Remains of the snowstorm – The tense situation in Myanmar – Marjorie Taylor Greene loses committee positions – Evening statistics
I showed foresight in breaking up the ice on my walkways three days ago, when enough water was running underneath it to make its removal, if not easy, at any rate a good deal easier than it is now. When I was out today I noticed several people hacking at the ice on their driveways and sidewalks with their shovels, making slow progress now that it had melted and then re-frozen over the past couple of days. Even with the rising temperature (it was close to 50 degrees today) and untrammeled sunlight from a cloudless sky, the ice was firmly adhered to the pavement and its removal appeared a tedious business.
Myanmar remains quiet. Some flags are being flown in support of the National League for Democracy (NLD) but there have been no mass demonstrations and no violent crackdowns. “Democracy” in the NLD’s title has to be taken with a grain of salt: even during the party’s prominence the military always had the upper hand and the NLD had to tread warily to avoid provoking it. And it appears that to some extent it was a bit of a personality cult for Suu Kyi. But undoubtedly it was providing a meliorating trend and until recently it seemed possible that the iron hand of the military government from previous decades would relax its grip. Now the prospects for genuine democracy are dim. Win Htein, a senior NLD advisor, was taken from his Yangon home early on Friday, arrested under sedition laws. Other prominent NLD members will probably undergo the same fate, including Suu Kyi herself; they are already under house arrest. Biden has spoken about imposing sanctions, but their effect may be only to push the nation into dependence on China.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has been removed from her committee assignments. The vote on the matter took place this evening, and the motion for her removal was voted 230-199 in favor, with 11 Republicans aligning themselves with the Democratic majority. The biggest loser in this new debacle for the Republican Party is not Greene herself, but Kevin McCarthy. He said that he deplored Greene’s extremist views and offensive behavior, but did not propose to penalize her in any way. Had he done so by having the GOP deprive her of the committee assignments on its own, he would have spared himself and the party at large from the humiliation of seeing one of their members publicly stripped of her responsibilities and being declared incompetent to fulfill them. In an attempt to retain her perquisites, Greene declared that some of her more far-fetched statements “were words of the past, and these things do not represent me.” No one believed this 11th-hour recantation, especially since she did not bother to mention her reprehensible conduct in stalking David Hogg, a survivor of the Stoneman Douglas School massacre in 2018. The entire process was executed with far less fanfare than I expected. I thought that the chamber meeting would be prolonged by GOP members arguing on her behalf or at any rate protesting about the precedent set by targeting a member of Congress over views expressed prior to serving as an elected official. But even though the vote went more or less along party lines, no one wanted to discredit himself by championing her.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 105,394,785; # of deaths worldwide: 2,292,538; # of cases U.S.: 27,269,684; # of deaths; U.S.: 466,870.