Collins to be First (Only?) Republican Senator to Back Brown Jackson for SCOTUS
And Some Numbers
Susan Collins of Maine has told The New York Times she will vote to confirm federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. This makes Collins the first, and potentially only Republican senator to support Brown Jackson to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer at the end of the current term, and virtually assures President Biden's choice will take the seat.
But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) still has his 2024 presidential run sound bites from grilling Brown Jackson over her sentencing record on child pornography cases and on her alleged position on Critical Race Theory taught in grade schools – we’ll repeat it again; CRT is not taught below college level.
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Dismal Numbers
1.) Russian troops have forcibly deported more than 20,000 Ukrainians to Russia in Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation,” Mariupol city council members say (per NPR) and,
2.) More than 4 million Ukrainians, about one-tenth its prewar population, have fled their country as refugees (also NPR).
The 4-million-plus consists mostly of women and children, as most Ukrainian men are now part of the country’s military, pushing back Russian troops. Britain’s Defense Ministry says “heavy losses” are forcing Russian forces back into Russia and Belarus.
Meanwhile
Ukraine officials doubt Russia’s promises made in cease fire talks held in Turkey earlier this week that it will “drastically reduce” attacks on Kyiv and Chernihiv, The Washington Post reports. Both cities were struck overnight Tuesday, and the belief is now that Russia made the promise in order to buy time to rotate its troops.
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Two Years Later
The White House has just launched covid.gov, “a new one-stop shop website for vaccination tests, treatments, masks, and the latest COVID-19 information.” It took us two attempts to successfully find it – in the first, we were directed to covid.gov.pk, a Pakistan government site that beat the U.S. site to the Web.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday that people age 50 and older are now eligible for a second booster shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, beginning today, The Washington Post reports.
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Meanwhile, in the world of every-day Americans
In January 2021 the Gallup Live Evaluation Index hit 59.2%, a 14-year high measuring those people who consider themselves to be “thriving” as compared with “struggling” or “suffering.” Another way of looking at it is as a measure of stress: those who are striving feel less of it.
The other shoe drops: The latest Index has the number at 53.25, which is the lowest since it hit the high. Seems like inflation is causing a deflation in the level of thriving.
The Gallup pollsters looked at the breakdown of responses along political lines. Back in October 2020, not surprisingly, the percent of Republicans thriving was 69.9%. The number has decreased, going to 64.7% in June 2021, 58.1% in December 2021, but then up a bit to 60.25% in February 2022.
The Dems back in October 2020 were at 42.4% (perhaps not feeling so positive about Biden’s chances), then by June 2021 the number was up to 58.1%. However, there has been a decline since then, to 55.3% in December 2021 and 53.3% in February 2022.
How did this happen? Seems somewhat surprising that the Republicans are thriving more than the Democrats.
Slight solace. Gallup shows that since 2008 the measure hit the low mark of 46.8% twice: In November 2008, when the Dow was at its low point during the financial crisis, and in April 2020, when U.S. unemployment claims hit 30 million.
So the latest figure is 6.45 points higher than those lows.
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Correction: 4-1/2 Minutes Short
We shorted the blank portion of President Nixon’s White House phone tapes turned over in connection with Watergate, in our item about President Trump’s missing January 6, 2021, communications Tuesday. In the case of Richard Nixon and Watergate, 18 and ½ minutes were missing, four-and-a-half minutes longer than we credited to Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, but still more than 439 minutes short of the length of missing communications from and to Donald J. Trump during the middle of the Big Lie-triggered insurrection on the Capitol. We regret the mistake.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash
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