Vicious Circle

Dire Day: So far US forces have managed to airlift more than 100,000 people out of Afghanistan.  Though a few thousand US citizens have been evacuated, most of those who have been flown out are Afghans who stood with us during our twenty years in their country.  It’s not that we aren’t trying to get more US citizens out but just that there aren’t that many left to remove and some of the remaining aren’t all that interested in leaving.  Sadly, the evacuation effort which is still ongoing will forever be marred by the tragic deaths of 13 US soldiers and somewhere around 85 Afghans, the result of yesterday’s two suicide bombings outside of Kabul Airport by ISIS K militants. By the way, in case like me your alphabet soup of terrorism hasn’t been kept up to date the ISIS K terrorists are a regional affiliate of that Islamic state crowd that the Former Guy said he eliminated even though he really didn’t largely because they are hard to eliminate and are quite immune to bombastic claims of their demise.  Simply put ISIS K is made up of former Afghan and Pakistan Taliban fighters who believe that the Taliban aren’t Taliban enough. They hate the west and as yesterday’s events show they are thoroughly into killing westerners but they are also are fighting those “too liberal” Taliban who were kind of cooperating with our evacuation and who are likely to have their hands full fighting their own civil war after we complete our departure. Late yesterday President Biden said that he will do everything he can to find and punish the ISIS K guys behind the deadly attacks and he probably will, but if this sounds all too familiar it’s because it is, we got into Afghanistan to rout out Osama bin Laden and now as we are leaving and Biden says we are still leaving probably still by August 31, it feels like we’re back to where we began.  The horrifying vicious circle continues.  Not surprisingly, just about everyone is now a foreign policy expert with a specialty in all things Afghanistan so the extreme wings of the Republican Party which these days is most of the party are calling for Biden to be impeached or worse, the Former Guy is saying that none of this would have happened if he was still in charge because the Taliban and ISIS K guys would have listened to him or else, those Republicans trying to get back into their base’s favor like Liz Cheney, Ben Sasse and the like are going after both Biden and the FG  and a few others on both sides are just second guessing every decision made or to be made.   

Politics Unusual: While all of the attention has been on Afghanistan, Pelosi’s team in the House has made some progress moving their $3.5 trillion along. As usual, Nancy managed to squelch the infighting between her moderates and the left and got everyone in her party to vote for the plan.  There’s still a lot to do, it’s likely that some Senate Democrats named Sinema and Manchin will do their best to shave a few billion off the plan so it’s too soon for anyone to raise hockey sticks in the air but still Pelosi and by definition Biden’s accomplishment is significant.  Of course GQP leader Kevin McCarthy says that he’ll be having none of it since he won’t support anything the Democrats want and to that end everyone in his party, including Adam Kinzinger and Liz Chaney, the two we’d like to believe are more rational that most, voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act this week because even they are all in on using voter suppressive legislation to prevent more people who won’t vote for them from voting.  As to Kevin McCarthy, though the chances that he’ll be the next Speaker of the House continue to grow especially if Biden and the Democrats face fallout in the midterms from the Afghanistan situation, he's got some immediate concerns from the House Select Committee on all things January 6^th.  The committee is seeking lots of records related to the days’ events and Kevin finds that a bit personal and concerning. No surprise then that the FG who previously said that he wouldn’t claim executive privilege to protect what he could, is now screaming privilege.  His screams aside, some of his former lawyers including Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and a long list of lesser known not so luminaries are finally facing consequences for all those lawsuits that claimed that some combination of fraud, space aliens, Jewish lasers, and the Italian military threw the election to Biden.  A Federal Judge in Michigan has sanctioned them and wants the state bars, legal not favorite watering spots, they belong to give them the Giuliani treatment.  Meantime, the results of the Cyber Ninja audit in Arizona are on ice, something to do with the head ninja and some of his staff being very sick with COVID, or at least claiming to be sick with COVID.                            

Viral Musings:  The Delta variant continues its onslaught particularly among conservative radio hosts and in those under vaccinated parts of the country where for some reason that totally escapes me local politicians like Florida’s DeSantis and Texas’ Abbott believe that mandating vaccines and face masks is akin to a crime against humanity, their god and/or will hurt their chances of ever becoming president. A concern apparently shared by South Dakota’s Kristi Noem who enthusiastically hosted the Sturgis Motorcycle super spreader event which so far has kicked her state’s virus levels up by about 450%.  According to the NY Times, there were 2210 US COVID deaths yesterday,  901 of them in Florida where a doctor is “selling” face mask exemption notes to local covidiots.  Not to be outdone a doctor in Arkansas is prescribing invermectin. a horse de-wormer, to  inmates at a local prison to treat and ward off COVID.  Given their predicament the prisoners are probably not among the thousands calling poison control hotlines right now, but elsewhere in the country the lines are jammed with those who’ve poisoned themselves with the drug that does nothing for COVID but can be, especially in large doses, poisonous. At least their scabies will be cured.  For the rest of us it looks like the FDA and CDC are going to say that boosters are warranted after six months rather than eight and that those who got J & J will be eligible as well.

More:  NYS’s Governor is now a woman named Kathy Hochul, voting has begun in California’s inexplicable recall election where Governor Newsom could be replaced by someone less popular and far more tarnished in an FG kind of way. There’s also an election percolating in Virginia where one time Governor Terry McAuliffe is facing off against an FG supported candidate named Glenn Youngkin.  And because FG supported candidates are going to be all the rage going forward despite pressure from Mitch McConnell for him to stay out of the race former football star and alleged wife abuser Herschel Walker has announced his run to seek the Republican nomination to run against Senator/Reverend Raphael Warnock whose “replacement” term  is up in 2022.        

