What are we to make of yesterday’s news that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died of ‘natural causes’? Sicknick’s death and to a much lesser degree the suicides of two other Capitol Police Officers within days of the insurrection are inextricably bound up in the story of that day and the gravity of those events. The Medical Examiner’s comments to the Post were themselves contradictory, at least in layman’s terms. Francisco J. Diaz found no discrete injury such as a head wound that would have been a proximate cause of Sicknick’s strokes. He also found no sign of acute respiratory constriction, which would be the standard sign of an allergic reaction to chemical spray which also could have caused a subsequent stroke. Yet Diaz also said of the events of January 6th and Sicknick’s confrontation with insurrectionists that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”

What does that mean?

The pandemic has brought to a head the complexities of one very uniquely American problem: the emphasis we as a country put on individual freedoms, which, this past year, has repeatedly run headlong into the need to care for our fellow man during a global health crisis.

It’s also revealed in new ways a more depressing American problem: mass shootings.

Without any real policy agenda, Republicans in Congress have largely seized on various fronts in the culture war to distract from Biden’s successes. And GOPers at the state level are doing the same, with a new heightened focus on an element of their socially conservative base’s traditional values: Going after the LGBT community.

Lately, that’s meant a fresh wave of anti-trans rights bills.

I want to recommend you read Josh Kovensky’s write up of yesterday’s Treasury Department statement about the 2016 Trump campaign’s direct tie to Russian intelligence. The Mueller report and the later Senate intelligence report were both unwilling or unable to determine whether Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik had passed the campaign information he received from Manafort to Russian intelligence. Treasury said he did. This is not a huge surprise since Kilimnik is widely reputed to be a Russian spy. And we should note that these are assertions listed in what amounts to a bill of particulars. They don’t explain what evidence underlies these claims. But this is the first time the US government has connected the pieces so clearly and categorically.

Why now?

While the Republican ringleaders of the Big Lie have seemingly fundraised in a big way following their efforts to overturn the results of the election, at least one Democrat is raking in substantial cash for doing, sort of, the opposite.