Most importantly, 2020 will always be the year that we joined together and toppled the greatest threat that our fragile union has faced in many decades. Turning out more people to vote against the president-strongman than had ever voted against anyone in American history. Turning out large enough numbers to ensure the victory was clear, to thwart his—and his party’s—attempt to overturn our democracy.
2020 will always be loss. But it will always be that victory, too. Don’t ever let the wannabe sophisticates retcon the last four years to make it seem like the happy ending was inevitable or that there was never any real danger. Because it wasn’t. And there was. Even now, those careerists hold their manhoods cheap for not taking the field to save our republic.
We achieved something important and lasting, something that will reverberate through the decades during a year that was otherwise The Worst.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-five. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 06m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
As of Wednesday, more than 14 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been sent out across the United States, up from 11.4 million doses on Monday morning. But just 2.1 million people had received their first dose as of Monday morning, according to a dashboard maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The 2.1 million administered doses reported by the C.D.C. is an underestimate of the true number because of lags in reporting. And a C.D.C. official said in a separate news conference on Wednesday that 2.6 million people had received their first dose. Whatever the number, it falls far short of the goal that federal officials put forward as recently as this month to have 20 million people vaccinated by the end of this year.
In the weeks since his defeat, Trump’s fury toward the Georgia official [Brad Raffensperger, Republican secretary of state in Georgia] has intensified, leading to a pair of tweets published around midnight, starting with this gem.
“I love the Great State of Georgia, but the people who run it, from the Governor, [Brian Kemp], to the Secretary of State, are a complete disaster and don’t have a clue, or worse. Nobody can be this stupid. Just allow us to find the crime, and turn the state Republican.”
First, “Just allow us to find the crime” is an amazing thing for anyone to write, and a reminder that the president and his team are still searching desperately for evidence that doesn’t exist. Second, “Nobody can be this stupid” is one of those phrases I’m going to brush right past without comment.
But it was the other late-night tweet that included a new accusation of particular interest.
“Now it turns out that Brad R’s brother works for China, and they definitely don’t want ‘Trump’. So disgusting!”
Among the many problems with Trump’s accusation is that Brad Raffensperger’s brother does not work for China. We can say this with great certainly because Brad Raffensperger does not have a brother.
When Republican David Perdue ran for the Senate six years ago, he spoke proudly of his years as a corporate executive in Asia. He made no apologies for having said that he “spent most of my career” relying on the outsourcing of jobs. He fended off attacks that he had enriched himself as companies he led relied on offshore production, and he won the Georgia seat.
But as Perdue seeks reelection, in a contest that will determine which party controls the Senate, he has sought to shift the focus away from such work as he allies himself with President Trump, who has blasted corporate executives who move jobs overseas.
The disconnect between Trump’s rhetoric about returning manufacturing jobs from China and the experience of Perdue was evident at an October rally in Macon with Trump. Perdue did not mention specifics about his career, telling the crowd, “I’m just a dumb business guy from right over that hill.”
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 05m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1813, British soldiers burn Buffalo, New York.
NEW YORK — The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has retained forensic accounting specialists to aid its criminal investigation of President Trump and his business operations, as prosecutors ramp up their scrutiny of his company’s real estate transactions, according to people familiar with the matter.
District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. opened the investigation in 2018 to examine alleged hush-money payments made to two women who, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, claimed to have had affairs with him years earlier. The probe has since expanded, and now includes the Trump Organization’s activities more broadly, said the people familiar with the matter. Vance’s office has suggested in court filings that bank, tax and insurance fraud are areas of exploration.
Vance has contracted with FTI Consulting to look for anomalies among a variety of property deals, and to advise the district attorney on whether the president’s company manipulated the value of certain assets to obtain favorable interest rates and tax breaks, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains highly sensitive. The probe is believed to encompass transactions spanning several years.