Stay safe

Enjoy the weekend.      

Virus Axis

The Dog Days of Summer: It’s been a rough few days.  Though not surprising it’s hard to watch the dissolution of Afghanistan and it’s not like the news on the virus front is providing much joy.  Though it’s not surprising that Republicans have jumped on the distressingly messy withdrawal using it as a cudgel against President Biden, their chutzpah is remarkable.  The Former Guy who previously attacked Biden for not getting out sooner is all over it, issuing lots of his “From the Desk of 45” twitter replacement statements. It should surprise no one that after saying that were he still in the Oval Office, the spot he’s only not in because his coup failed, all our Afghan helpers would have been safely removed by now, he’s moved to slamming Biden for working to get them out because it’s not like immigrants from “sh-thole” countries (his adjective not mine), especially Muslim ones, are his thing.  Besides some of his favorite influencers like Tucker and Laura have already stepped up their anti-immigrant rhetoric.  His VP who came close to being hung from the rafters on January 6^th by that day’s “tourists” actually wrote in a WSJ op-ed that had Biden stuck to the May 1 deadline in the agreement that the FG and his team negotiated with those nice and honorable Taliban guys, the withdrawal would have gone off without a hitch because the Taliban would have honored all of their promises.  Funny how Pence failed to mention that just about everyone knew the Taliban who spent the months after that agreement was negotiated strengthening their hands had no intention of sticking to its terms; the question was only how long it would take them to get to Kabul not if they would. Then again, Pence is the guy who doesn’t like meeting with women without the supervision of Mother, so maybe a part of him relates to Taliban philosophy.  For his part, Biden is not backing down from his decision to end the almost endless war.  Yeah he regrets that the withdrawal is such a mess and no doubt that it played out so publicly, but he says he remains okay with his decision, that the mess was unavoidable.  He gets credit for his candor but you know that his stumbling words will now be played over and over again on campaign ads for election cycles to come giving new meaning to the word endless.  One more thing, the State Department clearly is way behind on processing visas, a situation that is having dire consequences for too many of our interpreters and the like but keep in mind that a certain former president and his team spent four years eviscerating State and the visa application process, and that the State bureaucracy, never known for speed, could have and should have been issuing a lot of those visas during his administration but didn’t because he didn’t really want them to.         

Viral Musings:  Though the final approvals aren’t in place yet, yesterday the Biden virus advisory team said that COVID booster shots will be made available to all Moderna and Pfizer recipients on the eight month anniversary of their second jab starting on or around September 20th.  They didn’t address J & J recipients, not because they think that the smaller J & J cohort won’t need another jab but because they need more time to evaluate the J & J data. They believe they have that time since the J & J jabs only started going into arms in March. As to the shots for the under twelve year old set, they’re still waiting approval and though it’s extremely frustrating that the school year is beginning without that approval, the consequences of rolling out the shots to the younger set without first making sure that they do far more good than harm would be dire.  Absent the availability of shots for kids, at this point the solution is indoor masking, for them and for everyone else in high risk areas. Of course a number of red state governors including COVID axis Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are still fighting those mask mandates which is why the only thing surprising about Abbott’s current COVID positivity is that it took so long for it to happen.  Abbott who of course got some Regeneron antibodies, the best that medical science has to offer right now, seems to find the fact that thousands of school children throughout the country are already in quarantine and that four districts in his state with mask optional policies have already been temporarily closed due to outbreaks be of no concern.  Likewise DeSantis who is making life as difficult as possible for those county and school officials in his state who are trying to protect kids doesn’t seem worried that more than 10,000 Tampa area students are in quarantine as are 1000 in Nashville, 3000 in New Orleans, more than 800 in Ware County, Georgia and 20,000 in Mississippi. The pollsters say most parents want their kids to be masked if that’s what it takes to protect them so I don’t get why DeSantis and Abbott think endangering kids is a good thing to run on but they’re the politicians so maybe they know something the rest of us don’t.  There were more than 160,000 new cases and more than 1100 COVID deaths in the US yesterday.   Cases are also still surging in Israel, but an first to emerge study by one of Israel’s health care providers shows that their booster shot rollout which like their initial rollout of COVID vaccines started before ours is starting to work, cutting both infection and serious illness.  Let’s hope so.  

Legal Footnote:  Before he left office the FG issued a whole bunch of friends and family pardons.  One of those pardons went to Jared Kushner friend Ken Kurson who got caught cyber spying and trashing the reputation of his former wife.  Yesterday Kurson was arrested in NYC for that spying.  It turns out that since unlike one time FG campaign manager and all around criminal Paul Manafort Kurson was never tried and convicted for his crimes NY can go after him without running afoul of the state’s double jeopardy laws.  That’s something that should have Steve Bannon’s Spidey senses twitching as he could be next.            

