DL Open Thread Sunday 1/24/21

Delawareans who tried to get a dose of Covid vaccine on Saturday spent up to seven hours waiting in line, and many gave up before getting a shot.

Republicans, like vampires, aren’t good at self-reflection, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that after about 24 hours of acting stunned, GOPers have decided not to rethink anything, quite possibly because re-thinking is a sub-category of thinking, and there’s no evidence that Republicans know how to do that.

As evidence, the White Fascism Party, yet again faced with evidence that its policies are not popular, isn’t changing its anti-human/pro-corporate approach. It’s looking for more ways to disenfranchise voters, because that’s how a shitwagon rolls.

Further evidence: The 10 GOP House members who voted for impeachment have targets on their backs for daring to show any independence or intelligence. On the plus side, I’m all for the defenestration of Liz Cheney, because the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has floated an idea that might be the only way Trump will be convicted in his second impeachment trial: secret ballots. Otherwise, the thinking goes, they’ll be too scared of their own voters to convict.

Remember those stories from a week or two ago about Trump wanting to raise $2 billion for a presidential library? A writer who knows from presidential libraries says it’s unlikely there will ever be a Trump Presidential Library for a number of financial reasons. Chief among them: Trump would have to pay its operational expenses as well as its construction unless he applied to make it part of the federal government — and in doing so he would have to fork over several hundred million dollars to the government. Not gonna happen.

My incoming mail this week included a Christmas card mailed from North Carolina on Dec. 20. Though the USPS managed mail-in ballots well, its couldn’t cope with the volume of holiday packages, a reminder that Louis DeJoy, who’s heavily invested in non-USPS delivery services, is playing a longer game than helping Donnie Dotard’s re-election. He’s trying to destroy its service record, the better to privatize it.

When Dow DuPont split up, forming DuPont, Chemours and Corteva from the pieces, it was apparent to most observers that Chemours, as the chemicals division, was being larded up with future liabilities incurred by DuPont in the years before it was purchased by Dow. Chemours sued in 2017, claiming DuPont knowingly lowballed future liabilities, but the case was dismissed because courts had no jurisdiction — the separation agreement stipulated conflicts would go to binding arbitration. Now the parties have reached an agreement on liability sharing. Bottom line: Chemours still gets screwed, just not as hard.