New Hopes Sprouting

Soon enough, the gloom of the unending pandemic, the divided nation, the broken economy and the looming devastation of another fire season will darken our skies over Northern California, but for now, for just a minute, I'm transfixed by the new shoots of grass sprouting all around here.

They are courtesy of several sheets of rains that swirled in from the Pacific, bringing with them the hope that we can deal with it all once again like we have always have.

There will be a spring! 

Monday as I was focusing on how journalists -- and therapists and detectives and even strangers can get so much out of anyone by simply asking questions, my son brought me back to the other side of the equation: How much hangs on how you answer those questions when they come in a job interview.

We had just parked the car and were walking down the hill toward a restaurant when his phone rang and he took the call while standing in the entryway of a building near the corner.

I've never been much of a snoop, so I didn't listen to what he was saying but I could tell from his tone it was an important call.

A few minutes later, as we settled into our table on the outdoor patio of the cafe, he filled me in on the details.

"I'm nervous about how I will do," he started. He's just completed one phase in his quest to get certified as a medical assistant. This follows a stretch as an EMT answering 9-1-1 calls and transporting patients all over Northern California night after night for most of the past year.

He's seen a lot of people in situations we'd never want to be in, including many 5150s, usually younger folks who had tried or were threatening to commit suicide. After too long doing that work, he realized he hated dropping people off at the hospital when what he really wanted to do was stay behind and help them get better.

So he quit his EMT job and went back to school. Now he needed to land an "externship" -- a temporary training program in a workplace, offered to students as part of their study. That could be in a doctor's office in the very same medical complex where he had been born back in the 90s; at least that's what this phone call had indicated.

But first he had to get through the job interview, scheduled at the office for Tuesday afternoon.

We reviewed what he should wear -- a nice shirt, slacks, definitely *not* his usual dark beanie -- and how to answer some of the questions they always ask on such occasions. 

"And don't forget to smile,." 

"Right! Straight through my mask, Dad." 

"Well, ah, maybe lower your mask for just a second to flash them your smile."

We turned to other topics as I thought to myself what a weird time this is for 20-somethings.

An entire generation has been frozen in place by the pandemic -- graduating college with no ceremony, applying for jobs when there are none, saddled by college debt, having to move back in with their parents, never able to see their friends, living isolated lives just when they ought to be at their *most* social selves, networking, getting into relationships, launching careers, and maybe most importantly of all -- being able, finally, to feel like the adults they have worked to become.

I'm sure somewhere in the back of his mind, all that same stuff was swirling like the rainstorm poised off the coast Monday evening, or maybe he was just thinking about how he would let the interviewer see him smile.

***

I wish *somebody* on the national scene would develop a sense of humor to lighten up these dark times. Too bad Al Franken got so serious when he became a Senator, he certainly had the potential to be funnier than he was in office.

But the gravitas of it all really gets to these guys, as does the constant need to always be on point and on the job.

No one ever tells a joke and heaven forbid anyone should ever  actually laugh.

But no matter what, these Presidents, Senators and Representatives have been sent to Washington to make things better and now they need to do that when absolutely everything around them sucks.

Back there, they've gotten snowed on this week. If I were Speaker of the House, I'd propose that they take recess, go outside and have a snowball fight. It would probably do them a lot of good.

Then maybe they could get down to the real job of making a great big old snowman together.

***

P.S. Update: My son aced the interview and got the position.

