Pseudo 🌻🌻🌻

Tee Shots: Over the weekend the Former Guy’s Bedminster club, Ivana’s final “resting” place,  hosted a golf tournament sponsored by LIV the new Saudi funded golf tour that has been throwing wads of moolah at professional golfers to lure them away from the dominant PGA Tour.  In the face of criticism by 9.11 families who for obvious reasons are upset about his association with the Saudi sponsored tour, the FG who clearly is in it for the money and who remains pissed at the PGA for pulling their tournaments from his clubs responded by saying that canoodling with the Saudis is fine because “nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9.11,” that is nobody but everybody but him.  In contrast President Biden who suffered days of withering criticism when he greeted Saudi heir apparent Mohammed bin Salaam with a fist bump during his recent visit to Saudi Arabia, the country where the Former Guy embraced a shining orb on his first official presidential trip, approved what turned out to be a successful drone assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the evil Egyptian doctor and until this weekend the leader of al Qaeda who is thought to have been the mastermind behind Osama bin Laden’s World Trade Center attack. Of course politics being what they are, last night Fox’s hatemonger in chief Tucker Carlson shrugged off Biden’s success as a nothing burger because though the Fox owning Murdoch family has soured on the FG they are still all in on Tucker. In other international news, Speaker Pelosi is off in Asia, and likely to be touching down in Taiwan shortly on a trip that she was supposed to have taken earlier but was postponed due to her bout with COVID. The Chinese who as a matter of policy hate it when anyone even utters the word Taiwan, are outraged or at least faux outraged, odd because they had said nothing about her prior plans. At least they’ve backed off from suggestions that they’d shoot her out of the sky during or after her trip. By the way, though US officials do try hard not to offend the Chinese over Taiwan, Newt Gingrich did travel there back when he was Speaker so Pelosi’s trip is not without precedent.  Of course that was before the Russian’s attacked Ukraine, a strategy that China’s Xi would like to apply to Taiwan.

Politics as Usual: For some reason that escapes me and more significantly that also escapes most veterans as well as Jon Stewart, last week a number of Senate Republicans decided that holding up the passage of burn pit veteran health funding legislation was the best way to punish their Democratic colleagues, most notably Senate Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, for finally agreeing, well maybe agreeing, on a reconciliation package. Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, who is retiring this year, is so committed to trashing the bill that he appeared on several news programs over the weekend where in addition to falsely asserting that his opposition was about some nefarious language that was recently added to the legislation even though there is no such recently added language also attacked Jon Stewart calling him a “pseudo-celebrity.”  Stewart, a real celebrity and also a long term and very shrewd advocate for veteran health, struck back by also appearing on all the news shows and to put it mildly, you don’t want to get in Stewart’s way when he’s on a tear.  It looks like Stewart will emerge the victor in this battle as the legislation will be brought back up for a vote this week and is expected to pass as is. As to the Democrats reconciliation package, the blue crowd is now biting their nails, waiting to see if Arizona’s mercurial Senator Kyrsten Sinema will sign off on the package, especially the carried interest tax provision. Stay tuned.

Disappearing Ink:  The saga of the missing texts has legs.  It’s not just those Secret Service agents,  FG era acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli’s emails and texts are also are missing for the period leading up to the January 6^th insurrection. Adding to the intrigue, it appears that Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, who has known about the missing communications for longer than he previously admitted, denied a request by some at Homeland Security to have their widely respected and skilled colleagues in cyber work on recovering the missing emails back when the problem was first discovered. Cuffari is one of the many Inspectors General that the FG put in place back when he decided that he didn’t really like the whole idea of career IGs doing their jobs well, especially if that meant that they would investigate misdeeds that took place under his watch.  To borrow an expression from the Bard, something is rotten in the state of Denmark or else everyone in Homeland is really incompetent or both.   

Primarily Yours:  Today’s another primary day. Most of the activity is on the Republican side of the aisle where a whole bunch of MAGA election deniers are running against each other.  Last night the FG endorsed “ERIC” in the Missouri Senate race, leaving two Erics, the one-time disgraced Governor/misogynist Eric Greitans and one of the other leading Republicans Attorney General Eric Schmidt to each claim that they’d received his coveted nod. Of course the double endorsement allows the FG to claim victory as long as one of the two wins.  In Arizona, where most of the candidates refuse to acknowledge that Biden is president a Pence supported candidate is running for governor against a truly loony FG supported one.  In addition, in all likelihood Blake Masters, the candidate who has both the FG’s support and tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s financial backing is likely to be teed up to run against Democratic Senator/astronaut Mark Kelly.  Abortion rights is on the ballot in Kansas where Republicans are hoping that a primary dominated with Republican races, and therefore few Democratic voters, will make it easier for them to start the process of stripping reproductive rights from the state’s constitution.           

Viral Musings: If Biden turning COVID negative in just five days seemed too good to be true, it’s because it was. He like about 5% of those taking the Paxlovid antiviral has rebounded back into the positive zone.  The good news is that he doesn’t appear to have any symptoms, the bad news is that he’s back in quarantine awaiting another negative test, something that can take a while to get.  While COVID remains the disease to be most concerned about contracting, two others are worth noting.  Monkeypox is now a public health emergency in NY and California.  The number of documented cases in the US is somewhere around 5200 with most, though not all, of those cases still among gay men.  And because COVID and Monkeypox aren’t enough to keep the neurotic up at night, which these days is more of us than any care to admit, with one case of polio detected in New York State’s Rockland County and bacteria found in the area’s sewer system, the state Health Department is reminding everyone who isn’t, to get vaccinated ASAP.  At least for now COVID remains the disease to watch out for as so far no one in the US has died from the treatable and mostly preventable though painful monkeypox and we are all, at least we should all be, vaccinated for polio.                         

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