 

The Blame Game

Buddhas of Bamiyan:  In March of 2001 under the orders of Mullah Mohammed Omar the civilized world watched and kvetched as the Taliban blew up two sixth century monuments called the Buddhas of Bamiyan.  Then the horror of 9.11 happened.  The images of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the plane crashes in Washington and Pennsylvania and the accompanying deaths turned the destruction of those antiquities into a mere footnote in history. Mullah Omar went on to firmly cement his place atop the list of evil doers by harboring al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.  He and Bin Laden are now long dead but the Taliban aren’t and sadly after twenty years of a war that was initiated by the George W Bush/Dick Cheney team and at times surged by Barack Obama and was supposed to be all about getting Bin Laden but continued on even after he was found and killed in what was by then a hideout in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan the Taliban are back in full force.  Twenty long years, more than 800 billion dollars spent, the death of 2300 soldiers and injuries to 20,000 more and those are just the Americans, all that arming and training of the Afghan military so that they could take over the responsibility of running their own country and it’s all over or almost over, up in smoke in one long weekend. There’s nothing positive to say, the suffering particularly among women has only just begun, but apparently there are lots of fingers to point and so the blame game is on and is likely to continue for some time.  The Former Guy and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are getting blamed for starting the withdrawal and for cozying up to those nice Taliban leaders, the guys who they said could be trusted to do the right thing when the FG came close to hosting them at Camp David last September 11^th.  President Biden is being blamed for living up to his promise of ending the endless war by ripping the band aid off too fast and for not anticipating how quickly the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban. Quite a few Republicans are pointing their fingers at both Biden and Trump, using this weekend’s events to damage Biden while also distancing themselves from the FG.  To that end no one should be surprised that Republican “darling” Liz Cheney, whose father was among the biggest proponents of the Afghan war, is out there attacking both while saying nothing about the failings of her father.  Anyway, expect to see more dreadful pictures, hear lots of pundits and foreign correspondents bemoan our intelligence failures and countless comparisons to the US pull out from Saigon. Also don’t be surprised if the very same Republicans who are throwing daggers at Biden start complaining about all those Afghan refugees as they are resettled in the US because if or when they figure out that their Afghan related tarring and feathering of Biden isn’t working or inflicting as much damage as they want they’ll revert to their usual, fear mongering over migrant surges.

Viral Musings:  Delta is still surging everywhere but especially in those places with lower vaccination rates and among those who think that mask mandates are a mark of the devil and/or a violation of their right to get sick, take up hospital beds and die.  One bright note is that the pace of vaccination is up all over particularly in those parts of the country that have been lagging  possibly because some people who until now believed that the coronavirus was just a bad cold are finally getting that it is potentially deadly or possibly because some of the new vaccine mandates are starting to go into effect.  Of course, despite the dire situation in their states, Florida’s Governor DeSantis who one Florida school board member is calling the mad king of the COVID era is lashing out at everyone and standing by his so far unenforceable threats to defund schools that mandate masks.  He does have ample competition in the race to the bottom from Texas Governor Abbott who, together with his state’s indicted but effectively nefarious Attorney General Ken Paxton, is fighting somewhat succesfully in the Texas courts to prevent Texas towns and cities from imposing school mask mandates, all while a number of early starting Texas and Florida schools are already being forced into COVID lockdowns.

Stay safe.

Mask up indoors.

Get boosted when you are eligible.                    

 

Lollapalooza

The Big Lie: The Pillow Putz’ South Dakota cyber symposium where he promised he would reveal proof that the election had been stolen from the FG went off about as well as expected by everyone not named Mike Lindell.  No proof to share as even the Pillow man’s chief cyber expert refused to say he had anything to show, but given Lindell’s insanity and aberrant behavior someone should check to see if he’s back on crack.  The results of the 2020 Census, particularly the part about the white population of the US shrinking for the first time since 1790 and now under 60% combined with the under 18 portion of the population now being 52.7% people of color goes far towards explaining the Republican party’s efforts to suppress votes, something they’ll probably succeed at doing in the near term but, assuming Tucker Carlson’s preferred autocracy government doesn’t come to pass,  will fail at in the long run given the country’s changing faster than expected demographics.  Getting back to the 2020 election and the FGs efforts to get Biden’s Georgia victory tossed out, the mystery behind the sudden exit of Byung Pak the former US Attorney for Georgia who resigned rather suddenly in early January has now been revealed.  As suspected at the time, Pak left his position after being told that he was about to be fired for refusing to succumb to the FG’s pressure to say that the Georgia results were riddled with voter fraud.  While it’s good that Pak refused to lie about  the election results to placate the FG and also good that he showed up and revealed his experience during this week’s Senate Judiciary committee testimony, he doesn’t deserve any accolades as he didn’t have the courage to announce the reason for his resignation back in January when it could have been impactful.  As to misbehaving Republicans, it turns out that that Matt Gaetz isn’t the only one with sex trafficking problems, Republican strategist and sometime Fox guest Anton Lazarro was indicted on five counts of underage sex trafficking yesterday.  Speaking about Gaetz, he’s still free and out doing his thing which is astonishing given the thousands of texts and cash transaction records that his alleged partner in sex and drugs, one time Seminole County official Joel Greenberg has shared with investigators.  Some of those texts, many of which are now in the public domain, include pictures of Gaetz while documenting how Greenberg made arrangement for some drug fueled encounters for the two of them with a few “paid” dates.  Think about it, New York’s governor is out due to his bad behavior, none of which involved minors or drugs, while Gaetz remains a Congressman with all his Judiciary committee assignment intact.   

