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