Zorro
Zorro's JournalWhite House Dogs Dig Up Trump's Tax Returns on South Lawn
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what is being hailed as an amazing act of canine heroism, President Joe Biden’s two German shepherds have dug up Donald J. Trump’s tax returns on the South Lawn of the White House.
According to sources, shortly after the President let Champ and Major out to play in the snow, they started sniffing one small patch of the lawn and digging intently.
Within minutes, the two White House pooches had unearthed twenty years’ worth of Trump’s federal tax returns, which they eagerly deposited on the Oval Office carpet for their master’s perusal.
Although it was unclear how, exactly, the returns came to be buried on the White House grounds, at Trump’s home in Palm Beach the former President was overheard screaming at his son Eric.
Back at the White House, Biden had little to say about Champ and Major’s adventure other than “Good boys.”
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/white-house-dogs-dig-up-donald-trumps-tax-returns-on-south-lawn
The U.S. Attorney Whom Trump Installed In Atlanta Amid GA Plotting Has Left Post
U.S. Attorney Bobby Christine has left the Atlanta office that former President Trump hand-picked him to lead while he was trying to reverse Georgia’s election results, the Washington Post reported Monday.
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Atlanta is now being led by Kurt Erskine, the career prosecutor who was passed over when former U.S. Attorney Byung Jin “Bjay” Pak left his Atlanta post in early January.
Trump intervened in that line of succession to give the job to Christine, whom he had previously appointed as U.S. attorney in Savannah. Christine is still serving as U.S. attorney in Savannah, the Washington Post said.
The circumstances of Pak’s departure made Trump’s intervention all the more sketchy, and the shake-up is now the subject of an inspector general investigation.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/the-u-s-attorney-whom-trump-installed-in-atlanta-amid-ga-plotting-has-left-post
Exxon, Chevron CEOs Discussed Merger
The chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. spoke about combining the oil giants after the pandemic shook the world last year, according to people familiar with the talks, testing the waters for what could be one of the largest corporate mergers ever.
Chevron Chief Executive Mike Wirth and Exxon CEO Darren Woods discussed a merger following the outbreak of the new coronavirus, which decimated oil and gas demand and put enormous financial strain on both companies, the people said. The discussions were described as preliminary and aren’t ongoing but could come back in the future, the people said.
Such a deal would reunite the two largest descendants of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, which was broken up by U.S. regulators in 1911, and reshape the oil industry.
A combined company’s market value could top $350 billion. Exxon has a market value of $190 billion, while Chevron’s is $164 billion. Together, they would likely form the world’s second largest oil company by market capitalization and production, producing about 7 million barrels of oil and gas a day, based on pre-pandemic levels, second only in both measures to Saudi Aramco.
But a merger of the two largest American oil companies could encounter regulatory and antitrust challenges under the Biden administration. President Biden has said climate change is one of the biggest crises the country faces. In October, he said he would push the country to “transition away from the oil industry.” He hasn’t been as vocal about antitrust matters, and the administration has yet to nominate the Justice Department’s head of that division.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/exxon-chevron-ceos-discussed-merger-11612126203
Can't imagine something like this happening, but one never knows...
The Republican Economic Plan Is an Insult
It’s bad faith in the name of bipartisanship.By Paul Krugman
So 10 Republican senators are proposing an economic package that is supposed to be an alternative to President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The proposal would reportedly be only a fraction of the size of Biden’s plan and would in important ways cut the heart out of economic relief.
Republicans, however, want Biden to give in to their wishes in the name of bipartisanship. Should he?
No, no, 1.9 trillion times no.
It’s not just that what we know about the G.O.P. proposal indicates that it’s grotesquely inadequate for a nation still ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic. Beyond that, by their behavior — not just over the past few months but going back a dozen years — Republicans have forfeited any right to play the bipartisanship card, or even to be afforded any presumption of good faith.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/opinion/coronavirus-relief-biden-republicans.html
Alzheimer's Prediction May Be Found in Writing Tests
IBM researchers trained artificial intelligence to pick up hints of changes in language ahead of the onset of neurological diseases.Is it possible to predict who will develop Alzheimer’s disease simply by looking at writing patterns years before there are symptoms?
According to a new study by IBM researchers, the answer is yes.
And, they and others say that Alzheimer’s is just the beginning. People with a wide variety of neurological illnesses have distinctive language patterns that, investigators suspect, may serve as early warning signs of their diseases.
For the Alzheimer’s study, the researchers looked at a group of 80 men and women in their 80s — half had Alzheimer’s and the others did not. But, seven and a half years earlier, all had been cognitively normal.
The men and women were participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running federal research effort that requires regular physical and cognitive tests. As part of it, they took a writing test before any of them had developed Alzheimer’s that asks subjects to describe a drawing of a boy standing on an unsteady stool and reaching for a cookie jar on a high shelf while a woman, her back to him, is oblivious to an overflowing sink.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/health/alzheimers-prediction-speech.html
This is an intriguing report.
An Emboldened Extremist Wing Flexes Its Power in a Leaderless G.O.P.
As more far-right Republicans take office and exercise power, party officials are promoting unity and neutrality rather than confronting dangerous messages and disinformation.Knute Buehler, who led Oregon’s Republican ticket as the candidate for governor in 2018, watched with growing alarm in recent weeks as Republicans around the nation challenged the reliability of the presidential election results.
Then he watched the Jan. 6 siege at the United States Capitol in horror. And then, to his astonishment, Republican Party officials in his own state embraced the conspiracy theory that the attack was actually a left-wing “false flag” plot to frame Trump supporters.
The night after his party’s leadership passed a formal resolution promoting the false flag theory, Mr. Buehler cracked open a local microbrew and filed to change his registration from Republican to independent. “It was very painful,” he said.
