Mark Sumner

Over the Christmas holiday, I decided to try my hand at the podcasting game. Thanks to a microphone delivered by Santa and the ease with which all the little tools can be acquired these days, I sat down for a day and got something that sounds like … an amateur who sat down for a day. Still, I enjoyed the process and it gave me a chance to talk about something that has obsessed me for more than half a century: the books of former radio host Frank Edwards.

The frustration that vaccines are not showing up in the quantity, and on the schedule, that states were promised continues to grow. The distribution was called a logistical nightmare months ago, and despite a stack of promises from Donald Trump, that nightmare is coming to pass as federal sources utterly fail to get the vaccine where it’s needed in the appropriate quantity.

A Friday briefing on the Russian hack into “SolarWinds” networking software on government sites left members of Congress frustrated as officials shared less information than what was already available from public sources. Meanwhile Donald Trump has finally mentioned Russia on Twitter, except it wasn’t to admit to Russia’s massive hack into federal systems, or even to finally condemn Russia’s paying bounties for the murder of American soldiers. Nope.

Just two weeks ago, the National Science Foundation (NSF) made the sad decision to permanently close the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, after damage to the 1,000-foot-wide instrument rendered it unstable to even inspect, much less operate.

For at least a century and a half, capitalism has been so intrinsically tangled together with America’s government that it’s hard to think to think of an America that’s not ruled by the market. Democracy and capitalism are often taught as two sides of the same coin. Except, of course, they’re not.  

Capitalism has proven that it can do splendidly well under multiple forms of government. Capitalist systems flourished in Europe under monarchies.

Right now, every journalist in America is not just walking a tightrope, but definitely swaying from side to side.

When Barack Obama was sworn in as president in 2009, Sen. Mitch McConnell had already set out the primary goal of the whole Republican Party as making Obama a “one-term president.” McConnell didn’t succeed in that goal, but he did block the appointment of hundreds of judges, including most notably Merrick Garland. That left Donald Trump with 105 openings to fill on the day he took office.

At high noon on Thursday, Donald Trump’s crack legal team sauntered out for a showdown with destiny. They were there to demonstrate for America that Trump’s refusal to concede the election wasn’t a demonstration of infantile refusal to accept reality, but was really real. Really real. Oh, so real.

At high noon on Thursday, Donald Trump’s crack legal team sauntered out for a showdown with destiny. They were there to demonstrate for America that Trump’s refusal to concede the election wasn’t a demonstration of infantile refusal to accept reality, but was really real. Really real. Oh, so real.

It shouldn’t be shocking: Doing nothing in the face of a highly infectious disease results in high rates of infections. The nation as a whole is suffering from that truism at the moment, as Donald Trump can’t be bothered to leave the golf course for anything other than making attacks on democracy. But some states are being particularly hard hit because they’re getting a double-dose of inaction.

It shouldn’t be shocking: Doing nothing in the face of a highly infectious disease results in high rates of infections. The nation as a whole is suffering from that truism at the moment, as Donald Trump can’t be bothered to leave the golf course for anything other than making attacks on democracy. But some states are being particularly hard hit because they’re getting a double-dose of inaction.

After an exhausting week, in which half the nation seemed to be working out the muscles in their mouse-clicking finger in the endless quest for new numbers, Saturday was a glorious day.

In just a few minutes, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are finally going to get to deliver the victory speeches they’ve been keeping on ice since Tuesday night. It’s hard to express how great this night feels. It’s unlike the satisfaction of just winning an election.

Remember when America wasn’t constantly standing alone? When we weren’t the only nation to withdraw from the Paris Agreement? When we weren’t the only nation to destroy the treaty that prevented Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? When we weren’t the absolute worst nation in the world when it comes to our response to the COVID-19 crisis?

There may be nothing more emblematic about the 2020 election than this: The call came while Donald Trump was out golfing. Because of course he was. In the spirit of new transparency, America deserves to see that score card.

This isn’t just about the character of the president. It’s about the character of America. 

Right now, a pandemic is raging. Right now, the economy is in recession.

Though networks are still milking this moment of heightened attention for all the ratings points and ad dollars they can rake in, it’s clear tonight that the real drama is over. With that in mind, Joe Biden is going to address the nation. Kamala Harris is also at the Chase, and may also speak, though without a clear call from the networks, that’s not certain.

It will likely be brief, and don’t expect Biden to directly say what AP will not.

No. Not Stacey Abrams. Sure, Abrams is almost single-handedly responsible for the current strength of the Democratic Party in Georgia, is a towering inspirational figure, and deserves both the Nobel Peace Prize and her choice of cabinet positions.

