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.
[Read more…]

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.
[Read more…]

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.'”

[Read more…]

A dilemma for Mike Pence

Now that the Electoral College has cast its votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be president and vice-president respectively, the next step in the process is for the votes to be sent to Congress. A joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives will meet on January 6th to count the votes and this is where things get awkward for Pence.

Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes. The Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides over the count and announces the results of the Electoral College vote. The President of the Senate then declares which persons, if any, have been elected President and Vice President of the United States.

If any objections to the electoral votes are made, they must be submitted in writing and be signed by at least one member of the House and one Senator. If objections are presented, the House and Senate withdraw to their respective chambers to consider the merits of the objection(s) under procedures set out in Federal law.

[Read more…]

Trump’s woes mount

Seth Meyers discusses how even Trump’s neighbors who live in the vicinity of his Mar-a-Lago resort don’t want to him to live there after he leaves the White House. Since New Yorkers don’t seem to want him either, one wonders where he will end up. I must say that given how much Trump likes to humiliate other people, I am really enjoying him suffering one indignity after another.

The crazies can be dangerous

We may make fun of those who still cling, in the face of reality, to the idea that Trump won the election but was defrauded because of widespread cheating. But we have to realize that there will always be a few who decide that protesting is not enough and that they have a duty to take violent action based on that belief. The heavily armed man who went to ‘rescue’ children from the basement of a Washington DC pizza shop because he believe in the wild story that it was the location of a pedophile ring is a good example.
[Read more…]

The covid-19 vaccine rollout

There are over 17 million confirmed covid-19 cases in the US and over 300,000 dead, a staggering number thanks to our idiot president’s refusal to acknowledge the disease and take strong action early on. That works out to about 5% or the population or one in twenty who have tested positive. I read sometime ago that half the population knows at least one person personally who has tested positive and one third knows someone who has died.

Since I live alone and have been able to minimize contact with people, I was not surprised that until recently, I did not know anyone in either category. But last week a friend who lives nearby said that she had tested positive and had been isolating for the required period and then tested negative. She had no idea how she got infected because she had been working from home and only gone in to work about once a week and nobody else in her workplace had tested positive. But of course she has to do some shopping and the like and that may be how she got it.
[Read more…]

GOP’s ‘alternative electors’ try to cast their votes

When the members of the Electoral College met on Monday in their respective state capitals to cast their votes for president and vice president, the only people who could be present and vote were the slates of electors for the candidate who got the most votes in their states.

Trump and his allies have proposed one hare-brained scheme after another to try and stop this and one of their fanciful scenarios was to have the Trump slate show up in the states that he lost and claim that they are the ones who should be allowed to vote. The ‘brains’ behind this crackpot scheme is Trump aide Stephen Miller.
[Read more…]