Tues - Who Put the Ham in Hamtramck?

US Vaccine Data - We Have Now Administered 443 Million Shots  (Population 333 Million)

*I have no idea why it went down.  It looks like the CDC miscounted some fully vaccinated people as new ones.


70% of Adult Population Is Fully Vaccinated.


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We Continue to Vaccinate Half a Million New People a Day

Cases continue up, but are unlikely to reach last winter's peak.
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Who Says You Can't Clog Your Arteries for 63 Cents?

McDonald's Egg McMuffin is turning 50 years old, and it's giving the breakfast sandwich a price to match.

On Thursday, McDonald's will sell the Egg McMuffin for its original price of 63 cents during breakfast hours (6 am to 10:30 am). The promotion will be offered exclusively on the McDonald's app as the restaurant looks to boost its nationwide rewards program.
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At Least They Didn't Bring Any Zyklon B

Protesters rallying against vaccine mandates displayed a swastika and yellow Star of David on Sunday outside the office of New York state Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who is Jewish.

The crowd gathered in the Bronx to protest a bill sponsored by Dinowitz, a Democrat, that requires that children be immunized against Covid-19 to attend school. The rally was organized by Rob Astorino, a Republican candidate for governor.

Dinowitz slammed the display of the symbols as "repugnant and offensive."
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Are They Going to Allow Ham in Hamtramck?

A walk down the main street in Hamtramck, Michigan, feels like a tour around the world.

A Polish sausage store and an Eastern European bakery sit alongside a Yemeni department store and a Bengali clothing shop. Church bells ring out along with the Islamic call to prayer.

"The world in two square miles" - Hamtramck lives up to its slogan, with around 30 languages spoken within its 5 sq km area.

This month, the Midwestern city of 28,000 has reached a milestone. Hamtramck has elected an all-Muslim City Council and a Muslim mayor, becoming the first in the US to have a Muslim-American government.

Once faced with discrimination, Muslim residents have become integral to this multicultural city, and now make up more than half its population.
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It's Not Hogwash.  It's Hogwarts.



A scale model cake of Hogwarts castle has gone on display to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter film.

The cake, which is 6ft (183cm) wide, 5ft (152cm) tall and weighs 100kg (15.7 stone), was unveiled at Warner Bros Studio Tour in Leavesden, Watford, where much of the franchise was filmed.

It took 320 hours to create and was made with vegan-friendly ingredients.

The cake was donated to One Vision, a local charity fighting food poverty.
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Before the Previous Guy, There Was the Original "He Must Not Be Named"

Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Tom Felton and more of the Hogwarts gang will travel back to the magical school with filmmaker Chris Columbus for an HBO Max special to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the franchise's first film "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone," which premiered in the U.S. Nov. 16, 2001.

HBO Max announced the retrospective special, "Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts," Tuesday, corresponding with the anniversary. The special will arrive Jan. 1 and feature in-depth interviews and cast conversations and give a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the franchise, according to a press release.

The Gryffindor trio and Felton will be joined by memorable cast members like Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, He Who Must Not Be Named (Ralph Fiennes) and others. "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling's involvement in the special was not noted in the release.
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Who Doesn't Want Better Roads and Bridges?

Republicans are still warring over the bill even as a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 63% of Americans support the bill while just 32% oppose it.

The survey question was very simple: Do you support or oppose the federal government spending one trillion dollars on roads, bridges, and other infrastructure?

And Who Really Wants to Have Anything To Do With Steve Bannon?

There is simply no serious person anywhere who thinks Bannon has the legal right to thumb his nose at this subpoena, or that his claim of executive privilege is anything but preposterous. He was a private citizen at the time of the events in question; he left the White House over three years before. Furthermore, executive privilege belongs to the office of the presidency, which gives the current president the right to assert it; former presidents don’t get to use it to hide their misdeeds and those of their cronies as long as they live. [...]

Yet Republicans seem unified in their defense of Bannon. As The Post reports, Republicans are “rallying around” him, “warning that Democrats’ efforts to force Bannon to comply with what they say is an unfair subpoena paves the way for them to do the same if they take back the House in 2022.”

If You Answered "The QOP", 10 Points for Gryffindor!
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Don't Burn a Book.  Save a Life.



A tumultuous special Spotsylvania County School Board meeting ended after midnight last night with a complete reversal of the original vote to pull “sexually explicit” books from the school libraries. Speaker after speaker decried the vote, including students, parents, librarians and even one retired teacher who had taught one of the “book burning” Board members.

