Around the table: in which we confront rather relentless Republican hypocrisy.

Right-wing, pro-President group pays travel expenses for folks to attend a Presidential rally at the White House, including a "peaceful protest() for law and order." Thus once again we confront the fact that the right constantly accuses liberals of being "professional protestors" when the right hires actual professional protestors. And they kind of need them, too -- our President has never been all that popular, getting only 46% of the popular vote in 2016 and rarely cresting that in his approval ratings since then. And folks are sick of "law and order" meaning only "filling jails with black folks."

COVID-19 cases in rural areas jump 16% in one week, representing the biggest weekly increase since the start of the pandemic. Remember right-wingers bellowing that "red states manage the pandemic so much better than New York and New Jersey" back in the spring? Of course that was mostly about the relative lack of population density in "red states," which those governments had very little to do with. So what do you suppose they say now, particularly when New York and New Jersey are doing rather better than North Dakota and Iowa? I kid, of course -- they say some iteration of TEH FAKE NEWZ!!!!!, because what else can you say when you've been wrong about everything?

Back in 2016, the same Republicans who are now trying to ram through Judge Barrett's Supreme Court nomination argued just as vehemently for leaving Justice Scalia's seat open for another four or eight years if Hillary Clinton won the election. And thus we are reminded that Republicans don't care about norms or laws, or better arguments, or even more persuasive arguments -- they only care about bullying their way to more power, and at least a quarter of our electorate likes them that way. We can only hope the rest of the electorate have had it up to here with all that.

Right-wing trolls get nearly all the facts about a Denver shooting wrong, and then won't retract their numerous idiotic statements. You could say expecting them to admit they were wrong is like expecting a mound of dung in the middle of the sidewalk to magically transform into meatloaf -- or you could say expecting them to admit they were wrong is merely expecting human beings to act civilized, and surely even the most cynical among us wouldn't fault folks for expecting civilized behavior from nominally civilized people. I kid, of course -- cynical people are no better than right-wing trolls.

I've long said our President is unfit for office, but that doesn't mean I agree that U.S. Trade Rep Robert Lighthizer, easily the best of our President's Cabinet appointees, has done a bad job, and neither does this ProPublica article, not really. Sometimes, when you hear that "we've lost all this expertise," you have to ask expertise at what? And with trade, it sure does seem like we've only "lost expertise" at putting corporations before people. I don't know that our President has addressed our trade deficits with any particular skill, but the USMCA is a marked improvement over NAFTA, not least because it drastically curtails the use of "investor-state dispute settlement" systems that outsource our jobs and nullify our laws.

Finally, no, the New York Post did not find a "smoking gun" on a computer with data belonging to Hunter Biden. While the "smoking gun" email quoted in the article suggests (and doesn't state) that a Ukrainian businessman met with Joe Biden while he was Vice President, it's a long, long way from there to the right's long and winding tale of Vice Presidential corruption, and of course the 12-minute video that "appears" to have sex and crack on it is irrelevant even if it exists. And anyway, Presidential votaries who yell about "the privilege of being a Biden" are like a shit-covered man who comes into your living room and complains about your body odor.