In the spirit of the season, anyone blacklisted has been released from DL jail.  Even Ben DuPont who probably accounts for half of the uninvited people.    Enjoy your privilege while is lasts – you’ll probably be gone again shortly.

Biden’s Praise of Trump was a MAGAT MindFuck Intended to Push Them Away From Vaccinations

That is not true, or course, but I thought that headline should reside somewhere on the inter-webs. 

(CNN)President Joe Biden on Tuesday gave credit to the Trump administration for the development of the Covid-19 vaccine and praised his predecessor, Donald Trump, for getting a booster shot — marking a rare moment where the two men have found common ground since Inauguration Day.

“I got my booster shot as soon as they were available,” Biden said during a speech from the White House about his administration’s efforts to address the Omicron variant of Covid-19, adding, “and just the other day former President Trump announced he had gotten his booster shot.”
Biden insists he and Manchin will ‘get something done’ after Build Back Better setback
Biden insists he and Manchin will ‘get something done’ after Build Back Better setback
“It may be one of the few things he and I agree on,” Biden continued. “People with booster shots are highly protected. Join them. Join us.”

 

Meanwhile…

Trump, Still Not in Jail, To Hold Press Conference on Jan 6th

Former President Donald Trump Tuesday vowed to hold a news conference on the first anniversary of the storming of the Capitol as he steps up his campaign to whitewash the Jan. 6 attack.

A day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a “solemn observance” of the violent attack, Trump on Tuesday said he would offer his own spectacle claiming the historic insurrection attempt was nothing more than a peaceful protest. “The election was the insurrection,” Trump told Newsmax, “The January 6 day was not the insurrection, that was the ‘protest.’”

On this day in 1937 the Lincoln Tunnel, under the Hudson River, opened to traffic, connecting Weehawken, New Jersey to Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Nowadays the only legitimate use of government money is to buy drones for the army and yachts for Northern Virginia’s drone salesmen.

The flag of Hudson County, NJ

Are you guys re-masking up in public?  Are you re-burrowing in and not going out except to visit a state park for some fresh air, or for groceries?  Has anyone reading this canceled a flight recently?   If you answer yes to any of these questions, you are probably just a few days ahead of the rest of us.

The Delaware Division of Public Health reported 420 hospitalizations in its Sunday summary.

The 420 figure is within striking distance of the record 474 hospitalizations reported early this year.

On Friday, DPH reported 1,079 new cases, the highest number since early January of this year. New cases have risen rapidly during the fall after falling below 150. The total number of cases dropped to 719.

The number of Covid-related deaths remained unchanged at 2,242.

If some good comes from the death of Biden’s domestic agenda, perhaps it will also be the final death of Chris Coons pretending that a “Secret Bipartisan Caucus” is hiding in the wings, ready to swoop in and save the Republic.  Coons obviously can’t even get Republicans who claim to be Democrats to fall under the spell of Holy Bipartisanship anymore.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) was one of several Democrats who spoke to Manchin on the Senate floor for several minutes on Wednesday, although it did not appear to be a particularly upbeat conversation.

Here’s a round-up of headlines all dealing with the fact that Biden trusted Joe Manchin when he shouldn’t have.  The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are particularly ghoulish and gleeful.

I thought Biden would try to point the shit-fan away from his face a little.  Or at least provide some people with shit ponchos like Gallagher or something.

Note to Youngsters:  Gallegher was a comedian who comically sprayed his audience with smashed watermelons.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Delaware is going to have a big sad today. (Expect maudlin tributes from all the usual suspects.) The Dolles sign is coming down. Capitalism has spoken, or whatever. I can’t get very worked up about a sign for a company that makes taffy, an old-timey candy that nobody eats.

And yet I guess the word “iconic” sorta fits. So, it is like Athen removing the Parthenon, or London removing Big Ben, but on a much smaller scale.

A host of Fox News personalities watched the attempted Jan 6th coup with horror. In a flurry of text messages, they begged Mark Meadows to beg Trump to call off the coup, and not kill Mike Pence. They have all since revised their position on insurrection and the merits of murdering Mike Pence.

The Democratic Party has a serious problem – the moderates who have won control of the party are addicted to alienating working and middle class voters.

The NYT recently published an op-ed by Jamelle Bouie who implores moderates like Coons, Manchin and Sinema  to stop whining about progressives, to stop blaming liberals for your failures and get down to business.

There was a battle for control of the Democratic Party, and the moderates won. They hold the power and they direct the message. But despite this victory, moderate Democrats and their allies can’t seem to take responsibility for the party’s fortunes. When faced with defeats — as they were last month when Terry McAuliffe fell to Glenn Youngkin in the race to succeed Ralph Northam as governor of Virginia — they blame the left. It’s the same song, each time. If progressives would just stop alienating the public, then they could make gains and put power back in Democratic hands. Somehow, the people in the passenger’s seat of the Democratic Party are always and forever responsible for the driver’s failure to reach their shared destination.

