…finally [DOT 31/12/20]

bring on the new year...

31/12/20 SplinterRIP 41

…so we get to be done with 2020

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-republicans-prefer-covid-tax-cuts-hikes-our-research-proves-they’re wrong

According to a December report issued jointly by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies using data compiled by Forbes, America’s billionaires hold roughly $4 trillion in wealth — a figure roughly double what the 165 million poorest Americans are collectively worth. The 10 richest billionaires have a combined net worth of more than $1 trillion.

It’s a stunning snapshot of how the pandemic has distorted large sections of the real economy and exacerbated the nation’s stubbornly persistent economic inequality — one that persisted, largely along racial and ethnic lines — even in a pre-pandemic economy with unemployment at a half-century low.
[…]
A key driver of billionaire wealth concentration was the unprecedented monetary policy response to stabilize financial markets in the early days of the pandemic, which spurred the stock market’s gravity-defying rise. When Wall Street was on the verge of panic in March, the Federal Reserve intervened with the promise of low rates and an open-ended liquidity spigot.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/wall-street-s-best-year-ever-why-pandemic-has-been

…but is 2020 going to be done with us?

The sense of relief Democrats felt with Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election was not the same as a feeling of victory.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/30/democrats-party-joe-biden-working-class-americans

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-administration-speeds-midnight-rule-making-creating-hurdles-biden

…whichever way you look at it this last year has been a roller coaster

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/30/ive-never-seen-anything-like-it-2020-smashes-records-in-global-markets

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/30/california-wildfires-north-complex-record

…& what with one thing or another there’s been a fair bit of burying what in other years might well have been the lede

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/30/4-most-undersold-political-stories-2020

…& it’s going to be a while before we’re winning vis a vis the virus

The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/current-rate-it-ll-be-10-years-before-americans-adequately-vaccinated

…funny how they can be a hurry to fuck shit up but drag their feet when it comes to doing what’s so obviously needed

The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed blamed a variety of factors including snowstorms, the holidays, storage challenges and general inexperience for the slower-than-expected rollout of Covid-19 vaccines this month.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lower-we-hoped-trump-officials-ask-patience-vaccine

…but hopefully the new guy can pick up the pace

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday criticized the speed of vaccine distribution under the Trump administration and promised to step up the pace when he takes office, while delivering a sober warning about the toll of the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/us/politics/biden-coronavirus-vaccines.html

…& with a bit of luck there might be a win…or preferably two…come january

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/30/warnock-georgia-senate-runoff-black-church

…especially if they keep up this kind of crazy

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-calls-for-georgia-gov-brian-kemp-a-fellow-republican-to-resign/2020/12/30/story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/gop-senator-object-electoral-college-results-forcing-congress-vote-overturning-biden-win

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/29/sorry-president-trump-january-6-is-not-an-election-do-over

President Trump recently tweeted that “the ‘Justice’ Department and FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud,” followed by these more ominous lines: “Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.”

On Jan. 6, the vice president will preside as Congress counts the Electoral College’s votes. Let’s hope that he doesn’t do the unthinkable — and unconstitutional. [NYT]

…but then of course there’s motherfucking mitch

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, said on Wednesday that the chamber would not consider the issue of larger stimulus checks separately from two other demands issued by President Trump: the investigation of election security and the removal of legal protections for social media platforms. The decision all but dooms the effort to increase direct payments to $2,000.

McConnell says there is ‘no realistic path’ for an immediate vote on $2,000 checks. [NYT]

McConnell is done providing help to the U.S. economy, however, now that President-elect Joe Biden will be taking office in just three weeks.

But it’s a little too early to kill the idea just yet, so McConnell has put together a bill raising the stimulus to $2,000 per person but joining it to two of President Trump’s priorities — a commission to investigate voter fraud and a repeal of Section 230, the latter an obvious poison pill that would ensure his bill’s defeat.

In case you haven’t followed that particular debate, some conservatives, including the president, have seized on Section 230 in their displeasure at the fact that Twitter sometimes puts a stern label on Trump’s most egregious lies. The problem is that a sudden repeal of the law could drive every social media company out of business, because it would make it possible for people to hold Facebook or Twitter legally liable for anything anyone said on their platforms.

There are certainly reforms Congress could pass to address the sewer of misinformation, conspiracy theories and incitement that those platforms have become (particularly Facebook). But tossing a repeal of Section 230 into a stimulus bill without any kind of planning or deliberation is not the way to do it, which McConnell knows perfectly well.

