Where's the Beef? 🌻🌻🌻

Legally Yours:  Remember John Durham? He’s the once but no longer respected US Attorney from Connecticut who former Attorney General William Barr assigned to investigate the Russia investigation to prove that it wasn’t legitimately predicated. The FG and his echo chamber spent months talking up Durham, claiming that he would send many to jail after he proved that the Russia investigation was nothing more than a Hilary Clinton inspired witch hunt.  Well so much for that.  Here we are several years later, over $4 million spent and Durham has little to show for his efforts because though the infamous Steele dossier was somewhat sketchy, still no evidence of a pee tape, the Russia investigation was legit.  Yesterday, Durham’s big get turned into a nothing burger when Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the dossier, was acquitted of four counts of lying to the FBI, a fifth count had been thrown out by the judge overseeing the case.  All Durham did while burning our tax dollars was go after three people for lying. Two of those accusations resulted in jury trials where the defendants were acquitted, the third resulted in a guilty plea from a low-level FBI Agent who futzed with a document and ended up with probation.  Naturally, the conclusion of the FG’s crowd, most notably their It girl Margie Q, is that Durham’s prosecution failures are the result of biased courts rather than a lack of convincing evidence.  Durham is expected to produce his final document, maybe by year end.  Frankly, he should lose all his staff and be relegated to a cubby hole in a dusty basement with only paper and a manual typewriter to complete his assignment because too much time and money has been spent on these shenanigans.  Expect the FG and his crowd to now focus all their attention on Hunter, as if they haven’t been spending enough time touting that investigation.  As to the FG and his multiple legal cases, he’s due to  be deposed in the E Jean Carroll defamation case where he may have just damaged his best defense, that the broad protections he had when he was president allowed him to defame her because over the advice of counsel to keep his trap shut about her rape allegations, he recently called her a liar again on Truth Social.  Despite his claims that he’s still president, he’s not, so those protections, to the extent they ever existed, no longer apply.  Then there’s Special Master Dearie, the judge who is overseeing the sorting of the purloined documents, well at least those that aren’t market top secret, those even he isn’t allowed to review.  He’s just about had it with the FG team.  Yesterday, quoting from the classic Wendy’s commercial he asked “Where’s the beef” adding that the FG’s Mar a Lago documents assertions of privilege lack any evidence for a ruling to be made in his favor.  It certainly doesn’t help that author and one time Watergate reporter Bob Woodward just released a tape where the FG acknowledged that he had taken the Kim Jung un letters and that he’d show them to Bob even though they were top secret. Worth noting the DOJ is still trying to have Dearie’s role eliminated, not because he isn’t doing a good job but because he never should have been appointed in the first place.

Midterm Madness:  No matter where you live, please get out and vote and bring your friends and family with you.  Don’t assume that your candidate of choice can win without you.  The pollsters keep predicting that races, even in blue states like New York, are going to be close at best and that we could be in for some frightening upsets.  In NYS If the specter of Republican Congressman/Governor candidate Lee Zeldin beating Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul doesn’t scare you, it should, a lot.  Though Long Islander Zeldin has been trying to inch back from his extreme anti-abortion position to appeal to those voters who is already spooking with his unending cries about skyrocketing crime by saying that he wouldn’t be able to restrict reproductive rights in NYS even if he wanted to do, don’t buy it.  He’s been a consistent anti-abortion voter in Congress and as recently as April said he would appoint a “pro-life” health commissioner, a statement he made while talking with a Right to Life group.   On the Congressional front, GQP Leader Kevin McCarthy is talking about cutting aid to Ukraine and threatening to hold debt limit increases the US credit rating hostage if he doesn’t get the spending cuts he and the likes of Margie Q and Gym Jordan want.  By spending cuts, think cuts in health care, social security, programs to protect the environment and even the Department of Justice, because the only way the FG’s echo chamber can shut down investigations, especially the Mar a Lago purloined documents probe, would be to cut the DOJ and the FBI’s funding.  If you think those are just threats, remember who we’re dealing with.  Likewise, should the Senate fall back into Republican hands, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending will be on the chopping block.  That may sound nuts, but it’s what a lot of them are promising to do so take them at their word.  And while President Biden is promising that with two more Senators, the Democrats will eliminate the filibuster to pass the Roe abortion rights protections into law, Mitch McConnell’s crowd is likely to try to eliminate reproductive rights entirely if they have the votes.   

The Crazy Train:  Kanye continues to spout hate and now has agreed in principle to buy Parler, a right-wing Twitter wannabee platform that prides itself on being open to promulgaters of hate.  Parler’s CEO George Farmer has been trying to sell the failing app for some time.  Farmer’s wife is Candace Owen, the shrewd, outspoken, right-wing, Black pundit who has recently become one of Kanye’s best friends.  Coincidence? Rule 39.  Anyway, Parler occupies a crowded space that also includes Truth Social, Gab and Rumble, none of which are all that successful because what fun is spewing hate when there are no libs around to outrage; that’s a lot like that proverbial tree falling in the forest.  Elon Musk, celebrated Kanye’s decision to purchase Parler with a tweet depicting him together with the FG and Kanye dressed in Three Musketeer’s costumes, a tweet that he subsequently deleted. Though it’s possible that Kanye will be back on meds or under conservatorship before he completes his Parler purchase, the specter of all these social media platforms, including Twitter, being owned by so-called free speech advocates as in people who believe that pushing neo-Nazi talking points is okay is not a good thing, especially as we approach another presidential election cycle.