Happy New Year!  🌻 🌻 🌻

Out With the Old:  The January 6^th Report is out and available in hard copy and on Audible, a convenient way to “read” it fast. Most of what it contains isn’t new news, especially for those who watch stations other than Fox and the like.  The bottom line is that Trump and his team knew that there was a good chance he’d lose the 2020 election and even before election returns started coming, they began planning ways to toss out the results by casting doubts on early voting.  Then once the election was over his strategy included cockamamie accusations about Chinese, Italian and South American corrupted election machinery, pressing local officials to “find” more votes, pursuing countless frivolous lawsuits, the false elector scheme, pressure on VP Mike Pence and finally a violent coup. Only time will tell if Trump ultimately suffers serious consequences for his election crimes or for any of his other financial machinations but with control of the House about to switch hands to the Republicans, the House January 6^th Committee is disbanding, so yesterday they cancelled their subpoena for Trump to appear, not that he ever was going to appear. Though their days in control are over for now, as a parting shot the Democrat controlled Ways and Means committee will be releasing the entirety of six years of Trump’s tax filings today, including all the ones that the IRS didn’t audit even though they were supposed to.  We know from the summary information already released that Trump didn’t pay much in taxes, and when he did pay it was only because he had capital gains that even he couldn’t offset.  We also now know that despite all his showmanship, Trump didn’t really donate his income.  A few more comments on this subject:  Cassidy Hutchinson really is a heroine, she did what many others should have, becoming the John Dean/Alexander Butterfield of this generation, particularly notable given how many of her colleagues, most more powerful and senior than she was, obfuscated and prevaricated during their depositions, transcripts of which were also released this week.  Mark Meadows is the loser that many of us thought he was.  A weak, overly accommodating Chief of Staff who facilitated Trump’s coup when he had the power to stand up and stop him.  And lastly, let’s all send positive vibes in the direction of Congressman Jamie Raskin. As if the loss of his son to depression last year wasn’t already too much to bear, he disclosed this week that he has an aggressive, but treatable (fingers and toes crossed) form of lymphoma and will be immediately starting chemo.   

In With the New: Most of this week’s political press has been taken up by the saga of Long Island’s mendacious Congressman-elect George Santos, AKA Devolder AKA Zabrovsky and goodness knows how many other names. For the record he didn’t graduate from or even attend Baruch College, he didn’t go to NYU grad school, he never attended Horace Mann, his grandparents are not Eastern European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, his mother was not in the World Trade Center on 9.11 and though she did pass away a few years ago she didn’t die twice, he’s not Jewish nor Jew-ish, he may or may not be bi-racial but he’s probably not part Angolan, he does not and never did own 13 income producing real estate properties, he did not endure chemo for the treatment of a brain tumor largely because he never had one, his pet charity wasn’t legit, he probably didn’t go to Israel several times and in any case PM again Netanyahu’s first name is Benjamin not David, he may or may not have traveled to Russia several times and if he did we really should learn why, he did steal and cash checks in Brazil and probably engaged in some questionable as in illegal financial things, including campaign finance crimes, here in the USA for which he is now being investigated by the Nassau County DA, the NYS AG and federal prosecutors from the Eastern District of NY.  Santos probably will be sworn into Congress next week largely because lying is not a crime, and those suspected financial ones are as yet unproven and more significantly because GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy desperately needs all the votes he can get to become Speaker and as of now he has none to spare and may even be short a few but Santos probably won’t last in Congress for his full term.  Speaking of Kevin, he’s got a tough week ahead of him.  He probably will eventually become Speaker but absent a quick cave-in by one or more of the five Republicans who say that they’re “never Kevins” it may take a few rounds of votes before any “gray smoke” rises from the Capitol chimney and even if he wins, his hold on his position will be tenuous. In any case, next year will be full of lots of investigations and hearings related to Hunter Biden’s laptop, now retired virus guru Tony Fauci, Afghanistan, and Alejandro Mayorkas, mostly because he’s the one taking the heat for the border migrant crisis.  That’s the crisis that will probably never go away no matter who’s in charge because life is tough in Central and South America and so many people want to come here.  Regarding that crisis, this week the Supreme Court voted to leave the Trump era emergency coronavirus restrictions at the southern border in place for now, not because we’re still in a “virus” emergency but because they‘re okay letting people suffer for a few more months. Even Justice Gorsuch knows that’s a bad decision, he joined with the liberal wing writing “Courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency…..We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.”  Sadly, he’s right, we need new immigration laws but who are we kidding, that’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, and everyone should agree that Texas Governor Abbott sending ill-clothed migrants in busses to freeze outside of VP Kamala Harris’ Washington DC home on Christmas Eve is neither Christian nor a solution.   

China, Elon, Greta:  China has opened, it’s population many of whom either didn’t get vaccinated at all or didn’t get boosted and when vaccinated were jabbed with less effective Chinese made vaccines are now coming down with one of the more transmissible variants of COVID.  Even if those current variants are less lethal than original COVID, China has 1.4 billion people, so just a very small percentage getting really sick or dying is a bigly problem, for them and for us.  For them because their health care system can’t handle the volumes of sick people and because President Xi has made a big deal about how his strategy for dealing with COVID was so superior to the strategy in the “decadent” west and to be honest he did keep deaths down until now he just messed up on the vaccination front and is now likely to catch up with the west on mortality as a result.  Bad for us because hate rates of COVID in China could well end up creating more vaccine evasive variants which is why the US and other countries are now requiring that all visitors from China pass COVID tests before entering and why we are ramping up sequencing analysis.  Moving on to Elon, Tesla is now struggling, and it doesn’t help that due to COVID in China he’s had to close a plant or two.  His Tesla stockholders aren’t happy about his Twitter shenanigans not that many people are.  Today the NY Times reported that in addition to closing facilities and failing to make rent payments on those he’s still occupying, he’s fired Twitter’s cleaning crews leaving employees without things like clean toilets or even toilet paper. Calling all rats?  Over the past few days, Twitter has started to experience more than the usual technical glitches, not all that surprising given how many people have been fired and that one of those closed facilities had back-up servers. Worse, in the run up to Christmas Twitter “temporarily” disbanded its suicide and crisis information.  Awful at any time but particularly bad given that rates of depression rise this time of year.  The company explained that they took the information down because they were working on a replacement one that isn’t ready yet, but that’s not how it’s supposed to work.  Anyway, under pressure they put the crisis information back up.  And it turns out that allowing trolling haters back on Twitter doesn’t just depress advertising revenue, it also provides law enforcement with useful information so yesterday one of those trollers who is back on Twitter, accused sex offender Andrew Tate, got nabbed by Romanian police after he accidentally disclosed his location during a Twitter battle with environmental activist Greta Thunberg who responded to one of his nasty tweets to her with the ultimate clap down telling him to enlighten her by sending an email to smalldickenergy@getalife.com.  Unable to deal with the ridicule he was getting and the number of likes and retweets she got for her truly brilliant tweet; he responded with a lame one that included a picture of him with a pizza box from a local Romanian restaurant in the background.  The police were soon knocking at his door.  Even George Santos Devolder Zabovsky couldn’t make that tale up.  Well then again…..

