Everything must go

 As his latest bankrupt enterprise moves into its final hours, Trump is busy maximizing his last asset, pardons.  Jeremy Hutchinson, son of a former Arkansas legislator; Parker Petit, Georgia finance chair of Trump 2016; and Ross Ulbricht, founder of the online drug supermarket Silk Road are among those expecting to have their sins washed clean by the blood of the bribe this week.  If Trump is going to apply his chimp's-EEG signature to all those pages, he's entitled to a small profit ($100,000 is rumored to be the asking price).  

Public opprobrium closes a door and opens a window:  As predicted, Josh Hawley has found a new publisher for the volume the "woke mob" at Simon & Schuster declined, and all that free publicity, too.  (You may recall that Woody Allen had a similar problem last year, minus the First Amendment whining.)  But Hawley's insurrectionary activities have lost him a very rich friend, Jeffrey Yass of Susquehanna International Group and the reactionary Club for Growth.  Yass doesn't believe the "stolen election" crap and didn't expect his money would be used in an attempt to overthrow democracy in the United States.  As a Pennsylvanian, he's angry that outsiders like Hawley and Ted Cruz questioned the way the Commonwealth runs its elections.  Hawley has also alienated his mentor, former Senator John Danforth, who called endorsing him "the worst mistake I ever made in my life."  Several Missouri newspapers have demanded that he resign.  And he didn't even address the lynch mob on the morning of January 6, although a raised fist is, like Yass's millions, protected free speech.

Well, color me shocked.  It seems that not everyone who attacked the Capitol on 1/6 was a patriot.  The FBI is looking for Riley June Williams of Pennsylvania, who allegedly stole a laptop from Nancy Pelosi's office and tried to pass it to her friend in Russia and thus to Russian intelligence.  It's looking as if a lot of planning went into this coup attempt, which Counselor Giuliani says exonerates his client and invalidates the second impeachment.  See, if you can prove voter fraud, which he will totally do one day (if at sixtieth you don't succeed, try, try again), then Trump was right to dispatch his flying monkeys to the Capitol, there being no other way to STOP THE STEAL!!!  So Riley June can come home and the rest are off the hook and all is right, too-loo-ra-lay, I'm so glad he's not my lawyer.  

Lindsey Graham, who scampered to safety with everyone else, is outraged by the riot in the Capitol and he knows just who to blame:  "Where was Nancy Pelosi?  It's her job to provide Capitol security.  We'll get to the bottom of that."  Will you?  Are you still chair of the Judiciary Committee?  Will you be holding years of BENGHAZI!-style hearings?   Why don't you go stand outside Pat Leahy's office and sing "Will You Be My Neighbor?"

Twitter warned her to stop posting nonsense about election fraud.  Nevertheless she persisted, and now Marjorie Taylor Greene has been suspended and told to go think about what she did.  (Sure she will.)  I suppose they were alarmed by tweets like "The 1/5 disaster in Georgia lays [sic] solely in the hands of state leadership who failed voters in our state."  I'm no Ben Sasse fan but I thought he put it well in the Atlantic:  "Marjorie Taylor Greene is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs."  Of course, only a RINO would write for the Atlantic. 

I was heartbroken to read CNN's  account of the last, sad days of Ivanka and her glaceed husband.  They've cancelled their "farewell tour," they fear their political future will suffer from Daddy's post-election meltdown, and nobody will propose them for membership in the country club on Billionaire Bunker island.  Maybe it doesn't accept Jews.  They should have checked first.

Luke Mogelson of The New Yorker is the Robert Capa of the attempted coup.  He has posted jaw-dropping video he took of two Trumpanzees rummaging through a senator's desk:  "I think Cruz would want us to do this.  I think we're good."  As any lawyer but Giuliani would tell them, that won't hold up in court.

One thing that isn't going is covid-19 in all its varieties.  It's exploding everywhere but New Zealand.  A new study indicates that 30 percent of patients discharged from English hospitals were re-admitted within five months; one in eight died.  Inauguration Day will be the first anniversary of the first diagnosed case in the US.  That patient survived.   Joe Biden wants a hundred million Americans vaccinated in his first hundred days, traditionally a honeymoon but this is war and nobody has time.  And that's not even a third of the population.  Welcome our next contestant, Nipah virus in India.  This one has symptoms like epilepsy.

Today is Martin Luther King Day, and you can find his words, both inspirational and angry, all over.  If anyone tries to tell you he'd be a conservative today, take his phone and beat him about the ears with it.