December 31, 2021

Video of 18/22 Betty White appearances on the Craig Ferguson Show.

Guaranteed to provide nearly 2 hours to warm your heart during for what for most are difficult and trying times.

December 21, 2021

The Democratic retirement floodgates just burst open

This is not good. Surprised we are not hearing more about this problem. News to me today.

I share concern that the Democratic Party will have a setback in the midterms.

I think we can retain the House and get some margin in a Senate majority.

Evidently the MSM and others want the Dem's to give up already. We do not have a choice to give up and need to have the faith the pendulum will swing back in our favor.

We need to find Democratic candidates, not just in Congress but in State Houses to school boards.

The Democratic retirement floodgates just burst open


Florida Rep. Stephanie Murphy announced Monday that she will not seek a fourth term in Congress, the latest in a rapid series of retirements within the Democratic ranks that suggest momentum is moving heavily against the party as it seeks to hold on to its razor-thin majority next November.

Murphy's decision came less than 24 hours after New Jersey Rep. Albio Sires said he would be retiring at the end of this Congress. And, just before the Sires' news, California Rep. Alan Lowenthal said he, too, would be stepping aside.

All together, there are now 22 Democrats retiring or running for other offices this election cycle as opposed to just 11 Republicans doing the same.

Two years ago, just nine Democrats had announced their retirement plans at this point of the election while 24 Republicans had done the same, according to CNN's political unit.

more at: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-democratic-retirement-floodgates-just-burst-open/

December 16, 2021

America Is Not Ready for Omicron

IMO The Atlantic is one of the best sources of journalism left.

America Is Not Ready for Omicron

The new variant poses a far graver threat at the collective level than the individual one—the kind of test that the U.S. has repeatedly failed.

By Ed Yong


Updated at 12:00 p.m. on December 16, 2021

America was not prepared for COVID-19 when it arrived. It was not prepared for last winter’s surge. It was not prepared for Delta’s arrival in the summer or its current winter assault. More than 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day, and more have died this year than last. Hospitalizations are rising in 42 states. The University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which entered the pandemic as arguably the best-prepared hospital in the country, recently went from 70 COVID patients to 110 in four days, leaving its staff “grasping for resolve,” the virologist John Lowe told me. And now comes Omicron.


Will the new and rapidly spreading variant overwhelm the U.S. health-care system? The question is moot because the system is already overwhelmed, in a way that is affecting all patients, COVID or otherwise. “The level of care that we’ve come to expect in our hospitals no longer exists,” Lowe said.

The real unknown is what an Omicron cross will do when it follows a Delta hook. Given what scientists have learned in the three weeks since Omicron’s discovery, “some of the absolute worst-case scenarios that were possible when we saw its genome are off the table, but so are some of the most hopeful scenarios,” Dylan Morris, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. In any case, America is not prepared for Omicron. The variant’s threat is far greater at the societal level than at the personal one, and policy makers have already cut themselves off from the tools needed to protect the populations they serve. Like the variants that preceded it, Omicron requires individuals to think and act for the collective good—which is to say, it poses a heightened version of the same challenge that the U.S. has failed for two straight years, in bipartisan fashion.

The coronavirus is a microscopic ball studded with specially shaped spikes that it uses to recognize and infect our cells. Antibodies can thwart such infections by glomming onto the spikes, like gum messing up a key. But Omicron has a crucial advantage: 30-plus mutations that change the shape of its spike and disable many antibodies that would have stuck to other variants. One early study suggests that antibodies in vaccinated people are about 40 times worse at neutralizing Omicron than the original virus, and the experts I talked with expect that, as more data arrive, that number will stay in the same range. The implications of that decline are still uncertain, but three simple principles should likely hold.

article at : https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/america-omicron-variant-surge-booster/621027/