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How many passes does Anthony Fauci get? How many times must he be categorically wrong before people stop ogling his every facial expression and treating him as some sort of minor deity? Let me state unequivocally that enough is enough and it’s time for him to step aside. ​He won’t, of course. He’ll sit for magazine covers, attend sporting events the rest of us don’t get to go to, perhaps take CBS up on their offer to appear on Dancing with the Stars or sign a multi-year cable news contract. As COVID-19 tears through the country, and more importantly, through the parts of the country like California where elected officials worship Fauci like a sun-god, he continues his tour of the television studios. He continues to mislead the public.

At the end of the day, the votes cast and counted determine who wins and who loses. Though it might be the case that many people cast ballots in 2020 who weren’t eligible to do so for one reason or another, putting that horse back into the barn after the election is nearly impossible. The vote totals in seven Ohio counties shows why Donald Trump barely lost the election to Joe Biden while Republicans down ticket did extremely well. Republican congressman Troy Balderson’s 12th Congressional District encompasses parts of heavily-Democratic Franklin County (Columbus and its suburbs) along with six other suburban and rural counties north and east of Franklin County. Those counties include: Delaware, Licking, Marion, Morrow, Muskingum and Richland.

You’ve succeeded in business, made it as a TV star and got yourself elected president. What could possibly top that? Donald Trump may have stumbled on the answer. He has, perhaps accidentally, become a religious leader. Christianity has always played a major role in US politics. What’s new about Trump is the fervor he excites in his supporters, and how easily it can be combined with a kind of religious devotion. Trump fans bring crucifixes and rosaries to his rallies.

It’s been a month since the President pardoned a turkey, so why pardon a flock of them now? Presidential pardons and commutations may be lawful and traditional, and the conduct of government agencies in the Trump years has certainly confirmed that presidential fiat might be fairer than the Justice Department. But some of the names in Trump’s flurry of pre-Christmas pardons smack of the Washington insider-trading that Trump has decried — and suggest we might be better off with no pardons at all.There are exceptional cases, of course, but they are rare. The necessity of Andrew Johnson pardoning Confederate combatants after the Civil War is obvious.

President Donald Trump is the best. I already thought he was great, but I became even more convinced of his genius when I saw the updated rules on clothes washers, dryers, and showerheads issued by the Department of Energy on December 15, 2020 (new rules on dishwashers came out recently as well). The new regulations relax stringent regulations on the amount of water and energy consumption permitted in household fixtures and appliances, which save energy but impair functionality.I hear you thinking: do minor regulations on laundry, dishes and showers belong on the measuring stick of presidential greatness? It’s a fair point: the gallons of water per minute issuing from the average Joe’s showerhead aren’t on a par with peace in the Middle East.

Have you met Tina? You may have seen her this month leading a charge outside Mac’s Public House on Staten Island, protesting a second wave of economic terrorism against small business owners enacted by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo.The fiery, bombastic blond with the thick New York accent and colorful vocabulary has shown up at anti-lockdown events across the city, broadcasting footage to her 206,000 Twitter followers at a time when everyday New York Republicans are having a bit of time in the spotlight. https://twitter.com/RealTina40/status/1335652275532992512 A couple of years ago, the city cheered Vickie Paladino, a mom from Queens who was driving home one day and saw de Blasio surrounded by reporters on the street.

Tulsi Gabbard will retire from Congress at the end of the year. The Hawaii representative is going out with a bang, introducing several bills that show why she is so despised by her establishment Democratic counterparts — and why she could potentially become a very powerful broker in the American political realignment. Last week, Gabbard introduced the Protect Women's Sports Act, legislation that would prevent biological men from competing in women's sports. Gabbard understands that keeping men and women's sports separate is a question of basic fairness for female athletes — Chelsea Mitchell, a high-school track runner, for example, has lost out on four state titles because she's had to compete against two individuals who were born male.

