January 2, 2022
Late Morning/Afternoon Update:
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Sunday are here.
California. Eduardo Medina of the New York Times: "About eight and a half million gallons of untreated sewage have spilled into a flood-control waterway in Los Angeles County since Thursday afternoon, prompting at least five beaches to close, an official with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts said.... The spill began after a concrete pipe 48 inches in diameter in Carson, Calif., collapsed. The sewage leaked out of a manhole on 212th Street on Thursday evening and much of Friday.... From there, the waste traveled through storm drain pipes and toward the Dominguez Channel, a flood-control waterway that runs more than 15 miles from Hawthorne, Calif., and discharges into Los Angeles Harbor. Water from the channel eventually flows to the Pacific Ocean. Officials are investigating what caused the pipe, which was built in the 1960s, to collapse."
David Siders of Politico: "Donald Trump has already telegraphed the remarks he plans to give at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. If he follows the script laid out in his announcement of the news conference, he will commit a whitewashing of the day, repeating the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and defending his part in fomenting the insurrection -- all while a solemn prayer service is held at the Capitol, in a vivid split-screen moment.... One year after the riot at the Capitol, nearly three-quarters of Republicans still believe Trump's baseless claim that Joe Biden won the presidency due to voter fraud, according to a Monmouth University poll.... And according to a Quinnipiac University survey, nearly 8 in 10 Republicans want Trump to run for president again in 2024."
Donie O'Sullivan of CNN: "Twitter has permanently suspended Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Twitter account @mtgreenee, the company confirmed to CNN Sunday morning..., 'for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy.'Greene most frequently tweeted from the handle @mtgreenee. She still has access to and can tweet from her official congressional account @RepMTG." MB: Greene released a statement re: the ban, in which she said, "Communist Democrats can't stop the truth." O'Sullivan has her full statement. The New York Times' story is here.
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** New York Times Editors: "One year after from the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back.... But peel back a layer, and ... Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day. It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, 'When can we use the guns?' and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation's two major political parties. In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Meryl Kornfield & Mariana Alfaro of the Washington Post: "A year after a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol in the worst attack on the home of Congress since it was burned by British forces in 1814, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds that about 1 in 3 Americans say they believe violence against the government can at times be justified. The findings represent the largest share to feel that way since the question has been asked in various polls in more than two decades.... [The poll found] 40 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of independents saying [violence against the government] can be acceptable. The view was held by 23 percent of Democrats, the survey finds."
Sarah Lyall of the New York Times writes a longish article about how customers are always outraged and that's so unfair to "public-facing" employees. Marie: Maybe so. But I don't think when I call for customer service at a company where I drop hundreds of dollars every month that I should have to run a gauntlet of stupid questions demanded by an automaton, only to be put on hold for 45 minutes and then when I miraculously get through to a real person I'm told my "problem" is handled by another department so there will be another 45-minute wait and so on. The last time that happened, which was maybe a couple of weeks ago, I very nicely suggested to a human tele-clerk that she might get a big bonus if she put in the suggestion box a proposal to turn the company into a torture-for-hire outfit because they were a lot better at torture than they were at customer service. She laughed. I reckon being waterboarded is worse than listening to an hour-and-a-half of tinny, staticky Mariah Carey tracks from your crappy little phone speaker, but not by all that much.
The Pandemic, Ctd.
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Saturday are here: "Airlines had canceled more than 2,500 flights across the United States by afternoon on Saturday, by far the worst day in the industry's weeklong struggle with bad weather and crew shortages. The cancellations mounted amid reports of heavy snowfall across much of the nation's midsection, and if the pattern of the last week holds, many more could be canceled by day's end." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Beyond the Beltway
Louisiana. Vimal Patel of the New York Times: "A Louisiana judge who could be heard on a video using a racial slur while watching security footage of a foiled burglary outside her home has resigned.... 'I take full responsibility for the hurtful words I used to describe the individual who burglarized the vehicles at my home,' the judge, Michelle Odinet, of the City Court of Lafayette, La., wrote in a letter dated Friday to the chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court.... 'There was never going to be a situation where African Americans would appear before her and not file motions to recuse,' ... Ms. Odinet's lawyer, Dane S. Ciolino..., said.... Mr. Ciolino said there were efforts in New Orleans to scour Ms. Odinet's files for evidence of racism in how she had handled cases involving Black people.... In an earlier statement, Ms. Odinet confirmed to The Current, a nonprofit news organization in Lafayette that reported on the video, that the footage had been recorded in her home, but she did not acknowledge that she had used a slur." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Marie: The problem isn't that Odinet used a racial slur so much as it is that she thought of the burglar not as a lowdown miscreant but as a Black lowdown miscreant. If the SOB had been white, my guess is that she would not have been calling him a honky or whatever.
News Lede
New York Times: Rescuers risked their own lives to save 21 people trapped on the tram that leads up to the top of Sandia Peak near Albuquerque, New Mexico. "Rescuers had to get to a tower, climb to the tram and set up a rope system to lower people to safety, he said. From there, they hiked with the passengers about 100 yards to a landing site where a helicopter whisked them away a few at a time. Rescuers battled treacherous conditions, said Larry Koren, the pilot who flew the stranded to safety by landing his helicopter on a narrow ridge." An ABC News story is here. ~~~
~~~ Marie: I used to live near that tramway (actually, on the other side of the mountain). Nothing could have got me to go up it then, and nothing could get me to take any aerial tram now. Some tame funiculars, yes.
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Reader Comments (7)
It's not so much the outrage or the anger, which is often explicable, even justified, as it is the object at which it is directed.
