Fog of Guns 🌻🌻🌻

So much for the Good Guy Theory: Almost everything we first learned about the deadly Robb Elementary shooting in its immediate aftermath and much of what law enforcement officials said during yesterday’s truly bizarre news conference is wrong and a lot still remains untold or unclear or both.  Among the disputed facts:  that school safety officer the shooter encountered on his way into the school, there wasn’t one; the shooter didn’t run right into the school, he spent some time firing one of his AR 15 guns outside before entering; and despite initial reports that he did all his killing in one classroom, that’s not true either.  Also, in addition to the 19 children and two teachers who were killed, and despite no reference to them in early reports 17 more were injured and incredibly sadly, the husband of one of the dead teachers died of a broken heart yesterday leaving their four teens orphaned. Most damning but not at all shocking, despite those constant assurances from the NRA and their paid politicians, as in Buffalo “good guys” with guns weren’t able to save the day, in part because they appeared to be ill prepared for the task and hear me out on this one, possibly taking out a maniac with an automatic rifle isn’t all that easy.  It turns out that the day’s heroes were mostly parents some of whom managed to run into the school to grab out their kids even though at least one of them initially got into trouble for refusing to stand idly by.  

Mental Gymnastics:  Governor Abbott, who freaked out at his Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke for “rudely” interrupting him during his press conference, the one where Abbott blamed the deadly shooting spree on mental illness rather than guns, as if the US is the only country with mental illness, and who also recently stripped funding from state mental illness services because that’s who he is and what he does, revealed this morning that he’s not going to the NRA Conference not because he doesn’t want to go but because he’s fears that Beto might be making inroads with voters.  As to the Houston NRA conference Texas Senator John Cornyn has cancelled his scheduled appearance due to a sudden “conflict” but Senator Ted Cruz is still planning to attend.  Cancun Ted will probably use the opportunity to further expound upon his one door theory, because he’s now pushing the mantra that trapping students in schools in violation of fire codes is a much easier solution than making it as difficult to buy an AR 15 as it is to get Sudafed or adopt a shelter dog.  Of course the Former Guy is also planning to attend the NRA conference and because he’ll be there, naturally none of those gun things will be allowed. Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t reveal the solution that Georgia’s Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker has proposed:  “what about getting a department that could look at young men that’s looking at women that looking at social media…if we can stop that that way?” No typos, those are his words.  Highly likely that Herschel will refuse to debate his opponent Senator Raphael Warnock but if he does show up it will be entertaining in a car crash king of way to say the least.  On the Senate front, Pennsylvania’s too close to call Republican race is in recount mode.  Republican leader Mitch McConnell has given the go ahead for a few of his Senators to “negotiate” some kind of gun restrictions with Democrats led by Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, at least for the moment and only because he thinks it’s to his benefit to look like he cares.  And because he’s still playing Lucy with a football, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin is now teasing cooperation on build back better, again.

Happy Memorial Day.  Enjoy the weekend but stay away from COVID, Monkeys and AR 15s.

  

 

Sandy, Ross and Marjory 

Guns, Guns, Death: Yesterday was supposed to be all about primaries but instead the news quickly pivoted to guns in Texas rather than in war torn Ukraine after a body armor protected teen who had supplemented his personal gun arsenal with an AR 15 rifle the day after his eighteenth birthday seriously wounded his grandmother before going on to kill at least nineteen children and two adults at Ross Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.  Ross Elementary has now passed Parkland Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to become the site of the second deadliest US school (as opposed to university) shooting on record;   Sandy Hook maintains the dubious distinction of still being number one.  Naturally, most Republican politicians responded to the sickening tragedy with the usual bull sh-t pablum, saying that the victims and their families were in their prayers. Three of those prayerful hypocrites were Texas Senators Ted Cruz who though he’s “grieving horrifically…..still doesn’t see gun reform as a solution” and John Cornyn and another is Governor Greg Abbott who along with eliminating access to abortion counts making gun sales even easier among his major accomplishments in a state where purchasing a gun was already easier than buying cold medicine and way easier than voting but where the electrical grid routinely fails because who needs power when you’ve got an assault rifle? Proving that these days there is always an implicating old tweet to drag out, Abbott of course has one as back in 2015 he tweeted “I’m EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let’s pick up the pace Texans.” Alongside the Former Guy and South Dakota Governor Kristin Noem, Abbott and Cruz are still scheduled to speak at this weekend’s NRA’s conference which will take place in Houston, Texas of course. Wonder if SCOTUS still expects to make it easier to get guns before they go off for summer break? Probably.

Sounds of Silence:  Speaking of hypocrites, Mitt Romney responded to the Uvalde shooting by saying “grief overwhelms the soul….parents hearts are wrenched…incomprehensible…We must find answers” Worth noting with over $13.6 million of their blood money in his coffers, the many times over multi-millionaire Mittens is by far the leading recipient of NRA cash. He's not alone: among sitting Senators Richard Burr banked $6.9 million, Roy Blunt $4.6, Thom Tillis $4.4 million, Marco Rubio $3.3 million, Joni Ernst $3.1 million, Rob Portman $3.0 million, Todd Young $2.9 million, Bill Cassidy $2.9 million, Tom Cotton $1.9 million and so on down a list that includes virtually every other sitting Republican Senator.  On the Democratic side, VP Kamala Harris was the first to speak out with an “enough is enough” even though we know it won’t be while an especially weary and sad President Biden also spoke about the shooting after his long Korea flight landed.  An anguished Senator Chris Murphy, who represents Connecticut, the home of all time worst school shooting, Sandy Hook, took to the Senate floor to plead with his Republican colleagues to vote for something, anything, to chip away at the ease of obtaining killer weapons while also asking his Democratic colleagues to compromise because something is better than nothing.  One more thing, if you have time for just one speech listen to what Golden Warriors Coach Steve Kerr who like most of us is “tired of the moments of silence” had to say about yesterday’s horror.  At a time when the likes of college football Coach Tommy Tuberville is a Senator and Herschel Walker is trying to become one, Kerr’s speech is a reminder of the type of sports heroes that should be elevated.      

Midterm Madness:  Though it wasn’t a washout, neither was it a good day for the Former Guy.  In Georgia, the state which currently has two Democratic Senators largely due to his 2020 election theatrics, the FG’s least favorite Governor Brian Kemp cruised to a victory, beating the FG endorsed former Senator David Perdue by 52 points. Kemp will face Democratic darling Stacey Abrams again in the fall; she’s the long term Georgia resident who Perdue said should go back to wherever it is she came from as part of his last ditch effort to secure votes by acting as racist as possible.  While Kemp’s primary victory was expected, many thought and the FG hoped that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger might find his career on the chopping block but instead he received more than 50% of the vote in his primary, beating out his challenger the FG endorsed Congressman Jody Hice.  By crossing the 50% threshold, Raffensperger even managed to avoid a runoff, a remarkable feat given he was considered a “dead man walking” over his refusal to come up with those 11,780 votes that the FG needed to “secure” a victory in 2020.  In Alabama, Mo Brooks who the FG endorsed before he didn’t came in second, garnering enough votes to make it to a run off against Katie Britt, outgoing Senator Richard Shelby’s chief of staff.  In Arkansas former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who lies like she breathes, easily won her primary and will likely be the state’s next Governor and who knows, if the FG runs again, she could be his VP pick because why not?  One more Republican thing, in Texas the Bush legacy took another hit after George P Bush, son of Jeb, failed to beat the state’s sitting Attorney General, the FG endorsed Ken Paxton who is currently under indictment for securities fraud.  On the Democratic side, Georgia Congresswoman Lucy McBath, who lost her son to gun violence and who had been redistricted out of her seat beat another Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux in another district and, lastly, the results in the run off race between the House’s one anti-choice Democrat Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar and his challenger progressive Jessica Cisneros remain too close to call.