Happy and Healthy New Year to all! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Khakis and Jumpsuit   🌻 🎄 🌻 🎅 🌻 🎅 🎄       

Battle of Saratoga: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Washington yesterday, met with President Biden and then spoke before the joint session of Congress. He’s impressive and his Churchillian speech, delivered in English and peppered with mentions of US Revolutionary war battles like the turning point victory of the Battle of Saratoga that most historically challenged Americans never learned about or long ago forgot, was as well.  Much was made of the fact that a few of the attending Republican members of Congress, most notably Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz, who have bonded over their joint love for the Florida Man and their mutual distaste for Kevin McCarthy, didn’t stand or applaud Zelenskyy’s entrance or speech.  Frankly, who cares, the two performative clowns get far more attention than they deserve. It’s America, they’re entitled to oppose aid to Ukraine even if their reasoning has more to do with Putin affinity or a need to be contrarian than any genuine concern about spending or a genuine commitment to isolationism.  Anyway, though it’s a problem that they got away with refusing to go through metal detectors upon entering the rotunda, at least they didn’t scream profanities at Zelenskyy.  Also despicable, is that Don Jr, who continues to spiral to depths hereto unseen, tweeted that Zelensky is “basically an ungrateful international welfare queen,” that from a “nepo” baby who spends his time shooting rare animals rather than earning a living, but it’s been a tough week for Trumps so there’s that.  A few pundits, not just from the right, criticized Zelenskyy for wearing his trademark green khakis but worth noting, Winston Churchill wore his air raid jumpsuit when he visited with FDR so enough about that.  The bottom line is that while we’re all focusing on how the poorly timed “bomb cyclone” hitting parts of the US will affect holiday travel, Ukrainians are suffering from climbing death tolls, torture, and power outages while enduring winter temperatures and an unending barrage of bombs and missiles at the hands of Putin, the power- hungry despot who we should all want stopped before he grabs more of his neighbors.  Let’s hope Biden and the rest of the west can continue to thread the needle, supporting Ukraine while not tipping Putin into Armageddon.

The Taxman: With Congressional leadership about to be turned over to the Republicans, the House Ways and Means Committee went ahead and released a summary of six years of Trump’s tax returns with more details to come once personal information like Social Security numbers are blacked out.  Ignoring that every president since Nixon has released his tax returns, Republicans warned that the release of Trump’s was actually the “bad precedent,”  that we’re on a slippery slope that could lead to, OMG, the release of Supreme Court Justices’ returns.  Apparently, they’re concerned that we could find out more about the sources of Ginni Thomas’ earnings and who has been supporting Kavanaugh’s beyond his income lifestyle. As to Trump’s returns, no surprise that though he’s not as successful as he claims, he’s still far richer than most.  Exploiting every legitimate loophole and a few illegitimate ones, he mostly loses money, at least for tax purposes.  Those possibly illegitimate deductions involve “lending” boatloads of money to his kids and writing off donations of land at unsubstantiated valuations.  Also, something is funky about his charitable donations, most of which aren’t substantiated and some of which were made in cash, and we’re not just talking about end of year tips to his doormen.  Perhaps the biggest news, at least the biggest so far, is that he lied when he said that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was being audited. It wouldn’t have mattered if he was being audited but It turns out that despite IRS regulations requiring that presidents’ and vice presidents’ returns be audited, his weren’t audited during the first two years of his term with an audit of his third year’s returns started only after the House Ways and Means Committee made their formal request and even then only a single IRS agent was assigned to the task, one with no experience auditing complex partnership agreements.  For the record, the NY Times confirms that both Obama’s and Biden’s returns have been subjected to audits.  The failure of the IRS to audit Trump’s returns is highly suspicious, lots of people have some serious explaining to do including the IRS and its Trump appointees, the ones selected for saying that Trump could keep his returns secret if he wanted to. Moreover, the failure to audit Trump makes the proctological audits that former FBI Director James Comey and Acting Director Andrew McCabe were subjected to that much more suspicious in a retaliatory kind of way.

January 6^th:  All of the January 6^th files were supposed to be released yesterday but it turns out that most of the voluminous document got stuck at the printer or was delayed so as not to suck attention away from the Zelenskyy visit.  However, some interviews were released, confirming that many in Trump’s orbit including Charlie Kirk and Roger Stone plead the Fifth for almost everything, refusing to even confirm their ages or where they went to college. Nothing but everything to see there. Also, on Monday the Committee mentioned that one or more people had been advised by their lawyer to obfuscate during their depositions.  It turns out that one of those people was Cassidy Hutchinson who was initially represented by a Trump group funded attorney who was also a former Trump administration ethics(!) lawyer.  Hutchinson asserts that the attorney, Stefan Passantino, who she subsequently replaced told her she should just say that she forgot things that she clearly remembered. His law firm has now wiped him from their website.  And speaking of lies, George Santos, the Congressman-elect from NYS’s third district got caught in another one.  Despite his claims, he is most definitely not the grandchild of Jewish Holocaust survivors, his Brazilian grandparents did not flee Eastern Europe to escape Nazi persecution, they were Catholics born and raised in Brazil.  However, that fiction probably helped him pick up votes in some LI Jewish communities whose residents are the descendants of survivors. Not a surprising strategy given that he also picked up some LGBTQ votes by claiming to lose five members of his staff at the Florida Pulse night club shooting. That was a lie too. Congressman Zelig at your service.

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.                     

