Vampires and Werewolves 🌻🌻🌻 💙

Passing the Baton:  The election isn’t over yet but two things are for certain, the Republicans have won enough seats to take over the House and Nancy Pelosi is winding down her illustrious career.  Not clear yet is the size of the Republican’s slim majority or whether Representative Lauren Boebert, Colorado’s right wing loony toon will be part of their caucus; she leads her Democratic challenger Adam Frisch by 551 votes, an amount slim enough to have triggered an automatic recount. Should Boebert end up winning and she probably will because recounts don’t generally shift more than a few votes, she’ll get to join her Republican colleagues in pursuing their MAGA-tized objectives. Those objectives don’t include passing any legislation remotely beneficial to their constituents like cutting drug costs or reducing all that crime and inflation they campaigned on but they do involve using their regained subpoena power to go scorched earth on Hunter Biden and his dad and laptop, the FBI, Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Justice Department and virus guru Fauci, among others.  In exchange for her support, GQP Leader McCarthy has promise Margie Q an investigation into the DOJ and Speaker Pelosi’s “mistreatment” of the January 6^th rioters, you know those nice tourists who wanted to hang Mike Pence, the one-time VP who admits to being a wee bit mad that Trump was okay with him being lynched but who has found it within his “Christian” heart to forgive him  while also saying that he’s not going to cooperate with the January 6^th Committee so if you want to know what he has to say go buy his book, as if.  As to Congress, think funding battles, debt ceiling crises and Benghazi on steroids for the next two years. You have to hand it to GQP leader McCarthy and his crowd, a majority of voters rejected extremism, so their strategy is to go all in on revenge and extremism.  Time will tell if that’s a winning plan.  Speaking of extremist, one of them, Arizona’s Governor race loser Kari Lake is refusing to concede her loss and threatening to hire the best Kraken lawyers to sue.

In With the New: Pelosi’s eloquent speech was written with the help of historian Jon Meacham but it’s fair to assume that she crafted the part where she said that she’d “enjoyed working with “three presidents:  George Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden,” not so subtlety skipping the president that the NY Post referred to as that Florida Man, all by herself.  Pelosi isn’t leaving Congress but does plan to step away from her party leadership position, passing the baton to New York’s Hakeem Jeffries who has been her leader in training for a while. You may remember Jeffries as the sharp staccato speaking interrogator from the first impeachment trial.  Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn who saved Joe Biden’s presidential run also plan to step aside from their leadership roles, though, like Nancy, neither is leaving the House.  Their replacements are expected to be Massachusetts’ Katherine Clark and California’s Pete Aguilar. Collectively, the new team will have an average age around thirty years younger than those they’re replacing.  California Democrat/Impeachment Manager Adam Schiff who had contemplated challenging Jeffries for the party leadership position is instead expected to seek 89-year-old Diane Feinstein’s California Senate seat once she steps aside or expires, whichever comes first.  Notably, Qevin McCarthy failed to attend Nancy Pelosi’s stepping down speech as he was otherwise occupied, having a tete-a-tete with the not so charming, vampiric Steve Miller. Qevin doesn’t appear to have said anything about Nancy’s announcement though, unsurprisingly, others in his leadership group have had lots of nasty things to say.  Not much of a shocker that Don Jr has already started to attack Hakeem Jeffries.  That said, former Republican Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner, neither of whom were able to control larger majorities than the one that the less skillful Qevin has inherited, have had gracious things to say as has Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell who while acknowledging their many differences, congratulated Pelosi on her “historic tenure and path-breaking career.”  Speaking of vampires, in a truly off the rails campaign speech Georgia Senatorial candidate Herschel Walker rambled on calling vampires “cool people” while also saying he prefers werewolves” because he’s recently found out that “a werewolf can kill a vampire” so he “doesn’t want to be a vampire anymore,” he wants to be a werewolf.  Just a reminder, Walker received more than 48% of the Georgia vote and Republicans are throwing everything they have behind him in the hope that he’ll beat incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock during their December runoff. Despite Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy’s assertion last weekend that the Republican party is not a cult, it is and it’s scary.  Also, note to Senator Cassidy, having to assert your party isn’t a cult is a sure admission that you fear it is.

A New Twitter?  It appears that Elon Musk really has broken Twitter. A significant number of the company’s remaining engineers were so put off by his statement that they’d have to confirm their willingness to do “hardcore work” or leave by 5 PM, that they left. Concerned that one or more of them might sabotage Twitter’s infrastructure he then locked down Twitter’s building telling all staff, the same people who he previously told that they could no longer work from home that they would have to go home until Monday. At the moment it appears that Twitter is still running but it’s slow and cranky and expectations are that it will crash and with no one left to fix it, it might not be brought back up.  That’s an inconvenience for people like me but the end of a lifeline for those who live in dangerous regimes or even places like Buffalo which is currently experiencing an extreme snow storm. If anyone reading this has any idea why spending $48 billion to buy an asset only to destroy it makes sense, please send your thoughts.  What’s next?  Kara Swisher, the former WSJ/NYTimes tech analyst turned podcaster recommends signing on to new social media company’s Post News beta waitlist.  If you are interested use my referral code: https://post.news/?r=YGtzZ