 

Goulash  🌻🌻🌻

Hungarian Hate-Fest: Over the weekend, the former president of the United States “retruthed” (what retweets are called on his Truth Social platform) a message suggesting that the cure for US inflation is civil war.  Also, to hammer home how he feels about minorities and anyone not on his “team” he made a virtual appearance at this weekend’s CPAC Hungarian hate-fest where another featured speaker was a notorious Hungarian racist Zsolt Bayer who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people. Tucker “fish sticks” Carlson and former chief of staff Mark Meadows also spoke, making it clear that white supremacy and ethnic hatred is firmly entrenched in the increasingly right wing Republican party where right of center centrists are considered RINOs at best. Worth noting that it was a Hungarian, Theodore Herzl who founded modern day Zionism, calling for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Israel back in 1897 over a prescient concern that Jews didn’t have a future in Europe.  Back at home, the Republican Party still doesn’t have a candidate for the open Pennsylvania Senate seat but lots of the same election truthers who opposed the counting of all those mailed in votes in 2020 are now screaming for them all to be counted as long as they tip the scales toward their candidate of choice. Tomorrow is another primary day and in Alabama it looks like Republican Congressman Mo Brooks, who had been counted out last week, is making a comeback. Since none of the other candidates running is likely to clear the 50% hurdle that Alabama law requires, all Brooks has to do is come in second place to make it to a June 21 runoff and that looks like it could happen much to the chagrin of the FG who pulled his early endorsement over concerns about Brook’s viability. Of course the real state to watch remains Georgia, where the question isn’t whether or not Governor Brian Kemp wins his primary but rather by how much he trounces the FG endorsed former Senator David Perdue.  And of course there’s that secretary of state race where Brad Raffensperger’s fate is dangling by a thread.

Rotten Apple:  Enough about the Republicans, the Democrats are either in total disarray or not.  New York State is clearly a mess. It’s court approved new map merges NYC’s Upper West and Upper East side districts, pitting Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler against Oversight Chair Carol Maloney, hardly the outcome that was foreseen earlier in the year when expectations had been that the new map would create an additional Democratic seat or two. To make matters worse, former Mayor Bill de Blasio has thrown his hat into the ring too, running in the newly configured 10^th District which now includes much of Lower Manhattan and extends into Park Slope and Borough Park in Brooklyn.  He’ll face off against a number of candidates including Congressman Mondaire Jones who has decided not to go head to head with fellow Democrat DCCC chair/Dutchess County Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney in the redrawn Hudson Valley 17^th district. If all of this sounds confusing, it’s because it is and as a result of all the bizarre redistricting it looks like NY’s Democratic caucus could end up ceding a seat or two to Republicans instead of gaining one at their expense.  On the national front, news is also confusing.  Biden’s popularity remains low but projections about the midterms are all over the place.  Depending on the day of the week, the Democrats are either going to be wiped out in a defeat of epic proportions because of inflation or hold their own, bolstered by voters concerned about their reproductive rights.  And one more thing, a group of Democrats led by Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and including New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s  Ilhan Omar, Missouri’s Cori Bush, New York’s Jamaal Bowman, Illinois’ Marie Newman, Minnesota’s Betty McCollum have called for a vote to recognize the “continued dispossession of the Palestinian people” at the hands of Israel while AOC seem to be blaming military aid to Israel for the failure of the US to provide health care to all Americans. It’s not a coincidence that their call coincided with the celebration of Israel’s independence or that it comes after the very sad death of a Palestinian journalist who was killed while covering regional violence.

And Monkey Pox.  Oy.        

Nay, Neigh, Nyet

Mailing It In:  It’s Friday but we still don’t know whether Mehmet Oz or David McCormick will be Pennsylvania’ Republican Senate candidate.  With around 8700 mail-in votes still uncounted Oz has a very slim 1124 vote lead over McCormick.  Unless one of the two garners a significantly disproportionate share of the remaining votes, a mandatory recount will be triggered making it likely that a winner won’t be declared until early June.  Of course the Former Guy isn’t interested in any of that; he’s insisting that Oz just declare himself the victor and move on because that worked out so well for him?  The McCormick side, which includes many of the same FG aides who questioned both the validity of mail-in votes in 2020 and Biden’s victory, wants to wait until every ballot is counted particularly since many of them come from his home county. For his part Oz hasn’t declared himself the winner, yet, but he has said some of the quiet part out loud, thanking Fox pundit Sean Hannity for providing him with so much valuable campaign advice during their daily calls.  As to saying quiet stuff out loud Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp who is currently in autocratic leader Viktor Orban’s Hungary for this year’s “American” Conservative PAC conference weighed in on both the imminent overturning of Roe v Wade and Replacement Theory by saying banning abortion is a good thing since it helps with the “great replacement” and will result in the birth of more of “our people.”  I shudder to think what his plans are for the forced pregnancies that lead to more babies who aren’t white evangelicals.  Then again, judging by yesterday’s House vote, we kind of know what his party’s plans are.  Yesterday 192 Republicans, including all of GOP leadership, voted against providing $28 million to the FDA to help address the current baby formula shortage because while fertilized eggs matter to them, actual babies, particularly poor ones don’t.  That said, they’ll all continue to harp on the formula debacle because it makes for a good political talking point, especially if they let it fester.  Unfortunately for them between getting Abbott’s plant up and running again, importing banned by the revised NAFTA agreement formula from overseas, and allowing WIC (women, infants and children) food stamp beneficiaries increased buying flexibility, the formula problem will be resolved soon, though not soon enough for those currently in a bind. By the way Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz believes that families who use WIC benefits are not “hard-working Americans” and shouldn’t have access to more baby formula.  Apparently Herr Putz, whose district includes lots of members of the military doesn’t know or care that many of those financially stressed families are WIC beneficiaries.  Getting back to fertilized eggs, Oklahoma is gearing up to ban abortions from the moment of fertilization.  Their new law will take a page from Texas, allowing state residents to sue those having or abetting an abortion because isn’t that what good neighbors do and doesn’t every state need period police?

Primary Colors: Next week there will be primaries in Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia where the FG has basically abandoned former Senator David Perdue, the gubernatorial candidate he endorsed over current Governor Brian Kemp, something to do with polls that show Kemp leading Perdue by 32 points and the FG not wanting to be associated with another loser.  To be clear, Kemp is as conservative as they come and a whiz at voter suppression, the FG hates him because he refused to overturn the result of the 2020 election. To that end, the interesting Georgia race to watch is the too close to predict one between incumbent Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who refused to find those 11k votes that the FG asked him to dig up, and his challenger Congressman Jody Hice, who voted against certifying Biden’s victory and who promises that he’ll get to the bottom of all that fraud that wasn’t making sure that no Democrat ever “steals” another statewide election again.  Needless to say, Hice has the FG’s full endorsement.  In Alabama, where, as a result of the impending retirement of Republican Senator Richard Shelby, a Senate seat is up for grabs, Congressman Mo Brooks, who had the FG endorsement before he lost it when it became clear that he was lagging in the polls, is going to lose.  The likely Republican winner will be Katie Britt who, absent any as yet undisclosed accusations of child molestation, will cruise to victory and on to the Senate because Alabama is as red as you get.