"This board doesn't understand who our students really are," said one county librarian. "We have students who are victims of sexual abuse, who have been forced to prostitute, who have two moms or two dads, who identify as LGBTQ+, whose home is drug-infested. The school library is a safe place for them to find themselves in books."

One student spoke about a book that saved his life:

Courtland High School student Alexander Storen credited books with saving his life last year, during a time when he twice attempted suicide.

"[The book 'Shattered'] may have saved my life," he said. "It showed me that my life had meaning, that it mattered. When our School Board, which is supposed to have the best interests of our students at heart, bans books because they contain LGBTQ+ representation, what message is that sending to our teens, to our kids who are at risk? It's like saying, 'You don't matter.'"
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The Cage Match We All Want to See:  Porter Vs. Dejoy



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Who Wouldn't Pay More For A Hamburger to Help Starving Kids?

Rising prices have crushed consumer sentiment and become a major political story as President Joe Biden struggles to enact the broad social policy agenda that helped him win the White House last year.



But inflation is actually just one of several big economic stories happening right now. There has also been a big reduction in child poverty ― and Congress could make it permanent.



The same fiscal policies that are partly blamed for high inflation produced a 40% reduction in child poverty in July, according to researchers at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. The one-month decline was steeper than any year-to-year change in child poverty from 1967 until 2020, when Congress first sent out stimulus checks and boosted unemployment benefits in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

You Already Know the Answer.
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This Is How You Deal With a Pandemic!

The Biden administration is expected to announce this week that it is purchasing 10 million courses of Pfizer’s covid pill, a multibillion-dollar investment in a medication that officials hope will help change the trajectory of the pandemic by staving off many hospitalizations and deaths, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction.



U.S. officials see this antiviral pill, and another by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, as potential game-changers to help restore a broader sense of normalcy and are eager to add them to a small arsenal of treatments for Americans who contract the coronavirus. With breakthrough cases rising and 30 percent of American adults not fully vaccinated, health officials believe the pills will help tame the pandemic because of their ability to thwart the virus’s most pernicious effects.
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It Costs Too Much, But We'll But It Anyway

Americans might say they’re upset about rising prices and losing confidence in the economy, but that hasn’t stopped them from snapping up cars, electronics, sporting equipment and other big-ticket items.



Retail sales jumped 1.7 percent in October, marking a significant acceleration in spending from September, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. And despite new data showing that consumer confidence is at a 10-year low, they seem to be shrugging off the higher prices on gas, groceries and other everyday goods. Walmart and Home Depot, two of the nation’s largest retailers, benefited from the surge, with both reporting robust third-quarter earnings.



The data highlights a unique economic moment where the country is still in the grip of a pandemic, but the coronavirus and fears surrounding it have receded enough for economic activity to maintain a brisk pace. Even so, the composition of spending remains heavily weighted toward goods instead of services in the run-up to the holidays.



And though consumers are grumbling about higher prices, they have so far been willing to accept them, said Mark Cohen, director of retail sales at Columbia Business School.

In the Words of Jim Morrison, "We Want the World and We Want It ... NOW!"
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What About Diet Cola?  

Drinking coffee or tea may be linked with a lower risk of stroke and dementia, according to the largest study of its kind.



Strokes cause 10% of deaths globally, while dementia is one of the world’s biggest health challenges – 130 million are expected to be living with it by 2050.



In the research, 365,000 people aged between 50 and 74 were followed for more than a decade. At the start the participants, who were involved in the UK Biobank study, self-reported how much coffee and tea they drank. Over the research period, 5,079 of them developed dementia and 10,053 went on to have at least one stroke.



Researchers found that people who drank two to three cups of coffee or three to five cups of tea a day, or a combination of four to six cups of coffee and tea, had the lowest risk of stroke or dementia.



Those who drank two to three cups of coffee and two to three cups of tea daily had a 32% lower risk of stroke. These people had a 28% lower risk of dementia compared with those who did not drink tea or coffee.
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Talk is Cheap

Donald Trump’s secretary of state and treasury secretary discussed removing him from power after the deadly Capitol attack by invoking the 25th amendment, according to a new book.



Related: ‘Pence was disloyal at exactly the right time’: author Jonathan Karl on the Capitol attack



The amendment, added to the constitution after the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, provides for the removal of an incapacitated president, potentially on grounds of mental as well as physical fitness. It has never been used.



According to Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, by the ABC Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl, the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, talked to other cabinet members about using the amendment on the night of 6 January, the day of the attack, and the following day.
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