The View from the Hermitage, Day 308

Here we are at Sunday, the day on which there were supposed to be demonstrations at every state capitol. I just check The Washington Post website, and other than a brief mention of a crowd starting to form outside the Texas state capitol in Austin, there was no news of demonstrations. I do not know if this bodes well or not for Wednesday; I can argue it both ways. 

We're 44 weeks into the pandemic as measured by this blog, and things are not looking good here in Virginia. There were 6,757 new cases of covid-19 on Friday, and 9,914 yesterday. There could have been some sort of data malfunction that moved cases from one day to another, but the average for those two days is approaching 8,500. The seven-day rolling average of the number of new cases has increased to 5,778. That's more than two 9-11s! If the governor does a briefing on Tuesday and brushes this off because we now have vaccinations ongoing, it will be a major dereliction of duty. Unfortunately, I know that new or reimposed mitigation measures would not be well received and would probably not be observed by a majority of people.

Son #1 was as upset about this case number as I was. I told him that I will now be even more nervous every time The Professor has to go to his office or lab. As for me, I don't expect that I will leave the subdivision unless it is to take the dog on an early morning park walk or to get vaccinated. Son #1 suggested that I add "get a flu shot for 2021" to that list just in case things aren't better by then. I'd like to say that I poo-pooed that possibility, but given how things have gone so far, poo-pooing may well be the incorrect response. 

I don't know that all the jobs lost in December were due to the pandemic, but I do know that women accounted for 100 percent of the US jobs lost in December. There was a net loss of 140,000 jobs that month. Women lost a total of 156,000 jobs. The 16,000 jobs gained went to men. It is not surprising that women of color were harder hit than white women. Looking beyond the US, women are 39 percent of the global labor force but account for 54 percent of the pandemic-related job loss. 

The record of The Lame Duck's presidency will be an incomplete one. He has a habit of tearing up pieces of paper he no longer needs. For a couple of years, there were staff members with the job of taping the pieces together to recreate the documents. In one case--a private meeting with Vladimir Putin--The Lame Duck took the notes kept by the interpreter; those notes have not been seen since. Many administration figures used private email servers. Government ones would have stored the messages that end up "hidden" on private servers. This point is particularly frustrating given the negative attention paid to Hillary Clinton's use of private email during the 2016 campaign.

The Lame Duck has but three more days in which he can issue pardons. A number of the Capitol rioters are pleading with The Duck for pardons. (There are others whose defense is that the President told them to do it.) A headline in this morning's New York Times: "Prospect of Pardons in Final Days Fuels Market to Buy Access to Trump." People are not paying The Lame Duck directly; that would be bribery.  Whether he will pardon family members or even himself remains to be seen. It's going to be an interesting three days, days likely full of surprises. 

Dinner prep calls!