So there is an easter egg jobs call out in the HTML for the new Whitehouse website. Out of curiosity (I am not looking for a career change) I went and looked and the salaries look competitive, but it requires you to be in or around Washington D.C. I wonder how much that hurts their candidates and hiring good people?
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Dr. Fauci to lead U.S. delegation at WHO meetings as Biden plans to reverse Trump withdrawal
I can't handle this logical and sane news that is flooding out of Washington D.C.
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Amanda Gorman Inauguration Poem Transcript, 'The Hill We Climb'
Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans, and the world,
When day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We've braved the belly of the beast. We've learned that quiet isn't always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn't always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we've weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.
And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn't mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we're to live up to her own time, then victory won't lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we've made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it. We've seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children's birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it.
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President Biden was not my first or second choice of the Democratic candidates but I sure am glad happy and thrilled to have him. Welcome Mr. President.
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Breaking: Trump Didn't Drain the Swamp
As part of his fight against 'the swamp' he put a ban on people from his admin moving into lobbying. Literally in the dying hours of his Presidency, he revoked that. What a piece of absolute garbage.
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I go to sleep tonight knowing tomorrow is going to be an interesting day. Regardless, it will mean the end of 45 in office. I expect to disagree with Biden on a lot of things, but I never expect to be disgusted and embarrassed of our political machine the way these past four years have.
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Trump wants to split the Republicans and start the 'Patriot Party'
President Trump has talked in recent days with associates about forming a new political party, according to people familiar with the matter, an effort to exert continued influence after he leaves the White House.
Mr. Trump discussed the matter with several aides and other people close to him last week, the people said. The president said he would want to call the new party the "Patriot Party," the people said.
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Obituary for a Failed Presidency
In the end, Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a "deep state" within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent seeking reëlection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.
Another choice quote:
It strikes me that the mistake, the original sin for many in Washington, was in pretending that the Campaign Trump of 2016 was not the true Trump, when in reality they knew there was never going to be a governing Trump, never going to be a Presidential Trump. What he said in all those rallies and tweets was his authentic self: foul-mouthed, bullying, self-obsessed, casually racist, and capable not only of breathtaking lies but of repeating them over and over until they became a strategy unto themselves.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Donald Trump's Legacy
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an excellent writer and commentator on the state of the world.
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Biden picks Dr. Rachel Levine to be assistant health secretary
If confirmed, she would be the first openly transgender person to serve as a federal officer.
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From the Facebook Archives
2019:
I said it under Obama, I'll say it again under Trump. The fact our government is forced to shut down because they can't/won't negotiate a budget is unbelievable and sends me into a seething rage.
I would propose an amendment that said: When the US government shuts down due to budgets not being negotiated, every member of the House and Senate has to draw a stone out of a bag. Half of them randomly get replaced.
Unbelievable. Is there another government which purposefully shuts down as part of business?
I still feel the same way, I find it abhorrent that the government can be shut down because a budget deal isn't reached. Though a friend (who is much smarter than me) pointed out that the smaller party is more inclined to force the scenario I suggest in hopes of removing members of the bigger party and trying to win those seats.
I don't actually care about what scenario there is, my point was that there needs to be real consequences which actually motivates politicians to get their job done.
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Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol
I am about 1/10th of the way through this article and it is single-handedly going to get me to subscribe to the New Yorker. It's some of the most well written prose I've read in a long time.
I know the white privilege portion of the Capitol riot has been well covered but this particular passage hammers it home:
A moment later, the door at the back of the chamber's center aisle swung open, and a man strode through it wearing a fur headdress with horns, carrying a spear attached to an American flag. He was shirtless, his chest covered with Viking and pagan tattoos, his face painted red, white, and blue. It was Jacob Chansley, a vocal QAnon proponent from Arizona, popularly known by his pseudonym, the Q Shaman. Both on the Mall and inside the Capitol, I'd seen countless signs and banners promoting QAnon, whose acolytes believe that Trump is working to dismantle an occult society of cannibalistic pedophiles. At the base of the Washington Monument, I'd watched Chansley assure people, "We got 'em right where we want 'em! We got 'em by the balls, baby, and we're not lettin' go!"
"Fuckin' A, man," he said now, looking around with an impish grin. A young policeman had followed closely behind him. Pudgy and bespectacled, with a medical mask over red facial hair, he approached Black, and asked, with concern, "You good, sir? You need medical attention?"
"I'm good, thank you," Black responded. Then, returning to his phone call, he said, "I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet."
"Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?" the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.
"We will," Black assured him. "I been making sure they ain't disrespectin' the place."
"O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place."
It is hard to imagine that same tone of voice if the people he had been speaking to were Black Lives Matters protesters behaving exactly the same way. There's no way it would be the same calm tone in his voice.
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We started no wars and yet hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead because of your awful handling of a pandemic. We assassinated members of other countries. Turned a blind eye to the murder of someone on US soil by foreign agents. And we have 25,000 National Guard in Washington D.C. in hopes of avoiding an insurrection driven by the President's behavior. So sure, pat yourself on the back for this factoid.
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The Parler videos from the Capitol
Before Parler was temporarily taken down, some folks discovered they could scrape the Parler API and so they set about archiving and making available every video (public or private apparently.) These videos were not hacked and stolen, it was the result of the API simple incrementing a variable rather than randomly generating IDs.
ProPublica has taken every video from that day and put them into chronological order for ease of viewing.
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