the fight without engaging in as much combat themselves.

Fewer than 100 American troops died in combat in Afghanistan over the past five years, roughly the equivalent of the number of Americans currently dying from Covid-19 every two hours. Until the devastating attack this week by ISIS-K at the Kabul airport killed 13 American service members, the military had suffered no combat deaths since the Trump agreement was signed.

Yes, 100 deaths is 100 too many if no purpose is being served. But 5,000 US troops and associated air support were apparently a huge force multiplier propping up an Afghan army with dubious morale.

“The administration is presenting the choices in a way that is, at best, incomplete,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush who oversaw earlier stages of the Afghan war. “No one I knew was advocating the return of tens of thousands of Americans into ‘open combat’ with the Taliban.”

Instead, some, including the current military leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asserted that keeping a relatively modest force of as few as 3,000 to 4,500 troops along with the extensive use of drones and close air support could have enabled Afghan security forces to continue holding off the Taliban without putting Americans at much risk.

“There was an alternative that could have prevented further erosion and likely enabled us to roll back some of the Taliban gains in recent years,” said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the retired commander of American forces in Afghanistan and former C.I.A. director who argued the mission was making progress while serving alongside Mr. Biden under President Barack Obama.

If memory serves (and it does), the idea of a light US footprint focused on counter-terrorism rather than counterinsurgency was Biden's plan back in 2009. Met with derision at the time, maybe it doesn't looks so bad now.

Seems like a shame to skip the derision from 2009:

And others, more harshly, argue that Mr. Biden’s judgment on foreign policy has often been off base.

They point out that he voted against the successful Persian Gulf war of 1991, voted for the Iraq invasion of 2003, proposed dividing Iraq into three sections in 2006 and opposed the additional troops credited by many with turning Iraq around in 2007.

“When was the last time Biden was right about anything?” Thomas E. Ricks, a military writer, wrote in a blog on Sept. 24. Mr. Ricks is affiliated with the Center for a New American Security, a research organization founded by Democrats.

Well. By 2021, not even Team Biden liked the old Biden plan (my emphasis):

 

The Biden team considered other options, including keeping a small presence of troops for counterterrorism operations or to support Afghan security forces, but reasoned that was just “magical thinking” and would take more troops than was sustainable. They discussed whether to renegotiate the Trump agreement to extract more concessions but the Taliban made clear it would not return to the bargaining table and considered the Trump deal binding.

 

"Sustainable" seems to mean "politically popular here in the US". The wind has certainly shifted here since 2009, so the national security parallel to "defund the police" carried the day.

 

And why did Biden stick with the withdrawal negotiated by Trump? One 'excuse' which Biden offered and rejected is that Trump forced his hand:

 

Following the deal, Mr. Trump reduced American forces in Afghanistan to 4,500 from 13,000. Eager to be the president to end the war, he signed a memo to the Pentagon instructing it to pull out all remaining forces by Jan. 15 before leaving office, but was talked out of it by advisers. Instead, he ordered the force drawn down to 2,500 troops in his final days, although about 3,500 actually remained.

 

For Mr. Biden, inheriting such a small force in Afghanistan meant that commanders were already left with too few troops to respond to a renewed Taliban offensive against American forces, which he deemed certain to come if he jettisoned Mr. Trump’s agreement, requiring him to send thousands more troops back in, officials said.

 

While he has suggested he had little choice because of the Trump agreement, Mr. Biden in fact was already determined to pull out of Afghanistan regardless and acknowledged in a recent interview with ABC News that “I would have tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops” even if his predecessor had not negotiated a deal with the Taliban.

 

A stranger point - Biden did modify the deal, changing the deadline from May 1 (roughly the kickoff of 'fighting season', after the poppy harvest is in)  to Aug 31, prime fightin' time. Seemingly better months were considered and rejected:

Mr. Biden’s advisers also considered extending the withdrawal deadline until the winter, after the traditional fighting season was over, to make the transition less dangerous for the Afghan government. The Afghanistan Study Group, a bipartisan congressionally chartered panel that was led by Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., a retired Joint Chiefs chairman and that included Ms. O’Sullivan, in February recommended extending the May 1 deadline and seeking better conditions before pulling out.

