Welcome to Friday, December 20, 2024—only five days until Christmas and the beginning of the Six Days of Coynezaa. It’s also National Sangria Day, a good drink when made well, but not really appropriate for this cold weather.
The winter solstice begins at 3:24 a.m. Chicago time tonight, ushering in Yule tomorrow. That means that tomorrow is the shortest day of the year; it’s all downhill from here.
Sangria:
It’s also International Human Solidarity Day, Games Day, and National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day.
There’s a Google Doodle (below), that links to this four-minute YouTube video that shows the “Breakout Google Searches” in 2024. It was a pretty dire year but of course Google turns it into a year of wonder:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 20 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Apparently Trump is already acting as President, as he just sunk a deal approved by the Republican Speaker of the House to pass a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open.
Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday was toiling to find a way out of a shutdown after President-elect Donald J. Trump torpedoed the spending deal the speaker struck with Democrats this week, leaving Republicans without a strategy to fund the government past a Friday night deadline.
As Mr. Johnson met with his deputies on Thursday morning in his office in the Capitol, lawmakers eager to return home ahead of a scheduled winter recess were left in limbo with no clear solution to keep federal funds flowing past 12:01 a.m. on Saturday.
“The situation is fluid,” Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the Republican whip, told reporters on Thursday morning in what appeared to be a major understatement.
Mr. Johnson was caught between two seemingly untenable options. Mr. Trump has effectively killed the massive bipartisan deal, loaded with unrelated policy changes, that he negotiated to fund the government through mid-March. That plan would have drawn substantial votes from Democrats, but a Republican revolt over it fueled by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk sapped it of even the modest G.O.P. support it would have needed to pass the House.
What the president-elect demanded instead — that Republicans pair a stripped-down government funding bill with a measure raising the debt ceiling or getting rid of it altogether — is also likely to be opposed by a number of Republicans. And it would be a tough sell to Democrats, who are furious that Republicans have jettisoned their agreement.
UPDATE: The deal is still sunk, but this time by Republicans who rebelled against a compromise, with deep budget cuts, suggested by Trump himself. The gub’mint may shut down today:
With a possible government shutdown looming at day’s end, President-elect Donald J. Trump early Friday renewed his demand that Congress suspend the debt ceiling, intensifying a face-off with lawmakers from his own party as Republicans run short of options before a midnight deadline.
Congress failed to pass a spending bill on Thursday night, after Republicans rejected a Trump-backed proposal that included suspending the debt limit for two years. Hours after that vote, Mr. Trump urged lawmakers to “get rid of, or extend out to, perhaps, 2029, the ridiculous Debt Ceiling.”
Here’s the vote. Any bill, of course, has to also pass the Senate, a place where Democrats are still in control and it takes 60 votes to override a filibuster:
Here are the two Democrats who voted to approve Trump’s compromise bill:
This is apparently the doings of new Presidential advisor Elon Musk, who made more than 150 posts on X sinking the bill under consideration. What amazes me is that Trump is already controlling the Republicans even though he isn’t in office. But you know why: they live in fear of his retribution. So much for the three mutually controlling branches of American government!
*In the Free Press, political scientist and Democrat Ruy Teixeira argues that “Voters sent Democrats a clear message. They don’t want to hear it.”
In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.
Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.
Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.
Consider Greg Casar, the new chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a recent interview with NBC News, Casar urged the Democrats to “re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.” He said that “when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did—with Republican help.” Casar said that “the Republican Party obsession” with culture war issues is “driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”
. . . Get it? These aren’t real issues. They’re just distractions ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The logical conclusion of this argument is that Democrats don’t need to actually change their position on any “culture war” issue. Instead, they just need to change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains.
. . .Far too many Democrats simply believe they are on the “right side of history” when it comes to policies around immigration, crime, race, and trans issues.
This mistaken assumption has been a disaster for the party. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration is wrong and should be deterred—not indulged. They believe crimes should be punished and public safety is sacrosanct. They believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.
These issues reflect deeply held beliefs and values and are vitally important to ordinary voters, especially working-class voters. They are not distractions, or fake issues, or nonfactors in the election. So far, even the screamingly obvious implications of this last election have not been enough to shock the party out of its denialist torpor. Until they wake up, Democrats are doomed to repeat the mistakes of 2024.
