The Morning Dispatch: Pandemic Exit Strategy

Plus: As violence continues to spiral out of control in Israel, a deeper look at what caused it.

Fully vaccinated? The CDC says you can do this now. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images.)

Happy Friday! We wished you a happy Wednesday yesterday in error, but we triple-checked this morning, and you can rest assured that today is indeed Friday. You won’t be hearing from us for a few days.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The Centers for Disease Control issued new guidance for fully vaccinated people yesterday, saying those two weeks past their final COVID-19 vaccine dose can “resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic … without wearing a mask or staying 6 feet apart” in most indoor and outdoor settings. Americans will still be required to wear masks on planes, buses, and trains, however.
  • Bloomberg News reported Thursday that Colonial Pipeline paid nearly $5 million in ransom money last week to the DarkSide hackers that infiltrated the company’s systems. Asked if he was briefed on such a payment, President Joe Biden said he had “no comment on that.” Colonial had said earlier this week it resumed most operations on Wednesday evening.
  • Initial jobless claims decreased by 34,000 week-over-week to 473,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday, the lowest level since March 14, 2020.
  • Rep. Chip Roy of Texas announced yesterday he will run against Rep. Elise Stefanik in the race to succeed Rep. Liz Cheney as House GOP conference chair. Republicans are expected to vote this morning, and Stefanik—having received backing from former President Donald Trump—is the clear favorite.
  • Politico reported yesterday that an independent government watchdog concluded that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge violated the Hatch Act earlier this year when she weighed in on a 2022 U.S. Senate race.
  • The United States confirmed 39,013 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 3.9 percent of the 1,005,408 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 831 deaths were attributed to the virus on Thursday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 584,478. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 30,244 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Meanwhile, 1,915,642 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, with 154,624,231 Americans having now received at least one dose.

What to Do About Federal Unemployment Insurance?

As the vaccines continue their march across the land, with roughly 2 million Americans getting the jab each day, it’s clearer than ever that we’ve reached the end of the total-war phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC’s latest guidance on indoor and outdoor mask-wearing means that even the most safety-conscious Americans will begin tiptoeing back into “normal” life, making the primary question not whether the U.S. economy will come back online, but how soon.

A growing chorus of voices, however, are warning that even as the viral threat wanes, artificial barriers are hampering America’s ability to get back to work. Initial jobless claims are the lowest they’ve been since the start of the pandemic, but unemployment remains stubbornly high—a fact attributable in part to the federal government’s ongoing payout of expanded unemployment insurance at the same level as competitive wages in many states, which is not set to expire until September.

Last month’s jobs report did little to quell these concerns. After analysts had predicted that the economy would create 1 million jobs in April, the Labor Department reported last Friday that nonfarm payrolls increased by a mere 266,000 jobs last month. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate slid up to 6.1 percent.

Since then, the Biden administration has taken pains to convince the American public that the latest jobs report is just a snapshot in time. “I know there’s been a lot of discussion since Friday’s report that people are being paid to stay home rather than go to work,” the president said on Monday. “Well, we don’t see much evidence of that.”

Yet that same day, the White House announced a series of initiatives to “help Americans return to work.”

“We’re going to make it clear that anyone collecting unemployment who is offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits,” Biden said. “There are a few COVID-19-related exceptions so that people aren’t forced to choose between their basic safety and a paycheck, but, otherwise, that’s the law.”

Republican policymakers at both the federal and state levels are weighing in too. GOP Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said this week he would introduce legislation enabling any current beneficiary of federal unemployment who gets a job by July 4, 2021 to receive two extra months of the payments as a “signing bonus.” Sasse characterized this plan as being both “pro-worker” and “pro-recovery.”

How the Latest Violence in Israel Began

We sent you nearly 1,000 words on the situation in Israel earlier this week, but so much has happened since then that Charlotte had to write 2,000 more.

In a piece for the site today, she takes a look at the escalating violence, its myriad causes, and what comes next.

Here’s a 10,000-foot view of the situation.

As cross-border rocket fire between Israel and Gaza intensifies, families across Israel are becoming full-time occupants of their home, apartment, and neighborhood bomb shelters.

“The past several days have been especially challenging as a parent, in having to answer difficult questions posed by our 6-year-old daughter,” Adam Levick, who lives with his wife and two young children in Modi’in, told The Dispatch after Tuesday night’s attacks. “Though they’ve prepared her at school to some degree, we had to carefully explain to her, in language she would understand, but not language that would scare her, that there are people who want to hurt us, but that we’ll be safe in the shelter, and that our army—a word she likely doesn’t fully understand—and God—a word she does understand, as we are religiously observant—are protecting us.”

