Trump may end Pentagon support for CIA covert operations

I read with interest this report that Trump may end the Pentagon’s cooperation with the CIA in the latter’s covert operations.

Last week, news broke that Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, sent a letter to the CIA notifying the agency that the Pentagon would review the terms of its military support to CIA operations. News reports suggested that the Pentagon was planning to strip the CIA of its support for counterterrorism missions around the world almost immediately. Drones, elite soldiers, fuel, and medical evacuation of casualties, for example, would disappear almost overnight.
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It’s official: We are a nation of idiots

A group of massless people invaded a Target store and marched through it shouting “Freedom!” and “This is America!” and also, inexplicably,”Library Card!” (At least, that is what that last one sounded like.)

I can understand a person feeling, however wrongly, that wearing a mask is an infringement of their rights. But to care so much about it that they go out and recruit other people to engage in such an absurd stunt is to display idiocy of a high order

Can we all agree that the very lowest priority for getting the vaccines should be people like those in the Target store who are deliberately flouting the guidelines and needlessly putting other people at risk just to make a silly political point?

Seth Meyers makes the case for others who should be on the bottom of the list.

Under threat of lawsuit, Fox News backs away from some fraud claims

Fox News has felt free to parrot Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud and have even added to the charges and named companies that they claim colluded in it. Finally one outfit called Smartmatic got fed up and threatened to sue it and all the other right-wing news outlets for making false and defamatory claims.

Under that threat, three of their main shows that had been promoting these ideas, hosted by Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro, went into damage control and tried to walk back their claims. But the three did it in a strange way, by showing the identical pre-taped item.
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Trump’s incompetence helped speed up vaccine approval

After the expected spike in covid-19 cases and deaths about two weeks after Thanksgiving, the rates have started dropping again, although they are still high. We will now have to brace ourselves for another spike about two weeks after Christmas when some people will violate the guidelines once again to visit with family and friends.

The incompetence of the Trump administration in its handling of the pandemic has been responsible for the massive numbers of infected people and deaths in the US. In terms of total numbers (though not per capita), the US easily leads the rest of the world with over 18 million confirmed cases and about 325,000 deaths. Currently those numbers are rising at an average daily rate of about 200,000 and 2,500 respectively. Those numbers could been much lower if from the beginning Trump had been urging everyone to adopt the common sense safety guidelines that scientists and public health experts were advocating, instead of mocking them and hosting events that openly violated them and dismissing the seriousness of the pandemic.
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Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell is back?

After Sidney Powell was fired as a lawyer for the Trump campaign after making all manner of wild conspiracy theories about how the CIA and Hugo Chavez had worked with Dominion Voting Systems machines to swing the election against Trump, one could be forgiven for thinking that her 15 minutes of fame were over. But no.

She is back in the limelight for two reasons. One is that Dominion is threatening legal action against her unless she withdraws the allegations made against the company that they claim has damaged its reputation and resulted in its employees being threatened.
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Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!

It appears that the two facts that went in their favor in the past election, that Trump won 74 million votes, more than any other Republican in history, and that Republicans did not suffer major congressional losses, are enough to persuade party leaders that everything is just hunky-dory, even though Trump’s margin of defeat of seven million votes was two million larger than Mitt Romney’s in 2012. That loss triggered a huge post-mortem analysis as to what went wrong while this one is being ignored.
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Trump threatens to not leave the White House

The last days of the Trump presidency have seen one leak after another about how Trump is going nuts, lashing out at everybody, and making the most outlandish plans about what to do next. One should not take all these at face value. While I have no doubt that Trump is beside himself with fury, aides may be exaggerating things too, in order to ‘give good copy’ as the kids in the newspaper business say.

But that does not mean we cannot laugh at him and Seth Meyers looks at this latest absurdity and also the rot that has long infected the Republican Party.

The covid-19 vaccines and prisoners

As I expected, there has been some controversy about how to prioritize the order of who gets the vaccines. For example, health guidelines suggest that those who are for whatever reason forced to be in very confined spaces or have to deal with large numbers of people should get it even before older people like me who are low risk because we have little contact with people and have no complicating risk factors. That sounds reasonable enough but that list of people who should have higher priority includes prisoners because, for obvious reasons, prisons have been the source of some of the biggest outbreaks of covid-19 and those outbreaks have not stayed within their walls but have also spread to the nearby communities because prison employees and visitors go in and out of the place all the time, thus aiding the spread.
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Slut shaming a paramedic

A New York City paramedic was moonlighting as a nude model to earn some extra money and the New York Post, the Murdoch-owned rag that pretends to be a newspaper, upon discovering this, has made it out be some kind of scandal.

But as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly pointed out, the real scandal is that these emergency workers are paid so little that many of them are forced to take on second jobs.

The progressive New York congresswoman tweeted that instead of publishing a salacious article suggesting the woman isn’t adhering to “standards of personal ethics” while naming both her and her employer—reportedly against her wishes—the newspaper should have focused on “the actual scandalous headline…’Medics in the United States need two jobs to survive.'”

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