I think there’s a great deal of truth there. For crying out loud, I thought it was a good sign that AOC lost big time in her bid to head her party’s group on the House Oversight Committee, an important position since that’s the main investigative committee of that house of Congress. Yet there are still some miscreants saying that this is a bad sign: a sign that the Democrats won’t use fresh blood to help overcome their loss in last month’s election. But, for crying out loud, it was positions like AOC’s “progressivism” that help cost Democrats the election! Wokeness, it seems, is hard to dispel from our party.
*Luigi Mangione, accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has waived his fight against extradition to New York from PA—a doomed effort—and will be heading to the Big Apple to face a panoply of serious charges.
Mangione, 26 years old, appeared in court here Thursday to waive his right to contest his extradition, clearing a path for his transfer to Manhattan. The former tech worker, accused of gunning down Thompson outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel, has been detained in Pennsylvania since his arrest last week after being spotted in a McDonald’s.
Dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackled, Mangione was clean-shaven and appeared relaxed, as he sat next to one of his lawyers who advised him through the proceeding. The lawyer, Thomas Dickey, was swarmed by reporters outside the courthouse after the hearing.
“We’re ready to move forward and start defending these charges in New York and Pennsylvania,” he said.
Mangione could be arraigned in a New York state court in the coming days on 11 criminal counts, including a first-degree murder offense that prosecutors said was committed in furtherance of an act of terrorism. He had initially fought against the transfer to New York.
. . . Mangione is also expected to face federal criminal charges in New York, according to people familiar with the matter. It couldn’t be determined what charges he would face. A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, which is expected to bring the case, declined to comment.
Although New York law doesn’t really allow for first-degree murder charges for killing any non-government or non-first-responder citizen, it does allow it if the murder was committed to further an act of terrorism. And that’s why Mangione has a terrorism charge tacked on to the other ones. Will that fly? Was killing a CEO to make a point an “act of terrorism”? Don’t ask me. But one thing is pretty sure: the state seems to have enough evidence to convict Mangione, and if he is convicted, he’ll be behind bars until he dies. He’s shown no repentance, but worse, the judge would want to send a message to quash copycat crimes by imposing a life-without-parole sentence. Or so I’m guessing.
He’s now been hit with four additional federal charges, including two counts of stalking, a count of murder through the use of a firearm and a firearms offense. The federal trial will come after the state trial on 11 charges.
*Trump keeps getting one lucky break after another. Now a federal appellate judge has disqualified Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis to be in charge of the state’s case against Trump for election interference. This may let the Orange Man off the hook.
In a 31-page written opinion published Thursday, the Georgia Court of Appeals sided with Trump and eight co-defendants who sought to overturn a March order by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. His order rejected a motion to disqualify Willis and her office after she was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with an outside attorney she hired to lead the election interference case.
“After carefully considering the trial court’s findings in its order, we conclude that it erred by failing to disqualify DA Willis and her office,” the decision said.
The reason for disqualifying her was because she supposedly enriched the outside attorney, a special prosecutor on the case, by paying for his vacations and the like, and that is a conflict of interest, or could be.
“While we recognize that an appearance of impropriety generally is not enough to support disqualification, this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings,” the ruling said.
However, the appellate court denied a motion from Trump and his co-defendants to dismiss the indictment entirely, saying it “cannot conclude the record also supports the imposition” of that “extreme sanction.”
. . . The court said McAfee’s “remedy … did nothing to address the appearance of impropriety that existed at times when DA Willis was exercising her broad pretrial discretion about who to prosecute and what charges to bring.”
This isn’t over yet, though, as the vote was 2-1 from the appellate court with a scathing dissent, and Willis has vowed that her office, even if she’s not in charge, will continue to pursue the case. Since it’s a state case, Trump wouldn’t even be able to try to pardon himself.
*The two astronauts that took off in a SpaceX rocket last June for an 8-day visit to the ISS got stuck there because there were problems in the return vehicle. At that time I predicted to our resident Space Expert, Jim “Bat” Batterson, that they were going to die up there. He poo-pooed me, but now their stay in the ISS has been extended again–until March or April. Eight days has grown to eight months.
NASA’s two stuck astronauts just got their space mission extended again. That means they won’t be back on Earth until spring, 10 months after rocketing into orbit on Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
NASA announced the latest delay in Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ homecoming on Tuesday.
The two test pilots planned on being away just a week or so when they blasted off June 5 on Boeing’s first astronaut flight to the International Space Station. Their mission grew from eight days to eight months after NASA decided to send the company’s problem-plagued Starliner capsule back empty in September.
