Reading archive 2020-12-31

Wisconsin health-care worker ‘intentionally’ ruined more than 500 coronavirus vaccine doses, hospital says

Two state lawmakers confront a deadly pandemic, a disputed election and a divided, angry America

An island nation’s audacious effort to save its unique wildlife: New Zealand aims to rid itself of invasive predators by 2050. Success here could lead the way for other countries.

A new frontier is opening in the search for extraterrestrial life The reason we haven’t found life elsewhere in the universe is simple: We haven’t really looked until now.

Reading archive 2020-12-30

'Toxic Individualism': Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns

Girlfriend warned Nashville police Anthony Warner was building bomb a year ago, report shows

What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say: His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness. Maybe they’d be more understanding if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.

N.Y. prosecutor hires forensic accounting experts as Trump criminal probe escalates

Why increasing the stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000 is a bad idea

The Playbook for Poisoning the Earth

Secret Service to make changes to presidential detail to bring on agents who worked with Biden

Nikki Haley’s mind-numbing inanity - "The mindless denunciation of policies Democrats are not pursuing, appealing to White grievance, reiterating delusions of Christian persecution and uttering empty platitudes about capitalism are what pass for Republican 'ideas' these days.

...

"Republican 2024 aspirants think that appeals to White Christian victimology and cartoonish portraits of Democrats are the way to win over the MAGA crowd. Alas, I doubt that crowd is interested in a less inflammatory version of the message they have imbibed for four years, especially coming from slick politicians such as Haley."

Reading archive 2020-12-29

Is Dairy Farming Cruel to Cows? A small group of animal welfare scientists is seeking answers to that question. Facing a growing anti-dairy movement, many farmers are altering their practices.

Massachusetts GOP leader says he likely got covid-19 at a White House Hanukkah party: ‘I’m paying the price’

Sidney Powell’s secret intelligence contractor witness is a pro-Trump podcaster

Reading archive 2020-12-28

At Longwood Gardens, a new meadow for the ages

Biden put Wilmington on the map — but for garden lovers, it was already a destination

For D.C. protests, Proud Boys settle in at city’s oldest hotel and its bar

A Tycoon’s Deep-State Conspiracy Dive: Patrick Byrne, the former head of Overstock, had always been outspoken. Did an affair with a Russian agent push him too far? - "Emory University recently released the results of the most comprehensive analysis to date of people who are prone to conspiracy beliefs. According to the study, the personality profiles most often associated with such beliefs are entitlement, self-centered impulsivity, a sense of being wronged, and elevated levels of depressive moods and anxiousness.

...

"Several times over the summer, Byrne predicted that Barr would soon be making arrests, but they never took place. The Durham report did not appear, either, although a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Russian election interference was released in August. It mentioned Byrne several times, most significantly as someone Butina seemed to be using to connect with Rand Paul. The report was unequivocal: the Russian government had engaged in 'an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence' the outcome of the election, and it had done so with the aim of aiding Trump’s campaign. The conclusion of the committee, which is chaired by Rubio, effectively contradicted Trump’s assertion that Russian interference in the 2016 election was a hoax."

Reading archive 2020-12-24

Rejected by her family, this woman has been ‘Queer Santa’ for 22 years

U.K. and E.U. announce post-Brexit trade deal, smoothing Dec. 31 departure

Reading archive 2020-12-23

When my daughter asked if Santa was real, my answer was yes

The forgotten civil war history of two of our favorite Christmas carols

Activist posing as Smithfield CEO hoaxes Fox’s Maria Bartiromo

Democrats pressure McConnell to give in to Trump’s demand for $2,000 stimulus checks: ‘Let’s do it!’

What happened to Maria Bartiromo?

Republicans plunge into open battle over attempts to overturn Trump’s loss to Biden

Dominion worker sues Trump campaign and conservative media

Reading archive 2020-12-22

2 men shot up a California strip club with an AK-47 after refusing to wear masks, authorities say. Now they face life in prison.

