And it’s a beautiful day

If as Hegel remarked the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, I would be looking to spot several of them right about now, although maybe not up in a tree (Why do you think they call it a burrow owl anyway?).

(1) I can’t find anything on whether the plan floated a few days ago, to hold off on transmitting the article of impeachment to the Senate for a few weeks or months, is still being considered. I think this would be a good thing to do, because it’s practically certain that a whole bunch more damning information, both about last week’s attempted autogolpe, and about all sorts of other scandals that we at this point know little or nothing about, is going to come out shortly after Trump is no longer in office, and various canaries sing in the context of legal proceedings and the Darwinian struggle for book advances.

This is especially true because it’s increasingly evident that a convenient procedural dodge will allow enough Republican senators to even consider convicting Trump if a trial were to be held in the first few days of the Biden administration. That dodge is the argument that holding a Senate trial for a president who is no longer in office isn’t constitutional, which, unlike the typical Republican legal argument in the age of Trump, isn’t actually a frivolous argument on its face. (Tom Cotton has already gone down this road). So it probably makes more sense to wait.

(2) John Eastman’s two scheduled classes this semester at the University of Colorado were just cancelled because nobody signed up for them, even though all of the campus’s 20,000-odd undergraduates were eligible to do so. The story of how this maniac got to be a Distinguished Visiting Professor the year at my institution is both hair-raising and hilarious. Look for it soon on better blogs everywhere, and also at LGM.

(3) Speaking of proto-Nazis, Spengler once advised Hitler to beware of his Praetorian Guard — which would seem to be the sort of evergreen advice that tyrants, actual and aspiring, would be wise to heed:

Secret Service agents assigned to Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser, have been renting a $3,000 per month studio apartment at taxpayer’s expense for the purpose of having a bathroom available, The Washington Post reports.

After being instructed not to use any of the half-dozen bathrooms inside the Kalorama home, located in Northwest Washington, the Secret Service detail tried multiple solutions, including using the bathroom at the not-so-close home of Vice President Pence and a port-a-potty.

In 2017, the detail began renting a neighbor’s basement studio apartment to solve the problem, the Post reports. With a rent of $3,000 a month, the detail has spent upward of $100,000 on the toilet solution.

While the Post states that the directive came at the family’s request, the White House claims it was the Secret Service that made the decision about toilet use.

“This is just another false narrative,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill. “When discussions regarding protecting their home were initially had in 2017, Ivanka and Jared made clear that their home would always be open to the incredible men and women on their detail. It was only after a decision by the USSS was made that their detail sought other accommodations.

Also Jared got into Harvard on merit and that’s Ivanka’s real hair color.

Six days.