Back to the USSR

Subpoena, Subpoena:  Before the weekend the January 6^th committee issued a few more subpoenas.  Fourteen of them went to two fake delegates from each of the seven states that sent bogus alternative delegates slates to the National Archives.  Those are the faux slates that the FG and his kraken team of lawyers pushed former Vice President Pence to include in the official count in lieu of the legitimate Joe Biden ones. The seven states include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. To be clear, although the results were close in most of those states, Joe Biden won all of them even after the various and sundry audits were completed.  Curiously, one of those states, the very “blue” New Mexico, shouldn’t even be on the list.  The results there were neither controversial nor close, Biden won by 10 percentage points, but the crafty FG contingent needed five more electoral votes to pull off their planned coup so they chose New Mexico because with five votes, it was a convenient “plug.”  The committee also subpoenaed Judd Deere, the FG’s former deputy press secretary.  Apparently, other cooperating witnesses have told the Committee that Deere was involved in formulating the White House response to the January 6^th attack on the Capitol and was present at a meeting where the FG sought ideas for getting the “RINOs in Congress to do the right thing,” and by right thing, he meant execute the coup. As to the FG, he held another one of his pre-campaign rallies over the weekend, this one with the usual swastikas, MAGA hats and Q Anon flags was in Texas.  Since his pro-vaccine pitch hasn’t been going over all that well with his anti-vax fanbase, he’s deleted any suggestions that getting vaccinated is  good from his repertoire, shifting to some new material.  That new stuff includes a “suggestion” that when he returns to the White House he’ll treat those January 6 “tourists” fairly, in other words he’ll give them pardons because nothing insures that they won’t testify against him more than making it clear that he has their back.  Hey, obstruction worked for him with Flynn and Manafort so why not try it with a bunch of truly delusional fans? And to make it clear that he really was trying to stage a coup, last night the FG issued another one of his twitter alternative statements in which he said the fact that Congress, perhaps even a requisite bipartisan group of Senators, is considering amending the Electoral Count Act to clarify that the VP doesn’t have the option to pick and choose among competing electoral college slates means that the VP did have the option to do so in 2020.  An admission against interest, but that’s never worked against him before.

The Docket: One more thing on the legal front.  Remember John Durham, he’s the special counsel appointed by former AG Bill Barr, the one who was supposed to issue a pre-election report questioning the predicate for the Mueller investigation and didn’t but did manage to get an indictment against a Clinton related lawyer Michael Sussmann.  The indictment against Sussmann was for lying for failing to mention his Clinton relationship when he reported on some potentially strange goings on between Russia’s Alfa bank servers and those of the FG that didn’t turn up anything or at least haven’t so far.  Well, late Friday during a blizzard, Durham’s team filed an admission that they failed to share some potentially exculpatory information with Sussmann’s lawyers.  Nothing like trying to hide your questionably convenient oopsie moment in a pile of snow?  No doubt there’s more to come on this.

Viral Musings.  New cases of COVID are definitely trending downward but deaths, a lagging indicator, are still very high, with the 7 day average over 2500.  Those deaths are mostly among the unvaccinated.  New York State’s positivity rate is down to 5.06% with Manhattan’s down to 2.8%.  Given the Northeast blizzard and the fact that testing sites were closed on Saturday, data over the next few days will likely be sketchy.  Spotify must be feeling some pressure, not because the company cares that its most expensive content provider is  spreading COVID lies, but because its stock price is down, likely the result of some members of the older classic rocker pulling their music from its platform in protest of the crap that Joe Rogan has been pushing on his way too popular show.  Last night the company announced plans to issue public platform content rules intended to address COVID misinformation.  Following their announcement Joe Rogan said that though he thinks his anti vax guests are highly credentialed wonderful people even if their information is killing people, he will try to provide a more balanced group of experts going forward. Wink, wink.  As to COVID, the new more contagious subvariant of Omicron making the rounds in Europe is here.  The guru set says that it’s no worse than original Omicron.  #Sigh      

And:  As expected most, though not all, Republicans are slamming Joe Biden’s as yet unannounced Supreme Court pick because that’s what both parties do these days and besides she’s going to be a Black woman.  The situation in Ukraine continues to percolate with Putin deciding how far he can go towards achieving his goal of recreating the USSR and Biden and our European allies deciding how far they can push back. In case you’re wondering Tucker Carlson who’s heading to Hungary to canoodle with Viktor Orban denies he’s a Russian tool.

 

Maus Traps

The Supremes:  Two weeks ago during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Marsha Blackburn one of Tennessee’s Republican Senators said she would oppose the nomination of Andre Mathis to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.  She cited Mathis’ extensive “rap sheet” as one of the chief reasons for her opposition.  That rap sheet involved three speeding tickets, at least one of which was for driving 45 mph in a 40 mile zone, in other words for driving while Black. Blackburn failed to mention that last year her car was pulled over by police but that she avoided any consequences by flashing her congressional pin and indicating that she was a US Senator.  Senator Cory Booker responded to Blackburn’s rap sheet accusations by pointing out that by her standards he was a seasoned criminal as he had been stopped countless times for similar “violations” while growing up in a largely white New Jersey suburb.  I bring this up because with Justice Stephen Breyer’s decision to step down from the Court, over the next month or so we are going to be told that President Biden’s as yet unannounced nominee to serve as his replacement is a radical with politics somewhat akin to those of Che Guevara and Osama Bin Laden. We’ll probably find out that she pushed someone on the playground when she was in grade school, that she is an unapologetic vegan and that she doesn’t like apple pie.  As to who the nominee will be, Biden has already said that he intends to fulfill the promise he made on the campaign trail to nominate a Black woman. Republicans who have apparently forgotten that their hero Ronald Reagan promised to nominate a woman and then did by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor, who went on to became the first woman on the Court, are outraged that Biden had the audacity to even make such a promise.  Those are the same Republicans who had no problem with the Former Guy promising to outsource his judicial picks to the right wing Federalist Society, the group whose approved list includes only those who would promise to overturn Roe v Wade.  A strategy that sadly appears to be working for them.  Of course Mitch McConnell who stood in the way of centrist Merrick Garland being seated on the Court when he was nominated by President Obama has already made it clear that Biden should only nominate a centrist rather than any of those Black radicals he’s considering because he’s concerned that the “divided” nation can’t bear the seating of a liberal judge particularly a Black female one. That’s the same Mitch who is largely responsible for giving us the as far from centrist as you can get anti-mask Gorsuch, “I like beer and worse” Kavanaugh and Handmaiden Coney Barrett. 

The Candidates:  Though the pool of qualified and competent Black female jurists is quite deep, Biden’s nominee is likely to be either the recently confirmed Harvard educated DC Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Harvard and Yale educated Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court Leondra Kruger or South Carolina public university educated US District Court Judge Michelle Childs who was currently nominated to serve on DC Circuit Court.  Until recently and maybe still Brown Jackson was the frontrunner.  She clerked for the retiring Breyer, received the support of all of the Democratic Senators as well as Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham during her DC Court confirmation process, is recognized for her experience and as a result of her recent confirmation has already been vetted once.  While Brown Jackson may still be the favorite South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn whose endorsement propelled Biden to office and who pushed Biden to commit to nominate a Black women in the first place is advocating for home state favorite Michelle Childs in part because he believes her home state credentials will get the votes of his state’s two Republican Senators Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham.  And don’t count out Leondra Kruger, in addition to her stellar education and impressive experience, she clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens,  her father was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, something that might help when the right tries to tie one of the other candidates to radical Islam just for the heck of it.  We will know Biden’s pick soon enough, as both he and Senate Leader Schumer want to push the nomination through at Amy Coney Barrett speed despite Republican protests and the statement from pearl twirler Senator Susan Collins that the Senate should take its time.