Viral Musings:  The FDA made it official early this morning, immune compromised individuals with certain as yet clearly defined underlying conditions are now eligible for Pfizer and Moderna booster shots.  That was previewed yesterday during another a bit too jumbled coronavirus press conferences. The Biden team deserves a lot of credit for basing their recommendations on science but really needs to work on message delivery.  The FG was batsh-t crazy when he told us to go the Lysoltini route but was more masterful as he pushed his lethal cures.  Probably because the actual procedures for how to get those shots will be finalized at the state level, it’s still unclear how those shots can be obtained but the details will probably begin to shake out today.  In any case the US has more than enough doses to provide those booster jabs.  In fact we have or will have enough boosters to provide shots to all of us if, or more likely when, the decision is formally made that the rest of us need one.  As to the durability of the shots we’ve gotten, it appears that Moderna’s may be holding up marginally better than Pfizer’s.  Sadly, though a lot of people will heed the call to line up for a boost, far too many eligible individuals continue to refuse to get jabbed and so the Delta variant and its potential followers continues to spread like crazy among many of the same people who think that mask wearing is a sign of devil worship.  On a positive note, the Supreme Court is okay with universities mandating vaccines for returning students.  Yesterday, Amy Coney Barrett, the designated Justice for Indiana, refused to block the University of  Indiana’s vaccine mandate. The Indiana mandate provides outs for religious objections which is probably all she cared about but her action bodes well for other mandates. As to vaccinations, as shown by the recently held Chicago Lollapalooza, vaccinations really do work. Despite fears that the event would be a virus super spreader, the results are in and with 90% of the attendees vaccinated it wasn’t.  On the face masks in school front, Florida’s Governor DeSantis, who for some inexplicable reason seems to think that killing children and teachers will help him in the long run, has backed down from threats that he’ll dock school superintendents and principals who mandate masking.  He’s still going to cause them trouble but probably because he can’t he won’t screw them out of their pay for putting their student’s lives first.  By comparison there were about 21,000 new COVID cases and 357 deaths in Florida yesterday and about 2400 cases and 18 deaths in New York State. To put that in perspective Florida’s population is 21.48 million, New York’s at 19.45 million is only a little less, hardly enough to justify the difference.    

138,595 new US cases yesterday

1022 US deaths

  

Pig Wings

Politics Unusual:  The writing has been on the wall for a while now but still it’s depressing to watch another Democratic politician go down while so many Republican ones get away with malfeasance or worse.  So say good bye to Andrew Cuomo who resigned yesterday oddly enough right after one of his lawyers argued that the accusations against him were false or exaggerated.  Cuomo’s undoing had more to do with the volume of those accusations and his combativeness that any single harassment allegation.  Say hello to Kathy Hochul who in two weeks will officially become New York State’s first female Governor.  Don’t feel bad if you know little about the upstate Hochul, few outside of Albany know much about her because at least in New York Lieutenant Governors generally don’t get much attention and it’s not like Cuomo gave her much of an opportunity to glom the limelight. Even my spellcheck doesn’t yet recognize her name.  While Cuomo’s resignation was playing out, Joe Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed through the Senate by a vote of 69 to 30. Despite the Former Guy’s complaints and threats, a lot of Republicans jumped on board including a few like Ohio’s Rob Portman, North Carolina’s Richard Burr and Missouri’s Roy Blunt, who because they’ve decided not to run for reelection in 2022 are more or less immune to the FG’s threats.  A few others Republican yes votes came from those like Maine’s Susan Collins and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy who recently won reelections and were already in the FG dog house as they voted for impeachment.  A few more like Utah’s Mitt Romney and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski have already made it clear that they care little about what the FG thinks.  Even Mitch McConnell voted for the bill likely because he knows that at the end of the day infrastructure financing is both needed and popular, his state will benefit and because supporting a significant piece of Biden’s legislation program bolsters his position that the arcane filibuster should remain, at least for things that he doesn’t want to see passed like anything that ensures voter’s rights. Though the bipartisan infrastructure bill has made it through the Senate it’s not clear when it will be brought up in Nancy Pelosi’s House where progressives don’t want to vote on it until its companion piece, their wish list budget reconciliation package is ready for a vote.  To that end the Senate also passed a $3.5 trillion budget plan yesterday chock full of all those things, including climate initiatives, paid parental leave, child care, education, expansions to health care, and “revenues” as in taxes that they couldn’t get included in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.  The $3.5 trillion plan passed on a partisan basis with all Republicans voting no and all Democrats including Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema voting yes.  By the way despite all those complaints directed her way by House progressives, Arizona’s Sinema is getting a lot of the credit for making the bipartisan bill happen.

Viral Musings:  While Cuomo is exiting stage left, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Texas’ Greg Abbott and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem continue to fail miserably on the coronavirus front.  New cases are surging in Texas and Florida and if last year’s Sturgis Motorcycle is any example, this year’s which Noem is all in on will likely spur a further surge in her state and everywhere else those unmasked and unvaccinated motorcyclists return home to after it’s over.  Though a number of localities are flaunting Abbott’s and DeSantis’ prohibitions and threatened retaliations against mandatory face coverings, both Governors seem more than willing to accept, even solicit, help for their overtaxed and flailing health care systems because big federal government is only bad when it infringes on your right to get sick but not when you are actually dying and need a ventilator, a nurse and a doctor. Delta remains everywhere though former FDA Head Scott Gottlieb continues to insist that it’s peaking and that we’ll be out of the worst, at least from Delta, in a few weeks’ time.  His optimism, if you can call it that, may or may not be warranted and given the unpredictability of the virus no one really knows what will happen or what comes next so Biden’s team, the military and some in the corporate world are doing what they can, imposing and pushing for vaccine mandates.  Of course not everyone is onboard with that, Margie Q has been suspended from Twitter, this time for a week, for spreading more vaccine lies and for insisting that the FDA reject full approval of any of the vaccines, something that is expected to start happening in early September.  Notably United and Hawaiian Airlines are mandating that their employees get vaccinated but unfortunately Delta, American and Southwest are not.  Ugh.  According to the NY Times, there were almost 162k new cases of COVID in the US yesterday making for a rolling 7 day average of  118k.  There were more than 1000 deaths taking the US to a total of 618K.       

