December 31, 2021

It's already 2022:

Late Morning Update:

Dana Hedgpeth of the Washington Post: "Four hundred years after the Mashpee Wampanoag in Plymouth, Mass., helped the Pilgrims from the Mayflower survive, they have been fighting to get their ancestral homeland back. Last week, they won a major victory in a ruling from the U.S. Department of the Interior that will give them substantial control of roughly 320 acres around Cape Cod. The decision opens the door for the Wampanoag tribe to move forward on economic development projects -- such as a casino resort or housing -- that tribal leaders say will bring much-needed revenue to their community of roughly 2,800 members.... In 2015, the Obama administration put about 320 acres in federal trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag, under a law that allows the Department of the Interior to acquire the title to property and hold it for the benefit of a Native American tribe.... But ... Donald Trump's administration ordered that the land be taken out of trust, jeopardizing the Mashpee Wampanoag's ability to develop it." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Hedgpeth writes a very brief historical overview of the Wampanoag in Massachusetts, and it is not what I read in my 5th-grade history book. This is the "critical race theory" that right-wingers object to. It isn't critical race theory at all, of course; but it is based on facts that those people Ted Koppel met on the bus (see yesterday's Commentariat), for instance, don't want to face and don't want their children & grandchildren to learn. These Americans are not indulging in nostalgia for a happier, simpler time; they're suffering from a pandemic of denialism. BTW, if you didn't see Koppel's "60 Minutes" segment, embedded in yesterday's Commentariat, it's worth checking out.

David Gerson of the Washington Post: "The default ethical stance of Christianity is the Golden Rule.... This principle was developed in a variety of other religious and moral traditions. (See the Babylonian Talmud: 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah.')... There is no version of the Golden Rule that would recommend Christian resistance to basic public health measures during a pandemic. This is heresy compounded by lunacy.... Evangelical Christians are generally known as people who loudly defend their own rights. They show not radical generosity but discreditable selfishness.... And when Christians are asserting a right to resist basic public health measures, what is the actual content of their religious-liberty claim? The right to risk the lives of their neighbors in order to assert their autonomy? The right to endanger the community in the performative demonstration of their personal rights? This is a vivid display of the cultural and ideological trends of a warped and wasted year. It just has nothing to do with real Christianity."

Peter Eisler, et al., of Reuters: "Reuters has documented more than 850 threatening and hostile messages aimed at election officials and staff related to the 2020 election. Virtually all expressed support for former President Donald Trump or echoed his debunked contention that the election was stolen. The messages spanned 30 jurisdictions in 16 states. They came via emails, voicemails, texts, letters and Internet posts.... The messages collected by Reuters are only a sample of all threats to election workers nationally, taken mostly from states, counties and cities where officials were specifically targeted with false fraud allegations by Trump and his allies. Nearly a quarter of those hostile messages suggested the targets should die." MB: This is a big file and I found the page hard to navigate. But the messages I did see were horrible and give a good idea about the warped mindsets of quite a few Trump backers.

Alaska. Brad Dress of the Hill: "Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) on Thursday accepted the endorsement of former President Trump, which came on the condition the governor does not, in turn, endorse Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in her reelection bid. Trump issued a statement Thursday evening saying that Dunleavy, who is running for a second term as governor, had accepted the endorsement. 'Please tell the president thank you for the endorsement,' Dunleavy said in the statement. 'With regard to the other issue, please tell the president he has nothing to worry about. I appreciate all 45 has done for Alaska and this country.'"

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David Sanger & Andrew Kramer of the New York Times: "President Vladimir V. Putin warned President Biden on Thursday that any economic sanctions imposed on Russia if it moves to take new military action against Ukraine could result in a 'complete rupture' of relations between the two nuclear superpowers, a Russian official told reporters on Thursday evening. The exchange came during a 50-minute phone call that Mr. Putin requested, and which both sides described as businesslike. Yet it ended without clarity about Mr. Putin's intentions.... Mr. Biden ... pushed back, according to two American officials. A terse White House statement said he 'made clear that the United States and its allies and partners will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.' American officials declined to discuss the substance of the discussion, insisting that, unlike the Russians, they would not negotiate in public. But it was clear that both sides were trying to shape the diplomatic landscape for talks that will begin in Geneva on Jan. 10, and then move to Brussels and Vienna later in the week in sessions that will include NATO allies and then Ukraine itself." ~~~

     ~~~ The AP's report is here. The White House's readout is an embargoed conversation with a "senior administration official." The White House said it would publish an updated readout later, attributed to Jen Psaki. As of midnight, the White House has not published (on its Website) the updated readout.

Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times: "For years, millions of Americans with medical emergencies could receive another nasty surprise: a bill from a doctor they did not choose and who did not accept their insurance. A law that goes into effect Saturday will make many such bills illegal. The change is the result of bipartisan legislation passed during the Trump administration and fine-tuned by the Biden administration. It is a major new consumer protection, covering nearly all emergency medical services, and most routine care.... Even with insurance, emergency medical care can still be expensive, and patients with high deductible plans could still face large medical bills. But the law will eliminate the risk that an out-of-network doctor or hospital will send an extra bill." The article provides some examples of how the new law could affect you.

AP: "The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol says the Supreme Court should let stand an appeals court ruling that the National Archives turn over documents from ... Donald Trump that might shed light on the events leading up to and including that day. In a filing with the court Thursday, lawyers for the committee argued that it is within its jurisdiction to seek the information. 'Although the facts are unprecedented, this case is not a difficult one,' the lawyers said in the filing, adding, 'This Court's review is unwarranted, and the petition for a writ of certiorari should be denied.'"

Still Longing for de Old Plantation. Brian Schwartz of CNBC: "A lawyer allied with ... Donald Trump hosted numerous conspiracy theorists looking to overturn the results of the 2020 election at his South Carolina plantations, he recently told CNBC. Lin Wood, a conservative trial lawyer who led a failed legal challenge against the election results in Georgia, said in a lengthy interview that shortly after the 2020 contest last November, he hosted at his massive South Carolina properties fellow right-wing attorney Sidney Powell, former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and Doug Logan, the CEO of cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas.... Wood told CNBC that after the November election Powell asked him if she and her team could use his South Carolina property known as the Tomotley Plantation in order 'to do work on the election cases.' Wood reportedly bought the $7.9 million plantation last year." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Only Republicans -- and especially Trumpy Republicans -- would think it was a good idea to plot out a new civil war on an old South Carolina "plantation."

Michael Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center: "One year after Donald Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington D.C., the hard right, anti-democracy faction of the Republican base that led the attack threatens to overtake the party for the long term. This hard-right faction, loyal to former President Trump, minimizes, or supports, the violent storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. They have worked to systemically undermine America's democracy in the months following the attack by installing into positions of power loyal proponents of Trump's Big Lie and by passing a flurry of voter suppression bills. The few Republicans who oppose Trump or acknowledge the wrong that he and others did on Jan. 6 face being ostracized. This group of Republicans also embrace lies and conspiracy theories to spin away what happened that day. Repeatedly, such high-profile Trump backers as Tucker Carlson have opted to further stoke the feelings of paranoia and bitterness that undergirded the attack...."

Sarah Nir, et al., of the New York Times: "A jury on Thursday ruled that an opioid manufacturer and distributor contributed to a public nuisance by inundating New York with pills that killed thousands of people. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. and a handful of its subsidiary companies were found liable in a sprawling, six-month trial that sought to reckon with the role that the pharmaceutical industry played in the opioid epidemic in two hard-hit New York counties and across the state. New York State was also determined to be partially responsible. The trial began in June and was argued jointly by New York State and Suffolk and Nassau counties. The case began with more than two dozen defendants, and was the first of its kind to target the entirety of the opioid supply chain: the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured pain pills, the distributors of the drugs and the pharmacy chains that filled the prescriptions." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Adam Klasfeld of Law & Crime: "The day after a federal jury convicted Ghislaine Maxwell of sex trafficking and other crimes, the government formally recommended disposing of the prosecution of two guards on duty the night of Jeffrey Epstein's death. Indicted in November 2019, Metropolitan Correctional Center guards Tova Noel and Michael Thomas each faced charges of falsifying records and conspiracy for their allegedly failing to perform numerous jail-wide checks on the night of Aug. 9, 2019 and early morning of Aug. 10, 2019. Noel and Thomas reached deferred prosecution agreements with prosecutors this past May. 'After a thorough investigation, and based on the facts of this case and the personal circumstances of the defendants, the Government has determined that the interests of justice will best be served by deferring prosecution in this District,' Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Lonergan announced earlier this year...."

