Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The COVID pandemic is not over, as Europe heats up and the U.S. simmers
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Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump’s rage at Georgia Republicans should unsettle us all
CNN reports that [Gov Brian] Kemp is now facing the prospect of a serious primary challenge from David Perdue, the businessman and former senator. He very well may have Trump’s backing, and Republicans in the state say Kemp could lose if it happens.
In much of our discourse, Trump-backed GOP primary challenges to sitting Republicans tend to be cast mainly as retaliation for personal disloyalty to the former president. There’s something to that, but the full truth appears to be darker.
What this really suggests is that large swaths of Republican voters appear to want to elect people to office who would have been willing to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf, and will be willing to overturn a loss in the future.
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
The impeachment of President Biden and other American nightmares coming in 2023
With polls, gerrymandering making a GOP House all but inevitable in 2023, Americans need to ponder a year that could tear the nation apart.
Imagine this: It’s a gray, chilly day in Washington, D.C., in March of 2023. A handful of protesters from left-leaning groups like Indivisible are huddled outside against the icy Potomac winds, but mostly there’s a climate of disbelief in the nation’s capitol as the GOP-dominated House of Representatives wraps up debate over the impeachment of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., 46th president of the United States.
It was little more than five months since the Republicans gained 43 House seats in the 2022 midterms, many in newly gerrymandered seats, and since the incoming chair of House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, started studying a menu of equally off-the-wall options — Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Afghanistan withdrawal, or something unprecedented about the president’s mental acuity — for Biden impeachment hearings.
In the end, Jordan and his colleagues — including the radical QAnon conspiracy theorists who’d replaced GOP moderates Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — decided that the pretext didn’t even matter that much.
Dan Froomkin/presswatchers:
Handicapping the midterm elections? Let me rewrite that for you.
The inescapable conclusion is that if this Republican Party wins back control of even one house of Congress, they will grind governing to a halt — and that, if they win the presidency again, democracy as we know it may well no longer exist.
White House phone calls, baseless fraud charges: The origins of the Arizona election review
This is how Arizona plunged into a fog of election conspiracies, riven with partisanship and targeted by opportunists from across the country.
In a Bluetooth conversation that lasted several minutes, Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, noted their deep concern for what they viewed as widespread fraud and irregularities in Arizona’s election. Giuliani said they had evidence dead veterans had voted. And illegal immigrants. And there were other problems, too.
Trump and Giuliani wanted [state House speaker Rusty] Bowers to help ensure President-elect Biden’s 10,457-vote win in Arizona would not be formalized a week later. They told him “there’s a way we could help the president” and Arizona had a “unique law” that allowed the Legislature to choose its electors, rather than voters, he recalled.
“That’s the first I’ve heard of that one,” a skeptical Bowers told them. He told the men he needed proof to back up their claims: “I don’t make these kinds of decisions just willy-nilly. You’ve got to talk to my lawyers. And I’ve got some good lawyers.”
Bowers told them he supported Trump, voted for Trump and campaigned for him, too. What he would not do is break the law for him.
TPM:
Texts Show Kimberly Guilfoyle Bragged About Raising Millions For Rally That Fueled Capitol Riot
Guilfoyle’s texts, reviewed by ProPublica, represent the strongest indication yet that members of the Trump family circle were directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally. The attack on the Capitol that followed it left five dead and scores injured.
A House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 has subpoenaed more than 30 Trump allies for testimony and documents, including Pierson and Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Guilfoyle. But Guilfoyle herself has so far not received any official scrutiny from Congress.
Sarah Zhang/Atlantic:
The Pandemic’s Next Turn Hinges on Three Unknowns
A potential winter surge is up to vaccines, variants, and us.
Here are the basic numbers: The U.S. has fully vaccinated 59 percent of the country and recorded enough cases to account for 14 percent of the population. (Though, given limited testing, those case numbers almost certainly underestimate true infections.) What we don’t know is how to put these two numbers together, says Elizabeth Halloran, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. What percentage of Americans have immunity against the coronavirus—from vaccines or infection or both?
This is the key number that will determine the strength of our immunity wall this winter, but it’s impossible to pin down with the data we have. This uncertainty matters because even a small percentage difference in overall immunity translates to a large number of susceptible people. For example, an additional 5 percent of Americans without immunity is 16.5 million people, and 16.5 million additional infections could mean hundreds of thousands more hospitalizations. Because unvaccinated people tend to cluster geographically and because many hospital intensive-care units run close to capacity even in non-pandemic times, it doesn’t take very many sick patients to overwhelm a local health-care system.
COVID: Germany introduces new measures to curb the pandemic
Chancellor Angela Merkel and the 16 state premiers have decided on fresh restrictions. Parliament saw a heated debate over how best to respond to the dramatic increase in COVID infections.
Acting Chancellor Angela Merkel and the country’s 16 state premiers reportedly agreed on several measures to curb the pandemic. The leaders stressed the necessity of vaccinations for all employees of hospitals and nursing homes.
They also agreed on the introduction of “2G” restrictions for the unvaccinated in those regions where a certain hospitalization rate is exceeded. “2G” refers to a system only allowing free movement for leisure activities for the geimpft oder genesen — “vaccinated or recovered.”
Merkel has long favored stricter measures to curb the pandemic. She again described the current situation as “dramatic.”
Two Austrian regions to go into full lockdown next week
Measures imposed as Salzburg region prepares for triage as hospitals are overwhelmed.
Speaking at a state parliament meeting today, Upper Austria’s conservative governor, Thomas Stelzer, said that if there is no nationwide lockdown, the region will enter “a lockdown of several weeks from next week,” reported Die Presse.
The Salzburg region has also agreed to join these measures, announcing in a statement that they were needed “in view of the continuing sharp rise in new corona infections.”
Click thru to see the graphs.