The first chick hatched Dec. 9 and weighs just over half a pound. Its sibling debuted Dec. 13, weighing in at barely a quarter-pound. According to the aquarium, the sex of the two isn’t known yet.
Monterey Bay Aquarium plans to let the public vote on names for the babies.
[…]
The birds are part of a Species Survival Plan for threatened African penguins, a program managed by the Assn. of Zoos and Aquariums that oversees the health of 800 African penguins at 50 global zoos and aquariums.
Last week, we welcomed two tiny additions to our African penguin colony, which are currently on exhibit in the Splash Zone gallery. The first chick hatched on Monday, December 9 and, as of its last check-up, weighs 292 grams. pic.twitter.com/sdkNk3bHUp
I kind of doubt that Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski will end up voting with the Democrats on process. Alaska is a very red state these days and Trump has them completely mesmerized. But it’s giving Trump heartburn I’m sure, since she was one of the three who voted against the ACA repeal.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, says she was “disturbed” to hear Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell say there would be “total coordination” between the White House and the Senate over the upcoming presidential impeachment trial.
“And in fairness, when I heard that I was disturbed,” Murkowski said before describing that there should be distance between the White House and the Senate in how the trial is conducted. “To me it means that we have to take that step back from being hand in glove with the defense, and so I heard what leader McConnell had said, I happened to think that that has further confused the process.”
[…]
“How we will deal with witnesses remains to be seen,” Murkowski said before describing that the House should have gone to the courts if witnesses refused to appear before Congress.
For how the trial is formulated, Murkowski spoke of her desire for a “full and fair process,” potentially using President Clinton’s impeachment hearings as a template.
Murkowski remains undecided how she would vote when the trial takes place. “For me to prejudge and say there’s nothing there or on the other hand, he should be impeached yesterday, that’s wrong, in my view, that’s wrong.”
Hey, you never know. Maybe she, Romney, Collins and Gardner will vote for witnesses to be called. I don’t know if they will do it. And if they come, I don’t know what they will say.
But you may have noticed that Pelosi and the Dems have not said a word since the congress recessed while McConnell and some of his moderates have been musing about witnesses. It’s interesting….
I’ve always liked the Jewish tradition of eating Chinese food on Christmas (originated because they were the only restaurants open back in the day, I think.) I’m not a huge fan of the traditional turkey dinner.
Anyway, as a tribute to both my Jewish and Chinese friends on this Christmas day I thought I’d share this nice article in the NY Times about Chinese restaurants and the American dream:
More than 40 years after buying Eng’s, a Chinese-American restaurant in the Hudson Valley, Tom Sit is reluctantly considering retirement…Two years ago, at the insistence of his wife, Faye Lee Sit, he started taking off one day a week. Still, it’s not sustainable. He’s 76, and they’re going to be grandparents soon. Working 80 hours a week is just too hard. But his grown daughters, who have college degrees and well-paying jobs, don’t intend to take over.
Across the country, owners of Chinese-American restaurants like Eng’s are ready to retire but have no one to pass the business to. Their children, educated and raised in America, are pursuing professional careers that do not demand the same grueling labor as food service.
[…]
The retirements of the restaurant owners also reflect the history of Chinese immigration to the United States. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act halted what had been a steady rise in people coming from China. It was not revoked until 1943, and large-scale immigration resumed only after 1965, when other race-targeting quotas were abolished.
China’s Cultural Revolution, an often violent social and political upheaval that started in 1966, prompted many young people to emigrate to the United States, a country that projected an image of freedom and economic possibility. In the past decade, some members of the second generation have also chosen to take charge of family restaurants. Nom Wah Tea Parlor, a New York dim sum restaurant that opened in 1920, has stayed a family business: first run by the Choy family, then the Tangs.[…]
If he ever actually does hand Eng’s to someone else, Mr. Sit will miss his customers, and miss running an operation.
But he is proud of what he built. He is proud that his daughters, American-born educated professionals, are working jobs they have chosen, jobs they love.
“I hoped they have a better life than me,” he said. “A good life. And they do.”
Immigrants are what makes this country great. So do ethnic restaurants. And making a better life for your kids.
If we are (or were) “exceptional” it’s because of that.
Forgiveness these days is in short supply. As are Christmas truces.
Mary Elisabeth Cox doesn’t exactly brighten the morning with her story of another Christmas four years after the famous Christmas truce of 1914. Germany had signed the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918 and asked the Allies to lift the blockade that had left Germans hungry and dying of flu. But Allies feared Germany might renew the fighting. Despite a Christmas initiative by American leaders to lift it, Allies “too embittered by the war to see Germans, even children and other civilians, as anything except the enemy” kept the blockade in place until the Treaty of Versailles was signed in July.
“In the meantime,” Cox writes, “untold thousands of Germans died that winter, people who might have been saved…”
We have an unfortunate knack for mucking things up. “There isn’t a lot of that ‘love your enemies’ thing going around, and I confess to finding it difficult myself these days,” E.J. Dionne observes. It feels as if bitterness has settled in for the duration. Side-eye is more prevalent than forgiveness on this Christian holiday, even among Christians.
Napp Nazworth, the editor of the Christian Post, announced his resignation Monday after the website issued a pro-Donald Trump editorial in response to Christianity Today’s call for the president’s removal from office. CT editor Mark Galli warned evangelicals their support of a “grossly immoral” leader who has “dumbed down the idea of morality” would “crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel.”
