A Week and a Day

Eight Days: So, how’s the sleeping thing going with you?  I was in the laundry room at four this morning which is all you need to know about my current sleep patterns.  VP Pence should be missing a few winks too, concerned not just about his job longevity but about his health, or at the very least the health of those around him.  Over the weekend, despite Chief of Staff Mark Meadows best efforts to keep it from the public, we learned that at least five people in Pence’s direct orbit have tested COVID positive.  Those five include his Chief of Staff Marc Short, his body man Zach Bauer and advisor Max Obst. Nevertheless Pence, who insists that he and mother Karen have repeatedly tested negative, still plans to continue campaigning, exposing everyone he encounters, on his plane, in his air tight car and on the trail to his germs because he’s been deemed  “essential,” as in essentially if he doesn’t keep campaigning, he’ll be replaced by JFK Jr or Nikki Haley. A skeptical person might surmise that Pence whose eye was inflamed when he debated Kamala Harris has already had COVID and is in fact the super spreader who shared the virus with the rest of his team. That, of course, would jibe with what Mark Meadows told CNN’s Jake Tapper yesterday, that “we’re not going to control the pandemic because it’s a contagious virus.”  In other words the White House isn’t even pretending to try to contain it anymore, they’re just relying on herd immunity, hopefully helped along by those oft promised vaccines, and therapeutics, the ones that work on the margins, some of which, like the monoclonal antibodies and Remdesivir, are only available to the select few. So it appears that Scott Atlas, the radiologist with no epidemiological training, has fully supplanted virus guru Fauci and expert Dr Debby as the general on the virus frontline. As to the virus, around 225,000 are dead, we’re coming off a bunch of record new infections days, hospitalizations are up, Utah’s running out of ICU beds and medical staff, Texas’s Governor Abbot is turning the El Paso convention center into a makeshift hospital, and even NY Governor Cuomo is playing whack- a-mole with virus “clusters.”  Not to worry though as Trump’s newest campaign line is that US coronavirus deaths are overcounted because “doctors get more money and hospitals get money” if they say people died of COVID rather than the other comorbidities they have.  That’s Trump attacking dedicated medical professionals after they provided him with every imaginable treatment on the taxpayer’s dime during his bout with COVID.  By the way several members of Trump’s Fox echo chamber including Fox News President Jay Wallace and Anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum are now quarantining, the result of having come into contact with a COVID positive individual on their flight back from last week’s debate. 

Human Resources: On the staffing front the Daily Beast reports that Mark Meadows, as in the chief of staff who just told us that the virus is contagious, has spent $75,000 of the campaign funds he raised back before he moved from Congress to the White House, on things like cupcakes, jewelry and fancy meals.  The last guy to get caught doing things like that was Duncan Hunter, the former Congressman from California who flew his giant pet rabbit on a private plane at donors’ expense;  Hunter is now a convicted felon.  Ivanka and Jared’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz, the attorney the Trumps hire to threaten frivolous lawsuits when they can’t get Attorney General Barr to go after their critics, has threatened to sue the erstwhile Republicans that make up The Lincoln Project for posting two huge highly damning billboards of the tone deaf couple in NY’s Times Square.  The Lincoln Project guys don’t seem at all concerned. Trump illogically told a crowd of big money Republican donors that he expects to lose the Senate but retake the House.  According to AXIOS he also plans to dispose of CIA Director Gina Haspel, FBI Director Christopher Wray and Defense Secretary Mark Esper and possibly Attorney General Barr once he “wins” reelection. Apparently Haspel’s crime is that she works him like a counterintelligence target and thus far has refused to release “secret” documents that she thinks should stay secret.  Wray, of course is in bigly trouble for speaking truth about the Russians and Esper is up the creek because he’s refused to say that he’ll call out the military to stage a coup of Trump doesn’t like the election results.  

Politics Unusual: As to the election, the ultimate human resource event and the subject foremost in everyone’s mind, polls for what they’re worth show Joe Biden leading nationally by about 8 to 9 points leaving Trump with few paths to victory.  Of course, we’ve been here before so enough said and last time around the Democratic wall of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania turned out to be a combination of a Maginot line and a fictitious Mexican construction project.  As to Trump’s assertion that he thinks that the Republican’s will win the House, no one expects that; in fact the reliable Cook Political Report actually expects the Democrats to pick up as many as nine seats while possibly losing only one in Michigan, remarkable because Pelosi’s crowd already picked off all of the vulnerable ones in 2018.  On the Senate front, the Democrats stand a good but not guaranteed chance of taking over control from Mitch McConnell, though it’s likely that the ten seats that some pundits have been saying are in play probably aren’t really in play and Michigan’s Gary Peters is still considered vulnerable while Alabama’s Doug Jones faces what may be an insurmountable climb to victory.  As to Mitch, he will likely get his life’s wish by the end of today as it looks like the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation will be sealed up during the day and contrary to expectations, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski who voted against proceeding with the nomination process, revealed over the weekend that she plans to vote for Barrett’s confirmation.  Apparently illogical Lisa is no longer concerned about reproductive rights or the Affordable Care Act. Word is Trump plans to celebrate Handmaid Amy’s ascension to the Court with another White House lawn party because it’s not like the other one turned into a super spreader event, right?    On the Health Care front, something’s up with Mitch McConnell, he looks like he’s been through a shredder, his hands and face are black and blue.  McConnell, a polio survivor, does fall frequently but some of those bruises look like they are from more than just another podium dive.  Speaking of dives, that 60 Minutes episode ran last night, the won where a petulant Trump walked out because Lesley Stahl actually asked him tough questions and had the nerve to fact check him.  Not a good look for Trump especially since Stahl’s cohort, Nora McDonnell asked Joe Biden a number of tough questions too and he just barreled through them, not always with good answers but somehow he didn’t leave in a huff nor did he give his inquisitor a huge bound “health care plan” book that wasn’t anything but a stack of blank pages and unrelated executive orders. 

Et Cetera:  The NY Times reported on Trump’s charitable contributions in an article that used Trump’s financial records to confirm what the Washington Post’s David Farenthold ferreted out a few years ago, that Trump isn’t all that charitable and that most of his donations involved tax scams. After the editorial side of the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece that tried to make hay out of the scurrilous assertions that Joe Biden used his time as VP to advance his and son Hunter’s financial interests, the WSJ news staff reported that there was no basis for those assertions.  To make up for that WSJ walk back, Peggy Noonan, the one time Reagan speech writer/pundit, criticized Kamala Harris for being too gleeful and for dancing on the campaign trail.  Oddly enough Noonan didn’t have anything to say about Trump and his YMCA jig, though the SNL cast did in one of their funnier weekend skits.  Pick yourself off the ground, it’s going to be a long eight days.