Day 309…
It’s early. It’s quiet and dark.
There are no news alerts on my phone.
Michael must have gone to bed very late. There’s a pan on the stove that has popcorn kernels in the bottom and a post-it on the lid that says, “Um, yes I did.”
The cat started requiring food at about 5am which can’t have been all that much later than Michael went to sleep. Against my better judgement, I got up and fed him and then went back to sleep. Not long after, he came back in, jumped up on the bed and meowed so I kicked him off. After an hour or so, he did it again and Michael kicked him off too.
He’s now curled up in the living room with his back to me, pouting.
He can stay there as far as I’m concerned. It’s much too early for me to be up and it’s all his fault.
The President was impeached for the second time yesterday. 10 Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in the vote. 197 Republicans voted against it.
It’s not clear yet what will happen next. The Senate Majority Leader has said that he will not allow the Senate to consider the case before January 19th when the Senate reconvenes. He has also announced that he has not yet made up his mind how he will vote.
It will be interesting to see when Speaker Pelosi sends the impeachment decision from the House to the Senate. The danger, of course, for the Democrats is that an impeachment trial could delay confirmation hearings for the President-elect’s cabinet. Our Department of Justice and Homeland Security Departments are both leaderless at a time when we need them the most. Other Agencies are too.
A Senate trial could also get in the way of other legislation that he’d like to accomplish. As an example, he is reportedly going to unveil a $2 trillion COVID relief bill later today.
Marjorie Taylor Green, the QAnon-believing Republican Representative from Georgia announced that she plans on initiating impeachment proceedings against President-elect Biden on January 21st. She’s been in Congress for about a week. She should shut up. During the debates surrounding President’s impeachment vote, she wore a facemask with the word ‘censored’ on it to protest the mask-wearing mandate on the floor.
With each passing day, more and more troubling information comes to light in regard to the insurrection on January 6.
Democratic members of the House are asking the FBI to investigate an unusually high number of tours that Republican members gave to groups of constituents the day before. During a time where such tours are drastically limited because of COVID concerns, the worry is that some Republican members were allowing insurgents an opportunity to do reconnaissance beforehand so that they’d know where they were going on the day.
There’s video of rioters with bullhorns outside the Capitol giving extremely specific directions to the marauders about which windows to break and which hallways to take to get to where they wanted to go.
The Boston Globe is reporting that when Massachusetts Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley and her staff barricaded themselves in her office during the riot, they discovered that the panic buttons installed in there had been ripped out. Pressley is part of the so-called “Squad” of liberal legislators that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They are particularly reviled by the radical right.
It does not appear that there was anything spontaneous about the insurrection of January 6. It was planned out.
During a rally on the steps of the Minnesota Capitol in St. Paul the day before the attempted coup, a GOP official named Alley Waterbury addressed the crowd after it was announced that the Vice President would not interfere with the certification of the election results.
“Now you know why Trump wanted us there. I can’t express to you guys, you will be threatened, you will be scorned. My god you guys, we are going to fight, we are going to go down, there's going to be casualties. I'll be the first casualty, I don’t care. We are not going to give up.”
The President, who has been fairly effectively muzzled by the social media platforms over the last couple of days, issued a somewhat hilariously scripted taped video from the White House. Hilarious because it was so unlike anything he has ever done before. It was like listening to a real President speak, only we all know he can’t possibly have done it on his own. It’s so off the mark that his riled-up supporters will be able to ignore it in the same way that you can ignore what a hostage says on a ransom video while they are surrounded by armed jihadists.
In the video, he called for an end to violence and said that it would not support the cause. He never mentioned the impeachment and he certainly didn’t concede. During his trip down to Texas to look at his border wall with Senator Lindsay Graham on Tuesday, he reportedly was still ranting that he’d won the election.
His supporters will not be fooled by that video.
The President is going to do something to try to divert attention from all of this very soon. The White House has signaled that there is likely to be a new batch of pardons coming. Brace yourselves.
70% of the country fears for the safety of elected officials but just over 50% approve of him being impeached. Even after inciting an insurrection and being impeached a second time, the President’s approval rating is still higher than either Nixon or the second Bush’s was at the end of their terms.
Nationally, we have still not been able to get 10 million vaccines administered. Two weeks into January and we have only been able to accomplish 50% of the end of December goal.
New York City has opened a mass vaccination facility in the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It has the capability of handling up to 25,000 injections a day, but at the moment they are averaging about 1,500 a day. The problem is getting an adequate supply of the vaccine and getting the word out who those who are allowed to get it.
Part of the issue is that few of the elderly who are eligible understand the process. Every municipality has a different procedure which makes it close to impossible to follow if you don’t know how to look for instructions online. As a result, rather than waste vaccines on people who don’t show up, eligibility is starting to open up. In California, people 65 and older can now sign up.
As of this morning, there have been 23 million coronavirus cases in the US. 2 million of them have occurred in just the past 9 days. As fast as people are being inoculated, others are getting infected.
Former FDA Chief Scott Gottleib believes that those numbers may start going down next month. He says that by the end of January 30% of the population will have had it and 10% of them will have been vaccinated. With 40% of the population having some defense against the virus it will be that much more difficult to transmit.
10% of the population corresponds to 32 million people. For Gottleib to be right, that would mean that 23 million people, more or less, would need to get the vaccine over the next three weeks. Given what we are seeing now, that seems a somewhat over ambitious goal.
Of course, we will have a new Administration in place in a week.
As much as they are saying that they are going to be hitting the ground running, they are still going to run up against some very real obstacles. Many of the agencies that should be dealing with running our country are going into this transition without leadership. Many were never fully staffed in the first place during the last four years. Few appointed by this past Administration were experts in their fields - they were mostly supporters of the President that he was rewarding by giving them important positions.
Picture the United States as a well-maintained Victorian house which was given over to a fraternity for four years. No maintenance done at all during that time and packed to the rafters with unspeakable garbage.
That’s what the Biden/Harris Administration is going to find waiting for them. A trashed frat-house.
The people coming in will need to be confirmed by the Senate, who may be distracted while dealing with the impeachment. Once confirmed, then, they will first need to investigate the damage before they can really start to work.
Let’s not forget the Russian cyber hack. That’s in there, too. The computer systems in all of these departments may have been completely compromised. It’s going to take a while before new, independent systems can be set up.
Nothing that is currently happening is going to wait while any of that gets underway. It’s all going to just keep on getting worse making everything just that much more difficult to fix.
On the plus side, it does seem that the best possible people have been nominated to fill these positions. Cleaning up this mess is inescapable, but it appears that the incoming team is at least qualified to handle it.
We just have to get through this next week. It is already dragging out.
Michael just got up, came out of the bedroom to get some coffee and disappeared back into it. A friend of his helped him with a TV audition yesterday, so this morning he’s returning the favor.
The cat is still sulking.
The news this morning is mostly a rehash of old news on a continuous loop. At this point, no news really is good news.
I may need to go back to bed. On some level, it would be nice to be able to sleep through the next few days and just wake up once it’s all over.
But no.
There’s a whole day ahead and plenty to do.
But first, I’m just going to close my eyes for a second.
❤️”The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks” Tennessee Williams ..... and still aware of the rocks yet to break 💕💫