2.28 A six foot plus tall gold fiberglass statue of Trump was on sale at CPAC for $100,000.
2.28 EJ Dionne Jr. in the Post: “Trump’s takeover of the party in 2016 was undeniably built on long-standing habits of opposition to immigration, the courting of racial backlash and the waging of culture wars. But Trump also spoke to the exhaustion of the old themes of Reaganism. He did so inconsistently and often incoherently between 2016 and 2020. But he put pure economic conservatism, free trade and foreign intervention on trial. (He again attacked “endless wars” at CPAC.) He stressed big infrastructure spending (which he never delivered), defended Medicare and Social Security, and cast a rising China as a dangerous enemy to the well-being of working Americans. Episodically, especially in launching his scattershot trade wars, he reminded voters of the ideologically nondoctrinaire persona he had cultivated. But there was no consistency except on “own the libs” issues. They again dominated his speech on Sunday with its requisite attacks on the “fake news media,” “politically correct far-left indoctrination training,” “far left lunacy” and, of course, “cancel culture.” He even charged that Biden’s transgender rights policies would “destroy women’s sports.” The reality is that Trump is not the sort to devote himself to a lot of rethinking. His politics are all about himself — which means that the true litmus test on the right has become accepting his lies about what happened in the 2020 election. . . . The resumption of the Trump Show reminded the GOP that it has the worst of all worlds: a cult of Trump without any of the benefits that might have come from a serious inquiry into why the old conservatism had been unable to stop him. Party leaders in their hearts know that they can’t win with Trump and Trumpism — and they can’t live without him and his followers.”
2.28 Axios: Charlotte Bennett, 25, an executive assistant and health adviser in the Cuomo administration until November, told The Times that the governor, 63, had harassed her during the height of the state’s COVID fight, including asking whether “she had ever had sex with older men.” The most disturbing encounter came June 5, when she was alone with Cuomo in his Capitol office, The Times reports: [S]he said the governor had asked her numerous questions about her personal life, including whether she thought age made a difference in romantic relationships, and had said that he was open to relationships with women in their 20s — comments she interpreted as clear overtures to a sexual relationship. Bennett said Cuomo complained about being lonely during the pandemic. She said he mentioned that he “can’t even hug anyone,” then asked her: “Who did I last hug?” Cuomo said in a statement that he intended to act as a mentor: “I never made advances toward Ms. Bennett nor did I ever intend to act in any way that was inappropriate.”
2.22 Covid fatalities in US pass 500,000. Biden: “I know that when you stare at that empty chair around the kitchen table, it brings it all back — no matter how long ago it happened — as if it just happened that moment you looked at that empty chair. …And the everyday things — the small things, the tiny things — that you miss the most. That scent when you open the closet. That park you go by that you used to stroll in. That movie theater where you met. The morning coffee you shared together. The bend in his smile. The perfect pitch to her laugh.”
2.22 Tom Vinciguerra dies at 57
2.19 Less than ten hours after fleeing to Cancun to avoid the power crisis in Texas, Ted Cruz flies home.
2.18 Rep. Lauren Boebert attended a virtual House committee hearing Thursday with at least three large firearms prominently displayed behind her as she and her colleagues debated whether to ban lawmakers from bringing guns to committee meetings.