Adam Klasfeld of Law & Crime: "Federal judges ordered the unsealing of a 2009 settlement agreement that Prince Andrew has claimed insulates him from a civil lawsuit accusing him of having sexually abused a 17-year-old girl. The ... deal, signed by the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the prince's accuser Virginia Giuffre, is said to have shielded broad categories of Epstein's powerful associates, including 'royalty,' from civil liability.... In civil litigation, Prince Andrew and Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School Alan Dershowitz cited the civil deal in an attempt to swat away claims by Giuffre, who accused both men of sexually abusing her. Dershowitz, a rival of Giuffre's lawyer David Boies, vehemently denied the allegations and countersued Giuffre for defamation. He has also sued Boies."

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Aina Kahn of the New York Times: "On Wednesday evening, BBC viewers heard from the American lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz about the guilty verdict in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted that day of helping the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein recruit, groom and sexually abuse underage girls. What they were not appraised of was that Mr. Dershowitz had helped defend Mr. Epstein and has himself been accused of abuse by one of Mr. Epstein's accusers -- an accusation he denies. The British broadcaster, which introduced Mr. Dershowitz as a 'constitutional lawyer,' said later in a statement released on Twitter that the interview did not meet its editorial standards: 'Mr. Dershowitz was not a suitable person to interview as an impartial analyst, and we did not make the relevant background clear to our audience,' the statement said. 'We will look into how this happened.'" The Guardian's story is here. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: In the most egregious part of the interview, "... Dershowitz said that Ms. Maxwell's trial undermined the credibility of [Virginia] Giuffre, and her case against Prince Andrew." Giuffre has accused Dershowitz of being one of Epstein's friends to whom she was offered as a sex partner, & she and Dershowitz have brought lawsuits -- still ongoing -- against each other. No mention of that! If the BBC team was too damned dumb to know of Dershowitz's huge conflict of interest, he had an ethical obligation to raise it himself. (I acknowledge that it's kind of wrong to even use "Dershowitz" & "ethical" in the same sentence.) You often hear people on U.S. TV do just that; as in, "I should reveal I worked on So-and-So's first presidential campaign."

The Pandemic, Ctd.

The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Friday are here.

Giulia Heyward & Sarah Cahalan of the New York Times: "With more than 580,000 cases, the United States shattered its own record for new daily coronavirus cases -- beating a milestone it already broke just the day before. Thursday's count, according to The New York Times's database, toppled the 488,000 new cases on Wednesday, which was nearly double the highest numbers from last winter. The back-to-back record-breaking days are a growing sign of the virus's fast spread and come as the world enters its third year of the pandemic. Hospitalizations and deaths, however, have not followed the same dramatic increase, further indication that the Omicron variant seems to be milder than Delta and causes fewer cases of severe illness. In the past two weeks, deaths are down by five percent, with a daily average of 1,221, while hospitalizations increased by just 15 percent to an average of 78,781 per day."

Abandon Ship! Marnie Hunter & Naomi Thomas of CNN: "The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday increased the risk level for cruise ship travel to its highest level and said it should be avoided, regardless of vaccination status. The agency bumped up the travel risk level for cruise travel from Level 3 to Level 4, indicating the risk for Covid-19 is 'very high.' The move 'reflects increases in cases onboard cruise ships since identification of the Omicron variant,' the CDC website says." The New York Times report is here. The CDC's release/warning is here.

Benjamin Mueller & Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released two studies on Thursday that underscored the importance of vaccinating children against the coronavirus. One study found that serious problems among children 5 to 11 who had received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were extremely rare. The other, which looked at hundreds of pediatric hospitalizations in six cities last summer, found that nearly all of the children who became seriously ill had not been fully vaccinated.... By Dec. 19, roughly six weeks into the campaign to vaccinate 5- to 11-year-olds, the C.D.C. said that it had received very few reports of serious problems.

