Confirmed new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. have begun to fall, even before President Biden’s vaccination requirement has taken effect, a sign of progress that has left Republicans no choice but to tell people not to get vaccinated.
 

• The seven-day average of new, daily cases has fallen to just under 146,000, from its pre-Labor Day high of just over 166,000, even as testing has increased. The downward trend has continued long enough for hospitalization numbers to flatten, though deaths continue to climb as a lagging indicator, just as they have in the days after past infection peaks. 
   
• That inflection point can’t come soon enough, as parts of the country that have experienced the most severe outbreaks continue to produce infuriating, heart-wrenching stories. One vaccinated Alabama man died of an unrelated heart illness, after being turned away from dozens of hospitals overrun with unvaccinated coronavirus patients. A Texas school district has imposed a mask mandates, in defiance of Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX), after two of its teachers died of COVID-19 in one week. 
   
• Against this horrifying backdrop, support for vaccination requirements has grown (including majorities for workplace, classroom, and sporting-event and concert mandates) as has demand for booster shots. President Biden rode to the rescue for those majorities last week when he announced a forthcoming vaccination requirement for big businesses, but his administration reportedly remains divided over boosters. Senior CDC officials have reportedly argued that booster eligibility should be phased in more slowly, and two senior FDA vaccine regulators, both of whom recently announced their plans to leave the agency, have co-authored a paper arguing against offering boosters to the general population.

That’s how things work in a world where facts and evidence inform decisions aimed at ending the pandemic. Then there’s the Republican world…. 
 

• Biden’s change of course last week, in which he called out Republican governors for being “cavalier with the health of these kids,” has sent Republicans into a tailspin, leading some to take the politically damaging position that workplace vaccination requirements are tyranny, or the outright toxic position that people should defy the requirement based on lies.
   
• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rallied against requiring vaccination alongside anti-vax conspiracy theorists. Gov. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) justified opposing the vaccination requirement on the grounds that people don’t trust these vaccines as much as they trust other vaccines (instead of, y’know, saying the vaccines are trustworthy). Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance encouraged people to defy the mandate by not getting vaccinated and business owners to not pay non-compliance fines (that is, to break the law).  

Republicans seem to think the political benefit they’ll reap from prolonging the misery of the COVID-19 pandemic will outweigh the hit they’ll take from being vocally opposed to incredibly popular vaccines. We can upend this calculation in two ways: by getting as many people vaccinated as possible, and making sure they know Republicans wanted to put their lives at risk for partisan gain.

The California gubernatorial recall is tomorrow, polls show a ton of momentum against removing Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), and you know what that means: Republicans are pre-emptively lying about the election being rigged. The loudest and least subtle of the liars is disgraced former president Donald Trump, who said “Does anybody really believe the California Recall Election isn’t rigged? Millions and millions of Mail-In Ballots will make this just another giant Election Scam, no different, but less blatant than the 2020 Presidential Election Scam!” But it’s become a mantra for the party's most influential figures: any elections Republicans lose are rigged. The front-running GOP recall candidate/radio talk-show host/scam-peddler Larry Elder has even promised to file the kind of post-election sham lawsuits that Trump and his allies flooded courts with last November, in a prelude to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Let’s hope that’s not a harbinger of things to come if the recall fails—and it’s critical that it fails.

• House Democrats have released their plan to pay for President Biden’s Build Back Better proposals, which include raising taxes on corporations and wealthy heirs.
   
• Disgraced former president Donald Trump commemorated the 20th anniversary of September 11 by hosting and promoting a pay-per-view television event. In case you weren’t already convinced, here’s more on America’s worst family. 
   
• “My goal today is to convince you that this [Supreme] Court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett at the 30th anniversary of the opening of the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, named after Senate Minority Mitch McConnell, the same Mitch McConnell who introduced her at the event. That’s it, that’s the joke.
   
• In other Supreme Court clownishness, Justice Stephen Breyer said “I don’t intend to die on the court,” to the great relief of the zero people who believe Breyer can predict the future. 
   
• Gymnasts Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Maggie Nichols, and Aly Raisman will all testify at a Wednesday Senate hearing on the Larry Nassar case. 
   
• Read Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on why Biden’s Afghanistan critics are dangerously wrong, ahead of tomorrow’s big hearing. 
   
• Capitol Police arrested a man in possession of multiple knives when they noticed his truck, festooned with Nazi and white supremacist iconography, parked outside of DNC headquarters. The department announced it will temporarily reinstall perimeter fencing around the congressional campus in response to “concerning online chatter” about the pro-insurrection rally planned for September 18. 
   
• The FEC has dismissed a Republican claim that Twitter violated election law last year after determining that the company blocked an unsubstantiated article about Hunter Biden for legitimate commercial reasons.
   
• Steve Bannon was Jeffrey Epstein’s media coach shortly before Epstein’s arrest in 2019, apparently.
   
• Jurassic Park but for wooly mammoths, and, also, real?

Facebook systematically shields powerful users from the platform’s standards, according to leaked internal documents that are reportedly part of a larger cache that the Wall Street Journal has reviewed. The impunity for these users stems from an internal company program called “Xcheck” (pronounced “cross check”) which was originally intended to standardize enforcement against elite accounts. Instead, many of these VIPs are now “whitelisted”—that is, exempted from conduct rules—or subject to review that comes either too late to prevent abuse or not at all. A privileged, internal review of Xcheck referred to this double standard as “a breach of trust” and “not publicly defensible” and determined that it has allowed top users to harass victims, incite violence, defame public figures, and spread vaccine disinformation. The Journal has sourced its Xcheck scoop to an unnamed insider who has reportedly turned some documents over to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and is seeking federal whistleblower protections. 

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President Biden has reportedly told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer he’s ready to go to the mat to reform the filibuster and pass democracy protection legislation. “Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls."

The Biden administration has begun soliciting commutation requests from drug offenders serving sub-four-year sentences who are confined at home due to the pandemic. 

Skid Row finally has its own voting center, and homeless residents are showing up to vote in the recall election.

Biden will host a virtual summit of global leaders next week to “identify concrete actions and set the ambitious targets” needed to end the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meet Cobra, the coronavirus-detecting dog deployed at Miami International Airport whose nose for COVID is 99 percent effective.