The news:

* WHO mission to visit Wuhan Institute of Virology (NHK)

* N.M. official who warned of ‘blood running out of’ U.S. Capitol jailed pending trial in Jan. 6 riot case (WashPo)

* White Christian Evangelicals Were Among Capitol Rioters -- They oppose democracy and democratic values just like Trump. (Reveal)

* An Emboldened Extremist Wing Flexes Its Power in a Leaderless G.O.P. -- As more far-right Republicans take office and exercise power, party officials are promoting unity and neutrality rather than confronting dangerous messages and disinformation. (NYT)

* Former President Donald Trump raised $76 million by citing the need to challenge his reelection loss and for Republicans to win two Senate runoffs in Georgia, but through the end of 2020 he didn't spend a penny on either. “He put all this money in the bank for his own legal fights. He never cared about Georgia’s races," a top Republican told HuffPost's S.V. Dáte. [HuffPost]

* Right-wing mobs are a real danger. Fencing at the Capitol won’t help. (WashPo) 

* 'He invited us': Accused Capitol rioters blame Trump (Reuters)

* Bezos Will Step Down as Amazon CEO (Amazon)

* Rocket Startup Astra Space Poised to Go Public at $2.1 Billion Valuation -- The Northern California company—one of the few space startups with flight-proven technology—intends to be the first maker of small rockets to go public in the U.S., using a blank-check company, or SPAC.(WSJ)

* The House impeachment managers accuse Donald Trump of summoning a mob to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, whipping the crowd "into a frenzy" and then aiming them "like a loaded cannon" at the U.S. Capitol, pinning the blame for the deadly violence that ensued directly on the former president. (NPR)

* The Real Rosa Parks Story Is Better Than the Fairy Tale -- The way we talk about her covers up uncomfortable truths about American racism. (NYT) 

* Senate confirms Buttigieg to lead Transportation Dept., the first openly gay person confirmed to a Cabinet seat (WashPo)

* A gloomy Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney Phil says more winter (AP)

* Rochester, New York, police released body camera footage that shows a 9-year-old girl being handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by officers responding to a family disturbance call. "You're acting like a child," one officer tells the girl. "I am a child," she responds between sobs. “This is not something that any of us should want to justify, can justify, and it’s something we have to change,”  Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren said. [HuffPost]

* Exclusive: Wikipedia launches new global rules to combat site abuses (Reuters)

* Confederate names are coming down, but San Francisco is now taking on … Abe Lincoln? (WashPo)

* Michael Lewis, the author of “The Big Short” and “Moneyball,” takes on a fraught subject in his next book: how to prevent a viral outbreak even worse than Covid-19. (NYT Book Review)

* Biden Faces Pressure to Make Amends on Family Separation -- Restitution, mental health services and legal permanent residency are among the demands for compensation to families harmed by the Trump-era border policy. (NYT)

* In case you missed it, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who has routinely repeated conspiracy theories, wrote a Facebook post in which she falsely suggested that a secretive entity had caused the devastating, deadly Camp Fire using lasers from space in order to make way for the high-speed rail. [Media Matters for America]

* Fauci says there’s no definitive answer for when life returns to ‘normal' (WashPo)

* Judge throws out Trump rule limiting what science EPA can use (WashPo)

* Depressed Groundhog Sees Shadow Of Rodent He Once Was (The Onion)

***

Frosty the snowman was a jolly happy soul,
With a corncob pipe and a button nose
And two eyes made out of coal.

Frosty the snowman is a fairy tale, they say,
He was made of snow but the children know
How he came to life one day.

There must have been some magic in
That old top hat they found.
For when they placed it on his head
He began to dance around.

O, Frosty the snowman
Was alive as he could be,
And the children say he could laugh and play
Just the same as you and me.

Frosty the snowman
Knew the sun was hot that day,
So he said, "Let's run
And we'll have some fun
Now before I melt away."

Frosty the snowman
Had to hurry on his way,
But he waved goodbye saying,
"Don't you cry,
I'll be back again some day."

Songwriters: Steve Nelson / Walter Jack Rollins

-30-

Secrets on the Wind

MAIN STORY:

Most journalists are very good interviewers. People tell them things even when they don't mean to. And the key to good interviewing is careful listening.

Most of us would agree that Bob Woodward is a very good journalist. And if you listened to the tapes of his interviews early last year with Donald Trump, you know he urged the conversation forward by acknowledging Trump's answers, then using those answers to ask the next question.

