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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A sick country [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-27
We begin today with Helen Branswell of STATnews writing about the unnecessary death of a child in Lubbock, Texas from the measles.
The person had been hospitalized in Lubbock. So far in this outbreak 18 people in Texas have been hospitalized with measles, the state’s health and human services department said in a statement. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary and a longtime critic of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, appeared to try to downplay the news in a press conference after a Cabinet meeting in the White House. [...] Given that there has already been a death in Texas, the outbreak may be substantially larger than the number of confirmed cases suggest, said Paul Offit, an infectious diseases expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit noted that the death rate from measles is roughly one fatality per 1,000 cases. [...] So far in 2025 at least eight jurisdictions have reported measles cases, according to the CDC: Alaska, California, Georgia, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, Rhode Island, and Texas. The CDC’s measles count website is only updated monthly and though the most recent update was on Feb. 20, it is already out of date. It lists the national count so far this year at 93 cases, but the Texas outbreak alone exceeds that number.
David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times says that COVID alarmists were more right about the dangers of the spread of COVID-19 than anyone else.
Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths to a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million. In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected, but as early as March 2020 Donald Trump and Deborah Birx (who helped run the White House’s Covid response) appeared to be referencing Ferguson’s figure to claim credit for avoiding more than two million deaths — a success they explicitly attributed to shelter-in-place guidelines, business closings and travel restrictions. Five years later, though the world has been scarred by all that death and illness, it is considered hysterical to narrate the history of the pandemic by focusing on it. Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics now run the country’s health agencies, but the backlash isn’t just on the right. Many states have tied the hands of public health authorities in dealing with future pandemic threats, and mask bans have been implemented in states as blue as New York. Everyone has a gripe with how the pandemic was handled, and many of them are legitimate. But our memories are so warped by denial, suppression and sublimation that Covid revisionism no longer even qualifies as news. When I come across an exchange like this one from last weekend, in which Woody Harrelson called Fauci evil on Joe Rogan’s show, or this one from last year, in which Rogan and Tony Hinchcliffe casually attribute a rise in excess and all-cause mortality to the aftereffects of vaccination, I don’t even really flinch.
Chris Geidner of LawDork writes that the Pentagon has now issued its policy banning trans military service.
The policy — “Service Members and Applicants for Military Service who Have a Current Diagnosis or History of, or Exhibit Symptoms Consistent with, Gender Dysphoria“ — was issued by Darin Selnick, an official “Performing the Duties of Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.” According to his Defense Department bio, “Mr. Selnick leverages his extensive government and non-government experience advocating for veterans to position Service members for productive post-separation lives from the first day they put on a uniform.” On Wednesday, Selnick “advocated for veterans” by creating many more of them — putting in place a policy that would kick all trans service members out of the military.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo did some more digging into the cutting of Veterans Administration contracts; cuts that have now been restored.
As I wrote below, yesterday VA Secretary Collins was out bragging that he and DOGE had found more than $2 billion of BS professional services contracts that they were cutting right away. Then today the whole thing blew up in their faces. The contracts weren’t at all what they they’d described and they either didn’t know or didn’t care that the great majority of those contracts were with what are called service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses – SDVOSBs. I’ve done so poking around and I can share a bit more about how this seems to have happened. It’s probably a microcosm of damage being wrought across the executive branch. Here’s my understanding. DOGE is looking for contracts to cut at the VA, a repeat of what we’ve seen across numerous agencies. They come across a contract code (NAICs 541611) that lists as ‘Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services’. So they figure, okay, this is some McKinsey type BS. We can definitely cut that. [...] In today’s climate people probably think that if you look at DOGE the wrong way you get canned. And I take it there wasn’t a lot of pushback, though I don’t have detail on that front. In fact, the contracts, as I mentioned in the post below, covered everything from cancer prevention programs to burial services to doctor recruitment campaigns for the VA, to medical services of various sorts. In other words, about everything you can imagine that goes into VA efforts beyond the doctor who sees you when you visit a VA facility.
