Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Turning the corner on a deadly pandemic

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Perry Bacon Jr/FiveThirtyEight with an excellent piece on learning lessons:

What The Trump Era Taught Me About Covering Politics

Over the next five-plus years, I learned a lot about covering national politics. Some lessons came the hard way: By being really wrong. So now that we’re about a month into a new presidential administration, I’m trying to keep those lessons front and center. What are they? Here are nine:

1. Listen more to Black people.

Appearing on ABC News’s “This Week” in July 2015, then-Rep. Keith Ellison (a Democrat who is now Minnesota’s attorney general), said he thought Trump had a decent chance of winning the GOP nomination. The other panelists on the segment with him laughed at Ellison’s remark. I’m not singling them out — at the time, I was mocking the idea of Trump winning the nomination myself, after all.

Die Zeit:

The Brown Internationale

German neo-Nazis who head abroad to fight. American masterminds who dream of a fascist revolution. A former Russian soldier who provides weapons training to right-wing extremists from across Europe. The new right wing is networked internationally – and is growing more dangerous.

The hate preacher lives in a run-down rear building in the heart of Denver, on the second floor through the courtyard to the right. The TV is on. We knock, hoping to ask him a few questions about the new, globalized Nazi movement. After all, he’s one of the masterminds behind it.

The door opens. “Come on in,” says James Mason.

His full beard is icy gray and he is wearing a white-and-blue pinstriped shirt and pleated trousers. On the bookshelf are numerous works with titles like “Blood & Honor” and, in German, “Der Gauleiter” and “Deutschland Erwache! (Germany Wake Up!)” A ticking cuckoo clock hangs on the wall, going off every half hour.

This aging gentleman of 68 years is a legend among neo-Nazis. Mason was just 14 when he joined the youth wing of the American Nazi Party, and he later went on to became one of the most important right-wing extremists in the United States. He romanticized Hitler just as he did serial killer Charles Manson, propagating violence and terror and spending some time in prison. In 1992, he published a book called “Siege.”

Emily Tillett/CBS News:

How can the U.S. make vaccine access more equitable? Here’s what a former CDC director says

COVID-19 has only highlighted existing inequities in this country — lack of hospitals, food deserts, to name a few. With states in dire straits, what needs to happen on the federal level to address those needs?

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every community in the United States, but some populations have been hit significantly harder than others. Black, Latino, and Native Americans have all experienced rates of infection, hospitalization, and death that far exceed their proportion of the population. Just this week, new life expectancy numbers for the United States brought these disparities into stark focus: life expectancy during the first six months of 2020 declined by 2.7 years for Black Americans, 1.9 years for Latinos, and 0.8 years for Whites.

A key factor driving these disparities is a difference in the risk of exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19: a greater proportion of people of color are frontline workers who must interact with others on a daily basis in risky settings in order to put food on the table and to pay the rent. But the reasons go deeper than that. People and communities of color entered this pandemic at a significant disadvantage due to historic and ongoing racism and discrimination. A greater proportion of people of color work in jobs that pay lower wages, lack sick leave and family medical leave and lack health insurance. In the United States, skin color still has an outsized impact on whether people have the resources to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe from COVID-19.

David Siders/Politico:

Anti-Trumpers are done with the GOP. Where do they go now?

Scores of Republicans are bolting the party in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But they’re discovering there’s really no place to go.

When Jim Hendren, a longtime Arkansas state legislator, announced on Thursday that he was leaving the GOP, it marked the latest in a flurry of recent defections from the party.

Tens of thousands of Republicans across the country have changed their registrations in the weeks since the riot at the Capitol — many of them, like Hendren, becoming independents. Other former party officials are discussing forming a third party.

But if the Republicans’ reasons for leaving the GOP are obvious — primarily, disdain for former President Donald Trump and his stranglehold on the party — the sobering reality confronting them on the other side is that there’s really no place to go.

CNN:

Black women’s roles in the civil rights movement have been understated — but that’s changing

Claudette Colvin did a revolutionary act nearly 10 months before Rosa Parks.

In March 1955, the 15-year-old was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a White person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

The teenager and others challenged the law in court. But civil rights leaders, pointing to circumstances in Colvin’s personal life, thought that Parks would be the better representative of the movement.

“People said I was crazy,” Colvin recently told CNN’s Abby Phillip. “Because I was 15 years old and defiant and shouting, ‘It’s my constitutional right!’ “

Colvin’s story and the experiences of other Black women and youth underscore the difficult questions and realities that Black leaders and activists have been forced to grapple with. Who gets to represent a movement? And who’s the “appropriate” spokesperson for Black Americans’ fight for basic civil rights?

Ashish K Jha/Twitter:

For 78 days in a row

the 7-day moving avg for number of daily deaths from COVID was above 2000

Over the weekend, it fell under 2,000 for first time in nearly 3 months

By next week, it’ll be at 1500

And its falling a bit faster than I was expecting

Why?

Thread 

First, predictions

By March 10, we should be under 1,000 daily deaths

By St. Patrick’s Day, 750

And we could keep dropping

Amazing

Why?

Jamelle Bouie/NY Times:

How to Not Be at the Mercy of a Trumpified G.O.P.

Barack Obama asked Democrats to kill the filibuster and pass a voting rights bill because it was the right thing to do. There’s a stronger argument.

Obama asked Democrats to kill the filibuster and pass a voting rights bill because it was the right thing to do. But there’s a stronger argument: that if Democrats don’t do this, they’ll be at the mercy of a Trumpified Republican Party that has radicalized against democracy itself.

Democrats have already written the kind of voting rights bill Obama spoke about. It’s the For the People Act, designated as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate. If passed and signed into law, it would establish automatic, same-day and online voter registration, protect eligible voters from overly broad purges that remove them from the rolls, restore the Voting Rights Act with a new formula for federal preclearance (which would require select cities and localities to submit new voting rules to the Justice Department for clearance), re-enfranchise the formerly incarcerated, strengthen mail-in voting systems, institute nationwide early voting and increase criminal penalties for voter intimidation.