But I’m not talking about Abrams. I’m talking about a man. A coal-mining man.

Not giving a damn about the lives of individual Americans is Donald Trump’s real superpower. Being a sociopath who lacks all empathy and is incapable of seeing anything beyond how events affect his own bank account and TV Q may not seem like it would be a political advantage, but it allows Trump to get past all those barriers that hold many public figures back.

It’s now clear that Donald Trump lied to the nation about when he received a positive test for COVID-19. Trump was known to be ill, showing symptoms, and receiving treatment over a day before publicity around Hope Hicks’ diagnosis forced Trump to admit even a sliver of the truth. But if Trump trotting off to Minnesota and New Jersey to get his infectious face up close with supporters seems bad, what’s going on at the White House since then seems even worse.

A day after Donald Trump admitted to testing positive for COVID-19, the Rose Garden ceremony formally introducing Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee for the Supreme Court has emerged as a super-spreader event. In addition to Trump, at least 11 others — including former White House press secretary Kellyanne Conway, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, Republican Senator Mike Lee, and Republican Senator Thom Tillis have tested positive following Barrett’s introduction.

Donald Trump was flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday evening. At the time, he was apparently suffering from coughing, fever, lethargy, and some difficulty in breathing. The decision to send him to the hospital at that point appears to have been made not just out of an abundance of caution, but because, as The Washington Post reports, with Trump’s condition worsening, they wanted to move while Trump was “still able to walk to Marine One on his own.

Though early concerns about the availability of protective gear for hospital workers caused medical advisers to caution against ordinary people buying up the few available masks, by late March the CDC had already informed the White House that routine wearing of masks by everyone was necessary to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. At his very next public appearance, Donald Trump talked about masks … and immediately said that he was not going to wear one.

When White House adviser Hope Hicks received positive COVID-19 test results on Thursday, Donald Trump’s team tried to cover up those results and keep them “private.” But once the news leaked out, Trump was forced to admit that he also had tested positive. Since then, there has been an anxious scramble to test everyone who has been in contact with the Trump team over the past week.

In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) teamed with illustrator Molly Crabapple to create a short film called A Message from the Future. That film presented something extraordinarily rare when it comes to looking ahead these days: optimism.

After what seems like an endless parade of dystopias in literature and film, the short film, in which Crabapple illustrates scenes to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s narration, seems almost shocking in its optimism.

On Friday, the United States topped 55,000 new cases of COVID-19 for the first time since the beginning of August. It may be incorrect to say that there has been multiple waves of disease in the United States, because in a very real sense, the failure to ever institute any national policy means we never got past the first wave—we just passed it from state to state. But in a nationwide sense, there have definitely been phases to the development of the epidemic in this country.

On Tuesday, consumer pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson announced that their vaccine for COVID-19 was entering phase 3 trials. It seems hard to get excited about yet another vaccine at this point, especially when others began their phase 3 trials weeks, or even months, ago.

When it comes to the search for life in the solar system, Mars clearly gets most of the attention. The Red Planet seems so tantalizingly Earth-ish … if you ignore the cold, and the dryness, and the lack of all but a trace of atmosphere. After Mars, most of the attention of late has been focused on a whole series of icy moons.

Donald Trump is good for literature. Actually … that’s overstating it. A lot. But Trump is certainly good for publishers, and for dramatic titles. In one-word titles alone, it’s possible to build a pretty decent description of Trump using Rage, Unhinged, Disloyal, Fear, Hoax. You certainly don’t have to go to Insane Clown President, but … that’s also not a bad description.

With the news cycle exploding over reports that Donald Trump called American soldiers who died to stop a German attack on Paris “losers” and “sucker,” it’s obvious that Trump had only one choice: Spend the day honoring America’s military by chasing a little white ball around his private golf course in Virginia.

Before getting to the latest in the concern over Donald Trump’s attempt to turn everything about a public health crisis into a political football, it seems appropriate to give out a state-level special achievement award. Because Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has managed something very, very … special.

The rate of testing in Alabama was down this week. The rate of testing in Alabama was down the week before. The rate of testing in Alabama was down the week before that.

Ask Donald Trump about any issue, and he’ll tell you his TV ratings. Trump is far more concerned about the way something plays in the media than he is about the reality on the ground. Which is why, in the latest compound screw-up over the approval of the use of convalescent plasma over the unanimous advice of a panel of medical experts, the only two people to lose their jobs are a pair of PR experts from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).