Dan Diamond of the Washington Post: "The Food and Drug Administration is expected by early next week to authorize booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for 12-to-15-year-olds, according to two people familiar with the FDA's plan.... The FDA decision would then be reviewed by vaccine advisers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that agency's top official [-- Director Rochelle Walensky --] this week vowed to move quickly on recommending the booster shots if the advisers concurred with FDA." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: "The Biden administration told the Supreme Court Thursday that federal law gives it the authority to impose a nationwide vaccine-or-testing requirement for large employers, and the court should not stand in the way of a program that will save thousands of lives.... The Supreme Court has announced a special hearing on Jan. 7 to consider challenges to the rules from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It was upheld by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit earlier this month, but is being challenged by a coalition of business groups and Republican-led states. Also that day, the high court will hear a similar challenge to a vaccine mandate imposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; it requires shots for health-care workers at facilities that receive federal funds tied to those programs."

Ian Duncan of the Washington Post: "Amtrak said Thursday that it will reduce its schedule between New Year's Eve and Jan. 6 as it battles bad weather in some parts of the country and a surge in coronavirus cases among its employees. About two dozen trains on both its Northeast Corridor and long-distance routes will be affected."

Lee Hudson of Politico: "The Marine Corps announced Thursday that it has kicked out more troops for refusing the Covid-19 vaccine. The total number of discharges has risen to 206, up from 169 last week. The fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law Monday, dictates that the military services cannot dishonorably discharge members for vaccine refusal. The discharges must be either honorable or general under honorable conditions."

Ted Cruz Confuses Western Australia (WA) with Washington State (WA). John Wright of the Raw Story: "Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz apparently confused 'Western Australia' with 'Washington State' in an attempted attack on Democrats over COVID-19 restrictions on Wednesday night. [After an Australian official explained the government's ban on dancing on New Year's Eve, Cruz tweeted,] 'Blue-state Dems are power-drunk authoritarian kill-joys.'" There's a big world outside U.S. borders, Ted. Cancun, for instance. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)

Beyond the Beltway

Colorado. Azi Paybarah of the New York Times: "The 110-year prison sentence given to the driver of a truck involved in a 2019 crash that killed four people was reduced to 10 years by the governor of Colorado on Thursday. Gov. Jared Polis called the original sentence 'unjust' and 'disproportionate compared with many other inmates.'... He added, 'This case will hopefully spur an important conversation about sentencing laws' in the future.... In October, a jury found [Rogel] Aguilera-Mederos guilty on 27 counts, including vehicular homicide and vehicular assault. On Dec. 13, a district court judge, A. Bruce Jones, sentenced Mr. Aguilera-Mederos, then 26, to more than a century in prison, citing a Colorado state law that required sentences for each count to be served consecutively, rather than concurrently. The lengthy sentence drew immediate scrutiny, from people including the judge, who, Reuters reported, said, 'If I had the discretion, it would not be my sentence.' A petition calling for Mr. Aguilera-Mederos's sentence to be reduced quickly garnered millions of signatures."

News Ledes

New York Times: "It took only a few hours for the flames to cut an unimaginable path of destruction across the drought-starved neighborhoods between Denver and Boulder. By Friday morning, as smoke from the most damaging wildfire in state history cleared, more than 500 homes, and possibly as many as 1,000, had been destroyed. Hundreds of people who had hastily fled returned to ruins, everything they owned incinerated in the fast-moving blaze. Entire neighborhoods had been reduced to ashes.... Despite the astonishing destruction, no deaths were immediately recorded, a figure that Gov. Jared Polis said would be a 'New Year's miracle' if it held."