And More: Things in Afghanistan are going about as well as was expected by those who believed that the moment we left the country would implode which isn’t to say that we should have stayed for another twenty years but still it’s hard to watch particularly for those who stood by our side and the women who’ll suffer the most.  Here in the US, though it’s August, the FG is not back in the Oval Office despite the best attempts by his ally Pillow Man Mike Lindell who has moved his advertising from Fox to of all places MSNBC where his ads have actually shown up on late night repeats of the Rachel Maddow show.  Lindell’s cyber symposium where he claims he’ll be “proving” all his election conspiracy lies got off to a late start yesterday either because it’s technology was hacked or because his brain is melting, or both.  In other election “lie” news Dominion Voting Systems, the makers of those voting machines that Lindell and former Justice Department lawyer Clark insist were influenced by foreign lasers and the like, sued OANN and anchors Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb and Newsmax, alleging they promoted fraudulent allegations knowing they were false and “​​helped create and cultivate an alternate reality where up is down, pigs have wings, and Dominion engaged in a colossal fraud to steal the presidency” from the FG “by rigging the vote.”  Dominion also sued Patrick Byrne, founder and former CEO of Overstock and one of Red Sparrow Maria Butina’s supporters and former paramours alleging that he, a major spreader of election conspiracies,  “manufactured and promoted fake evidence to convince the world that the 2020 election had been stolen” using the company’s voting machines, saying he did so “to boost his own investments in blockchain voting technology.”  Dominion has already sued the Pillow Man, lawyer Lin Wood and Rudy Giuliani and is expected to add others, perhaps even a former president, to its list.                                      

Texas Lice

Viral Musings:  The Delta variant makes up more than 90% of coronavirus cases in the US where the 7 day average of new cases and deaths is up to 110,000 and 516 respectively.  Florida with almost 20,000 daily cases and 88 deaths and Texas with 14,000 new cases and 57 deaths make up a disproportionate amount of the country’s morbidity and mortality.  Florida’s Governor DeSantis continues to insist that he’s got COVID just where he wants it.  He remains combative, not with the virus but with health officials, and continues to insist that children shouldn’t be mandated to wear masks in schools if their parents find the requirement offensive and/or burdensome, particularly notable since Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson now regrets banning mask mandates and is trying to revoke his ban given the Delta onslaught.  Despite pushback from the cruise industry DeSantis doesn’t get why anyone thinks that travelers should be subjected to vaccine mandates an edict that the Norwegian cruise company which recently prevailed in court disagrees with.  Texas’ Governor Abbott appears to be team DeSantis, at least with regard to the virus.  In Texas where every case of head lice in school must be reported, officials have decided that there’s no need to tell parents about COVID cases in their children’s classroom because why bother extending contact tracing from lice to a potentially deadly virus?  DeSantis has experienced a dip in state polls but neither he nor Abbott are facing anywhere near the problems of New York’s Governor Cuomo who with the overnight resignation of his right aide Melissa DeRosa who helped us through our COVID peak is dancing on increasingly thin ice.  Cuomo’s end won’t be due to COVID, while case and deaths are up to 3400 and 10 respectively New York’s numbers pale in comparison to Florida and Texas.  His problem is all about those sexual harassment claims, the ones’ that the Albany DA who is moving forward with an investigation said could result in a misdemeanor charge. Oh the irony, four years of a multi assault accused president responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, bodies dropping unnecessarily in Florida and Texas and New York’s Democratic governor is the one facing the consequences of his actions, which isn’t to say that his behavior wasn’t reprehensible.  In other COVID news, Israelis over 60 have started getting their booster shots and reports are that so far the side effects have been no worse and frequently better than those from their second shots.  It’s highly likely that the US booster rollout will start in September, that the Pfizer shot, the first to apply, will get its full approval around Labor Day and that the elementary school set will get their shots late Fall, a date that can’t come soon enough for many.

WTF Chronicles:  Getting back to the FG, the one time president who seems really pissed off about Biden’s notable progress on the infrastructure front, on Friday his last “acting” Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen voluntarily spent some quality time with the Justice Department’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz and then followed up with seven hours of Saturday testimony to a bipartisan group from the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Though the details of his testimony aren’t public yet, preliminary reports are that he described how with the help of acting Civil Division head Jeffrey Clark, a Trump acolyte who believed that Chinese thermostats, yes you read that right, had been used to switch votes to Joe Biden, the FG tried way to hard to get several states to overturn their election results so that his coup could succeed. Clark is no longer at the Justice Department as he’s found new employment with the New Civil Liberties Org, an ultra-conservative legal group where he’s been tasked with battling unlawful administrative power, not to be confused with powers such as overturning fair elections.  As to the DOJ Inspector, he released his very long awaited report on those leaks from Rudy Giuliani about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Andrew Weiner’s laptop in the run up to the 2016 election.  His conclusion is that though Rudy chatted a lot with former FBI agents, his insistence that he was just making things up can’t be disproved.  There’s no evidence that Rudy actually got any inside poop from anyone who was then a current employee of the FBI.  Unfortunately, Rudy’s “made up” spin about Clinton’s emails in the run up to the 2016 election influenced former FBI Director James Comey to make the statements that he made right before the 2016 election and we know how that turned out for the country.  Curiously the Horowitz report on Giuliani did note that there were way too many to explain phone calls from FBI agents to phone numbers at Giuliani’s law firm, he just couldn’t tie those calls directly to Rudy though some agents appear to be facing some kind of punishment for their dialing habits.

