Good day from your Thursday newsletter guy, Timothy Noah.

Vaccination leads both The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Times reports that once the Food and Drug Administration approves Covid vaccinations for 5- to 11-year-olds in the coming weeks, the vaccinations won’t take place in cavernous mass inoculation sites but in doctors’ offices, pharmacies, schools, and health clinics. The Post leads with the FDA approving Covid boosters from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson and its decision that your booster doesn’t have to be the same brand as your first jab.

Snip, snip, snip. Congress continues to remove portions of its $3.5 trillion spending bill, now more like a $2 trillion spending bill, to pacify a certain freshman senator from Arizona who travels the world auctioning off bits of it to corporate lobbyists. The bill still beefs up IRS tax enforcement, The Wall Street Journal reports, but possibly without any increases in marginal tax rates on businesses, individuals, or capital gains. It’s gotten so bad, Politico reports, that House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth of Kentucky is floating the idea of putting the leavings into another reconciliation bill early next year. “Force Republicans to vote against, like, Medicare expansion, or childcare or senior care, depending on what we decide not to put in this package,” Yarmuth said. Turning Build Back Better from a transformative policy package into a campaign slogan would be of no particular help to Yarmuth himself, who isn’t running in 2022.

But today’s best news is that, driven by censorship from respectable social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, the Vienna Tourist Board is posting paintings and sculptures displaying the human form on the sex worker site OnlyFans. In addition to Koloman Moser’s Liebespaar (1913) and Egon Schiele’s nudes, art lovers can take in the 25,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic sculpture  dug up in Austria in 1908. Facebook and Instagram’s guidelines allow nudity in sculpture and painting, but artificial intelligence can’t always make this distinction. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have faced similar difficulties. “Subscribe now and discover all of Vienna’s 18+ content,” teases the Tourist Board on OnlyFans. Since the Vienna art scene of a century ago wanted to shock people, Schiele and Moser and all the rest would be delighted to learn they still can shock robots, at any rate, and be relegated to louche environs in cyberspace.

At NewRepublic.com, we unveil this morning the poignant cover story of our November print issue, in which Marion Renault profiles the “vaccinated minority” in the red state of Alabama, where only about 44 percent are fully vaccinated.  In Mobile, where the rate is even lower (41 percent), being vaccinated can “feel like damnation,” Renault is told. TNR’s Win McCormack assesses conservatives’ avoidant thinking on climate change, which is to play the skeptic; admit, when pressed, that climate change is real and man-made; then strenuously resist doing much, if anything, about it. And Natalie Shure compares allegations that Russia and  China are behind “Havana Syndrome” illnesses suffered by diplomats, which on inspection appear to be fairly common ailments like migraines, to Colin Powell’s persuasive-but-wrong presentation of evidence before the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Thanks!
Tim Noah, staff writer

Yesterday’s question: In 1916, Woodrow Wilson sent a military expedition into Mexico on a futile 11-month hunt for Pancho Villa, who had killed 17 U.S. citizens. The military incursion, which violated Mexican sovereignty, was led by a man who later won fame and renown in World War I. Who was he?

Answer: John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, who commanded the American Expeditionary Force.

Yesterday’s bonus question: Another military hero, this one a dominant figure during World War II and afterward, commanded the more than 200 soldiers on horseback who, with sabers drawn, attacked protesters in Washington, D.C., in 1932. He also sent tanks into Anacostia. Who was this military leader, and what prompted this excessive use of force?

Answer: Gen. Douglas MacArthur. On orders from President Herbert Hoover, MacArthur dispersed the Bonus Army, a group of World War I veterans encamped in a “Hooverville” in Anacostia. It was a very unpopular move, and it played a role in Hoover’s 1932 defeat by Franklin Roosevelt. The Bonus Army protesters demanded immediate redemption of Adjusted Service Certificates that Congress had awarded them; as matters stood, the certificates weren’t redeemable until 1945. In 1936, Congress finally granted the certificates’ immediate redemption. But to do so it had to override President Franklin Roosevelt’s veto.

Today’s question: The wealthiest member of the House of Representatives last year was worth $189 million. Who is he, and why isn’t he there anymore?

Bonus question: If you were to create a composite U.S. senator based on the average age in the Senate, would that composite be eligible to receive Medicare benefits?