Relentless

Viral Musings: As every New Yorker who follows traffic gridlocks knows, late September is when international leaders come to the city for the UN’s annual meeting.  This year the meetings are once again being held in person which means hundreds of possibly unvaccinated dignitaries are interacting with each other and roaming the streets of New York because though the UN participants are supposed to be vaccinated, officials are relying on an honor system rather than trying to confirm status.  One of those leaders, Brazil’s Bolsonaro isn’t even pretending to be vaxxed.  An adherent to the Rand Paul philosophy, he says that he’s good to go because he’s already had COVID.  His country’s health minister, a member of Bolsonaro’s entourage, has now tested positive and is in quarantine.  The minister says that his is a breakthrough case, apparently he received one of the Chinese vaccines. Note to all, if you run into any other members of the Brazil delegation or anyone they were seen sharing pizza with, keep your distance.  The presence of all those possibly positive and/or unvaxxed attendees explains why President Biden returned quickly to Washington DC after delivering his speech to the General Assembly.  Getting back to COVID, while still high the number of US daily cases appears to be finally “dipping” below 130,000.  Unfortunately, daily deaths, a lagging indicator, are still running above 2000.  Crossing through 675,000, the US COVID death count now exceeds that of the previous winner, the deadly 1918 influenza epidemic.  On the vaccine front, we’re still waiting for the official announcement from the CDC.  They are due to meet today and tomorrow before announcing the details of the much awaited booster plan.  Yesterday J & J released results from their not yet reviewed studies showing that while their one jab shot has been about 80% effective at preventing hospitalizations, a second jab raises its effectiveness to 94%.  Tennessee, one of the red states where inadequate mitigation is a thing, appears to be taking a page from Florida Governor DeSantis’ how horrible can you get playbook.  They are now recommending that scarce monoclonal antibody treatments only be used on the unvaccinated.  As to DeSantis, he appears to have found a new state Surgeon General, one who isn’t all that into either vaccines or masks.  Just what Florida needs.

Legal Update:  The Former Guy is now suing his niece Mary, the NY Times and its reporters over their in depth analysis of the tax information that she provided the paper. Mary, not one to mince words, responded by calling him a “f—king loser.” The  loser may have a few other things to explain, as, based on documents filed in a defamation lawsuit from a former employee of Dominion Voting Machines,  the NY Times reported that officials working for his reelection campaign were aware that the claims that the Dominion machines were flipping votes from the FG to Biden that were pushed by him and his crack- a-jack legal team were baseless not that any of that stopped anyone named Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell or Mike Lindell from pushing those claims. Regarding the 2020 election, Peril, the new tome written by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa includes a copy of a six point plan authored by John Eastman, another one of the FG’s lawyers.  The Eastman memo provided a game plan for how VP Pence could throw out the official 2020 election results and announce that the FG had won reelection, democracy be damned.  The plan which the FG embraced was so nuts that loyalist Senators Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham rejected it. Worth noting, Eastman, a conservative darling, previously argued that Kamala Harris could not be the VP, something to do with questioning her citizenship because her parents were immigrants.  In other news, while the FG crowd would prefer that everyone remain focused on the Democratic lawyer who was indicted last week for allegedly lying to the FBI, an accusation that might not go the distance, two GOP operatives, with long time Republican ties that include working for Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul,  have now been charged with funneling Russian money to the FG’s 2016 campaign.   And for good measure, Allen Weisselberg’s lawyers say that they expect a few more indictments will be handed down in his case; no one is suggesting at this point that any of the targeted share the FG’s name, though it is worth noting that son Eric who is scheduled to speak at a Q Anon anti-vaxx event seems to be having a bad week as Marc Mukasey, one of his lawyers quit yesterday.    

Other News:  The Democrats are still struggling to get their two part Build Back Better funding legislation passed.  Speaker Pelosi appears to be putting in a considerable amount of overtime engaging in serious arm twisting.  The debt ceiling looms. By a party vote, House Democrats passed a bill last night to fund the government through Dec. 3 and to suspend the nation's borrowing limit until the end of 2022, sending it to the Senate where Mitch and his Republicans who seem not to care that a national default would have dire economic consequences have vowed to block it because they can.  Members of the “squad” forced the funding of Israel’s Iron Dome out of the bill and though it will likely still get funded through another bill, that action probably just handed the Republicans another effective 2022 talking point.  On the abortion front, after a Texas doctor wrote an op-ed admitting to performing 6 week plus procedures in violation of the new Texas law he was sued; one of those suits comes from an Arkansas lawyer on house arrest another from a man in Chicago.  Neither of the plaintiffs seem to care much about abortions, the Arkansas lawyer may just want to cash in while the Chicago man says that he wants to see the law overturned and figured his would be a good test case.  Regardless of their motives, their suits mean that the Texas law will once again be challenged in court.  The Haitian migrant crisis is both tragic and ugly and for different reasons is fueling fury from both the right and left.  When an administration has to explain that the claim that whips are being used on migrants by Border Patrol agents isn’t  accurate because what looked like whips were “just” reins it’s a bigly problem.  Talking problems, there’s been a lot of press about the tragic drone attack that killed innocent Afghan civilians rather than the terrorists who killed so many at Kabul airport.  That event was tragic but sadly not a drone outlier as drone attacks all to frequently get the wrong target, which is one of the reasons that President Obama who authorized them quite often insisted on final sign off, a practice that the FG unwound by giving “trigger” authority back to the military.  As Biden said at the UN yesterday, it’s time to move from “relentless war” to “relentless diplomacy” if that’s even possible.