12.31 Michael Gerson in the Post: “We must ensure that the aspirations of people such as Hawley — who has made the madness more mainstream — come to nothing. This begins with a simple and sad recognition: The ambitions of this knowledgeable, talented young man are now a threat to the republic.
12.31 Washington Post: Sen. Josh Hawley opened a new front in his war with the Republican establishment — vowing to embrace Trump’s efforts to question the election result by lodging a challenge during Congress’s Jan. 6 electoral college tally. The effort, done against the wishes of McConnell and other party honchos, will not change the outcome of the election, but it has solidified his embrace of Trump and heightened questions about how far Hawley would go to advance his presidential ambitions. Rep. Paul Mitchell, who left the Republican Party this month just weeks before retiring from the House in protest of Trump’s baseless efforts to contest the election, tweeted that Hawley “is just getting in the queue early” for the 2024 presidential race. “Principles are optional or at least malleable,” Mitchell wrote. . . . Hawley’s efforts have captured attention across the political spectrum, including by many on the left who are watching his emerging populist agenda with at least some degree of intrigue, if not outright admiration. “There’s some real rethinking going on on the right, and he’s at the center of it,” said Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project and a leftist scholar of populist political movements. “This is a conservative Republican who just happens to be a populist and does not like libertarians, and, philosophically, that brings him a lot closer to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in his approach to corporate power. And that is a real threat to the Democratic Party and the left wing.”
12.30 The San Antonio Spurs’ Becky Hammon becomes the first woman to lead an NBA team during a regular season game. She took the reins in the second quarter Wednesday, after head coach Gregg Popovich was ejected from a game against the Los Angeles Lakers.
12.27 Dave Barry in his year-in-review piece in The Washington Post: “ Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo unveils a poster, for sale at $11.50, commemorating, in a cartoony manner, New York’s pandemic experience. Really. It is as if the White Star Line sold whimsical souvenirs of the Titanic.”
12.24
GAMC Remarks
Holiday 2021 DRAFT
December 2020
My Friends, as we gather this holiday season, we remember the great work and good fellowship we have shared during 2021. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
This has been a difficult year. We have worked hard and struggled much. What has been the reward for our efforts? The New York Post tinted my face green and called me the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. That is a sad development. Nobody wants to be a Grinch. I want to be jolly and merry.
In order to accomplish that, today I am announcing Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Guidelines for Having a Jolly, Merry Christmas During a Pandemic.
First, family gatherings will be permitted. However, participants are limited to five people. They must be seated around a U-shaped table, and separated by plastic shields. If people do not have plastic shields, they may be wrapped in Saran Wrap. But the key is the five person limit. If you want to zoom in Mayor DiBlasio or Dr. Fauci, that’s up to you.
And here’s a important wellness tip from our Commissioner of Health, Dr. Howard Zucker. This year, says Dr. Zucker, when you clean up after your holiday feast, do NOT seal the leftovers in Tupperware. Instead, seal yourselves in Tupperware. Much safer.
Second, you will be permitted to exchange presents. A present exchange tent has been set up in New Rochelle. People will be allowed to drive up, hand their gifts to a member of the National Guard, and then circle around through Larchmont, Mamaroneck, Rye, then west through Scarsdale, and then back to the tent in New Rochelle, where they will receive presents from another member of the National Guard, before exiting through Pelham Manor. The whole process shouldn’t take more than six hours. People will then be allowed to take the presents home and open them. In June. Outside. Under an ultra violet light. If they have been vaccinated.
Third, you will be allowed to drink egg nog. . . . . . Provided that it is the official New York State Egg Nog. Brought to you by the same wonderful guys at the Clinton Correctional Facility who made the Official New York State Hand Sanitizer, Official New York State Egg Nog is made from equal measures of eggs, cream, sugar, hydrochoraquine and hand sanitizer. We got that recipe off the White House website, so you know it has to be good.
Fourth, state residents will be allowed to kiss under the mistletoe. . . . . .Provided they maintain a distance of six feet from the mistletoe. And from one another. And keep their masks on. And don’t enjoy it. Those regulations apply only if state residents want to kiss other state residents. You can kiss any out-of-state residents you want to, providing they remain out of state.
Finally, here is the best news. Santa Claus will be permitted to visit New York State residents this year. Sort of. Two weeks ago, in order to make sure the people of New York would not be denied a Merry Christmas, the State Police sequestered Santa and his entire team of reindeer in a Holiday Inn in Lackawanna. We hoped he would be good to go. Unfortunately, one of the reindeer—Donder, I’ve been told– snuck out on Friday night and went to a Buffalo Wild Wings. He was exposed to the virus, which means that Santa and his entire reindeer crew have been placed in isolation until next week.