It all flowed like a river; in this case, downhill for Trump. And the weird thing is that Trump, who is not an idiot, knew what was happening, but he couldn't help himself. Such is the fate of a narcissist in the grip of a good interviewer.

Note to young journalists everywhere: Just ask the question. People want to tell you the answer.

The late Larry King was a good interviewer, though I would not call him a great journalist. He didn't really ask the hard questions or attempt to hold his rich and powerful guests accountable, but he *did* know how to get them talking.

And he kept them talking. And many of them ended up loving him as a result.

DIGRESSION:

This is somewhat embarrassing. Recently, I met up with a journalist friend not for professional reasons but just to check in. We were sitting outside of a cafe in the bustling downtown area of a little community in the South Bay. It was a sunny afternoon and we were eating sandwiches and sipping coffee.

We were socially distanced and our masks were down.

She asked me a question I hadn't seen coming. "Have you ever fallen in love with a work colleague?" 

I hesitated for a moment.

Then I told her a story, beginning to end in great detail, that I've never told anyone else. It just tumbled out of me.

"Okay, so..." she said slowly, with a steady gaze.

In that instant I realized hers had been a rhetorical question that I need not really have answered, certainly not in so much detail. Rather seamlessly (I hope) we pivoted to what she had been actually seeking, which was some collegial advice.

An hour or so later, as we were about to part, I hugged her and said, "Be good."  

Then, as she stepped away I added. "On second thought, no. Be bad." She smiled and nodded and we went our separate ways.

MAIN STORY, CONTINUED:

Anyway, that's how it goes sometimes when someone asks you a question. Even if you try to be evasive, you may inadvertently tell them what they do or do not want to know. 

Interviewing is an art, not a science. But sometimes when teaching journalism seminars near the end of a semester, I'd break the class into pairs and have everyone interview each other.

Now these seminars tended to be intensely personal experiences and we all came to know each other quite well over the course of 12 or 16 weeks. But every single time I ran that exercise, we all ended up finding out new things that none of us had ever known before. 

My conclusion is a simple one. There's a universal human trait to want to confide our secrets in one another. The great Woody Allen film "Crimes and Misdemeanors" explores this topic through hypotheticals and perhaps also hints at the roots of most fiction.

I think about that film when I consider the sheer volume of secrets we need our journalists to root out and share publicly during this unsettled and unsettling time. After all, they are our best hope to document the current state of our human condition.

And oh yeah, a little digression now and then isn't always such a bad thing.

*** 

Talk about unsettling, as I observe the political theater of the Dems taking over D.C., I believe they are playing a cynical game. Polls indicate that maybe 5 percent of the Republican Party's members are leaving the GOP in the hangover of the January 6th riot.

The Democrats know that a 5 percent hemorrhage will doom the Republicans nationally for at least the next few election cycles, so the White House may be theirs for a while. On the other hand, as they learned in 2000 and 2016, winning the popular vote does not necessarily translate into victory in the Electoral College, so there's work to be done in that regard.

And even in defeat, and after all of the scandal and violence, Trump and the movement he leads remains a serious threat on many levels. And it appears utterly unlikely they will get him convicted in the Senate. So the beast will sit on the sidelines, wounded and thirsting for revenge.

Meanwhile the victors sit unsteadily atop the throne and their own base threatens to splinter on the left. Basically what I see in Washington D.C. is one big mess, and it's unclear who or what can possibly clean this all up when or even how.

***

The headlines:

* Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said during an Instagram Live broadcast Monday night that she is a survivor of sexual assault. Ocasio-Cortez made the statement, which appeared to be one of the first times she has spoken in public about being a survivor, in contextualizing her trauma in the wake of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol last month. The New York Democrat went through a detailed account of her day on January 6, recounting her experience during the riot. She said those in Congress who are telling her "to move on," or even apologize, following the violent insurrection at the Capitol in January were using "the same tactics of abusers. The reason I say this and the reason I'm getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it's not a big deal, that we should forget what's happened, or even telling us to apologize. These are the same tactics of abusers. And, um, I'm a survivor of sexual assault...(and) when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other. And so, whether you had a negligent or a neglectful parent, and -- or whether you had someone who was verbally abusive to you, whether you are a survivor of abuse, whether you experience any sort of trauma in your life, small to large -- these episodes can compound on one another." (CNN)