Infrastructure Politics:  Despite the best efforts of some Republican Senators to derail it and the FG’s threats to campaign against each and every Republican Senator who votes for it, the bipartisan portion of Joe Biden’s infrastructure legislation is just about done, at least done in the Senate.  Once it is voted out of the Senate it still has to get through the House where Speaker Pelosi is going to have to do her best maneuvering to keep the progressives who make up her very slim majority on board.  Despite pleas from moderate Democrats to put the bipartisan legislation up for an immediate vote so that they can go home and campaign on it, she might decide that she has to hold it up until the larger partisan reconciliation package emerges from the Senate. Then again, if Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, one of the Republicans who made up the bipartisan team that negotiated the legislation, is right, and it’s not clear that he is, there may be enough Republican votes in the House, not from leadership but from the bipartisan problem solver’s caucus to make up for the few Democrats that fall by the way side. As to the reconciliation package, in addition to what is being called human infrastructure it may also include a much awaited provision to save the Dreamers as well as an increase in that annoying debt ceiling limit that needs to be increased periodically.  August is going to be a long month.        

Purple Pillow Pusher

Lunatic Log:  More information about just how close the FG came to pulling off a coup continue to emerge.  This week we learned some additional details about the efforts of Jeffrey Clark who served as head of the FG’s Department of Justice’s Civil Division.  Clark who either bought into all of the conspiracy theories about the presidential election being hacked by Chinese space monsters, Jewish lasers and the like and/or who just had ambitions of his own and wanted to become the FG’s next Attorney General tried to get his bosses at the DOJ to sign off on a memo telling Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp to call a special session of his state’s legislature to overturn the election results; the memo also said that if Kemp was too weak kneed to do so, the state legislature could, more or less a threat that FG would go around him if necessary. Clark’s efforts which extended to a few other states as well were thwarted by Richard Donoghue who was then the Deputy Attorney General reporting to Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen who’d replaced AG Barr following his resignation.  Donoghue and then Rosen rebuffed Clark’s efforts as both baseless and a violation of DOJ policy.  Senior management at DOJ were so concerned that given the FG’s backing Clark would succeed at getting Rosen fired that one senior aide, Patrick Hovakimian, prepared a letter of resignation saying that he and Donoghue would make bigly news by resigning if Rosen was fired.  That draft resignation missive is now in the public domain.  The mango one with the orange make-up has had little to say about any of that “fake news” as he’s been far too busy slamming US Olympians like that “purple haired” soccer star Megan Rapinoe whose superior play locked up her team’s bronze medal game victory, shuffling his “campaign funds” from account to account and preparing for his next rally. Mean time his good buddy former crack head and current pillow pusher Mike Lindell continues to push all kinds of conspiracies about the election; his current one “proves” that the Chinese hacked a whole bunch of election machines, turning FG votes into Biden ones, easily disprovable as election hardware is not connected to the Internet and  anyway back-up paper ballots confirm the real results.  Lindell is so furious that Fox refuses to cover his live streamed event on the election “theft” that he’s pulled all his ads from the “failing” network.  Those pillow ads have been the mainstay of Tucker Carlson’s program’s advertising revenue but since he brings in so many paying viewers Fox doesn’t worry about the fact that he has few if any remaining advertisers.  For his part Carlson who spent the week in Hungary hobnobbing and endorsing that country’s autocratic, anti-immigrant leader Viktor Orban’s Nazi like policies doesn’t appear all that concerned about losing the pillow pusher as he’s too busy calling for Orban’s policies to be instated in the US, a message that Stephen Miller has also been out marketing to Republican donors.

Viral Musings:  Back at home the Delta strain is doing what it does best: spreading.  Though stories of breakthrough cases are hard to avoid, the reality is that Delta is really a much greater problem for the unvaccinated because they, unlike those who’ve gotten jabbed, are far, far more likely to catch the virus, get seriously ill and even die.  To that end we keep hearing sad but not shocking stories of anti-vaxxers like H. Scott Apley, a Texas GOP official who consistently mocked COVID vaccines and masks on social media.  Apley died yesterday five days after posting a meme on Facebook, questioning the idea of getting inoculated against the virus. One likely less dire story involves Republican Congressman Ralph Norman of South Carolina who together with Congresswoman Margie Q is suing Speaker Pelosi over her House mask mandate and the $500 fine he received for failing to wear one.  The twice jabbed Norman is now suffering “minor” symptoms from a breakthrough case of COVID. On that front, Senator Lindsey Graham who appears to be recovering from the flu like symptoms associated with his break through case is calling for the FG to get out there and tell his base to get vaccinated as he attributes his relatively quick recovery to the fact that he was protected by the vaccine. No word from the FG but Florida’s Ron DeSantis says that the current huge Delta outbreak in Florida is due to Biden’s failure to curb all those unvaccinated masses crossing the Texas border from Mexico because when anything goes wrong Republicans always point to illegal immigration as the cause.  That’s not to say that there aren’t lots of migrants crossing the border and that some of them aren’t infected, but they are not the cause of Florida’s problems. In other viral news, Moderna’s mRNA vaccine appears to be holding its own six months out but like Pfizer, Moderna officials expect that a booster jab will be required for at least some of us before winter.  Thought they’re not prepared yet to show results, the Moderna folks have been studying the safety of mixing and matching shots, something that is occurring overseas and is also being done by those who’ve managed to supplement their J & J jab with an mRNA shot.  As to the virus don’t panic yet about those other strains that we are starting to hear about, so far the Delta strain is so dominant and so contagious that it is overwhelming the others, at least so far. Oy.             