But have no fear. We have a back up plan. On Christmas Eve, I will fill in for Santa. Yes, the man who the New York Post called the Grinch will take the reins of the sleigh. Who will fill in for the reindeer? Well, all I can say is On Gareth, On Davies, On Kelly and Jill! On Feeney, On Peter, On Reid Sims and Will! And just to make the everything goes well, we will be guided by Malatras the red-nosed chancellor.
As always, we will get the job done. Here is wishing you a NY Tough Christmas, and a Smart, United, Disciplined and Loving New Year..
12.17 28 inches of snow
12.14 Ron Klain on MSNBC: “We’re still in the middle of what will be a very, very, very dark winter. There are probably tens of thousands of deaths left before the end of the year and more deaths after that.”
12.14 First COVID vaccine administered in US
12.14 Electoral College validates Biden‘s election
12.13 E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post: “The 18 Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republican House members who asked the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the 2020 election may thus be more impudent than the Civil War seditionists in whose steps they followed. Here is a translation of what they were telling a majority of the nation’s electorate and voters in states representing 62 of President-elect Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes: “We don’t like the president and vice president you chose so we simply won’t accept the result of a free election. We’ll deploy lies and phony statistics to justify imposing our will on the rest of the country. The heck with democracy. But we’ll continue to enjoy the Social Security checks, the farm subsidies and all the other money that states that voted for Biden send our way.”
12.13 John LeCarre dies at 89
12.13 Cleveland announces that it will phase out the name Indians
12.11 Supreme Court denies rejects suit by Texas to overturn elections in four Biden states.
12.10 Steve Schmidt on MSNBC: “The Republican Party is an organized conspiracy for the purposes of maintaining power for self-interest, and the self-interest of its donor class. There is no fidelity to the American ideal… There has never been a force that has achieved power, or is within reach of achieving power in the next election, that’s been so hostile to the history, the founding, the essence and the entire meaning of the country, as is this Trump and Trumpist movement that has taken over lock, stock, and barrel the Republican Party. It’s no longer dedicated to American democracy. It is dedicated to Trump and Trumpism and to his family, to defense of his indecencies, his autocratic manner, his corruptions, an apologist for the profound damage he has done.”
12.7 Chuck Yeager dies at 97.
12.7 Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic: “Much debate has ensued about what exactly to call whatever Trump is attempting right now, and about how worried we should be. It’s true, the whole thing seems ludicrous—the incoherent lawsuits, the late-night champagne given to official election canvassers in Trump hotels, the tweets riddled with grammatical errors and weird capitalization. Trump has been broadly acknowledged as “norm shattering” and some have argued that this is just more of his usual bluster, while others have pointed out terminological issues with calling his endeavors a coup. Coup may not quite capture what we’re witnessing in the United States right now, but there’s also a danger here: Punditry can tend to focus too much on decorum and terminology, like the overachieving students so many of us once were, conflating the ridiculous with the unserious. The incoherence and incompetence of the attempt do not change its nature, however, nor do those traits allow us to dismiss it or ignore it until it finally fails on account of that incompetence. . . . The U.S. president is trying to steal the election, and, crucially, his party either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it.”
12.7 Peter Wehner in The Atlantic: According to one poll, 70 percent of Republicans say they don’t believe that the 2020 election was free and fair. According to another, 77 percent of Trump backers say President-elect Joe Biden won because of fraud. And a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 68 percent of Republicans said they were concerned that the 2020 election was “rigged,” and that only 29 percent believed that Biden had “rightfully won.” More than half of Republicans said Trump “rightfully won” but the election was stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud that favored Biden. This may be Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy—a nihilistic political culture, one that is tribalistic, distrustful, and sometimes delusional, swimming in conspiracy theories. The result is that Americans are disoriented and frustrated, fearful of and often enraged at one another.
12.7 Bob Dylan sells his entire publishing catalog of more than 600 songs to Universal Music for $300 million.
12.5 Trump in Valdosta, Georgia: “They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, but we’ll still win it. And they’re going to try to rig this election too . . . They’re trying to convince us we lost. We didn’t lose…All these swings states I’m fighting, I won them all by a lot. We’re all victims. Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims. Every one of you.”
12.5 Lindsay Boylan on Twitter: “Most toxic team environment? Working for @NYGovCuomo.”
12.2 Asked to what he attributes the many dropped passes of his receivers, Steeler coach Mike Tomlin replied: “Us sucking.”
12.1 Attorney General William P. Barr: “[I have] not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
12.1 Gabriel Sterling, a voting systems manager for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, at the State Capitol in Atlanta: “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. . . . Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. That shouldn’t be too much to ask for people who ask us to give them responsibility.”
12.1 A day after saying on The Howie Carr Show, “Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”, Trump attorney Joe diGenova portrayed the remarks as a joke. “For anyone listening to the Howie Carr Show, it was obvious that my remarks were sarcastic and made in jest. I, of course, wish Mr. Krebs no harm. This was hyperbole in a political discourse.”
12.1 Trump via Tweet: “It’s been an amazing four years. We are trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”