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Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., kept his annual tradition going this year by releasing his "Festivus Report 2021," where he airs his grievances about wasteful spending in the federal government, and where the money could have been better spent.

Festivus, of course, was made famous in a December 1997 "Seinfeld" episode called "The Strike." The fictional holiday occurs on Dec. 23a day before Christmas Eveand instead of basking in the glow of family members and candlelight, participants confront each other about annoyances endured during the year. The holiday is marked by an "unadorned aluminum pole."

Pauls office identified $52,598,515,585 what it sees as waste, including money spent on "a study of pigeons gambling on slot machines, giving kids junk food, and telling citizens of Vietnam not to burn their trash," according to a statement.

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, released his annual Festivus Report on Wednesday. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

His list reads like a menu with bulleted items next to their price tags. He posted about the $549 million on Afghanistan Air Force planes he said were later sold as scrap, the $2.4 trillion in the construction of buildings in Afghanistan that essentially went unused and the pigeons playing slot machines study that cost $465,339.

AUGUST 31, 2021: Taliban fighters wielding American supplied weapons, equipment and uniforms, at the Kabul International Airport. (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES) (MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES)

Pauls statement said the average U.S. taxpayer pays about $15,332, which he said means the government wasted the taxes from about 3.4 million Americans.

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The statement, which had footnotes to support his claims, said that $52 billion could have been spent on 13,149 miles of 4-lane highway construction across the U.S., 4.5 months of operating Veterans Affairs or giving every person in the world $6.78.

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Sen. Rand Paul releases annual Festivus Report, which focuses on what he sees as wasteful spending - Fox News

Days after the deadly mass shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford, Mich., Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted a photo of his family on Twitter around a Christmas tree holding multiple large guns with a caption reading Merry Christmas! p.s. Santa, please bring ammo.

One of the top donors to Massie in his 2020 reelection campaign was a group called the Gun Owners of America, a gun lobbying group that bills itself as to the right of the National Rifle Association. Massie received $5,000 from the group during the 2020 election cycle.

Gun Owners of America displays a quote from former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) on its website calling it the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington. The group has longstanding ties to the Paul family. The group also recently gave Kyle Rittenhouse an AR-15 gun as a gift after he was acquitted of homicide charges after fatally shooting two people in a 2020 Wisconsin protest.

One of the Gun Owners of Americas largest donations to a candidate in 2020 went to former Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), who received $15,000 from the group, giving him the $5,000 maximum donation for his primary, general and runoff elections. Perdue recently announced that he would run for Georgia governor and challenge incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who was endorsed by the NRA in his 2018 gubernatorial campaign.

Massie also received $5,600 in campaign contributions in 2020 from individuals related to Silencer Shop, a company that sells firearms and firearm equipment online.

The Kentucky congressman received backlash for the photo, with one NBC News opinion piece referring to the post as being an example of an egregious lack of compassion for the latest victims, families and communities.

Massie seemed to respond to the backlash to the tweet with a tweet on Dec. 7.

If only the leftists and RINO neocons could have mustered as much outrage over our failed policies in Afghanistan as they did my family Christmas picture, think of all the lost life that could have been avoided, Massie tweeted.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) also posted a photo on Twitter in response to Massies controversial post on Dec. 7. Her photo featured her four sons surrounding a Christmas tree holding large guns. In the past, Boebert also seemingly tried to take one of her guns onto the House floor, where they are banned, only six days after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. The Colorado congresswoman ran as a pro-gun candidate, and owns a restaurant called Shooters, a gun-themed establishment.

Boebert reportedly used pro-gun language in fundraising emails hours after a mass shooting in her home state of Colorado. In her 2020 campaign, she received $5,000 from the Gun Owners of America, as well as $1,000 from the NRA. She is also one of the most prolific fundraisers in the House, ranking 13th among House Republican members seeking reelection.

