Q Klux Klan

Weekend Update:  Just an ordinary weekend in the days of corona.  People around the world watched Prince Philip go to his not so final resting place in his custom built Land Rover accompanied by his somewhat dysfunctional family as the really dysfunctional Republican Party’s Q Queen, Marjorie Taylor Greene, road tested the creation of a white supremacist caucus.  A bunch more people were killed during a spate of mass shootings, daily US new covid case counts remained too high, in the vicinity of 70,000, and cities across the country began boarding up in anticipation of the Derek Chauvin verdict.  As to that white supremacist thing, while one Oath Keeper turned on his insurrection buddies, the Congresswoman from Q, remained loyal to the cause.  She circulated her plan for a “new” American First caucus to a few of her closest buddies but hit a roadblock when at least one of them or a member of one of their staffs sent a copy to Punchbowl News which gleefully shared the written racist rant with the rest of us. Margie Q’s white plan, which was drafted with input from co-racist Texas Representative/Dentist Paul Gosar, emphasized the dominance of “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and white people architecture, whatever that is.  Of course Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz thought that her ideas were spot on and immediately indicated an interest in joining possibly because anything diverting attention from his mounting list of crimes and his phone that has been in the custody of the FBI for months has to be a good thing for him but also because he shares her racist inclinations.  Margie Q’s initiative was met with pushback by several Republicans including designated party kvetcher Adam Kinzinger who few outside of the main stream media listen to and by two members of Republican leadership, the almost equally disdained Liz Cheney and House GQP leader Kevin McCarthy who seemed genuinely distressed about it, not its premise but that she’d said the quiet part out loud and that’s the kind of thing that could put his not unreasonable hopes of becoming Majority Leader in jeopardy. After McCarthy came out with a statement saying that the Republican party was the party of Lincoln not the party of “nativist dog whistles,” Margie Q kind of retracted her plan saying it was only a draft written by staff, that she hadn’t approved it, yet, and that it was being taken out of context by the “scum and liars in the media.” Pretty much a confirmation that it was her plan, but that she’d hadn’t expected such forceful blowback because she was just repeating what others say in private, those same fellow Republicans who thought that Gaetz sharing nudie shots of his “dates” was just fine too. Moving on to the shootings and sadly, there were far too many to move onto because gun violence remains rampant, pick a city and odds are that someone or a group of someones were shot there over the weekend.  While we were learning that the 19 year old Indianapolis Fed Ex mass shooter had purchased his two semi-automatic rifles legally because someone forgot to note or didn’t care that he’d had another rifle taken away earlier after his mother expressed concerns about him growing increasingly unhinged, nine more people were killed and ten others wounded in mass shooting events in Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio, Nebraska, and Louisiana and that doesn’t count the Ohio teen who got arrested after he was caught carrying a semi-automatic rifle in NYC’s Times Square.  By the way his excuse, which didn’t fly with either the NYPD or his judge, was that he thought it was okay to carry a rifle around NYC and on the subway as long as it wasn’t loaded.  To be clear, he had plenty of ammunition with him, he just hadn’t loaded his bullets, yet. Crisis averted, for now.  As to other crisis management, this week is likely to be a tough one on steroids.  After both sides present their closing arguments the Derek Chauvin jury will start deliberating.  Regardless of what they decide, it’s highly likely that some, or more likely, a lot of people won’t be happy.  Last night there were dozens of police cars positioned along NYC’s Madison Avenue, in response to my asking what was up, the accompanying officers said that they were out in force because of concerns about “current events” and they were talking spring flowers and cherry blossoms.

Viral Musings: The coronavirus story is such a mixed bag right now.  New cases, positivity rates, and those important hospitalization figures are trending down in many places but are still stubbornly high or peaking elsewhere like Michigan.  Over the weekend the US crossed the 200 million shots in arms metric that President Biden promised but vaccine hesitancy continues to be a big, or should I say bigly problem as according to the NY Times counties with the most vaccine-hesitant residents generally also voted for the Former Guy in 2020 by large margins, while counties with the lowest levels of hesitancy generally had fewer FG voters.  Sadly for all those delusional red county crackadoodles, COVID is an equal opportunity virus that cares nothing about who you voted for but does find mask and shot avoidance particularly appealing.  For the record, hospitalizations in NYS have finally fallen below 4000 to 3754 and while there are still some high positivity counties, the state’s over positivity dipped to 2.35%, not as good as California’s 1.5% but far better than Idaho, Iowa and Michigan which remain at the top of the board that no one wants to lead.  Half of US adults have now received at least one shot with 32% of adults or just under 25% of the country fully vaccinated. In Israel, where 61% of the total population has received one shot, 57% are fully vaccinated and only 14 new cases were recorded yesterday, face masks are no longer required outdoors.  Fauci expects that the J & J pause will be lifted later in the week possibly with some usage restrictions and/or instructions to the medical community on how to treat the unusual but rare blood clot occurrences. 

Stay safe!           

567,217

209,406,814 shots in arms