Tailgating

#ButHerEmails:  In addition to his endless and quite effective harping on Hillary Clinton’s “acid washed” email server, the FG’s repertoire included a toilet tirade, a complaint about how new technology was awful because it required so much more flushing to clear the bowl.  Well, now we may know why the FG’s toilet trips so frustrated him, it turns out that his problem may have had less to do with his gut wrenching diet or newer water efficient technology and more to do with his habit of flushing documents, maybe even some of those missing translations of his chats with Putin.  That little flush detritus comes from the NY Times’ Maggie Haberman who has a book coming out in October. Haberman, a former NY Post reporter, whose frequently chummy relationship with the FG goes way back also reports that he is still talking to bestie Kim Jung un which could explain why the little dictator has ramped up his missile activity.  For his part the FG claims that Haberman’s book is “mostly fictitious” and that her flushing assertion is “categorically untrue,” but Bloomberg’s well respected political reporter Jennifer Jacobs says her sources confirm it’s veracity.  Putting aside whether Maggie should have been more forthcoming about the FG’s flushing habits sooner instead of holding them back to sell books, the fact that he’s been destroying documents is both disturbing and illegal as is the report that some of the boxes that were found at Mar a Lago but are now back in the hands of the National Archives include documents marked top secret.  Moreover, former staff members report that the FG showed an unusual amount of care about at least one of those boxes as it was boarded on Air Force One and then hoarded at Mar a Lago. The National Archives has now asked the Department of Justice to investigate the FG’s handling of White House records.  Worth noting, removing classified documents is a real crime, Clinton era national security advisor Sandy Berger who was caught removing some was fined $50,000, had to perform 100 hours of community service and lost both his security clearance and law license.  Don’t get me wrong, the last thing we need is the FG doing community service but come on, its far past time for him to be punished for something. One more thing on the flushing front, though virtually every one of Haberman’s NY Times colleagues tweet promoted her book yesterday and defended her holding back worthwhile factoids to amp sales, the articles about the FG’s document destruction continue to remain below the paper’s fold, quite different than the way the paper treated Hillary’s emails which were given headline status, continuously.  The FG didn’t just destroy documents, it also appears that many critical minutes of his phone records from January 6th are nowhere to be found. That’s likely because he used a cell phone, not necessarily his, maybe even an untraceable burner that he borrowed from one of his colleagues. Among the calls that we know definitely took place but are missing from the logs are the ones to Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville and GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy.  And those are the calls we know about only because the people involved acknowledged them, it’s the others that remain hidden in the ether.

Human Resources:  Shortly after she arrived in Congress, the press trumpeted South Carolina’s first term Congresswoman South Carolina’s Nancy Mace as an up and comer, a new more rational kind of Republican and sometimes she uttered words that made her sound reasonable, she even criticized the FG now and again but more often than not she’d revert to praising him.  Well yesterday she learned that her failure to be 100% supportive has cost her his endorsement.  Her response to losing out on his endorsement: yesterday she traveled to NYC, stood outside of his eponymous tower, and talked about her early and ongoing support for him and all his policies and edicts. Fairly pathetic but not as pathetic as North Carolina’s Madison Cawthorn. Cawthorn, a diehard FG fan along the lines of Lauren Boebert and Margie Q, is the young wheel chair bound Congressman who has lied about virtually everything in his past, including saying that he’d been about to be admitted to the US Naval Academy before his injury even though he had already been rejected.  Cawthorn is now facing blowback from the bipartisan North Carolina State Board of Elections that asserts it can disqualify him from running for reelection over his role in the January 6^th insurrection. Not sure how far this will go, but it’s worth watching.

World Affairs:  The war drums keep beating on the Russian/Ukraine border.  Yesterday President Biden once again told Americans in Ukraine that its time for them to leave just in case bombs start flying.  In addition, though it might seem trivial, Putin has pulled his super yacht, the Graceful, from a German port where it was being further jazzed up, likely fearing that any sanctions imposed if/when he invades Ukraine could result in his bigly toy being confiscated. On the not so graceful front the International Olympic Committee is as usual finding it difficult to do the right thing, and has not yet, if ever, sanctioned the Russian wunderkind skater for having traces of a banned drug in her blood.  Should she be punished and her team removed from the medal podium, then Canada, which placed fourth in the figure skating team competition would get the Bronze medal behind the US and Japan.  That would be good news for Canada but probably not enough good news to get them past their current trucking crisis.  Though most of Canada’s truckers, like most Canadians are vaccinated, a small but boisterous and quite effective group of anti-vax truckers are blocking major border bridges in protest over requirements that truckers crossing the border must be vaccinated.  The truckers are of course getting lots of support from the some of the usual US suspects, they’ve even been comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi measures because genocide and vaccinations are so similar? Giving new meaning to tailgating, they are threatening to disrupt traffic around the Super Bowl before traveling on to Washington DC.  So just another reason why some of those things that you’ve ordered will be arriving late if at all and certainly no help to dampening inflation.

Viral Musings:  Masks keep coming off though many in the medical community question the scientific basis for tossing them away as a lot of people are still turning up COVID positive and some of them are actually getting sick.  Count Prince Charles, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace and CBS’s Gayle King among the newly positive.  Also, though she is now on hiatus working on the production of a movie based on her Spiro Agnew Bag Man book, Rachel Maddow spent last week broadcasting from home as a result of direct contact with someone who was infected.  We’ve known for some time that the J & J vaccine was less effective than the mRNA shots but we didn’t know how much less effective it was but now we do.  According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the shot was only 52.9% effective at providing moderate to severe-critical protection against the Alpha, Beta and Lambda coronavirus variants.  That said, for those few people allergic to the mRNA shots and those in remote places, J & J remains the only option.  

914k US deaths, 3000 plus yesterday.