Month: December 2020

(In the Earnest Hemingway Manner)

The New Yorker printed some holiday classics this year and this one by James Thurber from 1927 made me chuckle. I hope you enjoy it too:

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

“Father,” the children said.

There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We have visions of sugarplums,” the children said.

“Go to sleep,” said mamma.

“We can’t sleep,” said the children. They stopped talking, but I could hear them moving. They made sounds.

“Can you sleep?” asked the children.

“No,” I said.

“You ought to sleep.”

“I know. I ought to sleep.”

“Can we have some sugarplums?”

“You can’t have any sugarplums,” said mamma.

“We just asked you.”

There was a long silence. I could hear the children moving again.

“Is Saint Nicholas asleep?” asked the children.

“No,” mamma said. “Be quiet.”

“What the hell would he be asleep tonight for?” I asked.

“He might be,” the children said.

“He isn’t,” I said.

“Let’s try to sleep,” said mamma.

The house became quiet once more. I could hear the rustling noises the children made when they moved in their beds.

Out on the lawn a clatter arose. I got out of bed and went to the window. I opened the shutters; then I threw up the sash. The moon shone on the snow. The moon gave the lustre of mid-day to objects in the snow. There was a miniature sleigh in the snow, and eight tiny reindeer. A little man was driving them. He was lively and quick. He whistled and shouted at the reindeer and called them by their names. Their names were Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen.

He told them to dash away to the top of the porch, and then he told them to dash away to the top of the wall. They did. The sleigh was full of toys.

“Who is it?” mamma asked.

“Some guy,” I said. “A little guy.”

I pulled my head in out of the window and listened. I heard the reindeer on the roof. I could hear their hoofs pawing and prancing on the roof. “Shut the window,” said mamma. I stood still and listened.

“What do you hear?”

“Reindeer,” I said. I shut the window and walked about. It was cold. Mamma sat up in the bed and looked at me.

“How would they get on the roof?” mamma asked.

“They fly.”

“Get into bed. You’ll catch cold.”

Mamma lay down in bed. I didn’t get into bed. I kept walking around.

“What do you mean, they fly?” asked mamma.

“Just fly is all.”

Mamma turned away toward the wall. She didn’t say anything.

I went out into the room where the chimney was. The little man came down the chimney and stepped into the room. He was dressed all in fur. His clothes were covered with ashes and soot from the chimney. On his back was a pack like a peddler’s pack. There were toys in it. His cheeks and nose were red and he had dimples. His eyes twinkled. His mouth was little, like a bow, and his beard was very white. Between his teeth was a stumpy pipe. The smoke from the pipe encircled his head in a wreath. He laughed and his belly shook. It shook like a bowl of red jelly. I laughed. He winked his eye, then he gave a twist to his head. He didn’t say anything.

He turned to the chimney and filled the stockings and turned away from the chimney. Laying his finger aside his nose, he gave a nod. Then he went up the chimney. I went to the chimney and looked up. I saw him get into his sleigh. He whistled at his team and the team flew away. The team flew as lightly as thistledown. The driver called out, “Merry Christmas and good night.” I went back to bed.VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERThe Man Who Invented More Than Eight Hundred Iconic Toys

“What was it?” asked mamma. “Saint Nicholas?” She smiled.

“Yeah,” I said.

She sighed and turned in the bed.

“I saw him,” I said.

“Sure.”

“I did see him.”

“Sure you saw him.” She turned farther toward the wall.

“Father,” said the children.

“There you go,” mamma said. “You and your flying reindeer.”

“Go to sleep,” I said.

“Can we see Saint Nicholas when he comes?” the children asked.

“You got to be asleep,” I said. “You got to be asleep when he comes. You can’t see him unless you’re unconscious.”

“Father knows,” mamma said.

I pulled the covers over my mouth. It was warm under the covers. As I went to sleep I wondered if mamma was right. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 24, 1927, issue.

