Today is Monday, April 18, 2022. Today a stupid federal judge ruled against the Biden administration in mandating the wearing of masks on airplanes and other public transportation conveniences, even though coronavirus cases are surging in many states across the country. Here I thought I would be flying safely with other travelers – with masks on – two days from now to Los Angeles, but now I don’t know. As a result of this insane decision, a few airlines are already making masks optional on their aircraft, including Delta Air Lines (the airline that I’m flying on Wednesday), United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and Alaska Airlines. This story is covered in an online article by Pete Muntean and Dave Alsup entitled “These airlines are making masks optional after mandate struck down.”

Thus the airlines affected said in statements that enforcement of this mandate will be chaotic now that this federal judge made his ruling. United Airlines said in a statement that “masks are no longer required at United on domestic flights, select international flights (dependent upon the arrival country’s mask requirements) or at U.S. airports.” Alaska Airlines came out with a similar statement, imploring that passengers be considerate of one another. Sure, can you see this, given how many unruly passengers have been thrown off flights in the past year for protesting against wearing face masks? I’ve read somewhere that the rise in passengers being ejected from planes for being inconsiderate to fellow passengers has soared since the beginning of the pandemic. If people are now not expected to wear masks, you cannot demand that a fellow passenger put his or her mask on, given this new absurd ruling!

Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) extended the mask mandate through May 3. How bad would this have been if the mandate were extended to early May? This jackass of a judge – from Florida, no less – had to shoot down the mask mandate right now. Now a Biden administration official says the order is no longer in effect, while the ruling is reviewed. That means that in two days, I will have to optionally wear a face covering at Kennedy Airport and on my two Delta flights. Sheesh!

In a great example of how the former president has taken over the Repugnician Party, today the news that repulsive candidate for Senate in Ohio, J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, in 2016, has received the endorsement of Dumpf was overshadowed by the release of some texts he directed to a former roommate at Yale Law School, his alma mater, in which the groveling candidate said that Dumpf was a present-day Adolf Hitler. Of course, this Dumpf sycophant deleted his Trump criticism from his Twitter feed before announcing his Senate campaign, but the texts materialized anyway, just illustrating how once-sane people have shed their principles just to grovel before the Golden Idol.

This horrible state of affairs in the repugnican party made me think of the sci-fi classic from the 50s called Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which starred Kevin McCarthy (not the present-day nitwit) and Dana Wynter as two small-town inhabitants combating an invasion of space aliens inhabiting the bodies of their townspeople while showing no emotions. The film came out in 1956 but was immediately seen as a screed against the 1950s communist witch hunts presided over by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

With this film, I see present-day comparisons with the effect of our present-day version of Adolf Hitler, as Vance likened him to, on the makeup of the party hewed in his image. In a way, Dumpf has taken over the hearts and minds of feckless repugnican candidates and lawmakers in his party and has removed reason and the semblance of truth from their constitution, turning them into automatons of obedience. Just like those pods in the classic 1956 film! They looked and behaved like the townspeople, but had no discernible emotions; they were just hollow images of themselves. These are our present-day repugnicans, acting the same way, in trying to curry favor with a criminal! It’s patently disgusting! Do you agree with this analogy? It seems to fit the present-day incarnation of the repugnican party which is a cult party, nothing else.

In Vance’s original texts, the soon-to-be senatorial candidate revealed the ugly truth behind what happened to his party in 2016, in which he said, “But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and the entire party has only itself to blame.” He later added these words in texts sent to his former roommate, state Rep. Josh McLaurin (D-Georgia), “We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point.” He went on describing the toxicity of Dumpf to McLaurin this way, “Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect. I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”

Asked why he decided to release these old texts, McLaurin said, “The public deserves to know the magnitude of this guy’s [Vance’s] bad faith.” He accuses his former Yale roommate of personally trying to exploit the breakdown in Republican politics. With these texts, let’s hope Vance has no chance of ever winning that Senate seat.

Do we need another reason why any current repugnican need be elected to public office, even with the low standing of Democrats today. There is no sane reason to ever elect any repugnican into office after the main insurrectionist and his bastard hacks remain free to foment dissension and chaos in this country!! They must be voted out in November! I can’t believe the American people will fall for this garbage again. We are definitely witnessing our own version of Invasion of the Trump Snatchers at this sorry time in our history. Where are those public hearings already?

The spectacle of these GOP candidates dutifully visiting the home of the “Kingmaker,” Donald Dumpf, was severely criticized this morning by MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough who said that Dumpf’s brand remains “toxic” with most voters. Let’s seriously hope so!

Scarborough likened the parade of visitors to Mar-A-Largo as something straight out of The Apprentice reality TV show, in which the Orange Blob should have remained as host, not run for president, and said these cowardly candidates are fooling themselves if they think that will help them win a general election. Scarborough thinks that Dumpf’s endorsement won’t help in November. He went on to excoriate repugnicans for their awful messaging and called them “out of touch with Middle America.” We need to have the repugnican party lose big time come November, and, just maybe, the message of Dumpf’s liability will become more apparent by then.

Today the weather was cloudy and chilly; it seemed more like a day in mid-March than a day in April. Brrrr! Where is the warm weather already?

Since I will be heading West in two days, I just began packing for the film festival that I’m attending on April 21, and did some shopping of items needed for the trip, primarily trial sizes of toiletries and such. Later Elliot and I went out to dinner locally; we didn’t want to drive since rain was forecasted all evening. We walked to Observe Grill on Austin Street and sat outside in their enclosed shelter. It wasn’t as chilly as I thought it would be. I did ask the server if the restaurant had matzah and she just looked quizzically at me, so I assumed that was a decided “no.” We eschewed eating the pita bread.

We have a week’s hiatus from the kitchen remodeling job since our contractor, “Cameron,” again needed to travel down to Silver Spring, Maryland, to see his daughter. It seems that his son-in-law got into an auto accident and needs his help with getting around, as Cameron explained to us last week. So it was very nice to be able to wake up much later than usual. We didn’t have to fall out of bed in order to greet Cameron; that will come next week when I return home. I hope one more week will do it for the entire project. It will be late April by then.

So have a good Tuesday. I hope the weather tomorrow will not mirror today’s drab state of affairs.

Stay safe and be well.