But Mr. Biden was warned by security specialists that the longer it took to withdraw after a decision was announced, the more dangerous it would become, aides said, so he extended it only until Aug. 31.

Some say none of this would have happened if Biden were still alive.

Strange But True

Politico covers the meltdown of Team Biden's Plan for Afghanistan. They open with a reminder that a mere ten days the White House was celebrating its twin victories in the Senate on the bipartisan infrastructure and the Dems-Only Everything Else bill.

Yeah, that victory celebration went downhill.

And we'd expect Republicans to pounce on Biden's mis-statements, but the NY Times?

That Degenerated Quickly...

Kabul has fallen and the Afghan "government" has fled?!?

Afghanistan Live Updates: Government Collapses as President Flees, and Taliban Enter Kabul

The U.S. military raced to evacuate diplomats and civilians as the insurgents stood poised to retake complete control of the country 20 years after being toppled by American forces.

 

Meanwhile, Back In Afghanistan...

The US failure to create a stable national government in Afghanistan has been a slow train wreck coming. Some conservatives became restive under Early Obama, whose commitment and conviction to victory were, well, suspect.

And what might victory have looked like? I was firmly in the camp that believed the US was unlikely to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan even with resolute US leadership. I wrote this 2010 and reprised it in 2011 while discussing a Reagan-era military expert, Bing West, who detailed the probable failure of the US counter-insurgency effort.

My official editorial position is that if we had Lincoln in the White House, the Afghani equivalent of George Washington in Kabul, and Generals Marshall and Eisenhower peering at maps of Kandahar, we might still lose in Afghanistan.  Gen. Petraeus is a great general and a great American, but he is not partnered with Lincoln and Washington.

Obama didn't have the character to recognize who he was and pull the plug in 2010. Remember, Afghanistan was the "good war" and Iraq was the "bad war". Since Iraq was Bush's mistake, victory there was not important, even if achievable. Fighting the 'good war' made political sense to Obama even though military success was unlikely.

Whatever, dude, and a happy belated birthday from Maureen Dowd. Trump put us firmly on a withdrawal path we should have taken years earlier, and Biden will oversee the final debacle. 

My Pillow Guys Looking For New Experts?

Awkward moment: The cyber-sleuths hired by My Pillow guy Mike Lindell to help Stop The Steal can't back his story.

EXCLUSIVE: Cyber expert says his team can’t prove Mike Lindell’s claims that China hacked election

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The cyber expert on the “red team” hired by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell now says the key data underpinning the theory that China hacked the 2020 election unveiled at the Cyber Symposium is illegitimate.

Mr. Lindell said he had 37 terabytes of “irrefutable” evidence that hackers, who he said were backed by China, broke into election systems and switched votes in favor of President Biden. The proof, he said, is visible in intercepted network data or “packet captures” that were collected by hackers and could be unencrypted to reveal that a cyberattack occurred and that votes were switched.

But cyber expert Josh Merritt, who is on the team hired by Mr. Lindell to interrogate the data for the symposium, told The Washington Times that packet captures are unrecoverable in the data and that the data, as provided, cannot prove a cyber incursion by China.

“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” Mr. Merritt said on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium.

Mr. Merritt’s break from Mr. Lindell accelerated the unraveling of the MyPillow millionaire’s months of spinning of a conspiracy theory that he said would reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and restore former President Donald Trump to the White House.

Well, the expert is not definitively saying that hacking did NOT occur, which will probably help some people Keep Hope Alive.

And speaking of hope, its's great to see it ran out for Cuomo. We've all been spared a few months coverage of his death throes.

Closing Time In Tokyo

That was an odd Olympics, but it had some great moments. The Summer of Italy may be my favorite capped (so far!) by the men's photo finish gold in the 4x100 relay.

United Airlines To Require Employee Vax

From the WSJ:

United Airlines to Require All U.S. Employees Be Vaccinated Against Covid-19

United Airlines Holdings Inc. UAL -0.72% will require its 67,000 U.S. employees to be vaccinated this fall, the first major airline to take this step as the Delta variant drives a nationwide increase in Covid-19 infections.

Airlines including United have so far tried to encourage workers to be vaccinated voluntarily, with incentives such as bonus pay or extra vacation.