I have posted a version of this one every year since I started this blog. This new version is amazing:

For a laugh:

https://twitter.com/communistbops/status/1342223736410406914

I just love these little guys:

ICYM this sweet little vid:

Our national treasure;

 

Aaaaaand, a little politics. Gotta have it:

https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1342282252953255937

I’m here just counting my blessings…

A large explosion occurred about 6:30 a.m. Central Time in downtown Nashville this Christmas morning. Police believe it was an intentional act. CNN reports an officer had responded to a report of a suspicious parked vehicle (an RV) and called in a bomb squad before the blast. The explosion occurred as the team was en route. People felt the impact nine blocks away.

Authorities: This was an intentional act #nashvilleexplosion https://t.co/Fo1GELb01k

— Zac Summers (@ZacOnTV) December 25, 2020

Here’s what the #nashvilleexplosion sounded like from my backyard in East Nashville, about 2 miles away 💔 pic.twitter.com/60QsX6Dh36

— Stephanie Verheyen (@verystephanie) December 25, 2020

This is happening now #nashvilleexplosion #staysafe pic.twitter.com/OXx5qc7yQ8

— shamillion (@HoltShameica) December 25, 2020

https://twitter.com/TheVengeance17/status/1342480002986741763?s=20

Near the end of the lower video above, part of a building facade collapses.

It was big.https://t.co/UBR74MUdqH

— Bruce Wilson (@brucewilson) December 25, 2020

Not much more at the moment. Helluva blast.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:

The wedding a friend announced early this year for September went ahead. Without the guests. Without the big reception. Without his honeymoon trip. Plagues will do that.

Another friend finds herself after 10 months of isolation desperately missing the hugs and faces of family and friends. And more than she ever expected.

Elections have consequences? Yes, they do.

A few countries that had better taste in leaders are able to enjoy the simple pleasures we forgo this season. Those responsible enough not to put family and friends at risk, that is.

The Washington Post reports that successful coronavirus containment efforts by Australia, New Zealand, Rwanda, Taiwan and Vietnam have allowed eased restrictions for the holidays if they were not already relaxed:

Victoria state in Australia reported no new coronavirus cases ahead of Christmas — a miracle of sorts for 2020. The state, however, has in place restrictions on travelers from some other parts of the country, like New South Wales, which on Wednesday reported nine new cases.

“The virus doesn’t stop for Christmas; we don’t stop for Christmas,” Victoria’s testing chief Jeroen Weimar told Australian media. “If you’ve got symptoms on Christmas Day, go and get tested on Christmas Day.”

The government of New South Wales, which is Australia’s most populous state, announced Wednesday that new case levels were low enough for it to ease restrictions limiting social gatherings for the duration of Christmas.

In the Greater Sydney area, gatherings of up to 10 people are permitted (only five for harder-hit northern suburbs). The eased restrictions revert to covid “normal” on the 27th.

New Zealand has some of the tightest restrictions, having “recorded 49 active coronavirus cases, nine of which were newly detected in travelers from abroad, according to the ministry of health.”

The New Zealand Herald reports how one couple “stuck” there for the holidays turned friends into family:

When French-born Frederique Irion sensed she couldn’t return to France for Christmas this year, she suggested to her Iranian-born husband that they host a Christmas lunch at his Parnell restaurant for friends also stuck here.

About 50 people of at least 14 nationalities turned up for the party at Reza Sarkheil’s restaurant Rumi in Parnell on Christmas Day.

Irion, 33, and her husband would normally spend Christmas with her family in Strasbourg, but their plans were thwarted this year by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Christmas is a special time to be with family, and after a particularly tough year it is hard to not be able to spend the festive season with your nearest and dearest,” she said.

“We are lucky enough to be living in New Zealand where we are not in lockdown or facing tight restrictions, so I thought it would be nice to bring our friends and their families together for a Christmas lunch.”

They celebrate together because New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is a leader. U.S. voters ordered a lump of personality disorders for Christmas four years ago. He went golfing.

