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.