Instead, the point for him is to just run out the clock. The 116th Congress comes to an end on Jan. 3. The Georgia runoff elections happen two days later.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/30/why-mitch-mcconnell-wants-raise-your-hopes-then-dash-them

…running out the clock…there’s maybe a little more of that going around than there ought to be

President Trump ran out the clock Wednesday in his long-running legal battle to shield his tax and financial records from Congress when a federal appeals court declined to rule on the matter and sent the case back to a lower court.

The brief order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit does not mean that the effort by House Democrats to access Trump’s business records is over. But the congressional term will expire and Trump will leave office in January without having his financial data turned over to lawmakers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/trump-taxes-house-lawsuit/2020/12/30/story.html

The media echo chamber which now insists that Trump will be a titanic political force for years to come sounds increasingly similar to the one that, five years ago, claimed he was no more than a flash-in-the-pan celebrity candidate. The glaring underestimation of Trump in the past and probable overestimation of his prospects today actually stem from the same error: the belief that Trump’s political appeal rests mainly on his personality cult, not on any association with a certain set of policy arguments.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/29/donald-trump-influence-presidency-office

…a good few of which are fundamentally lousy arguments

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/30/trumps-blackwater-pardons-an-affront-to-justice-say-un-experts

…so where does this land on the affronts-to-justice scale?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/30/us-approves-sale-of-$290m-in-bombs-to-saudi-arabia

…or this?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/30/seattle-national-archives-indigenous-people-property-sale

…there’ll more than likely be a few more where these came from, anyway

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/30/best-legal-lines-2020

…guess it depends who’s resolved to do what

…all in all it’s certainly been one of those years

…so I guess we just hope the next one will be better

…I mean…it doesn’t seem like a high bar?

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41 Comments

  2. Another feature of 2020, the Year Like No Other, is, for me anyway, it won’t feel like it’s over tomorrow. We won’t be having anyone over tonight nor will we go anywhere. The Georgia elections will be held on the 5th but wi knows how long that will take to resolve. The Electoral College votes will be certified on the 6th, probably with some resistance but hopefully not enough to trigger a Constitutional crisis. Biden gets sworn in on the 20th and gets to work but since there has been not much a traditional transitional period at all, it’ll take some time to get up to speed.
     
    This year I am going to go with Lunar (“Chinese”) New Year, which is February 12th. It will be the Year of the Ox, which apparently is a lucky year. I certainly fucking hope so. 
     
    I was born in the Year of the Rabbit. What does this mean?
     
    Intellectual, scholarly, and learned, Rabbits can enjoy a good career as well as wealth.
    With a pair of dexterous hands, Rabbits have a gift for calligraphy and painting as well as tailoring and cooking.

  3. 10 years?….uh wow…i kinda feel like you’d almost have to be trying to take that long about it
    anyways….quiet years end here so far…heard a couple fireworks..couple illegal parties got broken up..but so far..nothing interesting is happening..
    course its only 1 pm and most people arent drunk yet
    no public transport after 8pm tho…so i guess we got put on a soft curfew here


  4. Mayor Quimby played by Ontario Finance Minister Rod Phillips who fake newsed his messages to his constituents while vacationing in St. Barts.
    What makes this worse is that this was the 2nd trip he made OUTSIDE the country in the middle of a pandemic.
    Lots of people are pissed.   Mayor Quimby’s Boss, Fat Tony, er, Douglie Ford claims he didn’t know that Quimby went on vacation.  Playing stupid doesn’t work when he claims he’s the boss/daddy of Ontario… trying the old authoriatarian CEO excuse.
     

  5. “The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed blamed a variety of factors”
     
    Well, of course they did. I mean, who could have foreseen that we might need a vaccination plan? And it’s not like we had months of shutdown time to nail down the details … oh, wait. 

    • Try to follow along:
       
      Robert F. Kennedy had 11 children. His son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been an anti-vaxxer for years, God knows why. His daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, has a daughter, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer (not to be confused with her aunt, Kerry Kennedy, another RFK daughter, who’s the ex-wife of Emperor Andrew I of the Empire of the State of New York*) is a doctor at New York Presbyterian and published an Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday saying her uncle is wrong about vaccines, so that was interesting. 
       
      * A great mystery about the Kennedy-Cuomo divorce is that both are still alive. I wouldn’t want to cross any member of either family, but I suppose they’re matched and probably afraid of each other’s family. A Democratic display of Mutual Assured Destruction. 

      • …I nearly put that in the DOT…but I figured we mostly don’t need to be told the anti-vaccine argument is nonsense

        …now I feel like I missed an opportunity to tempt you into a dynastic digression about the kennedy clan, though

        • The problem with keeping track of the Kennedys is that there are hundreds of them, mostly marginally employed in “public interest” fields which somehow keep them in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. Part of this is “doing well by doing good” (through fundraising for their causes and paying themselves lucrative non-profit-executive salaries). It’s partly because the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, must have been one of the greatest financial minds of his generation and their financial advisors are extraordinarily canny, so the various trusts to this day throw off a ton of money, but like Trump, the finances are all very opaque. 
           
