Somewhat Relieved: The House and Senate last night passed a $908 billion economic relief bill that by any estimate falls far short of what the country needs. As soon as next week, out-of-work taxpayers will get a $600 check that likely won’t pay a month of rent or mortgage. 

  While the US Congress has been nearly dormant since passing a $2.2 trillion relief bill in March, Japan is replacing 100 percent of lost wages; the Netherlands, 90 percent; Canada: 75%.

  Nonetheless, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on CNBC, “I think this will take us through the recovery.”

  Congress finally acted in large part so they could go home for Christmas feeling good about themselves. Blame falls largely on the Republicans sticking to their line of fiscal responsibility only when it comes to helping the less fortunate.

 Columnist Michael Hiltzik writes for the LA Times  that, “Republicans tied their objections to concerns about the federal deficit. That’s a spectacularly dishonest and cynical position, given that they hadn’t shown any concern about the deficit when enacting a $1.5-trillion tax cut for their well-heeled patrons in December 2017.” 

  Hiltzik wrote, “Now that a Democratic administration is entering the White House and the fiscal benefits would flow chiefly to the middle and working classes, the GOP claims to have rediscovered the virtues of thrift.”

The Covid Corner: A mutation of the coronavirus found in England is setting off alarms around the world, although possibly not in the White House. President Trump and the federal government have not reacted, but NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo has.

  “Today that variant is getting on a plane and landing at JFK,” Cuomo said yesterday during his daily virus briefing. The mutated virus is reported to be 70 times more transmissible, although not necessarily more deadly.

  Cuomo has begun asking the four airlines that fly from the UK to New York to test all passengers before they fly. European countries have already blocked air and rail travel from Britain because of the new virus strain.  

  Lamenting how slow the US reacted to the virus last winter, Cuomo said, “How many times in life do you have to make the same mistake before you learn?” He said, “You have many countries that have just restricted flights from the U.K. Many European countries have done it. Why are we doing nothing?”

Barr the Door: In what may have been final press conference before leaving the Justice Department, Attorney Gen. William Barr yesterday swept the legs out from under President Trump,  saying there’s no reason to appoint a special counsel to investigate voter fraud or for the federal government to seize voting machines.  

  Barr contradicted Trump on four issues, including saying again that Russia is behind a massive computer hack on government agaencies. He had called the presser to announce charges against a man accused of making the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988.

  As Trump claims massive fraud, Barr said he was “sure there was fraud in this election,” but he had not seen evidence that it was so “systemic or broad-based” that it would change the result. 

  Barr also said he would not name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, who’s under scrutiny for possible tax crimes.  Fox News and the President have portrayed it as the scandal of the century. Barr said the investigation was “being handled responsibly and professionally” by regular Justice Department prosecutors. 

Dress Gray: As many as 70 West Point cadets have been accused of cheating on a calculus exam last spring at the US military academy where the honor code says “A Cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” All but one of the accused was a first-year cadet. Fifty-five of them have admitted cheating and were placed in a special ethics rehabilitation program. The Academy used to just throw them out.  

Delayed Delivery: You’ll have to be a big believer in Santa if you want presents to arrive in time for Christmas this year. The Washington Post reports that millions of packages are delayed, “stacked up inside some postal facilities, leading employees to push them aside to create narrow walkways on shop floors.”

  Parcel business is up 14 percent from last year while the USPS is slowed by the coronavirus pandemic and budget cuts.

  A postal worker in Michigan told the Post, “No parcels are moving at all. “As bad as you think it is, it’s worse.”

Political Corrections: A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed from the US Capitol early Monday, a move Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam hailed as an “important step forward for our Commonwealth and our country.”

  Lee, however revered as a military leader and icon of the Confederate South, was a traitor who waged war against the US government. Moving the Lee statue is part of the movement to put Confederate heroes in their proper place, a museum.

  In San Francisco a panel of community members has recommended to the school board that they should change the names of 44 out of 125 public schools named after people they deem to have been racists.  Among them are the first president, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, also a president and framer of the Constitution. Both owned slaves.

  The committee wants to remove the name of Sen. Diane Feinstein from an elementary school because as mayor in 1984 she restored to its place a vandalized Confederate flag that had flown at City Hall.

  Also on this list of names to be erased is Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, but was found by the committee to have been bad for American Indians. We suggest that Lincoln be replaced by the lesser known  “Abraham the Emancipator,” the late Princeton mathematician Abraham Robinson, who liberated the variables from their paternalistic quantifiers.

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