"Gimme That Vaccine, Maxine!"

I'm a poet, and I know it.

Here's something else to wax poetic about: While President Biden fights COVID, the Republican Party is fighting his fight against it by opposing vaccine mandates, testing and PPE requirements, yet they keep blaming him for the rise in COVID cases. 

Why do the Republicans fight policies designed to alleviate and solve problems and then deflect the blame to the Democrats?  Mainly because it works.  Ronald Reagan blamed unemployment and failed foreign-policy initiatives on his watch on Jimmy Carter, Newt Gingrich blamed runaway spending on Bill Clinton despite being a strong proponent of increased military spending, right-wing talk radio hosts blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton despite George W. Bush's lack of engagement with efforts to stop bin Laden, and John Boehner blamed a sluggish economy on Obama after blocking his efforts to improve it.  And look what happened: Reagan and Bush the Younger were both elected to second terms as President and Gingrich and Boehner became Speaker Of the House.

By blocking Biden from fighting the pandemic and dodging the blame for blocking him and thus not paying a price politically, Republicans think they can win back Congress in the 2022 midterms - especially if they can also keep concentrating on immigration (except that Biden went ahead and kept a Trump policy in place to have Mexico keep migrants bound for America for processing) and inflation (though the economy is still strong and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will likely raise interest rates gradually to reverse it).  If inflation does ease and immigration becomes less of an issue by November 2022, well, a perpetual pandemic is the GOP's magic bullet.

But get this: Thanks to the omicron variant - the omicorona, I call it - vaccination rates in America are spiking now.  More people are taking this seriously.  And Biden has wisely decided not to offer any happy talk about the future like he did when Delta first appeared here.  More and more people on the same page, and it's not one in the GOP's playbook.  Although the Republicans are pandering to their base, the fact is that over 71 percent of Americans 18 and over - that is, Americans of voting age - are fully vaccinated.  Not all vaccinated adults are Democrats, of course, but most unvaccinated adults are Republicans.  If Republicans think they can rely on the unvaccinated to people them to victory in the 2022 midterms while President Biden and the Democrats continue to work diligently at trying to get things done for the American people - with plenty of time for their efforts to bear meaningful fruit before November 2022 - they're going to have to play a better hand than that.

Although, voter suppression remains an ace up their sleeves.          

Try to hang on, Maxine. 

Elena Kagan

So what do I think of Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama's choice to succeed John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court? I don't know, really, for she hasn't offered many clues to what kind of justice she would be.

Elena Kagan has been touted by the President as a "trailblazer," as she was the first female dean of Harvard's law school and developed a reputation there for being open to different points of view and building consensus. She's already served Obama as Solicitor General of the United States, arguing cases for the government. Her one failure? She argued to prevent elections from being tainted with corporate money on behalf of the citizens of the Union . . . but lost to Citizens United.

Maybe her lack of a paper trail is a good thing, because it won't start any ideological battles in the Senate confirmation hearings. Ideological battles have already started outside Washington, though, with right-wing talk radio commentators blasting Kagan for refusing to let military recruiters set up shop at Harvard Law School because she opposed their policy on gays openly serving in it. Some people have suggested that she is gay because she's been known to . . . brace yourself . . . play softball! Odd, given that softball is the female version of baseball, so organized to let women play the sport.

One battle that has already started is her lack of judicial experience, a condition that didn't bother Republicans when President Nixon named Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist to replace the esteemed John Marshall Harlan II on the Supreme Court in 1971. Nor were Republicans ready to disagree with President George Bush when he named Clarence Thomas - with only two years' experience as a judge and a horrible record as director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - to the Court in 1991.

And if the vast judicial experience of Samuel Alito leads to rulings like Citizens United, I'll pass, thanks.

Actually, many liberals are disappointed with Kagan's selection because they find her too accommodating to conservative judicial philosophy. They don't think Kagan is liberal enough; they wanted someone as far to the left as Antonin Scalia is to the right. But given united Republican opposition against such a judicial appointment in the Senate - and given the fact that the United States remains at heart a center-right nation, an anomaly in the Western world - anyone hoping for Obama to bring about the second coming of William O. Douglas was bound to be disappointed.

