Just dumping it all today
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Jan 21, 2021
Jan 20, 2021
Knives Knives Everywhere
So we kinda saw what was probably supposed to be the big push for plutocracy.
The shit Qult45 pulled (and didn't pull off) in DC on Jan6 is putting a lot of Republicans at odds with each other.
I haven't sorted it out yet, and I'm not expecting I'll every get it all sorted out, but this from National Review is basically a full on declaration of the internal war(s) that we should be watching the GOP struggle with for a while.
NRO:
Witless Ape Rides Helicopter
Well, that sucked.
Memo to MAGA and all its myriad fellow-travelers: Maybe Death of a Salesman as presented by Leni Riefenstahl just wasn’t the show Americans were dying to tune into this season.
And, while we’re at it, maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy.
Think on it, Cletus. I know this whole thing still sounds like your idea of a good time — how’s that working out for you?
Let me refresh your memory: On the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Republicans controlled not only the White House but both houses of Congress. They were in a historically strong position elsewhere as well, controlling both legislative chambers in 32 states. They pissed that away like they were midnight drunks karaoke-warbling that old Chumbawumba song: In 2021, they control approximately squat. The House is run by Nancy Pelosi. The Senate is run, as a practical matter, by Kamala Harris. And Joe Biden won the presidency, notwithstanding whatever the nut-cutlet guest-hosting for Dennis Prager this week has to say about it.
Donald Trump is, in fact, the first president since Herbert Hoover to lead his party to losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate all in a single term. Along with being the first president to be impeached twice and the first game-show host elected to the office, that’s Trump’s claim to the history books. Well, that and 400,000 dead Americans and the failed coup d’état business.
As for the ratings Trump fears and worships, ask the Third Lady: Melania Trump departs the scene the most unpopular presidential wife in recorded statistical history.
You Trumpish Republicans sneered that Joe Biden was too corrupt and too senescent to win a presidential campaign, that he was one part mafioso and one part turnip.
That turnip kicked your dumb asses from Delaware to D.C.
So you rioted. Real smart move, Cletus.
Five Americans are dead. Barricades have been erected around the Capitol. Thousands of federal troops have been deployed to the streets of Washington. State capitols have been obliged to prepare for siege. Americans blame you for this — and they are not wrong.
“Trust the plan,” the QAnon cultists say. Is this what you were planning? I know you are stupid, but you are not that stupid.
“Oh, but he fights!” you’ll say — over and over and over. He didn’t fight — he tweeted. He’s ten feet tall on social media and a pushover in real life. Trade deficit: up. Unemployment rate: rising. Abortion rate: rising. Beijing: rising. The coronavirus body-count: rising.
But he sure did tweet a lot!
And he pardoned Roger Stone — at least he took care of that pressing national priority.
“But the judges!” you protest. Fair point: Trump’s absurd attempts to overturn the election through specious legal challenges were laughed out of court by the very men and women he appointed to the bench. Even his judges think he’s a joke.
Everybody has figured that out. Except you.
And so, goodbye, Donald J. Trump, the man who wanted to be Conrad Hilton but turned out to be Paris Hilton. Au revoir, Ivanka and Jared, Uday and Qusay — there’s a table for four reserved for you at Dorsia. So long, Melania — it’s still not entirely clear what you got out of this, but I hope it was worth it. A fond farewell to Ted Cruz’s reputation and Mike Pence’s self-respect, Lindsey Graham’s manhood and Fox News’s business model. In with “Dr.” Jill Biden, out with “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
I’m sure we’ll all meet again. But I’d really rather we didn’t.
Witless Ape Rides Helicopter
Well, that sucked.
Memo to MAGA and all its myriad fellow-travelers: Maybe Death of a Salesman as presented by Leni Riefenstahl just wasn’t the show Americans were dying to tune into this season.
And, while we’re at it, maybe turning your party over to Generalissimo Walter Mitty, his hideous scheming spawn, and the studio audience from Hee-Haw was not just absolutely aces as a political strategy.
Think on it, Cletus. I know this whole thing still sounds like your idea of a good time — how’s that working out for you?
Let me refresh your memory: On the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Republicans controlled not only the White House but both houses of Congress. They were in a historically strong position elsewhere as well, controlling both legislative chambers in 32 states. They pissed that away like they were midnight drunks karaoke-warbling that old Chumbawumba song: In 2021, they control approximately squat. The House is run by Nancy Pelosi. The Senate is run, as a practical matter, by Kamala Harris. And Joe Biden won the presidency, notwithstanding whatever the nut-cutlet guest-hosting for Dennis Prager this week has to say about it.