In a letter to employees Friday, Chief Executive Scott Kirby and President Brett Hart said they expected that some would disagree with the decision but said the move was necessary to keep workers safe.

“The facts are crystal clear: everyone is safer when everyone is vaccinated,” the executives wrote. “Over the last 16 months, Scott has sent dozens of condolences letters to the family members of United employees who have died from COVID-19. We’re determined to do everything we can to try to keep another United family from receiving that letter.”

Hmm. Delta is ready when you are? Other employers remain up in the air?

 

Go, Go Cuomo!

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

Cuomo Live Updates: New York Governor Sexually Harassed Multiple Women, Report Finds

The report centered on allegations made by 11 women, nine of whom are current and former state employees. Letitia James, the state attorney general, said Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo retaliated against at least one woman for her allegations.

I don't see how he survives this.

Sunday Open Thread

An Olympic weekend!

An Imminent Vaccine Mandate For Federal Employees?

Per CNN and "according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter", a big announcement is due Thursday:

Biden will announce vaccination requirement across federal government on Thursday

There will be an exception:

Biden will not impose the requirement on the US military, despite his authority to do so, for the time being. He is, however, likely to outline how the Department of Defense may seek to approach the issue going forward, the source said.

Obvious takeaway - you can keep your freedoms if you have a gun.

As Team Biden puzzles over how to promote vaccine uptake, they might find helpful clues in their NY Times.

The Defense Secretary:

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has said he would not be comfortable with a mandate until the Food and Drug Administration fully approved the vaccine.

And a NYC municipal union leader irked by the new DeBlasio mandate:

Oren Barzilay, the president of a union of emergency medical workers that opposes the mandate, said that some of his 4,300 members have expressed concerns about side effects or complications from the vaccine and about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration not yet giving full approval to any coronavirus vaccine.

To belabor the seemingly obvious - if taking the vaccine is such a no-brainer, how come the Big Brains at the FDA are still noodling it? They want more data, but the vax-hesitant are knuckleheads for wanting more data?

I'm pro-vax but anti-nonsense. Biden has said the FDA will approve these vaccines any month now:

“My expectation talking to the group of scientists we put together, over 20 of them plus others in the field, is that sometime maybe in the beginning of the school year, at the end of August, beginning of September, October, they’ll get a final approval” for the vaccines, Mr. Biden said.

September, October, whenever. What's the rush? RUFKM?!?

C'mon, man - I've worked in bureaucracies where 'Hasta Manana" isn't just a saying but a lifestyle commitment. But that is not what we look for in the Fire Department or the Police Department and it certainly shouldn't be the FDA approach to a tremendous public health crisis. I'm getting a mental image of a burning house with smoke, flames and people coming out the windows while the FDA studies whether the fire hoses contain BPA. Get this done!

 

 

What Does A Solid Message Wrapped IN BS Smell Like?

The WaPo tugs at our heartstrings today with the sad tale of a young man (28 yrs old) who did not get vaccinated and subsequently died of COVID. Solid message - TAKE THE SHOT! (Unless you're Ben Simmons.  Never mind...).

However, the timeline makes no sense. His family was infected on March 5. Am I alone in remembering how hard it was to get vaccinated in January or February? Most states were offering vaccines to the elderly and front-line medical workers back then. To be somewhat protective by March 5, this kid would have needed a first shot in mid-February. Alabama did not open vaccines to those under 55 or with other medical issues until MARCH 22.

I endorse their "Take your shot" message but the family should not lose a moment's sleep (or be subject to criticism) for not getting vaccinated back when they were not eligible. And if I were a journalist, I might fact check my stories a bit more carefully. A helpful message wrapped in BS ends up smelling like BS. There's a chance this will not build public confidence in our ostensibly fair-minded yet sometimes agenda-driven media.

NUANCE: An earlier story in a Montgomery paper presents the "Get Vaccinated" message as more of a hypothetical - IF her son had lived he'd be telling the people that COVID is no hoax and no joke and vaccines are a great idea.

"I know that if Curt had survived, he would have made sure everyone knew how serious this disease is, and how important the vaccine is," Christy Carpenter said. "My daughter and I are now carrying out that mission in his memory."

