Comment on Michael Brenner: The Fourth Estate Indeed!

Colorado state officials and the Union Pacific Railroad reached a tentative agreement on the future of the 100-year-old Moffat Tunnel — and, in the process, set the stage to expand passenger rail service in the mountains between Denver and Craig, officials announced Monday. Barring any major hiccups between now and the formal signing in May, the state will extend the 99-year lease allowing Union Pacific to use the tunnel for another 25 years.

During the height of the COVID hysteria, then-President Trump promoted hydroxychloroquine, a drug used for Malaria as a possible cure for COVID-19, which caused a national panic. MAGATs continually used this study to prove its efficacy even though many virologists disputed it. Digby wrote a great piece at the time on this lunacy. Finally, the study has been retracted. In a lengthy retraction notice published at the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents on 17 December, publisher Elsevier, together with the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC), which co-owns the journal, said it had investigated the study and — among other concerns — wasn’t able to confirm whether ethical approval was obtained before participants joined the study, nor whether they could all have entered it in time for data to be analysed and included in the submitted manuscript.read more

It was 19 degrees yesterday morning when Amazon directed a high-volume water pipe on their strikers. Imagine. It was extraordinarily cruel. Is anyone surprised that the company headed by the man who's having a $600 million wedding is turning a stream on the people who work under inhumane conditions in his trucks and warehouses?

President-elect Donald Trump complained about possibly having to walk down steps to reach the stage at a conservative conference on Sunday. As he walked out to the podium at AmFest in Arizona, Trump began by wishing the audience a Merry Christmas. "Nice to win the election and very nice to win," the president-elect said.

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo pressed incoming White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt after 38 Republicans voted against President-elect Donald Trump's last-minute demand to raise the debt ceiling as part of a bill to prevent a government shutdown. During an interview on Sunday Morning Futures, Bartiromo told Leavitt that "drama" broke out on Capitol Hill due to Trump's demands derailing a government spending bill. "How much confidence should we have that the GOP can unite and agree on the agenda and President Trump's nominees?" the Fox News host wondered.

We have enough data points now to have some idea of what is going on—and most of us probably won’t like it.