This morning the figure was still 399,500 but this evening is already past 401k.
Think of it as Donald Trump's retirement number on his last full day in office.
The passing scene is hilarious, until it careens through the front yard and crashes into my living room.
This morning the figure was still 399,500 but this evening is already past 401k.
Think of it as Donald Trump's retirement number on his last full day in office.
Per Johns Hopkins University (data changes slightly as we write):
What courage! What principle! What restraint!
Upton joined nine other Republicans in the US House, including my own freshman congressman Peter Meijer, Republican chucklehead, MI-3, and all the Democrats, 222 of them, to impeach Trump a second time 232-197. Four Republicans did not vote.
The roll call is here. Upton is quoted here.
Upton, 67, has spent his life as a useless heir to a Whirlpool fortune estimated under $10 million. Once an aspiring journalist with a B.A. in journalism, instead he became a staffer to the libertarian Republican Representative David Stockman in the late 1970s and followed him to OMB under Reagan in the early 1980s. He first ran for Congress in 1986, eleven years after graduating from the U of M. He has been a congressional pest ever since, aren't they all?, who has inflicted on the American people such things as lightbulb bans, eventually styling himself as a moderate.
Meijer, now 33, is embarking on a similar trajectory, but with a gappy resume. Reportedly worth $50 million from the Meijer grocery store chain, Meijer has landed in Congress also after a decade of searching for himself.
Meijer got in to West Point but ignominiously dropped out after one year, became an Army Reservist, and went to Columbia in 2008 where he salvaged himself with a B.A. in anthropology by 2012. He interrupted this period at Columbia with service in Iraq in 2010-2011 as a sergeant. Post graduation in 2012 he served with an NGO 2013-2015. He took a wife in 2016, and an MBA from NYU, apparently 2016-2017. Then there was a brief stint in 2018 with Ilitch Holdings of billionaire family fame as an "analyst" which ended in January 2019. When Justin Amash left the Republican Party in July 2019, Meijer announced his candidacy.
Just as Upton took up the occasion of the Capitol attack as a moment of historic gravitas which inspired him to rise to impeach Trump, Meijer similarly has over-dramatized it by relating it to the drama of his "combat" experience as an intelligence advisor in Iraq (insert smirk here). He also laughably pondered out loud the danger those in the order of presidential succession were in from the trespassers on January 6. He reminds one of no one so much as the ex-bartender become US Representative, AOC, who has similarly made it a point to appear distraught and blow everything completely out of proportion to the reality in keeping with her modus operandi everywhere. Think of red-lipsticked Alexandria at the border fence a while ago, clad in white, head in her hands, weeping, sporting her $600 wristwatch.
The lefty Michael Tracey has framed such over-the-top demonstrativeness as "unhinged threat inflation" in recent days, which is exactly what we're being subjected to for demagogic purposes. The manipulation of the American people is nothing new, it's just that these young people are probably less aware of it as a technique than they are themselves victims and mimickers of the technique.
No so with Upton. He is the old hand who is too grown up and knowing for this, who knows just when to say just enough in order to receive huzzahs as a statesman instead of the harangues for the seat-warmer he is in reality.
Somehow the American people are content to let such people put us $28 trillion in debt. We chuckleheads have the chuckleheads we deserve.
Climate Update for KGRR: December 2020
Here, apparently because some people doubt it. He did, after all, bail out of West Point and will forever live with the stigma.
Read the whole thing and you'll see the freshman congressman is already psychoanalyzing his colleagues while admitting to the need for some himself.
Unbelievable. This is what we elect to Congress. A rich kid trying to be somebody.
There's a lot of things I respect about Rep. Amash. At the end of the day, you're going to be your own person. I think much of my approach is guided by my experiences overseas. I was fully uniformed, a through-and-through combatant in Iraq; I'd do intelligence operations. That gave me one vantage point. When I was working in disaster response efforts around the world, you—not literally, but kind of—parachute into an area, whether it was the Philippines or South Sudan, domestic response for tornadoes and hurricanes. You have to make a little bit of order out of the chaos. And then when I was in Afghanistan later for a couple of years, as a conflict analyst for the humanitarian aid community, that was a very different perspective, too. But I saw a sense of, how do things fall apart and how can they be rebuilt? ...