Now the pair won’t return until the end of March or even April because of a delay in launching their replacements, according to NASA.
A fresh crew needs to launch before Wilmore and Williams can return and the next mission has been bumped more than a month, according to the space agency.
NASA’s next crew of four was supposed to launch in February, followed by Wilmore and Williams’ return home by the end of that month alongside two other astronauts. But SpaceX needs more time to prepare the brand new capsule for liftoff. That launch is now scheduled for no earlier than late March.
NASA said it considered using a different SpaceX capsule to fly up the replacement crew in order to keep the flights on schedule. But it decided the best option was to wait for the new capsule to transport the next crew.
They’re not alone, as there are five other astronauts in the ISS, but if I were these two, I’d be mighty antsy. I don’t think they’ll die up there, but nobody seems to be in a rush to bring them back to the U.S. Batterson, in fact, assures me that the pair are enjoying their extra time in space. I don’t believe it.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is into revolution. Andrzej, of course, lived through the Nazi invasion of Poland followed by its occupation by the Soviet Union:
Hili: What is revolution?A: A dream to destroy everything in the name of justice.Hili: And how does it end?A: Usually with less to eat and more misery.
Hili: Co to jest rewolucja?Ja: Marzenie, żeby zburzyć wszystko w imię sprawiedliwości.Hili: I czym się to kończy?Ja: Na ogół tym, że jest mniej jedzenia i więcej nieszczęść.
And a picture of the loving Szaron:
*******************
From Meow. A quadruple-stuffed Oreo! Would you eat it?
From Things with Faces:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
Nothing tweeted by Masih today, but here’s a substitute tweet attacking misogyny and rape:
On rape as a weapon of war. 👇🏾Remember the women of October 7. Remember the women of Congo. Remember the women of Sudan. The women of Ethiopia. All the victims around the world. There is a war against women. It’s called rape.
Women are always the first victims of conflict. They… pic.twitter.com/ze3xBORx7Z
— Assita Kanko MEP (@Assita_Kanko) December 18, 2024
From Luana. Why does it take a red state to pass something like this?:
BREAKING: The Idaho Board of Education has passed resolutions requiring the state’s public universities to:
-Shut down DEI offices and policies.
-Commit to political neutrality.
-Protect free expression.
-Provide free expression training to faculty, students, and staff.
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 18, 2024
From Simon, who says, “By a factor of about 80.” I presume he’s referring to Musk’s donations to Trump’s campaign versus the price he paid for Twitter.
It’s weird to think that Elon Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States Government than he did for Twitter
— George Conway (@gtconway.bsky.social) 2024-12-19T02:44:15.185Z
From Malcolm, a real loving cat:
It’s a loving cat. pic.twitter.com/0jJXEobW4c
— Kathleen (@tmszhjh88) December 4, 2024
They put a Rowling tweet in my feed, and it’s a good one:
The thing is, @IndiaWilloughby, I really do enjoy cigars, whisky and facing down totalitarians, so by the same arguments that make you a woman, I am indeed Winston Churchill.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A French girl gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was three.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-20T15:26:33.683Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, well, at least his cat is living the dream. . .
Living the dream.
— Governor Tim Walz (@governorwalz.mn.gov) 2024-12-18T19:52:54.096Z
And a cat’s first sight of snow:
Ando’s first time seeing snow fall. #cat #kitten #snow
— Osha Davidson (@oshadavidson.bsky.social) 2024-12-17T17:13:34.613Z
In the Idaho bit, “political neutrality” was revised from “institutional neutrality” throughout.
This is a crystal-clear message to Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux’s cult of The Politics of Education (~1985).
Freire’s famous quote is “all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act”.
The Iron Law of Woke Projection helps understand Freire’s gnostic sentiment : it means all education exists to promote Freire and Giroux’s “politics”, which in fact is the “grassroots” Vanguard of the gnostic cult religion of Communism.
To avoid this website incurring the wrath of America’s new overlord, I’ll point out that it was not a SpaceX launch, it was a Boeing/Lockheed-Martin launch rocket with a Boeing capsule. 🙂
(Though SpaceX does now have the task of bringing the two astronauts back.)
Nellie refers to the new overlord as “President-elect” in her TGIF column this morning.
Then: “Twitter is dying, Musk has destroyed it, no-one uses it any more, we’ve all moved to Bluesky”.