 

Calling Norma 🌻 🌻 🌻

Barbie’s Dream House:  Over the weekend the Washington Post detailed Trump’s post presidential life, comparing Mar a Lago to a sad Barbie Dream House, reporting that the sad sap Florida Man is now surrounded by sycophants without either the extensive trappings of the presidency or its guardrails, an explanation for how Kanye and his white supremacist/anti-Semitic friends made their way to his dining table. Trump’s gilded palace may be Barbie like, but he’s no Barbie, and despite his over inflated ego and those bizarre money laundering virtual trading cards, he’s also not a Ken, rather he’s more of a delusional yet dangerous Norma Desmond, one who may have less staff than he’d grown used to but who still has lots of adoring fans and many, many bottles of ketchup.  It’s fair to assume that some of that ketchup hit the walls last night because though it’s not clear that it means much, he can’t be pleased that the House January 6^th committee took the unprecedented step of recommending that the Department of Justice pursue charges against him for obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the US, inciting or assisting in an insurrection, conspiracy to make a false statement and anything else they come up with.  In other words, they want the DOJ to throw the book at him for his attempted stealing of the election by blocking the certification of electors, participating in the phony elector scheme, and inciting of the January 6 attack. The committee also referred kraken lawyer John Eastman and “certain other Trump associates” for criminal indictment, likely former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, America’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani, environmental lawyer/AG wannabee Jeffrey Clark and still another kraken lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro as well. The Committee also voted to refer Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy, Judiciary Chair-to-be Jim ”Gym” Jordan, Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry and Arizona’s Andy Biggs, another Speaker wannabee, to the House Ethics Committee for failing to comply with the committee’s subpoenas which is likely to result in not even a hand slap given that they’ll be running the House and subpoenaing various and sundry Democrats, people named Hunter, and virus guru Fauci come January.  During yesterday’s televised hearing the committee treated us to a few more video tidbits, including clips of Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway saying that they told Trump that he’d lost the election and that he ought to stop the violence at the Capitol, violence that the committee made clear had nothing to do with antifa, as those guys heeded warnings to stay away from Washington on January 6^th, and former advisor Michael Flynn very tellingly pleading the Fifth went asked about whether he believed in the peaceful transfer of power. The Committee who described Hope Hicks, favorite child Ivanka, one time press secretary now Fox darling Kayleigh McEnany, and former Secret Service agent Tony Ornato as less than forthcoming or worse and released a lengthy summary report which also detailed the vast array of weaponry that the insurrectionists had with them during their assault including tasers, pepper spray, batons, brass knuckles and knives. You know, the kind of stuff that innocent tourists always carry when visiting the seat of government. The committee also said that they believed the slow response of the Pentagon to the marauding crowds was about miscommunication, not complicity. A full report will be released later this week around the same time that the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to vote to release six years of Trump’s tax returns, another event that is likely to elicit more ketchup eruptions at the Dream House.   

Which Witch is Which? Naturally, Republicans responded to the Committees actions as expected.  VP Pence who Trump wanted hung for his disloyalty said that he hopes that AG Garland, and the DOJ leave poor Trump alone, he’s suffered enough while most of the rest of the Republican contingent called the Committee’s actions “absurdly partisan,” just more of that witch hunt thing though Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell strayed from the party line saying that “The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day” while adding that “beyond that, I don’t have any immediate observations.” Aware that the House will soon be run by an unmanageable group of crazies Qs, two of whom Lauren Boebert and Margie Q are already publicly squabbling, McConnell has been busy on more important business, hashing out government funding legislation with Democratic Leader Schumer and anyway everyone knows that now that he’s gotten his Supreme Court Justices and has seen  Roe overturned, McConnell just wants Trump to ping pong between Mar a Lago and Bedminster preferably leaving his phone in Ivana’s tomb. One other thing about the wily Mitch, it turns out that he’s been spending quality time with Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema, guiding her through her conversion from Democrat to Independent and is working on convincing her that she’d do even better as a Republican.  For her part Sinema has filed paperwork to run for reelection in 2024 as an Independent, well at least for now.  On the subject of Arizona, last night a Judge threw out most, though not all of failed Gubernatorial candidate/Trump acolyte Kari Lake’s election fraud lawsuit ruling that seven of her assertions were nutzoid but saying that he wants to hear more about two of them leaving it to her legal team to prove their claim that ballot contractors in  Maricopa County stuffed extra ballots into the system and that the printer problem experienced there were intentional.  Democratic election lawyer Mark Elias says he’s confident that the judge is just crossing “t’s” and dotting “i’s” as Lake won’t be able to prove either of those false assertions not that she’ll ever stop screeching or fund raising, which is probably the point, after all she is a Trumpster.

Did Anyone Say Fraud? Right about now one of New York’s newest Congresspeople, Republican George Santos is probably relieved that Trump news dominated yesterday’s cycle because the article that the NY Times reported on his backstory is frigging alarming.  Santos upset Democratic candidate Robert Zimmerman becoming the Congressman-elect from Long Island’s newly configured Third Congressional District, part of which was previously included the North Shore seat vacated by outgoing Democrat Tom Suozzi who lost to Governor Kathy Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.  It turns out that nothing that Santos has said about his past and included on his resume is true.  He did not attend NYU, he did not graduate from Baruch College, he did not work for Citigroup, nor did he work for Goldman Sachs.  His Florida registered business is now inactive and it’s not clear how the previously impoverished guy came up with the money to run a rather well funded campaign, not his first as he ran and lost against Suozzi in 2020. Moreover, the pet charity he said he founded never had tax-exempt status and the proceeds from the one traceable event he organized never made it to the group that was the supposed beneficiary. Moreover, he doesn’t live at the address he claimed on his election forms.  In a normal world the Republican Party would be distancing themselves from him, but Kevin McCarthy can’t afford to lose a single member of his caucus because he’s still short of the votes he needs to become Speaker, so he’d support Jeffrey Dahmer if that’s what it took to win.  To be clear there’s no evidence that Santos is a Dahmer though he appears to have committed check fraud in Brazil and was seen partying at the NYC Republican gala with Margie Q and a number of other white supremacists.  As to why these lies weren’t caught earlier through opposition research, Democrat Zimmerman says that his campaign was aware of some of them but couldn’t get the press or enough of the district’s voters to care.  For their part, the NY Times says they came across the deception after the election as part of a story on incoming newbie Congresspeople.  Stay posted, this story could have legs though maybe not as much traction as the continuing Twitter saga.  Chief Twit Elon Musk spent part of his weekend in Qatar where he was seen watching football with Jared Kushner and a group of Saudis, investors perhaps? When not hobnobbing and re-platforming some though not all the journalists he’d cut off,  Musk conducted a Twitter poll, asking users if he should step down from the company’s CEO position, something that some disgruntled Tesla board members and a lot of investors would like him to do over concerns that his focus on his newest plaything is destroying their equity value.  Twitter voters overwhelming agreed that Musk should step aside, so naturally the Twit has called for a Mulligan, asserting “bot” fraud, saying that only “blue check” holders should have been allowed to vote.  Gee, claiming election fraud, how novel.    