The WaPo quotes turn the hypothetical into a missed opportunity:

Now in Carpenter’s Alabama home, the room belonging to Curt, her “beautiful baby boy” and firstborn, remains empty — a painful reminder of a life that could have been saved if the family had decided to get vaccinated, she said.

“It took watching my son die and me suffering the effects of covid for us to realize we need the vaccine,” the mother said. “We did not get vaccinated when we had the opportunity and regret that so much now.”

ERRATA:

 

Lest you doubt.

WaPo:

 

Alabama:

Montana Without Fly-Fishing?

Hot, dry waterways are no way to raise fish.

John Tierney Blasts Lockdowns, Masks, Media Panic-Mongering, And More

The iconoclastic John Tierney blasts the scientific community and the media for promoting COVID panic and ideological conformity while abandoning science in favor of masks and lockdowns. He's silent on vaccines, however.

Saturday Morning!

DACA on the ropes, again.

Back In The Wuhan Labs...

Per CNN, Team Biden is giving the lab leak a serious look, although no one is leaking stories of compelling new evidence:

Washington (CNN)Senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild -- a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory.

Still, more than halfway into President Joe Biden's renewed 90-day push to find answers, the intelligence community remains firmly divided over whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab or jumped naturally from animals to humans in the wild, multiple sources familiar with the probe told CNN.

 

Meanwhile, the head of WHO said the lab leak hypothesis is still on the table and is asking China to be a teensy bit more forthcoming. Fun quote:

 

“I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Tedros said.

 

 

Sporting Sunday

Lots to watch.

Kandahar Collapse

Our withdrawal from Afghanistan is going as expected.

A Tesla Autopilot Lawsuit

The short video of a Tesla rear-ending a pickup truck that was changing lanes shows you can automate Stupid. The Tesla was whizzing down the open lane of a multi-lane highway, blowing the doors off drivers on both his right and left. The pickup truck wanted to move into the lane where traffic was flowing, signaled a lane change to his right, and... boom. The Tesla driving system only slowed a fraction of a second before the crash. A kid in the pickup was not wearing a seat belt, and died.

But sudden lane changes are hardly unusual when traffic is messed up. Rocketing by people as if they are sure to look out for you is a terrible idea, even if done autonomously.

MORE: Video of crash starts at 30 sec. mark in this Fox News coverage.

Independence Plus One

Enjoy the last of the long weekend!

And in the Ongoing Weirdness file: the vaccines that came out of Operation Warp Speed seem like an obvious Trump win. But Republicans aren't exactly celebrating it that way.

Saturday Action

Away we go again.

Tucker Carlson vs. The NSA

I have a hard time taking Tucker Carlson seriously, but who knows?

Allahpundit at Hot Air:

NSA: We never targeted Tucker Carlson's communications with an eye to getting him kicked off the air

Bill Cosby Freed From Prison?

OK, wow. 

Bill Cosby freed from prison after sex assault conviction overturned by court

PHILADELPHIA - Bill Cosby has been freed from prison after Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned his sexual assault conviction.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction and opened the way for his immediate release from prison Wednesday in a stunning reversal of fortune for the comedian once known as "America's Dad," ruling that the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by his predecessor's agreement not to charge Cosby.

Cosby, 83, has served more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence after being found guilty of drugging and violating Temple University sports administrator Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He was the first celebrity tried and convicted in the #MeToo era.

The former "Cosby Show" star was arrested in 2015, when a district attorney armed with newly unsealed evidence -- the comic's damaging deposition testimony in a lawsuit brought by Constand -- brought charges against him days before the 12-year statute of limitations ran out.

But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said that District Attorney Kevin Steele, who made the decision to arrest Cosby, was obligated to stand by his predecessor's promise not to charge Cosby. There was no evidence that promise was ever put in writing.

 

Herschel Walker Running?

This oughta be good:

Trump: Herschel Walker will run for Senate in Georgia

Barr Dumps On Trump - Stop The Steal Or Cut The Crap

Former AG Barr is interviewed by Jonathan Karl for The Atlantic on Trump's claims of election fraud.