My hug-missing friend is ready for an around-the-world trip when this pandemic is over. Doing so might be harder than it was a year ago. The travel industry collapsed in March.

Cancellations poured in, says New York Times travel writer Tariro Mzezewa, after Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson reported contracting the coronavirus. The N.B.A. suspended its season the same day, March 11, after a Utah Jazz player tested positive (emphasis mine):

“The biggest issue is that we do not have a coordinated response from the federal government,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, told me over the summer.

The whole travel industry has been devastated by the pandemic. Nearly 40 percent of all travel jobs, 3.5 million positions, vanished between March and November. Six months into the pandemic, the American Hotel and Lodging Association found that most hotels across the country were struggling to keep their doors open and were unable to rehire all their staff because of the historic drop in travel demand.

In addition to livelihoods, the industry has lost something less tangible but still fundamental — the ability to shake hands, hug, see smiles. Hospitality employees are possibly the friendliest people out there, and for them to not be able to share that has been the source of its own kind of devastation.

We got a rare white Christmas last night. It will have to do.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:

What a chyron. What a year.

Wearing hard hats and protective suits, the choir of Notre Dame Cathedral sang inside the Paris landmark for the first time since last year’s devastating fire for a special Christmas Eve concert. https://t.co/fuhATtcJwO pic.twitter.com/SWqmh2T4kc

— ABC News (@ABC) December 25, 2020

For nearly 30 years David Letterman would have Darlene Love on his show on Christmas Eve to sing “Christmas: Baby Please Come Home.” His show is no more, but the tradition lives on here:

Happy Hollandaise, everyone.

Here’s the state of play in the last minute blow up of the omnibus spending bill and COVID relief bills. It’s as confused and chaotic as you might imagine:

A surprise scuffle over pandemic relief is set to run up against a crucial federal funding deadline next week as Democrats side with President Donald Trump in his demand for $2,000 payments to most Americans and Republicans take up his criticism of government spending.

Republicans on Thursday objected to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer‘s attempt to replace the $600 payments in the latest pandemic relief legislation with the $2,000 payments Trump said he wants. Democrats will try again Dec. 28, with a similar new bill that will be put to a full vote on the House floor.

“House and Senate Democrats have repeatedly fought for bigger checks for the American people, which House and Senate Republicans have repeatedly rejected – first, during our negotiations when they said that they would not go above $600 and now, with this act of callousness on the Floor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.

The standoff over stimulus payments comes after months of intense negotiations finally yielded a compromise to inject $900 billion into the U.S. economy — including forgivable loans for small businesses, supplemental unemployment benefits, support for renters facing eviction and funds for vaccine distribution. Those measures were combined with $1.4 trillion in annual government spending, and now the entire package is in limbo.

Trump hasn’t explicitly said he would veto the legislation, which Congress finished processing Thursday after it passed both chambers on Monday. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The bill will be flown to Florida, where Trump is spending Christmas at his private Mar-a-Lago club, according to a person familiar with the matter.

If the president doesn’t sign the bill by Monday night, the government — now operating under temporary funding — would begin a partial shutdown starting on Tuesday. The House may attempt to pass another stopgap funding measure on Monday if Trump hasn’t acted.

The president tweeted a video Tuesday criticizing the $2.3 trillion bill. His call for $2,000 payments, which most Republicans rejected as too costly, surprised GOP lawmakers.

“Republicans in Congress and the White House can’t agree on what they want,” Hoyer told reporters Thursday at the Capitol. “Surely, the president of the United States, whether he is in Mar-a-Lago or someplace else, ought to empathize with the suffering and apprehension and deep angst people are feeling this Christmas Eve.”

Senator Roy Blunt, a member of the GOP leadership, said there were not enough Republican votes in the Senate to pass the $2,000 payments.

“I hope the president looks at this again and reaches that conclusion that the best thing to do is to sign the bill,” Blunt told reporters.

The House will reconvene Monday to vote on the Cash Act, a bill introduced by Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal to increase stimulus checks to $2,000.

