Gates Gate 

Viral Musings: Okay, who had Bill and Melinda Gates getting divorced on their pandemic Bingo card?  One thing’s for certain, whatever their differences, they weren’t fighting over who gambled away the rent money at the Kentucky Derby.  Anyway, their business is their business but it’s only a matter of time before the QAnon mafia goes full on Gates gate attributing their marriage woes to a fight about who gets to control those chips that conspiracists and anti-vaxxers insist Bill has been inserting into our arms along with our mRNA vaccines.  Concern about those illusory chips may be one of the reasons that somewhere north of 25% of Americans say that they won’t ever get vaccinated.  That reluctance, which feeds variants, together with the slow rollout of vaccines across the world, are among the reasons that scientists are now saying that we’ll probably never reach true herd immunity but instead will have to learn to live with coronavirus outbreaks for a long time to come, hopefully at much lower levels and with newer “Tamiflu like” antiviral drugs along the lines of one that Pfizer says they’ll have by year end.  On the Pfizer front, US approval of its vaccine for the 12-15 year old set is imminent, no later than early next week with approval for Moderna, which to date has only been approved for those 18 and over, likely to follow in a few weeks.  As far as the virus goes, daily new cases fell to just under 50,000 yesterday with deaths at 738, largely because of the vaccine rollout but also helped along by seasonal effects. Most states are moving forward with the loosening and/or elimination of COVID restrictions and of course, not to be outdone, Florida’s president wannabee, Governor Ron DeSantis, signed an executive order yesterday that suspends all local COVID emergency orders restricting what local officials can do during pandemics.  For the record despite DeSantis’ assertion that all is hunky dory in Florida, it’s not.  The state has the 8^th highest COVID positivity rate in the country.  DeSantis is also expected to sign legislation that makes it difficult for Floridians to vote in future elections despite the fact that he earlier bragged that his state should serve as the model for how an election should be run.  Apparently even though Republicans did well during the last election, that “model” made it too easy for far too many Democrats to vote by absentee ballot so at the risk of disenfranchising a few older Republicans, the state wants to make it more difficult to get absentee ballots and for good measure plans to get rid of a lot of drop boxes.   

Red Party Politics:  The virus isn’t the only thing mutating these days.  The Republican Party continues to slither down the Former Guy hole.  Over the weekend consistently and reliably conservative Senator Mitt Romney survived a censure vote but was booed by the audience at his state’s Republican party convention. Likewise, Liz Cheney, another stalwart conservative, who refuses to back off her statements about the Former Guy, her confidence that President Biden won the 2020 election and who is getting pilloried for greeting him via fist bump during his walk to the podium for his Joint Session speech, is facing increasing pushback from House Republicans leadership. GQP Kevin McCarthy who has gone from acknowledging that the Former Guy bore responsibility for the January 6 reaction to kissing his ring and claiming that it was his efforts that stopped the coup appears to be ready to dump Cheney from his House leadership triumvirate with Axios reporting that he’d like to see her replaced by an insurgency friendly pick, someone like New York’s Elise Stefanik, Missouri’s Ann Wagner, or Indiana’s Jackie Walorski.  In other Republican news, Lin Wood, the conspiracist/wackadoodle election lawyer who claims that all those Hugo Chavez/George Soros Dominion vote counting machines flipped the election to Biden is seeking to lead the South Carolina Republican Party. A believer in all things Q, Wood has been campaigning and rallying in South Carolina with convicted/Former Guy national security advisor Mike Flynn, who many Qsters believe is Q.  By the way, Flynn who appears to love that people believe he is Q, isn’t, apparently the real Q or at least the originator of QAnon is likely a guy named Jim Watkins, the owner of the white supremacist/neo-Nazi message board site once knowns as 8chan.  In other news the Washington Post, NY Times and NBC have all retracted their story that Rudy Giuliani was warned by the FBI that his Ukrainian friends were Russian spies using him as part of their disinformation campaign against Joe and Hunter Biden.  That’s the good news for Rudy.  The bad news is that the FBI knew he was being used but didn’t bother to brief him over concerns that doing so could hurt their investigation.  It does appear the Senator Ron Johnson was briefed.  Anyway, whether he was briefed or not Rudy, who has taken to the airwaves to claim that he’s the victim of a political hitjob, is in trouble.  The FBI now has upwards of ten of his electronic devices as well as a cell phone that they obtained during a search of the home of uber conservative lawyer Victoria Toensing, who together with her husband Fox commentator Joe diGenova is knee deep in a lot of the Ukrainian business. Stepping back to the unfounded accusations about the Dominion Voting machines, the company is still suing virtually everyone who maligned them but Newsmax appears to have worked out something with Eric Coomer, Dominion’s director of product strategy and security.  After falsely accusing Coomer of rigging his company’s machines to flip votes Biden’s way and hounding him into hiding, Newsmax ran a series of apologies on air last week. Clearly Newsmax is trying to dig itself out of what could turn into its financial ruin.  Of course, as indicated by the ongoing vote audit being conducted by the too cutely monikered Cyber Ninja firm in Maricopa  County Arizona the damage has already been done.  Cyber Ninja, a company founded by a right wing nutter, is still counting away, employing a cast of questionable characters including a former Arizona legislator who participated in the January 6^th insurrection and some truly bizarre techniques such as special lights to detect watermarks that don’t exist and blue pens that can permanent mar ballots to “prove” that the election was stolen from the Former Guy.  The Ninja squad, which is being egged on by the Former Guy, promises to move on to Michigan and Pennsylvania next and have been placing calls to election lawyers to ask if its too late to “award” the election to the FG.   

Et Cetera:  Biden’s team will be reuniting four of the families separated at the border during the FG’s reign this week.  Sadly many more remain in separation hell because undoing evil is hard.  In addition, yesterday the White House announced that it will be lifting this year’s refugee cap to 62,500 from the 15,000 level set by the prior not so refugee friendly crowd.  The Biden plan is to lift next year’s number to 125,000.  Also, contrary to assertions on Fox, Biden’s earth friendly plans don’t involve restricting your monthly intake to one hamburger though it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to cut back.  Anyway, it’s not clear what you could eat instead as reports are that we are facing an imminent chicken shortage, something to do with the popularity of chicken sandwiches.    

577,565

246,780,203 shots in arms