While Republican members of Congress still vie for the endorsement of the NRA and other pro-gun rights groups, the NRA is dealing with legal and financial issues. The organization is facing a lawsuit from the New York attorney general to dissolve its lobbying operation, and the Washington, D.C., attorney general charged in a lawsuit that the NRA missued charitable funds.

The Supreme Court also heard a case in November from the NRA that could expand gun rights. Earlier this year, the NRA filed for bankruptcy so the group could reincorporate in Texas, attempting to avoid facing the legal consequences of the suit in New York. However, a judge dismissed the case and the NRA remains incorporated in New York, despite its headquarters being in Virginia.

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Republicans With Gun-Themed Xmas Photos Are Usual Recipients of Gun Lobby Cash - Truthout

By Ron McAllister| The Observer

A BeatlessongfromtheirSgt. Pepperalbum (1967)popped intomy head last week:A Day in the Life.Thetrackends with a crash, a loud orchestral crescendo and complete musical chaos.It is a crazy ending that fits with the crazy year that was 2021.Maybe thats why it came to mind. [Thank you, John and Paul.]

I read the newseveryday and often find itrather sad.It has been adepressingyear for many because of the pandemic (more people died with COVID-19in 2021 than in 2020); because ofclimate catastrophes(i.e., tornadoes in Kentucky, wildfires in Oregon and California, flooding in Arizona);because of mass shootings (i.e., Oxford, Michigan); because ofcivilunrest(January 6)and Congressional lunacy.How can we put our troubles in perspective?How can we find the calm within what Yeats called the deep hearts core? [Thank you, W. B.]

Ive been trying to figure out how to deal with it all.Looking over the dismal year weve had, I can see some things that helped me; strategies available to everybody.Here are the lessons I learned:

Be Creative.I write, butIm sureany creativeexpressioncan becurative whether it is photography, drawing,painting,sculpting, ceramics or something else. My writing this year resulted in27 columnsforThe York Weekly.Most of thesecould not have been writteninanypreviousyear.The act of writing is cathartic for me.In 2021 I wrote aboutwhat troubled me:COVID(multiple times), climate change(multiple times),D.J. Trump (multiple times),the insurrection,guns, misrepresentations ofBLM and CRT,the deathofour friendDavid Newman.[Thank you, David.]

Be Generous.I bake sourdough bread every weekten loaves a month on average.I give most of it away.The baking and the giving away help me stay connected with people.I hope my loaves will satisfy peoples bodily hunger, but also satisfy our mutual hunger for contact.[Thank you, Maine Grain Alliance.]

Be Connected.COVIDhas been an isolating experience, cutting us off from others but youve got to connect, even if it is only by Zoom.I was involved in at least 50Zoom(or Zoom-like)callsthis year.These sessions could not be done face-to-face.Of all the meetings and conversations I had, it was the ones with friends that helped me most.[Thank you, all.]

Go Outside. This year found me on my bike many mornings because cycling helps to keep my stress at bay.Map-My-Ridecountsmy trips andmaps mymileage so I knowI took 128 rides this year.You dont have to have to ride a bike but putting your body in motion helps.[Thank you, Nat, for the e-bike.]

Read a Book.At this point last year (2020) Id readmore than two dozenbooksbut this year (2021) Iveread a lot less.I dont know how many books I read this year because I stopped keeping track in March.I often found it hard to concentrate and I blame 2021 for howdistractedI have been.Ill read more next year because I know reading a good book is a great escape from painful reality.[Thank you, George Saunders and Karl Ove Knausgaard for your work.]

Dont just sit there, do something.Getting twoCOVIDvaccinations and a booster made me feel like I was attacking the virus and not just sitting home waiting for it to break into my house and attack me.What would my year have been like without my three vaccinations?I dare not think.[Thank you,Moderna and York Hospital.]

Dont just do something, sit there.Contemplation, meditation, not thinking, prayer, call it what you like.It is important (though not always easy) to be present to yourself and to others.[Thank you, Krista Tippett and the On Being Project.]