Writing for his newsletter, the journalist Osita Nwanevu made a version of this point earlier in the year. Progressive politicians and activists may be occasionally off-message but in the main, “The simple truth is that most of the things moderate liberals tend to argue Democrats should be doing and saying are, in fact, being done and said by the Biden administration, Democratic leaders in Congress, and the vast majority of Democratic elected officials.”

If, despite their influence, moderate Democrats are not satisfied with the state of their party, then they might want to turn their critical eye on themselves. What they’ll find are a few fundamental problems that may help explain the party’s current predicament.

After all, 2020 was not the first year that Democrats fell short of their expectations. They did so in 2010, when moderates had an even stronger grip on the party, as well as in 2014 and 2016. Here, again, I’ll echo Nwanevu. Despite pitching his administration to the moderate middle — despite his vocal critiques of “identity politics,” his enthusiastic patriotism and his embrace of the most popular Democratic policies on offer — Barack Obama could not arrest the Democratic Party’s slide with blue-collar voters. For the past decade, in other words, “the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects have been in decline for reasons unattributable to progressive figures and ideas that arrived on the political scene practically yesterday.”

Perhaps the problem, then, lies less with the rhetoric (or existence) of progressive Democrats and more with any number of transformations in the material circumstances of American life and the response — or lack thereof — from the Democrats with the power to do something. What was the Democratic Party’s response to a generation of neoliberal economic restructuring? What was its response to the near-total collapse of private-sector unions? What was its response to the declining fortunes of American workers and the upward redistribution of American wealth?

(snip)

Read in this light, the frequent focus on progressives as the cause of Democratic woes looks less like hard-nosed analysis and more like excuse-making. And my sense is that this excuse-making will only get worse as Republicans weaponize the institutions of American politics to entrench their power and lay the conditions for durable minority rule.

Right now, the moderate Democrats who run the party have a narrow and slipping hold on Congress against an opposition that relies on structural advantages, which could be mitigated, or at least undermined, with federal power. They have failed to act, and there’s no sign, so far, that anything will change.

If and when Democrats lose one or both chambers of Congress — and when we all face the consequences of their failure — I am confident that we’ll hear, once again, how it’s everyone’s fault but their own.

This is a companion post to my definitive list of the best Christmas songs and the best versions of those song.   In this list I don’t bother with versions because these songs are so execrable that figuring out degrees of awfulness doesn’t interest me.  To get on the list, the songs must be from the modern era (not traditional), truly bad and yet,  somehow still widely played along with the rest of the holiday canon.

5) The Little Drummer Boy

4) Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time

3) Last Christmas I gave You My Heart

2) Santa Baby

1) Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer

If you are a really glutton for punishment, check out this Esquire list of horrible holiday music that (thankfully) isn’t widely played.

Chris Wallace, who some regard as a legitimate journalist,   is leaving Fox so there is officially no need to go on pretending that Fox is a legitimate news station. Of course Chris Coons will continue going on, and they will still get credentials for shit. The jolly game will continue apace. It is all a fucking joke.

True blue idiot, Lauren Boebert tweeted:

Dem scolds and pedantic schoolmarms rushed to point out that “there enlies” is not English.  Lost in the pointing and laughing was the other error.  Fewer than 350 people  under the age of 21 are kidnapped by strangers per year in the USA.  She was only off by about 365,000.

In the largest strike happening right now in the United States, 3,000 student workers at New York City’s Columbia University are on their fifth week of strike. On December 8th the student workers are called on other faculty members to help them shut down the university.  Last Monday, many Columbia faculty members did walk out of their classes in a show of solidarity. “Graduate student labor is the invisible labor of the university,” says Jack Halberstam, professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University. “We’re bankrupting a whole generation in order to provide more profits for the university.”

Columbia could easily pay all of the Graduate students a living wage, and buy them each an apartment.  It ended 2021 with an operating surplus of $150 million AND an endowment right now that is over $14 billion.  Thats $14,000,0000,000

If you could save $10,000 every single day, then it would only take you 3,836 years to save 14 billion.

I’m treading on Alby’s territory here but I’m a few beers in so here is the definitive list of the “Top Ten Best Christmas Songs & Best Versions of Them ”

10) Hallelujah – Pentatonix ‘Christmas Time Is Here’ – A Charlie Brown Christma
9) Fairytale of New York – The Pogues
8) It’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) – U2
7) Father Christmas – The Kinks
6) All I want for Christmas is You – Mariah Carey
5) Happy Xmas (war is Over) – John Lennon
4) Baby Its Cold Outside – Glee Cast
3) Santa Claus is Coming to Town – Bruce Springsteen
2) Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Judy Garland
1) The Christmas Song – Nat King Cole