In the delicate 50-50 balance of the current US Senate, every Democrat vote is needed to pass legislation, and every Republican vote is needed to block it. As usual, the GOP is better at closing ranks than the Dems, but despite the potential Kingmaker/Spoiler role any member of the majority Party could choose to adopt, only two are playing that card: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
On Friday evening, 10 December 2010, some 30 tornadoes smashed through six mid-West states, creating havoc and spreading devastation, claiming upwards of 100 lives. The outbreak, apart from being one of the worst recorded, is all the more historic given the unseasonable timing, with most tornadoes occurring in the spring. Normally, cooler temperatures preclude the formation of tornadoes, and this December rampage is yet another sign of increasing weather instability stemming from unchecked climate change globally.
On October 21, 2021, police were called to the set of “Rust”, a western being filmed in Bonanza City, New Mexico. An accidental shooting with a prop gun, discharged by star Alec Baldwin, had killed the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounded director Joel Souza. The cause of the incident is still under investigation, but somehow, live ammunition was loaded into a real revolver, not blanks in a prop gun. While setting up the next shot, with the gun pointed at the camera and the cinematographer, the weapon discharged; Baldwin’s statement is that he had cocked the gun, based on Hutchins’ instructions, but did not pull the trigger.
On Sunday, 21 November 2021, a man broke through barriers and drove his red SUV wildly through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring more than sixty others. The suspect, Darrell Brooks, 39, was well-known to local police, a repeat offender who had just been released from jail two days prior on a thousand-dollar bail after arrest on a domestic abuse charge. Brooks had been accused of trying to run down his girlfriend with the same SUV. Witnesses said that Brooks swerved through the parade route in a zig-zag pattern, apparently attempting to hit as many people as possible. Police recovered Brooks and the damaged SUV several hours later; he was arraigned on multiple counts and bail set at a more reasonable $5 million.
Joe Biden’s solar year began at 11:31 AM EST on 19 November 2021, in Washington DC, just hours after a Lunar Eclipse with the longest duration in 580 years, which fell exactly opposed his natal Sun. This is not a positive augur for the coming twelvemonth, and delving deeper into the details, we’re not seeing much to alleviate that.
All politico eyes were turned to the “Old Dominion State” on Election Day 2021, where former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe sought to regain his old job and beat back a challenge from Republican Glenn Youngkin, a businessman with no prior political experience. Virginia’s increasingly blue tint, and a 10-point Biden victory margin just last year, not to mention McAuliffe’s earlier tenure of the office, all argued for a stately procession to victory, but in practice, the outcome was far from assured. Polls tightened in the weeks leading up to the election, with Youngkin showing significant leads in some, but a statistical dead heat in most.