Be grateful. See above. [Thank you, Judith.]

Now, at the end of another toughyear,listening toA Day in the Life,I think ofanother poem about a day: Mary OliversA Summer Day.The poemmovesfrom the prayer of naturetothe nature of prayerand endswith thisline:Tell me, what is it your plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?

A great question to help put everything in perspective.[Thank you, Mary Oliver.]

Ron McAllister is a sociologist and writer who lives in York.

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The Observer: Lessons learned from the year 2021 - Seacoastonline.com

(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis addresses The American Legislative Exchange Council annual meeting July 28, 2021 at The Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.

By Rich Lowry | National Review

| Dec. 27, 2021, 6:00 p.m.

Washington, D.C., is now the epicenter of the pandemic.

As of Dec. 23, it had 158 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents, a 541% growth in cases over the last two weeks. This was much more than Alabama, Mississippi or South Carolina, all of which had cases in the 20s or below per 100,000.

Is this because D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser cares less about controlling the virus than the governors of those three Southern states? No, if anything shes been overly zealous. Its just that the omicron surge has hit at a time when the winter season means that places like D.C. and especially the Northeast are particularly susceptible.

Other jurisdictions that have seen big increases include Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

The omicron wave should finally put paid to the perfervid fantasy, a staple of center-left thinking, that the coronavirus is somehow primarily a red state phenomenon, fueled by Republican recklessness and heartlessness.

Its been obvious for a long time that theres an enormous seasonal element to COVID-19 and that the virus itself has the most influence on the patterns of its spread and severity. The South got slammed last summer by the hard-hitting delta surge and now omicron which, hopefully, will be milder is roaring through blue states.

Of course, this context doesnt make for a useful political narrative, so the media and the left have ignored it in a hunt for cartoon villains. Last August, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman slammed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his states surge and unfavorably compared it to low numbers in New York. Of course, at other junctures of the pandemic he easily could have done the opposite.

Krugman said that DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus, a charge widely lodged against him and other GOP governors supposedly responsible for running a death cult.

DeSantis has never been anti-vaccine, but has opposed vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and masking in schools. Even if one stipulates for the sake of argument that DeSantis has been wrong about all of these policies, it is ridiculous to suggest Florida would have been spared the ravages of the delta variant if he had come down differently. A New York Times analysis of vaccine mandates concluded that they have not provided the significant boost to state and local vaccination rates that some experts had hoped for.

As it happens, positions that once were characterized as the height of Republican irresponsibility opposition to lockdowns and closing schools are now such a matter of consensus that even President Joe Biden takes them for granted.

Biden more than anyone should realize that the facile belief that Donald Trump or other Republicans had it within their power to shut down the pandemic at any point was partisan opportunism and tripe.

By the unreasonable standards he and others created over the last 18 months, he stands exposed as a miserable failure. On January 20, 2021, when Biden was inaugurated, there had been roughly 25 million cases of the coronavirus in the United States; now there have been 50 million. On January 20, 2021, roughly 415,000 Americans had died; now, more than 800,000 have.

The truth is, even though DeSantis and Bowser have different philosophies and a different willingness to let individuals make their own risk calculations in dealing with the virus, neither wants their residents to get infected or die, and neither is responsible for a highly transmissible variant of virus hitting their jurisdiction at a time of maximum seasonal vulnerability.

Back in August, when everyone was saying he had blood on his hands, DeSantis noted that the virus was here to stay, and vaccines and treatments not ham-fisted restrictions were the best weapons against it. The virus is now hitting a different part of the country hardest, but this view remains the correct one.

Rich LowryCourtesy photo

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

Twitter, @RichLowry

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Neither Democrats nor Republicans want their constituents to get infected and die. - Salt Lake Tribune

The jacket of my 1982 copy of L.A. Woman says, Eve Babitz holds the primal knowledge of what it is to be a woman in what she convinces us is the capital of civilization.