Donald Trump is, in fact, the first president since Herbert Hoover to lead his party to losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate all in a single term. Along with being the first president to be impeached twice and the first game-show host elected to the office, that’s Trump’s claim to the history books. Well, that and 400,000 dead Americans and the failed coup d’état business.
As for the ratings Trump fears and worships, ask the Third Lady: Melania Trump departs the scene the most unpopular presidential wife in recorded statistical history.
You Trumpish Republicans sneered that Joe Biden was too corrupt and too senescent to win a presidential campaign, that he was one part mafioso and one part turnip.
That turnip kicked your dumb asses from Delaware to D.C.
So you rioted. Real smart move, Cletus.
Five Americans are dead. Barricades have been erected around the Capitol. Thousands of federal troops have been deployed to the streets of Washington. State capitols have been obliged to prepare for siege. Americans blame you for this — and they are not wrong.
“Trust the plan,” the QAnon cultists say. Is this what you were planning? I know you are stupid, but you are not that stupid.
“Oh, but he fights!” you’ll say — over and over and over. He didn’t fight — he tweeted. He’s ten feet tall on social media and a pushover in real life. Trade deficit: up. Unemployment rate: rising. Abortion rate: rising. Beijing: rising. The coronavirus body-count: rising.
But he sure did tweet a lot!
And he pardoned Roger Stone — at least he took care of that pressing national priority.
“But the judges!” you protest. Fair point: Trump’s absurd attempts to overturn the election through specious legal challenges were laughed out of court by the very men and women he appointed to the bench. Even his judges think he’s a joke.
Everybody has figured that out. Except you.
And so, goodbye, Donald J. Trump, the man who wanted to be Conrad Hilton but turned out to be Paris Hilton. Au revoir, Ivanka and Jared, Uday and Qusay — there’s a table for four reserved for you at Dorsia. So long, Melania — it’s still not entirely clear what you got out of this, but I hope it was worth it. A fond farewell to Ted Cruz’s reputation and Mike Pence’s self-respect, Lindsey Graham’s manhood and Fox News’s business model. In with “Dr.” Jill Biden, out with “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
I’m sure we’ll all meet again. But I’d really rather we didn’t.
COVID-19 Update
World
New Cases: 592,896 (⬆︎ .62%)
New Deaths: 14,759 (⬆︎ .72%)
USA
New Cases: 174,378 (⬆︎ .71%)
New Deaths: 2,802 (⬆︎ .69%)
Vax Scores
14 million vaccinated
12.2% of the priority population
4.2% of the total population
Not much news about the pandemic in the papers today. It's almost like there's something else kinda important going on today.
See ya tomorrow.
Mike out.
Today's Today
Inauguration. Another new start. Another go-round in the American experiment.
Sometimes we do things in very weird ways.
1974
2021
Jan 19, 2021
The Last Gasp
The Trump Era has been marked by contradiction, dishonor, hypocrisy and the death of irony (part ∞).
Tomorrow at noon, the presidency of Donald J Trump ends with a final ironic demonstration.
The nation's capital city is an armed camp, filled with tens of thousands of National Guard troops with orders to kill anyone who tries to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.
That is 9 kinds of fucked up. And it's not likely to get much better. Trump will be out, and if we're a little lucky, he'll be tied in knots defending himself from the hundreds of lawsuits and criminal charges he's spent his whole miserable fucking life skating away from.
But even though some of the shit might fade into the background for a while, we'll still have plutocratic assholes trying to shit-can our democracy. They came too close to knocking us off - they'll probably pull back, consolidate, and regroup for the next assault.
The big ambition of small men always leads them to pursue their dreams of building their little fiefdoms so they can pretend at being emperors.
Because whether for good or ill, "The Greater Fool" is a double-edged sword.
A Global Plutocracy
My confirmation bias is boiling over.
While law enforcement officials in Washington ought to be held accountable for their alleged culpability in the deadly violence at the US Capitol earlier this month, and the off-duty cops and members of the military who participated in it ought to be disciplined, the attempted auto-coup cannot solely be understood through the lens of policing and security. At least as much responsibility lies with the billionaire donors and corporate interests – in other words, the capitalists – who made this moment possible.
Already a picture of the individuals, organizations, and institutions who lent their weight to the movement that stormed Congress has begun to emerge. Last year, the secretive and influential Council for National Policy (CNP), which author Anne Nelson describes as “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” called for state legislators in six swing states to reject Joe Biden’s election victory. CNP leaders were scheduled to speak at the rally on the morning of 6 January, where Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol.
Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which has contributed millions to the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga), listed as one of the participating organizations in the rally. Raga’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol ahead of the 6 January rally, at which the former chairman of Raga, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, spoke. But major donors to Raga include not only rightwing bogeymen like Koch Industries, Walmart, or the Adelson family but also household corporate names like Comcast, Amazon and TikTok.
Likewise, although Koch Industries is the single largest corporate donor to Republican representatives who pledged to try to overturn the election results, the next biggest contributors included defense companies like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, as well as tech (Amazon) and finance (Goldman Sachs) and insurance (Aflac), according to the Center for Media and Democracy. And while Charles Koch has maintained a posture of personal ambivalence, verging on distaste, for Donald Trump, super Pacs heavily funded by the donor network he and his late brother founded have spent millions supporting congressional Republicans who rejected the outcome of the 2020 election.
Dick Uihlein, the chief executive of the Uline shipping company and a contributor to the Koch donor network, spent at least $2m getting Josh Hawley elected to the US Senate and has contributed more than $4m to the Tea Party Patriots, another one of the 11 groups listed as participating in the Stop the Steal coalition. In 2019, more than $20m was funneled through DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund that disguises the source of major giving to nonprofits, to a dozen organizations that would ultimately contest the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, including $103,000 to Tea Party Patriots. In a statement provided to the Intercept, Tea Party Patriots cofounder Jenny Beth Martin denied spending any money on the Stop the Steal rally and condemned the violence that occurred.
Investigative journalists will continue to trace and disentangle the funding networks that facilitated 6 January. The list of names will grow longer; the sum of individual and corporate contributions greater. But already it is clear that what happened at the Capitol was not just the unintended consequence of specific capitalists’ ill-advised campaign donations; it was an expression of a deeper, ongoing crisis of capitalism, and the ruling class’s (sometimes contradictory) attempts to manage that crisis.
According to a report released late last year by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness, the 651 billionaires in the United States added more than $1tn to their collective wealth since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing the total to slightly more than $4tn. Meanwhile, the racialized distribution of labor in the United States – the concentration of workers of color in both essential industries, where they are more likely to be exposed to the pandemic, and service and hospitality industries, where layoffs have been rampant – means that Black, Latino, and Native Americans are significantly more likely to be hospitalized and die of Covid-19 than non-Hispanic white Americans. This serves as a stark reminder of the white supremacist character of the decades-long effort to defang and declaw the American labor movement – an effort funded and organized by the same far-right capitalists who laid the groundwork for 6 January.
The Capitol siege was just one battle in an ongoing, decades-long assault on democracy. Racist ideologues have served as the vanguard, but they have long been supported (sometimes openly, often tacitly) by a wide swathe of capitalists. The ultranationalist Maga diehards, Qanon cultists, and various fascists that stormed the Capitol are shock troops searching for a leader. Trump will likely prove too self-absorbed, too cowardly, and too lazy for the job. But no matter how many arrests are made or officials fired, the tide of history has returned us to the rocky shores of political violence and mass upheaval.
Already a picture of the individuals, organizations, and institutions who lent their weight to the movement that stormed Congress has begun to emerge. Last year, the secretive and influential Council for National Policy (CNP), which author Anne Nelson describes as “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” called for state legislators in six swing states to reject Joe Biden’s election victory. CNP leaders were scheduled to speak at the rally on the morning of 6 January, where Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol.
Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which has contributed millions to the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga), listed as one of the participating organizations in the rally. Raga’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol ahead of the 6 January rally, at which the former chairman of Raga, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, spoke. But major donors to Raga include not only rightwing bogeymen like Koch Industries, Walmart, or the Adelson family but also household corporate names like Comcast, Amazon and TikTok.
Likewise, although Koch Industries is the single largest corporate donor to Republican representatives who pledged to try to overturn the election results, the next biggest contributors included defense companies like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, as well as tech (Amazon) and finance (Goldman Sachs) and insurance (Aflac), according to the Center for Media and Democracy. And while Charles Koch has maintained a posture of personal ambivalence, verging on distaste, for Donald Trump, super Pacs heavily funded by the donor network he and his late brother founded have spent millions supporting congressional Republicans who rejected the outcome of the 2020 election.
Dick Uihlein, the chief executive of the Uline shipping company and a contributor to the Koch donor network, spent at least $2m getting Josh Hawley elected to the US Senate and has contributed more than $4m to the Tea Party Patriots, another one of the 11 groups listed as participating in the Stop the Steal coalition. In 2019, more than $20m was funneled through DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund that disguises the source of major giving to nonprofits, to a dozen organizations that would ultimately contest the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, including $103,000 to Tea Party Patriots. In a statement provided to the Intercept, Tea Party Patriots cofounder Jenny Beth Martin denied spending any money on the Stop the Steal rally and condemned the violence that occurred.