Republicans on Thursday tried to seek unanimous consent on a measure to examine taxpayer money spent on foreign aid, but Democrats blocked that move. In his complaint Tuesday about Congress’s combined virus aid and government spending bill, Trump criticized federal resources spent on international programs, even though such spending was included in his budget and was allocated as part of the bipartisan appropriations process.

Trump’s conflict with Congress further escalated this week with his veto Wednesday of the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed both chambers by large bipartisan margins earlier this month. The House plans to vote to override Trump’s veto Monday, with the Senate following suit on Tuesday. It would be the first time Congress overrules Trump.

President Donald Trump injected confusion into the outlook for Covid-19 relief on Tuesday night, demanding changes to the bipartisan legislation approved by Congress less than 24 hours earlier.

In a surprise video announcement posted on his Twitter account, Trump called the bill a “disgrace” and said it was full of “wasteful and unnecessary” items. He demanded that lawmakers increase the stimulus checks due to go out to most Americans to $2,000, from the “ridiculously low” amount of $600.

“I am asking Congress to amend this bill,” Trump said. “Send me a suitable bill or else the next administration will have to deliver a Covid relief package. And maybe that administration will be me, and we will get it done.”

The attack on Monday’s legislation, which included $900 billion in relief along with $1.4 trillion in government funding through next September, marked a sudden change after the administration had endorsed frantic negotiations among congressional leaders to get a deal after months of deadlock.

If the president doesn’t sign the legislation by Dec. 28, government funding would lapse after midnight that day.

House Democratic leaders, according to two people familiar with their thinking, plan to offer a separate bill during a pro forma session on Thursday that would replace references to $600 in the legislation passed Monday with $2,000.

Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, tweeted Tuesday night that she and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York “have the amendment ready. Send the bill back, and we will put in the $2,000.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted that the president should sign the current bill “to help people and keep the government open and we’re glad to pass more aid Americans need.”

The House adjourned Monday after approving the pandemic relief bill, with only pro forma sessions scheduled until possible votes on Dec. 28. The Senate is next scheduled to convene for regular business on Dec. 29.

If Trump vetoes or declines to sign the measure, it would suspend benefits from the previous Covid relief bill that expire at the end of the month, including a moratorium on evictions and extended unemployment insurance — all of which were addressed in the giant package approved Monday night.

Trump blamed the Democrats for delaying the bill when the reality is that it was the Republicans. He lied. Surprise.

Trump’s rant about the package came after he took a mostly hands-off approach to negotiations with Congress for months. He declined to engage directly with Pelosi, nor did he convene bipartisan congressional leaders in White House meetings to get a deal.

Still, Trump had indicated privately during the negotiations that he was unhappy with some of the provisions. The president had been working on a statement calling for $2,000 stimulus checks, but White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows raised objections to releasing it amid the fragile talks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Trump also sent conflicting signals about how big a package he wanted. He at one point pulled his team from talks with Democrats, then demanded a bigger bill than Pelosi herself had favored.

With regard to direct payments, a member of his own party, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, personally blocked bipartisan attempts to approve $1,200 checks instead of the $600 that ended up in the bill — citing concerns about the fiscal deficit.

Senior Senate GOP members in recent days touted that they kept the relief effort below $1 trillion, instead of the $2 trillion and more sought by Democrats, only now to be undercut by a lame-duck president after the fact.

If Trump had pushed for this 2,000 during the fall and told the American people that he would work directly with Pelosi to get that money and all the other necessities to the American people to help them through the pandemic he would have won. But he wanted to wage the culture war because that’s what he cares about.

I have no idea how this is going to come out. But I’m relieved that Pelosi is holding the line on this. They had to be back because of the potential government shutdown (due to Trump being a moron) but it’s nonetheless good that they are there to react to however this comes down.

If you needed an example of just how damaged the Republicans are, how weak, how corrupt how servile to Trump’s lunacy, this is it. We are suffering the death toll of 9/11 every single day. And this is how they lead. At Christmas. It’s mind-boggling.

