;)
New Year's Day 2022
Afternoon Update:
** New York Times Editors: "One year after from the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back.... But peel back a layer, and ... Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day. It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, 'When can we use the guns?' and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation's two major political parties. In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists."
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Saturday are here: "Airlines had canceled more than 2,500 flights across the United States by afternoon on Saturday, by far the worst day in the industry's weeklong struggle with bad weather and crew shortages. The cancellations mounted amid reports of heavy snowfall across much of the nation's midsection, and if the pattern of the last week holds, many more could be canceled by day's end."
Louisiana. Vimal Patel of the New York Times: "A Louisiana judge who could be heard on a video using a racial slur while watching security footage of a foiled burglary outside her home has resigned.... 'I take full responsibility for the hurtful words I used to describe the individual who burglarized the vehicles at my home,' the judge, Michelle Odinet, of the City Court of Lafayette, La., wrote in a letter dated Friday to the chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court.... 'There was never going to be a situation where African Americans would appear before her and not file motions to recuse,' ... Ms. Odinet's lawyer, Dane S. Ciolino..., said.... Mr. Ciolino said there were efforts in New Orleans to scour Ms. Odinet's files for evidence of racism in how she had handled cases involving Black people.... In an earlier statement, Ms. Odinet confirmed to The Current, a nonprofit news organization in Lafayette that reported on the video, that the footage had been recorded in her home, but she did not acknowledge that she had used a slur." ~~~
~~~ Marie: The problem isn't that Odinet used a racial slur so much as it is that she thought of the burglar not as a lowdown miscreant but as a Black lowdown miscreant. If the SOB had been white, my guess is that she would not have been calling him a honky or whatever.
~~~~~~~~~~
Meryl Kornfield of the Washington Post: "President Biden said Friday that he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin in a call that there would be 'a heavy price to pay' if Russia invades Ukraine again. Biden said he 'made it clear' that any further military action by the Kremlin would result in 'severe sanctions' but did not go as far as to say that Washington would respond to Russia's continued military presence near the border with Ukraine. 'I'm not going to negotiate here in public,' Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Del., where he is spending New Year's Eve. 'But we made it clear he cannot, I'll emphasize, cannot invade Ukraine.' Following his call on Thursday with Putin, Biden plans to speak by phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday amid growing alarm over Russia's military buildup near its border with Ukraine." A CNBC report is here.
Buh-bye. Lananh Nguyen of the New York Times: "The Republican chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who was appointed by ... Donald J. Trump, said on Friday that she was cutting short her term after a clash with Democratic banking regulators. Jelena McWilliams, who started a five-year term as chair in June 2018, will resign effective Feb. 4, she wrote in a letter to President Biden. She is also stepping down as a director of the F.D.I.C.'s board. Ms. McWilliams is the only Republican currently on the five-member board, and her departure will add a second vacancy.... Her exit came after Rohit Chopra, a member of the F.D.I.C. board and the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, complained earlier this month that Ms. McWilliams had refused to recognize attempts by Democratic regulators to review rules about bank mergers. Ms. McWilliams called the conflict a "hostile takeover' by other board members in an essay in The Wall Street Journal. Ms. McWilliams has mostly adhered to Republican ideological lines during her tenure." Politico's report is here.
Keith Alexander of the Washington Post: "Federal prosecutors in the District have charged more than 725 individuals with various crimes in connection with the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, when hundreds of rioters forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, the U.S. attorney's office said Friday. As the country nears the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol, the U.S. attorney's office in the District, the largest office of federal prosecutors in the nation, released a breakdown of the arrests and convictions associated with the attack." MB: An Herculean effort indeed, but you-all missed a Florida man & other ringleaders, like made man Bernie Kerik: ~~~
~~~ Nicholas Wu & Kyle Cheney of Politico: "A key adviser to Donald Trump's legal team in their post-election quest to unearth evidence of fraud has delivered a trove of documents to Jan. 6 investigators describing those efforts. Bernard Kerik, the former New York City Police commissioner and ally of Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, also provided a 'privilege log' describing materials he declined to provide to the committee. Among the withheld documents is one titled 'DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS.' Kerik's attorney Timothy Parlatore provided the privilege log to the panel, which said the file originated on Dec. 17, a day before Trump huddled in the Oval Office with advisers including former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, where they discussed the option of seizing election equipment in states whose results Trump was attempting to overturn.... It is unclear if Kerik would appear for a deposition instead of an interview. A Dec. 23 letter to the panel from Parlatore had included disputed claims that the Jan. 6 panel was structurally invalid and called its deposition process "fatally flawed." The panel has previously rejected those arguments."
