Send in the Clowns

Turkeys and Menorahs: Last week before we went off to our Thanksgiving feasts we learned that it was okay for a teenager to play vigilante in Colorado even if those actions ended up with some dead bodies, that it was not so okay to kill a man for jogging while Black and that despite the FG’s assertion there weren’t good people on both sides.  Kyle Rittenhouse, that teenager, has now visited Mar a Lago, appeared on fish stick heir Tucker Carlson’s show, become a hero of the right and is on the receiving end of several internship offers from a number of members of the Republican House clown squad.  He’s also provoked a fun to watch fight between some members of the FG’s loon squad with lawyer Lin Wood, Michael Flynn, Rittenhouse’s mother and Sidney Powell all taking potshots at each other over money, Q and other issues. As for the jogging murder, it turns out that calling out jogger Arnaud Arbury’s unpedicured toes as evidence that he deserved to be gunned down was probably not the best defense strategy to employ.  Similarly and thank goodness Virginia jurors get that neo-Nazis extolling white supremacy and the like while running down Heather Heyer was something that deserved consequences, financial ruin while not enough is better than nothing.  With Thanksgiving behind us and only one Chanukah light lit, this year by second gentleman Doug Emhoff,  it’s time to focus on what’s to come before year end.  The Government still needs to get funded, the debt limit needs to be raised, and there’s still that Build Back Better legislation to get passed through the Senate.         

Viral Musings: Going into Thanksgiving the talk was mostly about increasing COVID positivity levels in cold places with the focus on getting people vaccinated and boosted to blunt the seasonal increase in cases.  That’s still a big problem but now we know it may only be the tip of the iceberg or in this case the spike because as we’ve been told since the beginning of the pandemic, viruses especially coronaviruses mutate continuously and that absent high worldwide vaccination levels we ran the risk that a mutation that was both highly contagious and evasive of current vaccines would likely evolve.  The fear now is that with Omicron we’ve got one of those evasive and contagious variants to contend with.  Despite all the panic and accompanying market drops and travel bans we don’t yet know enough about Omicron, we’re not even sure if it’s as lethal as its predecessor variants as very preliminary reports out of South Africa indicate that it may not be.  That said the suspicion is that Omicron is highly contagious, possibly more contagious than Delta, the previous king of contagion.  We also don’t know if its plethora of spike mutations will allow it to evade, or even render the current crop of vaccines less effective.  For now the experts who are quick to point out that they need a few more weeks to get a handle on Omicron’s evil powers, seem to believe that the current vaccines and boosters remain the answer, or at least they hope so.  To the extent that a tweaked vaccine is needed both Moderna and Pfizer appear to be on the case, asserting that they can have a new mRNA version ready early next year. And while we’re into not so good news on the virus front, it turns out that the Merck antiviral pill, one of the one’s that was supposed to be our ticket out of the pandemic, has a much lower effectiveness at preventing hospitalization than promised, 30% rather than the 50% originally billed. So for now stay tuned, wear a mask when indoors and in crowds and, if you haven’t already, get boosted!                    

Human Resources: Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, the gun toting high school dropout from Colorado put her foot in her mouth last week, going after Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar not over her positions which may be fair to criticize but over her ethnicity which is not.  Boebert more than suggested that Omar, who she referred to as a member of the jihad squad, was a terrorist.  The sad thing about Boebert is that little about what she said was all that shocking given who she is as she, like far too many members of the Republican caucus including the sanctioned Representatives Gosar and Margie Q and the Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz and North Carolina not so wonder boy Madison Cawthorn, are what they are, and still they were voted in by their constituents and in most cases will be again while run of the mill conservatives like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney suffer. Facing a lot of pushback and probably a call from her party’s sniveling House leader Kevin McCarthy, Boebert did issue a lame “apology” of sorts but it was clear that she had her fingers crossed behind her back and it was also clear that McCarthy who finally did say something meaningless about her hate speech only cares to the extent it damages his chances of becoming Speaker in 2022. Speaking of clowns, Sean Parnell who the Former Guy had endorsed in the Pennsylvania Senate race, pulled out after losing custody of his children to his estranged wife who has accused him of abuse but nothing to worry about as another clown appear to be entering that race since Dr. Mehmet Oz of Oprah Winfrey fame appears poised to jump in because who doesn’t need another quick cure peddling medicine man in the Senate?  On the state front, Matthew McConaughey who was toying with running for Governor of Texas announced that now is not his time but Texas being Texas, “big lie” insurrectionist supporting Congressman Louis Gohmert has thrown his hat into the ring for State Attorney General, threatening the current one, the indicted FG fan Ken Paxton.  George P Bush son of Jeb who refuses to ever criticize the Former Guy despite all those nasty things he said about his father and his mother’s ethnicity is also in the race.  As to the House, a large number of Democrats, have announced plans to retire, they’re mostly older and from safe seats, still their departure plans likely reflect their expectation that Kevin Q really could become Speaker after the midterms.  Ugh.