 

Stocking Stuffer? 🌻 🌻 🌻

WTF on Steroids: On Wednesday, the Florida Man, not the disturbingly anti-vaccine Governor but that other one, teased that he’d be making a MAJOR announcement on Thursday.  The pundit class and a lot of the rest of us immediately went into overdrive trying to predict what that announcement might be.  Some suggested he would announce a running mate with leading candidates including the bombastic, election denier and similarly defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake or the increasingly powerful shadow Speaker Margie Q.  Others feared that he would announce that he was throwing his ring into the Speaker race, plausible as you don’t have to be a member of Congress to become Speaker and what better way to diss outgoing Speaker Pelosi while throwing a wrench into the functioning of government than to assume her mantle?  Well, as it turns out everyone’s prognostications were wrong. On Thursday, the man who was once president of the USA and leader of the free world announced the launch of a collection of digital trading cards depicting him in various “guises” including superhero, astronaut, and NASCAR driver. Not on my bingo card, yours?  Keeping with his usual grift, those non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, aren’t free, rather they cost $99 each with the promise that purchasing one gives the buyer a chance of winning a dinner with “their” president, presumably hamburgers loaded with ketchup, refillable cup of Diet Coke, and ice cream, one scoop only since those double portions are reserved for the faux superhero.  If you haven’t seen Trump’s NFTs, check them out online because there’s no way that words alone can describe their absurdity. The scary thing is that though Trump is slipping in the polls he still commands enough of his party’s support to stand a good chance of emerging from the Republican primaries as their candidate for president because as Congressman Adam Kinzinger said yesterday in his farewell speech “sheltering the ignorant and the racist” is what the Republican party is increasingly about these days.  Of course, it’s more than fair to assume that the money Trump raises by selling with this NFT grift won’t pay for his campaign, instead it will likely go towards sustaining his lifestyle, that Mar a Lago estate; his newly refurbished plane and his growing legal expenses are bigly expensive.  Trump’s announcement was widely mocked by many on both sides of the aisle including President Biden who tweeted that he “had some MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS the last couple of weeks too….” His list included the easing of inflation, the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, bringing Brittney Griner home, lowering of gas prices, and the addition of 10,000 new jobs in Arizona.  But sure, Don, brag about those NFTs.

 

More Stupid: The Florida man isn’t the only one doing stupid things.  Chief Twit Elon Musk, who said when he bought Twitter that “I hope my worse critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech is” blocked the accounts of a bunch of journalists last night. The list of those “permanently suspended” includes independent left leaning journalist Aaron Rupar who has 500,000 plus followers as well as a group of prominent media/tech writers from the NY Times, the Washington Post and CNN.  Musk also blocked the account of Mastodon, one of the more prominent Twitter competitors, eliminating the ability of Twitter users to post anything to their Mastodon accounts.  The purge saga began with Musk first banning and then threatening to sue Jack Sweeney, a University of Central Florida college student who was sharing publicly accessible information to track Musk’s private jet flights in real time.  After Sweeney was banned from Twitter, the journalists covered the story, sharing links to the flight information in their tweets while Mastodon tweeted that anyone who wanted to see Sweeney’s missives could find them on their app. Musk justified his decision to ban Sweeney by claiming that the dissemination of the public flight information was putting his and his children’s lives in jeopardy, probably a bit of exaggeration but to be fair, Musk isn’t the first celebrity/business leader who’s been put in this position and none of them have been all too pleased with having their whereabouts shown in real time.  The difference is that they don’t run Twitter, where all kinds of haters are now allowed to, even encouraged to, continuously target everyone but the Chief Twit.  Anyway, it’s not clear whether these bans are really “permanent,” whether the affected news companies will stop their other journalists from tweeting until the bans are lifted and, maybe more importantly for Musk, how his action will affect his bottom line both at Twitter where advertising revenue is already way down and at Tesla where board members and activist investors are losing patience with his antics and their impact on Tesla’s stock price.  Though Musk and Twitter are getting a disproportionate amount of attention right now, TikTok is also in the news.  The Senate has approved legislation to ban its use on government devices, something some states have already done.  Legislation has also been introduced to block TikTok entirely. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, the concern, which FBI Director Chris Wray expressed earlier this month, is that the Chinese government could gain access to user data through the app, deploying it to spread misinformation or worse.  That is the reason that Kara Swisher, the well-known, respected technology podcaster/writer keeps her TikTok account on a burner phone. The youth of America won’t be happy but absent a change in ownership or the housing of US data outside of the reach of the Chinese, the widely popular TikTok could go bye-bye at least for a while.

 

And:  More of former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows texts have been published. The bottom line is that not only did he fail to even try to control Trump, he and far too many Republican members of Congress were part of the insurrection. Name a virus and it’s out there right now, which explains why free COVID tests are now available again at COVIDtests.gov and also why the kiosk on my corner is offering convenient and quick turn around on COVID, flu and RSV tests right now.  

Happy Hannukah 🕎

Latkes and jelly donuts for all!

 

No Hobbits, Just Trolls 🌻 🌻 🌻

LOTR: The year is winding down but the crazy not so much.  Talking Points Memo released a trove of the texts that former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows shared with the House January 6^th Committee before he realized he probably would have been better off throwing his phone into the Potomac.  As Esquire Magazine’s Charles Pierce put it those “texts are so full of far-right trolls, you'd think it was a Lord of the Rings sequel.” The texts, 450 in all, show varying degrees of involvement by members of Congress, from “benign expressions” of support for Trump to the leading roles played by Republicans like incoming Chair of the House Judiciary Committee Jim “Gym” Jordan, Congressmen Jody Hice and Mo Brooks and Senator Ted Cruz in the plot to reverse Trump’s defeat. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies “reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory.” One Texas Congressman, dentist Brian Babin, texted “Mark, When we lose Trump, we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship.”  Another, Pennsylvania’s Greg Murphy went with “The Vote Has Been Hopelessly Contaminated. Republican State Legislatures Must Now Move to Appoint Pro-Trump Electors….Why are we not pursuing this strategy?” Murphy’s demand is a variation of the “independent state legislature theory” argument being made by North Carolina Republicans in the Moore v Harper case currently in front of the Supreme Court; essentially that argument is that state legislatures should be allowed to overturn election results when they see fit and by see fit think when their presidential candidate loses to one, they don’t like.  And then there’s Representative Paul Gosar, another loony dentist legislator who like Babin must have inhaled too much nitrous gas.  Gosar is known for pushing the insane, so maybe it’s not that surprising that he sourced conspiracist Alex Jones for evidence that the Chinese had taken over and manipulated the Dominion voting machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden.  To provide further proof of all that voter corruption that wasn’t he also cited a source called “Some Bitch Told Me.”  This would all be funny were it not for what happened on January 6th, and for the fact that the text trail continued up until inauguration day with a number of these delusional and dangerous Congresspeople, including the newest member of party leadership, Margie Q calling for Trump to impose “Marshall” law rather than turn over control to Biden, and to be clear it’s no coincidence that so many of them misspelled martial the same way.  The January 6^th committee will finalize its report on January 19, and as of now plans to hold one more public hearing on Monday, January 21.  Presumably. they will reveal their criminal referrals by then as well. Newly appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith has now subpoenaed Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger presumably to get his testimony about how Trump tried to get him to find more votes on record as part of his DOJ investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.  

