Turkeys!   🦃🌻 🦃🌻 🦃 🌻

Guns, Guns, Hate:  Overnight, six people were shot dead in a Virginia Walmart break room by a store employee who then shot himself because it was a day ending in D A Y and guns.  The Walmart shooting shouldn’t be confused with last weekend’s Colorado Springs Club Q shooting, the one that left 5 dead and many more injured, that a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show said was inevitable because, according to her, as long as LGBTQ people “engage in grooming and encourage gender affirming care,” that’s going to happen. The Colorado shooter who had a history of violent behavior shouldn’t have had any guns but did possibly because law enforcement in El Paso County where Colorado Springs is located aren’t all that into enforcing red flag laws something about the county having declared itself a “Second Amendment preservation county.” Because timing is everything, Georgia Senatorial candidate Herschel Walker’s campaign is now running an ad attacking transgender swimmers apparently because they’ve concluded that’s a message that will resonate with Georgia voters, shootings be damned.  That’s Herschel who blamed his Democratic opponent Senator Raphael Warnock for the cancellation of Archie Bunker and All in the Family, the TV program that ended in 1979, during one of his rallies which could explain why his Republican handlers no longer allow him to appear alone during televised interviews, instead pairing him off with other Senators like Lindsey Graham and/or Ted Cruz.  Not that it will matter, but yesterday the second woman whose abortion Walker encouraged and paid for held a news conference where she provided pictures of the two of them together and tape recordings of their phone conversations to refute his lie that he had no idea who she was.  A recent poll completed on behalf of AARP shows Warnock leading Walker 51% to 47% but if we’ve learned anything by now it’s that polls are often wrong.  That said the RNC seems to be really concerned about the outcome of the race and that the Georgia Appeals court upheld a lower court ruling allowing early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  They’ve appealed to the state’s Supreme Court because apparently if you can’t win legitimately, the next best option is to seek the Court’s help in suppressing Democratic turnout.  As to litigation, a lot of it is going on in Arizona right now.  Republican loser Kari Lake, who is being slammed by Tom Petty’s estate for using his “I Won’t Back Down” song at her rallies, has not conceded to Democratic Governor elect Katie Hobbs and is threatening to sue over Maricopa’s voting machines.  Not to be out done Republican Attorney General wannabe Abe Hamadeh is suing, claiming election mismanagement is the reason that he lost his race to Democrat candidate Kris Mayes.  That race, where Mayes’ margin of victory is only 510 votes, will be subjected to an automatic recount, but odds are that Mayes’ victory will withstand the recount or at least she expects that it will.

Legal Jeopardy:  Yesterday, not a moment too soon but maybe too late, the Supreme Court denied Trump’s request to shield his tax records from Congress.  Though those records are likely to be turned over to the House Ways and Means Committee momentarily, they won’t be made public unless someone decides to go the leak route.  Moreover, with the control of the House about to turnover, it’s not clear that the Committee will have enough time to digest the piles they’re about to receive.  Last night MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who once worked for Senate giant Patrick Moynihan, said that the Senate, which will remain in Democratic hands next year, can and should request their own copies.  Let’s hope that he’s right and that they do.  While that ruling was coming down from SCOTUS, a representative from Mazars, Trump’s long-term accounting firm, was testifying in the Manhattan tax fraud case against his company.  The Mazars accountant revealed that Trump reported losses on his tax returns every year for a decade, including $700 million in 2009 and $200 million in 2010. That Trump avoided paying taxes isn’t surprising, after all he once said that only idiots pay taxes, the question is how much of that avoidance was legitimate and how much was the result of fraud. In other legal news, Trump may be about to face another significant loss.  Yesterday, a federal appeals panel made up of three Republican appointed judges, signaled that it would throw out Florida Judge Aileen Cannon’s questionable appointment of the special master who she assigned to review the documents taken from Mar a Lago and an October 2023 date has been set for the NY Attorney General’s $250 million civil case against Trump, Ivanka, Junior, Eric, and his company .   

Wedding Blues:  Former Congressman/CIA Director/Secretary of State, the newly svelte Mike Pompeo who is doing all the things one does when one is readying himself for a Republican presidential run has identified the most-evil person in the world.  Not Vlad Putin, not Kim Jong un, but Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers. Time will tell if Pompeo or any of the other Republican presidential wannabes topple Trump, but one thing is for certain, the culture war will go on. Worth noting, Weingarten who is gay is married to a Rabbi making her the kind of person that a lot of right wingers and the people who are energized by their hate-filled rhetoric find offensive.  It’s fair to assume that she also believes in science and science education, kind of like Virus Guru Fauci, that other guy that the lunatic fringe also hates so much.  Yesterday Fauci made what is likely to be his last trip to the official government podium as he will be leaving government at year end.  He made one final push for everyone to get their COVID vaccines and boosters because COVID is not gone and what is looking to be a big flu season is here.   One more thing, you may have heard that Naomi Biden, the President’s granddaughter got married at the White House over the weekend.  Apparently, the press was not invited to the nuptials and a few of them are absolutely irate that that the bride sat for an interview and photo shoot with Vogue a few days before the wedding.  One of them, the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker equated the Bidens failure to tell her about the Vogue shoot to the lies that Trump told during his days in office and no surprise the NY Time’s Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman came to her defense.  Really? Get a grip.  Both-siderism run amok, again.

Happy 🦃  🦃 🦃