When she entered the Senate in January 2020, she was given a spot on the Agriculture Committee, which oversees government regulators of the Fortune 500 business where she was recently a top officer. The company, Intercontinental Exchange (known as ICE), owns and operates a number of financial and commodity exchanges regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which falls under jurisdiction of the Agriculture Committee.
Loeffler’s assignment to the committee seemed a whopping conflict of interest: She still owned between $5 million and $25 million in ICE stock, and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is its CEO. Worse, Loeffler was placed on the committee’s subcommittee on commodities, which has direct oversight of the CFTC. In response to criticism, she left the subcommittee in May but remained a member of the full committee.
Yet one piece of this tale has received little notice. Her conflict of interest was even more pronounced, for while Loeffler was on the commodities subcommittee, the CFTC took several actions that impacted ICE. This means Loeffler was overseeing regulators at the same time they were engaged in activity affecting a company she was intimately tied to as a current shareholder, former executive, and spouse of its CEO.
Coined by Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, during a Meet the Press interview in January 2017 to defend press secretary Sean Spicer’s the false assertion that Trump drew the biggest inauguration crowd ever. Together these formed the original sin of the Trump presidency, culminating in his coronavirus and election denialism.
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globalist
This was the dark side of “America first”. Trump’s defenders claimed he was using the term to condemn globalisation and its devastating effects on American workers. But critics heard a dog whistle for racist, antisemitic and antigovernment conspiracy theorists including the alt-right. George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist, was among the targets of anti-globalist bigotry.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with snow overnight, and a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 42s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1949, KC2XAK of Bridgeport, Connecticut becomes the first ultra high frequency (UHF) television station to operate a daily schedule.
The myth of the stolen election is central to that project, and to the president’s own psyche: It says that the story of 2020 is not that Trump is a failure and a loser, but that he is (as always) a victim, and justice can be obtained by putting him back in his rightful place of power. But as he continues to proclaim the myth, reality might make it less compelling even to those now inclined to believe it.
For the next four years, Biden will be president. It will be his face on the nightly news and his actions on the front page of the newspaper. He will command both attention and power. And Trump? With no ability to make decisions with more practical importance, he might appear smaller than ever by comparison.
The truth is that both of these futures are possible. In one, Trump remains the leader of the opposition and a president-in-exile, his every outburst celebrated by millions of fans and his control of the GOP unchallenged. In the other, he grows smaller and smaller, his miserable complaints about the unfairness of it all only repelling people from him. We don’t know yet which will come to pass, but the second future is obviously far brighter for the rest of us. And it has never looked more likely.
(The nativist man will fade, but nativism will go on. SeeMan and Movement.)
When Joe Biden is sworn in as president on 20 January, cable news viewers may witness one of the most dramatic 180-degree turns in history.
After four years of slavishly promoting the president, Fox News is expected to pump on the brakes within seconds of the inauguration ceremony.
All of a sudden, the person in the White House is not a Republican. More than that, the network can no longer rely on the willingness of the president or his aides to call into Fox News any time of the day or night.
The rightwing TV channel, and its big name hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, will spend the next four years as the party of the opposition.
(A network that spent four years justifying the abusive expansion of federal power – outside all law and tradition – will rediscover caution. Situational isn’t a substitute for serious.)
Earlier this month, Tom Mountain, a Massachusetts Republican Party leader, posed for a maskless photo in front of a silver menorah as dozens of other guests without face coverings mingled nearby at a White House Hanukkah party.
Three days later, the vice chairperson of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee was rushed to the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19 that later left him close to needing a ventilator.
….
“Lets put it this way: when I went down to Washington, D.C. for the White House Hanukkah event, I was perfectly fine,” Mountain, 60, told WJAR. “And three days later after that event, I was in the hospital … ready to be put on a lifesaving ventilator.”
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 04m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be known as x-rays.
More than 50 million people living in America, including 17 million children, are likely to experience food insecurity by the end of the year, according to Feeding America, the country’s largest anti-hunger organization. That amounts to 1 in 6 Americans and 1 in 4 children — an increase of nearly 50 percent over last year.