Human Resources:  Elon Musk whose takeover of Twitter remains in jeopardy has been tweeting a lot, as in tons, of weird stuff lately, peculiar even for him.  First he tweeted “in the past I voted Democrat because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.” Then because saying that he was moving to the “replacement theory” party not because he doesn’t want to pay more in taxes but because Democrats weren’t kind enough wasn’t sufficiently Orwellian, he tweet warned that an onslaught of “political attacks” against him would be forthcoming.  Well, late yesterday we learned what he meant by “political attacks.”  Apparently his SpaceX company paid one of his former flight attendant’s $250,000 to settle a sexual misconduct case in 2018.  The case which we are learning about now only because a friend of the flight attendant, who isn’t talking because she signed one of those non-disclosure agreements, has come forward with the details.  The case involved Musk flashing his private parts at the flight attendant during a massage,  promising to buy her a horse if she provided him with a “whole body” experience.  Apparently, having massage skills is a Flight Attendant requirement in Musk world not surprising given that frequently published photograph of Musk with Jeffrey Epstein abettor Ghislaine Maxwell.  Though he’s not been accused of sexual harassment, it looks like the House January 6^th Committee has pictures of at least one Republican Congressman, Barry Loudermilk, giving some “constituents” or insurrectionists posing as constituents a tour through the Capitol on January 5^th.  That’s significant for two reasons: first, because of pandemic restrictions Capitol tours were suspended at that time, and, second, Loudermilk had previously denied giving such a tour.  It wouldn’t be a reach to assume that the January 6^th Committee has many more implicating pictures that they’re about to share.  Speaking of implicating, there’s also be reporting about the ongoing investigation into all things Hunter Biden and how he resolved his tax liability. No doubt that Hunter’s business dealings are questionable but maybe that’s not why they’re getting so much attention.  It’s as good a time as any to mention the $600 million that Javanka booked during the FG presidency and the recent $2 billion capital commitment that the Saudi wealth fund made to the not so qualified Jared’s investment vehicle  

🌻🌻🌻 The $40 billion aid package for Ukraine passed the Senate yesterday by a vote of 86 to 11.  Despite Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saying that voting against the package would be a mistake because “anyone concerned about the cost of supporting a Ukrainian victory should consider the much larger cost should Ukraine lose” all 11 naysayers were Republicans including: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, John Boozman of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indiana, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. Some of them are presidential wannabees, some are just placating the FG, one is Rand Paul, and then there’s Tuberville who might not even knew what he was voting against.

Never Say Orgy

Primary Colors: As of this morning Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate remains a too close to call toss-up between the Former Guy endorsed/TV doctor/New Jersey resident Mehmet Oz and the Connecticut resident/hedge fund investor David McCormick, the rich guy with a cadre of the FG’s former aides on his campaign payroll.  Though she may never concede as she didn’t concede her loss to Democratic Congresswoman Dean in 2020, right wing commentator Kathy Barnette who had been surging in the polls in the run up to primary day is out of the running. Assuming she sticks by a statement she made earlier in the week she will not be endorsing either Oz or McCormick because she “has no intention of supporting globalists.” On the Democratic side, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman who voted via special absentee ballot from his hospital room before having a pacemaker with a defibrillator implanted easily won the Democratic primary over the more moderate Congressman Conor Lamb. Fetterman’s wife Gisele, a fixture on the campaign trail, delivered his thank you speech. Should former cardiac surgeon Dr Oz eke out a victory, his debates with Fetterman could prove interesting, in any case it’s fair to assume that the Republicans will try to make Fetterman’s health as well as his sartorial choices an issue. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro who like Fetterman was off the campaign trail yesterday nursing “minor” COVID symptoms, will face off in November against Republican Doug Mastriano, who easily won the Republican gubernatorial primary. Mastriano who received a late endorsement by the FG remains one of the most ardent pushers of the 2020 election lie and has promised that if he wins in November his secretary of state will revamp the state’s election procedures, code for he’ll do what he can to insure that only Republicans, especially Republican presidential candidates, win in Pennsylvania going forward.  If that’s sounds ominous, it’s because it is. At least for now, the relatively popular Shapiro is more likely to win in November and the hope is that Fetterman will benefit from his coattails but Pennsylvania being so swingy anything can happen. In other election news, North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn who had gotten a last minute endorsement from the FG lost his primary, evidence that when Republican leadership wants to kill off one of their own, especially one who accuses them of participating in drug fueled orgies, they can. The FG endorsed Republican Ted Budd, another election denier, won North Carolina’s Senate primary and will face Democrat/Former Chief Justice Cheri Beasley in the general election. Further proving that the FG’s endorsements while helpful don’t necessarily make victory a sure thing, Idaho’s Republican Governor Brad Little won his primary over his challenger, the FG endorsed Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin, another election lie proponent who is best known outside of Idaho for imposing a ban on mask mandates when Little was traveling out of state.  For the record, Little had never imposed a statewide mask mandate, McGeachin had just been engaging in right wing theatrics.  To no one’s surprise Kentucky Senator Rand Paul easily won his primary apparently because Kentucky has a fondness for really awful Senators. He will face Democratic challenger Charles Booker in November.  One more thing, it’s hard to figure out what exactly is going on in New York State but it looks like the state’s redistricting plans which were supposed to bolster Democratic representation have really gone off the rails so much so that two of the House’s most senior Democratic members, Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler, will be facing off for the same redrawn district while the unemployed former Mayor Bill De Blasio is once again teasing that he’ll be running in another one.    

Legalities: Late yesterday the NY Times reported that the Department of Justice has requested that the House January 6^th committee provide it with transcripts of some, or maybe all, of the interviews that it has conducted as part of its own investigation into all things related to the January 6^th insurrection.  While that’s good news and could mean that the DOJ has moved beyond going after individual insurrectionists and is actually investigating coup planners further up the food chain, the request is a month old and so far the January 6^th committee has not shared any of those transcripts, perhaps over concerns that the DOJ might decide to prevent them from including some of what they plan to share with all of us during the upcoming public hearings which are scheduled to take place in June. In other legal news, the  DOJ has updated its earlier indictment of the FG’s billionaire friend Thomas Barrack with an expanded one that provides additional information about how he “allegedly” exploited his proximity to the FG to make secret deals with the United Arab Emirates.  And remember John Durham, the special prosecutor that former Attorney General Bill Barr appointed to “prove” that the predication for the investigation into the possibility that the FG and his cronies were playing footsie with the Russians was a Hillary Clinton hit job, his case against cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann is now being tried in a Washington DC court. Durham alleges that Sussmann lied to the FBI in 2016 when he brought them his suspicions about possible cyber connections between the FG’s servers and the Kremlin linked Alfa Bank. To be clear the case is about whether or not Sussmann lied.  Sussmann denies that he did and though the FG, Fox and the right insist otherwise, the FBI did not base it’s decision to investigate the FG on those odd Alfa bank communications.  Next up Hunter’s laptop?

