Why not move Thanksgiving permanently?

Because of the pandemic, there have been calls for people to not get together for the traditional family and friends gathering at the Thanksgiving holiday, held on the fourth Thursday of November. Such gatherings can be a major cause of virus spread and since old people are often involved, this could be hazardous. People are also being urged to not travel, but today comes news that Sunday saw the highest number of air travelers since March, suggesting that many people are ignoring that advice,
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The walls keep closing in on Trump

Yesterday, Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration who has to write a letter to authorize the president-elect’s transition team access to resources to co-ordinate and work with the existing people in government to ensure a smooth transition, finally issued the letter. It appears that she had the power to do this without getting prior approval from Trump and her not doing so for three weeks after the election was over when it was clear that Joe Biden had won had resulted in much criticism. She finally issued a letter that was somewhat whiny and self-serving, saying that she had decided on her own to issue the letter and that she had not been pressured by Trump to not do so before nor to do so now.
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These people think they’re hilarious

At a time when the pandemic is surging across the world including the US, and we know that it is mainly transmitted by airborne droplets, what does one make of people who think that it is funny to deliberately breathe into the faces of other people who are taking the appropriate precautions?

A Trump supporter outside Trump’s golf club who was not wearing a mask deliberately breathed on people who had asked him to keep away. He has now been arrested and charged with assault.
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So, not the A Team then?

The trio of lawyers labeled by Trump legal advisor Jenna Ellis as an ‘elite strike force team’ seems to have suddenly fallen apart. After a bizarre press conference in which Sidney Powell spun conspiracy theories that were even more deranged than those of Rudy Giuliani, if you can imagine it, yesterday the very same Ellis who had praised her to the skies just days before announced that
Powell had been summarily dumped by the campaign.

The Trump campaign’s legal team has moved to distance itself from the firebrand conservative attorney after a tumultuous few days in which Powell made multiple incorrect statements about the election voting process, unspooled complex conspiracy theories and vowed to “blow up” Georgia with a “biblical” lawsuit.

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity,” Giuliani and another lawyer for Trump, Jenna Ellis, said in a statement on Sunday.

Trump himself has heralded Powell’s involvement, tweeting last week that she was part of a team of “wonderful lawyers and representatives” spearheaded by Giuliani.
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Four theories to try and explain Trump’s behavior

I have been trying to think about what the possible motivations could be for Trump’s bizarre behavior in continuing his futile quest to remain in office and have come up with four possibilities, presented here in no particular order.

1. The scorched Earth theory

This theory says that Trump knows he has lost and must leave the White House and what he wants to do, out of sheer spite, is make life as hard as possible for the new administration by refusing to allow the transition team the normal access to information, firing people left and right, filing lawsuits and raging against the integrity of the elections to sow doubt among his supporters as to the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, and possibly even bombing Iran.

The idea is not unlike that during wars when the retreating population burns their crops and homes so that the invading armies cannot use them. In this case, he wants to leave an administration in a shambles. Even if it results in the pandemic raging out of control and needlessly causing excess deaths in the order of tens of thousands, he does not care if he can gloat from the sidelines that things have gone to hell since he left.

He must be smarting from the fact that the stock market has gone up since the election despite his warnings that a Biden win would tank it, and that new vaccines seem to be appearing by the. day. He of course thinks that the vaccine companies conspired to not release this news until after the election because they too are working against him
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Trump’s Pennsylvania case also thrown out

In what is being seen as the biggest setback to Trump’s futile quest to cling on to power. the lawsuit argued by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell (described by one of Trump’s legal advisors as “an elite strike force team”) before a federal judge in Pennsylvania has been thrown out. The suit alleged such widespread fraud in the election that they were asking the judge to invalidate the results and declare Trump the winner in the state. In what has been described as a blistering opinion, the judge was brutal in his assessment of the case presented by this allegedly elite strike force team, describing it as a “Frankenstein’s Monster, [that] has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent.”
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Is duck kosher? It’s complicated

I was chatting with a friend of mine about the upcoming Thanksgiving and the December holiday season and I said that I was not a big fan of turkey and preferred duck. She said that while she has never heard about duck being explicitly forbidden as not being kosher, she has never seen it for sale in any of the kosher butcher shops where she gets her meat, nor are there any recipes for it in her Jewish cookbooks. We both became intrigued about the kosher status of duck and so I looked it up and, as is often the case with religious dietary rules, it is complicated.

The Torah apparently simply lists those birds that are forbidden to eat. But the problem is that the list was compiled way back by people living in one small part of the world and it is not clear what animals some of the names even refer to and what to do now that one has to deal with animals all over the world that were not known to the compilers of the lists.
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A real life Clayton Bigsby

There is an African American in Alabama who is an ardent supporter of the confederacy, waves its flag proudly, and opposes the removal of monuments and the renaming of buildings that honor the leaders of the rebellion. He was part of an otherwise white group of people who were interviewed when they came to protest the removal of confederacy-era monuments.

One of the interviewed individuals is a Black man named Daniel Sims, seen in the video wearing a variety of Confederacy-supporting merchandise.

“Regardless how the next person feels, I’m not gon’ take my flag down,” says Sims, who states that his family is entirely white. “If I got anything to do with it, ain’t no monument gon’ come down.”

Sims also claimed to have been taught “everything I know” from someone who fought in the Civil War, a claim that is mathematically dubious.

“My whole family is white, I went to an all-white school, lived in an all-white neighborhood,” he said. “My grandfather was white and he was the main one that fought in this war here. And he taught me everything I know.”

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When you won’t even appear on Tucker Carlson’s show, then you’ve got nothing

MAGAland has a new star. A lawyer named Sidney Powell has achieved her 15 minutes of fame as Rudy Giuliani’s sidekick, mouthing even more insane conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from Trump without providing a shred of evidence. She alleges that somehow the Venezuelan government (yes!) and George Soros (of course!) were behind a plot that managed to co-opt vast swathes of people from the local to the national to the international level to plan and execute a massive fraud that stole an election that Trump rightfully won. Need I mention that she is also a QAnon supporter and is considered one of the ‘heroes’ of the movement? Are you surprised?
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I have a better idea than Geraldo Rivera

Geraldo Rivera was once, if you can believe it, considered to be a genuine reporter but he descended into the fever swamps of Fox News and is now one of Trump’s most groveling sycophants. But he outdid himself with the suggestion he made yesterday.

I think that a better idea would be to rename to coronavirus that causes covid-19 after Trump. Right now it has the awkward and hard-to-remember name of SARS-CoV-2. Calling it the ‘Trump virus’ would not only be easier, it would be more appropriate since it is his utter failure to deal with it that has now led to over a quarter of a million deaths in the US with no end in sight.

Then we could ask each other, “Have you got your immunity to Trump?”