Morning Thread

Cases, deaths, hospitalizatons keep rising. Deaths lag hospitalizations. Doing the advanced math of squinting at the graphs, 4,000 daily deaths in 10 days or so is likely.

Thursday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour Thread

Enjoy

The Gorilla Channel

I don't particularly care what Trump is watching and think his half-life is shorter than people think, but one consequence of Trump abandoning his Foxy Friends is that when they clearly break from him, the rest of the political journalists will declare them redeemed and join them in their Hard Hitting Fair and Balanced Coverage of Joseph Stalin Biden.

Huzzah

BREAKING: @GovRaimondo says she will NOT be Biden's health secretary https://t.co/xAAMPVIUqZ

— Ted Nesi (@TedNesi) December 3, 2020

A good development, for this and other reasons.

How Pickled In Fox Are Their Brains

If Trump ever manages to get any election case in front of the US Supreme Court, we'll see how many of them do have terminal fox news brain.

(They're still aiming at them in PA and WI, from what I can tell)

The Best Grift In Conservadom

LaPierre has just been putting all the money in his pocket for years, so it's perfect for Don Jr and his dealer.

SCOOP: Don Jr. eyes a run for NRA chief. It's one more way the Trump family is making big plays to cement itself in GOP conservative politics for the next four years.

Lunch Thread

Busy with some stuff. That happens sometimes!

Thursday Is New Jobless Day

712K new lucky duckies.

Every week since this began has been higher than the peak week of the Great Recession.

Betrayal

Hey, MAGAs, Pence isn't standing by his man.

Vice President Mike Pence has been a go-to fundraising draw for the president’s campaign, and since October, no more than a day passed without his name emblazoning a fundraising email for the Trump reelect.

But that changed late last month. Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name.

Pence betting on abandoning Trump instead of embracing him! We'll soon find out which journalists he was a good source for (the ones that write his rehab pieces).

Morning Thread

2700 covid deaths yesterday. Yesterday's number wasn't just due to reporting delays.

Wednesday Night

Rock on.

America's Worst Killer Robot Manufacturers

Tesla.

900

I hope the writers of this dumb show get Covid and die before they can start on season 2.

Scoop: Pompeo and his wife are hosting multiple holiday parties (one on the 8th floor of the State Dept with more than 900 invitees & food & drinks). At the same time, Pompeo’s subordinates are warned against meetings for “non-mission critical events.” https://t.co/4MCPfRuyrU

— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) December 2, 2020

All The Best Parties

As I said, very long time DC insider. Respected by all the best people!

Joseph diGenova, the Trump campaign lawyer who had been a fixture in Washington legal circles for decades, resigned under pressure Tuesday from the elite Gridiron Club after an uproar over his comments suggesting former government official should be executed.

...

The Gridiron Club is primarily an organization for Washington journalists, but it is best known for an annual formal dinner that also ropes in political luminaries and a raucous musical-comedy presentation of satirical songs and skits. DiGenova, who served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in the 1980s, had been a “limited” member for more than 25 years, one of a handful of “ringers” recruited for their impressive singing voices.

America's Worst Mayors

Steven Adler.

Anti-Fa Supersoldier Sidney Powell

All these deep cover agents paying off.

Ex-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell encourages "all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure." She says there shouldn't be a Senate runoff.

She says we need to have voter ID and paper ballots. Georgia has both of those things.

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) December 2, 2020

Smokey Eye

A way in which the NORMS which keep things glued together, whatever their merits in isolation, are maintained is through social pressure, sometimes extreme, on the people expected to live up to them and on the people who appoint themselves as their guardians but fail to do so.

If the legal system can't touch an inhumane and corruption administration, then yelling at the individuals involved in restaurants for the rest of their lives is about the only enforcement mechanism left, especially when the perps have become the favored sources of the elite press.

Filling Up The Clown Car With Grifters

As I've said before, while I am certainly not one who imagines some golden era of good Republican governance, Trump did innovate by adding the "just put the bags of cash on the president's desk" feature which is new to the modern era, at least.

I do worry that when we consider why people want to be president in the future, the concerns will have to include "so they can place all the money from the Treasury in their pockets."

Is He Still There

Is our uncharacterisitically quiet president stewing in a rage spiral, or plotting crazy things?

Tired of having to worry about it. I know it's dumb to internalize this stuff personally, at least given my relatively comfortable perch, but the last month has been somewhat stressful!

Bad Religion

You know Tucker (and many others) would be demanding that their local police force be disbanded if they ever had a slightly unpleasant traffic stop.

230

My President wants to veto the defense bill (good!) for a dumb reason (twitter is flagging his tweets).

230, which basically means I am not responsible for what you write in the comments even if I engage in some moderation, is what conservatives obsess about. The moderation doesn't flip me from platform to publisher and make me liable for all your libel.

Which doesn't mean a re-examination of 230 is entirely inappropriate, as platforms which push things into your feed are arguably engaged in publishing, even if it's an ALGORITHM that's doing it. Like many things that's above my pay grade, but section 230 doesn't mean what conservatives think it means, and certainly getting rid of it wouldn't mean what they claim it would mean (the smart ones know this, but they don't care). It would definitely mean that twitter would delete Donald Trump's precious twitter account right away so as not to be liable for his bullshit.