Woke Up Call

Human Resources:  In a move that wasn’t surprising, the Former Guy endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who is running for reelection.  That’s not surprising because Paxton is an ardent FG guy, so much so that he led the Republican Attorneys General efforts to get the results of the last election thrown out. He also led the charge to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional.  Paxton is facing criminal indictment on fraud charges and a separate FBI corruption investigation too, but if we’ve learned anything by now, to the FG that’s a positive attribute.  One Republican running against Paxton, Jeb Bush’s son George P, has got to be bummed.  Despite the way the FG treated his “low energy” dad, George P has been a fervent FG supporter, he even made the trek to Mar a Lago in an attempt to get the FG’s endorsement.  Still, all is not lost for George P, there’s still a chance that he could beat Paxton in the primary if enough Texas voters prefer a renegade Bush to an indicted Attorney General or maybe not.  In other “best the Republicans have to offer” news, after being gifted with  a new AR 15 rifle by the pastor at an evangelical Church of Good Tidings in California one time national security advisor/convicted but then pardoned felon Michael Flynn joked “maybe I’ll find someone in Washington,” a not so humorous quip under any circumstances but particularly concerning given that many of the FG’s supporters are prepared to go January 6^th crazy if he isn’t back in the White House come August. Just wondering, is it normal for pastors to give guest speakers automatic weapons?  Talking indictments, Thomas Barrack, the FG’s former adviser and inauguration chairman, who is now out on $250 million bail, pleaded not guilty yesterday to those federal charges that he was working for the UAE, putting their interests above those of the USA when he was successfully influencing the FG’s Middle East policy.  On the January 6^th front, the House’s new select committee on all things insurrection will be having its first hearing today.  In addition to Wyoming’s Liz Cheney, Speaker Pelosi added Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger to the committee.  GQP leader Kevin McCarthy is not all that happy about that, he’s now calling Liz and Adam Nancy’s Republicans.  It turns out that voting against an independent commission and then trying to place two insurrectionists on the House committee may not have been a good strategy for Kevin. Lastly, on a sad note former Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi who retired from the Senate last year died yesterday, after being critically injured in a bicycle accident.  

Viral Musings: Unfortunately with too few Americans vaccinated, the plentiful Delta variant has been finding plenty of bodies to inhabit which explains why there were 88,696 new coronavirus positives yesterday. The initial news out of Israel that Delta had been making inroads among some of their vaccinated population is now accepted as a given rather than just a statistical anomaly. The good news is that at least so far few vaccinated people have gotten seriously ill from the strain, the not so good news is that while the vaccines continue to protect against severe infections, they aren’t doing as good a job as had been hoped at preventing infection, likely because the viral load associated with Delta is very high, it’s highly contagious, and the strength of the vaccines is starting to wane just a bit among those who received their shots early and among the more vulnerable immune suppressed, particularly those who’ve been the recipients of organ transplants.  All that  means that the 65 plus set and the immune suppressed are likely to be getting another shot, probably beginning sometime around October, of course by then the Delta variant which is already on the decline in India and the UK is likely be past its US peak not that there couldn’t be another variant of concern to worry about. The Delta onslaught is also the reason that a number of municipalities are either reimposing mask mandates or mask recommendations for all, even the vaccinated and are moving forward with vaccine mandates.  The Delta onslaught has also spurred a number of dyed in the wool conservatives/FG supporters like Arkansas gubernatorial aspirant Sarah Huckabee Sanders to publicly announce their vaccinated status, a belated effort to encourage some additional COVID deniers to get jabbed. On the 5 to 11 year old kid front, the FDA has asked Pfizer and Moderna to add more children to their studies in the hope that increasing the pool of participants will shake out any rare side effects before the shots are made available to the younger population.  Pfizer may still be able to meet their hoped for fall timetable but the increased study requirement is likely to delay Moderna’s approval.  

Politics Unusual:  There’s still no bipartisan infrastructure plan.  As the NY Times reports the infrastructure deal is either near or about to collapse.  It turns out that the Olympics is political too, not totally surprising as sports and Olympics have been political for some time. Still it was kind of weird to hear the FG come out loudly against the “too woke” US women’s soccer team and to also hear the crowd of attendees at his weekend rally, yes he’s rallying again, applaud his slam. Also, a number of the recent books about the final days of the FG cite his expectation that his SCOTUS justices, particularly Brett Kavanaugh would throw out the Arizona and Pennsylvania election results just because.  Well we may now know why he felt that Kavanaugh owed him the favor.  It turns out that the FBI received somewhere around 4500 tips alleging some bad Kavanaugh behavior in the run up to his confirmation. No doubt a lot of those were just crank comments from the peanut gallery but some of them may have revealed some really bad behavior.  The FBI turned the most concerning ones over to the White House but did not do further investigation as they say they only did what the WH engaged them to do.  The FG White House appears to have put the concerning complaints through the shredder.  We may never know if any of them were truly damning but we do know that the FG believes that Kavanaugh owed him a bigly favor and that may be all that we really need to know. Mississippi is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Roe v Wade abortion decision and given the current make-up of  SCOTUS that could really happen this time.

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