Orcs: The same crazies who sent all those insane texts to Mark Meadows will soon be running the House of Representatives, something that should scare all of us, particularly anyone who thinks financial stability is a good thing. Even Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is concerned. He’s on board with efforts to finalize the omnibus reconciliation spending bill before year end.  That’s notable because his House counterpart, soon to be Speaker, well maybe soon to be Speaker, Kevin McCarthy is on record saying that he’s against the bill as he’d rather a short-term spending extension that would leave funding and budget decisions in the hands of the soon to be controlled by Republicans House. McCarthy probably doesn’t mean that, but he is saying it because he needs to say it to keep his divergent caucus of crazies on board with voting for his Speakership. He knows that he’ll never be able to get anything substantive done once he takes over.  Things like raising the debt limit and funding government are going to be difficult if not impossible next year as his crowd will be too busy impeaching Biden and investigating Fauci.  

Return of the King? The good news is that Trump is slipping in the polls and his fund-raising efforts have become less productive, the bad news is that Republicans like Trumpism and therefore mini-Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ star continues to rise. Putting aside all of DeSantis’s performative political shenanigans like his fight with Disney, his Don’t Say Gay stuff, and his fight against voter fraud that wasn’t, his rise is particularly unnerving when you consider that he is now targeting COVID vaccine manufacturers. Yesterday he held a news conference, together with his anti-vaccine/anti-mask Surgeon General, where he announced that he’s asked the Florida Supreme Court to empanel a grand jury to investigate a broad group of entities associated with the development, distribution, and promotion of the COVID vaccines including pharmaceutical manufacturers and medical associations. DeSantis’ vaccine skepticism is dangerous as evidenced by the fact that Republicans have experienced higher COVID mortality and morbidity because too many of them have bought into the kind of vaccine skepticism that DeSantis he is promoting.  COVID is here to stay, vaccines while not perfect, are protective and we will probably need to be getting updated annual jabs going forward.  Moreover, with China giving up on its zero COVID strategy, cases and hospitalizations there are now skyrocketing because they have little herd immunity, their vaccines are less protective than ours, and because their most vulnerable older population is under-vaccinated.  If we’ve learned anything by now its that what happens in China doesn’t stay there, their high COVID rates will likely lead to more dangerous, vaccine evading variants and those variants will end up on our shores and our heartland.  A president who refuses to believe science, who disses vaccines and doesn’t fund research and distribution is the last thing we need now or ever.  

Sauron: We also could do without Elon Musk’s shenanigans. Earlier this week he disbanded Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, the group responsible for content moderation which makes sense when you consider that he’s also invited back almost everyone who was previously banned for violating their rules: the hate spreaders, marketers of misinformation and vaccine lie disseminators.  He’s also attacked Yoel Roth, the former Twitter executive/respected academician who once headed up the company’s hate speech moderation effort, implying by tweet of course that Roth is a pedophile, a baseless accusation but one that triggers the Qs and that has inspired so much hate that Roth has had to move out of his home to a secret location.  Also, the Ukraine country code has mysteriously disappeared from Twitter, making it extremely difficult if not impossible for Ukraine residents to authenticate their accounts, a problem because a lot of Ukrainians rely on Twitter for communication given that their country is under attack and frequently loses traditional methods of communication.  It’s not clear whether the country code elimination was intentional or the result of a coding error however it’s worth noting that Musk frequently echoes Putin’s talking points and then there’s Gibbs Rule 39, “there’s no such thing as a coincidence.”  It’s also not clear than any of this is doing much to improve Twitter’s bottom line which could explain why the company has stopped paying vendors, is auctioning off some assets, has not paid rent on its headquarters, refused to pay $192,000 in charter flight fees, and is threatening to withhold previously promised and legally obligated severance payments.

Gollum:  It looks like we now have a winner for this year’s Bernie Madoff prize and his name is Sam Bankman-Fried the founder of the FTX crypto-currency exchange and its related Alameda Research crypto hedge fund.  The eccentric SBF, as he’s called in the crypto-currency world, was arrested at his base in the Bahamas yesterday right before he was due to testify remotely before Congress.  He was indicted on eight counts including wire fraud, the misuse of company funds and for campaign finance violations.  John J. Ray, who stepped into the role of CEO of FTX to unwind the mess created by SBF, told Congress yesterday that the FTX business was a Ponzi scheme from the start. Investors are out about $8 billion. So maybe knowing that you don’t understand the crypto craze well enough to invest in it is a good thing? Much has been said about the fact that SBF contributed buckets of money to Democrats, but it turns out that he donated as much if not more to Republicans too funneling money to their dark money entities.  It will be interesting to see how many of the politicians who benefited from his largesse return the funds they received.  Awkward.   

 

Pronouns 🌻 🌻 🌻

Party Politics: Much of the weekend inside politics dialogue centered on Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to leave the Democratic party to become an Independent.  Depending on who’s opining her decision was either a shocking betrayal or an unsurprising big yawn since she plans to continue caucusing with the Democratic majority maybe because of those committee assignments she’d give up if she didn’t.  The reality is probably somewhere in between because, though she was and will remain a staunch supporter of individual rights, in most other ways she has acted as an Independent, albeit a quirky one.  Her quirkiness and independent streak were evident from her first week in office when she missed some early votes to compete in a triathlon and then continued to show itself with her insistence on bypassing her purported party’s leadership to engage in independent discussions and negotiations on critical issues like infrastructure directly with President Biden and his team.  Though Raphael Warnock’s reelection combined with John Fetterman’s victory will limit her power to dictate legislative terms and anyway with the Republicans controlling the House there will be little in the way of legislation to influence, some of her power will remain because the Democrats will still have to deal with Joe Manchin.  The West Virginia Senator is more upfront, he doesn’t play Sinema’s games, but he does take positions that put him in conflict with the rest of his party, particularly on issues related to energy.  Like Sinema, Manchin’s term expires in 2024 so though he’s relatively popular in his solidly red, Trump enthusiastic state, if he opts to run for reelection and Democrats should want him to run because if he doesn’t, they will lose the state, they’ll be times when he’ll have to tack right, and likely, Leader Schumer will give him the space he needs.  Arizona is an entirely different story, though Democrats won most of the big races there this year, only 30.5% of the state’s voters are registered Democrats, 34.5% are Republicans, the rest are mostly independent with a handful of Libertarians thrown into the mix.  By becoming an Independent, Sinema, who hasn’t yet announced whether she plans to run again in 2024, will avoid what was going to be a serious primary challenge from at least one left leaning Democrat, Congressman Ruben Gallego. It’s not clear that Sinema could pull off a victory in a three-way race but her decision to go Independent may well have thrown a wrench into Gallego’s plans since leader Schumer may conclude that backing Sinema is better than a three-way race that would likely hand the seat to Republicans in a year when the Democrats will be facing an especially unfavorable Senate map. As a result of that map, in addition to Manchin, two other red state Democrats, Montana’s Jon Tester and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown will also be up for reelection while several swing state Democrats including Nevada’s Jackie Rosen, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow and Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey will all be up for reelection too.  And though no one seems to be focusing on her right now, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand’s term is also in 2024 and though her seat should be safe, if we learned anything this year it’s that New York isn’t as blue as it used to be and, though he hasn’t expressed an interest in running, gubernatorial loser Lee Zeldin needs a job which probably explains why his name keeps popping up everywhere, as a possible challenger to RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel and even as a Republican candidate for Speaker should Kevin McCarthy not manage to get his crazy caucus on board because you don’t have to be a member of Congress to be Speaker.