Viral Musings:  New York City has raised its COVID alert to high and is urging, but not mandating, indoor masking.  There were more than 130,000 new US COVID cases reported yesterday.  Hospitalizations are rising too but not as fast, at least not so far, something that new COVID coordinate Dr Ashish Jha attributes to widespread, well widespread in most but not all places, vaccination levels and the availability of anti-viral medicines such as Paxlovid.  As to Paxlovid, while the five day regimen generally works, there are more reports of people experiencing rebounds a week or so after they finish taking their pills.  Those reports are anecdotal but count vaccine expert Dr Peter Hotez who is still a believer in Paxlovid’s benefits, as one of those relapse anecdotes. Last night he tweeted that he’s once again experiencing symptoms albeit minor ones.  The government is again providing free COVID tests to anyone who wants them (https://www.covid.gov/tests) and yesterday the FDA approved boosters for the 5 to 11 year old set.

🌻🌻🌻 Sweden and Finland have formally applied for NATO membership though at least for now Turkey appears to be against their membership, opposition that probably won’t carry the day.  Vlad, who according to unreliable news sources like the NY Post had some kind of abdominal surgery a few days ago, can’t be happy about the Finns and Swedes ignoring his threats. One of his justifications for going to war against Ukraine was to prevent it from joining NATO.  His other reason had to do with all those alleged Ukrainian neo-Nazis which is sadly ironic given our problems with white supremacists, you know those advocates of the replacement theory like the Buffalo shooter and Tucker Carlson.  As to our white supremacist problem, President Biden called the problem out while he delivered another one of his touching memorial speeches in Buffalo, but Tucker and most of the Republican hierarchy assure us that we’re all getting upset about nothing. The problem isn’t white supremacists with guns but rather it’s a combination of hysterical liberals. video gaming and mental illness.  Worth noting, there’s lots of video gaming in Japan but few guns, so few gun murders and sadly though there’s mental illness everywhere, places without wide spread gun ownership don’t experience frequent mass shootings.         

Heartbeats

Guns and Politics:  Last week there were mass shootings in Chicago, St. Louis, Paterson, Hot Springs National Park, Milwaukee, Houston, Orange County and Buffalo.  Each one was horrifying but the Buffalo shooting stands out because the shooter who killed 10 people while injuring an additional three didn’t hide his motivation, he  was upfront about why he selected and then traveled to Buffalo to engage in his killing spree.  A believer in Hitler’s Great Replacement Theory, he was out to kill Black people, to do his part to prevent the displacement of white Americans.  Advocates of replacement theory don’t just target Black people, their wide net also includes “undesirable” immigrants like those at the southern border and of course Jews which explains why the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us” during their rally, the one that ended with the murder of Heather Heyer and that the Former Guy described as a festive both sides hoopla. Sadly, the Buffalo killer’s views are not unique, in fact these days they are increasingly mainstream, at least among a wide swath of Republicans. Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, an outspoken advocate, has done his best to make replacement theory seem acceptable and, perhaps even more disturbing, New York State Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who after Kevin McCarthy and the KKK friendly Steve Scalise, holds the third most senior position in the Republican’s House hierarchy, is a big fan, she’s even bought Facebook ads that assert that white people are intentionally being replaced by migrants. Ohio’s Republican candidate for the Senate, hillbilly guy JD Vance is a fan too. As to guns, the Buffalo murderer’s manifesto said that his killing spree “would involve the use of guns. Why? Because they work.  There are very few weapons that are easy to use, accessible, and effective at killing than firearms.  That’s right I used the dreaded military grade assault rifle-15.”   if you think things are bad now, it’s only a matter of time before more people are out there following his model.  The Supreme  Court, the same crowd about to throw reproductive rights to the curb will be issuing a ruling soon in the case of NYS Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen and expectations are that the SCOTUS majority will rule against NYS’s century old concealed weapons licensing law because we really need more guns on the street, don’t we? Lee Zeldin, the Republican Congressman running for NYS Governor had little to say about guns this weekend but did send out a message calling for reinstatement of the death penalty because apparently he unlike the majority of criminal law experts believes that it would deter murder sprees. One more thing on the SCOTUS front, Clarence Thomas, Insurrection Ginni’s husband, was out whining this weekend about the abortion ruling leak, calling it “tremendously bad” and wondering “how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them."  Am I the only one who feels like we’re being punked?

Primary Colors: Tomorrow is primary day in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Idaho, Kentucky and Oregon.  Over the weekend things got just a bit weirder on both sides of the aisle.  The Former Guy announced his endorsement of Republican Doug Mastriano, the far right insurrectionist running to become Governor of Pennsylvania.  The general view is that despite pushback from what’s left of the Republican’s mainstream, the FG endorsed Mastriano, who spent the weekend campaigning with the equally far right, hate spewing Senate candidate Kathy Barnette, because he wants to be associated with a primary winner and it looks like Mastriano will win the primary while the Senate race appears to be a toss-up meaning that Mehmet Oz, his pick, might not emerge victorious.  Now for the totally unexpected, on the Democratic side, Sunday afternoon 52 year old Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, the Democratic party’s leading Senate candidate, revealed that the reason he’d gone radio silent over the weekend was because in his words “I had a stroke that was caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long.” Fetterman also reported the doctors were able to remove the clot, “reversing the stroke,” that his heart was under control and that he would be back on the campaign trail shortly.  And because strokes among the relatively younger Democratic Senatorial set appear to be a thing right now, you may recall that New Mexico’s 49 year old Senator Ben Ray Lujan was out for a while due to one earlier this year, 63 year old Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen revealed that he too suffered a “minor” stroke over the weekend, his was caused by a “small venous tear” at the back of his head.  The hospitalized Van Hollen who is up for reelection this year in solidly blue Maryland reports that doctors have told him that he’ll be fine too.  The Democratic majority hangs by a thread and one of those threads is Senator Diane Feinstein who many believe is suffering from dementia. Oy. Getting back to the primary races, with Senator Richard Burr retiring, North Carolina has a Senate seat to fill and there it looks like the FG’s candidate  who is also being supported by the right wing Club for Growth will likely win the Republican primary. Cheri Beasley will likely be the Democratic candidate.  Critical Senate races aside, the fun one to watch will involve Madison Cawthorn who just about everyone in Republican leadership has lined up against, not because he’s an insurrectionist or has been caught speeding without a license or trying to carry his gun on a plane but because of his orgy accusations and maybe also because of that icky sexually charged video.

🌻🌻🌻 A group of Republican Senators none of whom thought that the FG playing quid pro quo with President Zelenskyy over military assistance was a problem spent some time in Ukraine this weekend waving their flags.  The Republican squad included Leader Mitch McConnell, John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas, and Susan Collins of Maine. Presumably Kentucky’s other Senator Rand Paul was not invited and probably wouldn’t have attended even if he was.  As to the pearl clutching Susan, she probably felt safer in Ukraine than she would have back home because of all those peaceful pro-choice demonstrators who drew chalk pictures in front of both her Maine and Washington DC homes in protest of her vote against enacting reproductive rights legislation.  Apparently chalk is so much scarier than missiles.    