WTF:  Stupidity, ignorance and greed continue to reign across the country.  There’s no other way to explain the decision by Tennessee’s McMinn County Board of Education to remove “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the experiences of Holocaust survivors from the district’s curriculum over concerns about "rough, objectionable language" and a drawing of a nude woman. Of course, their decision has already had the expected Streisand effect, demand for Maus has skyrocketed so much so that it is now sold out on Amazon.  I’ve got a copies of both volumes if anyone wants to borrow mine. By the way the Streisand effect is in fact named after singer Barbra whose efforts to prevent aerial pictures of her property from being used by California to show evidence of Malibu beach erosion resulted in them getting the attention she was trying to avoid.  As to stupidity and wanton disregard for others, the infectious Sarah Palin continues to disregard COVID quarantine guidelines.  She’s been back to the Upper East Side’s Elios and has also been seen dining at another local Italian restaurant because apparently disease mitigation recommendations only apply to the rest of us.  Then there’s the New York Young Republican Club.  This week they “proudly endorsed” autocratic anti-Democracy leader/Tucker Carlson favorite Viktor Orbán for Prime Minister of Hungary. When I saw this on Twitter, I assumed it was a joke however, it’s not as it appears on their website.  Lastly, last night Spotify’s website was inundated by subscribers trying to cancel their membership.  Apparently, the decision to support anti-vaxer Joe Rogan over classic rock icon Neil Young isn’t going as planned. 

Enjoy the weekend, stay warm and safe. 

    

 

Pushing Placebos 

Tuckered Out: Reasonable people can have differing views on how far the US and NATO should or even can go to help Ukraine fend off another incursion from their land hungry regime rebuilding Russian neighbors but one thing we should all be able to agree on is that the host of the most watched nightly US cable show shouldn’t be Team Putin.  Nevertheless, that’s where Tucker Carlson is.  We don’t know what’s in it for Tucker, whether its all about ratings, money, an affinity for autocrats or whether he’s just seeking to bolster his political power broker position but we do know that Putin appreciates his support as Tucker’s pro-Russian segments aren’t just playing on Fox they’re also being featured prominently on Russian TV.  Of even more concern, Tucker’s fans, the same crowd that have bought into his anti-vaccine propaganda appear to be eating up everything he says about the Ukraine situation.  To that end, NJ Democrat Tom Malinowski reports that his office has been fielding calls from Tucker bros “upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine.”  The callers, are demanding that Malinowski support Russia’s “reasonable” positions, because apparently its reasonable for Putin to want as much of Ukraine as he can get his hands on?  Meantime back in the real world, Biden and our NATO allies are trying to bolster Ukraine’s defenses without engaging in any physical combat with Russia, a challenging goal hardly helped by Tucker and his fanbase. As to Tucker and his affinity for autocrats, he plans to return Hungary, one of his favorite destinations, to broadcast a few more of his shows because when not supporting Putin he’s all in on autocratic fascist types like Viktor Orban. Worth noting, a number of Republicans, including Mitch McConnell have actually been lending support to Biden as he confronts the gnarly Ukraine situation.  

Politics Unusual:  Congresswoman Margie Taylor Greene has weighed in on the Ohio Senate race where a number of Former Guy loving Republicans including FG acolyte Josh Mandel and one time Ohio party chair Jane Timkin are competing for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman.  Yesterday Margie Q bypassed them, instead endorsing Hillbilly Elegy author turned venture capitalist turned politician JD Vance.  Vance who unlike Mandel clearly has no Jewish Space lasers in his closet once compared supporters of the Former Guy to opioid addiction but no longer. He said he was honored to get her support, because who wouldn’t want Margie Q’s nod?  So far the Former Guy, who reportedly is so fearful of the consequences of supporting someone who doesn’t emerge on top that he’s considering endorsing more than one candidate per race has not endorsed anyone in Ohio.  On the Democratic side, though he is facing competition from a progressive candidate, moderate Congressman Tim Ryan will likely get the Democratic nod. Virginia’s new Governor, Glenn Youngkin, appears to be trying to outdo Florida’s Ron DeSantis these days. Not only has he banned the teaching of critical race theory in the schools, not that it was ever taught there, but now, taking a page from the East German STASI playbook, he’s asking parents and children to call his new “tip line” if they are taught any divisive subjects.  In other words if they are taught anything about racism or slavery they should turn in their teachers. Also, proving that elections really do have consequences, Virginia’s new Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares just fired University of Virginia’s legal counsel who is currently on leaving working for the House’s January 6^th Committee.  While it’s not unusual for new AGs to clean house, Miyares actions were undertaken a bit too quickly.  As to Florida, at the request of Ron DeSantis the state legislature is pushing forward a bill that would “prohibit making white people feel ‘discomfort’ when taught or trained about past discrimination in public schools and private businesses.”  It appears that the land of snowbirds is also filled with sensitive snowflakes.

On the Docket:  Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis’ request for a special grand jury to look into the FG’s “request” that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger find him the 11,000 votes he needed to overtake Biden has been approved.  Unfortunately, because justice crawls, the jury won’t be in place until the Spring.  As a reminder, Willis needs the special grand jury because her regular grand jury doesn’t have the power to hand down indictments and it’s fair to assume that her plan, or at least we hope her plan, is to indict a certain former president.  We learned yesterday via Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco that the Department of Justice is now looking into those “alternative” electoral college certifications that were provided by Republican officials from seven states to the National Archives. Those are the faux certificates that the FG’s team hoped would be counted by former VP Pence on January 6.   As to that seize the voting machine idea, it appears that it was originally concocted by a former Lt Colonel named Philip Waldron who worked together with former NY Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik on Rudy Giuliani’s crackpot team.  In other disturbing news, one time Speaker Newt Gingrich says that when or if the Republicans take over the House they should prosecute all the members of the January 6^th committee, because why not?

Viral Musings:  Pfizer is already testing its new Omicron focused booster on volunteers.  Florida’s DeSantis is really miffed over the FDA’s decision to pull Regeneron’s and Eli Lilly’s monoclonal antibody treatments out of circulation even though both  companies confirm that their products are ineffective against the Omicron variant that now makes up 99% of the coronavirus circulating in the US.  DeSantis who has played down the importance of vaccines and booster shots doesn’t care that the drugs don’t work, he just wants to keep giving them to his clueless constituents so he can say that he’s making them better.  No surprise that his unqualified for the job Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo is totally Team DeSantis, insisting that his data “proves” that the withdrawn antibodies work even though he has no such data and they don’t work. At around 650,000 cases per day, Omicron infections are declining but deaths, mostly of the unvaccinated, remain high. Just under 3000 people died yesterday.               