Kyle Cheney of Politico: "Capitol Hill's Jan. 6 investigators are exploring ways to Trump-proof future presidential elections by tightening up how lawmakers certify the results. There's one problem: A future Congress might simply ignore them.... [Congress] has agreed to abide by the Electoral Count Act [of 1887] every four years, even if, as a constitutional matter, the statute may be little more than a glorified suggestion.... Experts are split on whether any Congress can pass a law that would dictate how its successors certify presidential elections.... If a future Congress decides the Electoral Count Act can't govern the Jan. 6 certification, these fringe theories would serve as a blueprint -- and there's little recourse to overrule them.... There's also the unsettled possibility that courts would avoid weighing in on a future Electoral Count Act dispute." MB: Of course a real solution -- and one that won't happen -- lies in popularly electing the president & vice president, although such a Constitutional amendment would certainly raise new questions.
Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "Amid a drop in public confidence in the Supreme Court and calls for increasing its membership, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. devoted his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary on Friday to a plea for judicial independence." The AP's report on the report is here. Roberts' report is here; it comes with photos! maybe of crooked judges!
Stephen Marche in a Washington Post op-ed: There are secessionist movements in the U.S. that prominent politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene & Ted Cruz encourage (or don't discourage), and secession would be a far less bloody way than civil war to break up the nation. "The rest of the world is busily [breaking up nations] all the time. Separatism is a global political trend. The number of nations in the world has tripled since 1945. And there will soon be more.... And the United States might well be better off as separate countries. It might be healthier, more rational, less prone to violence.... But the legal process of separation is profoundly complicated, and the laws of the United States render it much more difficult to achieve than it is elsewhere."
Dana Hedgpeth of the Washington Post: "Four hundred years after the Mashpee Wampanoag in Plymouth, Mass., helped the Pilgrims from the Mayflower survive, they have been fighting to get their ancestral homeland back. Last week, they won a major victory in a ruling from the U.S. Department of the Interior that will give them substantial control of roughly 320 acres around Cape Cod. The decision opens the door for the Wampanoag tribe to move forward on economic development projects -- such as a casino resort or housing -- that tribal leaders say will bring much-needed revenue to their community of roughly 2,800 members.... In 2015, the Obama administration put about 320 acres in federal trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag, under a law that allows the Department of the Interior to acquire the title to property and hold it for the benefit of a Native American tribe.... But ... Donald Trump's administration ordered that the land be taken out of trust, jeopardizing the Mashpee Wampanoag" ability to develop it." (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ Marie: Hedgpeth writes a very brief historical overview of the Wampanoag in Massachusetts, and it is not what I read in my 5th-grade history book. This is the "critical race theory" that right-wingers object to. It isn't critical race theory at all, of course; but it is based on facts that those people Ted Koppel met on the bus (see yesterday's Commentariat), for instance, don't want to face and don't want their children & grandchildren to learn. These Americans are not indulging in nostalgia for a happier, simpler time; they're suffering from a pandemic of denialism. BTW, if you didn't see Koppel's "60 Minutes" segment, embedded in yesterday's Commentariat, it's worth checking out.