Deplorables: Regarding Arizona, Kari Lake who like Lee Zeldin failed to win her race to become Governor but unlike him refused to concede, is now suing. She tweeted  “Our sacred vote was trampled on. Every Arizonan should be furious, regardless of Party. My team has filed one of the strongest Election Lawsuits in history.” Naturally, that tweet also directed her supporters to send money to her election fund, because her case isn’t strong but her need for money is.  That she’s suing isn’t all that surprising, after all in the run up to the election she said that she wouldn’t accept the outcome of her race unless she won.  Also not surprising is that she’s borrowing a page from Trump’s playbook, saying that Arizona should either hold a new election or even better, just appoint her governor.  She’s citing problems with election machinery and long lines in Arizona’s most populous Maricopa County as the rationale for her suit, even though everyone who wanted to vote on election day was able to cast their vote while ignoring that the reason so many of those voting on election day were Republicans is because she discouraged them from voting early.  Naturally, Lake has hired a suitably kraken legal team including Bryan Blehm who previously represented the Cyber Ninja faux election auditors and Kurt Olson who reportedly spent time on the phone with Trump on insurrection day and pushed conspiracy theories to justify overturning that election. 

Twitter Chronicles: Lake isn’t the only deplorable who tweeted too much this weekend, the Chief Twit Elon Musk did too.  Not surprising given how much he overspent for the platform but still absurd when you consider that he’s also supposed to be running a few other companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.  By the way, subject to regulatory approval Neuralink claims it will be ready to implant experimental teeny tiny computers into human brains in six months.  What could go wrong?  Among Musk’s tweets this weekend was one in which he went after retiring Virus Guru Tony Fauci while also throwing shade at the LBTQ community tweeting “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Musk who once predicted COVID would be gone by April of 2020 largely because he wanted to keep his factories open no matter the health consequences for his employees, either has a bigly problem with Fauci or just knows that inflammatory tweets energize a particularly small minded but active subset of his 120 million Twitter followers, something he may think is good for advertising revenue but probably isn’t because what company wants their advertisements next to hate messages?  Regardless of his motives, he’s now put an even larger target on Fauci’s back and the backs of other scientists like Baylor College of Medicine’s Peter Hotez who also received a ton of hate after he came to Fauci’s defense.  Count me as one who believes that Fauci and Hotez, who makes vaccines that are distributed free to third world countries, are both heroes who should be celebrated rather than targeted.  Sadly, among those celebrating Musk’s call to prosecute Fauci are the leaders of the Republican party, including shadow Speaker Margie Q who told NY Republicans that if she ran the January 6^th insurrection, it would have succeeded because she would have made sure they had more guns and incoming House Judiciary chair Jim “Gym” Jordan who wants more transparency about Twitter’s practices but none about his gym days.  As to that transparency, Musk released a trove of communications that purport to show, but really don’t, that Twitter’s former management disadvantaged right leaning politicians and pundits when it seems like what they really did was try to prevent the amplification of harmful lies about elections and COVID.

 

Free Brittney 🌻 🌻 🌻

Whoa – Here’s a reason I should check my junk email box before hitting post, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party to become an Independent.  She says she’ll continue to caucus with the Democrats much like Maine’s Angus King and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, both Independents, but still wow. She’s up for reelection in 2024 and was likely to be primaried for the Democratic nod by Congressman Ruben Gallego, so this could complicate things a bit, then and now. 

Home Sweet Home: WNBA player Brittney Griner is back in the USA while ex-Marine Paul Whelan remains in a Russian prison camp, immensely sad for Whelan and his family but a very good thing for Griner and hers. A shellshocked looking Griner was released in exchange for convicted, imprisoned arms dealer Viktor Bout, the Putin favorite who is also known as the Merchant of Death for his extensive and deadly trading of illegal arms. Basketball player Griner was in Russia playing for a Russian basketball team during the off season, something many professional women players do to supplement their relative to their male counterparts’ meager earnings. A frequent traveler in and out of Russia, shortly before the start of the Ukraine war she was nabbed at the airport with some hash oil in her luggage.  Her arrest was probably a set-up by the Russians who recognized her “swap value.”  Paul Whelan, a corporate security expert who had been discharged from the Marines for bad conduct in 2008 for charges related to larceny, was also a frequent traveler to Russia.  He was on vacation there, something to do with a friend’s wedding, when he was caught with or set-up in possession of a “suspicious” flash drive.  He was accused and convicted of espionage and sent to prison where he is currently completing year four of a 16-year sentence.  Both Whelan and the US deny that he ever was a US spy, however Putin views him as one, which is all that matters.  To date Vlad has refused to include him in any prisoner swap so the offer to the US was its Griner or nothing. Depending on where you sit on the political spectrum President Biden’s decision to do the trade, freeing Bout in exchange for only Griner, was either the compromised senile Biden’s crime of the century or the best that could be accomplished given the fraught relations between the US and Russia.  Whelan’s family, incredibly gracious about Biden’s decision, appear to believe that POTUS and his negotiators did everything they could do but couldn’t get their son/brother home at this time.  They also believe Biden’s promise that his administration remains focused on getting Whelan out eventually.  None of that matters to the right-wing echo chamber which spent the day viciously slamming Biden rather than this sad saga’s real villain, Putin.  That chamber of course includes Don Jr. and his daddy who insist that he could have done better even though he never managed to get Whelan released while he was in office.  One of the best comments on the swap comes from former NBC journalist Tim Russert’s son Luke who tweeted “Prisoner swaps between adversarial nuclear powers are not Madden or the NBA trade machine.  Leave the nuances of intelligence gathering and diplomacy to experts.”   

