Fishy

One Fish, Hawkfish: Though Super Tuesday is behind us, its impact will be felt for some time.  Trump and company have ramped up their attacks against “sleepy” Joe, attacking his intellectual capacity and reupping the whole Burisma thing.  There’s something very special about Trump who speaks nonsense and makes up words going after Biden for his gaffes, many of which are tied to his life-long stutter. And don’t even get me started on the return of the Ukraine crap.  And though Trump had to be happy that the stock markets rebounded yesterday, he can’t be all that pleased that they did so because they would be more than comfortable with Joe Biden as president.  It’s also somewhat amusing to hear prolific fundraiser Bernie Sanders, who the markets do fear, attribute Biden’s Tuesday victories to establishment backing.  House Democratic Whip/African American leader Jim Clyburn’s response to that was to ask when it was that African Americans, the largest force behind Biden’s very good day, became part of the establishment set, a sentiment shared by Biden who added that his Tuesday victories were also the result of support from women. It’s worth noting that though Bernie asserts that he and only he can increase the Democratic voting base, a lot of his promised newbies stayed home while the slightly older more moderate set showed up in droves to vote for Joe.  In any case, though billionaires, all 60 or so of them, to the extent they plan to vote Democrat are far more likely to be Team Biden than Berniacs, few, if any of them, or any other really rich people for that matter had been sending dough to Biden before Tuesday, which is why his coffers had been running dry and he’d had little money for campaign infrastructure or ads.  Of course, that’s now changing, yesterday Biden raised $7 million largely from ordinary folk but one of those Sanders cited billionaires, Mike Bloomberg is now fully on Team Biden.  Bloomberg halted his run for the presidency yesterday morning saying that all he cares about is beating Trump and that Tuesday’s performance proved that Biden is the moderate who can achieve that “victory for the country.” Within the constraints of campaign finance laws, Bloomberg now plans to put his considerable resources towards helping Biden.  Those resource are huge and go beyond cash.  As he promised when he announced his run, Bloomberg plans to leave his many campaign offices open, making them and his staff available to Biden and downstream candidates.  Additionally, he also intends to contribute the services of Hawkfish, his campaign data mining company.  That’s notable because Hawkfish’s capabilities are topnotch.  The company which provides digital ad services, creates content, does ad placement, performs analytics and knows more about each of our political preferences than we care to admit to our closest friends will give Biden and the Democrats, presumably even Sanders were he to win the nomination, the ammunition needed to compete against Trump, his campaign manager/tech guru/Proud Boy lookalike Brad Parscale and all those Putin bots.  Getting back to Bernie, though he has made inroads with younger African Americans, he’s failed to persuade most that he’s their man which probably explains why he is now fishing in the Obama pond, running an ad showing the two having a bonding moment, particularly amusing given that Sanders actually came close to primarying Obama in 2012.

Red Fish, Blue Fish:  As to Tuesday, it’s not over yet.  The results from California are still coming in. With approximately 85% of the vote accounted for Sanders leads Biden by  8% and will end up with somewhere about 135 of the state’s delegates to Biden’s 83.  According to the NY Times, overall Biden now has 670 delegates to Bernie’s 589.  In other news, as of this morning Elizabeth Warren is still a candidate but its reported that she’s reviewing her options and that she’s been speaking with Bernie about their “common” interests.  In 2016 she endorsed Hillary Clinton over Bernie but it’s looking more likely that she will be Team Bernie this time around, though a number of pundits believe that somewhere around 40% to 50% of her supporters will probably migrate into Biden’s camp.  In other political news, Montana Governor Steve Bullock who was a presidential candidate for about a minute and who said that he had no interest in running for his state’s Senate seat appears close to announcing plans to run for that seat.  That’s significant because he is very popular in the his state and stands a decent chance of unseating Montana’s Republican Senator Steve Daines.     

Old Fish, New Fish:  It turns out that the whole Coronavirus situation is Obama's fault, or at least Trump now says that it is.  The only thing surprising about that allegation is that it took Trump so long to get there.  Trump’s rationale for that assertion has something to do with his claim that the reason that more COVID 19 testing kits haven’t been made available across the country is because of an Obama era regulation.  The problem with that assertion is that he’s been president for more than three years, and even more significantly, according to Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, it’s not true.  Anyway, although VP Pence continues to hold daily news conference, and even allowed the press to broadcast part of yesterday’s, a step up from the prior day, his efforts, some of which have been productive, are being impeded by his “need” to tow the Trump line.  So he and the CDC website continue to understate the virus’ spread and the number of fatalities.  Additionally, he and his team aren’t all that happy that their expert, the highly respected Dr Fauci actually had the audacity to call the virus a pandemic.  Pandemic or not, two law schools in NYC, Yeshiva and New York Law, shut down yesterday and California Governor Newsome declared a state of emergency over the virus.  The New York schools shut down over an abundance of caution in order to scrub a dub their facilities after learning that one of the virus victims, a hospitalized 50 year old lawyer who fortunately appears to be doing better, had some contact with a student or two.  And though I am not certain its due to the virus, my local bank branch shut down suddenly around 3 pm yesterday afternoon and as far as I know it had nothing to do with a run on their assets.  The Washington Post, as opposed to the not so reliable VP Pence, reports that there have now been 11 confirmed US deaths and that there are 150 confirmed US cases, a number that will rise as more people are tested.  As to the mortality rate, Trump says it’s his hunch that it’s really closer to 1% rather than the 3.4% mortality rate reported by the World Health Organization.  I’m not generally into Trump’s hunches but this time around it would be nice if he was right.     

Parting Note:  Yesterday Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer got hammered by a lot of people including Chief Justice Roberts for a speechlet he gave outside of the Supreme Court building. Referring to an abortion case in front of the court, one that could result in the further chipping away of women’s reproductive rights, Schumer said "I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”  Adding "The bottom line is very simple: we will stand with the American people. We will stand with American women. We will tell President Trump and Senate Republicans who have stacked the court with right-wing ideologues, that you're gonna be gone in November and you will never be able to do what you're trying to do now, ever, ever again. You hear that over there on the far-right? You're gone in November."  Schumer may have gone over the top, but Robert’s outrage is fishy given his silence after Trump’s recent slamming of Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Judge Amy Jackson Berman.  And does anyone remember him saying anything about Mitch McConnell and his whole Merrick Garland charade?  Oh, and remember that peace agreement with the Taliban, yesterday we bombed them in retaliation of their weekend attacks.  And did I mention that North Korea’s Kim Jong un has been testing missiles again?