It could take years for Biden to restore wildlife protections erased by Trump: Conservationists say the president-elect would have to start on Day One to draft policy to address Trump’s changes to the Endangered Species Act and other laws.

On a Trump-loving island in the Chesapeake, a virus outbreak unites instead of divides

Why Sen. Kaine wants to save Trump Country from sinking into the Chesapeake - "While Eskridge may see changes in the climate — powerful storms, eerie low tides — he doesn't believe humans are responsible. He favors the biblical prediction that the world is approaching the end days before the rapture when Jesus will return to Earth."

Washington Football Team settled sexual misconduct claim against Daniel Snyder for $1.6 million

Reading archive 2020-12-21

Undercutting Trump, Barr says there’s no basis for seizing voting machines, using special counsels for election fraud, Hunter Biden

How We Survive Winter: The solstice arrives in the depths of the pandemic. But the season of darkness also offers ancient lessons of hope and renewal.

The ‘Caliphate’ retraction won’t end the New York Times’s woes

As covid cases spike in Tennessee, health department warns Christmas surge ‘will completely break our hospitals’

I cut off all contact with my mother. It made my life much better.

Hunting is ‘slowly dying off,’ and that has created a crisis for the nation’s many endangered species

Reading archive 2020-12-20

Ex-cop hits truck thinking it held 750,000 fraudulent ballots, police say. It held air conditioning parts.

Reading archive 2020-12-19

‘Latinx’ hasn’t even caught on among Latinos. It never will. The term is an English-language contrivance, not a real gesture at gender inclusivity.

This California Representative Survived Jonestown and Says Trumpers Have Definitely Drunk the Kool Aid: A few years ago, Jackie Speier resisted comparisons between Jim Jones and Donald Trump. But now, she sees them clearly.

Reading archive 2020-12-18

If Trump pardons himself, Biden should un-pardon him

Once friends, Biden calls Lindsey Graham ‘a personal disappointment’ for not recognizing election win

Supreme Court won’t decide yet if Trump can exclude undocumented immigrants when allocating congressional seats

Reading archive 2020-12-17

Republicans suddenly discover they don’t like naughty words

How Geraldo Rivera, the sensationalist showman of ’80s TV, became the voice of election reason on Fox News: The investigative reporter-turned-freeform celebrity is now a seasoned pundit delivering a firm message to Trump fans about the 2020 race: “It’s over.”

Public transit is a lifeline for low-income residents. They will bear the brunt of service cuts.

Pressure mounts on federal agency over Union Station redevelopment. Critics say plan is too focused on cars.

FBI still won’t say who was wounded, or why, in ‘agent-involved shooting’ aboard Metro train

Reading archive 2020-12-15

Right-Wing Embrace Of Conspiracy Is 'Mass Radicalization,' Experts Warn

Reading archive 2020-12-14

Honeysuckle: An Unlikely Culprit in the Case of Water Quality

Tree Whisperers: Meet the DC Employees Who Watch Over Our Trees: Protecting the forest that lines DC’s streets is a daily battle for the city’s unheralded arborists.

Reading archive 2020-12-11

What we know about Rep. Eric Swalwell’s ties to an alleged Chinese spy

Here’s what happened when a Georgia lawmaker scrutinized the Trump campaign’s list of allegedly illegal votes

Texas has managed the near-impossible: Its presidential election lawsuit just got worse

Secession? Rush Limbaugh floats a startling notion — then quickly backs off.

Hatred of liberals is all that’s left of conservatism - "The Republican Party has proved that its hatred of liberals is so foundational that it will abandon any pretense of commitment to democracy, if democracy allows for the possibility that liberals might win an election. They have come to regard Democratic voters as essentially undeserving of having their will translated into power, no matter how large their numbers.

...

"Trump fights and fights, angrily, bitterly, endlessly driven forward by his hatred of the people his supporters hate. That’s what the base loves, and every other Republican knows it."