* Spurred By The Capitol Riot, Thousands Of Republicans Flee The Party (NPR)

* Dozens of former Bush officials leave Republican Party, calling it 'Trump cult' (Reuters)

* New diabetes cases linked to covid-19 -- Researchers don’t understand exactly how the disease might trigger diabetes, or whether the cases are temporary or permanent. (WashPo)

* Myanmar’s Leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Is Detained Amid Coup -- Communications were suspended and flights disrupted as the military took power from an elected government and declared a one-year state of emergency. (NYT)

* Essential workers get lost in the vaccine scrum as states prioritize the elderly (WashPo)

* Ford to Use Google's Android in Most Cars -- The auto maker plans to introduce the operating system in all of its models outside of China in 2023. (WSJ)

* Trump has left the White House, but the party he hijacked is still under his spell and that of the QAnon cult that worships him. As Republicans regroup after losing the White House and both chambers of Congress, they must face the fact that a significant percentage of their base remains more loyal to Trump than to the party as a whole. [HuffPost]

* Mask Fights and a ‘Mob Mentality’: What Flight Attendants Faced Over the Last Year -- Furloughs, passengers who won’t wear masks and tense political confrontations contributed to a year of perpetual chaos for flight attendants. “It’s insane,” one veteran attendant said. (NYT)

* Wisconsin pharmacist who destroyed more than 500 vaccine doses believes Earth is flat, FBI says (WashPo)

* Once united in support of Biden, environmentalists and unions clash over pipelines -- Environmentalists and labor unions that threw their support behind U.S. President Joseph Biden now find themselves on the opposite sides of a battle over the construction of big pipeline projects between Canada and the United States. (Reuters)

* Trump left U.S. democracy in shambles. Biden has to build it back. (WashPo)

* GOP's Mitch McConnell Slams Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Conspiracies As 'Loony Lies' (NPR)

* Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) suggested Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) should lose her committee assignment over her disturbing social media activity in which she appeared to endorse violence against Democrats and express support for beliefs that mass shootings had been staged. [HuffPost]

* House Democrats are moving expeditiously to remove GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments, a decisive step that comes as they pressure Republicans to rebuke the Georgia congresswoman over recently unearthed incendiary past statements. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is planning to deliver an ultimatum to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy on Greene this week. Hoyer is expected to tell McCarthy that Republicans have 72 hours to strip Greene of her committee assignments, or Democrats will bring the issue to the House floor. (CNN)

* As Virus Variants Spread, ‘No One Is Safe Until Everyone Is Safe’ -- Rich countries are buying up coronavirus vaccines, leaving poorer regions vulnerable — and as potential breeding grounds for variants, like one found in South Africa, that could make vaccines less effective. (NYT)

* Unemployment rate won’t return to pre-pandemic level for decade, CBO says (WashPo)

* WHO team in Wuhan visits disease control centers (AP)

* GameStop signals a new, destabilizing collision between social media and the real world (WashPo)

* Russia Protesters Defy Vast Police Operation as Signs of Kremlin Anxiety Mount -- Tens of thousands took to the streets across Russia to show support for the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. The police were out in force and reports of brutality flared. (NYT)

* SpaceX announces first-ever all-civilian space flight crew (CNN)

* A fast, at-home virus test will be available to Americans this year (WashPo)

* Jack Palladino, the flamboyant private investigator whose clients ranged from presidents and corporate whistleblowers to scandal-plagued celebrities, Hollywood moguls and sometimes suspected drug traffickers, died Monday at age 76. Palladino suffered a devastating brain injury Thursday after a pair of would-be robbers tried to grab his camera outside his home in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. He held on to the camera but fell and struck his head, and the photos he took before his attackers fled were used by police to track down two suspects. They were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and other crimes. “He would have loved knowing that,” his wife, Sandra Sutherland, told The Associated Press on Monday. She added that she had told her husband while he lay unconscious in the hospital: “Guess what, Jack, they got the bastards, and it was all your doing.” (AP)