        

Moral Decay

Seize the Day? The January 6^th Committee spent the weekend sifting through the 700 pages of documents that the Former Guy tried to keep hidden.  Though we don’t yet know everything included in those pages, via Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan we now know that one of those documents is a draft executive order that directed the Defense Secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” all the voting  machines and related election apparatus and to appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2020 presidential election. The memo cited disproven conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, including those off the wall assertions that such foreign players as China, Venezuela and Italy were involved in the so-called election steal as justification for what would have been extreme very undemocratic actions to state the obvious.  The plan included in the draft order sounds a lot like what kraken lawyer Sidney Powell was pushing in mid-December and it’s thought that she would have been the person chosen to assume the special counsel position. The memo cites two classified documents, one of which was so classified that its existence outside of government was not known, indicating that someone within the government was among its scribes. Notably just a day after the memo was written one time national security adviser Michael Flynn who was pushing for the FG to declare martial law, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne who in addition to being Team FG was a supporter and paramour of Russian sparrow Maria Butina and kraken lawyer Powell met with the FG in the Oval Office presumably to discuss the implementation of the plan.  Additionally, it was around that time that Attorney General Barr who until then had been willing to do almost anything he was asked to do submitted his letter of resignation and the leadership team remaining at the Department of Justice threatened to resign en masse.  Moreover, since by then the FG had replaced the leadership of the Defense Department with loyalists, had the executive order been signed, the confiscation of the voting machines as well as the whole martial law thing could have really happened and had it happened at the very least the FG would have remained in office well past January 20. Concerns that the FG was going to follow through with these plans likely explains why all 10 living former US defense secretaries took the unprecedented step of signing on to a public letter that was published in the Washington Post in early January, 2021 declaring that the US presidential election was over and that Joe Biden had won. 

The Melber Effect: While the election machines were never confiscated, what appears to have been the Rudy Giuliani led effort to upend the Electoral College vote certification process did go forward.  On Friday, Boris Epshteyn, one of the members of the Giuliani team, actually admitted that he was involved in that effort. Following in the footsteps of former trade advisor Peter Navarro, he did that during an appearance on Ari Melber’s nightly MSNBC show. Of course Epshteyn’s position is that he hadn’t done anything wrong, he was just lining up those alternative electoral college certificates in case former VP Mike Pence “needed” them. And why shouldn’t Epshteyn think that confessing on air isn’t exonerating, the FG has employed the tactic repeatedly and its not like he’s suffered any consequences.  As to consequences, it’s not clear that daughter Ivanka will ever really face any, well other than not being allowed to head up a charitable organization in NYS or being invited to the Met Gala, but she is running up legal bills, assuming that she rather than the Republican National Committee is paying them.  In addition to being subpoenaed by NYS Attorney General Tish James, last week she was invited to meet with the January 6^th committee.  They’ve heard from others that she tried repeatedly to convince her father to get the Capitol Hill tourists/insurrectionists to stand down before someone was killed. No one really expects her to show up, especially since right now the request is just that a request, not a subpoena, but how ironic is it that she is afraid to testify that she was actually doing the right thing.  It turns out that former Attorney General Barr, who like Paul Manafort has a book coming out soon, isn’t so shy.  Over the weekend we learned that he, like former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, has met with members of the Committee several times.

Viral Musings:  Yesterday a boisterous group of anti-vaccine mandate protestors held a rally in Washington DC.  Apparently, anti-vaxers now refer to themselves as just being anti-mandate, a position also popular with conservative judges including the Texas one who blocked another one of Biden’s mandates last week, as they’ve decided that being anti-mandate is more politically acceptable.  Don’t be fooled, the anti-mandate crowd is most definitely against vaccines. One of the louder demonstrators in DC was RFK Jr who attacked the mandates by saying that “even in Hitler’s Germany you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did.”  Apparently he never got to the end of the diary, and missed that Anne died at the Bergen-Belsen death camp. The Auschwitz Museum, the most important group to follow on Twitter, responded best saying “Exploiting the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured, and murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany — including children like Anne Frank — in a debate about vaccines and limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay.” Sadly, the Auschwitz Museum twitter response staff are kept far too busy these days.  On the virus front, while there’s no question that the Omicron wave is on a steep decline in places like New York State where the positivity rate is now below 10%, even lower in NYC, and hospitalizations are declining it’s too early to say that the country is out of the woods as the 7 day average of daily COVID deaths is still hovering around 2000 and hospitalization rates are still rising in many areas including even upstate NY.  Also, the results are in and it’s clear that COVID vaccines do not affect fertility though getting COVID can negatively impact men’s ability to procreate for around 60 days.

Ukraine: The situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate.  Last week President Biden was slammed for saying that an incursion of some kind by Russia into Ukraine was likely and that all of our allies weren’t in the same place with regard to pushing back at Putin’s plans. It turns out that though Biden may have been too frank for many, he was talking truth.  The Germans who rely on Russia for too much of their energy, are fearful that opposing Putin will result in consequences that they’d rather not face. To that end over the weekend the head of Germany’s Navy was pushed to resign after he suggested that Putin “probably” deserved respect, more than implying that it was okay to let him take another chunk of Ukraine because “Russia is an old country. Russia is an important country. Even we, India, Germany, we need Russia, because we need Russia against China."  He got canned for saying out loud what a lot of others in Germany are thinking and what Tucker Carlson and the NY Times’ Ross Douthat are saying.  Meantime, the Brits, who are knee deep in their own “Boris Johnson partying during COVID” controversy accused Putin of seeking to replace Ukraine's government with a pro-Moscow administration. For our part, though we appear to be close to imposing extreme sanctions intended to cripple Russia’s banking institutions and to limit its ability to produce technology dependent products, we’ve also started calling home families and non-essentials workers from Ukraine a recognition that things are likely to get uglier soon.  Oy.  

 

Kraken Toys

“American” Voters:  As expected last night the Senate finally held its vote on voting rights legislation.  All 50 Democratic Senators supported protecting access to the ballot box but no Republicans joined them and since two, Senators Sinema and Manchin, refused to vote for modifying the filibuster the legislation went down in flames. For his part a gleeful Mitch McConnell said the quiet part out loud calling the “concern” about protecting voting rights “misplaced because if you look at the statistics African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as American voters.”  So there you have it Mitch and his cronies don’t consider Blacks to be Americans. Moreover, his facts about voter participation are wrong too.  According to the Brennan Center for Justice while voter participation was up in the 2020 election, disparities among races remained significant: 70.9 percent of white voters cast ballots while only 58.4 percent of nonwhite voters did with the nonwhite vote breaking down as follows:  62.6 percent of Black American voters, 53.7 percent of Latino American voters, and 59.7 percent of Asian American voters.  As to the impact of new voter suppression laws, if the Texas experience is any indication, and it likely is, around 40% of requests for absentee ballots are now being rejected due to new intentionally confusing requirements that make it difficult for people to correctly fill out request forms. The other big piece of political news last night was that Joe Biden “finally” held another news conference.  His failure to do so sooner was a subject of a lot of complaints by the press but probably something that most of the rest of us failed to notice given how often he appears in front of the camera.  The conference went on for a long time, so long that the press then complained about its length.  Anyway, for the most part Biden’s performance was fine unless of course you get your post game analysis from Fox or the NY Post, which called him out as “bumbling” and the conference an “utter disaster.”  Notably Biden didn’t make fun of any ethnic groups or disabled people, took questions from reporters from all sides of the aisle and failed to insult any of our allies, a problem for Murdoch owned media.  For his part the FG who was having a particularly bad day on the legal front screeched about Biden taking only softball questions, of course he did that right around the time that Biden was answered a question tossed his way by OAN, the right wing station that is in the process of being kicked off of Direct TV.  Getting back to Biden, he did respond to a question about the Russia-Ukraine situation with a bit too much candor when he said that Putin probably will move into the Ukraine, revealing that our NATO allies, all of whom are a lot closer to what soon could be the hostilities, aren’t all that unified about how to react to a “minor incursion.”  Later Press Secretary Psaki cleaned up those remarks by saying that the US and its NATO allies would respond to Russian aggression with a “decisive, reciprocal and united response,”  The days ahead are not going to be pretty. By the way, Fox pundit Tucker Carlson is firmly Team Putin believing that the Russians have every right to take over as much of Ukraine as they want.