Metro disputes audit that claimed rail control center was ‘toxic workplace’ environment

Policing protests: Demonstrators say officers are taking sides as D.C. hosts pro-Trump rallies Saturday - "District officials say police did their best to minimize harm in a delicate and difficult situation. But officers’ behavior at the November rally — posing for photos with supporters of President Trump, standing back as demonstrators in Make America Great Again garb vandalized Black Lives Matter signs, standing back as arguments escalated to physical conflict — has prompted many to question the role personal politics play in policing."

Biologists say a wider American Legion Bridge would destroy critical research site

Reading archive 2020-12-10

The president and his party have gone to war against America - "When we look back on this dreadful era in our politics, I believe we’ll put this episode alongside Trump’s impeachment, because they share this sequence of events: A corrupt, narcissistic president engages in appalling misdeeds, then demands that his party defend those misdeeds, which they do."

Texas AG Asks the Supreme Court for a Coup: Ken Paxton and Donald Trump have a bizarre view of justice. [ed. note: author is a professor of law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter]

GOP Superlawyer Predicts Texas Election Suit Will Fail, Says Party 'Corroded' Under Trump

Hunter Biden confirms he is under federal investigation

Spies with Russia’s foreign intelligence service believed to have hacked a top American cybersecurity firm and stolen its sensitive tools

Reading archive 2020-12-09

‘God be with us’: Covid-19 becomes personal in a South Dakota town as neighbors die and the town debates a mask mandate

Who’s going to tell the GOP base that they’re being scammed? - "As long as those millions of suckers keep sending in their contributions and tuning in to their favorite shows, the people perpetrating the con will keep winding them up to greater heights of outrage. But what happens when President-elect Joe Biden actually takes office? Will they finally realize they got scammed? That their leaders knew all along that Trump lost but kept milking them for money anyway?

"Don’t bet on it. The GOP base’s eagerness to fall for every new iteration of this con is limitless, and nobody knows that better than the party’s leaders."

Biden to face wary allies after four years of Trump’s ‘America First’ rhetoric

Tamron Hall is betting on herself — and winning

TV’s gay Christmas movies are as benign, charming and cliche as we always hoped they’d be

The world’s rich need to cut their carbon footprint by a factor of 30 to slow climate change, U.N. warns: Despite sharp drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic, the world remains on pace for catastrophic warming in coming decades

Reading archive 2020-12-08

The Fascist We Deserve: The Authoritarian Ideology of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy

Prominent evangelicals are directing Trump’s sinking ship. That feeds doubts about religion. - "When prominent Christians affirm absurd political lies with religious fervor, nonbelievers have every reason to think: 'Maybe Christians are prone to swallowing absurd religious lies as well. Maybe they are simply credulous about everything.' If we should encounter someone who believes — honestly and adamantly believes — in both the existence of the Easter Bunny and in the resurrection of Christ, it would naturally raise questions about the quality of his or her believing faculties. It would call into question the standard of evidence being applied and muddy the meaning of faith itself."

A decade of wringing money and power out of conservative victimhood nears its apex: A tweet from the Arizona Republican Party encapsulates the moment

The Social Life of Forests: Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another? - "The razing of an old-growth forest is not just the destruction of magnificent individual trees — it’s the collapse of an ancient republic whose interspecies covenant of reciprocation and compromise is essential for the survival of Earth as we’ve known it."

Reading archive 2020-12-07

Arizona Legislature 'cannot and will not' overturn election, Republican House speaker says

UPDATE: Kemp again refuses Trump’s demand to overturn election

The African American History Museum Has Restored DC’s Rediscovered Last Supper Frieze: Studio Acting Conservatory built its new Columbia Heights home around the discovery of a lost sculpture inspired by the Black Arts Movement.

Two cheers for the Never Trump conservatives

National Zoo’s giant pandas will head to China in three years

In the Georgia runoff, just showing up for the debate was apparently the hardest part

Trump’s Most Malicious Legacy The outgoing president leaves behind a tribalistic, distrustful, and sometimes delusional political culture. - "This may be Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy—a nihilistic political culture, one that is tribalistic, distrustful, and sometimes delusional, swimming in conspiracy theories. The result is that Americans are disoriented and frustrated, fearful of and often enraged at one another."