 

 

Twitter What?

Insurrection Chronicles:  Well the January 6^th Committee has finally gone all in, subpoenaing five  sitting members of Congress, including GQP Leader Kevin McCarthy, Ranking Judiciary Committee member Jim “Gym” Jordan of Ohio,  Pennsylvania’s Scott Perry, Alabama’s Mo Brooks, and Arizona’s Andy Biggs.  It’s highly unusual for a member of Congress to be subpoenaed for anything that doesn’t involve an ethics inquiry but then again there’s nothing usual about the events surrounding January 6 and each of these subpoenaed conspiracists have been and mostly still are unapologetically supportive of the Former Guy’s coup. It’s not clear if any of these charmers will honor their subpoenas, they’ve already refused invitations to sit down with the Committee, but since their failure to show up will complicate their plans to investigate everything from Hunter Biden’s laptop to Joe Biden’s pooping schedule should they win back the House during the midterms, who knows?  Worth noting, Mo Brooks who wore protective armor during his crowd rousing speech on insurrection day has a bone to pick with the Former Guy for un-endorsing his run for the Senate so maybe he’ll be the first to cave, or not.  In other news, some more of those emails that he’s been working so hard to squelch reveal that John Eastman, the highly inventive member of the Former Guy’s kraken legal squad who argued that VP Pence could toss out electoral college certifications from swing states that went Biden’s way, pressed a Pennsylvania lawmaker to eliminate some of Joe Biden’s votes by applying a mathematical equation concocted to disproportionately declare mail-in ballots cast for Biden invalid in order to flip the state back to the Former Guy. If that concept sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not all that different than the one the FG was promoting when he told Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger to find another 11,780 votes. And because there always are tapes, another one released by the authors of the newest, too late to matter tell all book This Will Not Pass, reveals Senator Lindsey Graham so upset, well upset for a nanosecond, about the events of January 6^th that he called Joe Biden “the best person” to lead the US, while adding “I mean, how mad can you get at Joe Biden?”  As to the Former Guy, it turns out that Attorney General Garland hasn’t totally been ignoring his misdeeds, well at least hasn’t been ignoring all of them.  Yesterday, it was revealed that the Department of Justice has a Grand Jury looking into those boxes of top secret files that were carried off to Mar a Lago along with the FG’s entourage of family members and other misfit toys.  

Handmaids Tale:  On the topic of purloined information, it’s now widely believed that the source of the Supreme Court leaked draft opinion wasn’t a freaked out court liberal but someone associated with Justice Alito, possibly part of an effort to keep Justice Handmaid Amy and/or Justice “I like Beer” Kavanaugh from being peeled off of his kill Roe and send reproductive freedom back to dark ages team. Also, it’s no surprise that the Senate couldn’t pass legislation enacting the principals of Roe into law, but still it’s especially disconcerting that the so-called pro-choice Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted against protecting reproductive rights.  Sadly, Joe Manchin voted alongside the Republicans too, but he’s always been against reproductive choice so his vote, though depressing, was expected.  

Midterm Madness:  Things in the Pennsylvania Senate race, where NJ resident/recipient of the coveted FG endorsement Mehmet Oz is competing neck and neck against Connecticut resident David McCormick, the husband of one time FG advisor Dina Powell who also has the support of Hope Hicks, Stephen Miller, and Kellyanne Conway, among other former FG loyalists, continues to get weirder.  A third candidate, Kathy Barnette, an African American right wing pundit who is on record expressing her hate for all things Muslim and all things LGTBQ is surging in the polls freaking out Republican leadership who fear that should she win next week’s primary their hopes of holding on to the Pennsylvania Senate seat will end up in the toilet, perhaps alongside the FG’s shredded documents. It’s not just the Senate primary that is proving problematic.  The Republican’s leading candidate in a crowded gubernatorial race is State Senator Doug Mastriano, a prominent pusher of election fraud myths, who belittled efforts to contain coronavirus and spread conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine. Mainstream Republicans, to the extent such a category exists anymore, fear that a primary victory by Mastriano will make presumptive Democratic candidate/current Attorney General/fellow University of Rochester alum Josh Shapiro’s victory that much more likely and could also help the Democrats win the much coveted Senate seat. As to the Senate race, it’s looking more and more likely that populist Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, the very tall guy somewhat eccentric guy who almost always wears shorts will win the Democratic primary over the more staid, middle of the road Congressman Conor Lamb.  

🌻🌻🌻 Rand Paul is holding up the quick passage of the $40 billion Ukraine “lend lease” legislation because he is who he is and that’s what the Senator who John McCain once said works for Vladimir Putin does.  The legislation will still pass but it will take a few more days due to Paul’s intransigence.  As expected, Putin’s goal of preventing more countries from joining NATO isn’t playing out as planned.  Finland, previously studiously neutral, will be applying to join ASAP.  Needless to say, Vlad, who is either really ill or faking it, isn’t happy given that rather long border that they share and is threatening to do something nasty about it but probably won’t because he’s a bit stretched at the moment dealing with those rather difficult Ukrainians.   

👶 👶 👶:  This morning big whiner Elon Must tweeted that his deal to acquire Twitter is “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users." Maybe that’s the reason, or maybe it’s just because he’s looking to negotiate his inflated acquisition price down or just wants a way out.  Also, you may have heard that infant formula is hard to find these days.  Lots of finger pointing but as explained simply by MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, a business reporter back before she took over Brian Williams late night spot, the infant formula business in the US is an oligopoly 90% controlled by three companies who’ve lobbied successfully to create barriers to prevent the entry of foreign competitors. Abbott one of the dominant US producers had to temporarily halt production over some major quality control problems and that, rather than some nefarious Biden plan to kill off infants, is the reason we’re short formula right now.  Hopefully, the current plan to allow foreign products into the country combined with Abbott getting its production back online will help alleviate the price gauging and the shortage but probably not soon enough for those who need it most.

 

Hurricanes, Lasers and Microchips 🌻🌻🌻

Midterm Madness:  The results of yesterday’s West Virginia and Nebraska primaries are in, it was a split decision for the Former Guy, the once and possible future president/tweeter who according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper believes that the Chinese were responsible for all the hurricanes that hit the US on his watch; something to do with Jewish space lasers perhaps?  In Nebraska, the FG endorsed candidate Charles Herbster who had been accused of sexual misconduct by eight women failed to secure the Republican gubernatorial nomination, losing to Jim Pillen who will face Democrat Carol Blood in the general election.  The FG had campaigned for Herbster, urging his followers to ignore the credible allegations against him arguing that Herbster was the most innocent human being ever and that the allegations, like those against him, were just more fake news and, anyway, why should being a repeated sexual harasser be disqualifying for a Republican? Apparently, some voters in Nebraska were concerned enough to toss Herbster aside.  But don’t get too excited, winning candidate Pillen who, given Nebraska’s ruby red status, is expected to glide to victory in the general election, is no prize. The picture on his website depicts him armed with a rifle and talks about his opposition to the horrors of critical race theory, migrants on the border, socialism, particularly with regard to medical care, and, naturally, he equates abortion with murder.  In West Virginia where, as a result of population losses revealed in the 2020 census, the state is losing one of its Congressional seats, the FG’s candidate, Congressman Alex Mooney won his primary, trouncing fellow Republican Congressman David McKinley.  McKinley, who was endorsed by West Virginia’s Republican Governor Jim Justice as well as purple Senator Joe Manchin was one of the Republicans who had voted for President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure legislation and as we know despite all his infrastructure weeks, the FG is against infrastructure funding especially if he can’t take credit for it.  In addition, McKinley voted to certified Biden’s election win and supported the creation of the House January 6^th Committee, both bigly no-no’s to the vindictive FG.  Mooney on the other hand voted against the infrastructure legislation, election certification and investigating the insurrection so naturally he had the FG's full support.  There will be five more state primaries next week including particularly interesting ones in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz’s FG endorsement has so far given him only a small bump up in the polls. 