Happy Hollandaise everyone,

If we have all become rather ageist these days, and in some respects for good reason, Dr. Fauci is a reminder that some people are ageless. He shows it’s possible to stay sharp and energetic well into our dotage:

Anthony S. Fauci celebrates a big birthday on Christmas Eve. He’ll be 80. He says he has worked every day since January, often late into the night, laser-focused on fighting the coronavirus pandemic. He enters his ninth decade with remarkable vigor, and attributes his youthful appearance to genetics. His father lived to 97 and never looked his age.

To deal with the demands of his job, Fauci says he relies on the muscle memory from his days as a young doctor working crazy shifts in a big New York City hospital, often all through the night, triaging patients with life-threatening injuries.

“There is no option to get tired. There is no option to sit down and say ‘I’m sorry, I’ve had enough,’ ” he said. When fatigued, he recalled, he would tell himself: “I’m gonna dig deep and just suck it up.”

Which is kind of what he’s been advising the whole country.

This hideous pandemic will not last forever, but it won’t end soon enough, sadly, for thousands of families who will suffer through the dark days of winter as this cold-weather surge of infections, hospitalizations and deaths hits its peak. Coronavirus vaccines, a marvel of human ingenuity, will not begin to quash the pandemic for many weeks or months.

So: Wear a mask. Keep your distance. Wash your hands. Avoid crowds. Outside is better than inside.Fauci delivers that mantra every time he gives an interview, which is many times a day. He repeatedly cites scientific evidence or the lack of it. He is not hesitant to say that there are things we still don’t understand about this virus. And he has issued warning after warning: Take this thing seriously. It’s dangerous. We have to stay vigilant. And he says it again and again.

Some of us are listening. Some of us aren’t, unfortunately.

This part makes me sick:

Not everyone loves him or even likes him. He’s been derided by critics as apocalyptic. The criticism at times has been venomous, and scary. The fact that Fauci and his wife, Christine Grady — the chief of the bioethics department at NIH Clinical Center — require constant security is one of the countless dismal elements of this wretched, wrenching year. Even their three adult daughters have received harassing messages.

“On the one hand, I’m being adulated as this, you know, iconic figure, this person that everyone recognizes now, and knows. Which is fine. I can’t be distracted by that,” he said in an interview. “On the other hand, people have threatened my life and have harassed my wife and children and are still doing that. Public health measures have been swept up into the divisiveness of our society,” he said.

The only way Fauci gets through is by focusing on his job, he said — which includes speaking clearly to the public about the virus, the vaccines and what science does and doesn’t know.

Fauci is one of the few people who traveled in Trump’s orbit (by necessity) who managed to keep his integrity and credibility to the end. That takes some skill. And people wanted to kill him. It’s disgusting.

But this too will pass. And I want to go to his house for Christmas next year:

The pandemic will compromise Fauci’s Christmas Eve celebration. For nearly half a century he has marked the event with a traditional Italian meal at the home of his sister in Alexandria, Va. Not this year. Fauci will stay home in Washington with his wife.

Another family Christmas tradition has already happened, just a few days ago. Every holiday season Fauci makes timpano at some point when his kids are home. Timpano is an Italian pasta cake, filled with cheese, eggs, meatballs and salami — a caloric atomic bomb — made famous in the 1996 movie “The Big Night.” Fauci got the idea from the movie. It’s a major production. Ali Fauci, his youngest daughter, now a software engineer in San Francisco, says the greatest part of the timpano is not the food itself, although it’s delicious. It’s the delight her father takes in preparing it and presenting it triumphantly.

This year he made it while a documentary camera crew captured the moment and his daughters, who are scattered across the country, watched remotely.

“It turned out perfectly,” Fauci said. “The pressure was really on. If I had messed it up and it had fallen apart out of the pot it would have been very embarrassing.”