Donald Trump is a man consumed with grievance against people he believes have betrayed him, but few betrayals have enraged him more than what his attorney general did to him. To Trump, the unkindest cut of all was when William Barr stepped forward and declared that there had been no widespread fraud in the 2020 election, just as the president was trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory by claiming that the election had been stolen.

 

In a series of interviews with me this spring, Barr spoke, for the first time, about the events surrounding his break with Trump. I have also spoken with other senior officials in the Trump White House and Justice Department, who provided additional details about Barr’s actions and the former president’s explosive response. Barr and those close to him have a reason to tell his version of this story. He has been widely seen as a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department. But when the big moment came after the election, he defied the president who expected him to do his bidding.

 

Among other sources we have a cameo from Cocaine Mitch, who confirmed that he exhorted Barr to blow the whistle on the election fraud stories so the party could focus on winning the Senate races in Georgia. Ooops.

 

A couple of passages leave us with a tough editorial judgment.

 

But Barr told me he had already concluded that it was highly unlikely that evidence existed that would tip the scales in the election. He had expected Trump to lose and therefore was not surprised by the outcome. He also knew that at some point, Trump was going to confront him about the allegations, and he wanted to be able to say that he had looked into them and that they were unfounded. So, in addition to giving prosecutors approval to open investigations into clear and credible allegations of substantial fraud, Barr began his own, unofficial inquiry into the major claims that the president and his allies were making.

 

“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told me. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

 

And later, after Barr has aired his concerns with an AP reporter and is facing an enraged President:

As Trump ranted about other examples of fraud, Meadows continued to sit silently with his arms crossed, his posture suggesting that he, too, was upset by what Barr had done.

“You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges,” Barr said. “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”

Interestingly, Trump didn’t argue when Barr told him that his “clown show” legal team had wasted time. In fact, he said, “You may be right about that.”

The dilemma is obvious - was Stop The Steal "all bullshit" or "a clown show"?

ERRATA: Quite a descent - America's Former Mayor won't be practicing law in NY. 

Saturday Open Thread

Away we go.

The Bipartisan Deal That Apparently Isn't

Byron York has follow-up and Republican reaction to Biden's promise to work out both a bipartisan infrastructure deal that some Republicans can support and a Democrat-only infrastructure bill to which Reps would never agree.

Believe it or not, Reps aren't happy.

I can't remember a similar ploy in Washington, but maybe others can.

PILING ON: The WaPo and Politico cover the bipartisan deal that now looks DOA.

WaPo:

GOP senators are furious over Biden pledge tying infrastructure bill to huge Democratic package

A number of senators accused the White House of a bait-and-switch. Next steps are unclear.

Politico:

POLITICO Playbook: Graham: Biden made GOP look like ‘f---ing idiots’

 

The Long Sought Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal Is Announced

Joe Biden and a group of Senators announce they have a deal for a $600 billion infrastructure package. That's a long way from the several trillion dollar package Democrats had been looking for.

Biden insists that this slimmed-down deal will move in tandem with a larger Democrat-only package that will be a reconciliation cramdown:

Mr. Biden’s endorsement marked a breakthrough in his efforts to forge an infrastructure compromise, but it was far from a guarantee that the package would be enacted. Both the president and top Democrats say the plan, which constitutes a fraction of the $4 trillion economic proposal Mr. Biden has put forth, can only move together with a much larger package of spending and tax increases that Democrats are planning to try to push through Congress unilaterally, over the opposition of Republicans.

“If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” Mr. Biden said during remarks in the East Room of the White House. “It’s in tandem.”

Mickey Kaus tries to game this out and comes away thinking that Biden and his party will be under tremendous pressure to deliver something before the midterms. If the only bill that gets to Biden's desk is this little thing, he'll sign it.

Save The Filibuster!

Sen. KSyn argues that the filibuster promotes bipartisan buy-in and leads to longer lasting legislations. She does not mention the ten years of scuffling over the ACA as an example of the perils of cram-down lawmaking. But she should have!

Long time readers may take a dim view of Matt Yglesias, who was a young fire-breathing progressive twenty years ago. However, like so many of us, he seems to have mellowed with age. Or I have. Hmm, motion is relative, yes?

In any case, he makes an interesting argument about "The rise and importance of Secret Congress". His piece obviously violates the first rule of Secret Congress Club but his gist is this: in the current (and likely ongoing) hyper-politicized Nationalization Of Every Issue, neither side wants to give the other a visible win. Visible! As long as no one is paying attention, Congress can grind out legislation.

I'm not sure whether his Substack allows free trial views so here is an extended excerpt:

The core of the Secret Congress theory is that on highly salient issues, lawmaking is dominated by the question of which party controls which chambers and by how slim their majorities are. Under these circumstances, polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock, and when solutions pass, they pass on a near party line. 

• • Highly salient successes tend to be the most famous legislative achievements of a president’s term (the ACA for Obama, the TCJA for Trump, the ARP for Biden). 

  • Highly salient failures tend to be what people point to when they call Congress gridlocked: the 2013 Manchin-Toomey background checks bill, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the American Health Care Act, the Dream Act, etc.

But while these highly salient issues are the subject of heated debate in Regular Congress, Secret Congress keeps plugging away in obscurity. 

The key is that public attention creates incredibly perverse incentives. Members of the minority (rightly) think that any popular, well-known bill that passes on a bipartisan basis is going to help the standing of the president. David Mayhew’s book “Divided We Govern” studies the 1946-2002 period and finds that periods in which the president and Congress are on opposite sides generate just as much legislation as periods of unified government. Another classic Mayhew book, “Congress: The Electoral Connection,” is about how members of Congress like to win elections. Getting bills passed helps members win re-election by giving them things to take credit for. But in an era where congressional voting is so highly correlated with presidential approval, and primary electorates say they’d rather have members that fight the other party than help their own state, it’s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful.

In their essay “The Logic of Conditional Party Governance,” political science professors John Aldrich and David Rohde write, “As conflict increases, so do the negative consequences to members of either party from a legislative victory by their opponents.” But, when something has low salience, its passage isn’t seen as conceding ground to the other side. No Republican congressman is going to be primaried for voting for the low-salience Endless Frontiers Act, because it doesn’t count as “giving Biden a win.” 

Plausible. One obvious implication: the President's use of the 'bully pulpit' to sway public opinion probably hardens battle lines and makes compromise less likely. The good news - if we need a President who puts people to sleep rather than fires up half and antagonizes half, with Biden in office we have the man for the moment.

Another perverse incentive he notes is that activist groups (I think of lefty groups but there are righties as well) can't fundraise off of subtle silence and suasion:

But here’s a tough pill. The way a lot of contemporary activism and advocacy works is that you want to be able to show your funders that you are making progress. That tends to mean doing things that are intended to get attention, making a lot of noise in the press, building alliances with other activist groups, and otherwise demonstrating that your loud-and-proud activity is making an impact. This conceit tends to make its adherents very skeptical of popularism — the view that elected officials and party-aligned groups should emphasize a small number of high-polling ideas. They want to say that their advocacy work is helping expand the set of political possibilities. The Secret Congress theory suggests this is not only false but backward. Aggressive, partisan-affiliated public advocacy can help you pass bills if it leads to landslide electoral victories, but in a non-electoral context, you are more likely to make headway by staying chill.

"Staying chill"?!? That is not how we do things these days.

Happy Father's Day All!

Away we go.

Ross Douthat praises Biden for ignoring the crazies in his own party and dealing with Russia sensibly. Which he describes as Trump with better optics and a friendlier press. Do you remember four years of 'Trump is Putin's stooge"? Many do not!

Now comes Biden, making moves in Russia policy that are essentially conciliatory — freezing a military aid package to Ukraine, ending U.S. sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Germany to Russia, a return of ambassadors — and setting up a summit that can reasonably be regarded as a modest propaganda coup for Putin. And suddenly almost everyone wants to act as though the Trump years never happened: Not just the Republicans accusing Biden of being soft on Moscow, but the Democrats who have apparently decided that it’s fine to hand concessions and photo ops and promises of “stability” to the regime that just yesterday was the Great Reactionary Enemy, the liberal order’s greatest threat.

But this isn’t actually a column about liberal amnesia or hypocrisy. It’s a column about the wisdom of the Biden administration, in recognizing that certain Trump-era hysterias within its party can be safely put to sleep.