The FG Papers:  Now onto a subject that’s more fun, well at least for people who not members or “friends” of the FG’s family.  Late yesterday the Supreme Court rejected the former president’s request to block around 700 pages of his White House records from being sent to the House January 6^th Committee.  The ruling, opposed by only Justice Clarence Thomas, cannot be appealed and since the National Archives guys are an efficient bunch when they want to be, reports are that some of those documents were shipped over to the Committee last night.  As to Justice Thomas, his opposition shouldn’t be surprising as it is highly likely that his wife’s name appears, or at the very least he fears that her name appears, in a few of those files. In a just world he would have recused himself from opining on the issue, but he is who he is and far too much about the current Court isn’t all that just. The January 6^th Committee has also subpoenaed a number of our other favorite characters from the kraken toys unit including Rudy Giuliani, Boris Epshteyn, Sidney Powell, Jennifer Ellis and far right/white supremacist figures Nicholas Fuentes and Patrick Casey.  In other news, we now know that former VP Pence knew about the apparently coordinated efforts by FG’s supporters in various swing states to supply alternative electoral college certifications as he consulted with the Senate Parliamentarian on how to handle them during what was supposed to be just a procedural Electoral Vote ratification on January 6.  One more thing on the Oath Keepers, the guys who’ve been indicted for seditious conspiracy, they had a stockpile that included 30 days of supplies and a cache of rifles and ammunition stored just outside of Washington DC.  Don’t all tourists to that?

The Big Apple:  Shifting to New York, on Tuesday night we learned more about Attorney General Tish James justification for subpoenaing the FG, Ivanka and Junior as part of her investigation into the FG family’s practice of fraudulently playing fast and loose with the valuation of assets. Among other things, it appears that the FG claimed that his Tower triplex residence was about 20,000 square feet larger than it actually is, not all that surprising since he routinely adds floors on the height of that building.  Also, the family business claimed that it was receiving $150,000 initiation fees at its Westchester golf club that it never collected, as well as that it had mansions that had not yet been built on one of his private estates. As to Ivanka, it appears that she served as the primary contact with the FG’s Deutsche Bank bankers, presumably the private banker who earlier reports say was introduced to the family by husband Jared. The current subpoenas don’t cover son Eric because he already spent some time with the Tish James team, not that he was all that helpful as it appears that he like indicted CFO Allen Weisselberg pleaded the Fifth plus or minus 500 times.  Didn’t the FG once say that only mobsters plead the Fifth?           

Viral Musings:  Though Omicron cases are continuing to decline in the early US hotspots, nationwide the reported new daily case count remains around 800,000, an undercount since many people don’t report their cases.  The 7 day average death count is also high, just under 2000.  Florida’s Governor/FG nemesis/presidential wannabee Ron DeSantis, the anti-masker who refuses to admit that he has been boosted has a solution.  He’s opened a few more mono-clonal antibody sites across his state.  That might sound good but unfortunately two of the monoclonal infusions that the sites are providing are ineffective against the Omicron strain.  Maybe they are also providing urine chasers, the current treatment being pushed by the anti-vax loony contingent?  If you haven’t already, go to the impressively functional link  https://special.usps.com/testkits to place your order for four free home covid tests. Also, the government plans to provide free N95 masks from the national stockpile to anyone who wants one, details to follow shortly.       

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One Good Outcome

The Hate Train:  On Saturday while the hostage situation was playing out at Temple Beth Shalom in Colleyville, Texas the Former Guy was outside Phoenix, Arizona holding his first rally of this midterm year.  He was surrounded by his usual coterie of conspiracy nuts, haters and far right wing politicians, the types of characters who make up more and more of the Republican Party.  With the usual paid actors from Blacks for Trump, a group reported to be led by an ardent anti-Semite, standing just behind the speakers’ podium, the Former Guy falsely asserted that the left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, cheating those hordes of unvaccinated white people from the monoclonals that should be theirs.  Of course he also pushed his “election was stolen” by people like wink, wink George Soros mantra, calling office holders who agree with his lie “smart” and “tough” and those who don’t “horrible” and “weak.”   To that end a number of those “smart” Arizona politicians running to replace the “horrible” ones were also in attendance.  Among those was Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona GOP who called for the imprisonment of the Maricopa County election officials, their crime accurately counting votes.  Also in attendance was state legislator Jake Hoffman, one of those who signed and is proud he did, the possibly very illegal “alternative” electoral college certifications that are now being investigated by the January 6^th committee and maybe even the Justice Department. Though it would be nice to be able to dismiss these loons as fringe players with no clout, the reality is that they the way things are going, they could be in charge of a lot of swing states soon enough.  Speaking of people who are now in charge, look to Virginia where the new Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin is already doing what he promised to do on the campaign trail.  Yesterday, on Martin Luther King Day he banned the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the state’s schools, not that it really ever was taught there but, who are we kidding, he and his supporters don’t want any history that might be just a bit too uncomfortable for any of the people, who might still have white robes in their closets, taught to their young ones.  He also banned mask mandates in the state’s public schools because with Omicron everywhere why would anyone want to mitigate its impact?  Worth nothing Younkin’s kids go to a private school that mandates masks and a number of school districts have already announced that they’ll keep their mask mandates which is why, taking a page from the Ron DeSantis playbook, the new Lt Governor said that Younkin is considering defunding school districts that don’t obey his edict.  As to Ron DeSantis, apparently he and the Former Guy aren’t on the best of terms these days.  The FG who fears that the Florida Governor might actually be more popular with Republican voters has been squawking about DeSantis, calling him gutless for failing to admit that he’s gotten his COVID booster shot. For his part DeSantis says that he now regrets that he didn’t strike back more forcefully at the FG’s COVID mitigation efforts, the tepid ones that a lot of us hardly noticed. To add to the clamor, it’s being suggested that Mitch McConnell is all in on the tiff between the FG and DeSantis. On the Florida politician front, Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz’ problems appear to be mounting.  Yesterday, CBS reported that after being given immunity his ex-girlfriend testified in front of the grand jury looking into his “minor” offenses last week.  Maybe Gaetz’ Teflon coat is wearing thin? Worth noting, Gaetz was one of DeSantis’ closest campaign allies during and before his campaign for governor.

