Stuck on Gilligan's Island

Stop the Insanity:  The year is almost over but the crazy continues.  Up until yesterday it wasn’t clear that any Republican Senator would step up to abet the Republican Congressional contingent who had previously announced their intention to object to the certification of certain swing state Electoral College votes during the January 6  joint session of Congress.  Unfortunately yesterday one did, and it’s not the woefully ignorant former football coach newbie Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, it’s Missouri’s Josh Hawley, the Stanford College/Yale Law School graduate who until now has been known mostly for his extreme anti-abortion views and who knows better but who plans to run for president in 2024 and wants to get out ahead of his Republican competitors, laying a claim to Trump’s base. One can only imagine that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio spent a sleepless night fuming over being beaten to the punch. By joining the insurgency crowd, Hawley ensures that the January 6 session will be loud, messy and time consuming.  Everytime he joins with the House crazies’ objection to a state’s electoral college results the vote tabulation will be put on pause, making way for a debate where allegations of random Krakens, vote flipping machinery and the influence of the very dead Hugo Chavez will be brought up.  Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will win, again, at the end of the process because overturning any state’s results would require the approval of both the House and the Senate and under no circumstances would the Democratically controlled House vote to overturn any state’s results.  It’s highly unlikely that the Senate will either, like them or not, there are a few reasonably sane Republicans who want nothing to do with this crap, folks like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski aren’t going to vote to over turn the results of the election, but it is quite possible that a few Republicans Senators will, just to gain some traction with Trump’s followers. 

Nightmare Island: As to Trump, he’s thrilled that Hawley has jumped on his train, he may actually believe that Hawley’s participation, combined with the violence in the street that he’s been stoking and that his Proud Boys crowd is planning, is all he needs to stick around for another four years and let’s be honest, who doesn’t fear that there’s a chance, albeit a small one, that he’s right.  To that end last night Trump announced that he’ll be returning to Washington today, bailing on the New Year’s COVID superspreader shin dig that he’s supposed to be hosting at Mar a Lago, the one that 500 of his fans paid bigly bucks to attend.  And of course, he’s not coming back to work on fixing the seriously flawed roll out of the coronavirus vaccines that his Warp Speed team admits has been an unmitigated disater, in part because of all those holidays that no one could have anticipated take place in December but that Trump’s Defense Department is using as an excuse to freeze Joe Biden out of critically necessary transition meetings. Trump is also still planning to travel to Georgia to campaign for Senators Loeffler and Perdue. It’s unlikely that he’ll meet up with the Governor Brian Kemp or Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger since the three don’t appear to be on the best of terms.  Yesterday, Trump called for Kemp to resign for refusing to back up his claim that he rather than Biden carried Georgia in the November election.  In addition he attacked Raffensberger again, tweeting out a false allegation that Raffensberger can’t be trusted because his “brother works for China and they definitely don’t want ‘Trump’. So disgusting!.” To be clear, Raffensberger’s brother does not work for China.  Raffensberger is a life long Republican who has been consistently supportive of traditional Republican voter suppression policies like limiting polling locations in minority locales, he’s just unwilling to overturn legitimate election results, particularly those that have been recounted three times and that just passed a recently undertaken audit of absentee ballot signatures with flying colors.

Viral Musings:  A record setting 3624 people died yesterday, raising the US death count above 342000.  The states haven’t received anywhere near the number of vaccine doses they were supposed to have received by now and, more depressingly, most have failed to get the doses they have received into people’s arms.  According to the NY Times, though Maine has managed to inject all 8,000 of its doses, most states haven’t been anywhere as efficient.  New York’s Governor Cuomo, spent most of his Wednesday news conference discussing his efforts to facilitate in person attendance at the upcoming Buffalo Bills playoff game but had the feeblest of excuses as to why only 14% of the doses that NY State has received to date have been administered.  CNN reports that Florida’s “county-by-county plan to vaccinate its elderly population has created a mass scramble for a limited number of doses, leading to hours long lines at vaccination sites and overwhelmed county hotlines and websites.” In Wisconsin, a now fired employee actually threw out 500 vaccine doses, not by accident but intentionally.  It doesn’t have to be this way, there’s been plenty of time to prepare for the implementation of an efficient vaccination plan, one only has to take a look at Israel, where 2% of the population is being vaccinated daily to see how an efficient plan works.  Sure they’ve got fewer people, but they’re also way more organized and committed to getting the job done.  No small feat for a country with a political system so fractured that it is about to embark on its fourth election in two years. Maybe instead of working on testing protocols to get people into football games, Governors like NY’s Cuomo should be calling up the National Guard and using stadiums, convention centers and parking lots for shots.  Just saying.   

Wishing all a happy and healthy New Year, with an emphasis on the healthy. 

20 Days

RIP Dawn Wells, our favorite Mary Ann