The Empire Strikes: Also worth following is the clusterf-ck going on in New York State.  As a result of court rulings, the state still doesn’t have a new redistricting map, forcing a rescheduling of its Congressional primaries from June to late August.  An added complication is that NYS is about to have two empty House seats to fill, which likely will require a special election before the Congressional primaries.  That’s because facing sexual harassment charges of his own, yesterday Republican Congressman Tom Reed who had already said that he wasn’t running for re-election, announced he is stepping down before his term ends while NYS Governor Kathy Hochul, who stepped up to her position after Andrew Cuomo was forced out over his bad behavior, has tapped Democratic Congressman Antonio Delgado to replace her Lieutenant Governor Benjamin who was forced to step down over his public corruption charges.  The map fight in NYS is particularly important because Democrats had hoped to gerrymander their way into gaining a House seat even while the state lost one.  That could still happen as there is never a dull day in the Empire.  

Viral Musings:  On the subject of New York, COVID hospitalizations are at 2369.  A far cry from where they were at peak points in the pandemic but also substantially higher than the 821 level  of early April.  Nationwide, reported new daily COVID cases are closing in on 100,000 again, particularly notable given that with widespread home testing so many cases don’t get reported.  It’s fair to assume that as cases of the newest Omicron variant spread into the heartland,  hospitalizations and even deaths, which now stand above 1 million by everyone’s count, will continue to climb.  To be clear, vaccinations combined with boosters are helping stem the severity of cases but even a “minor” case of COVID is a buzz kill.  As to people with COVID right now, add Stephen Colbert who appears to be having a COVID rebound, whatever that is, and NBC’s Craig Melvin, his wife and his two young children.  Melvin, like his co-host Savannah Guthrie, called into the COVID sick list this week.  And it’s not just comedians and TV celebrities, vaccine expert Dr Peter Hotez, Dean of the Baylor School of  Medicine, is also on the COVID relief list, as is another COVID expert, Chair of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco Bob Wachner and his wife.  Bill Gates too, as apparently (bad joke alert) joining with George Soros to insert “tracking chips” into the arms of the world didn’t protect even him from infection.  The good news is that all the adults are fully vaccinated and boosted and none appear to be seriously ill.     

Don’t toss your masks, better yet wear them in elevators and high trafficked areas.

 

Supply Constraints  🌻🌻🌻 

Be Afraid: No surprise that SNL went all in on abortion politics this weekend. How could they resist, with Justice Samuel Alito and his conservative co-conspirators providing so much material?  But the thing is, none of this is funny.  It’s not funny that Alito’s draft justifies stripping women of their reproductive rights by citing a 17^th century English Jurist who had at least two women executed for witchcraft and wrote a treatise supporting marital rape nor is it funny that Alito’s draft bemoans the impact that letting women control their bodies has had “on the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted.”  Yes that little nugget, no doubt included to please Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who during oral arguments suggested that women shouldn’t terminate pregnancies because they can always leave those infants they were forced to carry for nine plus months on fire department steps or at other safe haven locations. By the way there are currently more than 114,000 children waiting to be adopted in the US right now, and that number doesn’t include the number in foster care but infants, particularly white ones are so much more desirable so we need more domestic production, right?  Since his case is serving as the trigger for Handmaid USA, Mississippi’s Governor Tate Reeves was a guest on a number of the Sunday talk shows.  He tried to defend the imminent overturning of Roe v Wade and Casey v Planned Parenthood by claiming everything will be okay because his state is looking into ways to improve maternal and child health, a total crock because that argument misses the whole women’s rights issue and also because despite all his “efforts” Mississippi has the highest infant mortality in the country and the state’s health care system ranks last across a range of measures of access to health care, quality of care, health care utilization, cost of care, health outcomes, and income-based health care disparities.  As to birth control, Reeves says his state probably won’t seek to outlaw it, at least right now, but he suspects that others might move in that direction and he’s probably right as the same groups that abhor abortion also believe that some methods of contraception like the IUD and the morning after pill are abortions because both prevent pregnancy by preventing fertilized eggs from successfully implanting in the uterine lining and of course a number of the same people just don’t believe in contraception at all.  Then there’s Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, over the weekend he told USA Today that a national abortion ban is “possible” if, as expected, Roe v. Wade gets overturned this summer when SCOTUS hands down its final opinion. As to the Democrats, Senate Leader Schumer plans a vote on making the Roe protections federal law but that vote will be for show purposes only because he doesn’t have anywhere near the number of votes needed to make that happen especially since West Virginia’s Joe Manchin is anti-choice and even Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, the two so called pro-choice Republicans aren’t as pro-choice as they say they are.  Though it probably won’t matter, and if anything it will probably harden their resolve, but this weekend a few of the Justices got to see just how upset a large number of people are about the specter of women being stripped of their rights.  Alito has been swept away to an undisclosed location, a crowd has formed outside of “I like beer” Kavanaugh’s house and the Court itself is now surrounded by fencing.  For his part Clarence Thomas, without any sense of irony, fretted about the public’s regard for institutions, and said that society is "becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes" and "not living with the outcomes we don't like."  Of course he didn’t have anything to say about his wife Ginni, a long term opponent of abortion, and her efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.  Nor did Chief Justice Roberts, who spent his weekend trying to ferret out the draft opinion leaker.

