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.