No Coke, Pepsi?

Seeing Red: The Former Guy doesn’t have access to Twitter but he still manages to get his messages out.  These days they come in the form of press releases that read like stringed together incoherent tweet rants.  Last weekend, in one of his shorter ones he wished Happy Easter to ALL including the Radical Left CRAZIES who rigged our Presidential Election, and want to destroy our Country!” That message was very on brand as was his campaign’s misuse of WinRed, the Republican campaign funding website modeled after the Democrat’s very successful ActBlue funding tool.  Unlike ActBlue, WinRed isn’t a non-profit, it’s run as a profit making entity and as revealed by the NY Times this weekend, WinRed even takes a cut of any refunds that it makes to contributors.  That’s quite convenient given that as a result of some chicanery WinRed had to refund $122 million in contributions, 10% of what it took in during 2020.  By comparison the Biden team only had to refund 2.2% of its ActBlue take. Refunds happen for a few reasons, sometimes campaigns send refunds after realizing that a contributor has exceeded their individual contribution cap and sometimes people request refunds upon realizing that they’ve “inadvertently” signed on to make reoccurring contributions.  What make’s WinRed’s high refund rate so alarming is that most of it was attributable to contributors who were duped into turning intended one time contributions into monthly or even weekly contributions.  It’s not a coincidence that the flip from “one time” to “reoccurring” accelerated during the fall as that was when the Former Guy’s campaign was running short of cash.  To fill his coffers the WinRed team, intentionally made it more challenging for contributors to opt out of turning one time contributions into Former Guy annuities.  They did that by requiring contributors to jump through more “uncheck” hurdles and by shrinking the language in those warning boxes into smaller and smaller print. As a result, unsuspecting WinRed contributors ended up providing interest free loans to the FG’s campaign.  To the extent that those inadvertent lenders realized that they’d been taken, something that many of them didn’t notice until after they exceeded their credit limits and/or received their credit card bills, they were able to apply for and receive refunds out of the funds that the FG continued to raise after the election when he told his delusional fanbase that he needed their money not to refund the duped but to keep up his legal battle against the “Big Steal.” Your choice as to whether to call this a Ponzi scheme, fraud or both, but it is notable that ActBlue discouraged its candidates from keeping reoccurring contributions as their default option and over time few of its candidates did.  Given the FG’s success with the ‘lie until you get caught and then keep on lying until everyone moves on’ model, Panhandle Congressman Matt Gaetz came out swinging yesterday, he’s not denying his extensive womanizing, he’s just insisting that he never paid any of his “dates” while also denying that any of them were underage.  He warned his fans that they should expect to hear a “drip, drip, drip” of allegations but that they will all be Fake News, just false accusations from the Merrick Garland Justice Department.  Somehow or other he’s skipped over the part about the investigation into his activities predating AG Garland.  And in case you’re wondering he has no plans to step down, at least for now.  Mitch McConnell’s recent comments are also just a wee bit deceptive.  Mitch wants all those corporations taking action against Georgia while also making statements against voter suppression legislation to chill out because as far as he’s concerned they should stay out of politics, or at least stay out of politics except when they are making contributions to his PACs or supporting Republican candidates.  By the way, a lot of airlines fly to Denver which is convenient because it appears that Denver is likely to be the new site for baseball’s All Star game.  Of course, the word from the FG and quite a few likeminded pundits and politicians is that no one should ever watch baseball again and that while they’re not watching they should also not fly Delta and not quaff Coke.  Of course that Coke ban doesn’t apply to the Diet Coke addicted FG who posted a picture of himself with his favorite immigrant hater, Stephen Miller, yesterday.  We know that because someone forgot to remove the bottle of Diet Coke from his desk.  Also, maybe flying United won’t work either as the friendly sky guys have also come out against voter suppression.  No word yet from Pepsi.

Politics As Usual:  Yesterday, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that Chuck Schumer can pass a significant portion of Biden’s proposed infrastructure/economy redesign legislation through the lower vote required reconciliation technique.  Now all Schumer has to do is convince West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and any other of those reluctant to sign on Democratic Senators hiding behind in his shadows that they should sign on. Some negotiation and changes are likely to be made to get Manchin and company on board, perhaps Biden will lower his plans to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% to some slightly smaller number, only time will tell. Remember Maria Butina, the Russian Red Sparrow who claimed that she wasn’t really a spy even though she spent much of her time in the US sidling up to prominent Americans until she ended up in jail and then sent back to Russia.  Well the “not a spy” lady is still doing Putin’s bidding. Last week she showed up at the prison where deteriorating Russian dissident Alexei Navalny is being held, not to help him get the medical care he needs but to taunt him on camera for unfairly complaining about the wonderful conditions in his jail. Navalny who is not doing well was finally moved into a prison hospital ward yesterday but not due to Maria’s intervention.  While Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson had no problem signing on to legislation banning nearly all abortions, discriminating against transgender youths is a reach even for him.  Yesterday he vetoed a bill banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, calling the legislation a “vast government overreach” and a “product of the cultural war in America.” Unfortunately Hutchinson is term limited and it’s quite possible that whoever replaces him will eventually sign a similar law, especially if that someone is Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is running to replace him. That’s Sarah whose father, former Governor Mike Huckabee, tweeted out a bizarre statement saying he was going to identify as Chinese so that Coke and Delta will like him, his ugly way of commenting on the outrage about Georgia’s election legislation because who doesn’t go all in on racial crap on a Easter weekend?

Viral Musings:  The race to vaccinate is accelerating.  This morning President Biden will announce that he wants all states to open up vaccinations to everyone over 16 by April 19.  More shots in more arms is the only way to get ahead of the more transmissible UK variant that, as expected, has taken hold in lots of places through out the country.  That variant is the reason that new cases in the US are rising again particularly among a younger cohort, especially in places like Michigan, despite the vaccine rollout. Notably though new cases in the UK and Israel are now way down, both countries had a similar experience during their vaccine rollout.  To date, in the US, 75% of those over 65 have gotten at least one shot and 55% are fully vaccinated.  To get shots out more broadly, the participation in the federal pharmacy program is being ramped up from 17,000 to 40,000 locations.  Also yesterday, Press Secretary Psaki said that the loss of the batch of  J & J doses that were tossed after they were contaminated with some materials from some Astra Zeneca shots that were also being manufactured at a Baltimore plant were not included in the administration’s rollout numbers because the plant had not yet been approved.  The expectation is that J & J will still be able to make its promised 24 million “one and done” dose delivery in April.

555,615

167,187,795 shots in arms