Pardon Me, Who Signed This?

Plus: Jan. 6 rioters headline GOP fundraisers, cormorants turn a Minnesota lake into bird soup & music licensing fees are killing the restaurant vibe.

In his final weeks as president, Joe Biden issued nearly 4,000 commutations and pre-emptive pardons signing 25 warrants with the aid of an autopen according to the New York Times. Now, Trump and his allies are accusing Biden of being so cognitively impaired that he wasn’t actually making any of those decisions, and his staff was improperly using the autopen to sign off on the warrants. Former President Biden refuted the claims in an interview, saying he personally authorized every clemency decision orally, auto-dotting every I and robo-crossing those T’s.

To be completely fair, no one gets into this line of work to sign a bunch of papers unless, of course, you’re a Mr. Donald J. Trump. That guy loves signing things live on air. And yes, the warrants were batched, so Biden wouldn’t have to sign 4,000 different sheets of paper, but also wrist strain and arthritis are occupational hazards in this line of work, so you can’t really fault our former president. He also didn't personally type up his proclamations or personally process animal hides in the production of parchment.

I did enjoy this stand-alone sentence in a New York Times story about pens and the presidency: “Age-related cognitive decline is a spectrum.” Indeed, and I think I’m slipping into senescence over this one. Not Donald Trump, who is a six on the Kinsey scale of excitement over pen-based scandals.

Welcome to the Gist List—a news roundup, autopenned on behalf of Mike Pesca, of things you should know, and my thoughts leading up to today’s podcast episode.

Here’s what’s on my mind:

💩 Birds use a Minnesota lake as their personal toilet.

🎶 Restaurants, bars and hotels are having a hard time keeping up with music licensing. (🔒)

🎭 D.C.’s hottest club has Jan. 6 rioters as speakers.

🧓🏻 House rep floats investigating cognitive impairments in lawmakers.

👠 Security theater is over. Populism theater is in. (🔒)

The Gist List

A Colony of Cormorants Is Dumping 14,500 Pounds of Feces in This South Metro Lake (Minnesota Star Tribune)

Mendota Heights residents are sick of this shit. Literally. A colony of cormorants are causing a spike of phosphorus and algae blooms as they are dumping out into Lake Augusta. To be clear, the dumping in question is not, as may be inferred from the Strib’s careful elocution, a midnight environmental disposal scheme. It’s caca. From their butts.

The lake has no natural outlet, so it has basically become a fetid bowl of cormorant soup, potentially causing dead spots and inhibiting plant growth. Projects resolving the issue have become constipated due to costs and ecological concerns. One plan is to encourage the marginally majestic cormorant population to relocate to Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, which is now a bona fide tourist attraction after bulldozing the bathroom in which former Senator Larry Craig adopted his wide stance.

Restaurants, Bars Consider Turning Off Music as Licensing Fees Skyrocket (Bloomberg)🔒

A little-known fact about the music you can barely hear over the noises of your local bar is that the friendly publican is being broken by fees in order to play it. Yes, the Spotify playlist from someone’s old iPod Shuffle is subject to the highly litigious music licensing industry, and restaurants pay, on average, around $4,500 per year in fees to Performing Rights Organizations (PROs).

Some venues are starting to see prices increase. The American Hotel & Lodging Association said that they are now seeing the prices balloon 200–400%, and even have to pay multiple PROs when artists represented by different PROs collaborate. But one of the biggest complaints is that the current system for tracking and enforcing licensing is confusing, opaque, and bureaucratic. There is no centralized database or reporting method, and frankly, you could probably get away with playing things off your phone until a PRO catches on. Until the Lionel Richie/Christopher Cross/Peter Cetera mix on volume two might suffice to create the mood music that nudges your bistro up to three and a half stars on Yelp.

Jan. 6 Rioters Are the New Hot Event in Town for Republicans (WSJ)

Former Jan. 6 defendants, many of whom were pardoned by President Trump, are now appearing as featured speakers at local Republican fundraisers across the U.S. And if you’re looking for the saddest fundraiser around, do I have the place for you. These events have everything:

• Cosplay patriotism

• Rock-ribbed Republicans comparing Jan. 6 to Tiananmen Square

• A guy named Trevor playing an original song called “Alone Stands a Patriot”

• Shamans

• A guy named Baked Alaska live-streaming his way into a federal indictment

• Guys recreating the dump on Nancy Pelosi’s desk

But in all seriousness—and no disrespect to Stefon—these GOP state party fundraisers are becoming a venue for one of our two “major” political parties to recast rioters as peaceful or misrepresented. Normally, that is the very party which would be especially loath to valorize an event which injured 140 officers and led to the deaths of seven police officers trying to keep the peace. Democrats and some Republicans are pushing back against the events, with protesters showing up outside. Let’s hope they left the bear spray and zip ties to the guests of honor.

In more news about people indicted for some 2020s-related nonsense, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the DOJ will be dismissing the charges against a Utah plastic surgeon for falsifying vaccine cards during the pandemic.

House Democrat Floats Radical Solution to Congress' Age Problem (Axios)

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez—someone with whom I share the initials MGP, and the fun fact of owning a washing machine from 1997—is proposing having Congress’ ethics office evaluate whether lawmakers are too cognitively impaired to do their jobs. Investigations could open the door to handing out warnings, fining lawmakers, or even having them expelled.

The topic, of course, is taboo, and the amendment in the House Appropriations Committee's bill failed in an overwhelming vote with Republican Rep. David Valadao saying the House’s bi-annual elections are a sufficient check on lawmakers' cognitive ability. Or you could ask them to run the rinse cycle on a 1997 Whirlpool Super Capacity Plus top loader, and see how they do.

The End of Airport Shoe-Screening Is Populism Theater (The Atlantic)🔒

If the much-loathed TSA policy of taking your shoes off was just security theater, rescinding that policy is populism theater. After the shoe bomb threat in 2001, it took until 2006 to formally enforce requiring passengers who are too cheap to get TSA pre-check to take off their shoes before they go through the metal detector. Basically, the idea was to make people feel safer getting on a plane, even though the TSA hasn’t reliably stopped any terrorist attacks.

When asked, Kristi “Bling Bling” Noem cited vague improvements in security with references to "multi-layered screening" and Real ID compliance. At least those in the slightly faster TSA pre-check line can no longer purport that much more superiority over us plebes over in steerage. My man on the inside at TSA tells me that there are machines that can properly scan your shoes for contraband, but further informs me that almost none of the airports that have dropped the scan requirement actually have those machines. Then he warned me, still off the record, that I was holding up the line.

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Last Week on The Show: Tony Tost Talks Genre, Guns & the Western Comeback

Tony Tost, now showrunning Poker Face, reflects on the show's expertly woven mysteries, genre roots, and why women who don’t want to pick up a firearm keep finding themselves forced to fire. Tost, an expert in poetry and Johnny Cash, brings a reverence for populist storytelling to a format that straddles the procedural and the mythic. He also discusses why westerns are still a hard sell in Hollywood—even when they’re smart, stylish, and starring Sydney Sweeney.

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This newsletter was put together in collaboration with Kathleen Sykes. Mike Pesca personally authorized all the mistakes and signed off via autopen.

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