Just read a spy novel which rang humorous changes on the recent and unfunny political scene in England and the United States. It had the cast of characters we're only too familiar with: The media baron who would do anything for money, a politician/pr smoothie with no soul, and a working class leader who had his followers marching in the streets to express the mixture of dissatisfactions that are often hard for the mob to articulate but pundits agree are more or less legitimate.
Those mobs can get pissed off and sometimes break things, but probably not the things they should be breaking, for those who have contributed to their unhappiness are far out of reach. Most of the time when the windows break, the fires are set and the looting occurs it is little people hurting other little people, which is exactly the way those manipulating them want it.
Those who call the shots, who determine how much more money they can make by cutting even more customer service, especially those who give the order to make such determinations, are the ones who ought to receive our ire, but we can never see or talk to them. They live insulated lives, far behind the front like the generals who sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths during WWI in one fruitless over-the-top assault after another.
And with the death of small local businesses, the current craze for tele- and on-line-everything, and the attendant decline in the opportunity and necessity for personal contact, of course our wait times get longer, the answers fewer, the satisfaction less and the hold your water music worse.
And always way beyond our reach are the capitalists who make all this wonderfulness possible.
There's gotta be a metaphor about "modern life" in here somewhere.
!!! The NYT editors think that elected politicians vote their conscience?!! When every newspaper writer, every lobbyist, every activist, every campaign fund contributor, every post political career job giver, every aspiring primaryist, every party boss, and, lets not forget, every lobbyist, is staring at the vote as it goes down. And let's also not forget the swagger and power plays the politician eagerly wields using the weapon of that oh so public vote. Conscience? OK, maybe, once in a while. But with everyone looking on, I think expediency is much closer to the mark.
What would my own vote look like, here, deep in Trumpland, if there were a half a dozen sidearm carrying 'poll watchers' standing by the ballot box watching me fill out my ballot to make sure I don't screw it up?
The US adopted the secret ballot for registered voters, at last, in the late 19th century, because of the obvious corruption public voting engenders. But, to this day, we still want elected politicians to vote publicly. Why? Because we want to control them, to bribe them, to threaten and intimidate them, and, in short, to corrupt them. Yet we also expect them to vote their pure-as-the-driven-snow conscience! Yes, we do seem to be a batshit crazy people.
I hadn't realized that Maureen Dowd's brother Kevin wrote columns that she then posted in her columns. I was aware that Kevin's politics differ from his sisters'–-that he is a staunch Republican and the two have had major quibbles over the years but here we have, in Kevin's own words a look-see into his mindset. If you do drop in notice that Kevin does not mention anything about Climate Change––the largest concern we must grapple with but obviously not something of concern for Kevin and his right-wing brethren.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/opinion/trigger-warning-its-my-brothers-turn-again.html
Progress?
According to this poll only half of declared Republicans are certifiably bonkers..
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/majority-americans-jan-attack-threatened-democracy-poll/story?id=81990555
Would have thought the percentage was higher...
THE HOLY FAMILY:
Now that Christmas is over I look forward to not seeing all the glitter and decor that festoons this neighborhood. The most notable was a replica of the Holy Family set on a vast lawn with streaming lights on Mom and Pop and the Baby.This Nativity story (in Luke) tells us that a Roman census forces this family to go back to its ancestral city of Bethlehem –--an obvious invention since there was no Empire -wide census at that time and no sane Roman bureaucrat would have dreamed of ordering people back to be counted in cities that their families had left hundreds of years before. I recall reading that Luke, whoever he might have been, invented Bethlehem in order to to put Jesus in David's city.
But back to the replica on the vast grass: It brings back the faith these people harbor–-the belief system works because it refuses to die–-it's too pretty a story not to keep it going year after year–-century after century. And we wonder today how so many believe in the other Big Lie and the guy who acts like that other fake guy in the sky.
@PD Pepe: When my grandfather was a boy (maybe about 9 years old), he was rummaging around the family's attic and discovered a book he had never heard of. He eventually took it downstairs to show his family: "It's called the 'Hully Bibble'! he exclaimed. "And it's full of great stories!"
I think if you look at the Hully Bibble through the eyes of a child and appreciate its "great stories," you're good. The Nativity itself is one of those "great stories," and it was kind of a late addition. The Gospel of Mark -- the earliest-written Gospel -- has no nativity story and neither does the later-written Gospel of John. You're quite correct that the Nativity story (actually two rather different Nativity stories, one in Matthew & one in Luke) is riddled with inaccuracies, but if you read it as just a piece of fiction and a metaphor (for something), those "mistakes" don't matter much. The story also is consistent with (and largely more wholesome than) other birth-of-the-son-of-god-by-a-virgin stories that other religions invented around the same time or earlier.
Marie: your grandfather's "Hully Bibble" is delightful–-good for him to retrieve it and present it as "great stories." But your "Matthew & (one in Luke) is riddled with inaccuracies, but if you read it as just a piece of fiction and a metaphor (for something), those "mistakes" don't matter much' EXCEPT that they do since the Christian religion is based on these "made up stories." The fact that all those Gospels were written decades after the character of Jesus' death; that all were were written in Greek,which the character of Jesus and the apostles couldn't speak and couldn't write –-if indeed they could read ot write at all; and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.
I was raised in part on Grimm's fairy tales which had lessons galore–-some rather gruesome but I knew these were stories. I was told through my Lutheran religion that the Bible was the word and the word was God. I have spent many years extricating myself from that lie and as much as I wish we could all look at these Biblical stories as metaphor, it ain't happening.