That capital is, of course, Los Angeles, and when Babitz died last week, a part of the city went with her. She embodied the permissive and pleasurable reputation of her native Hollywood, offering a breathy laugh over all of its endemic contradictions and frustrations.

With Colette as role model, her love affairs were material for her stories and, like the French author, she treated them with drollity and affection. She never married but had dozens of boyfriends throughout her life, many of whom remained besotted with her.

For Eve, sexual frankness was an expression of her power. Certainly, that is the case in Julian Wassers 1963 photograph of her sitting naked at a chessboard with the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. The photograph was Eves self-styled revenge on her married lover Walter Hopps, then curator of the Pasadena Art Museum, who had organized the show. I always wanted him to remember me that way, she told me. Babitz told me so many of these stories that it led me to construct my 2011 book, Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s, as a narrative about that decade.

Though she survived decades of hard partying, Eve was felled by an accident in 1997 when the ash from a cigarillo torched her polyester skirt while she was driving. The fabric seared onto her skin, leaving her with third-degree burns. She was hospitalized for months, and those boyfriends and girlfriends came through with the funds to help her recovery. Harrison Ford: $100,000. Steve Martin: $50,000. A benefit at the Chateau Marmont brought donated art by Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Ron Cooper and other artists, musicians and actors she had befriended. Yet she never fully recovered, and she disappeared socially and creatively afterward. She died Friday at age 78.

Artists Ed Ruscha and his brother, Paul Ruscha, were longtime friends of Eves and involved with her off and on for decades. I asked them to share memories of her.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp: Do you remember your first impressions of Eve?

Ed Ruscha: Oh, it was the early 60s, but she was a great part of my growing up. I know I was with her when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I was in bed with Eve and we were watching this on live TV, a little black-and-white set. So you can date me from there anyway and probably earlier.

But anyway, she lived in this house behind her parents house. She kept a sloppy quarters because she had a lot of cats who had their way. Her parents lived up at the front house on Bronson near Franklin. And I knew her parents well. Mae was a beautiful, sweet Texan who was an artist, and she drew pictures of the gingerbread houses on Bunker Hill. And Sol was the musician, violinist. They were very sweet people. So I would see Eve a lot in those early days, but right away I could see that she seemed to have everyones number. She was real quick to spot hypocrisy in any way.

She could be infuriating, confounding, but at the same time, she was very funny, streetwise and serious. I noticed that people were constantly checking in with her, to get her view on things, and then there was Mirandi, of course, who was the perfect sister. They were able to play off of one another.

HDP: Did you ever double-date when [artist] Joe Goode was dating Mirandi?

ER: We went to Musso and Franks. That was Eves favorite spot and mine too. And we would go to openings, go to Barneys Beanery, places that were hot at the time. In the early 60s, she was always talking about Walter Hopps. She even wrote a rough screenplay on Walter Hopps, and I recall buying the rights from Eve. I read all her books and I found them to be dead on. She was committed to her writing. Ive always thought about her as like being carved out of marble. Even her name, Eve, suited her.

HDP: Didnt you do a drawing of her name?

ER: I did, with really soft lines. Very faint. I dont know whatever happened to that. But I think she had to sell almost everything. Shes never really made any wise choices for finances or money. She didnt seem to care about making it, and she was more interested in the daily thinking of just her culture in the world.

HDP: Was yours an exclusive arrangement or loose?

ER: In the 1960s? No, no, it was loose and spotty. I guess thats just the way we lived back then. But always having good feelings about each other, and I never really had a conflict with her.

HDP: Do you think she introduced you to some ideas about old Hollywood glamour that would have been influential for you?

ER: It was an abstract connection that she was able to spin yarns that she found and talk about things. Somehow she just knew a lot of people and had a damn good life. If you ask me, an enviable life.

