What is happening to the Republican party?

When a candidate loses an election for president, they usually brace themselves for blame. When they take down their party with them, they would normally slink off into the sunset while the party regroups and rethinks its strategies. In the case of Donald Trump, he not only lost the presidency, during his time the Republicans lost their majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. And yet, when Trump made his first public outing to the annual CPAC conference, he was treated like a conquering hero and party leaders are making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring and going on TV to swear allegiance to him.

In a long article in The New Yorker Jelani Cobb takes a shot at answering the widely discussed question of what this means for the Republican party and he thinks its prognosis is not good.
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Children still being held in cages on the southern border

It appears that the appalling conditions under which migrant children were held during the Trump administration are still continuing under the Biden administration.

Hundreds of immigrant children and teenagers have been detained at a Border Patrol tent facility in packed conditions, with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t enough mats, according to nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight of immigrant detention centers.

The lawyers interviewed more than a dozen children Thursday in Donna, Texas, where the Border Patrol is holding more than 1,000 people. Some of the youths told the lawyers they had been at the facility for a week or longer, despite the agency’s three-day limit for detaining children. Many said they haven’t been allowed to phone their parents or other relatives who may be wondering where they are.
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John Oliver on how badly the US handles unemployment

Losing one’s job is not only a traumatic experience, it often leads to a cascade of disasters such as losing one’s home. Unemployment insurance is meant to tide people over until they find another job. But some political leaders, especially Republicans, seem to view it as a reward for lazy people. He describes how hard it is for people to get unemployment benefits and how some states like Florida cut the premiums that companies are supposed to put into the unemployment fund and then go out of their way to make things difficult for people to apply for relief.

50th anniversary of an epic break-in of an FBI office

On March 8th, 1971, antiwar protestors broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, PA and stole every file they could lay their hands on. These people were not criminal masterminds. They were ordinary people involved in peaceful antiwar movements, such as college professors, a homemaker, a taxi driver, and the like who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. The documents they stole and released revealed the existence of secret and illegal surveillance programs to infiltrate, harass, and discredit peaceful antiwar groups. The existence of these programs was widely suspected but unproven.
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Don’t mess with Katie

Congresswoman Katie Porter has shown time and time again that she prepares carefully for congressional hearings and yet industry executives keep trying to patronize and snow her and she keeps putting them in their place as happened again recently.

They never seem to learn that she does her homework.

I have been vaccinated, Now what?

On Wednesday I received my covid-19 vaccine. I had become eligible for it the previous Wednesday but finding an appointment was not easy and took me a few days. I finally got one at a CVS drug store. The downside was that it was in San Jose which is about a 90 minute drive for me. The upside is that they were giving the Johnson&Johnson vaccine which is a single dose. So I am now done. I also enjoyed that for the first time in a year, I actually went further than a couple of miles from my home and I enjoyed the change of scenery. Soon after the lockdown began last March, I filled the gas tank in my car in case of an emergency and when I checked on Wednesday before I set out, I had done only 240 miles for the entire year. The trip to San Jose added about 150 miles in just one day.
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TV review: Behind Her Eyes (2021) (WARNING: SPOILERS GALORE!)

Normally I am careful to avoid spoilers but I just finished watching this show and was incensed by it but could not give my reasons for hating it without exposing the plot.

This highly promoted Netflix six-part series starts interestingly enough. It features Louise, a part-time secretary in a firm of psychiatrists that has just hired David who has a beautiful wife Adele. Adele’s parents were very wealthy but died in a fire in their mansion while she was asleep but David managed to rescue her. She ended up in some kind of residential clinic for therapy and while there becomes good friends with a goofy working class gay drug addict named Rob and the two of them learn how to have lucid dreams, where one learns how to control one’s dreams.

It is now ten years later and it soon becomes clear that David and Adele’s marriage is in trouble, that he detests her while she keeps telling him how much she loves him. There is clearly some dark secret in their past and one knows that the plot is heading towards some big reveal. Meanwhile, David and Louise start a clandestine affair while Adele and Louise meet on the street and become friends but Adele asks Louise not to tell David that they are hanging out together, and Louise agrees. Why Adele asks this and Louise agrees is not clear. But ok, one can overlook that particular plot hole for the sake of advancing the narrative.

The first four episodes is your standard psychological thriller in which one character, in this case Adele, becomes increasingly creepy, seeming to have the ability to know what other people are doing even when she is not there. It was a little slow for my taste but not too bad and I was looking forward to the pace picking up in the last two episodes as the denouement approaches, when all is revealed that explains David and Adele’s weird relationship.

But then in episode five the plot goes bonkers and the final episode six is really nuts.

Now is where the spoilers begin.
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We need more Chelsea Handlers and fewer Piers Morgans

Smarmy Piers Morgan has resigned as co-host from a British morning show after getting blasted for saying he did not believe what Meghan Markle said in her interview with Oprah Winfrey and storming off the set when another host criticized him for his remarks. His behavior did not surprise me. What does is that people keep giving Morgan jobs even though he has demonstrated over and over again that he is a grade A reactionary jerk.

After his latest exit, Chelsea Handler posted on Instagram a clip of her experience with Morgan when she was invited onto his show when he was on CNN as the replacement for Larry King.

I am sure that Morgan can get another job with some Murdoch outfit or Newsmax or something. That would be a natural home for a person such as he, smug, arrogant, and proud of his ignorance.

What happens when you elect a smug know-nothing

You know how it is when a small child is bored and they discover something that annoys people and repeatedly do it just to get attention? That seems to be what is happening with Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon). After being stripped of all her committee assignments for being an unreconstructed conspiracist, she has decided to use one of the procedural rules to slow down the work of Congress. Her choice of tactic is to put forward a motion to adjourn, something that has to be dealt with before business can continue and can take up to half an hour. She has started using it so often that even some of her Republican colleagues are getting fed up at the waste of time with nothing to gain, and more and more of them are voting against her motion. Her latest effort was opposed by forty Republicans, double the week before. Basically, Greene is generating bipartisanship!

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