Kagro in the Morning "Encore Performance" - January 1, 2021, airing January 1, 2026

Time to give the voice a rest, using the convenient excuse of the holiday! That's right! It's Arbitrary Metric Day, the annual festival celebrated by making dad jokes about writing the wrong dates on things called "checks," whatever they might be. To mark the occasion and keep some number of you company today, we continue on our Christmas re-run timeline, presenting our January 1, 2021 episode. Back then, it was a brand-new, pre-recorded show, for a brand new year! Scott Anderson had the day off, so it fell to me to summarize the day's show. And boy, did I ever not want to do that! The only logical thing to do was to half-ass it, and I am nothing if not logical. The Senate advanced their work in overriding the NDAA veto yesterday, and everyone's a little bit puzzled as to how it's going down, and what it means for the prospect (if there ever was any) for $2,000 relief checks before this Congress dissolves. In the meantime, maybe just ask Moscow Mitch directly. In coronavirus news, a nurse who got his first dose of vaccine has caught the 'rona in-between jabs. But don't worry! That actually doesn't mean much. Masking appears to have helped India tamp down on the virus' spread, though there's some debate over how widespread the practice really is. Meanwhile, Russia appears to be 'fessing-up to its real losses. Here in the US, we may not be systematically underreporting losses, but we're not covering them as aggressively as we could be. More dopey Republicans have walked straight into the COVID buzzsaw. Good news! Trump is finally taking "action" about those bounties on our troops! The bad news is, he's only targeting China for it. Republican nutcases are still plotting to put on a futile display of upending our democracy. But some of the key Republican players on Jan. 6 probably aren't on board. Arizona's own Republican nutcases might have really stepped in it. As a parting New Year's present, here's a plausible theory for invalidating some of Trump's impeachment-connected pardons.