William P. Barr is out. Joe Biden is in. And Donald Trump has a few more weeks left to bemoan his fate and lash out at his subordinates now that the Electoral College vote has taken place. Poor Trump! He wanted a no-holds-Barred assault on the election. But Barr, who was supposed to be Trump’s faithful janissary, has proved less than reliable in recent weeks, earning him the ultimate opprobrium of the President today, who declared that at least Robert Mueller, in contrast to Barr, would have set the record straight about Hunter Biden. Yup. Mueller. He would have 'set the record straight’, Trump claimed. So the author of the putative Russia witch-hunt is now being used to highlight the shortcomings of Barr?

It has been months since Congress passed the last COVID-19 relief package, and as DC hurtles toward its Christmas holiday, the prospect of another legislative effort is still bedeviling Capitol Hill.That we are here at all reflects a divergence from the lawmaking consensus that saw three phases of major COVID-19 legislation pass in March — including the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which constitutes the largest economic response legislation passed in US history. At that time, there was general bipartisan agreement that it was necessary; that the lives of Americans were being consumed by a crisis not of their own making, and one that was putting the livelihoods of small businesses and families at risk. (That didn’t stop the bill from being stuffed with unrelated pork, however.

‘Disappointed but not surprised.’ I suppose that describes my initial feeling about the summary dismissal by the Supreme Court last night of the ‘audacious’ (the New York Times) lawsuit brought by the state of Texas against Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan on December 8. In essence, Texas argued that those four states had trespassed on the civil rights of citizens by favoring some voters over others in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amusing and perspicacious commentator known as Ace of Spades added a bit of hot sauce in his response to the news of the Court’s ruling. ‘The ultimate Friday Night News Dump,’ he wrote.

It’s hard to be the son of a powerful man. Just ask Saadi and Hannibal Gaddafi, Pier Berlusconi and Saudi Prince Majed al-Saud, or Prince Harry, Yair Netanyahu and Robert Mugabe Jr, Hunter Biden and Gerald Ford’s son Steven Ford, or Uday and Qusay Hussein. Spoiler alert: you can’t ask the last two because they’re dead. The list goes on. While high-born daughters from Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton to Jenna Bush and Kim Yo-jong have tended to fare better, their male counterparts have often floundered. It’s time for you to meet the archetypal failson. Steven Ford is an alcoholic soap opera actor who dropped out of the 1978 movie Grease due to stage fright. Hunter Biden is a crack-smoking sex enthusiast.

‘Follow the numbers,’ Gov. Andrew Cuomo likes to say, as if the numbers made a run for it and we all gave chase. ‘Follow the numbers!’ as if data can also make decisions. Follow the numbers. But what numbers? On October 6, during one of his regular scraps with Mayor Bill de Blasio in which the mayor wanted to implement shutdowns by zip codes and the governor wanted to use a color-coding system, Cuomo made the following remark about why he was shutting down schools in areas with elevated COVID positive test rates: ‘The schools are important because you will very often see the schools be a place of transmission.’ Gov. Cuomo never lacks for confidence so this comment was uttered with his usual certainty. You will very often see schools be a place of transmission.

Governors across the country are deploying their unilateral power to institute draconian measures which close small businesses, mostly those in the service industry. They use outright Orwellian language to justify doing so, all in the name of the greater good of halting COVID-19 cases. But it’s not working anymore. Total cases are higher now than they’ve been since the spring and people are losing their livelihoods. No federal relief has come and there is a nationwide feeling that the dam is about to break. When people were told they had ‘15 days to slow the spread’, they listened. While they obliged, they watched crowds gather in protest of their personal causes and politicians ignore their own rules.

It is two o’clock on an unusually mild December afternoon here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting on my back porch smoking marijuana.Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this lapse, but smoking nonetheless. Since 2012, when the voters of Washington State chose to decriminalize it, my part of town has been especially fragrant with the acrid smell of pot. A thick haze of the stuff lingers long in the air these quiet lockdown days.

Countless emergency 911 calls requesting aid for a mentally ill person behaving inappropriately are made every day. Recently, many cities and states have begun changing their protocols to answer these calls. Unfortunately, the injection of race into the discourse can unnecessarily create tensions and may weaken efforts.The latest inappropriate inclusion of race was an ABC story reporting on New York City’s proposed initiative to better respond to these 911 calls. Its misplaced focus is captured in its headline — ‘How Sending Mental Health Responders instead of Police Could Save Black Lives’.