Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz

Drip, Drip, Plop:  President Biden continues to push forward with his agenda.  With the passage of his coronavirus relief package checked off his to do list, he’s moved on to focusing on what he can do by executive action with regard to guns and  promoting his $2 trillion infrastructure plan despite Republican assertions that the plan is too big, focused on things that fall outside of their definition of infrastructure and because it relies on corporate tax increases that they find intolerable mostly because lowering those taxes, along with the confirmation of judges, was all they accomplished during the last administration.  Curiously enough a number of Republicans seem to be harping on the fact that Biden’s infrastructure plan provides funding for elderly care and facilities.  To that end, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn spent part of yesterday day tweeting, and then being tweet bombed for questioning all that old people stuff.  Call me crazy, but  going after old people hardly seems like a winning strategy, particularly for a party that relies on an increasingly aging demographic.  Maybe Blackburn was doing her best to distract from some of the really crazy stuff emanating from Republican land, like Former Guy golf buddy/caddy/Rudy son Andrew Giuliani’s reveal that he’s seriously considering running for New York Governor in 2024 and former Decathlete/Kardashian family member Caitlin Jenner retaining some Former Guy consultants and benefiting from free advice from the Former Guy’s once disgraced but now back in the fold data guru Brad Parscale as she moves towards running against California Governor Gavin Newsom who despite his improving popularity is likely to face a recall election.  As bizarre as those candidacies might sound they pale in comparison to the newest about the Panhandle’s finest, Representative Matt Gaetz. Earlier in the week, while acknowledging that he may have lavished his “dates” with hotel accommodations and flights rather than cash, he whined that the Merrick Garland Justice Department was attempting to do him in by selectively dripping out damning, but according to him, very fake information.  Well, apparently he knew what was coming.  Yesterday more indictments were plopped out against his jailed former BFF/Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg.  Greenberg now faces the possibility of  thirty years or more so in the slammer so it’s fair to believe that he might find implicating Gaetz in his sex capades, most notably that allegation that the two of them spent inappropriate time with the same 17 year old an attractive option.  As if that wasn’t enough for Gaetz to worry about last night CBS News “dripped” that another member of his sex capade posse is Florida hand surgeon Jason Pirozzolo, a self-described marijuana entrepreneur who at least once funded a joint trip to the Bahamas, one where they were accompanied by some of those ladies who accept hotel rooms and gifts in lieu of cash.  Hand surgeon/pot guy Pirozzolo may have been so generous because Gaetz was working with him on legislation to “facilitate research” on the medical effects of cannabis;  after that trip Gaetz paid him back twice, by introducing the Medical Cannabis Research Act that was never voted on.  That’s the same Gaetz who when he was a member of the Florida House was one of only two legislators to oppose bipartisan legislation outlawing revenge porn law, not much of a surprise given how he likes to share pictures of his “girlfriends” with his fellow legislators. While Gaetz waits for what is increasingly looking like an inevitable indictment, he remains busy. He’s scheduled to speak at a “Women for America First” event at the Former Guy’s Doral resort tomorrow which is just fine with the Former Guy who remains Team Gaetz because “he has totally denied all the accusations against him” and no one respects people who deny accusations against them more than the FG.  The FG made that statement while also denying reports dripped from the NY Times that Gaetz asked to be included in an omnibus pardon that he hoped the FG would issue prior to his departure from office; that pardon which was never issued was supposed to also include Joe Exotic. One more special delivery from the GOP, on Tuesday the Arkansas legislature voted to override Governor Asa Hutchinson veto of legislation that effectively bans the provision of gender confirming medical care for trans youths. No report on whether they bothered to up the funding of their suicide hotlines, assuming they have any, to compensate.       

Viral Musings: Well, as predicted, the UK coronavirus variant is now the dominant strain in the US.  That’s a problem because though our current vaccines work against the UK strain, it’s more transmissible and more virulent, so while the vaccination rate continues to ramp up at an impressive pace a lot of people, including ineligible children and adolescents, are not yet vaccinated.  After plateauing at a daily rate around 60,000 new US cases are now up to around 78,000 with 50% of those cases coming from five states:  New York, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  A large part of the case spike is likely due to the prevalence of the UK strain.  Again, that’s not because the vaccinations aren’t working, it’s just that the virus is still finding plenty of vulnerable, unvaccinated hosts.  Though we’ve got lots of Astra Zeneca vaccines in our warehouses, the shot still hasn’t been approved for use here and odds are that even once the AZ shots are approved they won’t go into US arms given our Pfizer, Moderna and J & J supplies and expected deliveries so we’ll probably share them with other countries, assuming we can get over a hurdle that the Former Guy’s team agreed to when they signed contracts with the vaccine manufacturers.  That hurdle which protects the vaccine manufacturers from US lawsuits would leave us assuming any liability if we transferred our vaccines out of the country.  That little glitch explains why we haven’t been able to do much in the way of vaccine diplomacy, yet.  As far as the AZ shot goes, though the number of people getting the scary blood clot complication remains very, very small, somewhere around 30 cases out of the 18 million shots dispensed in the UK, the UK government is now recommending that people under 30 get another vaccine while several other countries are only dispensing their AZ shots to people over 50 where the risk of getting really sick from COVID outweighs blood clot fears even more.  Despite the AZ concerns, with the blood clot problem a rarity, albeit a bad rarity,  a lot of countries would happily take our supplies if only we could get over the liability hurdle.

Breathing Lessons:  The Derek Chauvin case goes on, remaining both horrifying and immensely sad.  In a nutshell, prosecutors continue to call witnesses, including medical professionals and fellow police officers, who say that Chauvin’s actions violated procedures, were unwarranted and that George Floyd was killed by pressure from Chauvin’s knees while Chauvin’s defense team tries to introduce doubt in the mind of one or more jurors by saying that those actions were okay because of that fake $20 bill, the “threatening” crowd as in those people of color standing nearby and by claiming that anyway Floyd’s death was “really” his own fault because of his drug use. No words.     

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171,476,655 shots in arms!