I hope you haven’t stowed your face coverings too deep in the closet, because the smart money says we’re building toward a third-wave pandemic peak, probably in September.
You can tell it’s gonna be bad because as of yesterday, both Fox News and some of America’s dumbest, most recalcitrant GOP pols — people like Mitch McConnell and Tommy Tuberville — are suddenly encouraging their slack-jawed constituents to get vaccinated, and nobody is sure why. (I’d think we woke up in Bizarro World, except Rand Paul continues to demonstrate that the guy who finishes last in his med school class is still called “Dr.”)
Some people think it must have dawned on Team Fascism that owning the libs is going to require a very large pile of dead yokels. Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project says the flip-flop “smells strongly of new polling.” The best explanation I heard came from a friend who keeps an eye on Wall Street, who noticed that this all started when the Dow went tits-up on Monday.
Lots of reports out of Dumbfuckistan about hospitals being overwhelmed by unvaccinated hayseeds, including several of the “I thought it was a hoax!” variety, but the one that stands out is the social media post by an Alabama doctor about her dying unvaccinated Covid patients begging for the vaccine. It’s gone viral because it can break the hardest heart — it did mine, anyway.
A lot of people think Covid is just something we’re going to have to learn to live with. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos explains why that’s not a feasible plan.
Remember how the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was talking about denying communion to abortion-rights-supporting politicians like Joe Biden? Turns out one of the point men on that effort, general secretary Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, had a Grindr habit, according to a Catholic newsletter called The Pillar. Grindr claims its publicly available data couldn’t be used that way, and whined that the article was “homophobic,” but Burrill resigned immediately. Also, @Grindr: A high-tech pimp is still a pimp.
Over at the Capitol Hill Meat Co., the sausage making continues. Vox has the update on how the Republicans gummed up the grinder yesterday, meaning the Spicy Infrastructure links won’t be ready for breakfast. On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi put the kibosh on the cooks Kevin McCarthy hired to piss in the Jan. 6 Blood Sausage.
As much as we slag Chris Coons for protecting the filibuster, there’s a bigger obstacle to 86ing it: Joe Biden himself, who claims that nothing will get done if Democrats try it because Republicans will spend all the Senate’s time debating it. Normally I’d be skeptical, but he’s spent a lot more time with these hemorrhoidal assholes than I have, so he probably has a better idea of how they’ll react to Preparation H.
I’ve been saying this for a long time, but California Rep. Eric Swalwell gave a revealing interview to a podcast about how, once the little red light goes out, his GOP colleagues openly admit it’s an act — in pro wrestling they call it kayfabe, and Swalwell said some of them would be better suited to the WWE than Congress.
The floor is yours.