We've inserted ourselves into the middle of civil wars; we've taken sides. Sometimes those sides switch. In Iraq, we're backing the Sunnis one time, we're backing the Shia the other. In Afghanistan, it becomes a shifting set of alliances.
Ultimately I think that erodes something at the core of our national soul that we kind of paper over. That's something that I'll have to sit on a therapist's couch to better understand.
Here's Domenech, the husband of Megan McCain, daughter of John:
An apolitical viewer of the summer of 2020 would learn one distinct lesson: If you want to be heard, if you want to be listened to, you need to go into the streets, make a ruckus, set things on fire, and tear down icons of America. This disrespect will be welcomed, hailed, and supported if your cause is just and your motives are righteous.
Just about everyone who showed up on Capitol Hill yesterday believed that about why they were there . . ..
Anyone remotely familiar with the sequence of events on Wednesday January 6 recognizes that while Trump was still speaking at 1:07pm, and boring the huge crowd to death far away on the Ellipse, a smaller faction was already over at the Capitol breaking in at 1:03pm. The Blaze's Elijah Schaffer was there documenting the whole thing, and frankly, inflaming the situation as "revolution" when what it was was a juvenile stunt. Just look at the left's similar reaction to the event. This is an elementary playground squabble by grown-ups who never grew up, elevated to national importance by the children running the media and the Democrat Party.
We are not a serious country. But I repeat myself.
The bios of some of these flamboyant mental cases whose pictures you have probably seen after they broke into the Capitol reveal them to be anything but Trumpists, yet Domenech, and Limbaugh, are as content to lump them all together as the GOP House and Senate is to ignore the efforts of Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to investigate Election 2020 improprieties.
Business as usual. The left and the media caricature the right, and Con Inc. joins right in.
The left wins because the right eats it own. Every. Damn. Time.
Catch the podcast here: https://michaelsavage.com/
There's no way in hell that's anywhere close to true with coronavirus cases soaring by 10 million in two months.
You're all lying through your teeth.
If the Christians exaggerate their church contributions by between 51-115%, it's impossible any of this mask-wearing data is reliable anymore than was the polling data for Biden.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/06/us/contributions-to-churches-are-studied.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1132-9
https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=mask-use&tab=trend
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/29/asia/china-coronavirus-seroprevalence-study-intl-hnk/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_term=image&utm_source=twCNN&utm_content=2020-12-29T09%3A30%3A05
China has been lying about everything for a long time, like a rug.
The new calculation is based on an evaluation of excess death data compared with current projections for deaths based on prior years of death data. The US' CDC does the same routinely and that data confirms that US COVID death data is close though underestimated.
Places like China, Iran and North Korea however will never tell the truth.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/28/russia-admits-to-world-third-worst-covid-19-death-toll-underreported
Follow the (gullible) science lol:
Along with the inability to appoint the right personnel from the beginning, Trump's inability to negotiate for what he claims he wants has to be the biggest tell that THE ART OF THE DEAL was purely aspirational for him, kind of like following what THE BIBLE says is merely aspirational for Christians.
He's the biggest phony we've seen in a long time, and appropriately now the biggest loser.
Sad!
Cumulative announced US COVID cases through 12/26/20 = 19,023,776
Cumulative announced US COVID deaths through 12/26/20 = 332,011
That works out to 1.745% of all COVID cases dying.
In any given year in the US, 30 million people get the flu.
If 1.745% of 30 million died, that would come to 523,500 deaths, about 17 times worse than the average reality of 30,000 flu deaths annually.
That's the difference between 0.1% and 1.745%, which Rush Limbaugh could never figure out.
Did Trump say Afghanistan was "better than the US" as Drudge claims? Nope. Trump said their elections were better run than the US election in 2020.
Was a "White House" counselor's brother recently hired by Amazon as a lobbyist? Depends on which "White House" you mean. Certainly not the current one. The "White House" counselor is Joe Biden's counselor, and his brother conveniently was just recently hired by Amazon to lobby for it.
