Comic Relief 🌻 🌻 🌻

Dilbert Who?  Cancel culture has gotten to Dilbert because it turns out that saying racist things doesn’t work when your earnings come from syndicated comic strip revenues. Dilbert is out because his creator, Scott Adams, called Black people “a hate group” in a YouTube rant adding that white people should “just get the hell away” from them, a variation on Margie Q’s call for a national divorce.  Naturally, Elon Musk who spent $44 billion on a social media platform so that he could say what he wants whenever he wants to, is Team Dilbert which is why the Chief Twit called out the media outlets that dropped Dilbert for being racist against whites and Asians.  That’s the same Elon who has welcomed hate speech back onto Twitter and, unless I missed it, had nothing to say about the weekend’s neo-Nazi Day of Hate activities against Jewish institutions, plans that were largely thwarted by politicians, Jewish and allied faith leaders and police in New York City but appear to have gone on in other parts of the country. Margie Q, the Jewish space laser queen, also seemed unperturbed by the day of hate activities but then again why would she be, she still hasn’t suffered any consequences for her call for civil war and probably never will because Speaker Kevin McCarthy needs her on his team. Getting back to Elon, things appear to be going as expected at Twitter, revenues are still down largely because advertisers, like mainstream media outlets aren’t fond of seeing their products promoted next to purveyors of hate speech, so he’s fired another 200 employees, including Esther Crawford who earlier has pledged her “hardcore” status and loyalty to Elon by posting a picture of herself sleeping on her office floor. Crawford had been responsible for Twitter Blue, the plan that was supposed to turn Twitter into a subscription service less reliant on advertising revenues.  To summarize Twitter’s plight, the advertising revenues are way down, but few have signed on to Twitter Blue.    

Viral Madness:  COVID is still here but we still don’t know for sure how it originated.  Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that Department of Energy scientists have concluded in a “low confidence” assessment that the virus most likely came from a Chinese lab leak.  That puts the DOE at odds with several other intelligence departments who still think that the virus originated from spillover from the Huanan open air market.  Low confidence or not, the WSJ article went viral with a whole bunch of the usual crowd, the likes of Margie Q, Gym Jordan and the Murdoch empire screeching that they’d been right all along and many other news outlets hiding the “low confidence” part far from their click bait headlines.  The bottom line is that there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the origins of COVID 19 and though it’s fair to say that the Chinese government engaged in a cover-up it remains unclear whether they were covering up the virus’ spread and lethality, its origins, or both. Don’t expect to hear any of the nuance in the upcoming House hearings which will instead focus on the multiple ways they can torture virus guru Anthony Fauci. In other virus news, Republican run Lee County Florida, the home of Sanibel Island and Fort Myers, has voted to ban COVID vaccines because they want to be on the “vanguard” of stopping the “genocide,” the “bioweapons being unleashed on the American people.” If that sounds extreme, consider Idaho where two Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill that would criminalize the administration of all mRNA vaccines across the state.  They say they have issues with the COVID vaccines, but it’s equally fair to say that they just have bigly issues.

🌻 🌻 🌻:  The Ukraine War isn’t going to be over anytime soon, but Putin does appear to be winning over the hearts and minds of some people, not the citizens of Ukraine, but some here in the US as well as his sometime BFF Xi who might be on the verge of sending him weapons much to the chagrin of the US and NATO.  Though the majority of Americans continue to support Ukraine, the numbers supporting aid packages are shrinking.  There also appears to be a schism in the Republican party between those who are “America First” as in Putin over Zelenskyy and those who firmly back Ukraine, not just because they are team Zelenskyy but because they view caving to Putin’s aggression as a signal to him and to China that the US and NATO are weak and wouldn’t do much if the Baltics or Taiwan were annexed next. Because everything is linked, and also because anything Biden does immediately draws a backlash from the right, the DOE’s COVID lab link view, like the East Palestine train disaster, are both being weaponized against all things Biden because as one pundit put it Biden could cure cancer and instead of celebrating his rightwing opponents would complain that he had put oncologists out of work. On the subject of Biden and leaks, FLOTUS Jill who was in Africa this week, pretty much let Joe’s not so secret plans out of the bag by saying that he is not done, he still has lots to do, in other words he’s running.,               

And:  Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry may have some issues to deal with too, if the decision made by Chief Judge of the DC District Court Beryl Howell holds up on appeal. On Friday, Judge Howell unsealed the conclusion that most of Perry’s phone communications about overturning the 2020 election results are not protected by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause.  She unsealed the decision because she feels that the “powerful public interest” of everyone knowing about it outweighs the need for continued secrecy.