Whoops

Not on My Bingo Card: The confirmation of his first Supreme Court nominee hit a big speed bump yesterday after it was revealed that New Mexico’s 49 year old Democratic Senator Ben Ray Lujan had suffered a stroke.  The Senator’s office reports that he is expected to make a full recovery and will be back to the Senate floor soon.  Hopefully for Lujan, his office is right and his recovery will be speedy and smooth but given that the Democrats need all fifty members of their coalition to get anything done, his health crisis is the kind of setback that Biden can ill afford.  With all the octagenarians floating around the Senate, who ever thought that one of the younger ones would be the one to face such a crisis? Meantime, the Former Guy, the septagenarian who, despite his diet of hamburglers and Diet Coke, goes on ticking like one of those Everready bunnies remains up to all of his old tricks. In addition to dangling pardons in front of the many “tourists” who invaded the Capitol as part of the infamous January 6^th coup attempt, he’s also alerted his diehard fans to remain on high alert in case he needs them to take to the street to “protest” any of those government lawyers if or when they actually manage to indict him for one or more of his “alleged” crimes.  Responding to concerns that those protestors/riotors will target her, Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis has asked the FBI to “conduct a security-risk assessment of her courthouse and an adjacent government center,” a more than reasonable request given that her investigation into the FG’s attempt to get Georgia officials to “find” the 11,000 additional votes he needed to claim a Georgia victory and her two grand juries present bigly risks for the FG.  The House January 6^th committee also appears to be rubbing the FG the wrong way more than usual because despite the reticence of certain prominent hold outs like the as yet unindicted Mark Meadows to cooperate, a number of former White House denizens, including a few of the most senior members of former VP Mike Pence’s staff, have testified. Among the things that the Committee and the rest of us now know via the NY Times is that the FG was directly involved in the efforts to get one or more departments of the US government to confiscate voting machines, the ones that kraken lawyer Sidney Powell, pillow man Mike Lindell and the other members of the FG’s loon squad claimed were manipulated by Hugo Chavez, China and Italy to flip votes to Joe Biden. The craziest thing about this scheme and another thing not on my Bingo card is that Rudy Giuliani of all people apparently was the voice of reason.  He apparently persuaded the FG that having “his” military grab the machines from swing state election authorities would have a really bad and very illegal thing to do.  Of course, we shouldn’t give Rudy too much credit, after putting the kibosh on calling out the military, he followed up on the FG’s request that he call upon Homeland Security to go get those machines. Homeland Security leadership refused, saying that voting machine theft fell outside of their zip code, similarly before he resigned Attorney General Barr refused a request to have the Department of Justice do the same.  As to Rudy, let’s not give him too much credit as he was actively trying to overturn the election, it’s just that his plans did not involve martial law. One more thing on the legal front, NYS Attorney General Tish James has subpoenaed the Federal government’s Trump DC hotel records.  She wants to know whether the FG and his family lied about their company’s financial position when they were competing for the lease that they ultimately obtained from the GSA (General Services Administration).  By the way, Ivanka was the point person for the negotiation of the DC hotel project and one of the things being examined is whether she failed to mention her option to buy her NY apartment from her father’s company for $8 million, property that was valued at over $20 million on the company’s financial statements.

Hate Update: Over the weekend a group of neo-Nazis paraded, swastikas and all, at a shopping plaza and on a highway overpass near Orlando, Florida.  The Republican heads of Florida’s legislature, Republican Senator Rick Scott and Democratic Congresswoman/Senate candidate Val Demings all responded quickly, with condemnations but not Governor DeSantis. Initially he remained silent though his spokesperson did not. She suggested via tweet that the Nazis weren’t really Nazis, that they were more likely just Democrats pretending to be Nazis to make DeSantis look bad. DeSantis did finally say something but he was far more focused on those Democrats who criticized him for not saying something sooner than the neo-Nazis, because after all maybe there are nice people on both sides?  By the way, Senator Rubio who is up for reelection this year appears to have spent his weekend hidden under a rock. What does it say about the state of affairs when politicians can’t bring themselves to denounce neo-Nazis and the like? That should be a slam dunk. Whoopi Goldberg also fell down the Nazi rabbit hole this week.  She got herself into all kinds of trouble for saying on The View that the “Holocaust isn’t about race” and then doubling down on her remarks. By focusing on color, Whoopi missed that in the eyes of Nazis Jews are members of an inferior race and that’s what mattered during the Holocaust and judging by that parade in Orlando still matters. Ironically, the remarks that got her into trouble were made during a discussion of the banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus books which begin with the following Adolph Hitler quote “The Jews are undoubtably a race, but they are not human.” Later Whoopi issued an apology.  She repeated her apology on yesterday’s “clean-up” show which also featured Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt.  This morning ABC suspended Whoopi for two weeks.  Count me among those who think that though her initial comments were bad and needed to be retracted, her apology was genuine and that her suspension is an overreach.  We’d all be better off if DeSantis was the one kicked to the curb but sadly he’s still viewed as a Republican heir apparent should the FG step aside.

Viral Musings:  The Pfizer BioNTech COVID vaccine for those 6 months to five years of age is now expected to be approved for emergency use by early next month. The Moderna shots, like the Pfizer ones before them, are now fully authorized.  Today’s NY Times reports that despite the widespread availability of vaccines,  the US has a higher COVID death rate than other wealthy countries.  That disparity is attributed to our lower vaccine rates and our lower uptake of booster shots. It looks like giving air time to vaccine skeptics and fearmongers has consequences, something that Fox and Spotify and the other mostly right wing outlets who keep doing so should care about but apparently don’t.