Now: “Owing to the vast influence of his posts on X, Musk is now World Dictator”.
🙂
RE: Butch and Suni “enjoying” their extra time in space… Enjoyment is in the eye of the beholder. Our astronauts are a breed apart. Training for and going to space is very demanding duty for all NASA astronauts. Duty on the ISS is particularly demanding as there cannot be much “deferred maintenance” as you are in a very fragile cocoon situated in the extremely hostile and deadly vacuum of outer space. Things that break must be fixed and our astronauts spend a good deal of time attending to housekeeping. Getting used to zero-g is no picnic as their bodily fluids, evolved for 1 g on Earth seek a new balance. And…well I suggest reading retired astronaut Scott Kelly’s informative and entertaining account of his career and in particular his year on Station in his book “Endurance- A Year in Space” Available at Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/Endurance-Year-Space-Lifetime-Discovery/dp/1524731595/ref=asc_df_1524731595?mcid=00ca2e4281af3ded81bc21ec37f7d19c&tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=693327322263&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4462648851345145394&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9214779&hvtargid=pla-487665488607&psc=1 )
People, and I don’t expect there are many of them, like Butch and Suni and Don Pettit who is part of the current crew are unique individuals who we owe a huge thank you for pioneering what is required for and learning the impacts of becoming a space-faring species. While Kelly’s time on Station is of great interest, so is his time readapting to life on Earth upon his return from orbit. Space is not for the faint of heart! Btw, Scott Kelly’s twin Mark was also an astronaut, is a U.S. Senator and husband of former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. My final (trite) remark would be to imagine the conversation around the Kelly boys’ extended family holiday dinner table. Wow!
And I might also add that the Agency has finally started to walk the talk of safety overriding schedule in their decision-making. Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson has referred to Challenger and Columbia accident reports in news conferences where delays in a planned human spaceflight schedule were announced.
Oh and on a separate note: Hats off to Andrzej this morning. Well-said indeed!
I loved the book by Scott Kelly! As I recall, he had to spend hours fixing the station toilet.
Yes, Brooke. Their very lives, not just comforts, depend on hardware and software continuing to work right. But I think my biggest aha…its been a few years since I read it….was the time and discomfort in reacclimatizing to Earth’s surface conditions upon return home. After reading this book I have a much greater appreciation for the giant “barcaloungers” that returning astronauts are placed in when they are removed from the Soyuz capsules after landing on the steppes of Kazakstan.
I remember all the comments and complaints about lift off delays before the launch of the first space shuttle. And I felt so what, better to be safe. Saw the first one go up from a bridge over the Indian River in Brevard county Florida.
Boy, you got that right, Dennis. I worked for Nasa back then and all of my cousins were attorneys. With each delay they said “you guys screwed up or you failed again” type comments. I told them, no, that everyone walked away alive. Failure means people die. Delay meant that safety systems and procedures were working as they should. And then in 1986, Challenger showed us what true failure looked like with a clearly broken safety culture that in spite of the Rogers Commission findings continued on through the loss of Columbia and crew.
I remember where I was when Challenger exploded.
What is the benefit to me or the vast majority of humans of us becoming a “space faring species”?
I think becoming a species that doesn’t murder each other or a species that provides clean water and healthcare to everybody seems much more worthy.
False dichotomy.
One can be in favour of the latter whether or not one is of the former (and vice versa, though fewer would admit that, at least not publicly).
Having more of one does not prevent one having more of the other. It’s not a zero-sum game.
Here’s an impressive description of the persons participating in Donald Trump’s new governmental circus by Eliot Weinberger:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/eliot-weinberger/incoming
The NYT piece on the Continuing Resolution sounds like it’s missing key information. First of all, the initial bill, around which there was a flurry of opposition, was over 1,500 pages long. This was to enable the government to continue operating normally for three months! It was, of course, loaded with pork, including a 40%(!) raise for Members of Congress. The overall cost of the bill was over $1T dollars. It wasn’t just Musk, a lot of people were very active. I even called my Representative and Senators offices to tell them to vote against it. (People are pointing out that the people squawking about Musk being active like Billionaires well enough when they are on their side.) Second, the revised bill needed a 2/3rds majority to pass the House because they wanted it to bypass committee review. Therefore, even if all the Republicans voted for it, it still wouldn’t have passed. If the Dems were really interested in avoiding the shutdown, all they had to so was vote for the revised CR. They wanted their port.
