Peak Stupid 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢

HOMES:  HOMES is right there with SOH CAH TOA, one of the acronyms that most of us learned to help with the memorization of the names of the five Great Lakes.  The good news is that SOH CAH TOA hasn’t been banished from trigonometry class.  The bad news is that HOMES will no longer do it for geography because to punish our Canadian neighbors for failing to concede to his changing trade demands, yesterday petulant binky baby Trump issued an executive order changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America and HAMES, a real word defined as the two curved pieces of metal or wood attached to a draft horse's collar, just doesn’t cut it.  It would be nice to believe that we’ve reached peak stupid, but sadly Trump who is growing increasingly panicked about the midterms has nothing but stupid left in his addled brain.  A lot of the stupid concerns voting, not what Trump can do to appeal to more voters, but what he can do to disrupt the upcoming elections.  Though Trump votes by mail he doesn’t want anyone likely to vote blue to do the same.  Late yesterday, Massachusetts based federal district court judge Indira Talwani issued a new temporary restraining order against Trump’s order to the Postal Service that it sit on ballots that he doesn’t want delivered and counted. Talwani’s ruling, which applies to all the states, sets the stage for consideration of the legality of Trump’s Executive Order by the Supreme Court whose earlier ruling allowing Trump’s voter squelching order to remain in place was only about the appropriateness of the Court ruling before the Postal Service had issued its final regulations, not about the substance of the Executive Order. With only 63 days left before the midterms, less when you count early voting, and with ballots about to be sent out, there’s not much time left for the Supreme Court to upend the midterms, not that some of them, but hopefully not a majority, won’t try. 

MAHA Not:  The US has reported 2,777 confirmed measles cases so far this year, the highest annual count since measles was declared eliminated in the US.  Those are just the reported cases; the actual case count is probably higher. This week it was reported that two Pennsylvanians, both unvaccinated, one an infant, had died after contracting the preventable disease.  Taking a page from the anti-vax playbook he authored, Health Secretary RFK, is now challenging whether those deaths were really from measles and not from something else like pneumonia or Trump derangement syndrome.  Don’t be fooled by RFK’s rhetoric or his attacking of Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro, something else that he’s been doing,  the deaths were measles related. Moreover, since one way that measles kills is by causing brain inflammation, it’s likely that there will be a few more deaths related to this year’s outbreak, some of them showing up years from now. Not that Senator Darline Graham cares much about that.  Fresh off of her primary win, Lindsey’s sister was out campaigning against universal health care, saying that her “parents worked long, hard hours to make ends meet…. If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work.” A strange talking point for someone whose financially stressed parents, who couldn’t afford health care died when she an adolescent; right up there with Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s dismissing one of her constituent's concerns about Medicaid cuts leading to deaths by responding, "Well, we all are going to die.” Not long after making that remark, Ernst announced that she would not be running for reelection. Iowa’s Senate race between Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson and State Representative Democrat Josh Turek is now rated a “toss up.”  Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the Trump endorsed Darline will follow suit or that South Carolina’s seat will fall out of Republican hands.  Turning back to RFK, recently released communication indicates that he lied to Congress when he said that the trip where he dissed vaccines to vulnerable Samoans wasn’t related to vaccines, not that lying to Congress gets Republicans into trouble anymore. In other health related news, COVID which never really left is back, doing its late summer thing.  New shots for the newest strain were approved by the FDA this week and should be available at your local pharmacy shortly.  

 More 💩:  The Iran mess is still a mess, and the Ukraine war is still a war.  CIA Director John Ratcliffe has just returned from a secret, unusual trip to Moscow.  Trump wants us to believe that Ratcliffe’s trip was routine.  It wasn’t, CIA Directors don’t make routine trips to Moscow.  The mostly likely reason for Ratcliffe’s trip is that despite Trump’s insistence that Putin is a nice guy, he isn’t.  Russia is getting more dangerous and reports are that the administration wanted to warn Putin against escalating, and by escalating think maybe dropping a nuke on Ukraine or invading a small Eastern European country or both.  There’s fraud news out of Florida, not surprising given that Trump resides at Mar a Lago and Senator Rick Scott’s association with the largest ever Medicaid and Medicare fraud.  The most recent news involves the leaking of grand jury testimony about how Governor Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey received $10 million from a state Medicaid settlement.  The money was supposed to go to her Hope Charity but was instead diverted it to the Governor’s anti marijuana legalization political campaign. Senator Ashley Moody who DeSantis appointed to replace Secretary of State Marco Rubio is implicated in the scandal as is his former chief of staff James Uthmeier, who he has since appointed state Attorney General.  The Grand Jury did not charge anyone, not because they didn’t believe there was corruption but because none of the people implicated were willing to talk.  Finally, there is one piece of positive news in an otherwise bleak weak that saw us lose Dolly Parton and Tim Curry.  The father of one of sailors on the US Lincoln who had been arrested by ICE has been released from custody, probably because someone figured out that the optics of grabbing him was bad. That’s good for him but the same can’t be said for lots of others including some very young children who’ve been rounded up even though none of them, adults or children, are dangerous.