Investigative journalists will continue to trace and disentangle the funding networks that facilitated 6 January. The list of names will grow longer; the sum of individual and corporate contributions greater. But already it is clear that what happened at the Capitol was not just the unintended consequence of specific capitalists’ ill-advised campaign donations; it was an expression of a deeper, ongoing crisis of capitalism, and the ruling class’s (sometimes contradictory) attempts to manage that crisis.
According to a report released late last year by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness, the 651 billionaires in the United States added more than $1tn to their collective wealth since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing the total to slightly more than $4tn. Meanwhile, the racialized distribution of labor in the United States – the concentration of workers of color in both essential industries, where they are more likely to be exposed to the pandemic, and service and hospitality industries, where layoffs have been rampant – means that Black, Latino, and Native Americans are significantly more likely to be hospitalized and die of Covid-19 than non-Hispanic white Americans. This serves as a stark reminder of the white supremacist character of the decades-long effort to defang and declaw the American labor movement – an effort funded and organized by the same far-right capitalists who laid the groundwork for 6 January.
The Capitol siege was just one battle in an ongoing, decades-long assault on democracy. Racist ideologues have served as the vanguard, but they have long been supported (sometimes openly, often tacitly) by a wide swathe of capitalists. The ultranationalist Maga diehards, Qanon cultists, and various fascists that stormed the Capitol are shock troops searching for a leader. Trump will likely prove too self-absorbed, too cowardly, and too lazy for the job. But no matter how many arrests are made or officials fired, the tide of history has returned us to the rocky shores of political violence and mass upheaval.
Yeah, it's The Guardian. Grans of salt, etc.
Here's the thing though -
I may be paranoid but that don't mean nobody's out to get me
And don't think for a minute this shit ends tomorrow at noon on the steps of the Capitol.
COVID-19 Update
World
New Cases: 476,355 (⬆︎ .50%)
New Deaths: 9,242 (⬆︎ .45%)
USA
New Cases: 142087 (⬆︎ .58%)
New Deaths: 1,425 (⬆︎ .35%)
Vaccinations took another day off
10.6 million total vaccintated
9.6% Priority Population
3.2% Total population
Wouldn't it be nice if the dip in numbers over the last few days turns out to be a downward trend - like the holiday surge is done and we're going back down into relatively low trough, or maybe we've even started to get a handle on this thing.
Looking for the bright spots in what has been a very dark aspect of the world.
Coverage of the pandemic is a little sparse these days. Seems there must be a few other things occupying the Press Poodles' time.
Unfortunately, there's never a shortage of stories about how shitty it's been to lose good people to a monster largely of our own creation.
Lives Cut Short
On one single day in a monthlong period during which the United States lost more people to Covid-19 than in any other during the pandemic, Stacey Williams, a beloved youth football coach and father of five in Florida, was among more than 2,000 Americans with the virus to die.
Along with Mr. Williams, Jose H. Garcia, 59, the longtime chief of the Roma Police Department in the South Texas border region who was known to friends and family as Beto, died of Covid-19 complications. So did Nelson Prentice Bowsher II of Washington, D.C., 80, an affordable-housing advocate whose family’s feed mill business was a fixture of South Bend, Ind., through the 1960s.
Combing through hundreds of local obituaries, county records and interviews with families, New York Times reporters were able to piece together a tapestry of some of the lives lost on that day, Jan. 4.
Sherri Rasmussen, 51, of Lancaster, Ohio, was one. She is survived by a daughter who said she will always remember the day her mother gave her purse to a woman who complimented it in a CVS store, saying, “I want to pay it forward.”
And then there was Pedro Ramirez, 47, who loved his Puerto Rican homeland, salsa dancing and restoring Volkswagen bugs. Days before, he told his wife, Shawna Rodriguez, about the vaccine and how people like him, with chronic medical issues, would be getting it soon.
“I told him I loved him and how sorry I was that he had to be in the hospital by himself,” said Ms. Ramirez, 52, who works in a bridal salon in Macon, Ga.
The surge in deaths reflects how much faster Americans have spread the virus to one another since late September, when the number of cases identified daily had fallen to below 40,000. Since early in the pandemic, deaths have closely tracked cases, with about 1.5 percent of cases ending in death three to four weeks later.
Today's Tweet
And they'll call some of us the "Good Americans".
History will look back on the Trump presidency & wonder how Americans fell for him, why they tolerated him & his crimes for so long & how slowly they shook it off, even when it was clear it was over. It will seem inexplicable.
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) January 19, 2021
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