* Insurrectionist Truther Doesn’t Believe He Was At Capitol (The Onion)

***

Your secret's safe with me
(Your secret's safe with me)
Waiting for someone
Whose eyes will tell you it's real

-- Songwriter: Michael P. Franks

(image: woodyallenpages.com)

-30-

Boys Into Men and MALA

 

(wiki commons)

One of the dilemmas facing parents is that while there are good books about raising daughters and also many good parenting books by women, there is a relative paucity of useful information available about raising sons, especially written by men.

Rather than get into the specifics of what exists (I've read them), I want to stick to generalities, because that is what we journalists are -- generalists, only rarely specialists.

The first clue I got about this topic was when my son came along after two daughters. Almost immediately, I viewed him differently, and yes I know this says a lot about me, sexism, cultural standards and all that stuff.

But the reality was I sensed he would be able to see through me in ways my daughters would not, or would not choose to do. I was afraid he would see me as a fraud.

As time went by and I had two more sons and one more daughter, splittingg the deck at three each, my humility grew to the point where I had to admit to myself that I didn't have a clue how to raise daughters *or* sons.

Nope, it was the blind leading the seeing, because it was obvious they all could see through me. Yet they stayed fairly opaque to me. Oh I could see the obvious stuff -- their beauty, their brilliance, their kindness, their creativity.

But their paths through life seemed much more shaped by environmental factors than the genetic material we held in common. Still, little flashes of "me," whoever that is, would pop up now and then in them and still do.

But all that accomplishes is to further my quest to discover who the hell *I* am. Writers are known for their metaphors as much as anything else, and ever since I started my first work in Hollywood, I've been pretty sure that our lives are a lot like movies, with beginnings, middles and ends both predictable and utterly given to chance.

In that context, my own movie is well through its third act, with only the time and nature of the ending to play out. One can hope for some serendipitous twist, I suppose, but the time remaining would suggest that is unlikely.

My kids' movies, by contrast, are all just closing out on Act One, or proceeding through Act Two, or both at the same time. And that Act Two is the core, the pith of any movie or any life. What they do in this period trumps Acts One & Three by a long shot.

In our culture, Act One is extended anyway, as the youthful phase dominates most people well into their twenties and even beyond. For that matter, Act Three is often extended as well, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine.

You might be "old" for thirty years or more, although these days Covid is doing its best to reduce the numbers of us who actually last that long.

I've come to the conclusion that old age really does convey wisdom but it might be based on knowing what we don't know as opposed to knowing things.

In my case, my whole movie leaves me yearning for one wish -- the ability to travel back in time and relive one moment -- or two -- or maybe even three. Not that I have regrets, I don't really, but I might have chosen my lines a little more carefully had there been a Take Two.

You know what I mean?

***

Meanwhile, there comes an opinion piece in today's Times by Shoshanna Zuboff:

“In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.”

This captures what I have been struggling to say in my repeated attempts to sort out my worries about censorship, mass media, and free speech. The communication structure of our society was revolutionized by the Internet -- decentralized, or you might say democratized.

The problem is along with that decentralization came the deeply anti-democratic hate speech that is tearing our society in half -- if we let it.

Regulation? Boycotts? A renewed investment in local journalism?

Just how will we MALA -- Make America Loving Again?