Politics Unusual: Senate Leader Chuck Schumer plans to bring up voters’ rights legislation today.  That’s nice but the effort is expected to go nowhere as Senators Manchin and Sinema, who support the legislation, or at least some form of it, don’t support doing anything to change the filibuster that Mitch McConnell plans to deploy.  Absent anything unexpected, the legislation will go down in flames, the press will blame Biden for not being able to force his two so-called moderates to get on board and then will run another of their endless articles about Biden’s sinking ratings while progressives express dissatisfaction with his performance.  In other political news, last night the twitterverse was buzzing about the possibility of a Supreme Court Justice announcing his retirement soon.  In all likelihood the Justice in question is Breyer, who really should step down before the midterms while Democrats still controls the Senate. Keeping that control is another reason that progressives shouldn’t push either Sinema or Manchin to leave the Democratic caucus.  By the way, though he won’t, Clarence Thomas should step aside too, or at the very least recuse himself from any and all decisions concerning the FG given that his wife Virginia, an active supporter of the FG and all things right wing like the march on the Capitol, reportedly signed a letter calling for Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney to be booted from the Republican Party.

Viral Musings:  Last week Pfizer said that it will have an Omicron booster, one that also targets earlier COVID strains, ready sometime in March. Good news because though getting the current booster remains important for those who haven’t, for most of us a fourth shot of the current formulation doesn’t appear to do much, at least that’s the preliminary conclusion of a study of health care workers done in Israel.  The CDC which has gotten slammed for their messaging wants us to know that they’re doing their best, that making fast decisions in a rapidly changing environment isn’t their strong suit and that they’re trying really hard to keep up with COVID in all of its iterations. That’s frustrating but their candor is appreciated. The good news out of the northeast is that Omicron cases, positivity rates and hospitalizations are declining.  That bodes well for the rest of the country though not as well as it should given that large swaths of the heartland remain unvaccinated. Nationwide the daily death count remains above 2000 and with deaths and hospitalizations lagging indicators both are likely to remain high for a while to come.

International News:  Novak Djokovic is out of the Australian Open and now back in Serbia and unless rules change he will also be barred from playing in the French Open.  It turns out that being unvaccinated and lying on your visa application ultimately do have consequences.  In far more critical news, Putin may or may not be on the verge of glomming on to another chunk of Ukraine and the attention deprived despot in North Korea keeps shooting off missiles. Also attention deprived but through no fault of its own, is Tonga which has been devastated by volcanic eruptions and a follow on tsunami.      

         

Seditionists

Gruesome Twosome:  It’s looking increasingly likely that President Biden’s efforts to get voting rights legislation done is going about as well as his efforts to get Build Back Better legislation passed.  As a budget bill, Build Back Better needs only 50 votes to pass; its roadblock remains West Virginia Manchin’s concern that passage would further feed inflation, or at least that’s the primary justification Manchin gives for his opposition, his concern that poor people will spend child care money on booze and the like as well as his worries about his state’s coal industry also feed his opposition. Voting rights legislation is actually more popular, all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus agree that passing some form of it is desirable.  Unfortunately two of those members, Senators Manchin and Arizona’s very vocal and out there Sinema, oppose making any changes to the filibuster to facilitate its passage, and since absent any filibuster modifications passing Voting Rights legislation would require 60 votes, without Republican support it too will remain in permanent limbo. That’s truly unfortunate maybe even dire because Republicans really are trying to make it more difficult for people to vote and by people think people who are likely to vote for Democrats.  That, combined with the usual gerrymandering efforts that take place during census triggered redistricting years, quite likely will lead to Republicans gaining control of the House and maybe even the Senate. To be clear, Democrats aren’t innocent on the gerrymandering front, they just don’t have as many opportunities to go there and tend not to be as brazen as their Republican counterparts.

Sedition, Sedition:  Yesterday we learned a bit more about that “brazenness.”  First, the Department of Justice announced sedition charges against Oath Keeper’s leader Stewart Rhodes and ten additional members of his extreme right wing militia group.  The Oath Keepers who participated in the January 6 insurrection weren’t your average pro-Trump “tourists,” they were the guys wearing camouflaged combat attire marching shoulder to shoulder in military style formation as they made their way up the Capitol steps.  The indictment against them alleges that under the direction of Rhodes they didn’t just attack the Capitol they had a far bigger insurrection plan that involved two armed “quick reaction forces” ready to support their plot to stop the lawful transfer of power from the FG to Joe Biden.  As to Rhodes, he’s hardly a run of the mill frustrated right wing white guy, he’s a former paratrooper and a Yale Law school graduate, albeit one who wears an eye patch having lost an eye by accidentally shooting himself in the face. The charges that Rhodes and his co-conspirators now face are for seditious conspiracy, as in when two or more people conspire to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” the US government or to }levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.”   The DOJ built its case against Rhodes by getting a few of his comrades to flip, the expectation is that they are now trying to get him and a few more of his compatriots to point fingers at people up the FG food chain. Worth noting, when not laying siege to the Capitol members of the Oath Keepers have been known to serve as Roger Stone’s bodyguards.  Second, though it’s been getting far less media attention, mostly via Rachel Maddow we keep learning more about the efforts of Republican legislators/delegates in at least five and maybe up to seven states to upend the 2020 presidential election results by sending ersatz Electoral College certifications to the National Archives. The point of those efforts were to make it possible for VP Pence had he been so inclined to include the ersatz certifications in the official Electoral College count in lieu of the real ones.  Last night, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel revealed that she has referred an investigation into the 16 Republicans who signed and then sent the faux Michigan certificate to the National Archives to the US Attorney for the Western District of Michigan.  With the language and the typeface of each of the ersatz certificates identical, the obvious question is who provided the “forms” to each of the groups that submitted one?  That’s just another thing that the January 6^th committee and maybe even DOJ might be and most certainly should be investigating.  And because of course, a number of those who signed those false certificates are now seeking higher office with one, Jim Lamon one of those Let’s Go Brandon guys, running to be the Republican nominee to oppose Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly.  

Human Resources:  Hydroxychloroquine pushing Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, one of the FG’s most loyal supporters is running for reelection even though he once promised to only serve two terms. As of now Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz is running again too but he may encounter a few roadblocks between now and election day as one of his former girlfriends appears to be cooperating with the Feds who are investigating the allegations that he did some serious canoodling with an underage girl, transported her out of the country and then tried to obstruct the investigation into his actions.  Kanye West or Ye as he is now called has plans to go to Russia for a sit down with Putin because why not? Former FG Press Secretary/current Fox correspondent Kayleigh McEnany has met with the January 6^th committee, among other things they were particularly interested in the contents of her infamous binders.  GQP Leader Kevin McCarthy who like his good friend Gym Jordan has been invited to sit down with the January 6^th Committee has no plans to do so. The knowledge that the invitation was coming could explain why McCarthy lashed out at Democrats Adam Schiff, Ilhan Omar and Eric Swalwell over the weekend saying that when/if he becomes Speaker he plans on kicking them off their respective committees replacing them with the likes of Representatives Paul Gosar and Margie Q. And in case you are looking for something not to read, convicted/pardoned fraudster Paul Manafort has a book coming out in August about his time as a “political prisoner.”   

