Faulty Lymphatics 

Forty Seven Days:  Trump is desperately fearful of losing in November.  That’s not to say that Joe Biden is anywhere close to locking up an election victory; given recent history and the rapidity at which outcome altering events keep jumping out at us only an excessively optimistic fool would believe that.  It’s just that Trump is increasingly acting like someone who fears the legal, financial and emotional consequences of a loss so much that he will do anything to avoid one, or alternatively avoid acknowledging one.  Yesterday, three of his tactics were on prominent display.  The first involves his ongoing attack on the election, the undermining of everything about mail-in voting from the legitimacy of the physical ballots to his disruption of the USPS’s capabilities aided by a Republican machine that keeps suing to complicate the voting process while at the same time helping third party candidates like Kanye West who by the way posted a personal pee tape on Twitter yesterday because that’s what serious candidates do; the second involves his hyping of the much hoped for coronavirus vaccination, both its effectiveness and the timing of its appearance; and the third involves the further weaponization of the Justice department, most notably his nefarious sidekick/attack dog Attorney General Barr.  

Viral Musings:  On the virus front, yesterday while testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee, CDC Head Robert Redfield said that face masks remain the “most important powerful public health tool against the coronavirus pandemic” adding “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”  He further explained that while a vaccine only works if it produces an immune response, something that at best will happen 70% of the time, a mask works for everyone,” or at least everyone who wears one right and has the good sense to hang with others who do as well. As to the timing of an effective vaccine, contradicting Trump who continues to promise that one will be available by the end of October but echoing virus guru Fauci, Redfield said that while one might be available by year end it won’t be broadly available to most of the US until the summer of 2021.  Suffice it to say, Trump wasn’t all that happy about Redfield’s testimony so he screamed at him and then scheduled an afternoon press conference to contradict what he said; it’s fair to assume that Redfield’s career is now hanging by an even more tenuous thread than it already was. During his press conference Trump essentially said that Redfield misspoke and that his statements were wrong because come hell or high water, safety or not, that vaccine will be out in time to insure his election victory and those face masks, everyone knows that they’re useless. Armed with charts displaying blue and red mortality curves, Trump also said that the US death count isn’t really all that high because that close to 200,000 number that everyone cites right now includes deaths from states that voted for Hillary Clinton and those deaths don’t count because who cares about people from New York and New Jersey anyway. By the way more than 1000 Americans died of COVID yesterday, less than 15 of them were people from New York or New Jersey but a lot were from Trump’s red states.  And even if you were to delete those troublesome blue state deaths from the total US death count we would be trailing only Brazil in overall COVID mortality, hardly a position to brag about.  Nevertheless Trump insists that everything he’s done has been perfect and that he wouldn’t do anything different if he had the chance to start over again. Under pressure from Trump, Redfield clarified his remarks, a little,  last night, tweeting “I 100% believe in the importance of vaccines and the importance in particular of a #COVID 19 vaccine.  A COVID 19 vaccine is the thing that will get Americans back to a normal life” but then added “The best defense we currently have against this virus are the important mitigation efforts of wearing a mask, washing your hands, social distancing and being careful about crowds.”  Worth mentioning that at least one member of the White House staff tested COVID positive yesterday.  We only know that because a member of the WH press corps was told that the reason his scheduled test was running late was because one or more of the WH’s tests had come back positive, causing a bit of a hub bub in Casa Trump. So far no details about who that person or persons are nor how close they’ve been to Trump, nor do we know if they caught the virus during one of his several recent mask free rallies.  By the way, Michael Caputo, the nefarious Trump fan/Roger Stone acolyte who had been in charge of CDC messaging and who screwed around with components of their statistical reports, he’s stepped down from his position for 60 days of mental health recovery, something to do with his lymphatic system being on overload, and his personal science assistant has been permanently removed.    

Barring Barr:  Unfortunately Attorney General Barr is still running Justice and judging by the things he said yesterday that’s something that we should all be very, very concerned about.  According to the NY Times, he called for Federal prosecutors to look into charging Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan over allowing protestors to create a police free protest zone, something that the Mayor called chilling and an abuse of power because it is both chilling and would be an abuse of power.  And according to the Wall Street Journal he also asked prosecutors to start charging protesters, particularly all those radical leftists and Black Lives Matters agitators with a rarely used sedition charge, one that is supposed to only be used for those who have plotted a threat that posed imminent danger to government authority.  How very Fascist of him.  Additionally, because he believes and wants to make it clear to everyone at Justice that his views are the only ones that matter he also launched a broadside at everyone who reports to him, especially all those remaining independent, principled US Attorneys scattered in places like NY and Washington DC saying that he gets to intervene in their cases if he wants to because he isn’t running a Montessori kindergarten, he is running Justice and his is the only position that counts.  Again a little more Fascism for anyone who’s counting. He also said that the US would be “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if Trump was not re-elected, and he accused government workers of working to thwart the administration, and of course he made it clear that he agrees with Trump, that mail in votes cast for Biden are most likely coming from manipulators in China or Iran. Please someone, for the sake of all of us check his lymphatic system, STAT.   

Et Cetera:  Back to Ye, for some reason known only to him and maybe Kim K, he really did post a video of pee streaming onto a Grammy award in a toilet bowl because that’s what normal people do, right?  Also not so normal, when asked by a member of the WH Press Corp if she could share the vague health plan that Trump promised was ready during his Tuesday night ABC Town Hall, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said she would not divulge any of those details adding that if the reporter wanted to know them she’d have to give up her current job and join the White House staff, maybe to fill one of those recently opened job slots made available due to that lymphatic epidemic or those COVID positive test takers?