Love and Marriage: Much of the vitriol targeted at President Biden as well as the horrible comments saying Britney Griner should have been left to rot in a Russian gulag probably have a lot to do with her race and sexuality. Many of those tweeting anti-Britney hate messages are among those who also find same-sex marriage to be an unforgivable sin so it must have been that much more upsetting to them that Griner was released the same day that the House passed the Senate’s version of the Respect for Marriage Act, the watered down bipartisan legislation crafted to protect both same sex and interracial marriage in the face of concern that the conservative dominated Supreme Court might strip away the right to privacy recognized in Griswold v Connecticut, throwing both the Loving v Virginia and Oberfell v Hodges rulings that established the rights to interracial and same sex marriage respectively into the waste bin alongside Roe v Wade. The fury about the Respect for Marriage Act was expressed most pathetically by one tearful Republican Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler of Missouri who burst into tears as she begged members of the House to join her in voting against the bill she called “misguided and dangerous” because others getting to live their lives ruins hers?  Despite her emotional outburst the bill passed with support from both sides of the aisle with 39 Republicans joining in with their Democratic colleagues.  The Republican group consisted of a mix of Republicans from purple districts, retirees and even one from leadership, NYS’s Elise Stefanik as well as Liz Cheney, the women she replaced in that leadership role.  Curiously or maybe not so curiously, seven Republicans who had voted for an earlier version of the bill in the run up to the midterms voted against this one.  Additionally, neither Adam Kinzinger nor failed NYS Gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, who both voted for the earlier version cast a vote this time around. Worth noting Trump acolyte Zeldin’s name is one of those frequently bandied about as a possibility to become the new RNC head or even the new Speaker should Kevin McCarthy fail to get his problem crazies, the five Republican Representatives who say that they’ll never ever vote for him, to vote for him.  Those five include Arizona’s Andy Biggs, Virginia’s Bob Good, Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz, South Carolina’s Ralph Norman and probably Montana’s Matt Rosendale with a few other possible naysayers still out there.  In case you are wondering, Georgia’s Margie Q is now totally in McCarthy’s camp, she’s now considered a senior influential member of the Republican caucus and is likely to be on the Oversight Committee come January.  On the committee front, Jim “Gym” Jordan is definitely going to be the incoming Chair of the House Judiciary Committee.  Get your popcorn ready, next sessions’ “impeachment” hearings are going to be offensive, loud, and bizarre.   

Law and Order:  On the Trump front, his lawyers revealed that the team they hired to search his other properties for “accidentally” purloined documents have found two more with secret markings in a West Palm Beach storage facility.  The Washington Post reports that Justice Department lawyers are so fed up with the Trump team’s shenanigans that they have asked federal Judge Beryl Howell to hold Trump’s office in contempt for failing to fully comply with a May subpoena to return all the classified documents in his possession.  Remember Judge Dearie who’d been assigned by “in the pocket” Judge Aileen Cannon to screen the misappropriated documents, he’s now officially off the case as Trump and his lawyers opted not to appeal the Appeals Court ruling that he never should have been assigned in the first place. One more thing, though the January 6^th Committee has not yet decided or at least has not leaked any plans to make a criminal referral of Trump to the DOJ, last night it was reported that they do plan to refer kraken lawyer John Eastman, Environmental lawyer/AG wannabee Jeffrey Clark, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and whatever he is now Rudy Giuliani.  And because of course, the Florida legislator who sponsored Governor DeSantis’ much heralded Don’t Say Gay bill, stepped down yesterday after he was indicted for COVID relief fraud.   

Enjoy the weekend.

 

 Fifty One! 🌻🌻🌻 💙

Victory At Last:  A round of applause for Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock who will be returning to Washington DC as the crucial 51^st member of the Democratic caucus.  Another round of applause for Georgia’s Black voters, who understood that Republican candidate Herschel Walker’s nomination was all about luring just enough of them away from Warnock to secure a Republican victory.  They clearly understood the difference between a damaged, Texas residing, football guy/predator and a real mensch.  For a while last night, as the lead bounced back and forth, it looked like the election could go either way but that was just one of those election day mirages, a reflection of timing differentials between the inclusion of same day and early voting and the receipt of vote tallies from blue and red counties.  With almost all the vote counted Warnock’s win followed the projections made by the more reputable pollsters.  He prevailed, winning 51.4% of the votes to Walker’s 49.6%, a margin of victory of 97,597 votes.  That’s slightly more votes than Warnock’s margin of victory was in 2020 when he beat appointed fill-in Kelly Loeffler by 93,272 and almost twice as large as Senator Jon Ossoff’s margin over the more mainstream incumbent Republican David Perdue.  The bottom line is that Georgia still leans red but when the right Democratic candidate is put up against a weak Republican, Democrats can win, though not by a lot. Two more rounds of applause.  One for Stacey Abrams, who wasn’t able to come close to beating the increasingly popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp and will probably never be the state’s governor but whose herculean efforts at getting Democratic voters registered, all while pushing back at the impediments that Kemp and other Republicans put in place to suppress Democratic participation definitely contributed to Warnock’s victory.  And another round for Mark Elias, the Democrats amazing election lawyer who litigated to get more days of early voting, his efforts appear to have paid off bigly.  Though almost finished, the midterms aren’t over yet, a few recounts are in the works, including one for Colorado wingnut Lauren Boebert’s race and one for the extremely close Arizona Attorney General race. 

Law and Order:  Overall, Trump had a bad day.  Not only is he getting a lot of blame for his hand-picked candidate’s Georgia loss, but his company was convicted of tax fraud and other crimes yesterday.  In all a Manhattan jury found the Trump Corporation and the Trump Payroll Corporation guilty of 17 charges related to their practice of paying off-the-book perks involving items like luxury apartments, leased Mercedes-Benzes, private school tuitions and extra cash, to executives as part of a multi-year effort to avoid taxes.  That’s the good news, the not so good news is that the verdict carries a maximum penalty of less than $2 million though there could and should be wider repercussions as financial institutions don’t generally do business with fraudulent entities not that Trump still does much business with mainstream banks anymore.  Also, it’s not clear that Trump’s fan base, shrinking but still substantial, will give a hoot that their mango god’s company was all in on fraud, if anything they might find that a plus.  Trump and his family were not charged in the case though his ketchup dipped fingerprints were all over the place.  He announced that he was  “disappointed with the verdict,” and plans to appeal and then of course blamed CFO Allen Weisselberg for committing all that tax fraud behind his back. Then again also said that Warnock’s victory was proof that the country is going to pot, true but not in the way that he meant.  Elsewhere in the legal universe, NY District Attorney Alvin Bragg seems to be reinvigorating his thought to be dormant criminal case against Trump.  He announced the hiring of former Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo who before becoming a top official at Justice led the NY Attorney General’s civil inquiry into Trump’s fraudulent foundation, the one that used donations to purchase paintings of Trump but failed to disburse funds to needy organizations.  Also, Merrick Garland’s recently appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith, who at last check was still recuperating in the Netherlands, has sent grand jury subpoenas to local officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, three states at the center of Trump’s failed plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election.  Smith is specifically seeking “any and all communications with Trump, his campaign and a long list of his aides and allies.”  One of those allies, short term national security advisor, convicted then pardoned liar Mike Flynn was ordered by a Florida Court to stop stalling, to get his tush to Atlanta to testify in front of Fani Willis’ grand jury.  