Viral Musings: The good news is that the Omicron wave may be on the decline in those parts of the country it hit first.  Some of that evidence comes from the analysis of Boston wastewater, icky but a good indicator of disease spread.  The not so good news is that yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration had engaged in overreach with its mandate requiring that companies with over 100 employees require employees to either get vaccinated or submit to frequent testing.  Apparently all the conservatives on the court including Neil Gorsuch who has been eschewing masks during in person oral arguments aren’t all that into disease prevention.  However, two of those conservatives, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh did cross over to the other side with regards to health care workers, leaving those mandates in place. Justices Sotomayor and Breyer who actually got what he says was a false positive on one of his COVID tests are no longer attending in person sessions with the rest of their colleagues likely because of Gorsuch’s failure to follow masking protocols. By the way contrary to Politico’s truly embarrassing and later retracted story, Justice Sotomayor did not have dinner at a trendy Washington restaurant with Senator Schumer.  The woman in question was Schumer’s wife Iris Weinshall.  Unfortunately the accusatory Politico article went viral before it was retracted.    

 

Jerks and Morons

Filibuster Frustration: President Biden and the Democrats have hit a wall, not the fragmented structure that the FG built, but the Senate filibuster, an out of date rule that lets the Senate minority, one that currently represents only 43% of the country, to prevent even a discussion of any piece of legislation it opposes.  That’s a big problem because Mitch McConnell and his Republican coalition oppose most legislation that doesn’t involve cutting taxes or funding defense and most definitely oppose passing anything that  adequately protects voting rights, largely because they fear the consequences of making it easier for people who don’t  look like them to vote.  That’s particularly frustrating to Democrats who desperately want to see some form of voting rights legislation passed to combat the Republican party’s state by state efforts to make accessing the voting box more difficult, not just the laws that eliminate urban polling locations, vote by mail and early and Sunday voting, but also the even more undemocratic provisions that would allow Republican state legislators to override the outcomes of presidential elections, the thing that the FG tried very hard to do in 2020.  The problem is that even though all 50 Democratic Senators would vote yes for voting rights legislation, those 50 votes together with VP Harris’ tie breaker wouldn’t suffice because of the filibuster and at least two Democrats, Manchin and Sinema, remain opposed to its elimination even for protecting voting rights.  Biden who has been working behind the scenes to get Manchin on board has been taking a lot of heat from party progressives as well as quite a few center leaning realists for not pushing forward more aggressively so yesterday he and Harris went to Atlanta where they called for the filibuster to be kicked to the curb or at the very least watered down to facilitate the passage of voting rights legislation. For what it’s worth their speeches were good but maybe not good enough because it’s not clear that the target audience, Manchin, who erroneously claims that the filibuster is sacrosanct and been around forever, and to a lesser degree Sinema can be moved.  Worth noting, the last time voting legislation was up for a vote, twenty of the Republican now in the Senate supported it so their current opposition is even harder to swallow now all the more reason that Democrats need to channel some of their fury towards getting more Democratic Senators elected and maintaining their House majority rather than at Biden who can only do so much given the hand he has.  

Rounding a Corner?  As to that last election, the one that the FG continues to assert was stolen from him, Republican Senator Mike Rounds is in all kinds of trouble with the FG because he had the nerve to tell ABC that the "The election was fair, as fair as we have seen. We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency.”  The FG responded by calling Rounds a “jerk” and “ineffective,” threatening never to support his reelection again.  Rounds, who probably felt comfortable saying the election was fair because he’s not up for reelection again until 2026 doubled down. That’s all well and good, but really what took him so long and does his willingness to speak truth indicate that others might as well? Probably not. Speaking of the 2020 election, we keep on learning more about the desperate efforts that were taken by pro FG groups to overturn election results.  Those efforts included groups in a number of states including Michigan and Arizona sending forged certificates of ascertainment to the National Archives that falsely showed the FG winning those states’ Electoral College votes.  That’s on top of learning that the FG’s lawyers met with Fani Willis, the Fulton County Georgia District Attorney who is considering whether or not to bring charges against the FG and the other members of his team who tried to pressure state officials to find enough extra votes to overturn Biden’s state victory. We’ve been disappointed enough times to be skeptical, but various legal pundits say that meetings with a target’s lawyers typically take place at the end of an investigation when a decision is imminent.  On the January 6 front, the Committee has debunked right wing claims that that the FBI had a “secret” informant name Ray Epps “instigating” the crowds on that dreadful day.  Epps unlike quite a few people, including Congressman Jim Jordan who says he won’t, willingly cooperated and testified before the January 6 committee where he very credibly denied that he was an undercover FBI informant.  As to future testimony, yesterday it was reported that the committee has asked a number of the FG’s speech writers to come in for a visit and more importantly they appear to be circling former VP Pence, who is really upset about reports that former members of his staff have been cooperating with the committee because he so wants to be president and he cares more about that than preventing another January 6.  

Viral Musings: Yesterday during a Senate hearing where Republicans laid into everything that the White House and the CDC have been doing on the virus front, Dr. Fauci slammed back forcefully. The Virus Guru came armed, not with guns but with slides of  Senator Rand Paul’s fund raising emails, the ones that showed how the pathetic Paul targets Fauci, using the pandemic to raise money to fill his campaign coffers. Fauci also made it clear that he holds Paul personally responsible for a lot of the death threats targeting him and his family. Fauci’s frustration and ire didn’t just target Paul, later he was caught by a live mic calling Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall a “moron” after Marshall attacked him for failing to disclose his personal financials; the problem with Marshall’s attack is that it was all grandstanding as Fauci’s financial information is publicly available for all to see.  As to the administration and the virus, it’s widely agreed that they have a messaging problem and that they’ve been behind on getting testing to the masses.  The failures are largely due to the unanticipated magnitude of the highly contagious Omicron wave which has been overwhelming and the fact that the CDC has muddled its messaging about masks, tests, and the length of quarantine periods, always playing catch-up with a mutating virus and confronting a country made up of too many people who will always believe that vaccines and other mitigation efforts are stupid and a lot more weary people who just want the CDC to be perfect, or at the very least better, messengers.  On the Omicron front, the data is in and it really is less lethal, particularly for the vaccinated but even for the unvaccinated though it’s the latter group that is much more likely to end up in the hospital or worse.  Unfortunately, despite Omicron’s lower lethality, the sheer volume of patients is overwhelming hospitals, displacing people with other health care needs and exhausting health care workers, particularly those in unvaccinated, lower service regions of the country. On a more positive note, it looks like New York City and other places that were among the earliest to be slammed have hit their peaks with new cases and positivity levels, though still depressingly high, beginning a downward trajectory.  Well maybe.                            

Laughingstock Stock?