Gummi da Please

When you lose fake friends, you don't lose diddly-squat. And so is the case with a friend I found on Fakebook - I mean, Facebook.

A person connected to a few Facebook friends of mine became one of my Facebook friends as well. I won't say this person's name, and henceforth will refer to said person as Gummi da Please. I only became a friend of Gummi da Please because of the connections this person had to my other friends, and we got along well, as long as we didn't discuss politics. See, Gummi da Please - notice how I am not revealing this person's gender - is an arch-conservative. Gummi loves Sarah Palin and Scott Brown. I never discussed politics with Gummi, but I have of course written about and supported White House and congressional Democratic policies and initiatives on this blog . . . and Gummi avidly read my blog. Gummi appreciates my writing and humor but not my politics, and I was fine with that, because I don't like to discuss politics with anyone unless I know for certain he or she is simpatico with me on the issues of the day. I lost real friends like that.

Anyway, my fake friend Gummi apparently got tired of the liberal positions and the links to liberal activist groups and media establishments I'd been posting on my Facebook wall, because they show up on the home page of every Facebook friend I have, and so Gummi must have gotten exasperated with me. It was nothing personal against Gummi, really, because I would never deliberately mock a person who disagrees with me politically. Nevertheless, Gummi, proving to be rather thin-skinned, ultimately decided to "unfriend" me.

I don't miss Gummi, frankly. If Gummi can't accept political differences in a friendship, well, that's Gummi's loss. And Gummi was never really much of a friend anyway. Gummi came from a different part of the country than I - a part of the country where conservative politics predominate. I have never met Gummi in person.

So why did I call this person "Gummi da Please?" Why not?

And where did that name come from?

Sorry, I'm not divulging the source of that name any more than I'm divulging the real identity of the person I appended it to.

And anyway, when someone checks my Facebook page, they'll see . . . there's no one there by the name of Gummi da Please! ;-)

I Have Seen the Specter

You know things are bad for the Republicans when one of its brightest and most mature U.S. Senators leaves the party. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched to the Democratic Party effective immediately. His decision was based on two factors. First, he realized that there was no place for him in the Republican party after voting for President Obama's stimulus bill against overwhelming opposition from fellow Republicans. Second of all, he found that a conservative Republican primary electorate, out of step with Pennsylvania's moderate politics, could possibly deny him renomination for a sixth Senate term next year, and felt the general electorate was more qualified to vote on his re-election bid.

Specter was born in Wichita, and grew up in the Jewish community of Russell, Kansas - i.e., his family. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale School, he settled in Philadelphia, where he served as district attorney. As a U.S. Senator since 1981, Specter has supported abortion rights and gun rights, and he was one of only four Republicans to vote against Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987. He has high ratings from both the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action and the AFL-CIO.

So, Specter's a pretty moderate guy. A Democrat once before, he rejoins the party and demonstrates the growing disgust in the American Northeast with the GOP. Once a party of establishment types, it is increasingly becoming the party of right-wing crackpots and bigots, the kind of folks that even James Baker III once called "yahoos." Heck, these are the kind of people even Barry Goldwater thought were kooky.

Because Specter is not a true liberal, except by Republican standards, he won't be any more a reliable vote for the Democrats than he was for the Republicans. Indeed, there's something about him that irks Barbra Streisand; she invited Specter's 1986 Democratic opponent to her private fundraising concert for the Democratic party, and she went right up to Specter at one of President Clinton's inaugural balls in 1993 and snidely asked him how it felt to be on the losing side. (Actually, Specter won his bid for a third term in 1992, despite female opposition in Pennsylvania to his support for confirming Clarence Thomas to a seat on the Supreme Court, which he now regrets.) But he will be clearly be more comfortable in party that is the big tent the Republicans pretend to be. (Pennsylvania's other Democratic senator, Robert Casey, Jr., is pro-life.) And when Al Franken finally gets into the Senate, the Democrats will have a filibuster-proof majority that should intimidate the GOP opposition. Specter is certain to be a formidable candidate for re-election next year.

Streisand may even campaign for him. :-D

This must be the ultimate wet dream for MSNBC host and Philadelphia native Chris Matthews.

(Semi-related useless fact: Arlen Specter's name is an anagram of "learn respect." :-))