Open Mic for the week of 1/20/2025
It’s inauguration day.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
People who were worried that Fauci might not get pardoned can relax. Biden pardoned Fauci last night.Report
A laugh-out-loud zinger: “I guess the covid vaccines *DO* provide immunity.”Report
Holy cow, Kinzinger, Cheney, Schiff *ALL* got pardoned.
Nice.Report
Mark Milley too. And hey, more pardons incoming.
“Trump, who takes office at noon, has promised to grant swift clemency to many of those involved in the violent and bloody Jan. 6, 2021, attack, which injured roughly 140 law enforcement officers. “Everybody in this very large arena will be very happy with my decision,” he said at a Sunday rally. ”
https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-fauci-milley-pardons-january-6-3cba287f89051513fb48d7ae700ae747Report
Rachel Vindman is on Bluesky giving her take on the pardons:
Report
Question for the lawyers here:
Besides Nixon being pardoned by Ford, has a POTUS ever issued a preemptive pardon to an individual not actually charged with a federal crime?Report
Ooooh! The pardon for Fauci goes back to 2014!!!
Is that when the wet market opened?Report
Let me just ask a curious question to Perplexity:
What year was EcoHealth Alliance first grant in wuhan?
EcoHealth Alliance’s first grant involving research in Wuhan, China, was awarded in 2014. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided a grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study possible coronaviruses from bats, and $600,000 of this grant was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology[5]. This grant was part of a larger $3.7 million award from the NIH to EcoHealth Alliance[5]. The project was initially set to run for five years and was renewed in 2019 for another five-year period, but it was subsequently terminated by the Trump administration in April 2020 following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic[5].
Can add citations in separate post if folks are interested…Report
He’s pardoned his entire family!
James Biden, Sara Jones Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, John Owens, and Francis Biden!!! Dating back to 2014!!!
Oh, wow.Report
The only curious thing about the pardon is that it seems to imply that they needed 6-yrs to get the first operation monetized.Report
Oh, good. He got Leonard Peltier.Report
The twitter accounts for POTUS and VP have changed hands. If you were holding out hope that Trump would be arrested at the podium, it looks like that has not, in fact, happened.
Trust the plan.Report
If you’re wondering if we ever discussed Birthright Citizenship in the past, we did! Back in 2018.
Some of the arguments that we were able to dismiss because they were racist back then may bubble up again.Report