Catherine D’Amato, president and CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank, said that in her 40 years of working in food banks, the need has never been greater.
“I’ve been through plenty of disasters … hurricanes and floods,” D’Amato said, but “we haven’t seen it so pervasive,” with every city, every state, every country involved.
Before the pandemic, the Greater Boston Food Bank was providing about 550 food pantries with about a million pounds of food a week, D’Amato said. Now, deliveries have swelled to 2.5 million pounds of food shipped weekly from its massive and meticulously organized warehouse in South Boston.
One of the areas it serves is Norfolk County, where Weymouth is located. The county has a distinction no one would want: a projected 168 percent rise in child hunger since 2018, according to Feeding America, the biggest increase in the country.
While the pandemic didn’t cause the nation’s hunger problem, it has made things much worse.
Pam Denholm, the executive director of the Weymouth Food Pantry, said the pressure on pantries has greatly intensified since March.
“The demand has increased dramatically,” Denholm said. “All across America, we have these middle-class communities that are being deeply affected.”
After the Cold War, when RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) faced congressional elimination in the 1990s, Joe Biden — then a Democratic senator from Delaware — was instrumental in saving the broadcaster. And he cautioned in a 1993 Senate report that if federally supported networks “become direct agencies of the U.S. Government, they will maintain neither the appearance nor the reality of journalistic independence.”
Now the president-elect will have an opportunity to protect these broadcasters from future attempts to politicize them. His administration should work with Congress on bipartisan reforms to firmly establish how the U.S. government explains its policies to the world and how it bolsters truth in the digital age.
RFE/RL and the other non-federal networks should be granted more independence from the federal government. Their independence and adherence to the truth even when that runs counter to U.S. policy are what attracts the loyalty of audiences and differentiates them from their authoritarian competitors.
The broadcasters must also bolster their relevance by adapting better to the digital age. They should forge partnerships with social media platforms to expand their reach with key audiences. Doing so would help break through the static of 21st-century information overload and counter authoritarian messaging on the platforms.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 03m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Patricia Cohen reports The Struggle to Mend America’s Rural Roads (‘As supersize vehicles bear heavier loads, maintenance budgets can’t keep up. Meet the Wisconsin farmers paying the price’):
Like hundreds of other small agricultural counties and towns around the country, Trempealeau County in central-west Wisconsin is overwhelmed with aging, damaged roads and not enough money to fix them.
“Our road hasn’t been paved since the ’60s,” said Kellen Nelson, whose family owns Triple Brook Farms on County Road O outside Osseo. “Patching and seal coating is all they’ve ever done.”
The roads look like losers in a barroom brawl. Thick, jagged cracks run down the asphalt like scars, interrupted at points by bruised bumps. In some places, guardrails are tilted off their moorings like a pair of glasses knocked askew.
“It is not real stable — the shoulders are eroding in many places,” Mr. Nelson said. “When you’re going through with an 80,000-pound load of soybeans and meeting cars, that’s dangerous.”
Throughout much of the Midwest and South, the rural transportation system is crumbling. Two-thirds of the nation’s freight emanates from rural areas. Traffic volume has increased. And over the years, tractor-trailers and farm equipment have been supersized, ballooning in length, breadth and weight.
A legally loaded semi-trailer truck can produce 5,000 to 10,000 times the road damage of one car according to some estimates, said Benjamin J. Jordan, director of the Wisconsin Transportation Information Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Her conviction that the rest of the media is biased against Trump now extends to social media. Like the president, the newswoman herself has seen some of her tweets flagged by Twitter for promoting misinformation — such as the Federalist article she shared the day after the election headlined, “Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election in Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania,” and her following day’s evidence-free claims of “AZ poll workers forcing voters to use sharpies thereby invalidated ballots” and “4 am dumps” delivering tens of thousands of swing state votes for Biden.