Fauci has been warning people that this is no time to mix households. In a recent call among Fauci, Grady and their daughters, Fauci expressed concern that it might look hypocritical if anyone in the family traveled home for the holidays. Before he could even complete a full sentence, the kids said, “We get it, Dad.” So the Fauci family will have a Zoom Christmas.

The kids didn’t come home for Thanksgiving, either. Fauci and his wife ordered takeout from Cafe Milano, a Washington restaurant popular among the city’s power brokers, and shared it with their security detail.

“I felt sad,” he said of Thanksgiving. “It was very 2020.”

Yeah, a lot of us are right there with him. It’s sad. But better sad than dead.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers,
digby

Happy Day After Christmas, everyone. Our country may be in a weird dark place right now, but at least we have pretty lights. Gotta take our pleasures where we can this year.

Just a quick note to thank everyone who has dropped a little something in the old stocking this year. I am more grateful than you know …

cheers,
digby

We knew it was coming. Nonetheless, the pardon of Paul Manafort is shocking. It’s shocking because it is the ultimate debasement of the pardon power. And yet, like everything else, Donald Trump will get away with doing it.

The Republicans are all shrugging their shoulders and reminding everyone of Clinton’s pardon of Mark Rich, about which they had a collective hissy fit of epic proportions. Here’s a reminder of what the Mark Rich pardon was about.  

Rich had been indicted on charges of tax evasion and making oil deals with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. (I will just remind you here that on Christmas eve 1992 George Bush Sr pardoned a bunch of Reagan administration officials for their role in illegally sending arms to Iran during the Iran hostage crisis.) Rich was in Switzerland at the time of the indictment and never returned to the United States. Bill Clinton pardoned him at the behest of his wife, a big Democratic donor, and Ehud Barak, the prime minister of Israel, along with numerous other high profile Israeli political figures such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert as well as numerous leading Jewish figures in the US including Rabbi Irving Greenberg, chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It appeared that Rich had bought his pardon by donating to the Democrats and various Jewish causes. There was also a rumor that he had been working on behalf of the Israeli government although I don’t think it was every proved.

The Republicans went wild and I mean wild. It was as if he’d pardoned Charles Manson. There were several congressional investigations and the DOJ investigated as well and no crimes was found to have been committed other than the crime of bad judgment, which goes without saying when it comes to Bill Clinton.

Fast forward to yesterday’s pardon of Paul Manafort. I’ll let Tim Miller of the Bulwark take it from here:

Amid a raft of indefensibly unscrupulous pardons issued hours after the resignation of the attorney general, that of Paul Manafort stands as the worst of the worst. It will go down in the annals of American history as among the most corrupt and self-serving actions taken by a chief executive…

The [Republicans] will pretend this is business as usual. They will compare it to corrupt pardons by Democrats past—pardons that, at the time, they rent their garments over. Now, those old Democratic pardons are just a flimsy little dish-towel Trump’s defenders are using to try to hide their indignity and abasement.

Let there be no doubt. The pardon of Paul Manafort is not business as usual. It is not standard-fare political back-scratching. It is unconscionable and enraging and perverse and abnormal and anti-American.

Paul Manafort is the will-o’-the-wisp of the Washington swamp. This was the stated reason Trump brought him onto his campaign in the first place—to help guard against Republican establishment revolts at the 2016 convention.

Prior to Trump, Manafort worked at the highest levels of the slimy Washington influence space and for the most despotic and crooked clients imaginable, both foreign and domestic. He was the fixer for a Russian revanchist tyrant in Ukraine who committed atrocities. Through this experience he became deeply indebted—to the tune of millions of dollars—to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin.

According to an ex-Russian spy and arms dealer, Manafort “owed us a lot of money . . . and he was offering ways to pay it back.” The Russians weren’t the only people Manafort was in debt to. When he joined the Trump campaign he was nearly broke, having racked up bills in the millions as he lived a life of luxury with absurd rugs and ugly but expensive suits.