2.18 The pandemic drove life expectancy in the U.S. to its lowest level since 2006, according to preliminary CDC data. U.S. life expectancy was about 78 years in the first half of 2020. In 2019, it was roughly 79 years. Men can expect to live an average of 75 years, compared to 81 years for women. Both lost about a year off of their life expectancy in the first months of the pandemic. This is the largest drop since WW II
2.17 Depart the Executive Chamber
2.17 Rush Limbaugh dies at 70. The Washington Post offered this long Limbaugh statement: “[T]here are a lot of people in this country who are conservative. There are a lot of those people that won’t admit it, for whatever reason, don’t want anybody to know it, for whatever reason or another, and therefore they live and vote and do things for the most part which are conservative, certainly not liberal. But that’s not the glue that unites them all. If it were, if conservatism — this is the big shock — if conservatism were the glue, the belief and understanding of deep but commonly understood conservative principles, if that’s what defined people as conservative and was the glue that made the conservative movement a big movement, then Trump would have no chance. . . .Because, whatever he is he’s not and never has been known as a doctrinaire conservative. But neither is John McCain. Neither is 90 percent of the Republican Party, so it’s not a criticism. It’s not an allegation. The point is that if conservatism were this widely understood, deeply held belief system that united conservatives . . . . then outsiders like Trump wouldn’t stand a prayer of getting support from people. Yet he is. Therefore, it’s safe to conclude that there are other things at play here that make people conservative. And look, I’m gonna go back to it. The thing that’s in front of everybody’s face and it’s apparently so hard to believe, it’s this united, virulent opposition to the left and the Democrat Party and Barack Obama. And I, for the life of me, don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that.”
2.17 The Post reports, “As millions of people across Texas struggled to stay warm Tuesday amid massive cold-weather power outages, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directed his ire at one particular failure in the state’s independent energy grid: frozen wind turbines.” There is one problem: That is not remotely true (as you might have guessed from a state with an enormous oil and gas sector). “The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.” In other words, rotten policy and management are to blame. “What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans,” The Post reports. “It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.”
2.16 Steve Bannon tells a Boston audience that he hopes to see Trump run for Congress in 2022, then run for speaker of the House (which Bannon presumes Republicans will win), then preside over the impeachment of President Biden: “We totally get rid of Nancy Pelosi, and the first act of President Trump as speaker will be to impeach Joe Biden for his illegitimate activities of stealing the presidency,”
2.14 Chris Churchill in the Times Union: “Cuomo. . . could have admitted the state’s nursing home policy was a mistake, and moved on. New Yorkers would have understood and moved on. But with Nixonian penchant for secrecy and paranoia, Cuomo couldn’t do it. Now his reputation is in tatters.”
2.13 David Frum in The Atlantic: The 57–43 margin wasn’t enough to convict under the Constitution. It wasn’t enough to formally disqualify Trump from ever again seeking office in the United States. But practically? It will do as a solemn and eternal public repudiation of Trump’s betrayal of his oath of office. You say that you are disappointed? That a mere rebuke was not enough? That justice was not done? It wasn’t. But now see the world from the other side, through the eyes of those who defend Trump or even want him to run again. Their hope was to dismiss this impeachment as partisan, as founded on fake evidence, as hypocritical and anti-constitutional—to present this verdict as an act of oppression by one half of the country against the other. That hope was banished today. It’s not half against half. It’s a clear American majority—including a sizable part of the Republican Senate caucus—against a minority. And even many of the senators who voted to acquit went on record to condemn Trump as an outlaw and a seditionist. Again and again, the Trumpists lost key votes. Five Republican senators and then six rejected the argument that the Senate lacked jurisdiction. Five Republican senators rejected the vote against witnesses. The accusing majority consistently stuck together. The condoning minority repeatedly splintered. The 57 votes against Trump silence any complaint that he was condemned on some partisan basis or by some procedural unfairness. It crushes his truculent lawyers’ claim that the argument against Trump was mere chicanery. The senators who voted to acquit are the ones likely to justify their decision on some strained, narrow, technical ground. The number who truly believed Trump innocent of the charges brought against him is surely smaller than the 43 who voted to acquit. Statements by senators such as Mitch McConnell and Rob Portman show that their votes did not match their thoughts.
2.13 The Senate finds Trump guilty by a vote of 57-43, a number insufficient to convict him. “It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters, and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance, and persecute, blacklist, cancel and suppress all people and viewpoints with whom or which they disagree,” the former commander-in-chief said.