A fight for forest equity in Southeast D.C. takes on new urgency amid pandemic

Florida police raid house of fired data scientist who alleged state manipulated covid-19 stats

Reading archive 2020-12-04

Trump raises $495 million since mid-October, including a massive haul fueled by misleading appeals about election fraud

Reading archive 2020-12-03

Kayleigh McEnany and the Trump team are running out of voter fraud tricks

No, Joe Biden Did Not Only Improve in Four Major Swing-State Cities - "Is it true that Joe Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in 32 out of 36, and overperformed in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia? No, it is not. It is emphatically false:" [ed. note: National Review]

Trump escalates baseless attacks on election with 46-minute video rant - "The president’s latest salvo came a day after his attorney general, William P. Barr, said the Justice Department had found no evidence of voting fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election."

Their View: Bedford County's 'no shutdown' crowd gives aid to the enemy

Dr. Marvin James Farr - "Dr. Marvin James Farr, 81, of Scott City, Kan., passed away Dec. 1, 2020, in isolation at Park Lane Nursing Home. He was preceded in death by more than 260,000 Americans infected with COVID-19. He died in a room not his own, being cared for by people dressed in confusing and frightening ways. He died with COVID-19, and his final days were harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary. He was not surrounded by friends and family.

"Marvin was born May 23, 1939 to Jim and Dorothy Farr of Modoc, Kan. He was born into an America recovering from the Great Depression and about to face World War 2, times of loss and sacrifice difficult for most of us to imagine. Americans would be asked to ration essential supplies and send their children around the world to fight and die in wars of unfathomable destruction. He died in a world where many of his fellow Americans refuse to wear a piece of cloth on their face to protect one another."

Parler's got a porn problem: Adult businesses target pro-Trump social network

‘When the Bombs Go Off, the Blood Is on Mike Flynn’s Hands’: Retired Officers Blast His Calls for Martial Law: The pardoned Army three-star promoted a call to suspend the Constitution for an election do-over. “Grant and Lincoln are rolling over in their graves,” said one retired general.

Trump campaign’s star witness in Michigan was deemed ‘not credible.’ Then, her loud testimony went viral.

Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe crashed a private CNN teleconference. CNN says he may have broken the law.

Man, 41, had no teeth and could barely speak after his mother locked him in their suburban apartment for 28 years, say reports [ed. note: Stockholm, Sweden]

The most petulant 46 minutes in American history

Rural Virginia county officials pass resolution rejecting ‘tyranny’ of governor’s coronavirus restrictions

Inside The Great British Baking Show’s Pandemic Production Bubble: The producers of television’s most soothing program tell V.F. how they went full Mission: Impossible to (safely!) film a new season mid-pandemic, and deliver it to a crisis-plagued audience.

Farah resigns as White House communications director in tacit nod to Trump’s loss

Army museums have tens of thousands of artifacts. They’re looking to downsize.: With 47 museums across the country, Germany and South Korea, and duplicates of nearly everything, a massive culling is underway.

1-year-old Carmelo Duncan is the latest victim of gun violence in D.C. as homicides hit a 15-year high - "Houseal blames the violence on disruptions caused by the coronavirus — people home, out of work, out of money and out of options. 'These are survival crimes associated with people who are traumatized,' she said. 'There are lot of people who are struggling and they need support. … Lately, a lot of people have been acting out of desperation.'" [ed. note: shooting into a car is not a "survival crime"]

Legendary Afghan pilot in hiding after U.S. reverses decision to help him flee Taliban

Reading archive 2020-12-02

‘Someone’s going to get killed’: GOP election official in Georgia blames President Trump for fostering violent threats

Trump lays the groundwork for a massive government purge on his way out the door

D.C. Council votes to rename Lafayette rec center and park, honor long-ignored Indian treaty

A massive new effort to name millions sold into bondage during the transatlantic slave trade

By facing more of its racist truths, Kansas — and America — could heal more of its divides