          On the other hand, they cling to that Kennedy name like someone thrown overboard would cling to a life preserver. Take the good doctor who wrote the Op-Ed appealing to science and reason. Kerry Kennedy Meltzer. Mom’s maiden name is Kennedy, Dad’s is Townsend. Her maiden name would, no doubt, have been Kerry Kennedy Townsend. Presumably she married a guy named Meltzer. Where did the paternal name go? If she has a daughter I’m sure she’ll be X Kennedy Meltzer, and the Townsend lineage with be extinguished. So if you’re an armchair Kennedy watcher, and someone you’ve never heard of gets an Op-Ed published in the New York Times or founds a public interest group and they are Mary Kennedy Smith, as opposed to Mary K. Smith, you can be sure they are a member of the clan. 
           
          Andrew Cuomo somewhat famously has three daughters, he’s started mentioning them often during this Pandemic Year. Their last names are Kennedy Cuomo. Now what if one of them marries into a prominent family, like the Rockefellers (of which there are also hundreds) so now she is X Kennedy Cuomo Rockefeller. She has a daughter, who is Y Kennedy Cuomo Rockefeller. Then she gets married. Presumably she would Y Kennedy Cuomo Rockefeller [husband’s name, if she even bothers taking her husband’s last name.] Now we’re getting into parodic German nobility title territory.
           
          God I’m bored. 

          • The finances are always what fascinate me. I try to imagine having such obscene amounts of money that I could set up trusts that would support hundreds of non-working distant family members for generations. That’s literally a financial advisory industry all by itself to support a single family line. 
             
            I used to write a newsletter for an old, old financial advisory firm in Boston that only handled the super-rich. It was strange because they didn’t really need a newsletter, as near as I could tell. They didn’t advertise — they only accepted clients by recommendation. There were about 8 financial advisors, and each one would get a “byline” (I wrote it all) every other issue. They’d print and mail about 300 copies every quarter to their existing clients.
             
            I don’t think they added a single client the three years I wrote that newsletter, though I don’t think they’d tell me. But I don’t remember adding any names to the mailing list, which was top-secret, obviously. It was this secret little club that you only found out about if you knew the right person. 

          • That Kennedy surname gives people inflated confidence, like thinking they can challenge Ed Markey just because it’s Massachusetts and they have Kennedy in their name.  Every interview I heard from Joe this primary season was extremely light on any real reason to run as a primary challenger. In the end, the name Ocasio Cortez carried more influence than the Kennedy name did in that race.

          • The name thing makes sense though. Keeping your maternal line name shouldn’t be worthy of ridicule, especially if it’s something meaningful to you or close to your identity. I don’t think ill of any of them for hanging onto the Kennedy name, but I do roll my eyes at how much they lean on that name for the prestige. (Joe can fuck right off for challenging Markey.) 

      • “Try to follow along”
         
        It sounds to me like you’re saying we should probably get medical advice from trained medical professionals rather than doddering old idiots. Shit, that’s never going to catch on. Next you’ll be telling me I shouldn’t remove my own gall bladder.

    • …I hear that…& I confess I do tend to be unsure that the upside of the big social media platforms outweighs the downside…but the section 230 stuff confuses me on a couple of counts

      …the first is that I don’t love the idea that bullshit nuisance lawsuits would arguably become a go-to move to drive places like this off the internet because some asshole or other decides they don’t like a thing somebody said…I tend to lean towards the idea that I’d rather live in a world where people get to say things I don’t like than one where all speech is constrained by the loudest (or most deep-pocketed) among us…because those people are not (in my experience) the ones I’m keenest to hear from…& I think a diet of prevailing opinion & a dearth of dissent might be a terrifying recipe that some of them might be inclined to invest in heavily

      …hopefully that’s just residual bitterness about what became of gawker/kinja/splinter/deadspin & what have you…but I dunno…after the last few years I can’t shake the feeling?

      …& the other one that really stumps me is the traditional “how the fuck do you even think that works?” bit…in what world does it pan out that donnie dumbass gets to fuck up twitter because he got called on the fact he’s routinely talking utter bullshit on their platform…but is somehow still insulated from droves of people coming after him for, well…routinely talking utter bullshit on that platform…bullshit that is often trivially easy to demonstrably prove to be untrue & harmful

      …it probably shouldn’t but that’s the sort of inherently self-contradictory shit that it winds me up to discover is a successful mechanism for “energising his base” or whatever we’re calling it these days

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