Armageddon  🌻🌻🌻

The Pasta Defense:  Well, let’s get the ridiculous over with first, meaning the Herschel Walker mess. Things continue to go south, well maybe, for the one-time football hero/Republican Georgia Senate candidate.  Walker continues to deny that he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion, sticking with his assertion that he doesn’t know the accuser even though it turns out that she is the mother of one of his previously “secret” children.  At least I think he continues to deny the allegation, it’s hard to tell given that he's mostly incoherent, either because he’s suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) or something equally dire or because he’s figured out that speaking in word spaghetti is his only defense.  Naturally, just about every Republican leader, with the exception of Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan who now says that Walker is unbearable, is defending him because as said out loud by former NRA spokesperson current conservative radio pundit Dana Loesch, it doesn’t matter if he paid for some “skank’s” abortion, it’s all about power and regaining control of the Senate.  Current polls show Walker losing ground to his opponent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock but it’s hard to tell if the polls mean much because what “pro-life” person wants to admit to a random pollster that paying for an abortion is okay but just for Republican politicians?

Rule 39: As Leroy Jethro Gibbs would say there is no such thing as a coincidence so It’s probably not one that someone at the FBI leaked to the Washington Post that the investigation of Hunter Biden’s “crimes” is wrapping up and that he will face indictment shortly. First, even though the US Attorney responsible for looking into the Hunter situation is a Trump appointee working independently of AG Merrick Garland, it’s highly unlikely that he could pull off indicting Biden’s son in the run up to the midterms and those crimes, they boil down to tax evasion and lying on a gun application about drug use.  The taxes have since been paid and the drug use problem, no secret, would probably result in a plea bargain, not jail time but exploiting Hunter’s problems now and to be clear he’s got them, what a great diversion.  Less diverting to the right is that the Former Guy’s Mar a Lago purloined document case continues to fester.  It’s hard to follow all the court cases or to understand why the NY Times’ Maggie Haberman thought that sitting on her knowledge that he’d taken some to Mar a Lago was okay, but it continues to appear that every judge except pocket judge Aileen Canon, isn’t buying the defenses that the FG team is offering up.  Yes, the FG is managing to delay the inevitable, but not by as much as he hoped.  As to the purloined documents, last night the NY Times reports that there are likely more of them hanging at one or more of the FG’s residences and that the DOJ has been in discussions with the FG’s team about how to get them back pronto but that the FGs lawyers have been giving him contradictory advice with his newish $3 million lawyer pushing for some cooperation with Justice while his others push for more obstruction. Surprise, surprise, the obstructionists are winning, well winning for now. Then there are the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.  Like all the court battles over the purloined documents it’s hard to keep the cases against those two groups of evil numb nuts  straight but two notable things did happen yesterday:  a Proud Boy leader pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy for his efforts to stop the transfer of power from the FG to Biden following the election which means he’s struck a deal and is spilling his guts to minimize his sentence; and a former Oath Keeper testified that at least one of his Oath Keeper colleagues was speaking to one or more members of the Secret Service in the run up to the January 6^th insurrection, maybe one of those who “acid washed” a phone before returning it to higher authorities?  A few Secret Service guys also tried to obfuscate a recent car accident that one of them had while driving VP Harris.  Something about claiming that busting a tire by running into a curb was just a mechanical problem. My initial response was to laugh that one off because who among us hasn’t hit a curb or two while driving, well at least I have, but then again we are not graduates of the Secret Service defensive driving school.

Nuclear Alert: On the international front, last night at a Democratic fundraiser hosted by James Murdoch, not to be confused with his brother or father, President Biden who was not speaking word spaghetti said clearly what we all fear, that a desperate, back to the wall Vladimir Putin could go with the nuclear option, “if in fact things continue down the path they are going.” Biden added “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.” The already stressed out Strangelove Putin can’t be happy that the Nobel Prize Committees awarded this year’s Peace Prize to Ales Bialiatski, a jailed Belarusian activist; Memorial a Russian organization; and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine. Those groups and individuals have become symbols in the fight against the disinformation pushed by Putin and his defenders. One more thing on the international front that is likely to affect all of us, well not as much as nuclear waste flying overhead but something that is likely to hit our pocketbooks shortly, our not so good friends the Saudis and their cohorts at OPEC are cutting oil output by an amount far higher than what was expected  It doesn’t take a nuclear scientist to figure out that the Saudis are likely trying to influence the outcome of the midterm elections, not just because Prince Bone Saw is such good friends with Jared and the Former Guy, but because he also prefers politicians who favor carbon emissions over environment sparing technologies.  

And: It looks like Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who fashions himself as one of the more principled Republicans in the Senate, a low bar, is expected to resign to become the president of the University of Florida. His resignation will not change the make-up of the Senate, since Nebraska’s Republican Governor Pete Ricketts will get to choose his successor and may even choose himself.