Spent Bullets 🌻🌻🌻

Guns, Guns, Guns:  Mass shootings, defined to include sprees where four or more people not including the shooter are injured or killed, have averaged one or more per day this year.  Moreover as evidenced by this weekend’s “events” where an additional 17 were killed while 69 were injured, not a single week has passed without three or more mass shootings taking place.  It would be nice to believe that the Uvalde elementary school shooting, coming so close on the heels of the Buffalo race motivated supermarket rampage, will be the tipping point that leads to some national gun policy changes but given past experience, probably not.  That said, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, the Democrat’s gun control point man is trying, really hard to get something, anything done, though even he admits the most he’ll be able to get 60 Senators to sign on to will be something that includes red flag laws and some mental health and school safety funding but that does little to stop the easy purchase of AR 15s and the like.  Ironically, though Florida’s current Governor/ presidential wannabee/Republican culture warrior Ron DeSantis vetoed $35 million in financing for the Tampa Bay Rays planned spring training facility to punish them for using their social media platform to speak out against gun violence, Murphy pointed to the post Parkland gun legislation passed by Florida when DeSantis’ predecessor Senator Rick Scott, hardly a gun control snowflake, was governor as a good model to look at.  Anyway, with Republican leader Mitch McConnell still refusing to utter the words gun control and the likes of Ted Cruz out there citing door policies, don’t be surprised if the Senate’s current efforts once again end up in the trash alongside a bunch of Lauren Boebert’s spent bullet casings.  Speaking of Florida’s DeSantis, because going after the Rays wasn’t enough he also used his position to bully the Special Olympics into dropping its COVID vaccine mandate for participants in its USA games being held in Orlando this week by  threatening to fine the organization $27.5 million if they continued to require that athletes be vaxxed. Think about that, dropping mandates for some of the most vulnerable to push a personal political agenda. The sad thing is that DeSantis’ antics appear to be working, or at the very least seem to be impressing his targeted right wing base, for the second year running he edged out the Former Guy in the Conservative Western Conference Summit’s presidential straw poll. By the way, the FG is so concerned about DeSantis’s rise that NBC reports he is considering announcing his 2024 candidacy as early as this summer and that combined with the press’ ongoing criticism of all things Biden, and yes there has been a lot of that lately, should have us all shaking in our boots.

Must See TV:  The January 6^th Committee will be holding its first televised hearing on Thursday. This weekend on the talk show circuit, Wyoming’s Liz Cheney, the very conservative but somewhat principled Republican whose political elimination is the FG’s number one objective, called the January 6^th insurrection and the events leading up to it an “extremely broad” and “well organized” conspiracy that is ongoing.  Some of those events came into more focus over the weekend when we learned that former VP Pence’s team, including his chief of staff Marc Short, were so concerned about his safety that they alerted the Secret Service.  Getting that message across to the general public, including the majority of the country more focused on inflation, prices at the pump and the availability of infant formula will be a challenge particularly given that the FG dominated right with the support of its Fox enablers plans to “counter program” with assertions that the January 6^th committee is made up of a bunch of partisan hacks acting out.  Some of that was evident last week following the indictment and arrest of one time FG trade advisor Peter Navarro, who dug his own ditch by refusing to even show up to testify in front of the Committee asserting executive privilege that he didn’t have while spilling his guts repeatedly on Ari Melber’s MSNBC program. Maybe the non-lawyer who is representing himself is going for an insanity defense?  The right echo chamber, especially Louis Gohmert who moaned that “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you” was outraged by the way that Navarro was treated while the rest of us sighed in frustration upon learning that the FG’s last Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his social media aide Dan Scavino will not be suffering any consequences for their refusal to play ball.

Midterm Politics:  Connecticut resident/Hedge fund manager David McCormick has conceded to New Jersey resident/TV Doctor Mehmet Oz whose endorsement by the FG helped him eke out a very slim victory to become the Republican’s candidate for Senate in the key Pennsylvania race.  Oz will face off against the Democrat’s candidate Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman who admitted this weekend that he’d been warned about his ticking time bomb heart condition but had ignored earlier medical advice.  The question now for Pennsylvania voters is whether the populist Fetterman’s approach to his own health care makes him more relatable than the elitist TV doctor who isn’t really a local and who though he’s a real cardiac surgeon is also known for peddling false cures.  Building on his Pennsylvania “success” the FG has now endorsed Blake Masters, another election denier, who is running for the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona.  Masters, like hillbilly guy JD Vance, is backed by billionaire tech guy Peter Thiel, a married gay guy who doesn’t seem at all concerned that the people he supports would take away his rights because he’s too rich to be bothered.  Whoever wins the Republican primary in the very polarized state will face off against former astronaut Democratic Senator Mark Kelly.   

And:  While the focus was on Queen Elizabeth’s frailty and Prince Harry and Meghan, one notable thing about this weekend’s royal celebrations was the absence of two players:  disgraced son Prince Andrew and the Archbishop of Canterbury both of whom were sidelined by COVID. On the COVID front, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing a no-confidence vote today over his partying and the cover-up of said partying during the early strict quarantine days of the pandemic.  Officially the daily case count in the US is somewhere around 100,000 but since so many cases go unreported we really don’t know what it is.  Hospitalizations are up a bit but not, at least so far, at alarming levels and the 7 day death count is just under 300. Vaccines for the 5 and under set are expected to finally be approved at the end of the month.  And the war in Ukraine continues with no end in sight, very bad for Ukrainians and also bad for food and oil supplies.