I just read on the Politico site:
Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) expect to skip the “Justice for J6” rally on Sept. 18, according to the GOP duo’s spokespeople.
Some are implying that M&M are frightened by the likelihood of violence at this next attack on the Capitol. But, you know, these two don’t scare easy. So I’m wondering if they will be hastening to a love-nest in, of course, an undisclosed location.
Latest reports reveal that: Wyoming, Idaho, Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia have vaccinated less than 40% of their populations against COVID19, and that Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arkansas are left with less than 10% capacity in their Intensive Care Units, the vast majority of the sufferers in ICUs coming from the ranks of the unvaccinated.
Wyoming’s population is about 570,000, and Idaho’s is 1.87 million. If they have less that 40% vaccinated, they are maybe not trying very hard. However they do face stiff challenges. Wyoming and Idaho are among the western states that are badly infected by the Wild-West, mountain-man, cowboy, 7th-Cavalry fantasy lives of professedly rugged individualists who get their money from land belonging to the Federal Government. No city-slickers are going to tell them what to do!
But the other constellation of states is also of interest. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arkansas are all former Confederate states, and many Northerners who’ve migrated South to these sunbelt states become Good Old Rebels in no time at all. These states are weak on civil rights, weak in education, strongly anti-labor, crowded with evangelicals, largely anti-science, enthusiastically creationist, and the homes of many zealots in the Trump base. Do their shared history and these shared traits have anything to do with their contemptible record in the fight against COVID19?
It is endlessly evident these days that you cannot believe everything you hear. That is why I am inclined to disregard rumors I have heard of high-jinks in the Republican Hot House. We’ve all seen the trendy couple Matt Gaetz and Marjory Taylor Green junketing around the country to the delight of MAGA mobs. Does this glamorous pair share any more than platonic love and enthusiasm for notoriety? While we are wondering about that, Madison Cawthorn has started thrusting himself more and more into the public eye, showing Marjorie Taylor Green that he can be as thoughtless as she. Now I hear that Mr. Cawthorn is jockeying to take over Matt Gaetz’s place alongside the Flamboyant Congresswoman. Should I believe this? Well, hand me the Ivermectin.
When all is said and done, I think Kevin McCarthy may be the most loathsome figure in national politics. Shameless stupidity.
I want prosecutions for depraved indifference to human life brought against renegade governors and talk show spielers who are for their own ends contributing to the escalation of the COVID-19 virus and, therefore, causing the loss of human life.
There must be limits to freedom of speech even though our courts have been sluggish about asserting these limits. The COVID situation shows how very dangerous unbridled malicious speech can be. The depraved indifference of renegade governors is shown not only by their misleading statements and insurrectionist posturing but is acted out in their refusal to be guided by the public health community.
I see that the FDA has given full approval to Pfizer’s COVID19 vaccine. Some think that this approval will prompt an increase in the number of vaccinations. Well, maybe, but the increase is bound to be slight. Most of the unmasked who refuse the vaccine are invincibly ignorant or morbidly stubborn. They are of the antisocial “nobody’s gonna tell me what to do” variety, or they are MAGA addicts holding the party line against masks and vaccines in order to establish their Trump credentials. I think we may soon reach the point where catching COVID19 and spreading it around will become “patriotic” and serve as the membership card of the MAGA movement.
It is difficult to get any real news about what’s actually happening in Afghanistan. The news outlets seem interested mainly in evaluating daily the popularity of our President at home, and of our country on the world stage.
But we are learning a few things: People are now acknowledging the fact that in Afghanistan, as in many other of our misadventures abroad, we’ve been backing the wrong team, i.e., we’ve been trying keep afloat a regime that was addicted to its own corruption and, predictably enough, lacked the support of citizens and soldiers alike. One has to wonder: HAVEN’T WE KNOWN THIS FOR DECADES?
We are also learning of the difficult in admitting imperiled Afghanis. Huge delays and “you can’t get there from here” situations have been created by the sabotage of the immigration apparatus during the Trump regime directed by that dirty little sneak Stephen Miller. Miller should be dropped in Afghanistan without papers, without money without a cell phone, and without the backing of right-wing xenophobes.
American arrogance and naivete have done it again. The exodus of Americans from Afghanistan is well under way, and those of us who viewed the exodus from Saigon are having a déjà vu experience. “Operation Iraqui Freedom” was an incalculable waste of wealth and lives, and now, I suppose we are watching the ill-conceived “War on Terror” end with a whimper. What were we doing in Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires,” anyway? Couldn’t we have learned from 200 years of foreign-policy disasters in Afghanistan, from the British Empire’s series of catastrophes there, from the Soviet Empire’s experience that led to the fall of their Empire? And now we are seeing signs of the collapse of the American Empire.
And what can our foolish statesmen tell the veterans who were physically or mentally maimed there, what can they tell the families of those who were lost in Afghanistan, what could they conceivably say to our service men and women who died there? Yet again Rudyard Kipling’s epitaph for A Dead Statesman comes to mind:
I could not dig: I dared not rob;
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
Patricia and Mark McCloskey could not rest in obscurity after their pardon, but have leapt back into the light by filing a lawsuit to recover their shootin’ irons and $872.50 they’ve paid in fines. Yes, St. Louis’ own Bonnie and Clyde are standing up for their “gun rights,” backed by the plenary indulgence they received from Gov. Parsons. If this does not get them the attention they feel they need, they can emulate another, more prominent Bonnie and Clyde, the motor-mouth twins, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.
1) It is reported in the local paper and now on the internet that Missouri’s bone-head governor has officially pardoned Patricia and Mark McCloskey. Good ol’ Parsons, he said he would do it and he’s done it.
The McCloskey case went through so many changes of course and zig-zags that I’m not sure of what they were convicted. But it is clear that prosecuting them, a wrong-headed bid for popularity by St. Louis’ naive prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, gave a prominence to disgraceful people and pointed up the inadequacy of our criminal code, namely that being stupid, self-aggrandizing, or otherwise anti-social is not a crime.
2) Ever more alarming information becomes known daily about the criminal Trump’s attempted coup d’état: his attempt to force the connivance of the Dept. of Justice, his confidence in co-conspirators among the Republicans in Congress, the instigation of insurrection by Trump and his collaborators, and the disinformation campaign now being conducted by these same collaborators.
I think it’s time to stop calling these people “Trump loyalists,” “Trump supporters,” “Trump defenders,” etc., and name them for what they are: “pro-Trump fanatics,” “Trump addicts,” “criminal conspirators,” “anti-democratic revolutionaries,” “violent insurrectionists,” “betrayers of the Constitution,” and, yes, the good old “enemies of the people.”