Paper:  Yesterday was the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection or as the FG and his crowd call it a the day that patriots visited the Capitol to engage in a group grope with Capitol policemen, Congress and hang former VP Pence.  Both President Biden and VP Harris gave speeches. Biden’s speech was described by many, none of whom work at Fox, as the most forceful and impressive of his presidency, though the FG who wasn’t mentioned by name but was repeatedly slammed as the “defeated former president,” an anti-democracy loser, wasn’t all that impressed.  We know that because he sent out one of his from the “desk of the 45^th“ statements in which he once again claimed that the election was rigged,  asserting this time that hurtful, laughingstock stock (his typo, not mine) Biden only succeeded in becoming president because he bought votes for $10 apiece adding that there’s no way all those Black people really voted for him, while also saying that Biden was the worst ever, perhaps a bit of projection and maybe some regret because he didn’t think to offer voters cash?  There was a memorial ceremony in Washington where many recounted last year’s horrors. Though most of the attendees were Democrats, Liz Cheney and her father, former VP Dick Cheney, were in attendance.  He was there to support his daughter and to make it clear that he agrees with her assessment that the FG is a dangerous buffoon.  It was particularly odd to see so many Democratic politicians greet him warmly given that until recently he was their Darth Vader but the times are unusual to say the least.  A large number of Republicans instead attended former Republican Senator Johnny Isakson’s Georgia funeral which was conveniently scheduled during the same time slot.  Mitch McConnell was there as was presidential wannabee Ted Cruz who later appeared on Tucker Carlson’s evening show where the fish stick scion intimidated Cruz into walking back a statement he had made earlier in the week, the one where he accidentally admitted that many of those those nice tourists at the Capitol last January 6 were terrorists.  Though it was fun watching Cruz squirm, it was fairly terrifying watching how he kowtowed to Tucker, a repeat of the way he previously forgave the Former Guy for attacking his wife and father.  One more truly disturbing thing, we still don’t know who placed those bombs at both the DNC and RNC shortly before last year’s “tourist” festivities, but yesterday we learned that Kamala Harris, then the VP elect, was at the DNC when the police found the live bomb that had been placed there. Think about what would have happened had she been injured or worse.  It’s fair to assume that the day’s violence would have been far worse. On Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland kind of reassured us that he and his team are working hard to bring people to justice, we just don’t know which people he’s focused on and whether or not he’s reaching high enough up the food chain and by food think hamberders and diet coke.

Playing Football:  Remember Peter Navarro, he was the FG’s trade advisor whose only positive attribute is that he was one of the first to recognize that COVID 19 would lead to a worldwide pandemic.  He’s also one of the FG’s most ardent supporters.  Earlier this week Navarro appeared on Ari Melber’s MSNBC evening show.  My initial reaction to seeing him was to question  Melber’s judgment but I have to admit that I was wrong as Navarro admitted on air to Melber that he, Steve Bannon and the rest of the FG team really were trying to pull off a coup.  Navarro’s position is that going the coup route, undoing the results of the election and overthrowing the government, was okay, that it was just the violence of the day that wasn’t so good. Navarro provided details of their plan to engage in a “Green Bay Sweep” with “scores” of Republican officials and politicians teed up to object to the results of the 2020 presidential vote in six states. Navarro hated the day’s violence, not because people got injured and killed, but  because to succeed the football strategy “required peace and calm on Capitol Hill,” and all the violence of the day ruined the master plan, as a few too many of those members of Congress who were supposed to object to the Electoral Vote count reneged on their promise to do so.  Think about that, Navarro admits that a coup was the plan and most of the other members of his party and everyone in its leadership wants us to think nothing bad happened, that it’s time to move on or as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, another aspiring Republican presidential candidate says, January 6^th is now the Democrat’s Christmas, whatever that means.  By the way, that’s the same DeSantis whose current raspy, breathing impaired speech pattern sounds a lot like he’s still in the throes of a holiday case of COVID.

Viral Musings:  Here, there and everywhere, maybe peaking in New York, but still on the rise in other parts of the country, most notably in Florida where the state’s widely discredited surgeon general says that the problem is too much testing not the disease, hospitalizations or death.  Sound familiar? You know, if you don’t test for it, it’s not there, right? Not much more to say about COVID right now, because what is there to say?         

 

Landing the Plane

Stormy Weather:  If you think your new year has gotten off to a rough start consider the thousands of hapless souls who spent Monday night stuck in a 28 hour traffic jam on Interstate 95 outside of Washington DC.  Of course given how many of them work for the government, log jams are probably not as new to them as the experience of humongous snow storms like the one that paralyzed the highway.  The Former Guy who is ensconced in the gaudy luxury of his Mar a Lago home didn’t encounter any snow unless his oldest son had his alleged usual supply on hand but he did experience a hail storm of pushback about his plan to hold a press conference on January 6 to “celebrate” the insurrection.  Some of his nearest and dearest supplicants including Senator Lindsey Graham advised against the optics of doing so.  While it’s hard to believe that the FG really worried about their concerns, he did apparently care that most of the networks had no plans to cover his event and also may care about the damning contents of those Sean Hannity texts that were released last night so he’s cancelled for now though he still plans to give a speech about how the election was stolen from him during an upcoming trip to Arizona. As to those Hannity texts, the January 6 Committee appears to have gotten them from a number of other former White House staff members including from the stash that Mark Meadows shared before he stopped cooperating. The texts reveal that despite what he was saying on the air, Hannity, who was the FG’s shadow Chief of Staff for most of his term in office knew that the FG had lost the election and was trying to get him to face reality.  Hannity was unnerved about what he knew was a coup attempt, was aware that many in the Justice Department were threatening to resign en masse and wanted those around the FG, most notably Gym Jordan and Mark Meadows, to just get him to “land the plane” and by that he meant graciously depart to preserve his “legacy.” It’s becoming increasingly clear that though a few prominent conspiracists like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and Mark Meadows aren’t cooperating, most of those asked have been and as a result the January 6 committee has compiled a compelling tick tock of the events leading up to and including January 6.  They’ve invited rather than subpoenaed Hannity to come in for a tete a tete and may also invite former VP Pence to do the same but it seems more and more that those invitations are more about being thorough than anything else, part of the Committee’s final preparation for the public hearings that are likely to take place during prime time in just a few weeks. One more thing on the January 6 front, Attorney General Merrick Garland who has been the recipient of lots of flack for not being more aggressive, or at the very least for not showing his hand, has scheduled a press conference for today to discuss some of his January 6 related activities. Tune in for details.  As to the FG’s kids, Ivanka and Don Jr who is reportedly now engaged to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s ex Kimberly Guilfoyle, might have to visit New York sooner than they’d like as New York Attorney General Letitia James has subpoenaed them to fill in some details about how their father low balled the value of his real estate assets for tax purposes while inflating their value to lenders.  No surprise that they and their lawyers are trying to squash those subpoenas, they probably won’t pull that off but they might be able to limit the scope of questioning and at the very least will delay the inevitable.  As to lawyers, remember White House fave Jay Sekulow,  he’s still around, he’s now representing Sean Hannity as he decides whether or not to show up for his sit down with the January 6 committee.           

Viral Musings: According to genome sequencing Omicron now makes up about 95% of new COVID infections in the US.  Around 1 million of those cases were reported yesterday, a number somewhat inflated by delayed reporting of cases that were picked up but not reported to official data collectors over the holidays. Some of those new positives are showing up on Capitol Hill.  According to the Capitol Hill’s physician the positivity rate there has gone from under 1% to over 13%, particularly notable given the Hill’s high vaccination rate.  By the way, the Supreme Court which is due to rule on vaccine mandates shortly, released a statement yesterday reporting that all of the Justices are now boosted.  Hospitalizations are way up too although it looks like a significant number of the cases that fall into the hospitalization count are being detected in patients hospitalized for reasons unrelated to their infection. To that end, the NY Times reports that 50% to 65% of admissions to NYC hospitals for other reasons are turning up COVID positive on routine tests.  Moreover, far fewer COVID positive patients are ending up in the ICU.  That’s good news and further proof that at least for the vaccinated without immune compromised health issues Omicron is less serious than Delta.  The bad news is that the sheer volume of admissions is staggering, and hospitals and health care workers remain and will remain under intense pressure for some time especially those in parts of the country with low vaccination rates.  Lastly, as expected, the FDA has approved boosters for the 12 to 15 year old set, shortening the qualification period to 5 months from last shot. 

