Rebuild America

Counterprogramming:  Trump can’t be happy, the Biden/Harris show is eating into the airing of his afternoon virus show. Yesterday the Democratic duo showed up together during Trump’s favorite early evening time slot for their first joint appearance, socially distanced of course, promising to rebuild the America that Trump failed to make great again.  After thanking Biden for bringing her on to his team, Harris lit into Trump’s multiple failure especially his disastrous inability to deal with the virus, easy to do because that failure is so blatantly obvious.  For his part Biden made it clear that he’ll always have her back, a good thing because the Republican smear machine was out in full force yesterday.  Their messaging was inconsistent, everything from her being a left wing radical to a shill for the banking industry. Trump called her a liar, because we all know he would never tolerate lying, while also saying that Biden’s selection of a female running mate was an insult to all men.  Son Eric liked a tweet calling Kamala a “whorendous pick” while also going with another one of his frequent “where’s Hunter” tweets as if that’s what we all care about right now.  And because some racist lies never die, Newsweek actually published a piece suggesting that because Kamala’s parents were immigrants, she might not be eligible to be on the ticket. Who thinks a similar claim would be made against a son or daughter of Norwegian immigrants?  Sticking with the racist theme Trump reupped his warning to suburban moms that a vote for Joe and Kamala would make the suburbs unlivable and by unlivable he means more integrated.  Apparently Trump still lives in the 1950s. On the virus front, Trump has installed a new expert, Scott Atlas, a radiologist rather than an infectious disease expert and of course a frequent Fox guests.  Unlike Dr Debby and Virus Guru Fauci, Atlas shares Trump’s views that kids don’t get COVID, that all schools should fully open and that football games should be mandated.  Apparently Atlas is all in on achieving herd immunity, because who really cares if, absent a reasonably effective vaccine,  another million or two of us would have to die for that to even come close to happening.  By the way, though daily new virus counts may be down a little, it’s hard to know for sure since national testing is also down.  Yesterday’s death count was up to 1485, bringing the total to more than 158,000 or 200,000 if the NY Times is right about the number of unexplained deaths that should be attributed to the virus. And those high schools in suburban Atlanta that have been opening without social distancing or facemasks, things aren’t going all that well for them, more than a 1000 students and faculty have now been put in quarantine. None of that is a problem though for Georgia Governor Kemp who remains against mandating face coverings in schools. 

 Politics Unusual:  Though a few, very few, Republicans including Adam Kinzinger and Steve Scalise seem fairly distressed about the specter of a Q Anon conspiracy theorist/bigot joining their Congressional ranks, Trump’s all in.  Yesterday while his campaign attacked Kinzinger for speaking out Trump congratulated Marjorie Greene, the winner of the Georgia Republican runoff who is likely to cruise to victory in November in her very red, gerrymandered district, tweeting “Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up - a real WINNER.”  In addition to being prolific haters, the Q Anon folks believe that the Democrats are all pedophiles, they are into things like storming pizza parlors to save children from predators like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta while also believing that only their great Q, who some of them believe is Trump, can save them. That last part explains why Trump is so friendly to the Q Anon crowd, look closely and you’ll see their banners at his events, a few of them were prominently displayed at son Don Jr’s recent boaters for Trump flotilla. On the legislative front, Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin finally spoke yesterday.  That’s the good news, the bad news is that they are still waving fingers at each other and though Pelosi has offered to meet Mnuchin in the middle, shaving a billion dollars off of her aid package, Mnuchin hasn’t moved, which might be because Chief of Staff Meadows who never met anything worth funding is holding him back. The Democrats still want to do “crazy” things like help out the cash strapped states and make sure the Postal Service has the funding it needs to do its job.  As to that $400 supplemental unemployment amount that Trump promised to provide by executive action, those checks won’t be in the mail anytime soon.  First of all, as expected by everyone not named Trump, the states, both Republican and Democrat, are making it clear that they don’t have the resources to provide the 25% share that Trump said that they had to fund.  Trump now appears to be saying that they can get $300 even without funding the additional $100 but, in addition to being only one half of what people had been receiving, the payment mechanism for the distribution would require the states to get new computer programs up and running, something that few if any of them have the capability to do quickly.

 Et Cetera:  It’s increasingly likely that the Michael Fynn case isn’t  going away anytime soon as the full bench of the DC Circuit Court looks likely to block AG Barr’s efforts to dismiss the criminal charges against the former national security advisor, sending the case back to Judge Emmet Sullivan who wants to get a better understanding of why Barr is seeking to drop the charges despite Flynn’s guilty plea, as if he and we don’t know why.