David Gerson of the Washington Post: "The default ethical stance of Christianity is the Golden Rule.... This principle was developed in a variety of other religious and moral traditions. (See the Babylonian Talmud: 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah.')... There is no version of the Golden Rule that would recommend Christian resistance to basic public health measures during a pandemic. This is heresy compounded by lunacy.... Evangelical Christians are generally known as people who loudly defend their own rights. They show not radical generosity but discreditable selfishness.... And when Christians are asserting a right to resist basic public health measures, what is the actual content of their religious-liberty claim? The right to risk the lives of their neighbors in order to assert their autonomy? The right to endanger the community in the performative demonstration of their personal rights? This is a vivid display of the cultural and ideological trends of a warped and wasted year. It just has nothing to do with real Christianity." (Also linked yesterday.)
Peter Eisler, et al., of Reuters: "Reuters has documented more than 850 threatening and hostile messages aimed at election officials and staff related to the 2020 election. Virtually all expressed support for ... Donald Trump or echoed his debunked contention that the election was stolen. The messages spanned 30 jurisdictions in 16 states. They came via emails, voicemails, texts, letters and Internet posts.... The messages collected by Reuters are only a sample of all threats to election workers nationally, taken mostly from states, counties and cities where officials were specifically targeted with false fraud allegations by Trump and his allies. Nearly a quarter of those hostile messages suggested the targets should die." MB: This is a big file and I found the page hard to navigate on my crap computer. But the messages I did see were horrible and give a good idea about the warped mindsets of quite a few Trump backers. (Also linked yesterday.)
The Pandemic, Ctd.
Carl Zimmer & Azeen Ghorayshi of the New York Times: "In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty.... The reason that Omicron is milder may be a matter of anatomy.... [Researchers] found that the level of Omicron in the noses of the hamsters was the same as in animals infected with an earlier form of the coronavirus. But Omicron levels in the lungs were one-tenth or less of the level of other variants."
Beyond the Beltway
Alaska. Brad Dress of the Hill: "Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) on Thursday accepted the endorsement of former President Trump, which came on the condition the governor does not, in turn, endorse Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in her reelection bid. Trump issued a statement Thursday evening saying that Dunleavy, who is running for a second term as governor, had accepted the endorsement. 'Please tell the president thank you for the endorsement,' Dunleavy said in the statement. 'With regard to the other issue, please tell the president he has nothing to worry about. I appreciate all 45 has done for Alaska and this country.'" (Also linked yesterday.)
Colorado. Jason Samenow, et al., of the Washington Post: "The raging inferno that erupted in Boulder County, Colo., on Thursday afternoon became the most destructive wildfire in the state's history as it burned through hundreds of homes in densely populated suburbs. The fire was fueled by an extreme set of atmospheric conditions, intensified by climate change, and fanned by a violent windstorm. The fire came at a time of year when a blaze of such violence is unprecedented; Colorado's fire season typically spans May though September. But exceptionally warm and dry conditions through this fall, including a historic lack of snowfall, created tinderbox conditions ripe for a fast-spreading blaze." Related stories linked under Thursday's & Friday's News Ledes.
Florida. Steve M.: "Florida governor Ron DeSantis has disappeared from public view, and there's been a great deal of speculation about why.... The governor's press office released a photo of DeSantis at a bagel shop, but it was two weeks old.... In response to the speculation, his press secretary tweeted this [Thursday]: '... @GovRonDeSantis has a wife and 3 kids ages 1-5, and it's not surprising if he wants to take a few days off at Christmas to spend time with his family, especially as his wife is battling cancer....' And now we have a fuller response, at Fox News, DeSantis's favorite media outlet: 'Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis accompanied his wife to her cancer treatment while critics were accusing the governor of taking a vacation as coronavirus cases spiked, Fox News has learned....' If DeSantis or his press secretary had simply said this days ago, the governor's critics would have cut him some slack.... [But] For DeSantis, politics is total war. And this Fox story is clearly intended to shame his critics." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Gee, I criticized Ron, and I'm not a little bit ashamed. If you had an "ordinary" job and your spouse got sick & needed your fulltime attention, would you just not show up at work till the crisis was over or would you call in, apprise your boss or coworkers of the situation & request time off? Yeah, I thought so.
