Happy New Year!  🌻 🌻 🌻

Out With the Old:  The January 6^th Report is out and available in hard copy and on Audible, a convenient way to “read” it fast. Most of what it contains isn’t new news, especially for those who watch stations other than Fox and the like.  The bottom line is that Trump and his team knew that there was a good chance he’d lose the 2020 election and even before election returns started coming, they began planning ways to toss out the results by casting doubts on early voting.  Then once the election was over his strategy included cockamamie accusations about Chinese, Italian and South American corrupted election machinery, pressing local officials to “find” more votes, pursuing countless frivolous lawsuits, the false elector scheme, pressure on VP Mike Pence and finally a violent coup. Only time will tell if Trump ultimately suffers serious consequences for his election crimes or for any of his other financial machinations but with control of the House about to switch hands to the Republicans, the House January 6^th Committee is disbanding, so yesterday they cancelled their subpoena for Trump to appear, not that he ever was going to appear. Though their days in control are over for now, as a parting shot the Democrat controlled Ways and Means committee will be releasing the entirety of six years of Trump’s tax filings today, including all the ones that the IRS didn’t audit even though they were supposed to.  We know from the summary information already released that Trump didn’t pay much in taxes, and when he did pay it was only because he had capital gains that even he couldn’t offset.  We also now know that despite all his showmanship, Trump didn’t really donate his income.  A few more comments on this subject:  Cassidy Hutchinson really is a heroine, she did what many others should have, becoming the John Dean/Alexander Butterfield of this generation, particularly notable given how many of her colleagues, most more powerful and senior than she was, obfuscated and prevaricated during their depositions, transcripts of which were also released this week.  Mark Meadows is the loser that many of us thought he was.  A weak, overly accommodating Chief of Staff who facilitated Trump’s coup when he had the power to stand up and stop him.  And lastly, let’s all send positive vibes in the direction of Congressman Jamie Raskin. As if the loss of his son to depression last year wasn’t already too much to bear, he disclosed this week that he has an aggressive, but treatable (fingers and toes crossed) form of lymphoma and will be immediately starting chemo.   

In With the New: Most of this week’s political press has been taken up by the saga of Long Island’s mendacious Congressman-elect George Santos, AKA Devolder AKA Zabrovsky and goodness knows how many other names. For the record he didn’t graduate from or even attend Baruch College, he didn’t go to NYU grad school, he never attended Horace Mann, his grandparents are not Eastern European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, his mother was not in the World Trade Center on 9.11 and though she did pass away a few years ago she didn’t die twice, he’s not Jewish nor Jew-ish, he may or may not be bi-racial but he’s probably not part Angolan, he does not and never did own 13 income producing real estate properties, he did not endure chemo for the treatment of a brain tumor largely because he never had one, his pet charity wasn’t legit, he probably didn’t go to Israel several times and in any case PM again Netanyahu’s first name is Benjamin not David, he may or may not have traveled to Russia several times and if he did we really should learn why, he did steal and cash checks in Brazil and probably engaged in some questionable as in illegal financial things, including campaign finance crimes, here in the USA for which he is now being investigated by the Nassau County DA, the NYS AG and federal prosecutors from the Eastern District of NY.  Santos probably will be sworn into Congress next week largely because lying is not a crime, and those suspected financial ones are as yet unproven and more significantly because GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy desperately needs all the votes he can get to become Speaker and as of now he has none to spare and may even be short a few but Santos probably won’t last in Congress for his full term.  Speaking of Kevin, he’s got a tough week ahead of him.  He probably will eventually become Speaker but absent a quick cave-in by one or more of the five Republicans who say that they’re “never Kevins” it may take a few rounds of votes before any “gray smoke” rises from the Capitol chimney and even if he wins, his hold on his position will be tenuous. In any case, next year will be full of lots of investigations and hearings related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, now retired virus guru Tony Fauci, Afghanistan, and Alejandro Mayorkas, mostly because he’s the one taking the heat for the border migrant crisis.  That’s the crisis that will probably never go away no matter who’s in charge because life is tough in Central and South America and so many people want to come here.  Regarding that crisis, this week the Supreme Court voted to leave the Trump era emergency coronavirus restrictions at the southern border in place for now, not because we’re still in a “virus” emergency but because they‘re okay letting people suffer for a few more months. Even Justice Gorsuch knows that’s a bad decision, he joined with the liberal wing writing “Courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency…..We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.”  Sadly, he’s right, we need new immigration laws but who are we kidding, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, and everyone should agree that Texas Governor Abbott sending ill-clothed migrants in busses to freeze outside of VP Kamala Harris’ Washington DC home on Christmas Eve is neither Christian nor a solution.   

China, Elon, Greta:  China has opened, it’s population many of whom either didn’t get vaccinated at all or didn’t get boosted and when vaccinated were jabbed with less effective Chinese made vaccines are now coming down with one of the more transmissible variants of COVID.  Even if those current variants are less lethal than original COVID, China has 1.4 billion people, so just a very small percentage getting really sick or dying is a bigly problem, for them and for us.  For them because their health care system can’t handle the volumes of sick people and because President Xi has made a big deal about how his strategy for dealing with COVID was so superior to the strategy in the “decadent” west and to be honest he did keep deaths down until now he just messed up on the vaccination front and is now likely to catch up with the west on mortality as a result.  Bad for us because hate rates of COVID in China could well end up creating more vaccine evasive variants which is why the US and other countries are now requiring that all visitors from China pass COVID tests before entering and why we are ramping up sequencing analysis.  Moving on to Elon, Tesla is now struggling, and it doesn’t help that due to COVID in China he’s had to close a plant or two.  His Tesla stockholders aren’t happy about his Twitter shenanigans not that many people are.  Today the NY Times reported that in addition to closing facilities and failing to make rent payments on those he’s still occupying, he’s fired Twitter’s cleaning crews leaving employees without things like clean toilets or even toilet paper. Calling all rats?  Over the past few days, Twitter has started to experience more than the usual technical glitches, not all that surprising given how many people have been fired and that one of those closed facilities had back-up servers. Worse, in the run up to Christmas Twitter “temporarily” disbanded its suicide and crisis information.  Awful at any time but particularly bad given that rates of depression rise this time of year.  The company explained that they took the information down because they were working on a replacement one that isn’t ready yet, but that’s not how it’s supposed to work.  Anyway, under pressure they put the crisis information back up.  And it turns out that allowing trolling haters back on Twitter doesn’t just depress advertising revenue, it also provides law enforcement with useful information so yesterday one of those trollers who is back on Twitter, accused sex offender Andrew Tate, got nabbed by Romanian police after he accidentally disclosed his location during a Twitter battle with environmental activist Greta Thunberg who responded to one of his nasty tweets to her with the ultimate clap down telling him to enlighten her by sending an email to smalldickenergy@getalife.com.  Unable to deal with the ridicule he was getting and the number of likes and retweets she got for her truly brilliant tweet; he responded with a lame one that included a picture of him with a pizza box from a local Romanian restaurant in the background.  The police were soon knocking at his door.  Even George Santos Devolder Zabovsky couldn’t make that tale up.  Well then again…..

Happy and Healthy New Year to all! 🎉🎉🎉🎉