Covid Nation: New cases of Covid-19 in the US have dropped more than a third since September 1^st, 35 percent to be exact.

  Worldwide, cases have dropped 30 percent since August.

  The reason for the dip isn’t known. David Leonhardt writes in The NY Times; “The most plausible explanations involve some combination of virus biology and social networks. Perhaps each virus variant is especially likely to infect some people but not others — and once many of the most vulnerable have been exposed, the virus recedes. And perhaps a variant needs about two months to circulate through an average-sized community.”

  Yesterday on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told host Margaret Brennan that it is “too soon to tell” whether it will be safe for gatherings during the holiday season.

  Of course, there’s nothing like threatening peoples’ jobs to get them vaccinated. In New York City, which has 150,000 school employees, about 18,000 got their first shot when faced with firing if they didn’t.

  The Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs also report surges in vaccination as the result of mandates.

  Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson is applying for FDA approval of its booster shot. The Pfizer booster has already been approved.

  This morning, 701,178 Americans are dead of Covid-19; worldwide, 4,803,300.

Unfriended: The Facebook whistleblower who released tens of thousands of pages of internal research and documents from the company has revealed herself as Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company.

  Haugen told “60 Minutes” that the company knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence, and misinformation and has tried to hide the guilty knowledge. She said, “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.”

  The company is annoyed, of course. In particular, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, has said it is “ludicrous” to assign blame to Facebook over the January 6th Capitol riot. Clegg said the company will never be able to control all content but might be open to more regulation.

Full Disclosure: Freed from her nondisclosure agreement, former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman said on MSNBC that if Donald Trump wants to run for president again in 2024 he “needs to come clean to the American people” about his health.

 She gave no details but said,  “I don’t know if he will even be healthy enough to run in 2024,” she said.

  Omarosa just won a court case freeing her from her NDA.

  She published a book, “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” while Trump was still in the White House. 

 The Sports Page: Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight end Rob Gronkowski, who took a crushing hit by the Los Angeles Rams linebacker Terrell Lewis, revealed that he has  “four cracked ribs, one broken rib and a punctured lung.”

  Needless to say, he didn’t play in last night’s 19-17 win over his former team, The New England Patriots. 

The Spin Rack: A spill of 120,000 gallons of oil from an offshore rig has reached the coast of Southern California, killing wildlife and slicking the sand in Huntington Beach. — The NY Times reports that while the US has poured billions of dollars’ worth of aid into Jordan over the past 10 years, the country’s King Abdullah II has spent more than $100 million on lavish homes in this country, including three adjacent oceanfront homes in California. One of them is a  14,000-square-foot Mediterranean with seven bedrooms, nine baths, a gym, theater, outdoor spa, and infinity swimming pool. — A woman walking in Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park found a yellow 4.3 carat raw diamond, about the size of a jellybean. The park registers finds but allows people to keep them, about 700,00 diamonds since 1906.

The Obit Page: Former US Rep. Todd Akin, a conservative Missouri Republican whose stunningly stupid statement that women’s bodies have a way of avoiding pregnancies in cases of “legitimate rape,” has died of cancer at 74. 

   His comment torpedoed his 2012 run for US Senate. Akin later described it as his “six-second mistake.”  A family statement said, “He was a devout Christian, a great father, and a friend to many.”

Gray Lady Down: The NY Times  is nicknamed The Gray Lady, not just for the traditional seriousness of its journalism, but for the way it used to be printed in gray columns of type unbroken by pictures and certainly not color.

  Also, the 20^th Century was more than half over before the Times admitted that human beings have sex.

  Over the weekend, the Grady Lady printed a story about controversy over a small publishing house called Blushing Books that specializes in spanking erotica. The story says the authors are in revolt against the company owner over terms of their contracts and other financial funny business involving sales of the books. One writer said her royalty payments were erratic .. not erotic.

  This being The NY Times, the writer of the article refrained from saying the writers want to spank the publisher. 

Insufferable: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted about one of CNN’s reporters, ‘Is there a more insufferable ass on television than Jim Acosta?” That begs the question as to whether there’s a more insufferable ass in the US Senate than Ted Cruz.

-30-