The 40% raise is misinformation. It was a 3.8% raise, and the salary hasn’t been raised since 2009. If we want regular folks, not just the rich to serve in congress, they need to get raises periodically. Yes, there were other items in the bill, like natural disaster, aid, farm aid, cancer research, and other items. What is the issue with that?
To your last point, why would Dems vote for the new CR that they had no say in crafting (after Republicans scrapped the bipartisan bill) and that sets them up for absent limit fight if they won the midterms?
The issue is that it makes little sense to combine such items in one bill. The whole point of doing that is an all-or-nothing approach, forcing people to choose between pork-barrel politics and shutting down the government.
As far as I know, such omnibus bills, and bills with riders, and so on exist only in the USA.
The pay raise issue is a distraction; I’m surprised you mentioned it.
Even the funding levels are a distraction. A chief reason for opposition to this 1500-page bill is the degree to which it has nothing to do with funding. There is a great deal of legislation stuffed into it that needs to be debated and otherwise could not pass.
Maybe the reason Trump keeps getting “lucky” on these legal matters is that they are bad cases pushed by bad actors?
There was nothing iffy about the case against Trump in GA.
I am so livid at Fani Willis I can barely be coherent. She just heaps insult upon injury by her claims that the attacks on her aren’t motivated by her legal malpractice, but by racism (the desire to ‘bring down powerful black women’). She’s not the victim. WE are. The only who makes out – like a fucking bandit – is the man she was entrusted with prosecuting.
+1. And Alvin Bragg is more of the same.
All cases are iffy until a jury returns a verdict. If the case never gets to a jury that tells you something.
There is what is to me a rather alarming argument that we should just get rid of the debt ceiling altogether. That is something that Trump is recommending, and surprisingly it is also something that many democrats and economists have been recommending for many years.
Factions in both parties meanwhile want to keep the debt ceiling, in part to use as political leverage when the other party is in power, and I suppose in part to limit spending and pork.
And yet there are really smart people (or at least one would think they are smart) who have been saying that we should not have a debt ceiling on spending. I don’t understand this, though. Isn’t that a way to collapse an economy?
No, because the debt per se isn’t bad. The deficit is what matters and whether it is increasing relative to GDP.
Other countries don’t have a debt ceiling. It seems to me that in the US it’s entire existence is there to beat up the other party..
If the astronauts die up there, it’ll be because of old age. Their go-home date keeps getting pushed out! Surely each delay is a disappointment, despite the happy faces they are wearing.
And, yes, it’s good that AOC did not get her coveted position on the House Oversight Committee. And, yes, the Dems are on their way to more defeats if they continue to claim that the social issues are mere distractions. If they were mere distractions, they would stop promoting their out-of-touch positions in order to eliminate the “distractions.” They are not distractions; they are core to the progressive agenda. If their failure to recognize this leads to failure at the ballot box, I will not be disappointed.
Yep, Norman. They ain’t spring chickens. Suni is 59, Butch is 61, and Don Pettit who recently joined them is 69! Like an ultimate gated senior community up there.
I would be impressed if it weren’t for the fact they are highly trained for this…however, I am IMPRESSED!
SENIORS IN SPACE!
It makes cruising look like playtime in a child’s daycare.
I enjoyed the photo of RFK Jr’s truck.
LOL!!!
LOLOLOL!!
Indeed LOL. But it’s not hard to find these types that traipse around with signage like that, or have it prominently displayed at the entrance to their property. Is it one manifestation of a decline into Alzheimer’s, and/or is there a particular genetic basis?
Tim Walz’s cat does seem to be living well.
🐈🐈🐈🐈
I certainly don’t love all of AOC’s positions and I can’t stand the other squad members, but the Dems could use some younger leadership. I have a suspicion that woke or not, they don’t have any interest in elevating young politicians. Maybe an 84 year old woman who just had hip surgery shouldn’t be running the show. Who releases a book called The Art of Power? Do you think that makes people like you? Maybe if it’s Sydney Sweeney in black leather with a whip, but otherwise I’m not feeling it. People near death clinging to power has not helped this dreadful party. They could do worse than a sexy woman with talent.
I don’t think a predilection for whisky, cigars and facing down totalitarians makes Rowling Winston Churchill but I think she’d be a lot closer to the original than the present occupant of No. 10