News Ledes
Colorado. AP: "A Colorado official says nearly 1,000 homes and other structures were destroyed, hundreds more were damaged, and three people are missing after a wildfire charred numerous neighborhoods in a suburban area at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle also said Saturday that investigators are still trying to find the cause of the wind-whipped blaze that erupted Thursday and blackened entire neighborhoods in the area located between Denver and Boulder. Pelle said utility officials found no downed power lines around where the fire broke out. He said authorities were pursuing a number of tips and had executed a search warrant at 'one particular location.' He declined to give details. A sheriff's official who declined to provide his name confirmed that one property was under investigation in Boulder County's Marshall Mesa area, a region of open grassland about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) west of the hard-hit town of Superior." ~~~
~~~ New York Times: "Just two days after they fled a firestorm, residents of two Colorado suburbs that had been gutted by flames slogged back home on Saturday through nearly a foot of snow and single-digit temperatures to confront a new list of woes: frozen pipes and water damage, thanks to an abrupt turn in the weather."
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Reader Comments (14)
A second year without the Fat Fascist in the White House.
It’s already a good year.
@Akhilleus: Yes, indeedy. This time last year, Trumpolini was planning to steal the 2020 election. Today, he's planning to steal the 2024 election. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Nice to see Justice John notice he has a few problems on his hands, but it's kinda late. The way I read him: a sorta smart man, maybe even well-intentioned, but one who's been guzzling the corporatize Kool-aid so deeply and so long that he lost track of what was really going on in the country he thinks he lives in.
Here we have a man who thought the extension of more right to corporations wouldn't affect those once assigned to individuals, not noticing that when more powers are granted to bullies, the distribution of rights is a zero-sum game.
So we have more economic inequality, more money in politics than ever before.. hence more outright and obvious corruption....more restive workers, and Roberts' answer is to call for an independent judiciary.
And on that voting thing. His court looked away from evident racial discrimination in voting practices across the states and thus made the very idea of voting rights a laughing stock, like a teacher handing a hallway pass to the political party that immediately began to use it to run amok in the school hallways and set fires in the school's bathrooms.
Nor will the delicate Roberts court take up the small matter of gerrymandering, playing Pontius Pilate toward one of the greatest and most obvious impediments to our democracy. If it's to preserve its reputation, he says, the Court must stay clear of politics.
As if corporate and voting rights decision were apolitical.
Can't figure this guy. Yes, he smart. He can string words together in ways that parse. But his pleas for and independent judiciary seem somehow a justification for a Supreme Court that is already far too independent.
Justice Roberts already oversees a court so independent that it has shunted reality so far to the side that it is living a dream fast becoming a national nightmare.
@Ken Winkes: Yes, "independence" from reality used to be the definition of insanity; now it just means you're a Republican. A Republican, Ken & I walk into a psychiatrist's office, and she gives us each a one-card Rorschach test. Ken sees an eagle; Marie sees a hawk; and the Republican sees a "socialist!" or a "Jewish laser!"
And yet. And yet. That Republicans is a middling-successful small businessman, a member-in-good-standing of the local Chamber of Commerce & the Rotary Club AND a deacon at his church.
Welcome to America 2022.
I'm sorry for DeSantis' wife, of course. But all this radio silence from DeSantis had convinced me that he had contracted Covid and was hiding out at home.
Victoria,
My thoughts exactly. Cowardly little fuck.
Ken: Enjoyed your take on Johnny Roberts who long ago lost his pulse––if ever he had it–– on the ways and means of American life. I recall someone saying––"he needs to get out more."
Which brings me back to Ted Koppel and his Mayberry Memoirists. Some of you may remember Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology" –-a book that many read as a whiff of quaintness, of simpler days gone by much like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" or "Our Town"––all performed on stage as an "aw shucks" dramatic version with straw hats and string ties. But Master wasn't spoon feeding –--there are precious few happy marriages in the town of Spoon River–-many suicides–- sexual prudishness–- bigotry–-hypocrisy and its habitual cruelty toward those on the margins. Yet somehow, for many, this truth was not acknowledged. Some did see it as a place where a pleasant surface fostered a hypocritical underbelly, but that assessment was mostly from literary critics.
