GOP could retake the House in 2022 just by gerrymandering four Southern states

GOP could retake the House in 2022 just by gerrymandering four Southern states

Ari Berman reports: Before Georgia voted for Joe Biden, the biggest upset in recent state politics came when Democrat Lucy McBath became the first Black person to represent Newt Gingrich’s former congressional district. Georgia’s Sixth District, home to the affluent northern suburbs of Atlanta, was long a bastion of deep-red Republicanism, represented by Gingrich for 20 years. But that changed in 2018, when college-educated white voters shifted their allegiance to the Democrats and joined with an influx of Black, Latino,…

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Behind the masks, a mystery: How often do the vaccinated spread the virus?

Behind the masks, a mystery: How often do the vaccinated spread the virus?

The New York Times reports: The recommendation that vaccinated people in some parts of the country dust off their masks was based largely on one troublesome finding, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New research showed that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant carry tremendous amounts of the virus in the nose and throat, she said in an email responding to questions from The New York Times. The finding contradicts what…

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Something strange is happening in Britain. Covid cases are plummeting instead of soaring

Something strange is happening in Britain. Covid cases are plummeting instead of soaring

The Washington Post reports: This is a puzzler. Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain. They were supposed to soar. Scientists aren’t sure why they haven’t. The daily number of new infections recorded in the country fell for seven days in a row before a slight uptick Wednesday, when the country reported 27,734 cases. That’s still almost half of where the caseload was a week ago. The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and…

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Chinese officials and Taliban meet in Tianjin as U.S. exits Afghanistan

Chinese officials and Taliban meet in Tianjin as U.S. exits Afghanistan

CNN reports: China’s Foreign Minister met with senior leaders of the Taliban in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin on Wednesday in the latest sign of warming ties between Beijing and the resurgent Islamist group. During a meeting with Taliban’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the group’s political committee, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the Taliban as an important military and political force in Afghanistan, and said he expected the Taliban to play an important role in…

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Cats’ genomes are surprisingly similar to humans’

Cats’ genomes are surprisingly similar to humans’

Katherine J. Wu writes: The genome of a mouse is, structurally speaking, a chaotic place. At some point in its evolutionary past, the mouse shuffled its ancestral genome like a deck of cards, futzing up the architecture that makes most other mammalian genomes look, well, mammalian. “I always consider it the greatest outlier,” Bill Murphy, a geneticist at Texas A&M University, told me. “It’s about as different from any other placental mammal genome as you can find, sort of like…

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The intellectual far right contemplates an ‘American Caesar’

The intellectual far right contemplates an ‘American Caesar’

Damon Linker writes: A former director of communications for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (where he was briefly my boss) and former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, [Michael] Anton penned the most notorious and rhetorically scalding case for supporting Trump. Published in early September 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books online, “The Flight 93 Election” portrayed Trump as a final, last-ditch opportunity for conservatives to wrest control of the country back from those (like Hillary Clinton) who…

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Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual

Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual

Margaret Sullivan writes: Back in the dark ages of 2012, two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its dire effect on American democracy. In a related op-ed piece, these writers made a damning statement about Washington press coverage, which treats the two parties as roughly equal and everything they do as deserving of similar coverage. Ornstein and Mann didn’t use the…

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‘America is not racist’ becomes a GOP 2024 mantra

‘America is not racist’ becomes a GOP 2024 mantra

Politico reports: Democrats made structural racism a centerpiece of the 2020 presidential primary. Now the Republican rebuttal is emerging as an early plank of the 2024 GOP contest: America is not a racist country. The mantra, used by nearly all of the Republican contenders, is unavoidable in the earliest stages of the GOP’s nominating campaign. At the annual Family Leadership Summit in Iowa this month, all three potential presidential prospects on stage — former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary…

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Hooked on Trump: How the GOP still banks on his brand for cash

Hooked on Trump: How the GOP still banks on his brand for cash

The New York Times reports: Even in defeat, nothing sells in the Republican Party quite like Donald J. Trump. The Republican National Committee has been dangling a “Trump Life Membership” to entice small contributors to give online. The party’s Senate campaign arm has been hawking an “Official Trump Majority Membership.” And the committee devoted to winning back the House has been touting Mr. Trump’s nearly every public utterance, talking up a nonexistent Trump social media network and urging donations to…

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Pfizer data suggest third dose of Covid-19 vaccine ‘strongly’ boosts protection against Delta variant

Pfizer data suggest third dose of Covid-19 vaccine ‘strongly’ boosts protection against Delta variant

CNN reports: A third dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine can “strongly” boost protection against the Delta variant — beyond the protection afforded by the standard two doses, new data released by Pfizer on Wednesday suggests. The data posted online suggest that levels of antibodies that can target the Delta variant grow fivefold in people 18 to 55 who get a third dose of the vaccine. Among people ages 65 to 85, the Pfizer data suggest that antibody levels that…

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Video shows salmon injured by unlivable water temperatures after heatwave

Video shows salmon injured by unlivable water temperatures after heatwave

  The Guardian reports: Salmon in the Columbia River were exposed to unlivable water temperatures that caused them to break out in angry red lesions and white fungus in the wake of the Pacific north-west’s record-shattering heatwave, according to a conservation group that has documented the disturbing sight. In a video released on Tuesday by the non-profit organization Columbia Riverkeeper, a group of sockeye salmon swimming in a tributary of the river can be seen covered in injuries the group…

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Gaza: Apparent war crimes during May fighting

Gaza: Apparent war crimes during May fighting

Human Rights Watch: Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups carried out attacks during the May 2021 fighting in the Gaza Strip and Israel that violated the laws of war and apparently amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. The Israeli military and Palestinian authorities have a long track record of failing to investigate laws of war violations committed in or from Gaza. Human Rights Watch investigated three Israeli strikes that killed 62 Palestinian civilians where there were no…

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Republicans refuse to reckon with January 6

Republicans refuse to reckon with January 6

What a moment https://t.co/SySsgNoLRk — 💫 Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) July 27, 2021 Elaine Godfrey writes: All along the hallways of the Capitol complex today, members of the Capitol Police stared at their phones and nearby TV screens. Four of their fellow officers were testifying before Congress for the first time about the treatment they’d endured on January 6. They described being beaten with metal flagpoles, sprayed in the eyes with wasp repellent, and shocked with their own Tasers. One of…

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Pelosi is fighting a war that Republicans started. Their aim is to never lose an election

Pelosi is fighting a war that Republicans started. Their aim is to never lose an election

Kurt Bardella writes: Two things happened on Jan. 6. First, there was that domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol and second, 147 Republicans returned to the U.S. Capitol AFTER said domestic terrorist attack and gave the legislative equivalent of a stamp of approval to said domestic terrorists by voting to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election. On this day, it became the official position of many (most?) in the Republican Party to reject democracy. It…

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