Unhinged 🌻🌻🌻

January 6:  Yesterday’s hearing was chock full of information that was both shocking and not shocking.  Shocking because the Former Guy, then the President of the USA knew he’d lost the 2020 election but was so unwilling to accept his loss that he really did try to pull off a coup and if it took a bloody civil war triggered by a militia composed of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters to do so, so much the better.  Not shocking because though we learn more gruesome details about the FG’s coup attempt and how his not so innocent tweeting and pre-meditated speechifying inspired his followers to invade the Capitol on January 6^th every time the Committee holds a hearing, the general outline of his bad acts has been apparent for some time.  Not that those bad acts have stopped, the FG is on the campaign trail right now, and when not tripping off to Alaska and other parts of red America to advocate for more Margie Q types and Sarah Palins, he also continues to obstruct, or at least he’s trying to.  Yesterday’s hearing ended with another one of those “tune in next time” teasers when Vice Chair Liz Cheney revealed that the FG remains all in on witness intimidation.  Specifically she reported that he “tried to call” a witness presumably to encourage that person to keep his or her lips sealed.  That witness who has not yet appeared in one of the public hearings didn’t take the call but immediately contacted his or her lawyer who contacted the committee who contacted Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. As to the rest of the hearing, we learned more about the wacked out December 18, 2020 meeting at the White House, the one when a group that included kraken lawyer Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and former Overstock CED Patrick Byrne who in case you’ve forgotten was once a paramour of Russian red sparrow Maria Butina, pushed their conspiracies about fraud as well as their overturn the election schemes on a very receptive FG who liked what he heard so much that he either appointed or tried to appoint Sidney Powell as a Special Counsel while White House Counsel Pat Cipollone who had dashed to the White House a la OJ Simpson in his pre-murder Hertz commercial tried to quash.  And because presenting details of that wackadoodle meeting wasn’t enough for one Committee hearing, we also heard from a former Oath Keeper and one of those delusional FG supporters who, under the influence of all of the FG’s tweets, the ones that those nice folks at Twitter knew were seriously problematic, participated in the Capitol invasion on insurrection day but would have left the scene way earlier if only the FG had tweet directed the crowd to vamoose.  Tune in next week for more in the continuing and perhaps unending saga about the end of Democracy.  By the way, that Twitter acquisition by Elon Musk is currently off track while the parties sue each other.

Other Legalities:  Though we still haven’t heard anything more from one time Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who is either in witness protection on ice in the Mar a Lago Diet Coke fridge, Steve Bannon is talking or at least trying to. In order to get himself out from under those problematic criminal contempt charges for defying his House subpoena, he has now offered to testify in public saying that suddenly he can because the FG has waived the executive privilege that he never could offer him and that curiously enough the FG’s lawyers say that he never did.  Bannon’s last minute offer doesn’t appear to be going over well with US District Court Judge Carl Nichols who is hearing his case.  Nichols has refused to push off Bannon’s contempt trial which is scheduled to begin next week.  Judge Nichols decision cannot be music to one-time aide Peter Navarro’s ears because it doesn’t bode well for his similar claim of executive privilege that isn’t. Meantime another judge, this one in Fulton County, Georgia has ordered Senator Lindsey Graham to testify in front of the special grand jury investigating all those efforts to throw out Democratic votes while finding more Republican ones. Its fair to assume that Graham will continue to fight his subpoena because of course and anyway he could just spend the rest of the year on Congressionally sponsored foreign trips.

ButHerEmails:   While the January 6 Committee and the Fulton County DA continue to do their thing looking into the FG’s insurrectionist acts, President Biden hasn’t been having an easy time either.  It’s hard to open a paper or turn into a news program without hearing about his dismal popularity, his doddering old age or how progressives in his party are ready to put him out to pasture and that’s the so-called mainstream media.  Add in Hunter’s laptop and then you’ve got the right wing as well.  Also, apparently each and every awful decision issued by the Supreme Court is Biden’s fault too, especially the recent Roe overturning Dobbs decision.  It’s not clear why Democrats eat their own, but they do, and it’s also not clear why the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and MSNBC endlessly run these types of stories but they do to.  Perhaps they miss the ratings hike that FG stories deliver? Or maybe they just love doing that #ButHerEmails thing over and over again?  Anyway, it’s worth noting that Biden wasn’t really the Democrats first choice last time but he won the nomination and then the election anyway and that the immediate problem is the midterms, the next presidential election is still over two years away.  As to those midterms, candidates like Georgia’s Herschel Walker, his multiple personalities, and his strange utterances, aren’t doing much to help the Republican’s quest to retake the Senate.  That’s got to be a concern for Mitch McConnell, not that it’s stopping him from doing his thing which currently means that he’s threatening to withhold support from the bipartisan US-China competitiveness bill if Democrats move forward with a separate unrelated spending bill and of course remains opposed to things like lowering the cost of insulin because apparently there are no diabetics in red states?