Music: Chris Potter — ‘Oh So Many Stars’
Is Trump’s coup a ‘dress rehearsal?’
Ben Jacobs writes: The United States has survived the 2020 election and its seemingly never-ending and increasingly bizarre aftermath. Efforts by Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the courts met abject failure at almost every turn even as a number of Republican elected officials and Republican voters embraced them. The most apocalyptic scenarios that some scholars worried about before the election did not come to pass. But nothing that happened after November 3 can be considered normal —…
Gohmert suit may force Pence’s hand in effort to overturn Trump’s defeat
Politico reports: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump’s defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss. Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress’ counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with…
L.A. was uniquely vulnerable to this Covid catastrophe. Here is what went wrong
The Los Angeles Times reports: Los Angeles is careening toward catastrophe. An explosion of COVID-19 patients has begun to flood hospitals and may soon force doctors to ration care. The number of available beds in intensive care units is rapidly dropping to zero, as healthcare providers plead with people not to come to emergency rooms unless it’s a matter of life or death. “Ambulances are circling hospitals for hours trying to find one that has a bed open so they…
Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll
AFP reports: Russia said on Monday that its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities. For months, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has boasted about Russia’s low fatality rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries. But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government…
Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting
The New York Times reports: A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a citizen journalist who documented the early days of the coronavirus outbreak to four years in prison, sending a stark warning to those challenging the government’s official narrative of the pandemic. Zhang Zhan, the 37-year-old citizen journalist, was the first known person to face trial for chronicling China’s outbreak. Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai in February, at the height of…
We found the forced labor factories inside China’s mass internment camps
BuzzFeed reports: China has built more than 100 new facilities in Xinjiang where it can not only lock people up, but also force them to work in dedicated factory buildings right on site, BuzzFeed News can reveal based on government records, interviews, and hundreds of satellite images. In August, BuzzFeed News uncovered hundreds of compounds in Xinjiang bearing the hallmarks of prisons or detention camps, many built during the last three years in a rapid escalation of China’s campaign against…
We live in a wake-centric world out of touch with our dreams
Rubin Naiman writes: In the Old Testament, Jacob, on the run for his life from the twin brother he betrayed, beds down for the night in the wilderness and there dreams of a ladder stretching between heaven and Earth, of angels ascending and descending, and of God assuring him of an auspicious future. With his head on a pillow of stone – symbolic of matter in its densest form – Jacob dreams of a structure linking the material and ethereal…
Music: Chris Potter — ‘Rising Over You’
Mass confusion over Trump’s endgame as Washington barrels toward shutdown, economic crisis
The Washington Post reports: As President Trump rapidly approached a Monday deadline to avert a government shutdown, aides and lawmakers appeared flummoxed about his strategy, left to interpret musings from his Twitter feed while he golfed and otherwise remained out of public view. A large spending bill that Congress passed last week must be signed into law by midnight on Monday to prevent many federal agencies from dramatically scaling back their operations. After Congress passed the bill, Trump posted a…
‘This just has to get done’: Lawmakers push Trump to sign the relief bill
The New York Times reports: Lawmakers on Sunday urged President Trump to sign a sweeping $900 billion aid package after millions of Americans lost their unemployment coverage on Saturday as the president put the fate of the measure in limbo by pushing for bigger relief checks. Mr. Trump’s resistance to signing the bill risks leaving millions of unemployed Americans without crucial benefits, jeopardizes other critical assistance for businesses and families set to lapse at the end of the year, and…
Texas fracking billionaires drew Covid-19 aid while investing in rivals
The Wall Street Journal reports: As the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices walloped U.S. frackers this spring, Texas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks got a $35 million relief loan to help one of their fracking companies stay afloat. At the same time, they were on a buying spree in the country’s oil patch. Since spring, businesses controlled by the Wilks brothers have hunted for deals among fracking firms going through bankruptcy and taken or increased stakes in at least…
Rep. Kinzinger calls efforts to overturn election ‘a scam’
Politico reports: “This is a scam,” said Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of continued efforts by President Donald Trump and some House Republicans to overturn the election of President-elect Joe Biden. Kinzinger, speaking Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said: “The reality is there is no impetus to overthrow an election,” and added that even if there were reasons to do so, there is not a constitutional mechanism to overturn a presidential election after states have formally certified…
Americans’ acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy
Robert Reich writes: Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America. Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy. Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken…
A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers
The New York Times reports: In the top echelons of classical music, the violinist Jennifer Koh is by any measure a star. With a dazzling technique, she has ridden a career that any aspiring Juilliard grad would dream about — appearing with leading orchestras, recording new works, and performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. Now, nine months into a contagion that has halted most public gatherings and decimated the performing arts, Ms. Koh, who watched a year’s…
The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep
James Hamblin writes: The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human…