Political Cartoon is by Bill Bramhall in the New York Daily News.
Tuesday, February 02, 2021
The GOP's Tiny Proposal Is Not A Plan - It's An Insult!
The Republicans have come up with a different proposal. They want to trim the Biden bill down to only $600 billion. They are touting their pathetic proposal as a bipartisan effort to negotiate.
That's ridiculous! The GOP proposal would do nothing to solve the current problems -- either for the pandemic or the economy. It would have little effect on either. It just shows the Republicans are not really willing to negotiate in good faith.
The problems are big. The solutions must also be big.
Here is a part of what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman had to say about this in The New York Times:
So 10 Republican senators are proposing an economic package that is supposed to be an alternative to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The proposal would reportedly be only a fraction of the size of Biden’s plan and would in important ways cut the heart out of economic relief.
Republicans, however, want Biden to give in to their wishes in the name of bipartisanship. Should he?
No, no, 1.9 trillion times no.
It’s not just that what we know about the G.O.P. proposal indicates that it’s grotesquely inadequate for a nation still ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond that, by their behavior — not just over the past few months but going back a dozen years — Republicans have forfeited any right to play the bipartisanship card, or even to be afforded any presumption of good faith.
Let’s start with the substance.
By any measure, January was the worst pandemic month so far. More than 95,000 Americans died of Covid-19; hospitalizations remain far higher than they were at previous peaks.
True, the end of the nightmare is finally in sight. If all goes well, at some point this year enough people will have been vaccinated that we’ll reach herd immunity, the pandemic will fade away, and normal life can resume. But that’s unlikely to happen before late summer or early fall.
And in the meantime we’re going to have to remain on partial lockdown. It would, for example, be folly to reopen full-scale indoor dining. And the continuing lockdown will impose a lot of financial hardship. Unemployment will remain very high; millions of businesses will struggle to stay afloat; state and local governments, which aren’t allowed to run deficits, will be in dire fiscal straits.
What we need, then, is disaster relief to get afflicted Americans through the harsh months ahead. And that’s what the Biden plan would do.
Republicans, however, want to rip the guts out of this plan. They are seeking to reduce extra aid to the unemployed and, more important, cut that aid off in June — long before we can possibly get back to full employment. They want to eliminate hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments. They want to eliminate aid for children. And so on.
This isn’t an offer of compromise; it’s a demand for near-total surrender. And the consequences would be devastating if Democrats were to give in. . . .
So it’s OK for Biden to talk with Republicans and hear them out. But should he make any substantive concessions in an attempt to win them over? Should he let negotiations with Republicans delay the passage of his rescue plan? Absolutely not. Just get it done.
Monday, February 01, 2021
Our Foreign Allies Think Trump Did Poor Job Dealing With Virus
If you ask Trump and his aides, they will tell you they did a very good job in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic -- as good as anyone could have done. But the American people don't believe that. Poll after poll shows the people think Trump did a very poor job with the virus.
And they are not the only ones. The Pew Research Center questioned people in 13 other countries in 2020 -- all countries that are generally considered to be allies of the United States. The people in those countries overwhelmingly thought the U.S. (under Trump) did a poor job of coping with the virus. Between 79% (Japan) and 93% (South Korea) thought that -- with the average of the 13 countries being 84% thinking the U.S. did a poor job.
All Of Trump's Attorneys Quit A Week Before His Senate Trial
I say "had", because those attorneys have all resigned. They will not be representing him at the trial. Why?
It seems that the attorneys wanted to attack the charges by claiming they were unconstitutional since Trump was no longer president. It was a very weak argument, but it's basically all they had.
But Trump didn't like that. He wanted them to claim the election had been stolen from him. That was something the attorneys could not do.
An attorney cannot use a defense they know is a lie. They must have at least some evidence that the defense they pursue could be true. But they know it wasn't, because there was no evidence at all for it. That meant, if they pursued that course (knowing it was a lie), they could lose their law licenses. They could find themselves in the same boat as Rudy Giuliani, who took that lie to court without evidence and is fighting now to retain his law license. They had no option except to drop Trump as a client.
Now Trump faces the prospect of entering the trial without an attorney, since he will be unlikely to find one that will represent him by lying to the tribunal.
I suspect he will get some of the craziest members of Congress to speak on his behalf -- the ones who have been pushing the lie to their base -- maybe someone like Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
January COVID-19 Cases And Deaths In Texas
The numbers in these charts are from The COVID Tracking Project. The bottom large charts show the daily number of deaths and cases of COVID-19 in Texas in January. The top two charts show the average number of deaths and cases daily in Texas for the last four months.
Note that things are not getting better in Texas. The pandemic continues to get worse.
Hopefully, if the Biden administration can fix the vaccination delivery problem, that will change soon. We can only hope.
Jan. 6th Riot Was Organized/Funded By Trump Campaign
The truth is that a Trump campaign official in charge of collecting donations (Caroline Wren) had a big part in organizing the insurrection. And a huge Trump campaign donor (Julie Jenkins Fancelli) provided the money for it.
I'm sure that Trump and his campaign aides will try to claim that this was done without his knowledge. That's ridiculous! If there's one thing we've learned about Trump, it's that he's a micro-manager. NOTHING happens in his organizations, both business and political, without his knowledge and consent,
Here is part of the coverage of this story from ProPublica.org:
In the week leading up to the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that exploded into an attack on the Capitol, a top Trump campaign fundraiser issued a directive to a woman who had been overseeing planning for the event.
“Get the budget and vendors breakdown to me and Justin,” Caroline Wren wrote to Cindy Chafian, a self-described “constitutional conservative,” in a Dec. 28 text message obtained by ProPublica.
Wren was no ordinary event planner. She served as a deputy to Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at Trump Victory, a joint presidential fundraising committee during the 2020 campaign. The Justin mentioned in her text was Justin Caporale, a former top aide to first lady Melania Trump, whose production company helped put on the event at the Ellipse.
Text messages and an event-planning memo obtained by ProPublica, along with an interview with Chafian, indicate that Wren, a Washington insider with a low public profile, played an extensive role in managing operations for the event. The records show that Wren oversaw logistics, budgeting, funding and messaging for the Jan. 6 rally that featured President Donald Trump.
Chafian told ProPublica that Wren and others had pushed her aside as plans intensified, including as a late effort was made to get Trump to speak at the event.
On Dec. 29, after receiving the budget, Wren instructed Chafian, via text, to hold off on printing event-related slogans “until we decide what the messaging is and we have no clue on timing because it all depends on the votes that day so we won’t know timing for a few more days.” The “timing” appears to be a reference to Congress’ Jan. 6 vote to certify the election results.
Wren’s services were enlisted by a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported Saturday that Julie Jenkins Fancelli, the heiress to Publix Super Markets, committed some $300,000 to fund the Jan. 6 rally.
The funding commitment by Fancelli, who Federal Election Commission records show has donated more than $1 million to Trump Victory, the president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee since 2018, was facilitated by the right-wing conspiracy peddler Alex Jones, the Journal reported. Chafian told ProPublica that she herself had been directed by Jones to Wren, who, she was told, had ties to a wealthy donor who wanted to support the January affair.
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