Choices

another piece of good news of another sort from the guardian:

Wildlife officials in Colorado say an elusive elk that wandered the hills with a car tyre around its neck for at least two years has at last been freed.
The four-and-a-half-year-old, 270kg (600lb) bull elk was spotted near Pine Junction, south-west of Denver, on Saturday evening and tranquillised, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. It was the fourth attempt wildlife officers had made in the past week to try to capture and help it.
Officers with the agency had to cut off the elk’s five-point antlers to remove the object because they couldn’t slice through the steel in the bead of the tyre.
“We would have preferred to cut the tyre and leave the antlers for his rutting activity, but the situation was dynamic and we had to just get the tyre off in any way possible,” officer Scott Murdoch said.
[…]
Swanson and Murdoch were surprised to see its neck was in good condition after two years of chafing. “The hair was rubbed off a little bit, there was one small open wound maybe the size of a nickel or quarter, but other than that it looked really good,” Murdoch said. “I was actually quite shocked to see how good it looked.”
The rutting season played a role in helping officers find him. Murdoch said: “The rut definitely made him more visible. There was a bigger bull in the group he was with on Saturday, but he is getting to be a decent size bull.”
Wildlife officers first spotted the elk in July 2019 while conducting a population survey for Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and mountain goats in the Mount Evans Wilderness. It has since spent the past couple of years travelling back and forth between Park and Jefferson counties.
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congress critter choices: to coup or not to coup

How Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell Plotted to Undermine Trump’s Stolen Election Claims | Vanity Fair

Neither senator openly contradicted the former president when he began spreading election-fraud conspiracy theories, but both privately agonized over a potential bandwagon scenario, David M. Drucker writes in his new book, In Trump’s Shadow.

On Sunday, January 3, 2021, at 10:09 p.m., a political hand grenade exploded in my inbox. In a carefully crafted 327- word statement, Tom Cotton announced that he would support the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory when Congress met in joint session on Wednesday, January 6. The senator would vote against any objections.
Trump, in a last-ditch attempt to overturn the 2020 election, had issued a clarion call for Republicans to object to state-certified electoral votes from six swing states that had voted narrowly for Biden, delivering him the presidency. The majority of Republicans in the House, led by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise—or was it the other way around?—answered the call. In the Senate, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, whip-smart constitutional lawyers both, did the same. Between the two of them, they managed to recruit about a dozen Senate Republicans to join them.
Cotton, stunningly, gave Trump the Heisman. It was not a spur-of-the-moment calculation. For weeks leading up to the January 6 vote, Trump had ratcheted up conspiratorial claims that the election would be stolen. It was a fantastical sundae, cooked up by Trump’s calamitous legal team and served up by the president to the rank-and-file voters who backed him. The cherry on top was Trump’s assertion that Congress, and Vice President Mike Pence, were empowered by the Constitution to sidestep the Electoral College and install the losing candidate as president. In the midst of all this, Cotton, in league with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was maneuvering behind the scenes to derail the outgoing president’s effort to remain in office, and marginalize those Republicans who were abetting him.
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nancy also said according to the hill:

 “I’m very disappointed that we’re not going with the original $3.5 trillion, which was very transformative,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol, forecasting “some difficult decisions because we have fewer resources.”

“But whatever we do, we’ll make decisions that will continue to be transformative,” she added. 

[…]

In a letter to Democrats Monday night, Pelosi had suggested the cost-cutting efforts would come in the form of eliminating some of the proposed benefit provisions altogether. She promoted the idea of putting the focus more squarely on child benefits and efforts to tackle climate change. 

“Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well,” she wrote.

On Tuesday, however, the Speaker said she’s receiving some pushback from Democrats who would prefer to press forward with the broad array of benefits included in the larger bill, but scale back the duration of those programs to reduce the price tag. That, the Speaker said, would be their first option. 

“The fact is that if there are fewer dollars to spend, there are choices to be made,” Pelosi said. “And some members have written back to me and said, ‘I want to do everything.’ So we’ll have that discussion.”

She added: “The timing would be reduced in many cases to make the cost lower.”

Pelosi ticked off a number of proposed benefit programs that will be prioritized as Democrats make those tough choices, including a child tax benefit, expanded child care and pre-Kindergarten programs, and new spending for home healthcare.   

“I mean, we’re still talking about a couple trillion dollars. But it’s much less” than the $3.5 trillion we wanted, she said. “So mostly we would be cutting back on years and something like that.” 

Pelosi said one of the controversial revenue-raising provisions — empowering the Internal Revenue Service to access certain bank records in order to catch tax cheats — will be included in the final bill. But she also suggested the parameters surrounding that provision — which currently targets those who make more than $600 in deposits or withdrawals per year — might change.   

“That’s a negotiation that will go on, as to what the amount is,” she said.

[…]

On Tuesday, she said she’s “optimistic” that Democrats are on track to meet that month-end deadline, which coincides with the expiration of the federal authority for highway funding.   

The Speaker also asserted that she won’t bring any bills to the House floor that can’t pass the Senate — a stipulation of some Democratic centrists wary of voting on liberal wish-lists that have no chance of becoming law.

“We have to have something that will pass the House and pass the Senate,” Pelosi said. “I’m not asking members to vote for something that has no chance to pass in the Senate.”