Modi’in—along with other cities across central Israel—has come under unprecedented rocket fire in the past several days, as Hamas unleashes its artillery on heavily populated civilian areas in retaliation for recent Arab-Jewish skirmishes in the Israeli capital of Jerusalem.

Before foreboding U.N. warnings of “full-scale war,” Amos Giland—a former Israeli defense official—described the lead-up to the conflict as a “powder keg” primed to “explode at any time” with prescient accuracy early this week. On Monday morning, a clash between police and Palestinians left more than 500 participants—mostly Muslim—wounded in the capital’s holiest site. By Monday evening, Hamas militants based in the Gaza Strip had retaliated with more than 450 rockets aimed at cities across Israel.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) hit back in a series of targeted strikes the same night, setting off an aerial fight with alarming casualties on both sides. Early morning Friday, Israeli ground forces—including troops, artillery, and tanks—had amassed the border to Gaza. But despite contradictory statements from Israel’s military and premature reports from the media, no ground offensive has been launched into the territory as of yet.

According to the Gaza-based Palestinian Ministry of Health (a source that analysts have rightly cautioned should be taken with a grain of salt), at least 109 Gazans have been killed since Monday, including 28 children. Six Israelis, including a 6-year-old boy, have also been killed.

 

Worth Your Time

  • We’re pretty sure we’ve never mentioned Rebekah Jones in this newsletter, and that was intentional: Her conspiratorial claims about Florida cooking the books to downplay its COVID-19 situation were farcical, and we didn’t want to elevate them beyond the Resistance Twitter fever swamp. But her theories caught on in certain pockets of the left, in large part because they painted GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as a ruthless monster. Charles Cooke eviscerates the whole saga in a comprehensive piece for National Review. “There is an extremely good reason that nobody in the Florida Department of Health has sided with Jones,” he writes. “It’s the same reason that there has been no devastating New York Times exposé about Florida’s ‘real’ numbers. That reason? There is simply no story here.”
  • Ezra Klein wants us to talk more about UFOs. There’s been an uptick in stories about potential sightings, and former high-ranking intelligence officials have repeatedly hinted at there being pertinent information to which the public is not privy. “All this is a little weird,” he writes. “None of it is proof of extraterrestrial visitation, of course. … The way I’ve framed the thought experiment in recent conversations is this: Imagine, tomorrow, an alien craft crashed down in Oregon. There are no life-forms in it. It’s effectively a drone. But it’s undeniably extraterrestrial in origin. So we are faced with the knowledge that we’re not alone, that we are perhaps being watched, and we have no way to make contact. How does that change human culture and society?”

Presented Without Comment

Twitter avatar for @KevinMaddenDCKevin Madden @KevinMaddenDC

there’s an old political adage: “When they try to run you out of town, make sure you get out front and make it look like you’re the grand marshall of a parade.” https://t.co/WBxuDLR5QU

Josh Kraushaar @HotlineJosh

“Randi Weingarten, president of the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, plans to call on Thursday for a full reopening of the nation’s schools for the next academic year” https://t.co/7Kf7iVuzeQ

Also Presented Without Comment

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

  • Atlantic reporter McKay Coppins joined David and Sarah on yesterday’s Advisory Opinions to chat about his recent profile of Brett Kavanaugh, which tracks the Supreme Court justice’s journey from his contentious 2018 Senate confirmation hearings to the bench. Plus: A discussion of a federal judge’s decision to dismiss the National Rifle Association’s bankruptcy case, the Facebook Oversight Board’s decision to uphold the platform’s ban on Donald Trump, and lower level judicial confirmation hearings.
  • Historian Niall Ferguson joined Jonah on The Remnant yesterday to talk about his new book: Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. The pair discuss the human tendency to prepare for one disaster scenario while another hits us square in the jaw, the reason “we may be forced by companies to do Zoom” even after the pandemic ends, and why book tours are delirium-inducing even when done from the comfort of one’s home.
  • For more on the violence in Israel this week, check out David’s latest French Press(🔒). “One does not have to view Israel through rose-colored glasses to know that it is right to respond to jihadist attacks with military force,” he writes. “Israel is not a perfect nation, but it does have the right to use its superior firepower to attack and destroy jihadists who possess murderous intent.”

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).