Not unlike Trump’s impeachment critics in Congress, The Christian Post does not address the substance of the Christianity Today case, but instead impugns the critics. The Post denounces Galli and his CT “fellow travelers” in a sharp rebuke, confirming that among Trump evangelicals messages in the tradition of the prophets are now “elitist.” Nazworth wanted no part of it:
“I said, if you post this, you’re saying, you’re now on team Trump,” he said. He said he was told that’s what the news outlet wanted to do.
Forgiveness is in short supply, as are Christmas truces. However, there is still a Christmas message. Pope Francis delivered his during midnight mass at the Vatican. It carried a somewhat different tone from The Christian Post’s.
“God does not love you because you think and act the right way,” the Argentine pontiff said. “You may have mistaken ideas, you may have made a complete mess of things, but the Lord continues to love you.”
Whew!
Everyone loves a good redemption story, especially at Christmas. Things work out for George Bailey, and for Ebenezer Scrooge. It simply is not clear how things will work out for the United States. Right now, this feels like the third act of The Empire Strikes Back.
You can stream the thing here as well as Netflix. Merry Christmas.
It’s Holiday Fundraising time. If you’re of a mind to support the kind of independent media we provide here, informed by nearly two decades of daily observation and analysis, you can do so at the links below or at the address on the column on the left.
Again, thank you so much for reading and supporting my work all these years. It means the world to me. — digby
REPORTER (Jonathan Lemire from AP): Thank you. A question for each president. President Trump, you first. Just now President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every US intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did.
My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is would you now with the whole world watching tell President Putin — would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?
TRUMP: So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server?
Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the democratic national committee?
I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media.
Where is the server?
I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying? With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia.
I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.
But I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server.
What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they?
What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone — just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily.
I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails.
So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that president Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.
And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer.
Okay thank you.
Maybe it’s just coincidence that Trump came out of that private, unrecorded meeting talking about “the server” which we know he believes is somewhere in Ukraine. But I doubt it.
I don’t know how all this is going to come out in the end but it’s obvious what happened. It was obvious from the moment he said it.
If you have your credit card out and you feel like putting a little something in the stocking before you sign off, I’d be most grateful.
This is an exhausting time and I know everyone is sick of it. But we’ve got a hell of year ahead of us and I could use your help to keep this old blog afloat.
And thanks again for reading and contributing all these years. I am more grateful than you know. — d
Donald Trump jokes Kim Jong-un might send him ‘beautiful vase’ instead of conducting ballistic missile test after aggressive North Korean dictator promises ‘Christmas gift’ pic.twitter.com/vj6MmnUU7L
Notice that he whines about everyone “surprising him these days.” Poor baby. Nobody knows the trouble he’s seen.
If you want to read about where we are at the moment with North Korea and how we got here, this article in the Atlantic
is the best I’ve read recently about it:
The story of how Trump’s North Korea policy collapsed is in part one of Pyongyang’s intransigence, obfuscation, and bad faith in talks about its nuclear program, as well as one in which U.S. and North Korean officials misread one another and at times placed too much stock in the rosy messages of the South Korean government, a key intermediary.
But it’s also a tale about the American president undercutting his own success. Trump prioritized the North Korean threat, amassed unmatched leverage against Pyongyang, and boldly shook up America’s approach to its decades-old adversary. Yet he squandered many of these gains during his first summit with Kim, in Singapore, and set several precedents there that have hobbled nuclear talks ever since. He shifted the paradigm with North Korea in style but not in substance. While transforming the role of the president in negotiations with North Korea, he did not bring the same inventiveness to the negotiations themselves.
[…]
Over the course of one momentous day in Singapore, Trump shook Kim’s hand, played him a faux movie trailer about the economic bounty awaiting a nuclear-free North Korea, and joined the North Korean leader in committing in writing to strive for peace and denuclearization. Unlike traditional leader-to-leader summits, Singapore was “meet and agree first and then fill out the details later,” Brooks said, adding that he felt this was a wise method, “given the personalities involved and their approach to central leadership, top-down decision making.”
But this also established a problematic pattern for future meetings between Trump and Kim: Set a date and venue, and then have negotiators scramble to figure out the details of what’s actually achievable without necessarily empowering those lower-level officials. The top-down approach short-circuited bottom-up talks rather than turbocharging them.
That wasn’t the only troublesome precedent that the Singapore summit set. Trump also began framing the diplomatic effort to denuclearize North Korea in far more personal, triumphalist terms, as something he alone could accomplish because of his dealmaking savvy and chemistry with Kim. Instead of an unusual means, his reality-TV diplomacy became an end in itself. This only solidified the North Korean view that it was best to deal directly with the president rather than with his more detail-oriented and less flexible subordinates. Kim echoed this narrative in letters he exchanged with Trump.
[…]
For the North Koreans, Yun said, the “lesson is essentially—this is not just in Singapore, but throughout—that only by dealing with Trump are they going to get what they want.”
This comes as no big surprise, of course. Anyone could have seen that Kim had Trump’s number.
Anyway, it’s fallen apart now. Let’s just hope Kim sends a very lovely vase.
If you have your credit card out and you feel like putting a little something in the stocking, I’d be most grateful.
This is an exhausting time and I know everyone is sick of it. But we’ve got a hell of year ahead of us and I could use your help to keep this old blog afloat.
And thanks again for reading and contributing all thee years. I am more grateful than you know. — digby
Happy Hollandaise everyone!
If you have your credit card out and you feel like putting a little something in the stocking, I’d be most grateful.
This is an exhausting time and I know everyone is sick of it. But we’ve got a hell of year ahead of us and I could use your help to keep this old blog afloat.
And thanks again for reading and contributing all thee years. I am more grateful than you know. — d
