Trust the Dogs 🌻🌻🌻

January 6 Committee:  The only thing surprising about President Biden having COVID is that he remained negative for so long.  Given his travel schedule and his serial hugging habit, it was fair to wonder if he was benefiting from a new, as yet approved for the masses, miracle preventative.  Well it turns out he wasn’t and hopefully he, like most who’ve been appropriately vaccinated and boosted and, in his case, dosed with the Paxlovid anti-viral combo, will be fine.  Biden isn’t the only one in quarantine, having turned up positive a few days ago, January 6^th Committee Chair Bennie Thompson is COVID positive too which is why he introduced last night’s end of this season episode of How the FG Almost and May Still Destroy Democracy, from a remote location, probably his home, where he, like President Biden was recuperating in dress for success garb, proving that politicians really are different from the rest of us: we wear pajamas or athleisure during our recoveries and look haggard on zoom cameras while they wear jackets and starched shirts and look better than ever. As to the January 6^th hearing, once again we got to see how harrowing the day was, this time with a tick-tock revealing that as the Capitol police, members of Congress, and even the Secret Service protecting then VP Pence feared for their lives, the FG did nothing more than repeatedly call his best bud Rudy Giuliani while also dialing up some of his wannabee buddies, perhaps on some since acid washed phones of his Secret Service team because no calls appeared on the official White House logs.  Of course the Senators he targeted were the ones he thought he could convince to vote against signing off on the results of the election that he lost, not that he’s stopped trying to influence officials, earlier this week he called one in Wisconsin to try to get him to overturn that state’s 2020 results.  Having seen Josh Hawley’s fist in the air salute to the marauding crowds celebrated on Fox, it’s fair to assume that the FG didn’t bother calling the Missouri Senator because he knew he had him in his bag.  To the extent he watched last night’s hearing, Hawley who has been using that infamous air fist picture as a campaign funding tool probably didn’t enjoy the film clip showing him running for his life from the very hooligans and insurrectionists that he’d urged on just hours before   No worry for him though, he and his enablers probably spent the better part of last night trying to figure out a way to monetize his dash and given his base, while we laughed at it, he’ll probably succeed. As to the rest of the hearing, we heard from former Deputy National Security advisor Matthew Pottinger and former Communications Director Sarah Matthews, long time Republicans who made it clear that until the insurrection they’d been cheerful, dedicated members of the FG squad, proud of his policies and accomplishments, but that the events of January 6^th were a step too far, even for them, which is why both of them quit by the next day.  Through their testimony and clips of interviews with some others including former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and an unnamed security official we learned more about how it was left to VP Pence and perhaps Mother to take the actions necessary to get the violence at the Capitol stopped because the seething FG was too busy enjoying it while he binged watched TV.  We also received confirmation of Cassidy Hutchinson’s earlier testimony about the fracas in the FG’s limo that took place when the FG’s team refused to take him to the Capitol.  That’s the fight that several members of the FG’s Secret Service contingent alleged didn’t happen, not that they ever denied it under oath because it’s one thing to whisper denials into the ears of willing reporters and another thing to lie when there could be consequences.  As to consequences, a somewhat frustrated Attorney Merrick Garland wants it to be known that all those reports that he’s sitting on his hands doing nothing are not accurate, that no one, including a former and possibly future president, the one whose video outtakes show how hard he tried to not call off the marauding crowds, will get away with breaking the law.  Let’s hope Garland means it because this morning’s Axios features an article by Jonathan Swan detailing how the FG is already planning his next presidential term and that those plans include shutting down a few departments,  firing a huge number of civil servants while replacing them with his loyalists, a list that is currently being vetted and that his future cabinet would include the likes of Jeffrey Clark, the environmental lawyer who tried to take over the Department of Justice to cancel the results of the last election. And of course, folks like Stephen Miller, Mark Meadows and Kash Patel would feature prominently in his next administration.  So basically the nightmare scenario is that the FG wins reelection, pardons anyone who has been convicted and then staffs the government with loyalist cronies.  No wonder Steve Bannon isn’t sweating despite wearing five shirts in sweltering DC.

Major Knew:  Reports are that Biden’s since banished German Shephard Major was involved in eight biting incidents, with his targets being members of the Secret Service. We should have trusted his instincts.   It turns out that the situation at the Secret Service is even worse than initially reported.  The Secret Service which has been part of the Department of Homeland Security since the post 9.11 revamp of governmental security agencies is on the verge of implosion and probably should be because destroying texts at any time when law requires that all official communications be archived permanently but certainly after records were requested by several House Committees in the aftermath of an insurrection is a bigly, likely illegal no no which is why the text destruction is now being investigated as a possible crime.  As to the destruction, it’s worth noting that the Secret Service is the go to place for recovering “lost” information from electronic equipment which probably also means that they are very good at getting rid of what they, or at least a bunch of their agents, don’t want seen, ever.  It’s probably not a coincidence that James Murray, the former head of the Secret Service recently stepped down from his post to take a job with Snapchat or that the Inspector General responsible for Secret Service oversight who tried to belatedly position himself as “concerned” about those text deletions is an FG appointee with a  record of ignoring earlier complaints about bad behavior. The Secret Service text destruction story has legs and is likely to be addressed in one or more of the future episodes of How the FG Almost and May Still Destroy Democracy, now scheduled for September.

Legislative Update:  It takes two to tango, meaning that while Nancy Pelosi’s House frequently passes legislation, most of that legislation never makes it to the floor of the currently too evenly split Senate.  That said, the votes on some of what the House passed this week are very revealing:  209 House Republicans voted against abortion rights; 205 House Republicans voted against protecting interstate travel for reproductive care; 195 Republicans voted against protecting access to contraceptives and 157 Republicans voted against marriage equality.  Of those bills, only the one protecting marriage equality stands a chance in the Senate although so far only five of the ten Republican Senators required to get to the needed sixty have said that they’ll vote to protect same sex and interracial marriage, the two components of the bill. One of the Republicans on board is Ohio’s retiring Senator Rob Portman who has signed on as a co-sponsor of the marriage protection legislation, largely because the issue is personal to him, he has a gay son.  How sad is it that we have to rely on Senators being personally affected by an issue to get their support.  Also, how said is it that none of them will admit to being similarly affected by anything related to reproductive rights even though we know that they are, they just don’t want to admit it.