HDP: Do you think that she had any influence on you in terms of the evolution of your own art?

ER: Oh, I guess Im influenced by everything. Theres nothing that crosses my path that doesnt influence me in some way or other. Even if I reject it, Im influenced by it. And, so, sure. I mean, she was a strong figure and I think everybody respected her. All the artists respected her, and and we were curious about her because she was a hot number. She did well with it, you know. (laughs)

HDP: How did she come to be Pauls girlfriend?

ER: I passed her on to him. (laughs)

Paul Ruscha: No. (laughs) I came to L.A. in 1973. We met at Jacks Catch All; it was this great thrift store. I was a veteran thrift shopper and so was Danna [Ed Ruschas wife]. She introduced me to Eve, who said, Id like to have you over for dinner. Danna said, I think she likes you. Eve knew that Ed and I were friends with [fashion model] Leon Bing. So she called Leon, who told Eve, Well, no matter what you make for him, be sure that its loaded with cilantro because hes just crazy about cilantro. Eve put it in the salad and the soup, and I hate cilantro and I couldnt eat it. All I could do is laugh. She called me the next day and she said, I hope you let me make it up to you because I am a pretty good cook. So then we were just locked into each other.

It was great. I loved her cooking. It was very chuckwagon style, you know, where she tossed the cats off of the stove. If I spent the night with her, shed wake up before I did and then want me to leave. So shed throw coffee into a pot of boiling water and bang on it to make the grounds go down and to wake me up and say, OK, heres your coffee. Now get out of here. And Id laugh and then shed say, I think Ive got something Id like you to read. Then Id read whatever shed written the day before. I gave her my critique, and if she liked it, she let me stay, and if she didnt, shed throw me out. So that was weird, but it worked for what it was. She loved to talk about her boyfriends. It was always fun and interesting to hear what was going on in their lives.

But we never lived together. After I got my house in the Valley, she would come over and stay with me, but because she was a Taurus I always called her the bull in my china shop. She just couldnt go anywhere without ruining something. Shed knock something over or break something, and the same thing at her house. I remember a couple of fur coats I gave her, and one of them she threw over this little space heater that she had. It caught on fire and it burned up her garage.

HDP: What was her lasting influence on you?

PR: She always did have an incredible way with language when she spoke. She never elaborated. She was just a woman of few words, but they were always words that counted. And I loved that about her.

HDP: I think she would be happy that her friends are sharing these stories and talking to each other.

PR: About her! (laughs)

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All about Eve Babitz: Artists Ed and Paul Ruscha on the late L.A. icon - Los Angeles Times

After a thriller on Christmas against the Lakers, the Brooklyn Nets will look to maintain their momentum against the Los Angeles Clippers. Brooklyns starters combined for 112 points in their last outing, but the bench only scored 12 points. The defense could have been better too, particularly in transition and in the second quarter, where the team allowed 39 points.

With Patty Mills shooting it at career-high 44% from three, expect James Harden to try and find the Australian in the opening minutes. On the other end, Brooklyn should be able to keep Los Angeles under 100 points.

Heres when you should tune in to see the game:

Nets: LaMarcus Aldridge (health and safety protocols), David Duke Jr. (health and safety protocols), Kevin Durant (health and safety protocols), Kessler Edwards (health and safety protocols), Joe Harris (health and safety protocols), Kyrie Irving (health and safety protocols), DayRon Sharpe (health and safety protocols) and Cam Thomas (health and safety protocols) are out for Brooklyn.

Clippers: Kawhi Leonard (knee), Paul George (elbow), Reggie Jackson (health and safety protocols), Marcus Morris Sr. (health and safety protocols), Isaiah Hartenstein (ankle), Jay Scrubb (health and safety protocols) and Jason Preston (foot) are out.

Brooklyn Nets

Los Angeles Clippers

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Nets vs. Clippers: Lineups, injury report and broadcast info - Nets Wire