Please Mr. Postman

Viral Musings:  The US COVID death count is up to 170,000 with more than 1000 people dying daily but Jared Kushner, who now counts epidemiology and disease control among his ever expanding skill set, says not to worry because we are still below the high of 2500 daily deaths. Kushner also said that he is totally comfortable sending his kids back to school, private school of course, because it’s not like COVID is as deadly as the flu. He has a point in that so far fewer children have died from COVID than typically die from the annual flu, however he forgot, or more likely, conveniently ignored that illness among the young is on an upswing and that teachers, staff, parents and grandparents catch the coronavirus from their disease carrying kids but then again Kushner isn’t really good with details. That’s the same Kushner whose mass coronavirus testing plan was shelved in the Spring because only people in blue states were dying.  In contrast, Mitt Romney the only  Republican in office who frequently speaks out against Trump, and someone who knows a thing or two about crisis management, said that  “we really have not distinguished ourselves in a positive way by how we responded to the crisis …. the proof of the pudding of that is simply that we have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s deaths due to covid-19.”  Separately former Ohio Governor John Kasich, another Republican not happy with Trump’s performance, who will be speaking at the virtual Democrat convention that kicks off tonight, teased that a prominent Republican congressman will be endorsing Joe Biden this morning, later clarifying that he was talking about a former Congressman.  It’s not clear who that will be but among some lesser Republican names making the rounds on Twitter are two “prominent” ones, former Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner,  though that’s just idle speculation so we’ll have to wait to see.  Getting back to COVID apparently there’s a new cure out there or so says Mike Lindell, AKA the Pillow Man, and HUD Secretary Ben Carson.  Both are now pushing oleandrin, an extract from the Oleander plant, as a miracle treatment that cures COVID in two days. Trump is all in and according to Axios is pushing the FDA to approve its use.  Would it surprise you to learn that the Pillow Man has bought an interest in a company that produces the extract?  Suffice it to say that while Oleander can be poisonous in large doses, there’s no evidence that it’s a COVID cure.  

Deliver De Letter:  To the dismay of Jared Kushner who wanted to hype the UAE-Israel peace initiative all weekend the post office saga, together with the totally false but racist assertion that Kamala Harris isn’t American enough to run for VP,  overwhelmed the news cycle and the Sunday morning news shows. While pictures of decommissioned blue USPS boxes being loaded onto lorries for their trips to oblivion and reports of mail sorting machines being dissembled and thrown into junk piles went viral, Trump continued to question how an election relying on mail-in ballots, which he continues to distinguish from absentee ballots, can be legitimate.  It’s growing increasingly clear that his strategy is to sow as much fear and distrust into the electoral process as possible, laying the groundwork for him to question any outcome that doesn’t involve him emerging as the victor.  Whether that’s because he truly believes he’ll lose both the vote count and the more important electoral college, wants to have an excuse in place if he does, or more menacingly, just wants to declare victory on election night whether or not he has the votes to do so is up for debate, but the bottom line is that November is not going to be pleasant, and that’s an understatement. Because this is the Trump administration where few plans are really ever well thought out, it appears that the nefarious minds responsible for undercutting the USPS failed to take into account its popularity and the number of people around the country who rely on their daily mail delivery for life saving drugs so in addition to those viral pictures of decommissioned blue boxes floating around this weekend, there were also countless stories about veterans, diabetics, cancer patients and the elderly not getting their much needed prescriptions in a timely matter. It takes a lot to inflame West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, the Democrat who most frequently votes with the Republicans, but even he’s furious and vocal about it, because so many of his largely rural constituents rely on mail for everything. Speaker Pelosi has taken the unusual step of calling the House back into session to pass some legislation intended to prevent any more USPS service cuts and House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney scheduled and then moved up a hearing on the subject “inviting” Postmaster General/Trump donor Louis DeJoy and USPS Chairman/Mitch McConnell buddy Robert Duncan to testify next week where, in addition to being asked to address all the overtime and equipment cuts, they are likely to be asked about those letters that were sent to 46 states telling them to expect ballot delivery delays. Of course, this being the Trump administration there’s no guarantee that either DeJoy or Duncan will show, nor is there any indication that the Democrats can do anything more than send threatening tweets and hold hearings.  Similarly there’s no indication that Senate Leader McConnell plans on bringing the Senate back to address the situation and anyway the Ron Johnson chaired Senate Homeland Committee, the committee responsible for the USPS, is far too busy investigating the Bidens’ Ukraine connections to focus on trivial things like mail.  By the way, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows insists that concerns about the Postal Service are overblown and that all of these service changes were planned long ago.  He also says that “everyone” knows that voter fraud is a real concern even though, aside from that Republican scheme to harvest North Carolina absentee ballots that was caught last year, there’s no evidence of voter fraud, remember Trump’s election fraud commission, it was disbanded without proving anything. Meadows cites that lack of evidence as proof that the fraud doers are just really good at committing fraud, an argument that is like saying that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are real and hang out together nightly, we just don’t have the video, yet.

Et Cetera:  After Trump said that he wants to meet Putin in New York before the election, his national security advisor Robert O’Brien said that he has no plans to do so which either means that Trump has no plans for a meeting or hasn’t kept O’Brien in the loop. Trump also said that he’s open to pardoning Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker who has been living in Moscow for the past few years, a decision that would likely enrage the intelligence community since several of their colleagues were outed by Snowden’s leaks but that would be in keeping with Trump’s war against the “deep state.”  As to that “deep state” on Friday, the Justice Department announced that Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer involved in the preparation of one of the FISA applications related to the investigation into Carter Page, will admit that he altered an email from the CIA that was used to justify the application while trying to clarify facts related to whether or not Page had also ever worked as a CIA source.  Those who believe that the Russia investigation was a witch hunt point to Clinesmith’s admission as proof, others say not so much, just a bad act by a corner cutting lawyer. The bigger concern is whether US Attorney John Durham, whose report AG Barr continues to dangle, will claim that this one action means that the whole Russia investigation wasn’t properly predicated.  And in between golf games, a visit to his critically ill now deceased brother, and press conferences, Trump who insists that he will win in New York State in November retweeted a message calling for Democratic run cities to be “left to rot.”  That ought to guarantee that imaginary New York victory, right?