Offensive Holding  🌻🌻🌻

#RoeRoeRoeYourVote:  If the Democrats hold onto or even improve their position in the Senate and stand any chance of fighting back a red wave in the House next month it will be largely due to outrage about the Supreme Court’s trashing of reproductive rights with its Dodd decision as well as a not unfounded concern that a Republican controlled House and Senate will pass some form of a national abortion ban even worse than the one proposed by South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham.  That focus on reproductive rights is what makes the disclosure last night that Georgia’s Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker “allegedly” paid for at least one past girlfriend’s abortion that much more ironic. Football guy Walker, who is woefully unqualified to serve in the Senate, has been incoherently parroting all the official Republican talking points and positions and as such claims to be opposed to abortion in all cases which means he should have been against ending a pregnancy because a baby would inconvenience his plans but naturally that’s the reason that his one-time girlfriend said he gave her when he encouraged her to end hers, while offering to pay her expenses.  Though we don’t know her name, the woman in question has shown the Daily Beast her receipts which include her bill, a cancelled reimbursement check from Walker and the “get well’ card he sent her at the time.  In addition, the Daily Beast has spoken with a friend who she confided in at the time of the procedure.  Naturally, Walker who lied about the existence of a few of his kids until they suddenly appeared out of the ether, denies that he ever paid for an abortion.  Last night he threatened to sue for defamation but earlier today, his lawyer, mindful that doing so would probably be a bigly bad idea, said that he’s only considering his options. To add to the story, Walker’s son Christian, the one he’s acknowledged from the beginning, who is a conservative influencer whatever that means, went ballistic on Twitter last night, calling his father out for his lies, saying Herschel’s no “family man,” that he ignored him and his mother to “bang a bunch of women” and “threaten to kill us” adding that everyone in Walker’s orbit had told him not to run for the Senate because of the secrets he was hiding, well everyone except for the Former Guy that is who may well have funded a few abortions but was smart enough to hide the receipts because that’s how he rolls.  That’s the FG who continues to be the hero of the religious right despite the Access Hollywood tape, his multiple marriages, Playmate, and porn star so who knows what will happen with Herschel.  Till now, despite his obvious inadequacies Walker has been polling neck and neck with his opponent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and Georgia is a 50-50 state so as crazy as it sounds, don’t count Walker out yet.  Also, don’t count out Mehmet Oz, hard as it is to believe, the polling gap between him and his Democratic opponent John Fetterman has narrowed, well at least had before yesterday’s story about the 300 puppies and other animals that his lab team killed back during his pre-Oprah Columbia University medical research days.  The clincher in that story was that the techs he was supposedly supervising disposed of some of the dead puppy bodies by throwing them in with the live ones they hadn’t yet killed.  Makes you yearn for the days when Mitt Romney’s sin was that he traveled with his dog tied to the roof of his car.  Well maybe not so much.          

The Legal Morass:  On the subject of lawsuits, the FG must be really concerned about things these days, as he too is going the lawsuit route, only he’s not threatening he filed one against CNN for $475 million.  The lawsuit cites times when CNN hosts and guests criticized him over his policies and his election lie while also complaining that some guests have compared him to Hitler.  One of the guests he named is Linda Ronstadt because why not? It’s probably not a coincidence that some more details about those Mar a Lago purloined documents keep popping out, including that he personally packed a bunch of the boxes that were sent back to the evil libs at the National Archives, that he asked one of his lawyers to sign a certificate saying that everything he had taken had been returned, something that the doubting attorney wisely refused to do and that among the things taken were his Kim Jong Un love letters and the customary welcome to the White House letter from Barack Obama, you know the guy who he asserts was born in Kenya.  Of more concern than the missing North Korean letters, the National Archives folks are worried that much remains missing from their collection including conversations that the FG’s inner circle had on their phones’ encrypted apps and unofficial emails.  Lastly, to no ones’ surprise, the FG’s legal team has responded to the DOJ’s request for a federal appeals court to expedite the review of the purloined documents by instead asking the court to delay their ruling until January.  No surprise there as delay is part of the FG’s life-time legal strategy.  There are some, probably not too off the mark, who believe that the FG is counting on the Republicans winning big in the midterms so that one or more of his good buddies like Gym Jordan and/or Mark Meadows can then threaten to defund the DOJ if the cases against him aren’t dropped. Also, because this list goes on and on the sedition case against some Oath Keepers began yesterday.  Their defense is that they were only doing what the FG told them to do.   

Viral Musings: Covid is still out there and the flu is expected to do its thing soon so make a plan to get jabbed with a flu shot and a booster, not necessarily at the same time unless you want to get it over with all at once; assuming your doctors are on board of course.  On the Covid front would it surprise you to learn that a new study of deaths in Florida and Ohio shows that registered Republicans had far higher excess death rates than Democrats during the pandemic, with almost all the difference coming after Covid vaccines were made available? 

And:  If you are wondering why Elon Musk’s name kept popping up yesterday, it wasn’t because of his Twitter plans which as of today may actually include buying the social media company for the $44 billion he originally bid, it was because he’d tweeted his Ukraine peace plan  His suggestion, which wasn’t received all that well by President Zelenskyy or just about any diplomats with any experience in such matters, was that the Russians rerun the “sham” elections they held last week to see if those forced to show up and vote for Putin taking over their homes held to their votes. His view was if they were still all in on having their land ceded to Russia than sobeit.  Count me as someone who would love to see peace break out all over Ukraine but some how I doubt that ceding large swaths of the country to an evil crazy leader will end his aggression.  

An easy and meaningful fast tomorrow for all those not eating.  May everyone be inscribed in the book of life for a good year.