Then, during the campaign—while a hostile foreign government hacked the private emails of the Democratic candidate and funded a network of bots and social media accounts to push coordinated disinformation—Paul Manafort was providing private campaign briefings and access to allies of the perpetrators, in order to help pay off his debts.

He was the definition of a compromised asset.

When Special Counsel Robert Mueller tried to look into the details of the ties between Manafort’s Russian clients and the Russian hackers who were aiding the Trump campaign, they were stymied by his lies, his use of “sophisticated communications security practices,” and his foreign business partners’ lack of cooperation.

Later, when Manafort cut a plea deal with the government, he promised to testify “fully, completely, and truthfully” about his actions—but he then breached that plea, repeatedly being caught in lies including about his communications with Russian intelligence during the campaign.

During a deposition with the FBI, Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates admitted that this was of course intentional on Manafort’s part. That his plan was to block the truth from coming out, stay loyal to Trump, and wait for a pardon. “Sit tight,” Manafort apparently said. “We’ll be taken care of.”

Manafort’s bet paid off. His conspiracy against our country paid off. Because a corrupt, impeached, lame-duck president took care of him.

After this pardon no one should ever again accept the charge that the Russia investigation into the president was some sort of “hoax.”

People who are the victims of hoaxes do not obstruct justice and obstruct the truth about the most serious foreign attack on our elections in history.

Here is the truth.

Paul Manafort is the human embodiment of every negative trope about influence peddling and the Washington swamp.

The Republican-led Senate investigation concluded: “Manafort’s influence work . . . was, in effect, influence work for the Russian government and its interests.”

Part of that work was providing access to the top levels of the Trump campaign, which the Russian government was covertly assisting across many vectors.

Manafort lied and concealed this collusion with Russian operatives at every possible opportunity in order to protect his own ass and to protect Donald Trump.

These actions were nothing short of treasonous.

So is this pardon.

For me, the pardoning of war criminals ranks right up there too. But this is really bad too.

It’s clear that Trump is pardoning people who kept their mouths shut about what they knew. Paul Manafort’s job as Chairman of the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign was the most serious evidence that there was something very weird about the fact that so many people with Russian ties were in the Trump campaign. And keep in mind that Trump only added to those suspicions during the entire four years in the White House. This pardon couldn’t more clearly indicate that those suspicions were justified.

It’s obvious. And yet, nothing will happen. The pardon power is plenary and even though the dangling of pardons as he did openly on his twitter feed and in interviews should be considered obstruction of justice. But when a Republican president does it, it’s not illegal so …

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here:

By the time this post goes live, BBC’s annual Christmas Eve broadcast of “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” by the King’s College choir will be underway in Cambridge, England. The event this year has been changed, as much has this year, by the raging coronavirus pandemic. For the first time since 1918, the choir will not perform live.

Daniel Hyde, the choir’s music director, and his singers recorded the program weeks ago just in case but, said Hyde, “Let’s hope we can just keep it in a drawer.”

It was one Christmas wish that would not come true:

On Dec. 18, with coronavirus cases soaring in Britain and rumors circulating that a new lockdown was imminent, the choir canceled the live broadcast. It decided it just couldn’t risk going ahead and contributing to the growth of the pandemic.

This year, listeners around the world on Christmas Eve will hear the December recording instead. Mr. Hyde said in a telephone interview after the decision that he had heard the recording and he was sure it would keep listeners on the edge of their seats.

“I feel lucky we had the foresight to make it,” he said. “Given the year we’ve all had, I hope people will feel a special connection.”

The Reverend Dr. Stephen Cherry, Dean of Chapel, adds:

A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was introduced to King’s on Christmas Eve 1918 to offer solace to people who were distressed, exhausted, injured and, in many cases, bereaved at the end of the First World War. In this pandemic year many people are experiencing some of these same realities and feelings. But while war gave people a great sense of togetherness and community, the pandemic forces people to be isolated, distanced and anxious.

Broadcast live or not, I’ll be listening.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here: