Split Screens🔥🔥😱 ✡️🌻😱🔥🔥 

No🤴🤴🤴:  We always knew that Saturday was going to be a split screen day, but the expectation was that the split would be two-way, between Trump’s Palantir, Coinbase, UFC’s Dana White, and Oracle sponsored military/birthday parade and what turned out to be two thousand No Kings Day marches. As it turned out the split was more of a complex fracture, the result of a crazed, partisan, “pro-life” Minnesota lunatic shooting two prominent state politicians and their spouses, killing one of the couples and sending the other to the hospital with life threatening injuries and the barrage of missiles going back and forth in the Middle East. After an intense two-day man hunt the Minnesota shooter, a 57-year-old white man whose target list included many other prominent Minnesota Democrats, was finally captured last night. The Orange wannabee 🤴 who pardoned the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and threatened to lynch his VP and has been publicly toying with pardoning the men who plotted to kidnap and kill Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic Governor of Michigan, declared his military jamboree a wild success though at best it was just meh, with fewer than the expected attendees and, as indicated by the yawning Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a bit of an hours long snoozefest. With somewhere north of five million attendees, the No Kings rallies were upbeat, plentiful, and well attended. Kudos to whoever came up with the no 🤴 🤴 moniker. They were mostly peaceful with a few hiccups including a big burp in the Los Angeles epicenter where local police shot tear gas and rubber bullets into some of the crowd, perhaps because they really feared that things were about to get out of hand but just as likely because they wanted to demonstrate to the federalized National Guard and Marines that they were unneeded. As to the migrant roundups that triggered the LA demonstrations, under pressure from some in the business community, Trump now says that he’ll be pausing the deportations of hospitality and agricultural workers including those employed in meatpacking plants, because those migrants are “very good long-time workers.”  To the extent he follows through, that’s good news for those workers but not so good news for the others, including the construction workers, nannies, and garment center employees who will have to make-up the rest of Trump and Stephen Miller’s daily quotas. To that end, last night Trump directed federal immigration officials to keep doing their thing, but to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities because to be clear only migrants in blue areas are really bad, the rest at times tolerable. To put this purge in perspective, the American Immigration Council estimates that unauthorized immigrants make up 4.6% of the nation’s employed labor force, around 7 million people. The Department of Agriculture estimates that about 42% of America’s farmworkers are undocumented.

Fog:  The war between Israel and Iran is now in its fourth day with both countries shooting more and more advanced missiles at each other, Israel’s targeted at nuclear sites, nuclear scientists, and military leaders; Iran’s targeted mostly at civilian populations including Tel Aviv and Haifa.  Trump, who initially insisted he had nothing to do with Israel’s pre-emptive anti-nuclear attacks, now says that he was just pretending, engaging in his unique brand of “strategery.” Regardless of whether he gave Netanyahu the go ahead, Trump has been helping Israel shoot down incoming missiles.  He’s also calling for the warring parties to get back to the nuclear negotiating table even though it appears that Iran’s nuke negotiators are no longer among the living, one of the reasons that the next round of negotiations have been cancelled.  During a birthday call to Trump, because of course Putin called to wish his dutiful puppet a happy day, the Russian leader offered to act as an intermediary between Iran and Israel and why not, it’s not like he’s engaging in any peacemaking on the Ukraine-Russia front.  Ironically, unlike the US, Russia is still a party to the JCPOA nuclear deal that Trump walked away from. Imagine where we would be if Iran’s leaders spent their money on improving the lives of Iranians instead of spending tens of billions on developing nukes, supporting Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis and calling for the destruction of Israel. In related news, Voice of America, the government-funded broadcasting system shut down by the Trump administration is in the process of calling back Farsi speakers who’d been on paid leave so that it can broadcast into Iran. Note that we didn’t save a dime since they were on paid leave, but we are behind the eight ball because stupid, short sighted decisions are just that.

Viral Musings:  RFK is turning out to be as bad as many thought he would be, and Louisiana’s gutless Republican Senator/Dr Bill Cassidy knew he would be. RFK’s new picks for the Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (ACIP) that he recently gutted include people with a history of criticizing vaccine recommendations and questioning vaccine safety including some who served as paid experts in lawsuits against vaccine makers.  The next ACIP meeting is scheduled to start on June 25.  The panel will decide whether to recommend vaccines for COVID-19, the human papillomavirus, meningococcal disease, and RSV.  As the internationally recognized expert in virology and immunology Dr. Paul Offit puts it: “These are established vaccines, and we’re voting on them?......The entire childhood and adult immunization schedule is on the table!” RFK whose been vocal about his doubts that AIDS is caused by a virus, believes in the long-discounted miasma theory, that contagious diseases are caused by “bad vapors” rather than viruses or bacteria.  We’re rapidly moving back to the dark ages and that’s not an exaggeration.  What, but everything, could go wrong? And it’s not just vaccines. RFK’s slashing of the NIH is gutting research on cancer and many other diseases.  The impact of those cuts will be felt for decades.

#BringThemAllHomeNow