Roasted Nuts!?

🌻🌻🌻: Apparently those assertions that Putin was refocusing his efforts on southern and eastern Ukraine aren’t entirely correct.  Overnight his forces bombed Lviv killing more civilians possibly in retaliation for the embarrassing loss of his Moskva battleship but also because as shown by the bodies piled up in Mariupol and Bucha, killing and torturing civilians, like incinerating, is what genocidal maniacs do and yes, taking a page from Hitler’s playbook, he is also reportedly incinerating bodies to hide his war crimes. Though they seem to be ”only” wounded some of the volunteers working with Chef Jose Andreas World Central Kitchen in Kharkiv were also victims of one of Putin’s bombing runs this weekend.  In other news, over the weekend President Zelenskyy said that he would love it if President Biden stopped by for a visit so it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that someone senior from the US, perhaps even Joe, will do a very quick fly by during the week.    

Insurrectionist Party:  Another week and another piece of news about how some more elected Republicans tried their best to undo the results of the last presidential election.  The politicians in question this time are Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Congressman Chip Roy. On November 7, in a series of texts to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, someone who really did commit election fraud, Lee offered his "unequivocal support” for Meadows “to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections while Roy wrote "We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend." Lee also lobbied for Meadows to help get kraken lawyer Sidney Powell, who he called a “straight shooter” in to see the Former Guy because she had a strategy to keep the election in play, moving more states into the FG column. Lee didn’t stop at pushing for Powell to gain access, once her insanity became obvious, even to him, he began pushing for the now discredited John Eastman to take her place as a way to keep the coup going. By the time January had rolled around, Lee and Roy both backed off and after the insurrection at the Capitol they did vote to certify the election results but by then the damage had been done.  Worth noting that, Utah’s other Senator Mitt Romney who probably suspected that his colleague was up to no good, has not endorsed Lee’s reelection run, he hasn’t endorsed any of his Republican opponents or Evan McMullin, the former CIA Agent, conservative running as an independent either but not endorsing your state colleague is highly unusual.  On the subject of endorsements, fresh off of his endorsement of quacky Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Former Guy has endorsed Hillbilly guy JD Vance.  Vance, whose campaign is being largely financed by tech billionaire Peter Theil, used to be an FG critic before he saw the space lasers. About the best thing to say about Vance who is also on the record saying that no one really cares about Ukraine, is that he doesn’t appear to have a history of violence against women, which distinguishes him from the Republican Party’s leading candidates in Missouri, Nebraska and Georgia where former Governor Eric Greitens, Corporate CEO Charles Herbster and former football hero Herschel Walker, all credibly accused, may end up as the party’s 2022 candidates.   Though Missouri’s Greitens, who was ousted from the Governor’s mansion for tying up and blackmailing his former girlfriend among other things, hasn’t yet received one of those coveted FG endorsement, Walker and Herbster have.  Though we still have to get through the midterms, the 2024 presidential race is also in the news.  Last week we were gifted with another indication that the FG is planning to run when the RNC announced that it had unanimously voted to require GOP presidential candidates to commit to abstain from presidential debates sanctioned by the Commission on Presidential Debates, the non-partisan group that has been sponsoring the process for decades. Quite a few of the Republican presidential wannabees are actually good debaters but one notable one, the Former Guy, is really bad at it so the RNC’s move is not a surprise and could be undone if the FG opts not to run.                   

Culture Wars:  We continue to reach new levels of crazy as the right moves forward with its plans to make sure that the country’s children are “protected” from learning about anything that might  make them, or more likely their parents, uncomfortable.  Florida, where Disney is now the enemy, has determined that 41% of its textbooks are impermissible because they contain references to Critical Race Theory (spoiler alert they don’t) and/or the “unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning in mathematics.” Maybe the image of a Black conductor in one of those trains going 55 mph before it passes the one going 65 mph would make the textbook disqualifying?  Perhaps the solution is to just stop teaching math or anything else for that matter because who needs to learn useful skills anyway?   Florida isn’t just going after textbooks and Disney, last week presidential wannabee Governor DeSantis signed into law a new restrictive abortion law which prohibits abortions after 15 weeks with limited exceptions related to saving the mother’s life.  The law does not allow for exemptions in cases where pregnancies were caused by rape, incest or human trafficking. Back in the old days, as in last year, such a law would have been deemed unconstitutional but with the expectation that SCOTUS will toss Roe v Wade out the window sometime in June when it rules on Mississippi’s Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, DeSantis, like a bunch of his Republican gubernatorial cronies is going all in on cutting back or even eliminating reproductive rights, because why not?  Then there’s Tucker Carlson, the guru of the right, in addition to lamenting over all that bad press that his man crush Vladimir Putin has been getting, something to do with his Ukraine genocide, Tucker has been spending some of his spare time producing “documentaries” about such topics as the impact of declining levels of testosterone on culture.  But nothing to worry about, he has a solution for that, he’s now advocating that men “explore testicle tanning” as a solution to their problems.  Really, I am not making that up and the sad thing is that a significant number of his viewers, perhaps many of those who chugged horse paste and avoided getting their COVID vaccines, will probably take him up on the suggestion.

Viral Musings:  On the COVID front, though disease levels are down from their highs, well down to the extent counts are accurate given the use of unreported home tests, much of the country is experiencing an upswing, again, due to the highly contagious BA2 strain.  NBC reports that NYC officials are considering following Philadelphia’s lead, bringing back face mask requirements in high-risk settings and places where social distancing is not possible.  In addition according to the city's latest available data, the “positivity rate is at more than 10% in five neighborhoods -- four of them are in Manhattan: Financial District (10006), Lincoln Square, Lenox Hill/Upper East Side, Financial District (10004), and Greenpoint.”  The good news is that NYC is highly vaccinated, anti-viral meds are available and most cases are not leading to hospitalizations but still hospitalization levels are rising, well above 1000 statewide again. New York has the hospital capacity to handle COVID spikelets, but in parts of the country with hospital beds are scarcer and higher percentages of the population are unvaccinated BA2 and its offspring may not be so benign.