2.12 George Will in the Post: The Framers are, to the 45th president, mere rumors. They, however, knew him, as a type — a practitioner of what Alexander Hamilton (in Federalist 68) disdainfully called “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.”
2.11 NY Post: Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors. The stunning admission of a coverup was made by secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football. . . .He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes. He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.” In addition to attacking Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors, DeRosa said, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us. And basically, we froze,” she told the lawmakers on the call. Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us. . . . That played a very large role into this.” After dropping the bombshell, DeRosa asked for “a little bit of appreciation of the context” and offered what appears to be the Cuomo administration’s first apology for its handling of nursing homes amid the pandemic. But instead of a mea culpa to the grieving family members of more than 13,000 dead seniors or the critics who say the Health Department spread COVID-19 in the care facilities with a March 25 state Health Department directive that nursing homes admit infected patients, DeRosa tried to make amends with the fellow Democrats for the political inconvenience it caused them. “So we do apologize,” she said. “I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.” Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried immediately rejected DeRosa’s expression of remorse, according to the recording. “I don’t have enough time today to explain all the reasons why I don’t give that any credit at all.”
2.11 David Frum in The Atlantic: Over almost eight hours, the House managers presented a detailed timeline of Trump’s culpability for the January 6 attack. They showed how Trump started arguing in mid-summer 2020 that any result other than his own reelection should be treated as a “fraud” and a “steal.” They showed the intensifying violence of his rhetoric on TV and Twitter through November and December. And they itemized how Trump repeatedly and forcefully summoned supporters to Washington on January 6 to stop the final certification of the vote in Congress. Then they played a minute-by-minute juxtaposition of Trump’s words of incitement on the day of the attack with videos of the violence of supporters who told cameras again and again that they acted on Trump’s orders, at Trump’s wishes. They showed how Trump went silent as the assault unfolded, how he ignored supporters who pleaded with him to call off the attack or call out the National Guard. They quoted Trump praising and thanking the insurrectionists even after he knew they had wounded police officers, and repeating the big lie that had set the insurrection in motion, the big lie that he had somehow won an election that he had actually lost by 7 million votes.The remorseless, crushing power of the House managers’ evidence, all backed by horrifying real-time audio and video recordings, shuttered any good-faith defense of Trump on the merits of the case. The constitutional defense—that it’s impossible to convict a president if he leaves office between his impeachment and his trial—was rejected by 56 senators yesterday, not least because it defies a quarter millennium of federal and state precedents. There is no defense. There is only complicity, whether motivated by weakness and fear or by shared guilt. And the House managers forced every Republican senator to feel that complicity from the inside out.
2.11 After reviewing police reports and court filings, a HuffPost investigation found that at least nine insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol have a history of violence against women ― ranging from domestic abuse accusations to prison time for sexual battery and criminal confinement.
2.10 Washington Post: Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.
2.10 The House managers of Trump‘s impeachment put on an extraordinary prosecution, showing the evolution of Trump’s rhetoric and actions as proof of his intentions and statements. Among the most striking revelations: that Trump’s campaign spent $50 million to promote attendance at the rally; and that after Trump learned from Tommy Tuberville that Mike Pence was fleeing the Capitol, Trump tweeted that Pence had betrayed him, a tweet which was red before the rioters.
2.7 Charles Cooper in the Wall Street Journal: “During the impeachment of Bill Clinton, his defenders argued that his misconduct was ultimately private and didn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense. In the current impeachment of Donald Trump, that’s a hard argument to make with a straight face, since the then-president’s offenses, culminating in the siege of the Capitol, were obviously public and political. So his defenders claim instead that it’s unconstitutional for the Senate to try him now that he’s no longer in office. Forty-five Republican senators voted in favor of Sen. Rand Paul‘s motion challenging the Senate’s jurisdiction to try Trump. But scholarship on this question has matured substantially since that vote, and it has exposed the serious weakness of Mr. Paul’s analysis. The strongest argument against the Senate’s authority to try a former officer relies on Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, which provides: “The president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The trial’s opponents argue that because this provision requires removal, and because only incumbent officers can be removed, it follows that only incumbent officers can be impeached and tried. But the provision cuts against their interpretation. It simply establishes what is known in criminal law as a “mandatory minimum” punishment: If an incumbent officeholder is convicted by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, he is removed from office as a matter of law. . . . .[T]he argument would be “compelling” if removal from office were the only punishment, adding that the Constitution allows the Senate to disqualify those convicted of impeachable offenses from holding office again. Given that the Constitution permits the Senate to impose the penalty of permanent disqualification only on former officeholders, it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.”