Book Selling:  Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper is out marketing his book, teasing out those sections which reveal just how much more disastrous the Former Guy’s presidency would have been were it not for his efforts to impose some restraints.  Putting aside the outrageousness of Esper not coming forward way sooner, his disclosures are both disturbing and frightening because the Former Guy is barreling towards another run for the presidency and should he succeed he won’t surround himself with Esper’s but with Flynn’s and Bannon’s.  Anyway, in case you were off spending your Kentucky Derby Rich Strike winnings you probably heard that among other things the Former Guy wanted to bomb Mexico, blaming some other country like maybe Canada for the attack; he wanted the military to open fire on Washington DC’s George Floyd protesters Tiananmen Square style; and he didn’t like the aesthetic look of our Naval ships, preferring instead that they look like those of Italy or Russia, pushing back when Esper said our ships were designed to maximize performance rather than to look good.  The Former Guy, responded by calling Esper weak and totally ineffective, a lightweight and a figure head.  He called claims that he was planning to use the Insurrection Act which would have allowed him to deploy active-duty troops to shoot the peaceful George Floyd demonstrators “fake news” but refused to comment on his desire to bomb Mexico. He also sent out a truly bizarre mother’s day message and once again referred to Putin as a genius. On the topic of book sales, over the weekend one time John McCain advisor, frequent MSNBC guest Steve Schmidt and Meghan McCain whose recent book was bought by fewer than 300 foolish souls and is now languishing in the $1 bin at Walmart’s, got into a Twitter fight of epic proportions after he struck back at her false claims that he was a pedophile.  Their battle was Twitter at its most entertaining. Meghan would be wise to zip it because the bombastic Schmidt is not someone you want to enrage especially if, like Meghan, John’s daughter as she likes to repeatedly remind us, you’ve been acting out of line for most of your life. Anyway, check out the tweets if you are up for some entertainment in these otherwise unentertaining times.  Or if you really want to be sick, check out Blake Masters, another candidate that billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel, a backer of the Ohio hillbilly guy who won the recent Ohio Republican Senate primary is supporting with more of his megabucks.  Masters who is running to become the Republican candidate for the Arizona Senate seat currently occupied by incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly who is up for reelection in November believes that killing abortion isn’t enough, that SCOTUS should also take aim at the right to buy and use contraception. Got to get that supply of infants up?  

Viral Musings:  Add NYS Governor Kathy Hochul, Savannah Guthrie and Chris Hayes to the COVID positive list.  The virus is out there, everywhere and don’t buy in to the mild thing, some of those cases aren’t so mild. Congress still hasn’t passed additional funding for COVID related resources because Republicans are holding money up, battling over migrants at the border because that’s a good thing for them to fight about in the run up to the midterms, health of the rest of us be damned. The failure to provide funding could turn out to be bigly problem at a time when case loads are rising and the government needs more money for the next incarnation of the COVID vaccine, the one that is supposed to be available in the fall. As to vaccines, late last week the FDA announced that going forward, the J&J vaccine will only be available to people 18 and older who cannot take one of the other available vaccines for medical reasons, or who simply will not agree to be vaccinated with one of the messenger RNA vaccines over an opposition to the technology or fear of getting injected with George Soros and Bill Gates microchips.   

It’s Victory Day in Russia whatever that means.    

 

May the Force Be With You 🌻🌻🌻

It’s Not About the Leak: Pushing the narrative that the issue is the leak rather than the stripping away of fifty years of reproductive rights, the right has started pointing fingers at potential leakers, targeting one of Justice Breyer’s law clerks, even though there’s no evidence that she is the source, and even going after incoming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson who since she isn’t seated yet has had no involvement in the upcoming decision but then again she is Black so there’s that?  Oddly enough, just about as many pundits believe the leak may have come from the right, perhaps even from Justice Alito, the author of the horrifying draft, an attempt to solidify what is believed to be his five vote majority. Notably, Alito has cancelled an upcoming speech because maybe he like the Former Guy fears tomatoes and pineapples?  Politico, where the leaked opinion first appeared has upped security over concerns that someone will go after its “traitorous” reporters. In addition, while confirming that the draft is genuine, an agitated Chief Justice Roberts announced an investigation into the source of the leak because Ginni Thomas coup colluding and using her marital influence isn’t a problem, but the leak is?  Worth noting, the general view is that though the leak was highly unusual, it wasn’t illegal.  Moving on from the leak, the issue to focus on is Reproductive Rights and what can be done to preserve them.  Supporters of choice are calling for Congress to pass a law guaranteeing nationwide access but to do that the Senate would have to first agree to a filibuster carve out because even if Republican Senators Murkowski and Collins sign on, the majority would fall far short of the sixty votes needed to pass any legislation.  Moreover, even if it did, a Republican controlled Senate would then do what they tried to do to the Affordable Care Act, so instead of attacking Senators Manchin and Sinema, who by the way is a long-time supporter of reproductive freedom but continues to oppose eliminating the filibuster, the left and everyone else who cares should focus their efforts on growing the Democratic majority in the Senate.  Did I mention that pearl twirler  Collins wants us all to know that none of this is her fault because Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch lied when they assured her that they would respect the Roe and Casey precedents?  Left unsaid is that her so called gullibility was fed by lots of political contributions from Mitch McConnell’s PAC. Turning to the states, while far too many of them are poised to severely restrict access to abortion the second that the Supreme Court rules, three Republican Governors: New Hampshire’s Sununu, Massachusetts’ Baker and Vermont’s Scott all announced that they remain in the pro-choice category.

Oh Ohio:  The Former Guy’s guy, hillbilly author JD Vance won the Ohio primary and will be the Republican candidate for the open Ohio Senate seat.  The Republican field was fractured, and Vance only received 32% of the vote, but the Former Guy is taking his victory as confirmation that his power is once again ascending and sadly it probably is but Vance also benefited from a lot of tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s money and the fact that no one else in the race was all that impressive.  But let’s move on from Vance and focus on the upcoming race.  The runaway winner of the Democratic primary was Congressman Tim Ryan, a popular centrist who supports reproductive rights.  Though Ohio has moved to the right over the past few election cycles, its other US Senator is Democrat Sherrod Brown who won reelection in 2020 so we shouldn’t count Ryan out especially since the weaselly Vance is on record saying that he “really doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine” and more than 45,000 Ohioans claim Ukrainian heritage.  That was a long winded way of saying that if you are so inclined consider going to Actblue.com and donating to Tim Ryan’s campaign because with billionaire Peter Thiel financing Vance, Ryan is going to need all the help he can get.  

Viral Musings:  It’s not your imagination, COVID is on an upswing, here, there and everywhere.  It turns out that the BA2.12.1 variant is even more contagious than its predecessors and that those who came down with the earlier version, especially those who aren’t vaccinated and boosted are vulnerable to reinfection.  Yesterday Secretary of State Blinken’s office revealed that he is now COVID positive as is ABC journalist Jonathan Karl.  Both were at last weekend’s White House Correspondent’s dinner where Karl who sat at celebutante Kim and SNL Pete’s table and shook hands with POTUS received an award for excellence in presidential coverage.  As to Blinken, he says that he’s not considered a direct contact of the at least for now still negative Biden and to be fair, Blinken’s been all over the world lately so he could have contracted his COVID anywhere.  It’s not surprising that a few people who attended the correspondent’s dinner where everyone was vaccinated and, unlike the earlier Gridiron super spreader dinner, had to show a negative test to attend, turned up positive so it’s too early to say whether or not it was the super spreader that host Trevor Noah joked it could be.  Bottom line, don’t throw away those masks and consider wearing one when indoors, assuming that is that you don’t care about joining the at least once infected majority.  US COVID deaths are trending up again, and depending on whose statistics you look at we’re now very close to or have crossed through the 1 million mark.  

Still More:  A New York appellate court judge rejected a motion from the Former Guy to stay the contempt of court ruling against him requiring that he actually pay $10,000 per day in fines levied against him for failing to turn over documents to NYS Attorney General Tish James for her investigation into his business dealings. That said, I have no idea if he, or more likely some group of his gullible donors, are actually paying those fines. Earlier this week, FG Junior actually testified, remotely, in front of the January 6^th committee.  Reports are that he did not plead the Fifth which means that either he lied or that he confirmed the things that the Committee already knew about his behavior on and around insurrection day.  Junior’s cooperation makes those assertions by others in the FG’s orbit that they can’t testify due to presidential privilege awfully awkward.