When I don't have Rush Limbaugh to kick around anymore, I'll always have Drudge.
California's situation (blue in the graphs) is now mimicking New York's troubles (gray) in the spring, but not on a population-adjusted basis. Percent of hospital beds dedicated to COVID in California is also rising sharply.
Texas (pink) is reprising its experience in the summer in all categories.
Pennsylvania (not shown) is having a similar experience right now to number three New York.
Systems which find themselves under pressure from the pandemic have lattitude to refrain from performing elective procedures to free up beds. Doing so, however, comes at a cost to hospitals which depend on those procedures to remain profitable.
The total was 319k+ this morning and this afternoon is already 321k+
Current hospitalizations for the disease hit a new all-time high for a single day yesterday of 115,351
US COVID deaths have averaged 2,488 per day in the first twenty days of December 2020. Projected through the 31st that will result in over 77,000 deaths.
April 2020 had been the worst month for deaths to date with 58,836.
The basic premise is that Trump was winning on election day, only to lose overnight as a flood of fraudulent ballots washed away his lead.
This is completely mistaken.
It is now clear that just 54% of voters voted "in person", either early or on election day. 46% voted by mail/absentee.
66% of Trump's vote was "in person", but only 42% of Biden's. That's why it appeared that Trump won on election day.
Most of Biden's vote, 58%, was counted after the polls had closed into the next day(s) because it was absentee/by mail. He had a larger reservoir of his voters to draw on than did Trump, whose post-election day reservoir was only 34% of his vote.
There were doubtless more fraudulent votes cast this election because so many of the ballots were absentee/by mail, and so many more people voted and voted this way. The problem has been proving it, and proving it was large enough to flip places like Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
Absentee/by mail ballots typically post high rejection rates for voter noncompliance reasons: failure to sign the envelope, failure to return it on time, failure to mark the ballot correctly, failure of the signature to match the record, failure to show a return address matching the file, and much more. These rates typically exceed 1%, often by quite a lot. The problem is rejection rates in this election are coming in much lower than 1%, which, contrary to the Democrats, is a huge red flag.
Investigation of these problems should have been Team Trump's number one objective in challenging this election. Unfortunately and characteristically it got side-tracked by craziness and laziness, the hallmarks of the Trump era. Pieces of paper are evidence. Fanciful theories using computer "data" are not. Courts are not interested in jeopardizing their claim to impartiality by facilitating fishing expeditions for one political party against another. Either you've got the goods, or you don't.
It's sad Trump is such an incompetent and wasn't ready for this, but it is what it is. All the "shouldas wouldas and couldas" in the world ain't gonna fix it.
Buh-bye.
Deaths per day from COVID by state since Jan 22 through Saturday 12/12/20:
October 2020 Climate Update for KGRR
Deaths were approximately 289.5k early this morning, but blew right through that in short order to get almost to 292k tonight.
107,258 are currently hospitalized.
Think of each of those 11.5 million full-time units forming a household, buying a house, buying a car, buying a washing machine, raising some kids, paying taxes for good schools to which to send them, etc.
That's what's missing.
Sad!
As a percentage of population, full time in Nov 2020 remains in the basement digging holes at 47.6%, reminiscent of the historic lows pre-Reagan and the double Reagan recessions of the early 1980s.
Full-time never recovered after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, if you mean a return to pre-GFC1 levels. Under Obama and continuing under Trump full time after eight long years finally clawed its way up to 50.4% in 2019 on an average annual basis, only to be felled again by a lousing, stinking virus.
But don't make the mistake of blaming the virus. Conditions were long too weak to support pre-GFC1 levels of full time employment. Contrast this with the vigor of the Reagan/Bush surge in which full time went from 47.3% to 52.2% in just six years.
That missing vigor is the irreducible fact of the present economic malaise now in its twelfth year which very few acknowledge let alone understand.
Congress allocated the spending Biden threatened, unlawfully, to withhold, but Trump became the bad guy and Biden was elected instead of Trump.
Simply amazing.
As was Chris Irons of QTR Research on Feb 26, here.
This isn't rocket science. This isn't "mastermind" level stuff. It didn't take a genius to predict that Trump would lose to a virus. All it took was paying attention and being honest.