New York Times: "Television stars, comedians, a president and seemingly the entire internet paid tribute on Friday to Betty White, the actress whose trailblazing career spanned seven decades and who died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles." ~~~

~~~ New York Times: "Betty White, who created two of the most memorable characters in sitcom history, the nymphomaniacal Sue Ann Nivens on 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' and the sweet but dim Rose Nylund on 'The Golden Girls' -- and who capped her long career with a comeback that included a triumphant appearance as the host of 'Saturday Night Live' at the age of 88 -- died on Friday. She was 99."

"How to Steal an Election"

Senator Doctor Rand Paul is a well-educated man. Admittedly, his undergraduate degree is from a southern university where trustees later thought it would be a good idea to select Ken Starr as its president & chancellor. But despite Li'l Randy's flirtation with the little-known god Aqua Buddha (a religious episode he later could not recall), and despite the fact that he wasn't actually graduated from Baylor University, Duke University's School of Medicine found him good enough to accept into its program, possibly as a legacy (Li'l Randy's doctor-congressman father Ron Paul was a graduate of the same school of medicine).

All that education notwithstanding, Rand Paul does not seem very bright. I haven't the space to catalog all of stupid ideas Rand has shared with the public. A Google search for "stupid things Rand Paul has said" elicited about 4.7 million hits. And the hits just keep on coming. Steve Benen of MSNBC wrote Tuesday,

"The American Conservative website published this piece [by William Doyle] last week, which described the Democratic electoral strategy in Wisconsin this way: "Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results."

Rand Paul then republished Doyle's observation in a tweet, describing it as a lesson in "how to steal an election."

As Akhilleus wrote in Wednesday's Comments thread, "This is how democracy works." Benen agrees: what Democrats were doing "was simply democracy at work: Democrats targeted a competitive battleground state — a state the Democratic ticket has won in eight of the last nine presidential election cycles — implementing a strategy that involved messaging, access, and legal voter participation. There was nothing nefarious or untoward about it."

If you parse Doyle's sentence & Paul's analysis, you will no doubt come to the same conclusion Akhilleus & Benen did. But there are clues -- dogwhistles, you might say -- in Doyle's description of just how he and Randy believe this Democratic "election stealing" works:

Doyle describes Democrats "harvesting and counting the results." "Harvesting" is a loaded word. "Ballot harvesting" is a practice in which a partisan group distributes and collects ballots and takes them to polling locations. Particularly unscrupulous "harvesters" might "accidentally lose" any ballots they believe could be for the "wrong candidates."

AND built into Doyle's construction is the implication that it was Democrats who were doing the counting, not polling machines & elections officials.

Doyle also writes in that loaded sentence that ballot harvesters were "convincing potential voters to complete [ballots] in a legally valid way." In other words, harvesters were coaching voters on how to fill out their ballots so that they marked their votes for Democratic candidates.

In addition, Doyle describes this Democratic activity as taking place in "an area heavy with potential Democratic votes." That of course makes sense; Democrats would seek out Democratic voters & let Republicans get their own voters to participate in the election. But Doyle also is building in racist and ageist implications: those "areas" "with potential Democratic votes" are apt to be neighborhoods with a majority ethnic minority population, or -- in the case of Madison -- with lots of "leftist" students.

Doyle also is particularly exercised over the cost of the Democrats' outreach programs, which he addresses at the top of his article. He charges that a "shadow campaign" was secretly financed by none other than ... Mark Zuckerberg. and his wife Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg is Jewish & Chan is Buddhist (but not Aqua Buddhist!). So besides leftist kids & Black people, we're to assume that an international cabal of non-Christians financed the "big steal."

While there was no evidence of vote harvesting in Wisconsin during the 2020 election (that I could find in a Google search), evidently Wisconsin Democrats mounted a robust GOTV effort in the 2020 election, one made crucial by the coronavirus pandemic. What Rand Paul, William Doyle and other right-wingers find galling is that GOTV activities tend to bring out more Democratic-leaning people: people who may not have time to stand in line to vote, may be preoccupied with student activities or may not have ready transportation to the polls. Or, as Rand Paul himself put it more euphemistically earlier this year, "The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for."

December 30, 2021

Afternoon Update:

Sarah Nir, et al., of the New York Times: "A jury on Thursday ruled that an opioid manufacturer and distributor contributed to a public nuisance by inundating New York with pills that killed thousands of people. Teva Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. and a handful of its subsidiary companies were found liable in a sprawling, six-month trial that sought to reckon with the role that the pharmaceutical industry played in the opioid epidemic in two hard-hit New York counties and across the state. New York State was also determined to be partially responsible. The trial began in June and was argued jointly by New York State and Suffolk and Nassau counties. The case began with more than two dozen defendants, and was the first of its kind to target the entirety of the opioid supply chain: the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured pain pills, the distributors of the drugs and the pharmacy chains that filled the prescriptions."

