I continue to be impressed with the depths the cons will go to in an effort to deny facts they don’t like. I persist in believing they’re mostly being deceived by the conservative bubble but after awhile, it really doesn’t matter.

If I understand this correctly, George Soros created the Coronavirus because he wanted Bill Gates to get a vaccine that will make China cry and the Nashville bombing was a ploy to cover up the whole thing. Okay, maybe that’s not quite right. But it DOES make as much sense as the alternative facts being peddled in the bubble. Whatever it is they’re smoking over there in con-land, it’s too powerful and their cognitive abilities are paying the price.

I read a letter to the Editor in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat this morning in which the writer was expressing his anger that over fifty courts have refused to even consider all of the evidence the trump campaign has. I believe the writer was sincere. He simply doesn’t know that the trump legal team didn’t bring any evidence, just…well, trumpery. He should know it. He could know it. He doesn’t WANT to know it. So how does one communicate with someone who has made a conscious choice to be wrong and insists on stubbornly sticking to their wrongheaded position? The answer is, you don’t.

On the up side, social media is much quieter. Boring, even…

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I’ve been watching as various (non-journalistic) outlets complain about the assorted and sundry elements found in the Covid relief bill. The thing is, Congress – in it’s never-estimable wisdom – pushed the Covid relief bill as part of a government funding bill. So cash relief for struggling Americans and unemployment enhancements are part of Covid relief and aid to foreign countries is part of the government funding. Putting the two out together was the perfect opportunity for opponents to misrepresent – and misrepresent they will…

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The question in my mind is whether the dumbass knew he was putting the GOP in such a precarious position with his demand for $2,000 dollars in place of the $600 the GOP was willing to go or was it just part of his tantrum? Moscow Mitch has shown ALL Americans that as long as he’s in charge, Americans are on their own. (Well, poor Americans, anyway. Congress is ALWAYS there for the rich.) When the dumbass called for more, Senate Democrats were quick to seize on the $2,000 dollar option. Republicans were forced to come out and say no, exposing their true colors.

I presume that down in Georgia, Democrats are hammering the message every day: it doesn’t matter which party you belong to, if you need a bit of help through this crisis you didn’t create, you’d BETTER vote Democrat because the Republicans have made their position clear: they HAVE to offer something as a political ploy to try and help in Georgia but it will be as little as possible and there will be nothing after this so…make that $600.00 last.

It’s cruel and it’s blind. The actual economic impact from Covid hasn’t even hit yet but it’s been racing at us for months like a freight train that can’t stop. As more and more people fall through the cracks, they’ll get desperate – then angry. I imagine Mitch’s plan is to try to point that anger at Biden. The cons will buy it. Hell, they’re already angry at all the failures of the not-yet-extant Biden administration. I don’t expect thinking people will, though. I don’t know what the one percent think will happen but history says it’s not going to be good for them…

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I was confronted by a couple of my con friends who wanted to know why I refused to give the dumbass the credit he deserves for bringing the vaccine so quickly. It turned out to be a beneficial exchange – for me, anyway. You see, I DID have concerns about how quickly the vaccine was developed. I trust science and if scientists say it’s safe, well, okay. But in looking into whether or not trump deserves credit, I discovered some things I thought I’d share here for your (possible) peace of mind. What follows is my (slightly edited) response:

Here’s the thing: you guys are acting like trump donned a lab coat and started peering through microscopes and cutting RNA. (I get that. When the reality of the Chosen One falls short, glorifying stories ensue. Always.) But he didn’t do that. He doesn’t even seem to understand Covid-19 is real. Now, the one thing we CAN agree on is that Operation Warp Speed (OWS) promised a huge pot of money for development of a vaccine, yes? As you’ve indicated, the conservative bubble is crediting OWS with the unprecedented speed of development. As is usually the case, the conservative bubble is twisting the details to present a less than accurate complete picture.

You see, it’s not like the world was sitting around waiting for Americans to develop a vaccine. Most of the first world knew of the need and began working on options long before OWS. OWS was launched in May – only FIVE months AFTER the need for a vaccine became apparent. So…late to the party. How late? Well, the company that actually developed the first successful vaccine was NOT Pfizer. It wasn’t even an American company. It was created by a small German company called BioNTech. It was in human trials in Germany in MARCH. That would be two months BEFORE OWS even launched.

More, the Pfizer/BioNTech partnership didn’t use OWS money. They self-funded. I’m not trying to be unfair. OWS DID sign an agreement with Pfizer to buy 100 million doses and knowing they had access to the American market certainly didn’t dissuade Pfizer. This particular forward thinking move was offset a bit by the administration’s decision to NOT commit to another 100 million doses Pfizer had offered without risk – which now means we’ll all have to wait longer. Either way, because Pfizer self-funded, they were not going to get paid at all if they didn’t come up with a success.

Actually more important to the development speed, though, is the fact that most of the drug companies had a head start. Because of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), both forms of Coronavirus, scientists knew where to start. They had already started working on vaccines for those two forms in the past. They stopped the SARS effort because of money when SARS petered out. But they STILL had the information they needed and scientists had continued working on a MERS vaccine since 2013. In short, this current vaccine became available so quickly because the world had already been working on it. Much of the groundwork had already been done before anybody had ever even heard of Covid-19.

Trump DOES deserve credit for this: his complete failure to effectively address the problem in the first place created HUGE waves of infections (and deaths). That gave the testing protocol lots and lots and lots of potential test subjects. In other words, if Trump had been better at flattening the curve, testers would have had to wait longer to find viable subjects. So, I guess there’s that…

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Best hopes and wishes from My Bacon Press to you for the upcoming new year. We’re finally getting rid of the vile pestilence – and Covid-19 is going to go away, too! Happy New Year!