His unhappy exit highlighted one facet of the upheaval now underway in the G.O.P.: It has become a leaderless party, with veterans like Mr. Buehler stepping away, luminaries like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio retiring, far-right extremists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia building a brand on a web of dangerous conspiracy theories, and pro-Trump Republicans at war with other conservatives who want to look beyond the former president to the future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/us/politics/republicans-trump-ronna-mcdaniel.html
Republicans just handed Biden a good reason to go big -- without them
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Ten Senate Republicans are unveiling their own scaled-down economic rescue plan — with the transparent aim of getting President Biden to negotiate away his own ambitions. The game they’re playing runs as follows: If Biden doesn’t make all kinds of concessions in their direction, they suggest, he’ll be reneging on his promise to pursue “unity.”
But this argument has now been badly undercut by none other than Republicans themselves.
In an important new piece, the New York Times reports that Republican operatives are openly boasting of their intention to ramp up efforts to gerrymander House districts during this year’s decennial redistricting.
The upshot of that report: It’s plausible that Democrats could lose the House in 2022 largely on the strength of GOP partisan gerrymandering.
If so, then it seems obvious that Biden and Democrats cannot seriously trim their agenda for the sake of achieving bipartisanship for its own sake. If Democrats do lose the House, Biden’s agenda screeches to a halt.
It would be the ultimate perversity if this were to happen due to GOP gerrymandering after Biden significantly downscaled his agenda in search of bipartisan comity. If Republicans are threatening to take back the House through a nakedly partisan exercise of counter-majoritarian tactics — and if there’s a decent chance they’ll succeed — it furnishes a good reason for Biden and Democrats to do as much as they can right now, with or without Republicans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/01/gop-gerrymandering-biden-agenda-stimulus/
Budget office projects 4.6% growth in Biden's first year
The Congressional Budget Office expects the U.S. economy will grow at a 4.6% annual rate this year, with employment returning to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
The 10-year outlook issued Monday said the economic recovery from the coronavirus has been boosted by an unprecedented wave of government spending to combat the outbreak, such that growth could pass its maximum sustainable level in early 2025 before returning to a long-run average of 1.7%. Based on the CBO’s projections, economic growth would be the strongest since 1999.
Congress has spent $4 trillion to keep the economy stable since the pandemic shuttered schools, offices, restaurants, gyms and other businesses, leading to roughly 10 million job losses and an economic decline of 3.5% last year.
The CBO estimates factored in the roughly $900 billion approved in December, but they excluded President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan because the projections are based on current law.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/nation/story/2021-02-01/budget-office-projects-4-6-growth-in-bi dens-first-year
That's good news for the country.
After Capitol Riot, Elected Officials Under Pressure Back Home
At least 19 state and local elected officeholders from across the country attended the Jan. 6 rally and, in some cases, stormed the Capitol.In a video posted on Facebook, Couy Griffin, the founder of a group called Cowboys for Trump, bragged that he had a “first row seat” to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and considered returning for another rally in which he imagined “blood running out of that building,” the F.B.I. said. Later, he told the F.B.I. that he hoped the next demonstration would be nonviolent but there was “no option that’s off the table for the sake of freedom.”
He was arrested before he could hold another rally on Inauguration Day as he planned. But first, he returned to his post as an Otero County commissioner in southern New Mexico, where an effort to oust him has now gained new steam.
Mr. Griffin “leapt right into sedition,” said Paul Sanchez, a Republican who is leading a committee that hopes to recall him. “His focus is not at all on Otero County.”
Mr. Griffin, who has been charged with trespassing at the Capitol, was not unlike many others there that day: He had a deep allegiance to former President Donald J. Trump and a belief that the election was rigged. He is also among at least 19 elected officials from across the country now under heightened political scrutiny back home because they attended the president’s rally and, in some cases, stormed the Capitol building along with a mob that became violent in its effort to stop the vote that would make President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election official.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/us/capitol-riot-local-politicians.html
If Marjorie Taylor Greene Isn't Beyond the Pale, Who Is?
There’s still time for Republican leaders to reject Q.By The Editorial Board
How far is too far? This is the question Republican leaders are being forced to grapple with as the public outcry grows over one of their newest House members, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The Georgia freshman is best known for endorsing QAnon, the right-wing movement convinced of the fiction that Donald Trump is a messiah sent to defeat a cabal of Satan-worshiping, child-abusing, deep-state villains. But this is just one of the bizarre lies she has peddled. Her greatest hits include promoting the conspiracy theory that blames the 2018 Camp Fire wildfire in California on a space laser controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family, suggesting the Obama administration used its MS-13 “henchmen” to murder a Democratic National Committee staff member and floating the idea that the Clintons had John F. Kennedy Jr. killed. She has dabbled in 9/11 Trutherism and contended that various school shootings were false-flag operations. She also traffics in racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim talk.
Ms. Greene does not draw the line at promoting bigotry and disinformation. Videos and social media posts from before she ran for Congress show her endorsing violence against those she sees as enemy combatants in an ongoing civil war. She has expressed support of social media calls to execute high-profile Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and F.B.I. agents. When asked about such activities, Ms. Greene has dodged, asserting that her pages have been run by “teams” of people over the years, some promoting views with which she does not agree. Many of the posts in question have since been scrubbed.
Ms. Greene’s behavior since her election has been troubling as well. She has peddled false claims that the presidential election was stolen and rife with fraud. She was among the 139 House Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the Electoral College on Jan. 6, even after a pro-Trump mob sacked the Capitol. On Jan. 17, Twitter briefly suspended her account for repeatedly violating its “civic integrity policy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/opinion/marjorie-taylor-greene-gop.html
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Gender: MaleHometown: America's Finest City
Current location: District 48
Member since: 2001
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