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Aina Kahn of the New York Times: "On Wednesday evening, BBC viewers heard from the American lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz about the guilty verdict in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted that day of helping the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein recruit, groom and sexually abuse underage girls. What they were not appraised of was that Mr. Dershowitz had helped defend Mr. Epstein and has himself been accused of abuse by one of Mr. Epstein's accusers -- an accusation he denies. The British broadcaster, which introduced Mr. Dershowitz as a 'constitutional lawyer,' said later in a statement released on Twitter that the interview did not meet its editorial standards: 'Mr. Dershowitz was not a suitable person to interview as an impartial analyst, and we did not make the relevant background clear to our audience,' the statement said. 'We will look into how this happened.'" The Guardian's story is here. ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: In the most egregious part of the interview, "... Dershowitz said that Ms. Maxwell's trial undermined the credibility of [Virginia] Giuffre, and her case against Prince Andrew." Giuffre has accused Dershowitz of being one of Epstein's friends to whom she was offered as a sex partner, & she and Dershowitz have brought lawsuits -- still ongoing -- against each other. No mention of that! If the BBC team was too damned dumb to know of Dershowitz's huge conflict of interest, he had an ethical obligation to raise it himself. (I acknowledge that it's kind of wrong to even use "Dershowitz" & "ethical" in the same sentence.) You often hear people on U.S. TV do just that; as in, "I should reveal I worked on So-and-So's first presidential campaign."

Dan Diamond of the Washington Post: "The Food and Drug Administration is expected by early next week to authorize booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for 12-to-15-year-olds, according to two people familiar with the FDA's plan.... The FDA decision would then be reviewed by vaccine advisers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that agency's top official [-- Director Rochelle Walensky --] this week vowed to move quickly on recommending the booster shots if the advisers concurred with FDA."

Ted Cruz Confuses Western Australia (WA) with Washington State (WA). John Wright of the Raw Story: "Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz apparently confused 'Western Australia' with 'Washington State' in an attempted attack on Democrats over COVID-19 restrictions on Wednesday night. [After an Australian official explained the government's ban on dancing on New Year's Eve, Cruz tweeted,] 'Blue-state Dems are power-drunk authoritarian kill-joys.'" There's a big world outside U.S. borders, Ted. Cancun, for instance.

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David Sanger & Andrew Kramer of the New York Times: "President Biden will talk to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday about the grinding crisis at the Ukrainian border, White House officials said, the second time in a little over three weeks that the two leaders will speak directly about what Washington sees as Moscow's effort to redraw the map of Europe. Mr. Putin requested the call, the officials said. His desire to speak directly with Mr. Biden again set off speculation in Washington and Europe about whether Mr. Putin was trying to de-escalate a situation largely of his own creation, or whether he was seeking a response to a series of demands about Russian security concerns that, if left unfulfilled, may provide him with a pretext to initiate the military action he has threatened in Ukrainian territory."

Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times: "The Pentagon is building a second courtroom for war crimes trials at Guantánamo Bay that will exclude the public from the chamber, the latest move toward secrecy in the nearly 20-year-old detention operation. The new courtroom will permit two military judges to hold proceedings simultaneously starting in 2023. On those occasions, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the four other men who are accused of plotting the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, would have hearings in the existing chamber, which has a gallery for the public. Smaller cases would be held in the new $4 million chamber. Members of the public seeking to watch those proceedings at Guantánamo would be shown a delayed video broadcast in a separate building."

Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: "Lawyers for ... Donald Trump told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that a Washington Post interview with the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol shows the committee is trying to establish a criminal complaint against Trump, something the lawyers say is beyond the committee's authority. The lawyers filed a supplemental brief alerting the justices to a Dec. 23 Post article featuring an interview with Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee's chairman. In the article, Thompson said the committee is looking intently into Trump's actions on Jan. 6 as it considers whether to recommend that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into the former president.... Trump lawyer Jesse R. Binnall ... said the committee is acting as 'an inquisitorial tribunal seeking evidence of criminal activity,' which he said is 'outside of any of Congress's legislative powers.'" An Axios item is here.