Live Long and Prosper!      

 

 

Roe RIP 🌻🌻🌻

🌩🌨⛈:  Yesterday morning at 6 AM New York City was shocked out of bed by a thunder boom so jarring that had it been Kyiv everyone would have rushed to their nearest bomb shelter assuming another Russian missile attack or worse. As it turns out the boom was the least jarring part of the day because last night as the usual coterie of Anna Wintour approved celebutantes were sashaying up the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum celebrating the Gilded Age, the superficially shiny period from 1870 to 1900 when women had few rights, we learned that one of those hard earned rights, the right to choose, really is on the chopping block.  That revelation came after Politico published a draft of what is believed to be the Supreme Court’s upcoming opinion in Mississippi’s Dobb’s v Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization. Authored by the very right wing Judge Alito, the draft opinion, which likely has the full support of Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch but not the support of the three liberal Justices or even of right of center Chief Justice John Roberts, is a “full throated, unflinching repudiation” of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v Casey that largely maintained that right. In the draft, Alito writes that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” and that it “must be overruled….returning the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”  Essentially, the draft opinion says that states and presumably Congress as well, can criminalize abortion with no rape or incest exception because the Constitution doesn’t explicitly consider it a right. Though the focus of the opinion is abortion, it’s not a stretch to see how it would also apply to other rights that the conservative justices aren’t fond of, like the right to privacy, the basis for Griswold v Connecticut which said that the courts couldn’t interfere with married couples use of birth control.  The bottom line, if this draft opinion is the real thing, or even close to what the final opinion will look like, reproductive freedom will cease to exist for most in this country and that’s not an exaggeration.  As to the leak itself, don’t be distracted by the number of people, mostly on the right who are horrified that someone had the nerve to take the unprecedented step of leaking a Court draft,  The issue isn’t the leak, it’s the elimination of reproductive rights and the willingness of this court to ignore fifty years of precedent to go there.

A Few Other Things:  It turns out that the reason that there were no Republicans on the Nancy Pelosi trip to Ukraine was because those invited turned down the opportunity to join the delegation.  To be fair, for security purposes none of them were informed that the group was going to venture into Ukraine, rather they, like all the Democrats who did join the Speaker, were told they were going to Poland. Another person who needs lots of security these days is Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis largely because a whole bunch of MAGA maniacs are upset that she is proceeding with her case against the Former Guy.  Yesterday she seated a special grand jury, one tasked with looking into  whether the FG and others in his orbit illegally tried to influence the 2020 election in Georgia when they  quite obviously illegally tried to get Brad Raffensperger to find those 11,780 extra votes. Also, it’s primary day in Ohio.  We will soon learn whether the FG’s endorsement of hillbilly guy JD Vance over the groveling brown noser Josh Mandel worked, whether State Senator Matt Dolan, who’s been climbing in the polls pulls off a surprise victory and, of course, just how many votes the not so real candidate JD Mandel garners as a result of that accidental endorsement he got over the weekend. And despite everyone’s desire to wish COVID away, it’s still here which is why New York City moved into the higher yellow risk category for virus transmission yesterday.

 

Mandalorian? 

Mixed Messaging:  President Biden held his own during this weekend’s scarily crowded White House Correspondents Dinner where full vaccination and negative COVID tests were required for admission, something Biden noted while pointing to the fully vaccinated Fox Network hosts in attendance.  He also called the Former Guy’s four years in office a plague, and that was before he even mentioned the coronavirus pandemic.  He laughed at all of Trevor Noah’s jokes, even the ones that poked fun at him, not a bad performance for a guy who right wing pundits continue to insist is curled up in the WH basement suffering from advanced dementia.  As to dementia, the Former Guy’s mental condition was on full display this weekend too.  At a rally for Charles Herbster, who despite or maybe because he has been accused of sexually assaulting several women, is the Republican party’s leading candidate to become Nebraska’s next US Senator, the FG again riffed about the “person, woman, man, camera TV” cognitive test he passed with scores higher than anyone before him ever had. He then went on to list all the other candidates he’s endorsed for the Senate, getting his Pennsylvania endorsement of the quacky Dr Oz right but hitting a bigly memory hole when he got to Ohio where he conflated his preferred candidate, hillbilly guy JD Vance’s name with that of sycophantic perennial candidate, Josh Mandel creating a new guy named JD Mandel. And Twitter being Twitter, at least until the Elon Must takeover goes through, it turns out that there really is a JD Mandel who immediately responded by announcing his candidacy, encouraging all to submit write-in votes for him while thanking the FG for his valuable endorsement. As to Fox, we’ve known for a long time that it is Team FG, but now we’ve got the receipts in the form of 82 texts between Sean Hannity and former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.  Those texts show Hannity both giving advice and asking for directions as to what he should be doing to snatch the FG’s victory from those jaws of defeat. Hannity stands by his communication, his excuse: he’s not a hard news journalist, just an opinion guy who gets to say and do what he wants. Whatever you think of that excuse, it doesn’t work for Maria Bartiromo.  The Fox Business host, is supposed to adhere to some standards as she is on the “news” side of the network. However, no surprise that the Meadows text trove reveal that the one time Money Honey provided Meadows with the questions she planned to and did ask the FG during the “hard hitting” post-election interview she conducted with him on November 29, 2021.  Worth noting, news side or not, Bartiromo has been one of the biggest boosters of the election fraud myth.

🌻🌻🌻 Count Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov as another one who is into the promotion of nefarious myths.  Over the weekend this decade’s winner of the Bagdad Bob award once again called Ukraine a hotbed of Naziism saying that just because President Zelenskyy is Jewish doesn’t negate his country’s Nazi elements.  He went on to assert that Hitler also “had Jewish origins…the greatest antisemites are precisely the Jews.”  Israel responded about as one would expect, calling the Russia’s Ambassador to Israel in to deliver an apology, for Lavrov’s “unforgiveable, scandalous statement, a terrible historical mistaken.” Somehow I doubt that apology will be forthcoming.  We’re closing in on May 9, the date that Putin has inked in on his calendar to celebrate Ukraine’s liberation so the next week is likely to be very interesting, at least for those who find war crimes intriguing.  At least Nancy Pelosi and her small Congressional delegation will be long home by then.  The Speaker and her crew managed to pull off a secret trip this weekend as did New York’s Cardinal Dolan, who snuck in with his own traveling squad.  

Viral Musings: Moderna announced that’s its vaccine for children six and under will be available for formal review at the FDA’s June meeting. Pfizer’s will also be on the agenda.  Moderna also expects to have “large amounts” of an Omicron COVID booster ready for fall’s virus season.  Daily US Covid deaths are around 330 right now, way lower than they had been but the number to focus on is hospitalizations.  They are now trending upward because though, as a result of vaccinations, boosters, anti-viral medicine and prior infection, most people will make it through COVID without needing to be hospitalized, with so many turning up COVID positive, math dictates, even in anti-arithmetic Florida, that a significant number will make it into the hospital or worse and once again the group that is getting the sickest includes those above 65, especially those who haven’t gotten their boosters.