Lauren Gambino of the Guardian writes about the tacky shoe salesman's executive order that further expands the power of an illegitimate and unofficial president.
The new order calls for a “transformation” in federal spending on contracts, grants and loans by requiring agencies to create a centralized system to record and justify payments, which may be made public for transparency – an initiative that would be monitored by Musk’s team. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” it states. The order instructs each agency’s Doge team lead to provide monthly reports on contracting activities, including payment and travel justifications. Law enforcement, the military, immigration agencies and national security-related activities are excluded from the new requirements.
Jasper Scherer of the Texas Tribune reports that Governor Abbott’s long-desired school vouchers bill has enough cosponsors to pass the Texas lower House.
Days after Rep. Brad Buckley filed House Bill 3, the chamber’s plan for letting families use public funds for their children’s private schooling, 75 Republican members enlisted as coauthors on the measure. The 76 votes, including Buckley, would be just enough to form a majority of the 150-seat House if each member supports the final version of the bill. Speaker Dustin Burrows did not sign on as a coauthor, but the Lubbock Republican has signaled support for vouchers and Buckley’s bill, and he could provide an extra vote of breathing room for voucher proponents. Speakers rarely vote on legislation but occasionally make exceptions for key votes or to break ties. [...] Though HB 3 is now supported by a majority of the House, the measure will likely evolve as pro-voucher lawmakers iron out differences with the Senate, which passed its own plan in early February to create voucher-like education savings accounts. The Republican-controlled Senate has passed several voucher bills in recent years, including in 2023, but each has died in the House under opposition from Democrats and rural Republicans. Many of those anti-voucher Republicans were supplanted by members who support the policy, prompting Abbott to claim that the House now has 79 “hardcore” voucher supporters — nearly in line with the number supporting Buckley’s bill.
Paul Farhi writes for Columbia journalism Review about the tentacles that the White House is putting on the WH press pool.
..On Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt stunned reporters by announcing that the administration intended to wrest control of the pool from the WHCA. Henceforth, she said, the White House’s press staff would offer pool slots to “well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility.” Leavitt moved swiftly to implement the White House’s new vision on Wednesday, bumping pool mainstay Reuters from the daily rotation and replacing the news service with representatives from two pro-Trump outlets, Blaze Media and Newsmax. The White House also booted liberal-leaning HuffPost, replacing it with a reporter from Axios. The moves confirmed the fears of mainstream reporters, who say the White House’s intent is to undermine independent reporting by making the pools more MAGA-friendly. While Leavitt hasn’t ruled out including “legacy” outlets from future pools, the plan appears to be to increase the presence of partisans willing to lob softball questions at Trump. Conversely, White House control of the pool’s composition gives it the power to exclude reporters or news organizations the administration dislikes. [...] Participating in the travel pool can also be an expensive undertaking. Pool reporters (or rather their employers) pay for their own airfare (at Air Force One rates), hotels (wherever the president stays), ground transportation, and food. The costs for even a modest domestic trip can easily approach five figures; a multi-destination presidential trip abroad can cost many times that.
Finally today, Jonathan V. Last of The Bulwark analyzes the tepid (to say the least) legacy media response to the banning of the Associated Press from White House press briefings.
One of the hallmarks of small-l liberalism is that journalists are supposed to be concerned with both actual fairness and the perception of fairness. This internal self-regulation is one of those aspects that makes free societies work. It’s part of the honor system. Here is the problem: While MSNBC holds to the honor system and tries to be fair to Republicans, Fox News paid $787 million dollars so that it could knowingly lie about Democrats. [...] What’s going to happen next? Asymmetry. What should happen is that the entire press corps should stop showing up to cover White House events until this policy is rescinded. Any outlet which complies with Trump and accepts pool duty should be blackballed and treated as propagandists and not journalists. Chances of this response actually happening? 0.00%.
I agree for the most part with Last’s analysis but that does not mean that the shuffling of on-the-air talent at MSNBC was about race. At all.
Yeah, I know.
Nevertheless, have the best possible day everyone!
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