Some of those hysterias belong to the progressive left, and plenty has been written about Biden’s refusal to let woke Twitter set all his political priorities. But the Russia hysteria was a paranoia of the center, an establishment overreaction, so it’s notable to see Biden and his team steer away from it as well.

In this case, what the White House seems to grasp is that pieces of Trumpist foreign policy are worth preserving: not the dodgy business ties (well, depending on where Hunter Biden resurfaces) and the weird man-crushes on dictators, but the general idea of a U.S. foreign policy reoriented away from Europe and the Middle East and reorganized to contain the threat of China, with late-1990s fantasies about the inexorable expansion of the liberal order left behind.

This reorientation does not require friendship with Putin, which would be morally undesirable and strategically unlikely. But it requires treating Russia policy primarily as the management of a weak and therefore mischief-making competitor, rather than a grand crusade against a number-one geopolitical adversary. Hence the summit and its talk of “strategic stability,” hence the conciliatory moves that if Trump had made them would have headlined every hour on MSNBC.

Notably, Biden can get away with this — meaning his stiff-arms to the center-left Resistance as well as the woke left — not just because of the power of Draper-ish partisan amnesia, but because his core support within the Democratic Party didn’t belong to either of the groups he’s stiff-arming.

His discussion of the divisions within the Dem Party is interesting but disturbing - as he notes, the Woke Left are the young and restless, so their crazy ideas won't be going away anytime soon.

 

 

 

Narrative Uber Alles

Andrew Sullivan denounces critical race theory and the ongoing media attempt to circle the wagons. Another obvious recent example of woke 'narrative uber alles' "reporting" was the media's lack of curiousity with the Wuhan lab leak theory.

Thursday Action

Away we go.

I do have to say - I can't take the Biden fan-boys seriously. C'mon, all his foreign policy chops? What happened to 'wrong about everything'?

Putin-Biden would have been a mismatch twenty years ago and it hasn't gotten better. Well, that isn't a fair comparison anyway, since Putin's combination of physical energy, mental acuity and ruthlessness put him ahead of all our recent Presidents. But ask me about John McCain, who may have been the one guy that could have impressed Putin. His POW resume is scary. And either Bush 41 or Reagan would have done fine, especially since Putin would have been a mere lad.

The Texas Power Grid Struggling Again?

I'm getting too old for this. Becoming an expert on the Texas power grid doesn't seem like much of a hobby for my sunset years.

Texas grid operator urges electricity conservation as many power generators are unexpectedly offline and temperatures rise

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas says a large number of power plants are offline, but it could not provide details as to what may be causing the “very concerning” number of outages. At the same time, the state is experiencing near-record demand for electricity in June.

I'm sure the late spring(!) heat wave isn't helping but c'mon - Texas gets hot in the summer is news? Texas gets cold in the winter and hot in the summer and the gird can't handle either?!?

Well. Each morning in my (relative) youth I rode the Metro North commuter rail into the Greatest City in the World. I learned that light rail is the most economical and reliable form of mass transit EVER! Unless it is too hot, too cold, too sunny, too rainy, or there are too many squirrels playing near the tracks. Metro North sort of had the reverse Post Office motto - almost nothing could fail to derail them.

If Texas is going to mess with us and undermine the case for light regulation with their stupid grid problems there will be outrage. Probably not from me, however.

Not Yet Ready For The Weekend Open Thread

Away we go. Jonathan Turley is very interesting on the Supreme Court's recent display of collegiality:

In the latest decision, Borden v. United States, the lineup of justices was strikingly non-ideological. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for Justices Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, with a concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas — three liberal justices and two conservatives agreeing to limit the meaning of a "violent felony" for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Last week, the decision in Van Buren v. United States was a majority of three liberals and three conservatives. In that case, the most senior justice was Breyer; he assigned it to his conservative colleague, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote for Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh. Although he was on the other side in Van Buren, Justice Thomas joined his liberal colleagues in Borden.

These decisions follow a litany of unanimous decisions from the court, which seems to be sending a message in the timing of the release of their opinions: The justices do not rule on cases to send messages to Congress, but they do control what cases are accepted and when those decisions are released. It is hard not to view the last few weeks as a type of judicial “harrumph” to the continuing calls for court-packing. While we expect more ideological splits in a few upcoming cases, these cases reaffirm that they are not so rigid or “hopelessly divided,” as Democratic leaders and other critics have suggested. .

