Cockburn

After eight months of frantic work, several coronavirus vaccines appear ready for launch. But there are 330 million Americans, and decidedly less than 330 million shots right now. So the great question America must ask is, who should receive the vaccine first?At least, it was supposed to be a great question. Mercifully, the New York Times has come forth like the Good Witch of the North to show us the way. Figuring out health policy is easy, it turns out: just decide the best policy based on race.That was the clear message of a Saturday article posing the question: 'The Elderly vs. Essential Workers: Who Should Get the Coronavirus Vaccine First?

Cockburn has enjoyed giving teasing liberal opinion leaders for their limitless ability to engage in political projection. But even his patience is wearing thin after the latest atrocity inflicted upon the New York Times opinion page by economist and professional irritant Paul Krugman. Krugman’s latest column, published Monday evening, asks how the coming Biden administration will ever possibly cope with the unprecedented idea of having an opposing party with political disagreements. ‘When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge... he’ll be the first modern US president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy.

Find a comfortable spot on the carpet, children, the New York Times has a lesson for you all about how to curate editorial content. While fishing through his neighbor's recycling this morning, Cockburn was amused to see, on page A15 of the Times, a piece about his favorite poll aggregators, RealClearPolitics. What on earth could the site have done to earn the scrutiny of the Gray Lady? Brace yourself, dear reader: you may find parts of the report unsettling: '...RealClearPolitics and its affiliated websites have taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years as donations to its affiliated nonprofit have soared.' Dear heavens! Rightward and aggressively pro-Trump?

They also serve who only stand before the camera and talk nonsense. As the Resistance pick through the rubble of the Trump regime, CNN anchors are counting the cost, and not only in dollars, tens of thousands of which they pocketed for jabbering histrionically around the clock.‘As Election Night 2020 bled into Election Week, the talking heads on CNN became something like members of our families,’ writes Kate Storey at Esquire. Every family has its grandiose narcissists, its liars and sex pests, though not all have a 9/11 truther like Van Jones who can cry on cue.‘I was getting a new coffee every half hour,’ says Jake Tapper, heroically risking simultaneously losing control over both his mouth and his colon.

In his victory speech on Saturday night, Joe Biden quoted the 1970s Roman Catholic hymn, ‘On Eagle’s Wings’. The President-elect said that its message helped him cope with his various personal tragedies, which are undoubtedly very real and sad. Still, Cockburn wonders whether Biden is correct in his assessment that this particular hymn ‘captures the faith that sustains’ America. If Biden is right about that, then Cockburn wonders whether the ‘battle for the soul’ of the nation was even worth having.Of course, Cockburn doesn’t pretend to be a Catholic, let alone a good one, but having borrowed a friend’s Bible, he suspects that the hymn in question — a bastardization of Psalm 91 — rather misses the point.

It's been a bad couple of years for Jeffreys... Veteran New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended from the magazine after he 'exposed himself during a Zoom call last week', according to VICE. Toobin, who also serves as a CNN legal analyst, must have been reaching for the tissues as he described the incident as an 'embarrassingly stupid mistake' and offered an apology to his 'wife, family, friends and co-workers' in a statement. Cockburn is perhaps most surprised that Toobin is the first significant figure to be caught out during a video-conference, seven months into the COVID pandemic. What took us? Naturally, Twitter users have been having a field day with the story: https://twitter.com/rysimmons/status/1318266346610765829 https://twitter.

The lockdown is dead...long live the lockdown?In an interview last Thursday on Spectator TV, WHO special envoy David Nabarro warned seven months too late that the ubiquitous global response to the coronavirus pandemic might be a bit of an oopsie-daisy: https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1314573157827858434 ‘We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,' Nabarro said. ‘Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer... It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.’Now, there was nothing astonishing about Dr Nabarro’s claims.

Remember the Ukraine impeachment drama? No? Cockburn can hardly blame you. But believe it or not, less than nine months ago, the Ukraine ‘scandal’ was supposed to be the greatest in American history. Donald Trump was impeached. Mitt Romney gave some embarrassing speech.Not even a year later, it’s the story never happened. Neither impeachment nor Ukraine were mentioned a single time at the Democratic convention. The party isn’t just tired with the story. They seem earnest about keeping it dead.But now, thanks to the US Senate, they’ll need an assist from the press.A newly released report by the Senate Intelligence Committee resurrects the Ukraine story by reviving focus on Joe Biden’s ne’er-do-well son Hunter Biden.