From an important story with an hyperbolic title by Edward-Isaac Dovere for The Atlantic, "The Mastermind Behind Biden’s No-Drama Approach to Trump", here:
' [M]any Democrats stressed over the campaign’s decision to ignore most of Trump’s daily diversions in favor of focusing on the coronavirus pandemic. Dunn’s plan, and Biden’s, ended with a win. ... “Those of us who had worked in the White House, and Joe Biden, who had been vice president of the United States, had a much better understanding of why the Trump strategy that everyone was panicked about, the daily press conferences, would not work unless they actually did something” about the pandemic, Dunn said. “All those people who were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s doing daily press briefings. He’s all over. He’s dominating,’ were missing the bigger point, which is unless he actually does something to deal with what is a genuine catastrophe, then it doesn’t matter how many press briefings he does.” '
Democrats are already fuming.
Reported here:
"An order making Durham special counsel, which was revealed on Tuesday, provides the federal prosecutor further protection against the prospect of President-elect Joe Biden trying to shut down the criminal inquiry into the origins and conduct of the FBI's investigation."
I agree.
His basic perception about the public was right. They were, and are, afraid.
Whether they should have been or should be now is irrelevant. They were, and Trump failed to play to that fear, which is exactly what Biden did.
About 16 minutes in.
US COVID current hospitalizations rose every single day from Oct 25 at 41,786 to 90,481 on Nov 26: 32 days straight.
Current hospitalizations finally fell for once yesterday, Nov 27, to 89,834.
"cant wait to have earned enough money to move to Canada and escape the hideous capitalistic system"
Seen here in the comment by Werde Sowieso Gebannt.
It doesn't get any richer than that.
He estimates Dec 15 will be his last live show on the radio forever.
His daily podcast will continue, at michaelsavage.com .
Shrimp Shapiro takes over the whole time slot apparently. Benji's actually an inch taller than Savage, but has the voice of a soprano in a tin can.
I could listen to Savage read the phone book, but Shapiro?
Nah.
From his essay here:
Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.
If you subscribe to ideology qua ideology, you can pretend that what your lyin' eyes are trying to tell you isn't true. And Holloway explicitly embraces the ideological habit of mind which blinds him to our reality:
Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”
Accordingly, he embraces a sharp, ideological distinction between North and South, which is nothing but a caricature, as if neither love of lucre nor racism existed in the North:
Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain.
You will hardly find in American "conservatism" anywhere any rumination on the founding of the colonies as corporations, entities which were explicitly formed for gain for and by the English Crown in cooperation with the Bank of England. That was the whole point of Samuel Johnson's "Taxation No Tyranny", which ridiculed Americans with "Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?", which is the main reason why no one reads it. The American colonists broke the business deal with the Crown, violating their contracts. We responded by gussying up our thefts with lofty bs about freedom and equality and rights. French loans, and the French navy, helped us get away with it.
Tocqueville's antipathy toward the South is an artifact of French affinity for the excesses of those Enlightenment ideas which enjoyed a higher traffic in the American North, but also of immemorial French hatred for England which enjoyed free trade with the American South. He is hardly the guide Holloway makes him out to be.
If there is any commonality left with the French vein in 2020 America, we have seen it in our streets with the violence, destruction, and blood-letting too reminiscent of the excesses of the French Revolution. The difference is that French republicanism sought to literally behead aristocrats, whereas now the rage is explicitly racial, focused on whites.
We have not learned to live with each other as fellow citizens. Cancel culture is everywhere, a euphemism for murder. The triumph of the ideas of BLM will literally mean the death of whitey.
Any conservatism which pretends otherwise isn't worthy of the name.
Trump underperformed:
Ronchetti in New Mexico (loser)
Lummis in Wyoming
Capito in West Virginia
Cornyn in Texas
Rounds in South Dakota
Somebody you never heard of in Massachusetts (loser)
Sasse in Nebraska
Gardner in Colorado (loser)
Cotton in Arkansas
Collins in Maine
Sullivan in Alaska
Perdue in Georgia.
Imagine doing worse than three losers.