Trump’s pardon of Roger Stone trends at the top of google news as if no one saw it coming. Houston is out of ICU beds. ERs are directing ambulance crews elsewhere. Trump’s pardon of Stone dominates the headlines. Who really gives a rat’s ass about Roger Stone? We have real problems that need to be kept out front. Would the press please quit falling for that shit and prioritize? Stone could have been pardoned long ago, saving the courts money. The pardon came down now, because it was guaranteed to generate an outcry that would bump the pandemic out of the spotlight for a minute.
Let’s not let it be more than a minute. The virus, an entity far more powerful than the President, probably won’t let itself be out of the spotlight for more than the past minute or two that I hope Texas Governor Abbott enjoyed, because his political life is about to go through a hell that he never imagined. He will be held accountable for more death than this state has seen since the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, and he knows it now. He has had to close the bars back down like I said he would about 12 hours before he did. He has required the wearing of face coverings statewide, with exemptions for counties with less than twenty confirmed cases. So in 56 of our 254 mostly diminutive counties, you can still walk around downtown without a mask, if your county applied for the exemption. It won’t be this way for long in most of those counties. It didn’t have to be this way at all, not here, not in Florida, not anywhere.
Meanwhile, Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick is oh so pissed about the Mayor of Houston’s cancellation of the in person State Republican Convention that the LG was not planning to attend in person anyway. Funny that an LG wouldn’t want to attend his party’s state convention, press the flesh, act like one of the people. Patrick says the cancellation is a political hack. I don’t see how anyone can fault Houston for not wanting to host a mass gathering at this point in time. They are verging on NYC back in April scenarios. Perhaps Dan should get the convention moved to his original home town of Baltimore. Dan’s old home state, Maryland, has a Republican Governor who seems to have done a much better job of dealing with the virus than has our own.
P.S. Hmmm . . right. It wasn’t a pardon, it was a commutation of sentence, which means Stone can still remain silent in any future court proceeding. Stone could still incriminate himself because he lacks the protection of a Presidential Pardon. Pretty slick.
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