Three Plane Monty 😱 ✡️🌻 😱 🚀🚢 🗳️

✈️✈️ ✈️ :  If you had Trump sneaking via a catering cart on to a back-up to the Air Force One that was itself the back-up to his increasingly costly “free” Qatari One plane while leaving last month’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey on your bingo card you’ve won this week’s Trump 💩show award.  If you had him leaving Secretary of State Rubio, junior Goebbels Stephen Miller and the press corps on what is now being referred to as the decoy plane but taking Secretary of War and Beer and blonde aide de jure Natalie Harp with him, you get a Sharpie signed miniature gold toilet bowl too.  The three card Monty plane shenanigans took place after the Secret Service learned that the Iranians were closely tracking all his moves in Ankara, allegedly planning to shoot him out of the sky with a shoulder fired missile. To be fair to Trump, not that he’s been all that fair to the rest of us, he’s not the first president who to abandon Air Force One for a “safer” plane, but he is the first one to have done so without alerting his traveling squad that he was leaving them as sitting ducks.  Trump endangering the lives of others with his plane shift is a fitting counterpart to his Vaccine Executive Order, only the vaccine order, unlike the plane game will endanger far more people, it’s likely to result in the sickness and deaths of thousands upon thousands of children.  On Tuesday, with Secretary of Health and Brain Worms RFK by his side Trump, who like RFK has absolutely no medical training though unlike RFK he probably didn’t inject heroin during his college days, issued an Executive Order calling for children to get fewer routine vaccines.  Among the shots that he’s decided children should no longer routinely get are the ones for flu, hepatitis B and A, Rotavirus, RSV, Meningococcal disease, and COVID 19. In addition, Trump wants the MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccine to be split into its three components, so what if single shots for each of those diseases are no longer available in the US and no other countries or the WHO recommend splitting them up. Trump insists that cutting down on vaccines and splitting up the MMR shot so that “soda bottles” of vaccines aren’t delivered into babies’ arms will reduce the incidence of autism even though there is no evidence that the shots or the established vaccine schedule contribute to autism and claims about vaccines being the cause of autism have long been debunked. There are two things that have contributed significantly to the spike in reported cases of autism: one is an expanded definition that has raised the number of children reported as being on the autism spectrum, another is being the child of an older father but that old dad thing would require some introspection on Trump’s part, and that’s not going to happen.  Besides, focusing on shots allows Trump to avoid doing much if anything about all the particularly nasty chemicals that do contribute to all sorts of diseases and syndromes because the manufacturers of those chemicals are among his contributors.  The good news is that Trump’s executive order won’t have as much impact as he wants it to in that most doctors will continue to recommend the shots and their time-tested established schedule.  The bad news is that there are people who listen to him and as a result there will be more vaccine hesitancy and avoidance.  In addition, some children whose parents want them vaccinated but who buy into Trump’s scheduling mishigas or who have doctors who do won’t have the time or financial resources to show up for the multiple appointments that Trump’s “spread out the shots” order requires.

Primary Tuesday:  The biggest takeaway from yesterday’s primaries is that polls, and the prediction betting sites that amplify them are frequently wrong by a lot.  Last week, polls predicted a runaway victory by Michigan’s El Sayed; he did win his primary but barely.  Yesterday, the polls predicted that Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong would win her primary to become the Democrat’s nominee for Governor of Wisconsin by twenty points.  Instead, in what turned out to be a nail biter, Hong appears to have lost to moderate Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a relief for Wisconsin’s Democrats who feared that Hong, who among other extreme views at least once said that Thanksgiving should be eliminated, would doom the party’s chances of holding on to the Wisconsin Governor’s mansion. Crowley, who had withdrawn from the race but reentered after the leading candidate withdrew due to her campaign’s financial improprieties, won by only 3100 votes in a crowded field, with 39.78% of the vote to Hong’s 30.37%.  He will now face off against Republican Tom Tiffany, an extreme election denier who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential race.  The Cook Political Report is calling the November race a toss-up, not unusual for 50:50 Wisconsin’s statewide elections.  In better news for the progressive wing of the Democratic party, Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan easily beat the more moderate Congresswoman Angie Craig and will be Minnesota’s Democratic nominee for the Senate race to replace the retiring Tina Smith, the Senator who initially made it to the Senate as the replacement for Al Franken who was an early not so deserving victim of the me too movement more because his humor fell flat than anything else. The good news for Democrats is that it is much easier for a progressive to win a statewide election in Minnesota than in very swingy Wisconsin.  Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar easily won her Democratic Governor primary, but pillow man Mike Lindell who Trump endorsed was trounced, losing to fellow Republican State legislator Lisa Demuth.  Klobuchar is favored to win in November.  Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline who was endorsed by Trump came in first in the South Carolina special primary for her brother’s seat but failed to clinch the nomination since she received only 35% of the vote.  She’ll face off in an end of the month runoff against Freedom Party Congressman Ralph Norman who obtained 25% of the vote.

More 💩:  The pool saga is even more complicated than originally reported, there were a lot more contractors involved none of whom were chosen for their related experience or competency.  Despite how much they screwed up, Trump is still pressing for the Olympic canoeist to be re-indicted because someone other than Trump has to take the blame for the mess he’s created.  Also, it turns out that the US really is running out of advanced missiles, a shortage that Trump partially inherited but then worsened with the Iran war.  Who would have guessed that Trump, who has been busy spending tax dollars on airplanes, gold statues, pools, golf course renovations, opening and shutting INS prisons while hugely bloating the INS, and so on together with his Fox weekend host Hegseth who has been focused on eliminating experienced female and Black officers while proposing testosterone shots but not flu shots for soldiers could possibly have missed that their supply of sophisticated weaponry was running low.