"A Slow-motion Insurrection." Nicholas Riccardi of the AP: "In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a 'slow-motion insurrection' with a better chance of success than Trump's failed power grab last year.... 'The [Republican] party itself has become an anti-democratic force,' [said political scientist Steven Levitsky.]" ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: Though it gets little or no mention in the many articles reporters write about the ways state Republicans are giving themselves easy access to control of elections outcomes, Congressional Republicans are just as committed to stealing elections. Almost none of them support any kind of voting rights bill because they want GOP state legislatures to be able to throw out Democrat victories and make it harder for likely Democratic voters to vote. (in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to vote for one provision of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act; she has opposed other voting rights measures.)

Tom Hays & Larry Neumeister of the AP: "The British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted Wednesday of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by the American millionaire Jeffrey Epstein. The verdict capped a monthlong trial featuring sordid accounts of the sexual exploitation of girls as young as 14, told by four women who described being abused as teens in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein's palatial homes in Florida, New York and New Mexico." (Also linked yesterday evening.) ~~~

     ~~~ Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post: "The jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking of an individual under 18. She was found not guilty of enticement of one individual under 17.... Maxwell faces up to 65 years in prison. No sentencing date has been set."

Michael Sainato of the Guardian: "Workers say Amazon's "excessively rapid work pace", surveillance and disciplinary systems have created a dangerous environment[.]... Reports of high injury rates and high turnover rates at Amazon warehouses around the US as a result of immense productivity pressures and quota rates on workers have been documented by numerous media outlets and organizations over the past several years and confirmed by OSHA logs. Amazon shareholders have recently called for an independent safety audit of the company." MB: A little more than ten years ago I linked to a story researched & written by reporter Spencer Soper of Allentown, Pennsylvania's Morning Call that detailed the horrible working conditions at an Amazon warehouse in Allentown. That should have been enough to shame Amazon into making their warehouses worker-friendly, but a number of other stories written over the years about other Amazon warehouses, make it clear that Amazon kept up its bad practices everywhere.

Emily Yahr of the Washington Post on what happened when Ted Koppel went to "Mayberry": "... while Mayberry was not real, the city of Mount Airy, N.C., claims to be the prototype on which it was based, and still draws thousands of tourists every year looking to relive their beloved show.... [In] one of the most striking TV segments of the year..., Koppel was visibly taken aback by the fierce nostalgia for a time and place that literally never existed -- and how it connects to the misinformation that has infiltrated America's politics.... 'The Andy Griffith Show' ... a viewing experience that Koppel compared to 'chomping down on a marshmallow, was an antidote to everything going on in the world at the time, which never showed up on the sunny series: Tens of thousands of American troops killed in Vietnam War. Race riots throughout the country. Assassinations." The scene on the tour bus is the clincher. MB: Those dimwits on the bus would be all surprised if they knew that in 2008, Andy Griffith & Ron Howard (and Henry Winkler) cut a 3-minute ad endorsing Barack Obama. ~~~

Marie: As an indicator of how frivolous our society is, all day Wednesday, the New York Times featured football fan John Madden's obituary above that of former Senate Leader Harry Reid. By late in the day, Reid's obituary had been relegated to a spot near the bottom of the page and there were two new feature stories about Madden. BTW, former Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said on MSNBC that at a budget committee hearing he once attended, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asked with some incredulity at Republican callousness, "What kind of Christian religion would condone cutting food stamps?" Franken answered, "Southern Baptist." Harry Reid was the only senator who laughed.

David Li & Whitney Lee of NBC News: "A heavily armed California man was arrested in Iowa after he told law enforcement officers that he would 'do whatever it takes' to kill government leaders on his 'hit list,' including President Joe Biden and his chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, authorities said in court papers Wednesday. The man, Kuachua Brillion Xiong, 25, has been held in the Pottawattamie County Jail in Council Bluffs since Thursday, according to sheriff's records. Xiong was pulled over Dec. 21 in Cass County and found to have an AR-15 rifle, ammunition, loaded magazines, body armor and medical kits, Secret Service Agent Justin Larson wrote in a criminal complaint."

The Pandemic, Ctd.

The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Thursday are here: "With a caseload nearly twice that of the worst single days of last winter, the United States shattered its record for new daily coronavirus cases, a milestone that may still fall short of describing the true toll of the Delta and Omicron variants because testing has slowed over the holidays.... Record caseloads are being reported in a long list of U.S. cities where vaccination rates are relatively high, including New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta and Detroit. Experts say there are two reasons for the high numbers in urban areas: population density and more testing." ~~~

