Oprah's Favorite Things 🌻🌻🌻

Finally:  Oprah Winfrey, the mega celebrity responsible for Mehmet Oz’s TV fame added John Fetterman’s name to her annual favorite things list, endorsing his Pennsylvania Senate run, saying that if she were a Pennsylvania resident, she would have already cast her absentee ballot for him. To borrow a phrase from that other TV celebrity, Martha Stewart, that’s a good thing,  It’s also got to burn NJ resident Dr Oz, who had previously implied that the only reason Oprah hadn’t endorsed his candidacy was because he’d asked her to stay out of the fray. Oprah also endorsed the Senate runs of North Carolina’s Cheri Beasley, Florida’s Val Demings, Wisconsin’s Mandela Barnes, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, and Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and the Gubernatorial runs of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams and Texas’ Beto O’Rourke. Most definitely not on Oprah’s list is Net’s star Kyrie Irving who late last night finally issued a statement condemning anti-Semitism. His not all that voluntary disavowal came after a forced $500,000 contributions by him and his team to anti-hate groups, a pathetic news conference where he failed to acknowledge that a conspiracy filled movie he had endorsed was full of anti-Semitic tropes and an open ended unpaid suspension from playing.  To be clear, the unvaccinated Kyrie hasn’t changed his views, he’s just woken up to the fact that his playing career is hanging by a thread.  As to careers, a whole bunch of Twitter employees are waking up to the end of theirs, well the end of their Twitter careers that is, as today is dismissal day at Twitter.  New owner Elon Musk is expected to fire half of Twitter’s staff, including many if not most of the company’s content moderators, by email. Musk also plans to put his new “blue check” policy in place on Monday, that’s the policy that will allow anyone to purchase a blue check by paying a monthly subscription fee; he intends to phase out the older “free” ones over a not yet disclosed time period.  The fee part isn’t the problem, he owns the company and can do what he wants, at least until he runs out of money to pay the banks owning his loans, the problem is that until now blue checks verified that tweeters, at least those who are famous or have huge followings,  were who they said they were.  So, for example, a tweet from Barack Obama was really from Barack Obama rather than from a wingnut pretending to be Obama .  What could possibly go wrong when tens of thousands of miscreants and Russian sponsored bots here and abroad start spreading misinformation about things like the legitimacy of elections, COVID and other hot button issues while hiding behind identities that aren’t theirs?

Communism? The Former Guy, who is still not back on Twitter, has been burning up his keypad and the right-wing airwaves with lots of frenzied and desperate rants and at least one new frivolous lawsuit where he’s seeking to have a Florida Court with no jurisdiction opine on his New York case. All that was before yesterday when Judge Arthur Engoron, the NY judge overseeing the NYS fraud case against his company, granted NYS Attorney General Tish James’ request that the FG Organization’s dealings with banks and any sale of major assets be subject to supervision by a court named third-party expert.  Judge Engoron’s ruling was in response to AG James’ credible concern that a new corporate entity that the FG had set up in Delaware, too cutely called FG Organization II, was specifically created to facilitate the transfer of assets out of NYS to avoid paying the restrictions and the penalties that FG expects will be assessed for his financial shenanigans. The FG’s response to Judge Engoron’s ruling, including the part that said that he’d have to pay the newly appointed monitor, was about as expected, he called him a “puppet judge of the NY Attorney General and other sworn enemies” who has “issued a ruling never before seen anywhere in America….Communism comes to our shores.” Communism, really? Getting back to social media, trouble continues to loom for the FG’s Twitter copycat Truth Social. FG Media and the Truth Social linked SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) again failed to get the shareholder votes they need to postpone their merger deadline beyond a December 8 liquidation date.  That’s really bad news for any of those small investors/FG fans who hoped to make money off the shares they bought at their peak but maybe good news for the FG who, when Truth Social implodes, will be free to accept Chief Twit Musk’s invitation to rejoin Twitter without worrying about violating any noncompete promises he may have made to Truth Social.  In other legal news, its being reported that US AG Merrick Garland, is considering appointing a Special Counsel to oversee the inevitable case(s) against the FG if he really runs again.  As to the election interference case, not to be confused with the Mar a Lago purloined documents case there’s more incriminating information about how the FG and his crew were angling to get their election lies in front of Justice Clarence Thomas, the only member of SCOTUS who they believed would seriously consider delaying the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote. On the purloined documents front the DOJ has given FG acolyte Kash Patel limited immunity in the hopes of getting him to speak truth in front of a grand jury.   

And:  The results of Israel’s gazillionth election are in and it looks like Bibi is back, well at least for now.  

VOTE!