I suspect its not just Roberts who is worried about the court's current public perception as hopelessly partisan and divided.

Meanwhile, Back In Lafayette Park...

Its Narrative versus Reality at Lafayette Park. Or is it Narrative versus Narrative? ABC News on the Inspector General's report about the clearing of Layayette Park prior to Trump's controversial photo op last summer:

Police did not clear Lafayette Square so Trump could hold 'Bible' photo op: Watchdog

Trump claimed the inspector general's report "totally" exonerated him.

Well, OK-ish. The IG is a Trump-appointed holdover, so there's that. And regardless of when the clearing of the park was originally planned, I'm skeptical that the tempo wasn't affected by the surprise news of an impending Presidential visit. My emphasis on the word "planning" below:

U.S. Park Police did not clear Lafayette Park and the nearby area of protesters on June 1, 2020, so President Donald Trump could walk from the White House over to St. John’s Church, but learned of his interest in surveying the site hours after they already had begun planning to clear the area to put up new fencing, according to a new watchdog report.

And later in the story:

Interior Department Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, nominated by Trump, called the events of June 1 a "a particularly tumultuous event in a tumultuous time" and said their review looked at why U.S. Park Police decided to clear Lafayette Square when and in the manner they did, and whether the president's plans to come out of the White House influenced those decisions. The review ultimately found park police had been planning to clear the area for days to install anti-scale fencing and that the decisions on the ground were not changed because of the president or White House's plans.

"We did not find evidence that a potential presidential visit to the park or the St John's Church influenced the park police's decision making, or their deployment, you know, in their operation to clear out the park. So that's the big, the big finding of our report is, is the is the clear evidence of why they decided to do so and when they made the decision, and on the flip side, the lack of evidence related to the President's potential visit influencing that decision," he said on ABC News Live.

...

Citing interviews, radio dispatches, videos and other records from Park Police, the 38-page report echoes claims from senior Trump administration officials last year that the park wasn’t cleared for Trump’s controversial photo op.

One Park Police commander told the inspector general's office they were caught off guard about Trump's plans during a conversation with Attorney General Bill Barr, who asked, "Are these people still going to be here when POTUS [President of the United States] comes out?" according to the report.

"The USPP operations commander told us he had not known until then that the President would be coming out of the White House and into Lafayette Park. He said he replied to the Attorney General, 'Are you freaking kidding me?'" the report reads.

But it does not explore why so many officers used as much force as they did against peaceful protesters in the area that day -- or dig deeper into the actions of the Secret Service and other federal entities on the ground.

I'm surprised the White House would schedule a Presidential stroll without calling ahead. But that was the Park Police story and the IG didn't vex others to hear their version.

Greenblatt told ABC News that even though his office did not speak to Barr, the White House, or Secret Service for this review, it would have done so if the evidence indicated there was pressure from any of those sources that had an impact on Park Police decisions.

"We would have pursued evidence had it gone elsewhere. But we found that the U.S. Park Police officials on the ground, they owned the decision and the corroborating evidence supported that," he said on ABC News Live.

Well. Fire and brimstone from Glenn Greenwald, who dislikes the legacy media more than he dislikes Trump. Hot Air has more excerpts from the report.

 

Tax Returns Of The Rich And Famous

Thanks to a leak from (almost surely) a politically motivated IRS staffer, ProPublica has access to the tax returns of many of the wealthiest Americans.

Their breakthrough  insight: Bezos, Buffet, Gates et al are seeing huge, untaxed gains in the stocks they own. Hence their tax rates relative to 'economic' income are tiny. This is a stunning revelation to everyone except those who have spent more than five minutes studying the subject of wealth and taxes.

From their story:

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

...

America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.

To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.

We’re going to call this their true tax rate.

It takes far too long but eventually they get to the obvious - if the problem is the tax code doesn't recognize unrealized capital gains, the solution would be to change the code so it does recognize unrealized gains as income. That is Sen. Ron Wyden's proposal. (Ages ago I was suggesting something similar.)

As to the little matter of IRS privacy and the law, well, whatever. I have no doubt the Biden DoJ will go hard after these leakers.