Voting is a superpower

Pete Buttigieg, who had campaigned for president as Mayor Pete, has been named as Secretary of Transportation, reports Mark Sumner of Daily Kos. Buttigieg will be the first openly gay member of the cabinet. This will allow him to gain some big government experience. Several people (including me) said that lack of experience made him not ready to be president. Hunter of Kos reported Jennifer Grandholm, former governor of Michigan has been named as Secretary of Energy. She has been pushing for zero emission cars. Her appointment is evidence Joe Biden intends to refocus the Department of Energy from the nation’s nuclear stockpiles to research to move us away from fossil fuels. She’ll be the domestic climate person while John Kerry is the international climate person. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that after Moscow Mitch acknowledged that Biden is president-elect the nasty guy tweeted:

Mitch, 75,000,000 VOTES, a record for a sitting President (by a lot). Too soon to give up. Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry!

Yeah, 75 million is indeed a record number of votes for a sitting president – but Biden got 81 million. Accusing Moscow Mitch of not knowing how to wage a political fight is a joke – he’s been holding up another round of coronavirus relief for at least six months and has forced Democrats to drop the size of the relief from 3 trillion to under 1 trillion. Adam Jentleson tweeted a couple days ago about the ongoing negotiations:

The presumptive outcome is that only the 748B will pass. The endgame is that Dems will have climbed down about $3T and secured none of their top priorities while McConnell came up a smidge and secured his top priority of delivering the least amount of economic stimulus possible.

Yeah, Moscow Mitch knows how to fight. Jessica Sutherland of Kos reported that no matter how quickly (or not) a relief bill comes states are long past the point to prevent an interruption in payments. The problem is that many states run unemployment and other services on outdated systems that are not quickly modified when new laws are passed. Many states will take 3-4 weeks to be able to process what’s in the latest package. Some states will take up to seven weeks. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that David Fink, lawyer for Detroit, is filing a suit against the nasty guy’s legal team for filing frivolous suits with improper aims and zero chance of success. In addition to fines they are seeking to ban those lawyers from practicing law in the Federal Eastern District of Michigan. Garry Kasparov tweeted:

What Trump is doing now is what he’s done all his life: bankrupt the business to cover his tracks. He lost at democracy and now wants to destroy it. I predicted as much, but I never imagined he’d find so many enablers.

Tired of the negative campaign ads? Mark Sumner included a few ads that stress the positive. One is a general call to vote – voting is a superpower. Another is from candidate Raphael Warnock warning people away from his opponent’s negative ads. John Tester, Democratic senator from Montana, did an interview with the New York Times about Democrat messaging in rural America. Because it is behind a paywall, bknynj of the Kos community summarized and paraphrased the major points. My summary of the summary: * Images of riots in cities did turn off rural folk. Dems didn’t respond but can by saying rioting is not demonstration and is not acceptable. * Dems can go on the offensive in rural America by talking about infrastructure, like broadband, and that some Republicans want to privatize education. * Right now rural folk connect more with a millionaire from New York City than with national Dems. We must redesign our message. Happy Birthday to Ludwig van Beethoven today. He was born 250 years ago. A lot of orchestras were going to celebrate the anniversary in a big way this fall and a lot of plans were canceled. My radio station, WQRS had a Beethoven marathon today and 13 hours did not include all of his music. Just the 32 piano sonatas take most of the day to play (the Detroit Symphony Orchestra hosted such a concert a few years ago). There are also 9 symphonies, 5 piano concertos, a violin concerto, a few violin sonatas, 16 string quartets, an opera, several concert overtures, and lots more. My morning began with Peter Schickele of PDQ Bach fame narrating the opening movement of the 5th symphony as a sports event. Hannah Natanson tweeted with a short video:

As dusk crept over the nation’s capital, the National Cathedral tolled its bell 300 times, to honor 300,000 Americans lost to covid. People gathered to watch. Some bent their heads. Others held each other silently. It was the most profoundly tragic thing I’ve ever witnessed.

Johns Hopkins reported there have been 16.9 million cases of COVID-19 in the US and 307K deaths as of today.