Politics Unusual:  The FG who previously endorsed Brazilian strongman Bolsonaro’s bid for reelection has now extended a similar endorsement to his and Tucker Carlson’s likeminded buddy in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban.  To put it mildly, Orban is not nice.  He’s anti-immigrant, anti-gay, transphobic, anti-Semitic and no fan of the free press.  In other words, just the FG’s kind of guy. Apparently he is also the kind of totalitarian that the Conservative Political Action Committee, CPAC, loves as well.  Their Spring convention is being held in Budapest, an endorsement of Orban’s views and behavior.  Back at home, outlier Democrat Joe Manchin denies that he’s had any conversations with Biden’s team about Build Back Better.  He probably has but just doesn’t want to talk about it. For now the Biden team has shifted their attention to voting rights where they really need to accomplish something given the anti-Democratic activities underway in Republican dominated state legislatures.  Of course Manchin and Arizona’s Sinema and just about all Republicans in the Senate remain impediments to getting anything done there as well  By the way as of yesterday 25 Democratic House members have announced that they will not be running for reelection, some of them are running for other offices but still that’s a large number particularly when compared to the 12 Republicans who have also announced their departures. One of those is already out as Devin Nunes has exited, off to work for the FG’s new social media company.                 

 

Bye Bye Betty

2022!  So here we are, another groundhog year.  COVID continues to flourish and another big election cycle looms.  We continue to learn more details about just how hard the Former Guy and his cronies worked to overturn the 2020 presidential election, from the efforts to declare it tainted even before election day to the staging of a failed coup accompanied by a violent insurrection, to the ongoing efforts to push the “big lie” that Joe Biden isn’t really the president.  To that end, even while we learn more details about the FG’s nefarious efforts to get as many sitting members of Congress, swing state governors and secretaries of state to throw out legitimate election results, that last an effort that he’s working to tee up more for future elections, the FG has announced via another one of his “official” statements from the desk of the 45^th President, that he’ll be celebrating the anniversary of January 6^th at Mar a Lago, with a speech and maybe even an official announcement of some sort. Perhaps he’ll say that he’s running for reelection, or in his parlance for a third term, or perhaps he’ll announce some more endorsements, regardless he’ll be up against President Biden who will also be making a speech, albeit probably one that’s a lot less bombastic, of his own.  As to those FG endorsements, they remain coveted.  Over the end of year holidays when not celebrating at his totally unmasked but very sequined gala in the COVID infested sunshine state, the FG endorsed the reelection of Mike Dunleavy, the Republican Governor of Alaska.  That endorsement came with a catch, Dunleavy had to agree not to endorse Senator Lisa Murkowski who is up for reelection this year.  The FG has already endorsed her opponent, Kelly Tshibaka whose qualifying attribute is that she wouldn’t have voted to see him kicked out of office.  The willingness to support the FG’s candidates is quite a thing this season, despite questioning former football player/Texas resident/accused spouse beater Herschel Walker’s competency, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of Republican leadership has lined up behind him in his effort to unseat newbie Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia. That’s Walker who doesn’t seem to know that the John Lewis voting bill is named after John Lewis, who he claims to have admired, because of the iconic civil rights activist’s lifelong advocacy of voting rights. The FG still hasn’t said who he’ll endorse in Ohio but frequent candidate Josh Mandel, hillbilly hypocrite JD Vance and former state Republican leader Jane Timken are each trying to out emulate him by tweeting anti-immigrant and anti-vax mandate missives in an effort to win his coveted nod. The same appears to be going on in Pennsylvania where long time New Jersey resident Mehmet Oz who once was pro-choice but is now a right to lifer has jumped on the FG train hoping that his Oprah Winfrey anointed celebrity, which by the way has not and will not earn him her coveted endorsement, will carry him past a crowded Republican field including over hedge fund manager David McCormick, the candidate being encouraged to run by FG supporter/technology venture capitalist Peter Theil who despite his own same sex marriage has no problem funding and supporting a Republican party hostile to his family life. The FG isn’t only weighing in on Senate races, he also went over the heads of Republican party leadership this weekend to endorse Republican Congresswoman Mary Miller, a Freedom Caucus member and good friend of Congresswoman Margie Q, who as a result of Illinois redistricting is running against fellow Republican Congressman Rodney Davis who once led the state party’s effort to get the FG back into office, so much for gratitude. As to Margie Q, her personal Twitter Account was permanently shut down this weekend, not because she called her political opponents vermin but because she violated Twitter policy by spouted one too many lies about the “lethality” of COVID vaccines despite all the warnings she had received about doing so. Alas, Margie isn’t going anywhere, she still has her official Congressional Twitter account.  Also, before I forget, Build Back Better may be back, it is still being negotiated with Joe Manchin whatever that means.  See what I mean, this year feels a lot like last year.  Well one thing is a little different, a few from the right wingnut farm including Alex Jones and Candace Owens are now questioning the FG’s grasp on reality, something to do with his finally saying that vaccines and boosters are good but only if you aren’t forced into getting them.  

Viral Musings:  Omicron is quite the rage, it’s everywhere.  Raise your hand if you don’t know at least five people who had a breakthrough case over the holidays. Fortunately for most vaccinated people, especially those who’ve been boosted it appears no worse than an annoying cold or flu, not that a case of the flu is anything to sneeze at.  At least one Israeli woman managed to get “flurona,” the new name for catching COVID and the flu at the same time, not recommended but she appears to be fine.  The biggest problem with Omicron is the sheer volume of cases.  Even if most people do okay, too many people, a few vaccinated but mostly those unvaccinated including children under five, are ending up in the hospital taxing resources and leaving many who need care squeezed out of the system. Also its hard to run a country when a significant percentage are in quarantine, one of whom as of last night is now mildly symptomatic Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.  If you’re confused about what to do if you get one of those maybe inevitable Omicron cases or at the very least one of those positive test results, don’t be distressed about not knowing what and when you can and cannot do things.  CDC quarantine guidelines have changed.  The current party line is that infected people should isolate for “5 days and if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving, follow that by 5 days of wearing a mask when around others to minimize the risk of infecting people they encounter.”  As to those masks, the official recommendation is to go for the real thing, a KN95, N95 or multi layered surgical mask for the infected everywhere and for the rest of us in indoor or close settings.  At the very least double mask if you are sticking with cloth, this Omicron variant is very sneaky. About all the testing, this weekend virus guru Fauci said that they mostly work especially if repeated.  Count me among the skeptical.  As to  booster boosters as in fourth shots, Israel has started giving them to people who’ve had organ transplants and is now also offering them up to those over 60 who feel especially vulnerable although that may be more than the average 60 plus year old needs right now so it’s probably a good idea to wait for some study results before jumping on line.  One other thing on the booster front, it looks like the FDA will approve them for the 12 to 15 year old set as soon as today.   

RIP to everyone’s Golden Girl, may her memory be a blessing, as her time on earth certainly was.