She decried the media’s role in calling the election for Biden. “The media’s role is to report the facts, and I think it’s up to the electors to report on who the president is,” she said on her show long after all the major networks had called the election for Biden but before the electors voted on Dec. 14. Now that that vote has happened, Bartiromo told The Post that she acknowledges Biden as the president-elect. “That said, you still have a sitting president contesting the election, which I will cover as well. I will also ensure to cover any instances of fraud, not just for this election but for future elections.”
She’s going to have to be a bit more careful covering claims of election fraud. Bartiromo was one of several Fox hosts, including Dobbs, who were forced to air a corrective segment on their shows in response to a legal threat sent by voting technology company Smartmatic. Bartiromo was mentioned 46 times in the letter to Fox, the most of any Fox personality, largely for giving so much airtime to Trump allies Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
Through a spokesperson, Bartiromo declined to comment further.
This Tuesday, December 29th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Knives Out @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
(Crime/Drama/Mystery)
Rated PG-13
2 hours, 10 minutes (2019)
An unconventional detective investigates the death of the patriarch of an eccentric, dysfunctional, combative family. A real whodunnit with many plot twists, turns and MacGuffins. Murder mystery fans will love this clever film!
Stars Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Don Johnson.
Masks are required and you must register for a seat either by calling, emailing or going online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk. There will be a limit of 10 people for the time slot. No walk-ins.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 03m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1776, at the Battle of Trenton, the Continental Army attacks and successfully defeats a garrison of Hessian forces.
In his suit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission and others, Trump had sought to have the Republican-led Legislature, rather than voters, decide how to allocate Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes.
Ludwig — a Trump nominee — concluded Wisconsin officials had followed state laws when they conducted the Nov. 3 election.
In a unanimous ruling, the three-judge panel in Chicago “affirmed” Ludwig’s decision.
“On the merits, the district court was right to enter judgment for the defendants,” the 7th Circuit said. “We reach this conclusion in no small part because of the President’s delay in bringing the challenges to Wisconsin law that provide the foundation for the alleged constitutional violation. Even apart from the delay, the claims fail under the Electors Clause.”
For much of his administration, the construction of hundreds of miles of steel-and-concrete barriers has symbolized futility and waste — a massive, publicly funded undertaking whose payoff in deterring illegal border-crossing was unproven at best, ineffective at worst. Now, as crews dynamite, bulldoze and raze their way through pristine canyons, riverbeds, mountains, deserts and grasslands to gain access to construction sites, Mr.?Trump’s wall has become a symbol of wanton environmental destruction.
President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to halt the wall’s construction immediately upon taking office. That hasn’t stopped or slowed what amounts to a full-court press to complete as much of the wall as possible before Mr. Trump leaves office Jan. 20. However, for every new mile of wall construction, far more damage and degradation is done to the landscape by a dozen or so contractors carving their way through wilderness and wildlife areas with access roads, retaining walls and other eyesores.
The folly of the project is glaring. Even as more miles of wall are completed, the number of unauthorized migrants apprehended after crossing the border has spiked in recent months to the highest level in years. Driven by the ravages of pandemic, hurricanes, economic ruin and violence in Central America and Mexico, migrants keep coming, wall or no wall.
The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, is actively investigating Trump’s business dealings. The focus described in court documents is “extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization” including possible bank fraud.
A second major investigation by the fearsome federal prosecutors of the southern district of New York has already led to the conviction of Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen. He pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations relating to the “hush money” paid to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who alleged an affair with Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
During the course of the prosecution, Cohen implicated a certain “Individual 1” – Trump – as the mastermind behind the felony. Though the investigation was technically closed last year, charges could be revisited once Trump’s effective immunity is lifted.
Christmas Day in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1776, Washington and the Continental Army cross the Delaware River at night to attack Hessians serving Great Britain at Trenton, New Jersey, the next day.
When it came to asylum seekers and refugees, President Trump’s agenda, crafted by adviser Stephen Miller, was largely animated by a few core principles.
