Good afternoon, this is The Smoke Eater for Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2020, and that's macho insecurity.
Quick Hit
* Human centipede * The 117th's line of scrimmage * Don't cry over spilled milk * Start thinking about 2022 *
NOTE: Welcome to 2021, I guess. I'm not going to make any promises I can't keep, but I will say that I plan to keep waking up before dawn to start hashing this thing out. Did you know that I erase trackers from links in the newsletter? Not harvesting your clicks for easy cash (like some cheap imitations that shall remain nameless!) is just another reason The Smoker Eater is mobile friendly, totally free and supported entirely by its super awesome readers. If you want to be super awesome and support The Smoker Eater in its second year of poorly edited existence, tip me on Ko-Fi, find me on Venmo, or Paypal, or subscribe to my Patreon!
Same Old Song And Dance
There's no shortage of GOP civil war stories right now. Poor Sen. Mitch McConnell has struggled to keep his most electorally-challenged members from being forced to choose between their fealty to Trump or the Constitution ahead of the 2022 Mid-terms, but alas, Republican members of Congress will have to take sides in their party's divorce from reality.
Some prominent Republicans are weary to sign on to so-called Sedition Caucus' spectacle as they openly fear it will delegitimize the electoral college, and consequentially doom their party's presidential prospects in 2024. The Washington Post Philip Bump notes that this is a real thing for Republicans as the GOP has developed a terrible habit over the last several decades — losing the popular vote by a rather substantial margin, yet somehow winning the presidency via electoral fuckery.
With bean counters and Wall Street suits chewing their fingernails down to their cuticles in fear of a "double-bubble," business leaders, fancy lawyers, real estate assholes, Silicon Valley dickheads, sports jockies, and high snobriety, — some of whom have lived off the fat of Trumpland — penned their a letter urging Trump and his sycophants to stop trying to subvert democracy with their exponentially insane tantrums.
Still, the ultimate loyalty test will fall upon Vice President Mike Pence tomorrow. Maggie Haberman writes that a person close to Pence said he faces a a "gut-wrenching" decision to follow his ceremonial and scripted role in carrying out his sworn Constitutional duty, or to continue licking the boots of a wannabe autocrat. It's unclear whether Pence will skip town after that, but Republican soothsayers tell Habes' that Pence will probably flush his own 2024 presidential prospects down a golden toilet when he Biden the winner of the 2020 election on live television.
Regardless of what happens on the Hill, D.C. is bracing for a throng of armed, ultra-nationalist MAGAcolytes to descend upon the city tomorrow. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has activated the National Guard in preparation of violence as the white nationalist and pro-Trump have a history of picking fights, and openly threatening non-Trump aligned politicians, journalists, and activists. Bellingcat has a rather concerning OSINT deep dive into how neo-Nazi groups and far-right extremists have begun to merge together, and are attempting coordinate violence after the rally(s) — which Trump may speak at tomorrow — as they call for armed rebellion on social media. Several D.C.-based journalists and activists have told me they're urging friends, family, and colleagues to stay home and avoid D.C.
BONUS: Punchbowl's John Besnahan has been reporting from one of many spin-off groups that slithered into the Capitol earlier this afternoon.
The 117th Congress
Nancy Pelosi was reelected to her fifth term as Speaker of the House. With cacophonous tweets from the whipper snappers caucus demanding fresh blood in Democratic leadership, and the GOPs crackpot caucus scheming to wrest the gavel in the 118th, this could be the 80 year-old Pelosi's final term as speaker AND her last years in the House where she'll preside over one of the thinnest majorities in decades. The vote to confirm Pelosi was chaotic and narrow; a plexiglass box had to be constructed so that some members still under quarantine — two Democrats and one Republican — could fly to D.C. and cast their vote. This doesn't include Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore who was conveniently cleared from quarantine at midnight on Sunday.Several Democrats defected from leaders who'd been wrenching the arm of the rest of the caucus. They included Reps Jared Golden and Conor Lamb, as well as Reps. Elissa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger, and Mikie Sherill.
Colorado's gun fetishising freshman Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert declared victory after the new House 117th's rules didn't explicitly ban her from bringing her Glock into the Capitol. She can't bring her gun onto the floor of the House or Senate, and it has to be kept on a leash in her office. There's no word whether she'll clean up its mess.
The wealthy Republican milk magnate who challenged — and lost — to Illinois Rep. Lauren Underwood, Jim Oberweiss, waited until last moment to file a "Notice of Contest" with the Clerk of the House of Representatives. "Racist Ice Cream," as he's been called by some detractors due to multiple instances of racist campaign ads targeting immigrants and Black rights activists during his multiple failed attempts to get into national politics, lost to Underwood by 5,734 votes, but he's demanding all mail-in votes from suburban Kane County be thrown out. Oberweiss ultimately lost the suburban Chicago county by 2,621 votes, though he still claimed victory on election night as incomplete returns showed him with a narrow 895 vote lead. In the weeks leading up to the Nov. 3 election, several counties in greater Chicagoland were slow to process the large number of mail-in ballots cast in 2020, with some officials telling local NPR-affiliate, WBEZ, that they were still waiting on a majority of mail-in ballots in an Oct. 22 report. Oberwiss tells Politico that he thinks "there's enough evidence for a re-do" based on his claims, though in a statement he said, "I do not believe we found any rampant fraud." Seriously.
For Your Radar
Stacey Abrams is gearing up for a 2022 rematch against Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp after spending the last two years building a deep-pocketed war machine. The Georgia GOP is currently weathering schizophrenic attacks from Trumpland (which can blow out just as quickly as they blow in), hoping it can hold fast for another likely rematch between Sen. Kelly Loefler and Raphael Warnock in 2022.
People who collected (or are still collecting) unemployment benefits are probably going to get screwed on their taxes this year as it counts as an income.
KCRW Berlin has gone off the air after its California-based counterpart was unable to afford broadcasting fees. The station appealed for help from the Trump administration to no avail. Listeners attempted to offer financial support for the station, but it was already too late for the station by the time the news became public. RIP.
One More Thing...
It's long, but sit down and read Lawrence Wright's piece on the response to COVID-19 in the New Yorker, "The Plague Year." It has first hand accounts from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Debroah Birx, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, White House foreign policy advisor Matthew Pottinger, CDC officials, survivors, frontline workers, and doctors Barney S. Graham and Jason McLellan — the proverbial architects of the vaccines. The piece traces the U.S. failure to contain the virus down to three distinct moments, and recalls many of the pivotal roles in previous outbreaks, such as H.I.V./AIDS.
New York Magazine has a piece of fan-fiction about COVID-19 in the form of Nicholson Baker's 12,000 word rationale for how the virus might have been engineered and accidentally escape from a lab. The piece offers no actual evidence, and repeatedly notes that it's, "just a theory," so you can skip it. It's informally presented here as filler.
Zeynep Tufekci also has a long-read in The Atlantic about how the new mutation of COVID-19 rapidly spreading across the U.K. (and, without a doubt, the U.S.) could be a herald of things to come. Most of them are very, very bad — unless the U.S. can get its shit together in the next few weeks.
OK, here's a cute critter video: IT'S WELLINGTON AND FRIENDS!
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