Mask up when appropriate.  You’ll be protecting yourself and the vulnerable like the children who are not yet eligible for shots.   

127k US COVID cases yesterday 

574 Deaths                   

 Drain Circling

Tipping Points:  There were 149,788 new coronavirus cases and 668 related deaths in the US yesterday; so much for that low disease summer that we all thought the vaccines would bring us. The spike in cases is largely due to the hyper contagious Delta variant running amok, mostly but not entirely through the unvaccinated population which, despite the US finally making Biden’s 70% of all adults with at least one shot goal, is still finding plenty of people to infect including children everywhere and those adults who still refuse to get vaccinated.  To convince more of the unvaccinated adults to get with the program, NYC announced that it will be requiring proof of vaccination for entry to restaurants, fitness centers and indoor venues. NYC is not along, a number of corporations around the country are now requiring their employees to get jabbed or else.  Notably Tyson Foods, hardly a woke entity, is requiring its 120,000 US workforce to get vaccinated, a policy that Disney put in place for its salaried and non-union hourly employees last week.  The number of corporations pushing mandates for employees is growing and is likely to grow even more after Labor Day, especially if as expected the Pfizer’s Emergency Use Authorization is upgraded to a full one with Moderna’s and J & J’s expected to follow.   The vaccine mandates have got to be annoying wannabee president, flailing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who continues to insist that no one should be shamed for not getting vaccinated and that no one should mandate that children wear masks in school if their foolish parents don’t say they should.  His state accounted for one third of yesterday’s US coronavirus new case count.  President Biden called for DeSantis to get with the program on COVID, and Floridians, even some Republican ones, appear to get that DeSantis’ approach to coronavirus mitigation is woefully lacking as a new poll shows him in a statistical tie with former Governor Charlie Crist, one of those vying for the Democratic nomination.  Florida polls are notoriously inaccurate and the gubernatorial election is a year away but that’s a significant decline for DeSantis.  Talking about governors NY’s one time COVID hero Andrew Cuomo appears to be circling the drain.  Yesterday, NY Attorney General Latisha James announced the results of her investigation into those sexual harassment allegations against him. To put it mildly the conclusions were not good and just about everyone including Biden who to date has stayed away from commenting on Cuomo’s troubles is now calling for him to resign.  Cuomo, of course, continues to insist that he’s just an irrepressible hugger, a point he tried to prove by showing what was clearly a waiting in the wings video of his and other’s hugs.  Unfortunately for him, that video and all of his protestations are unlikely to save him.  Like Florida, NY has a gubernatorial election coming up in 2022 and Democrats need a viable candidate or else the state will be run by one of those aspiring Republican candidates, someone like Trump supporter Lee Zeldin or maybe even Andrew Giuliani. Even though a number of New Yorkers would probably still vote for Cuomo, he’s unlikely to be on that ticket because he appears to have lost the support of state Democratic leadership who is likely to start moving to impeach him if he doesn’t resign first.   

Politics Unusual:  The Senate unanimously voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the officers of the US Capitol Police and the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department for their heroic efforts pushing back at the January 6th insurrectionists.  Unfortunately that delayed appreciation came too late for two of the beleaguered defenders, Kyle DeFreytag and Gunther Hashida, who committed suicide this week.  While it’s impossible to know exactly why they did what they did, it’s more than fair to assume that their mental state was hardly helped by the right wing echo chamber’s insistence that the insurrectionists were nice tourists who were just at the Capitol to hug the officers.  Speaking of one of those “huggers” the Former Guy is now 1 for 2.  Last week, his favored candidate lost a run off for a Texas Congressional seat, leading many pundits to say that his magic was waning but maybe their reports of his end were premature as last night his candidate won a special election in a mostly red Ohio district.  In another race, in Ohio’s heavily blue Columbus area, the Hillary Clinton/Jim Clyburn endorsed moderate Shontel Brown comfortably defeated the Bernie Sanders/Squad endorsed candidate Nina Turner for the seat vacated by Marcia Flood who left Congress to serve as Biden’s Housing Secretary. It turns out that Turner’s criticism of Biden’s not left enough policies as well as memories of how she treated Clinton didn’t go over with the mainstream. That said, not all squad members had a bad day.  One of the newest Congresswoman Cori Bush,  chalked up a notable victory yesterday.  Bush who was once homeless had been sleeping outside of the Capitol to protest the end of the eviction freeze. As a result of a combination of Speaker Pelosi’s insider efforts and Bush keeping the issue front and center,  Biden got the CDC to extend the federal eviction moratorium in most areas of the country for two more months, that is assuming that the Supreme Court which isn’t all that supportive doesn’t weigh in to tank those plans. Getting back to the Former Guy, would it surprise you to learn that though he’s sitting on a $100 million war chest, funded largely by members of his base who contributed thinking that they would be funding his battle against the “steal,” he’s hasn’t spent money on those election legal fights or Rudy Giuliani’s legal bills but has been using the funds on his personal legal expenses and for his political action committee staff.  And though he did send a last minute infusion to his losing Texas candidate, he mostly hasn’t been contributing to others because after all grifters got to grift.  By the way, according to The New Yorker, those election steel legal fights, most notably the long sham audit in Maricopa County is being funded by a number of right wing Republican entities including Overstock founder Patrick Byrne who was one of Russian Sparrow Maria Butina’s boyfriends and the Heritage Foundation, the holier than thou group that also tees up Conservative nominees for the Supreme Court.  The FG is only one of the threats to the continuation of Democracy as we know it.    