Among them: Migrants are primarily a threat, and should above all be feared. They’re largely driven by nefarious motives, looking to scam their way into the United States and get over on us, rather than being driven by larger forces that rendered their decisions to migrate understandable, earning them just treatment.
And because of those, their efforts to migrate must above all be crushed through the deterrence of maximal cruelty and hardship, and migration flows must be mercilessly reduced to the lowest levels possible.
President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is sending early signs that the break with this worldview will be comprehensive, substituting an entirely new vision. And the rough outlines of this vision are heartening, though details will matter greatly.
First, Biden officials said their intention is to “expand legal pathways for migration,” including “allowing people to apply for refugee resettlement.”
That’s important. It means they will seek to create pathways for would-be asylum seekers to apply for refugee status from home countries. That seems to mirror a Democratic proposal that would expand the number of refugees the U.S. takes in from Central America in particular.
The principle underlying this is that it’s good policy to create ways for people to more easily seek protection here, to relieve them from having to make the arduous, dangerous trek. This would also enable us to manage migration more effectively, allowing for evaluation of cases before migrants make the trip.
We are so clearly living through the worst chapters of a civics textbook. Even as we suffer, we know that our hyperventilations and breakdowns will be archived and studied by some patient people in a saner future. And so we feel displaced. We have become living fossils, ancient even to ourselves. Still, somehow, there is so much fresh pain.
Over the last month, as a coping mechanism, I have been watching the same viral video over and over and over. It is not a campaign ad or a supercut of triumphant congressional zingers. In fact, it is the opposite: a brief clip of old-timey French people pelting one another with snowballs. This is my favorite film of 2020 — a tiny masterpiece that perfectly distills not only our current mayhem but also, more profoundly, our baffling displacement in time.
The footage was captured in Lyon, in 1897, by the Lumière brothers, who were among the world’s first filmmakers. It was originally black and white, of course, and herky-jerky because of the low frame rate. But this snowball fight has recently been colorized and smoothed, and the result is shockingly modern.
Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1814, representatives of the Britain and America sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.
Donald Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday, claiming to be “working tirelessly for the American people” with a schedule that included “many meetings and calls”. Back in Washington, a Democratic proposal to increase direct payments to Americans under the Covid relief bill, from $600 to $2,000, was blocked.
That was Trump’s demand in a surprise video address on Tuesday night but it was shot down by Republicans who opposed greater spending throughout stimulus talks.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would try again on Monday. Should the relief bill fail, millions of Americans will be without desperately needed relief at least until President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.
“To vote against this bill is to deny the financial hardship that families face,” she said, “and to deny them the relief they need”.
The White House’s official guidance to reporters about Trump’s “tireless” Christmas Eve schedule contrasted with recent examples notably light on official events, which have left Trump free to make baseless claims of electoral fraud and meet with conspiracy theorists and cronies about attempts to subvert the constitution and stay in power, despite defeat by Joe Biden.
Trump pardoned former congressmen Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who pleaded guilty to misuse of campaign funds, and Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), who was in prison after being convicted of securities fraud. The president commuted the sentence of former congressman Steve Stockman (R-Tex.), who was convicted of misusing charitable contributions. Hunter and Collins were early and avid supporters of Trump’s campaign.
Looking on the bright side of a humiliating national disaster, the manner of President Trump’s departure from power has clarified why he must never hold power again.
In leaks to a variety of news organizations, senior Trump administration officials reported: 1) Rudolph W. Giuliani urging the federal government to illegally seize Dominion voting machines; 2) presidential consideration of deranged conspiracy-monger Sidney Powell as a special counsel investigating nonexistent election fraud; and 3) a White House meeting involving disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn at which Trump discussed the imposition of martial law.
These accounts indicate the emergence of two distinct factions within Trump’s inner circle. On one side are the lunatics — among them Giuliani, Powell and Flynn — who want Trump to violate laws and assume authoritarian powers. On the other side are sycophants who supported Trump’s spurious legal challenges to the election result but apparently draw the line at treason. By most accounts, Trump’s sympathies lie with the lunatics.
