The above photo of Bernie Sanders at the inauguration became a widely shared meme. Seth Meyers discussed it with Sanders as well as the inauguration and what he hopes to achieve with the senate budget committee that he now chairs.
There is this weird phenomenon in America of excessive admiration of Winston Churchill. We see this with the reaction to the bust of him that Biden has moved out of the Oval Office, that threatened to create another kerfuffle like when Barack Obama moved it.
It had once been a transatlantic art scandal — or at least various actors of questionable intent would have you believe it was.
Overheated, confusing and laden in the end with blatant racism, the case of the White House bust of Winston Churchill still persists.
President Joe Biden has removed it from the Oval Office after four years standing sentry under his predecessor, who thought he looked something like the wartime prime minister.
An Oval Office redesign brought in new busts instead: Latino civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt.
His departure from Washington was a pretty pathetic affair. He was able to order up a 21-gun salute and a military band but that was about it in terms of the pomp that his narcissistic personality craves.
With the pomp and circumstance granted to a foreign leader visiting the nation’s capital, the taxpayer-funded ceremony treated Trump to a military band playing “Hail to the Chief” as deafening sounds from a 21-gun salute echoed across Joint Base Andrews, just outside Washington, DC. The manufactured nature of the festivities, ginned up to rival President Joe Biden’s inauguration, seemed more fitting for an ousted autocrat heading into exile.
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Stephen Colbert discusses what is going on with the vaccination program as well as developments with the QAnon conspiracy and their great hopes for a grand climax at the inauguration. He has an idea for something that QAnoners can do now that is as absorbing but not as destructive.
Seth Meyers also makes fun of Cruz’s pathetic attempts to ingratiate himself with Pittsburgh after he had tried to throw out all of Pennsylvania’s votes.
Ted Cruz, pandering as always to the nativist base of Trumpers in the hope that they will flock to him in a future presidential bid, thought he had come up with something clever.
By rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, President Biden indicates he’s more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh. This agreement will do little to affect the climate and will harm the livelihoods of Americans.
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) January 20, 2021
I am fascinated by cults and the people who join them. And the mother of all political cults is QAnon. As many people know by now, this was a Trump-supporting cult that believed that the Democratic party and other prominent people were part of some global conspiracy of pedophiles and that Trump was a genius strategist who was carefully planning to, in a dramatic denouement, expose them all and arrest and execute them. There are a lot more layers to this cult’s beliefs and I am just giving the highlights.
Naturally they did not accept that Trump had lost the election and thought that he would be able to reverse the outcome. As the day of Biden’s inauguration came close, excitement built up among them and they seemed to expect that just as he was about to be sworn in, federal agents would run down the steps and arrest him and all the other dignitaries and execute them, and that Trump would emerge as their victorious leader. Yes, really. (The people are watching w-a-a-a-y too many action/fantasy films.)
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Seth Meyers had a good summary of Trump’s departure and Biden’s inauguration.
Stephen Colbert’s show from the night before inauguration day was also pretty good.
The US is constantly criticizing other countries and lecturing them on how they should behave, as if the US is some kind of moral exemplar. Most countries do not respond in kind because of the US’s economic and military power but with China increasingly challenging the US in both those areas, they are in a position to respond. But the Chinese government tends to be cautious in its approach and temperate in its language even as it pursues hardline policies, an iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove approach that has helped it gain influence in the world.
So it was a surprise, to me at least, to see them imposing sweeping sanctions on high-level Trump officials accompanied by harsh language, delivered even as Joe Biden was being sworn in.
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As I have said so many times before, the US is a one-party state. The party is a pro-war, pro-oligarchy party with two factions that are labeled Democrat and Republican that differ on mostly social issues. But having said that, it would be a mistake to assume that there is no difference between the two and that elections do not matter. There is a world of difference from Trump being elected in November and Joe Biden winning, as we can see by what happened immediately after Biden was sworn in when he unveiled a whole raft of executive orders and legislative proposals that set in motion polices that all headed in a positive direction.
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This video that was sent to me by a friend shows what a powerful predator the peregrine falcon is.
I am always impressed at nature photographers and filmmakers. The animals in their films seem to behave as if they are following a script and one wonders how the filmmakers were able to be at the right place at the right time.T hey must be spending an enormous amount of time in order to capture events like this.