   

Party Time?

Viral Musings: First the good news,  the US women’s gymnastics team accumulated quite a few medals this weekend.  Suni Lee won the all around gold and the uneven bar bronze while her teammate Mykayla Skinner, who was only able to compete because the GOAT Simone Biles dropped out, won the vault silver and, spoiler alert, this morning Jade Carey won the floor exercise gold.  Moreover as of now Biles plans to compete on Tuesday in the balance beam finals.  Now the not so good news, the Delta coronavirus variant continues to run amok through the US, especially in places where vaccination rates are low. The 7 day average of new cases is just under 80,000 and the 7 day average death count is 362, low when compared to the peak but climbing.  Though the lion’s share of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths are among the unvaccinated, the vaccinated have become infected as well though to a far lesser degree.  Though those breakthrough cases are still the exception and most of them result in asymptomatic or less severe cases, the press loves reporting them and so does everyone else. That reporting combined with confusing messaging from the CDC, not to mention leaked documents of internal discussions, is making the problem seem worse than it is, or at least worse than it has been so far, which isn’t to say that it’s not a problem. Mask mandates are back in high virus zones, congested areas and everywhere where people are virus wary though they remain controversial with the usual set of delusional agitators who seem to believe that wearing a mask is worse than getting intubated until, of course, one of them gets intubated.  Then  there is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who despite the fact that cases and related hospitalizations in his state are at record levels and represent one fifth of all the country’s cases took time out of his busy campaign schedule to issue an executive order banning mandatory school mask mandates. Don’t assume that DeSantis will be penalized for his virus failure, just a few months ago despite evidence to the contrary, Politico and a number of other media outlets that should have known better cited his superior virus management skills.  The CDC should consider tapping into DeSantis’ public relations team because they could use some better spin doctors. Texas’ Governor Abbott may want to call in some PR experts too, his state’s death count now exceeds New York’s, shocking when you consider than New York was ambushed and Texas had plenty of warning.   On the booster front, Israel has started contacting their 60 and over crowd, telling them to start lining up for third shots and Germany’s health minister wants to offer an mRNA booster to the very elderly and people with weakened immune systems starting in September.  He also wants to start vaccinating 12 to 17 year old’s who to date have not been eligible for jabs in Germany.  Here in the US vaccination rates are climbing back up as a number of vax avoiders appear to either be scared by rising infection levels, responding to private sector mandates and/or want to get the $100 being offered up in various locales. 

Human Resources:  Proving that Republicans aren’t the only ones who are tone deaf former President Obama will be holding a 500 person 60^th birthday celebration at his home on Martha’s Vineyard this week. The festivities will be outside, everyone will be vaccinated and tested and the Obama’s will have a COVID Coordinator on site because doesn’t everyone, but still the optics aren’t pretty even if the outcome will probably be okay.  That said Obama’s messaging smells less awful than what’s been coming out of GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s mouth.  Speaking at a Tennessee fundraising event attended by 1500 likeminded Republicans, McCarthy who will become Speaker after the midterms if, as predicted, the Republicans win back the House, said that “it will be hard not to hit Nancy Pelosi with a gavel” when he takes over. Responding to criticism about his remarks, McCarthy who voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and who doesn’t seem all that interested in getting to the bottom of who motivated those “nice tourists” who called for Pelosi’s head on January 6^th said he was just joking because as we all know joking about bashing women is okay and on brand.  One person who might agree with that is former football player Hershel Walker.  The Former Guy, and a number of other Republicans not named Mitch McConnell think Walker would be the logical candidate to challenge Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock who is up for reelection in 2022.  Walker has a history of wife abuse, has a checkered business past, isn’t a resident of Georgia and says he’s been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder  but given his race the FG, who shares a lot of Walker’s traits, believes that he’d be the perfect candidate to trounce Warnock.  Besides the association with football worked in Alabama where former coach/current Senator Tommy Tuberville beat Doug Jones and aren’t all southern states like all Black people the same? Then there’s Oklahoma where despite all the pushback that Margie Q got for equating vaccine mandates with Holocaust events, a post on the state Republican Party’s official Facebook page features a picture of a yellow Star of David with the word “unvaccinated” on it while urging people to call the lieutenant governor and ask him to call a special session to prohibit employers from requiring employees to get vaccinated. Getting back to the Former Guy and his big election lie, at the end of last week via contemporaneous notes taken by a member of then acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s team that were provided by the Justice Department to Congress we learned that when Rosen refused to announce that the November election results needed to be tossed because they were riddled with fraud, the FG told him  “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.” By R congressmen think Mo Brooks and Gym Jordan and the like and maybe even Senator Lindsey Graham who tried to get Georgia to decertify their election results. Though they’re not released yet, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department told the IRS that they should release the FG’s tax returns to the House Ways and means Committee.  Unfortunately, a federal judge gave the FG’s team until this Wednesday to challenge the Justice Department’s decision.    

More:  The text of the bipartisan infrastructure plan is out.  Progressives are stressing because a number of moderate Democrats are likely to crimp their plans, hemming in the size of the really huge reconciliation package that they want to see passed at the same time.  And Democrats are also fighting over the best way to extend the expiring virus eviction ban with everyone pointing the responsibility for the extension at someone else.  Welcome to August.