Moderna Too!

State of the Union: With the coronavirus raging out of control to unimaginably horrific levels, Trump’s herd immunity advocating medical advisor Scott Atlas urged Michiganders to “rise up” against Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s new public health measures because what’s the point of restricting activities and limiting the size of gatherings when a vaccine is right around the corner and by corner think maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll be vaccinated by the end of the second quarter of 2021 except for New York State of course because taking a page from the Seinfeld soup Nazi, on Friday while taking full credit for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Trump said that no one in that insignificant to the economy state will get a vaccine until Governor Cuomo crawls over hot coals and begs and maybe not even then, unless someone else is controlling the government come January 20.  That last part was Trump’s first “slip of the tongue” admission that he’s lost and knows it. He slipped again, tweeting that he lost the election before “clarifying” his comment making it clear that it only looks that way because of all of that election “rigging” fraud that doesn’t exist.  One more thing on the vaccine front, really good news out of Moderna this morning, its vaccine which like Pfizer’s is based on new m-RNA technology, appears to be 94.5% effective! 

More Crazy Train: Of course, Trump is doing nothing to mitigate the virus’ onslaught now, as he’s far too busy golfing, grievance tweeting and giving drive-by thumbs ups to his supporters, especially the thousands (not millions) of racist ones with swastika and MAGA emblazoned flags who showed up in Washington DC this weekend to echo his message that the election, the one that his Homeland Security experts say was the most secure ever was riddled with fraud.  By the way, while Trump called this weekend’s counter-protesters “Antifa scum” somehow or other Attorney General Barr “forgot” to send out his militias to throw pepper balls at those nice swastika emblazoned people from the other side, maybe because he’s busy dealing with an insurrection at the Justice Department from attorneys refusing to pursue cases against those non-existent perpetrators of election fraud. As to that faux fraud, with David Bossie, the former coordinator of Trump’s election legal strategy in COVID quarantine, Trump has shifted the responsibility for directing election litigation to Borat foil Rudy Giuliani and a team made up of some of the lawyers from earlier episodes of the Trump saga including Michael Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell,  QAnon tweeter Victoria Toensig, her conspiracy theorist, anti-Semitic husband Joseph DiGenova and gay bashing campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis; so basically a crowd straight out of Trump central casting.  So far the assorted Trump lawyers, short two of their outside law firms who have resigned due to the bad publicity of being associated with trying to overturn election results, have achieved nothing beyond getting a few hundred ballots thrown out, a problem for Trump because despite his hopes that Republican state legislatures will ignore the will of the voters, replacing Biden’s electoral slates with his, the leaders of those legislatures have indicated that they won’t, not because they haven’t eaten his Jell-O, but because Biden’s margins of victories in all those states, even Arizona and Georgia now firmly in Biden’s 306 electoral college total, are too large to credibly challenge.  The current hope is that later this week, after the Georgia hand recount is completed, Trump will give up his fight, not to concede, but maybe, just maybe to direct @GSAEmily to sign the ascertainment letter that will finally deliver resources and authorize government officials to start sharing information and working with the Biden team on the transition, because sharing and coordinating things like vaccination distribution plans and which country is about to launch a nuke are essential, well to everyone except Trump who is far too focused on figuring out how to best pardon himself, his family and his very best friends and how to continue grifting off contributors to worry about national security and virus death rates.    

Decapitation: Though no one knows for sure whether Trump decapitated the Pentagon to destroy evidence of his bad acts. to selectively leak doctored bad stuff about Biden and his family, to launch a war or to do all of the above, the current thought is that war is unlikely but that a rapid troop pull-out from Afghanistan and more pressure on Iran and China is in the cards.  To that end Secretary of State/2024 presidential hopeful Mike Pompeo is off meeting with a series of world leaders, including France’s Emmanuel Macron who has already made it clear that he’s beyond gleeful about Trump’s loss. Pompeo is also heading to the Middle East for chats, about moves against Iran?, with the heads of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.  As to Israel, Trump’s newest appointee retired army colonel Douglas Macgregor who is now an advisor to newbie Defense Secretary Chris Miller, is not a fan, on at least two occasions, including in an interview to Russian media outlet RT he said that “Israeli lobby” money is responsible for Washington’s support and accused current and high level officials, including Pompeo and former national security advisor John Bolton, of becoming “very, very rich” as a result of their support for Israel. When asked to comment, Bolton who slammed Trump for not cooperating on the transition, answered “I don’t respond to anti-Semites.” Remember when Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was eviscerated by Republicans for similarly invoking racist tropes, that was then and anyway she’s just a “radical,” ungrateful immigrant as opposed to Macgregor who is a Trump appointee, so now crickets. Maybe that inconsistency, and all those swastika carrying Proud Boy fanboys is one of the reasons that 77% of American Jews voted for Biden, an amount even higher than the overwhelming number that went for Hillary in 2016.  

Et Cetera:  It turns out that failing to legally appoint your Secretary of Homeland Security has consequences.  Over the weekend Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the US District Court of the Eastern District of New York ruled that Chad Wolf was not legally serving as the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security when he issued the memo that stopped new applicants to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.  Garaufis isn’t the first federal judge to point out that Wolf’s appointment is illegal. His ruling, combined with the Supreme Court’s June ruling that blocked the Trump administration's attempt to cancel DACA, because its reasoning was "arbitrary and capricious,” leaves DACA intact and open to accepting new applications. One less thing for Biden to have to worry about on January 20, a good thing because he’s going to have a lot to do.  Trump not so much, expectations are that he will have already vamoosed to Mar a Lago where he’ll be golfing, hanging with his far too many fans, and focused on his financial woes and those NY legal cases, the ones that probably account for his slam against NYS even more than his anger about Governor Cuomo and his testy remarks. On the Democratic side, the squabbles between the progressive and moderate wings of the party continue to bubble up, because why not fight in public rather than focusing all your attention on those key Georgia Senate races? One major issue is who gets asked into Biden’s cabinet.  Bernie Sanders appears to be angling for Secretary of Labor and Elizabeth Warren has her eyes on Treasury. I’ve been very wrong before but my guess is that neither of them will get their wishes but another name that’s been floated is interesting.  There have been suggestions that Maine’s Independent/Democrat caucusing Senator Angus King is under consideration for Director of National Intelligence.  Maine has a Democratic Governor so maybe Sara Gideon, who failed to win a Senate seat the old fashioned way, could end up seated after all.    

65 Days