O-K-L-A-H uh....

Oklahoma, twenty-first in literacy and first in your hearts, sent Brittney Poolaw to prison last year for the crime of miscarrying a pregnancy.  Now the Sooner-You-Than-Me State wants to set up a database to keep tabs on flesh incubators (sometimes known as women) considering abortion.  Called the Every Mother Matters Act because irony was outlawed years ago, it would require women seeking legal (for now) abortion to register for seven years (do Okies know how long a pregnancy normally lasts?) and be nagged out of the sinful procedure.  Apparently many refugees from Texas have availed themselves of Oklahoma's relatively liberal regulations, and this must cease.

Even if you start talking to them in a calm and measured voice, anti-vaxers will soon be insisting, with dilated pupils, that the covid vaccine is really just a delivery system for Bill Gates microchips, so he can find out how often they pause The Walking Dead to make a sandwich.  This violation of their privacy will not stand, man, they would rather die than undergo this Mengele-adjacent outrage.  Many have.  But it's fine for a state to keep tabs on women who are, or were, or might become pregnant.  At least call it what it is, George Burns, if that is your name:  The Only Zygotes Matter Act.  Ozma, as in the L. Frank Baum book.  Oh, dear, we're back to literacy.

According to Maggie Haberman (so, you know, grain of salt) Trump is having a no-good, very-bad day because he heard that Lewis "Scooter" Libby, recipient of a prestigious Trump-trash pardon, will attend a fundraiser for Liz Cheney next month.  Well, he was her father's chief of staff before he was convicted of obstructing justice and lying to investigators.  (Yes, kids, I remember when those were crimes.)  Still unable to convince the squirrels in his skull that he is no longer president, Trumpelthinskin wants to rescind the pardon.  Oh, the ingratitude.  Good for ten minutes of whinging self-pity by the Man of Sorrows at his next hate rally, I expect.

Studying New York's wastewater for viral RNA has to be one of the worst jobs imaginable, but someone does it.  That's how a new "cryptic" strain of covid was identified, possibly in the city's vast rat population.   Before we blame the rats, consider:  it might have come from Wasilla with Typhoid Sarah.

Could classy Melania be running a fake charity?  What we know for certain is that nobody wanted to buy her funky used hat so she's selling tickets to a tea party, if you please, with "a portion" of the proceeds allegedly providing computer lessons to foster kids.  But Florida's Consumer Services Division, where legit charities have to register, has never heard of BeBest or Fostering the Future.  Probably a mix-up with the paperwork, like the diploma from Ljubljana Tech she never produced in support of her application for an "Einstein visa." 

Control the past and you control the future, as they say in Oceania.  This doesn't just apply to Texas school boards.  In Poland, where a significant portion of the Holocaust happened within living memory, new laws passed by the far-right government are already preventing historians from doing their job when it might anger, embarrass or make uncomfortable descendants of perpetrators.  A 2018 law making it illegal to accuse Poles of collaborating with the Nazis was used to sue Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, forcing them to make changes in Night Without End:  The Fate of Jews In Selected Counties of Occupied Poland.  Echoing the long-held policy of successive Russian governments, calling attention to Jewish suffering is "insulting Poland" and diminishing Polish victimhood.  Of course there is no antisemitism in contemporary Poland, just as racism in America is a thing of the past.  

Ask D'Monterrio Gibson, the FedEx driver who was delivering packages in Brookhaven, Mississippi, when beardy father and son team Gregory and Brandon Case began following him and fired five shots at his van.  Gibson was not on foot like Ahmaud Arbery, so he survived.  The story is that someone reported Gibson, who was wearing a FedEx uniform, as "suspicious."  Why this activated the Cases is not clear, but Gibson says he was not taken seriously, reflected in the fact that it took over a week to have the shooters arrested.  FedEx kept him driving the same route despite anxiety and panic attacks until he put himself on "unpaid leave."  

I will spare you the "soup Nazi" and "White House plumbers" jokes.