And circling back to Ken's comments, when Masters moved to Chicago to practice law, he formed a partnership with Clarence Darrow. But he found it lacking in his need to express himself through poetry. I'm wondering how he would look upon our S.C. and the man who heads it.
Secession, eh? Sure! Why not? Let those treasonous moochers have their own place. It will, upon signing the paperwork, instantly become one of the worst countries in the world. A shithole, ruled by shitheads.
And I vote for Blue America to require seventeen forms of identification and anal cavity searches for any of those assholes who want to enter our country. And they can take their Supremes with them. See how Amy Phony, Bart, and Pubic Hair Clarence like deciding important issues like whether Proud Boys can shoot people on the street just for practice. MTG can be president, Cancun Ted can be AG, Ron Johnson will be in charge of edumacation, and Kyle Rittenhouse can run the Bentagon. What a place.
Faux will be state run television, and TuKKKer can be head of state propaganda.
Of course we’ll have to ban all travel to and from the place given how Covid will be rampant in a place where idiots refuse to get a vaccine shot and wear masks. After all, there’ll be the pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi1, psi1 and omega variations of the virus within months. Half the place will be dead and dying and the other half in the loony bin. Leave us just say that tourism to Red America won’t be big.
So yeah, let them secede. Good fucking riddance.
Little Johnny Roberts? Look up manqué in the dictionary. You’ll see his picture next to the entry.
P.D.
Thanks for bringing up some of the old literary hands, fondly and well-remembered by this one.
Selections from Edgar Lee Masters and his Spoon River opus were in my junior year high school Adventures in American Literature anthology, published circa the 1950's, and I encountered Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, soon thereafter.
Looking back on those days, a few decades before Reagan's sunny and misplaced optimism which gave birth to the nation's generalized yearning for a time that never was, I see that much of the American literature we were fed then still reflected the dark doubts about American life that emerged earlier in the century, propelled to the surface by the Depression's all-consuming misery.
The darkness was there for all to see, the questioning of American mythology apparent enough for even this naive youth to notice. Though many think of the 1950's as a dull, conformist Leave it to Beaver-land, the Depression, WWII, and the strident and lunatic anti-Communism of the McCarthyites still poked through the facade far enough to be apparent in the literature of the time, fiction and non-fiction alike.
In fact, I'd say if the 1950's and early 60's were really the Mayberry the AGS depicted in its anticipatory nostalgia, there would have have been the 1960's and 70's most of us remember.
Thanks, P.D. for prompting me to mull a bit on the past as the year starts anew.
Like many who reached their majority in the 1960's, I, too, grew up absurd...
Should have added: And am now growing old the same way....
One more time: "There wouldn't have been the sixties and seventies most of us remember..."
Odd for someone as negative as I am to leave one out...
@Ken Winkes: For me, the elemental difference between the '60s & '70s & now is that back then, despite all the obvious inequities among us, it looked as if we were headed in the right direction. The "bad guys" were still dominant, but it seemed as if they were on the losing side. But what Nixon & Jerry Falwell could not convince me of, Ronald Reagan did. Not only would the Old Guard not be beat, it would forge an unbreakable alliance with the worst elements on the right. "Traditional values," which evoked "Leave It to Beaver" and ladies in pearls, also played into the nasty, narrow, aggrieved worldview of the great white unwashed. George Bush I & Donald Trump wrapped themselves around the same flag. I no longer see any hope of overcoming those nimrods on the "Mayberry" bus. They are as American as I am. They used to seem like the pathetic people left behind. Now I feel that I'm the one left behind -- not nostalgic for those "happy times" in the peachful protest march but for the belief the protests could move us forward.
Anybody who can remember the '60's and 70's wasn't there.