     ~~~ The Washington Post's live Covid-19 updates for Thursday are here: "Coronavirus cases are soaring across the United States as the more transmissible omicron variant spreads, but hospitalizations remain 'comparatively low,' Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters Wednesday."

Carl Zimmer of the New York Times: "A Johnson & Johnson booster shot provided strong protection against the Omicron variant, greatly reducing the risk of hospitalization, according to a clinical trial in South Africa. The study, which compared more than 69,000 boosted health care workers with a corresponding group of unvaccinated South Africans, found that two shots of the vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization from Omicron by about 85 percent. In comparison, another study in South Africa found that two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduced the risk of hospitalization by about 70 percent."

Florida. Where's Ron? AP: "The mayor of one of Florida's largest counties on Tuesday blasted Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, saying he has been missing in action during the latest wave of COVID-19.... [Jerry Demings,] the mayor of Orange County, home to Orlando, said local governments had been forced to figure out on their own, without help from the state, how to respond to the omicron variant that has rapidly overtaken the delta variant as the dominant strain of the coronavirus in Florida.... 'Our residents, all Florida residents, should be outraged and they should ask the question, "Where is our state? Where is our governor? Where is Ron DeSantis now?" When is the last time you saw the governor do a press briefing on COVID-19?' said Demings, a Democrat." MB: As far as I can tell (and I'm having a horrible time loading the page so I could be wrong), the story doesn't mention that Mayor Demings' wife Val is running for governor against DeSantis. ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: According to a guest on MSNBC yesterday, Ron really is missing. He hasn't been seen in public in days, and a video his office recently put of his dining (unmasked, of course) at a popular restaurant was made 12 days earlier. Maybe Cancun Ted knows where Ron is.

Oklahoma. Grow Up, Guv. Andrew Jeong & Alex Horton of the Washington Post: "A federal court Tuesday denied a lawsuit filed by Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) that challenged the Pentagon's military-wide coronavirus vaccination mandate by asking that the requirement be suspended for his state's National Guard members. Judge Stephen P. Friot sided with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who has said the mandate is needed to maintain a healthy force that is ready to act quickly. Friot also disagreed with Stitt's assertion that the Pentagon was overstepping its constitutional authority, noting that Guard members are already required to receive nine immunizations. 'Adding a tenth ... vaccine to the list of nine that all service members are already required to take would hardly amount to "an enormous and transformative expansion [of the] regulatory authority" the Secretary of Defense already possesses,' he wrote in his ruling."

Beyond the Beltway

Michigan. Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: "A decade after Michigan Republicans gave themselves seemingly impregnable majorities in the state Legislature by drawing districts that heavily favored their party, a newly created independent commission approved maps late Tuesday that create districts so competitive that Democrats have a fighting chance of recapturing the State Senate for the first time since 1984. The work of the new commission, which includes Democrats, Republicans and independents and was established through a citizen ballot initiative, stands in sharp contrast to the type of hyperpartisan extreme gerrymandering that has swept much of the country, exacerbating political polarization -- and it may highlight a potential path to undoing such gerrymandering. With lawmakers excluded from the mapmaking process, Michigan's new districts will much more closely reflect the overall partisan makeup of the hotly contested battleground state."

News Ledes

Colorado. New York Times: "Fast-moving wildfires fanned by powerful winds swept across parts of suburban Boulder County, Colo., on Thursday, prompting the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and burning at least 500 homes, a shopping complex and a hotel, the authorities said. The Boulder County Office of Emergency Management announced evacuation orders for Superior and Louisville, urging residents to leave quickly, as the sky turned orange, ash swirled in the wind, and buildings were engulfed in flames. Residents in parts of Broomfield and Westminster, Colo., were also ordered to evacuate. Gov. Jared Polis declared a state of emergency in response to the grass fires, allowing the state to tap emergency funds and to deploy state resources, including the Colorado National Guard. He said wind gusts of up to 110 miles per hour had pushed the fires with astonishing speed across suburban subdivisions where residents are not as accustomed to the kind of wildfires that have frequently menaced mountain towns and forests across the West." ~~~

     ~~~ An AP story is here.

Biden's Booming Economy, Ctd. CNBC: "Initial filings for unemployment insurance dipped last week and remained close to their lowest level in more than 50 years, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Jobless claims for the week ended Dec. 25 totaled 198,000, less than the 205,000 Dow Jones forecast and a dip of 8,000 from the previous period.″