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.