***

Okay enough philosophy; the news marches on and there's always a Take Two in the headlines:

* How Trump’s Focus on Antifa Distracted Attention From the Far-Right Threat -- Federal law enforcement shifted resources last year in response to Donald Trump’s insistence that the radical left endangered the country. Meanwhile, right-wing extremism was building ominously. (NYT)

* Virus mutations add urgency to vaccination effort as experts warn of long battle ahead -- A complicated mix of good news and bad news makes any forecast for the coming months fuzzy, but scientists have one clear and sobering message: The pandemic is a long way from over. (WashPo)

* Defying Putin, Russians Return To The Streets To Demand Alexei Navalny's Release (NPR)

* GOP Rep. Kinzinger to start new PAC to challenge party’s embrace of Trump (WashPo)

* Russia arrests over 4,000 at wide protests backing Navalny (AP)

* The Silicon Valley Start-Up That Caused Wall Street Chaos -- Robinhood pitched itself to investors as the antithesis of Wall Street. It didn’t say that it also entirely relies on Wall Street. This past week, the two realities collided. (NYT)

* The pandemic is completely changing the way we treat unemployment (WashPo)

* WHO team visits Wuhan market where first COVID infections detected (Reuters)

* The Coup We Are Not Talking About -- We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. (NYT)

* Covid: Australian city of Perth goes into snap lockdown after guard tests positive (BBC)

* A steady stream of Latino students were arriving on college campuses. Then the pandemic hit. (WashPo)

* Unwelcome On Facebook And Twitter, QAnon Followers Flock To Fringe Sites (NPR)

* Thousands flee Hong Kong for UK, fearing China crackdown (AP)

* ‘Like Wartime’: Canadian Companies Unite to Start Mass Virus Testing -- A consortium of some of Canada’s largest companies, representing 350,000 employees nationwide, has launched a rapid testing program aimed at reopening the country’s economy. (NYT)

* On Friday, more than 75 years after Korematsu fought against Japanese internment, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared Jan. 30 as “Fred Korematsu Day” in California, pledging to honor his decades-long crusade for years to come. (KQED)

* 30 Million Americans Say They Don't Have Enough To Eat (CNN)

* The military said it wants to fight white supremacy. What is it waiting for? (WashPo)

* Forecast: Wild Weather in a Warming World -- The polar vortex is experiencing an unusually long disturbance this year because of a “sudden stratospheric warming.” Bundle up (NYT)

* Free Version Of Meditation App Plays Panicked Shrieks Every 15 Minutes (The Onion)

***

We may lose and we may win
Though we will never be here again
So open up, I'm climbin' in
So take it easy

 -- The Eagles

-30-

-30-

Power to the Players

When I was raising my three youngest kids, one of our regular stops each Saturday was the GameStop store on Mission near 24th Street. Those of you who know San Francisco will recognize this as one of the busiest parts of the city, at least on the weekend.

At least it used to be, pre-Covid.

I lost count of how many video games we bought and sold there, but it equated roughly to the number of dreams I could make come true for my sons as they traveled back and forth between my house and their Mom's. 

Their little sister was sometimes along for the ride, but she had a whole separate set of routines to make her weekends special, which usually involved visits with her friends.

Of course, like most parents, I worried that I might be feeding my boys' addiction to video games, but I consoled myself with the thought that at least they were learning a lot about how to navigate the iterative world of software.

So this week as I've tried to comprehend the forces that have sent GameStop's stock soaring from about $4/share to about $150/share, making many Millennials millionaires, I've been suspecting it has something to do with a whole generation of people who learned all too well how to navigate the iterative world of software.

So much so that they have brought the hedge fund overlords of Wall Street to their knees.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer group of guys.

You know, our lives in certain ways resemble software projects, though not necessarily video games. Especially those of us who've remained in the workforce. We've had to reinvent ourselves so many times over the past quarter-century that our original operating systems have become strained under the weight of adding new features.

Just keeping up with the evolving language of the workplace requires a mastery of next year's edition of the urban dictionary long before it's issued. (You know that you are on top of things when it anoints phrases you left behind three developmental cycles ago.)

In my travels through Silicon Valley, many times I was one of the few non-engineers in a company. Some of the coders just ignored me; others befriended me as a curiosity -- a kindly, aging uncle who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag but somehow seemed to be providing something useful to somebody somewhere.

For my part, I loved them -- every last one of those engineers, even the ones who never talked to me. Maybe because they reminded me of my guys back home.

