Matzo Balls

The Big Lie:  The Former Guy is gone from office and if we’re lucky he’ll stay there but the effects of his big election lie continue to reverberate because instead of working to widen their base by appealing to new voter groups, Republican politicians and party officials across the country have concluded that appeal isn’t the problem, that they lost the 2020 presidential election because too many Democratic voters, especially people of color, were allowed to vote. With that in mind officials in far too many red states have turned their focus to solving the problem of voter fraud, the fraud that the commission set up by the Former Guy and chaired by his VP four years ago never found largely because it wasn’t there to find and because the few times it does occur it’s too insignificant to impact election results and/or is committed by Republicans, like that North Carolina vote harvester who turned blue absentee ballots red.  So last night under the guise of preventing all that fraud that isn’t, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp hastily signed the new election “protection” just passed by his Republican legislators into law. That new law will make it harder for working people to vote by making it more difficult to obtain absentee ballots, limiting voting days, hours, locations and drop boxes, even making it a crime to give a bottle of water to anyone waiting on one of those hours long lines, the ones that are far more common in Democratic leaning urban districts while also making it legal for the state legislature to overturn election results that they don’t like, the way the Former Guy tried to do during the 2020 election cycle.  To drive the racist intent of the legislation home, Georgia capitol law enforcement officers arrested Georgia state Democratic lawmaker Park Cannon who had the temerity to try to knock on the door of the chamber where Kemp was holding his closed door signing ceremony because nothing says fair treatment under the law like a bunch of burly white guys with guns dragging a Black woman off to jail while a Republican governor signs away her constituency’s voting rights. The legality of the Georgia legislation will likely be resolved by the courts, maybe even ending up with the Supremes, the same crowd who facilitated this mess with their Shelby County v Holder decision that paved the way for states to pass restrictive voting laws.  In all likelihood only the passage of Federal voter protection legislation will solve the voter suppression and that toss out “inconvenient” election results problem  but that legislation isn’t going to get anywhere near the sixty votes needed to pass through the Senate and might not even get the fifty votes needed if the filibuster is junked. So that Big Lie reverberates while democracy dangles by a string.

Infrastructure!   In other news, President Biden held his much awaited first press conference yesterday.  He didn’t insult any one,  yell at any reporters for wearing masks or advocate Lysoltinis but according to Fox and the right echo chamber, despite all that, or maybe because of it the “senile old guy” did a horrible job.  They were particularly outraged that he referred to notes a few times because why would anyone use notes during a press conference covering a wide array of topics?  For the record, the Former Guy frequently referred to his “Sharpie” notes when talking to the press but apparently that was okay.  In reality, the consensus view is that Biden was well prepared and did a pretty good job.  Like most politicians he pivoted away to subjects he wanted to discuss when asked questions he didn’t want to address, amusingly his pivot was to infrastructure, the topic that a certain other guy was known to pivot to also, only Biden talked details, making it clear that he plans to, or at the very least hopes to, move forward with infrastructure legislation shortly. Biden started off by announcing that he’d revised his vaccination target up from 100 million to 200 million shots in arms during his first 100 days, a more aggressive but achievable goal given the large supply of doses coming down the pike. Surprisingly, the press corps didn’t follow up with any more virus related queries but did ask whether Biden planned to run again in 2024 and whether Harris would still be his VP partner if he did.  Biden who appeared amused that after complaining endlessly about his failure to hold press conferences anyone would waste their slot with such silly questions, scrunched his eyes and answered yes to both, but really why would he say otherwise at this point in his term and why would he ditch Harris?  And those Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout, Biden called them “sick” while also calling out the filibuster as a relic of the Jim Crow era.

546,825

133,305,295 shots in arms

 Hag Sameach. Happy Passover.