2.7 The Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs 31-9 to win their secnd Super Bowl title. Tom Brady wins his seventh title in ten attempts.
2.7 I don’t know who Oki-Cospi is, but here she is dressed as Red Sonja, and I’d say she nails it.
2.7 George Schultz dies at 100.
2.6 Colin Jost on SNL: “Former social media influencer Donald Trump will not testify at his impeachment trial next week and I think I speak for all of us, when I say, come on, please? Give us one last show, man. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, put in your [hair] extensions and burst into that trial like it is Maury Povich and you are NOT THE FATHER!”
2.6 Michael Che on SNL: “Marjorie Taylor Greene looks like a mug shot of a former child star.”
2.5 Christopher Plummer dies at 91.
2.4 The House removes Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committees.
2.4 Marjorie Taylor Greene: “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”
2.3 Lila MacLellan in Quartz: “If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal,” Jeff Bezos told Amazon employees this week in a memo announcing the end of his reign as CEO. “People yawn,” he added. “That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.” If only Bezos had tried to induce yawns as an employer, too. He might have, for example, made it de rigueur for large companies to help employees in entry-level jobs work their way into a solid middle-class life, with strong wages and fair benefits. Talk about boring. Bezos wouldn’t have received as much attention as he has by earning over $90 billion during a public health crisis of biblical proportions, one in which at least 20,000 of his employees were infected with Covid-19. He could have averted outrage over Amazon, currently valued at $1.7 trillion, stealing $61 million in tips from its Amazon Flex delivery people. If he had accepted unionization drives at Amazon and its Whole Foods grocery chain, Bezos wouldn’t have seen his leadership team outed for attempting to run a smear campaign targeting an organizer. He could have avoided getting called out by the media—after raking in billions by serving customers who wanted to shop online in a pandemic—for trying to block mail-in voting during a potentially historic union election set to begin at a fulfillment center in Alabama next week. Cracking the code that allows capitalism to work for everyone and not the few, on Amazon’s massive scale, would not have been yawn-worthy at first. Ensuring that, for example, none of the company’s hourly employees qualified for food stamp programs would have been huge news. Then, in time, it might have persuaded other businesses to adopt similar models, leading to new norms, and, finally, the high praise of a gaping yawn. ”
2.1 From Ted Heller.
2.1 Mitch McConnell: “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country. Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality. This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”
2.1 Derek Thompson in The Atlantic: California lost more people to out-migration than any other state in 2020, and the five largest states in the Northeast—New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland—joined California in the top 10 losers. Rents have fallen fastest in “pricey coastal cities,” including San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York City, according to Apartment List. Zillow data also show that home values in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., are growing below the national average. These migration trends could spell long-term trouble for cities such as San Francisco and New York, where municipal services rely on property taxes, sales taxes, and urban-transit revenue. Absent federal intervention, “the financial situation that nearly every transit agency in America is in will certainly lead to significant service cuts, which inevitably lead to terrible spirals,” Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of the New York City Transit Authority, told me. “Service reductions are bad for commuters, devastating for essential workers, and detrimental to the economy.” If people leave New York—and newcomers don’t immediately take their place—that will reduce the city’s subway and bus revenue, which will lead to service cuts; that will make New York a harder place to live, so more people will leave the city; transit revenue will be reduced further, and on we go.”