In any event, I've developed the ability to sense when it's time for me to embrace my next iteration. And that time is now.

[Footnote: The sweet 2015 film called "The Intern," starring Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, conveys a fraction of what I'm trying to say in this post.]

***

The news:

* Former President Trump's five impeachment defense attorneys have left a little more than a week before his trial is set to begin, according to people familiar with the case, amid a disagreement over his legal strategy. It was a dramatic development in the second impeachment trial for Trump, who has struggled to find lawyers willing to take his case. And now, with legal briefs due next week and a trial set to begin only days later, Trump is clinging to his election fraud charade and suddenly finds himself without legal representation. (CNN)

* Dodger Stadium’s mass COVID-19 vaccination site was temporarily shut down Saturday afternoon when about 50 anti-vaccine protesters gathered at the entrance, frustrating hundreds of motorists who had been waiting in line for hours. (LA Times)

* FBI probe of U.S. Capitol riot finds evidence assault was coordinated -- Agents are probing interactions between on-the-ground instigators and leaders of national extremist groups. (WashPo)

* G.O.P. Quiet as Pressure Mounts to Address Lawmaker’s Conspiracy Claims -- In a newly unearthed video from 2018, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that 9/11 was a hoax, President Barack Obama was a Muslim and the Clintons were guilty of murder. (NYT)

* Democrats building  emotionally charged case for impeachment (WashPo)

* The World Health Organization-led team investigating the origins of COVID-19 during a mission that has been tightly controlled by its Chinese hosts visited a hospital on Saturday in the central city of Wuhan that treated early coronavirus patients. (Reuters)

* What’s Happening to Our Economy Is Like a Natural Disaster (NYT)

* The Pentagon raised doubts on Thursday that the U.S. military would withdraw from Afghanistan by May 1 — the deadline set in a February 2020 agreement with the Taliban — after accusing the Taliban of failing to uphold its commitments under the deal. (AP)

* Actions by Proud Boy at Capitol show ‘planning, determination, and coordination,’ U.S. alleges (WashPo)

* What’s Driving Everything From a Market Frenzy to an Embrace of U.S. Deficits? Magical Thinking. (WSJ)

* U.S. Airstrike Kills Top ISIS Leader in Iraq (NYT)

* As Biden pushes to reopen schools, Europe is moving in the other direction (WashPo)

* As California virus cases fall, more people than ever dying (AP)

* Legal Pressure on Trump Increases With Judge’s Order in Fraud Inquiry -- The order, answering a demand for documents by New York’s attorney general, rejected a bid to shield the records with attorney-client privilege. (NYT)

* In race against time on virus mutations, U.S. is ‘falling behind’ (WashPo)

* In Biden’s White House, Masks, Closed Doors and Empty Halls (NYT)

* Biden environmental challenge: Filling vacant scientist jobs (AP)

* GameStop mania exposes SEC’s failure as regulator (WashPo)

* Exhausted Researchers Inform Public Covid Vaccine Won’t Shrink You Down To Size Of Ant (The Onion)

***

The Grand Tour

George Jones

Step right up, come on in
If you'd like to take the grand tour
Of a lonely house that once was home sweet home
I have nothing here to sell you,
Just some things that I will tell you
Some things I know will chill you to the bone.

Over there, sits the chair
Where she'd bring the paper to me
And sit down on my knee
And whisper oh, I love you
But now she's gone forever
And this old house will never
Be the same without the love
That we once knew.

Straight ahead, that's the bed
Where we'd lay in love together
And Lord knows we had a good thing going here
See her picture on the table
Don't it look like she'd be able
Just to touch me and say good morning dear.

There's her rings, all her things
And her clothes are in the closet
Like she left them
When she tore my world apart.

As you leave you'll see the nursery,
Oh, she left me without mercy
Taking nothing but
Our baby and my heart.

Step right up, come on in...

Songwriters: George Richey / Carmol Taylor / Norris D Wilson

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