Kevin Drum

I was out shooting pictures of something else at Seal Beach and happened to come across this pair of lovebirds on the beach. This picture may be a cliche, but then, there's a reason things become a cliche.

Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty runs down several recent stories about shipments of COVID-19 vaccine that have gone astray or been allowed to spoil:

When a pharmacist discovered that 57 vials....Nearly 2,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine....More than 1,100 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine....165 Moderna COVID-19 vaccine doses....the majority of the 11,900 doses in the shipments.

When all of these anecdotes are laid out, it feels like a small miracle that anyone ever gets vaccinated.

This adds up to about 15,000 doses out of 49 million that have been distributed so far. That's 0.03 percent.

Geraghty asks, "Is this the most rage-inducing Corner post I have ever written?" I'd say it's not only not rage inducing, it's positively miraculous. If the number were ten times higher, it would still be pretty good.

This is yet another example of what I (clumsily) call the "America is a big country" syndrome. It's easy to find examples of almost anything, and it's just as easy to come up with large-sounding numbers. But that's only because our country has a population of 330 million. There's always somebody doing something stupid. And even a hundredth of a percent is still 33,000 people.

So: good job, vaccine distributors! Now if we can just figure out what happened to the 20 million doses the Trump administration apparently failed to account for.

The Congressional Budget Office is bullish on the economy in its latest report. Here's their forecast:

Real GDP expands rapidly over the coming year, reaching its previous peak in mid-2021 and surpassing its potential level in early 2025....Labor market conditions continue to improve. As the economy expands, many people rejoin the civilian labor force who had left it during the pandemic, restoring it to its prepandemic size in 2022. The unemployment rate gradually declines throughout the period, and the number of people employed returns to its prepandemic level in 2024.

There is, of course, a chart:

At its current growth rate, CBO projects that GDP will be less than potential GDP for three years, after which it reaches its full potential. This compares to nine consecutive years of below-potential GDP following the Great Recession.

If you trust the CBO, this is a good argument that we don't need any further fiscal stimulus. However, it says nothing about whether we need to continue helping those who have suffered the biggest income losses from the pandemic shutdown.¹

¹Hint: Yes, we do.

Dan Froomkin of PressWatch wrote a widely-linked piece yesterday about the role of the press in modern-era Washington. Here's a piece of it, framed as a speech that a new editor delivers to her newsroom:

First of all, we’re going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors)....Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today.

....Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.

....Political journalism as we have practiced it also too often emphasizes strategy over substance. It focuses on minor, incremental changes rather than the distance from the desirable – or necessary — goal. It obfuscates, rather than clarifies, the actual problems and the potential solutions.

....Tiresomely chronicling who’s up and who’s down actually ends up normalizing the status quo. I ask you to consider taking — as a baseline — the view that there is urgent need for dramatic, powerful action from Washington, not just when it comes to the pandemic and the economic collapse, but regarding climate change and pollution, racial inequities, the broken immigration system, affordable health care, collapsing infrastructure, toxic monopolies, and more.

The reason I'm highlighting this is because it distills a widely held belief on the left: namely that national political reporters are consumed with both-siderism; horse race coverage; faux balance; and giving too much exposure to bad faith arguments. Instead, as Froomkin suggests, they should take a broader view that downplays insider politics and instead focuses on the big picture.

But there's a problem here: we already have media outlets that do this. They're called monthly magazines, which often focus on analysis and broad trends.

By contrast, a daily newspaper (or TV news show) reports on the news. That is, the stuff that happened that day. This is totally legitimate, since lots of people want to know what's happening on a day-to-day basis. In fact, since you're reading this on the internet, you're most likely someone who wants to keep up with the news on an hour-by-hour basis. Waiting a whole day is for your grandparents, amirite?

So what's a daily political reporter to do? If President Biden proposes a $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill, you have to report it. If a group of Republicans counteroffers with $600 billion, you have to report that. And if Biden agrees to meet with them, once again we have news. And there's really no way to report this except through a partisan lens. The entire thing is fundamentally driven by the fact that Democrats and Republicans disagree about what should be in the package. And as with so many things, there is no disembodied truth about who's right.

