Abyss 

Viral Musings:  Well it looks like Trump’s decision to move on to bigger and better things like reviving the economy and campaigning and VP Pence’s declaration that remarkable progress had been made in the fight against COVID 19 were just a wee bit premature.  So much for mission accomplished, instead we’re teetering on the edge of an epic abyss.  Yesterday in an effort to right a sinking armada, several more states and cities stalled or pulled back on their reopening’s.  Governor Ducey of hard hit Arizona who had prematurely opened up too many of his state’s businesses to show fealty to Trump ordered the reclosure of  bars, gyms, and theaters and added restrictions to the size of large gatherings.  Bars are closed again in hard hit Texas, another state where the Governor prioritized impressing Trump to taking care of his citizens.  NJ Governor Murphy, who has been cautiously moving his state out of its early COVID mess announced that he’s pushing off plans to allow indoor restaurant dining while New York Governor Cuomo appears to be on the verge of doing the same for NYC.  The tide is turning on face masks too. A number of prominent Republicans are now getting with the program.  Over the weekend Representative Liz Cheney tweeted out a picture of her father former VP Dick Cheney captioned “Real Men Wear Masks” and yesterday Senate Leader McConnell reiterated that Americans should continue to wear masks, emphasizing that there is “no stigma” associated with them.   Jacksonville Florida, the city that Trump moved his planned acceptance speech and related festivities to after growing frustrated with the RNC’s first choice location, Charlotte North Carolina, over their requirements that virus appropriate protocols be followed, is now requiring that facemasks be worn in public settings and even Pence is in on the action, well a little, he’s modeling mask wearing in more and more pictures.  Trump of course remains mask-less, as does his mini me Don Jr, who reportedly attended a crowded party in Bridgehampton over the weekend with his similarly uncovered campaign financed girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. Someone is going to have to be retested and/or quarantined before his next visit/rally with dad. Speaking of rallies, virtually everyone who showed up for a COVID test in Tulsa over the past few days tested positive, compare that to New York State where the positivity rate is below 1%.  On the vaccination front, while Trump continues to promise that we’ll have one before year end or better yet the day before the November election, a pipedream at best, the Chinese are moving forward with one of theirs because they can do that kind of thing. They plan to start injecting members of their military with a vaccination jointly produced by a government research unit and CanSino Biologics, safety testing be damned.

Russia, Russia, Afghanistan:  The spin, excuses and denials related to what and when Trump learned about the Russians offering bounties to the Taliban for killing US and allied soldiers continued to take on lives of their own yesterday.  According to Press Secretary Kayleigh “lies a lot” McEnany the bounty story is a fiction drummed up by the failing NY Times which should be forced to give back all its underserved Pulitzers.  According to Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe, who was not even in his position in March the time that NY Times and several other confirming news outlets report that Trump was briefed, the intelligence was too raw and unproven to share with the so called Commander in Chief even though it was shared with allies. Former national security advisor John Bolton says that Trump was told and the NY Times insists that two different sources report that the Russia/Taliban information was most definitely included in Trump’s daily briefing, that’s the briefing that he doesn’t read and only listens to sometimes, when it doesn’t interfere with his twittering. For some inexplicable reason through yesterday morning Trump continued to insist that he still hadn’t been brought in to the bounty/Russia/Taliban loop because the intel was too flimsy for his eyes and ears and anyway he’d been too busy playing golf and tweeting racists memes to be bothered.  The White House knows that it has a mess on its hands, so yesterday a select group of mostly fawning House Republicans were invited in for an intel update because that’s what you do when you have nothing to hide, you call in only Republicans.  Suffice it to say the uninvited Democratic contingent was fairly outraged at being left out of the meeting.  Apparently, some of them are now invited to one today, though it’s not clear that they will be offered as much information as their Republican colleagues were yesterday. Nevertheless, it is fair to assume that we’ll learn what they learn immediately after the meeting concludes.  Providing further evidence that a lot of scurrying and cover-ups are in process, late last night, the Department of Defense said it is evaluating intelligence about Russian “malign activity against the US and coalition forces in Afghanistan” and CIA head Gina Haspel issued a similarly evasive,  non-committal statement that looked like it was written at the behest of the White House. Though he’ll probably backtrack at some point because he always does, Republican Senator Ben Sasse tweeted what a lot of others are thinking but are too afraid to say “No. 1, Who knew what, when? And did the commander-in-chief know? And if not, how the hell not? And No. 2, What are we going to do as a proportional cost in response? In a situation like this, that would mean GRU and Taliban body bags.”  

The Supremes: Though we are still waiting for a ruling on the release of Trump’s financial information, yesterday the court issued a bigly one, overturning a law that had made it virtually impossible to obtain an abortion in Louisiana by imposing intentionally over restrictive and unnecessary requirements on those few doctors still performing abortions in the state.  Chief Justice Roberts joined the Court’s four liberal Justices, saying that because the Louisiana law was virtually identical to a Texas law that the Court had overturned a few years ago, he felt compelled to overturn this one.  That’s particularly notable because he wrote the dissenting opinion in the Texas case.  He hasn’t changed his anti-abortion stance, he’s just sticking with stare decisis, the principle of going with precedent.  Notably, Justice Kavanaugh who supposedly promised Maine Senator Susan Collins that he wouldn’t do anything to block access to abortion, dissented, joining the court’s conservative, anti-abortion contingent.  That’s not all that surprising because most of us knew that Kavanaugh was prevaricating, but it may turn out to be the final nail in Susan Collin’s electoral coffin.  Left with little to say, she uttered something along the lines that there is nothing about yesterday’s dissent that indicates that Kavanaugh would vote to overturn Roe V Wade, a response that was laughable at best and that her Democratic opponent Sara Gideon is already using in a political ad.

Primaries:  Believe it or not primary season isn’t over yet.  Though we still don’t have final results from last week’s Kentucky and New York primaries, a few more are on the docket today, one in Colorado where former Governor/presidential candidate John Hickenlooper is up against a more progressive opponent for the Democratic nomination to run against vulnerable Republican Cory Gardner and another in Utah where former Governor/Russia Ambassador/sometime Trump critic John Huntsman is seeking the Republican nomination to become governor again.  As to last week’s primaries, Kentucky’s are expected this morning, as of now Amy McGrath appears to have a few more votes than progressive Charlie Booker but NY’s might not show up for a while, the state is still counting a flood of absentee ballots.