Unless, of course, you simply assume that liberals are always right, as Froomkin gives away in the last paragraph I excerpted. If that had been written by a conservative, it would look something like this:

I ask you to consider taking — as a baseline — the view that there is urgent need for dramatic, powerful action from Washington, not just when it comes to the pandemic and the economic collapse, but regarding a ballooning welfare state, a stifling culture of political correctness, a broken immigration system, and increasing hostility to religious freedom.

There's something to the lefty critique of political reporters, but not because they report the news that actually happens on a daily basis. Nor because they ignore background and context. Generally speaking, I find that they usually do a good job on that score. For my money, I'd say they spend too much time on Twitter and too much time printing rumors from anonymous sources without much backup.

I am, of course, talking here about legitimate news outlets like the New York Times or CBS News. I am decidedly not talking about places like Fox News, which don't even attempt to provide any kind of balanced treatment of the day's events. That's a whole different topic.

A "Gang of Ten," if you will, has made a counteroffer to President Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill:

Ten Republican senators are set to meet with President Biden on Monday to push a much smaller alternative to his $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to address the toll of the pandemic, including scaling back another round of direct payments from the government.

The coalition of mostly centrist Republican senators, led by Susan Collins of Maine, on Monday outlined their $618 billion plan, which they are billing as a way for Mr. Biden to pass a pandemic aid bill with bipartisan support and make good on his inauguration pledge to unite the country....After receiving a letter from the senators on Sunday requesting a meeting, Mr. Biden called Ms. Collins and invited her and the other signers to the White House, where they are scheduled to meet Monday evening.

This is drawing scorn from lots of progressive observers, but it shouldn't. This is precisely what Biden ran on, and a few days of back-and-forth will do no harm. The "lesson of 2009," conversely, is to avoid getting stuck in months of bad-faith negotiations.

That said, the Republican group is going to have to show some serious flexibility if they want to be taken seriously. Their plan takes a chainsaw to assistance for individuals and the unemployed, and there's no way that's a sustainable proposition. Biden's best strategy is to meet with them, talk with them, and then insist on a better proposal within a day or two. Meanwhile, there's no need for things to slow down in the House.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I've been waiting for this:

A month ago the CDC tried to prioritize essential workers along with the elderly, but they were met with a blizzard of mockery for, among other things, not focusing solely on the elderly. After all, that's nice and easy and it would save the maximum number of lives.

So now what do we get? Complaints that essential workers aren't getting vaccinated.

As for me, I'm only 62 and I work at home, so I think our big problem is not prioritizing cat owners. Why are we being overlooked?

As of the end of the month, here's where we stand on vaccinations compared to every country in Europe. Note that this counts the number of doses, not the number of people vaccinated, since some people have already received two doses.

Some countries are doing better than others, but overall the US is at 9.4 compared to an EU average of 2.74.

Ha ha ha:

Former President Trump has parted ways with his lead impeachment lawyers just over a week before his Senate trial is set to begin, two people familiar with the situation said Saturday. Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier, both South Carolina lawyers, are no longer with Trump’s defense team....Greg Harris and Johnny Gasser, two former federal prosecutors from South Carolina, are also off the team, one of the people said.

According to a different person with knowledge of the legal hires, Bowers and Barbier left the team because Trump wanted them to use a defense that relied on allegations of election fraud, and the lawyers were not willing to do so....Trump has struggled to find attorneys willing to defend him after becoming the first president in history to be impeached twice....After numerous attorneys who defended him previously declined to take on the case, Trump was introduced to Bowers by one of his closest allies in the Senate, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Jokes aside, this shows that Trump understands what Bowers didn't: this isn't a trial, it's a TV show. Trump knows that his control over the Republican Party is still strong enough that he faces no chance of conviction, which means that legal arguments are unnecessary. Instead, he wants this to be a nationally televised opportunity for him to persuade the public that the 2020 election was teeming with Democratic fraud that cheated him out of reelection. He will, of course, be aided in this via coverage from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and all the rest of the right-wing media empire. I predict high ratings.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.