And:  Texas/Cancun Senator Ted Cruz appears to have some serious problems on the home front that need his attention a whole lot more than all that Herschel Walker baby-sitting he was engaged in during the run up to the Georgia midterm.  Overnight it was reported that his 14-year-old daughter was taken to the hospital suffering from self-inflicted stab wounds, a possible suicide attempt. Truly disturbing news. Sending positive thoughts her way.

We the People?  🌻🌻🌻

Duck, Duck, Dick: In 1986 Geraldo Rivera who had once won awards for his reports on the horrific treatment of patients at the NY State run Willowbrook institution for people with disabilities was in a rut. To reinvigorate his then flailing career, he hosted a much hyped, widely watched television special centered on the live opening of Al Capone’s vault.  Thirty million viewers tuned in expecting to learn that the vault contained some combination of valuables and corpses.  The event turned out to be a bust as the vault contained only dirt and a few empty bottles. Following in Rivera’s no-news is still news tradition, over the weekend Elon Musk hosted a similarly ridiculous event. Instead of Rivera, this time the sewer straddling reporter was one-time award-winning Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, the media outlet was Twitter, and the subject was the “corrupt,” “leftist” decision making process that resulted in Twitter squelching the NY Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.  Though the topic was a presidential candidate’s troubled son rather than a convicted criminal mastermind, the results of this so-called “expose” was pretty much the same. Despite all the hype, Taibbi’s report was a bust.  Instead of revealing a globalist plot, the internal Twitter emails revealed a decision process that was thoughtful and somewhat anguished; one that concluded that absent verification about the laptop’s origins and over concerns that the laptop could have been a Russian plant, the story should be blocked.  That conclusion meant that Twitter also blocked the sharing of Hunter Biden “dick pics,” which were also on the laptop, content that the Biden campaign had requested not be shared.  Notably Biden’s team had no control over Twitter, he wasn’t in office at the time and requests like his were not unusual, campaigns on both sides of the aisle make them.   Twitter later admitted that they should have let the story fly, pun intended. Unfortunately for democracy, the key difference between today and 1986 is Trump and his canny, evil ability to inflame his base, twisting facts to make everything appear to be a plot against him so naturally the former president, current presidential candidate seized on Twitter’s weekend reveal of the vault of “dick pics” as “proof” that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.  He went ballistic on his social Truth Social platform, calling for the termination of the Constitution to overturn the “False & Fraudulent” 2020 election, so that he, the “RIGHTFUL WINNER”  could be returned to office because a “Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles.”  Trump, given the winner take all nature of the Republican primaries, really could be his party’s candidate again in 2024.  He just called for the suspension of the Constitution so that he can complete his coup and as usual, most GOP politicians are too afraid of the consequences of condemning him.  Of course, one of those most fearful is Speaker wannabee Kevin McCarthy, who last week promised to open “his” first session of Congress with an out loud reading of the Constitution, the one that Trump wants eliminated.

Lights Out: The House is now in possession of six years of Trump’s tax filings.  If this weekend’s Forbes article is right, that information will likely reveal that during his one term as president, Trump failed to disclose a $19.8 million debt to Daewoo, a South Korean company with a history of ties to North Korea, the country run by his good friend Kim Jong Un. Not related to Trump’s financials or his propensity to sidle up to dictators, but very disturbing nevertheless, the FBI and local officials are investigating a power outage in Moore County, North Carolina believed to have been caused by intentional and targeted attacks on substations.  The outage has left 40,000 customers without power.  Though the motive for the attack is still not clear, there are suggestions that the attackers may have been trying to disrupt a scheduled drag show event.  Who knows, maybe combining targeted hate with a leader/hero who promotes dissension and bigotry actually leads to dire outcomes?  Getting back to Twitter where hate tweets and COVID misinformation are more welcome than ever, the company is still in business, but it’s advertising revenues are way down and that much hyped threat from Apple that it was seriously considering removing Twitter from its App store, that was just another diversion orchestrated by the Chief Twit.  Diversion or not, the Chief Twit, who once said that Twitter should be a neutral platform was either lying or has changed his mind as he and his platform are now anything but neutral which could explain why so many Republican politicians are now among his biggest supporters.  It’s also hard not to notice that his staged Hunter Laptop reveal, bust or not, took place in the run up to Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoff.   

Midterm Madness:  Regarding that runoff, tomorrow is election day in Georgia. According to the oddsmakers and the more respectable pollsters, Senator Raphael Walker is likely to beat the ex-football player, multiple personality guy Herschel Walker by a smidge or maybe even a little bit more.  That said, it’s not like the pollsters or even the oddsmakers are always correct so we’ll have to wait until the polls close and maybe a bit longer to find out who gets to go to Washington.  Keep in mind that depending on when Democratic leaning early votes are dumped into the count, there could be an early “mirage” effect.

 

Bear With Me 🌻🌻🌻

Woke up this morning frozen out of my normal email account so I am typing this on my iPad’s back up email account. Please excuse the formatting and likely extra typos. 😂

Hate, Hate, Hate:  Until yesterday the GOP House Judiciary committee’s Twitter account still displayed its now infamous “Kanye, Elon, Trump” tweet and it looked like that tweet, posted to celebrate Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the return of Trump and Kanye to the platform, would be there forever but finally even Jim Jordan’s GOP crowd has seen enough. The tweet has been taken down, not because Elon has invited hate mongers and conspiracists back to his platform and not because Trump dined with the despicable white supremacist Nick Fuentes but because Kanye went full on Nazi yesterday, expressing his love for Hitler and the good things he did back in the day on a podcast hosted by Alex Jones, the guy who called the murdered children at Newtown crisis actors.  Kanye followed up that performance by posting a swastika embedded in a Star of David on Twitter last night. Even Musk, who is now allowing COVID misinformation back on Twitter, has seen enough, at least for now. He suspended Kanye’s account, but only temporarily, as if a temporary suspension will change Kanye’s behavior or cure his hate or halt the burgeoning spread of anti-Semitism among his followers.

Midterm Madness: Speaking of incurable behavior, via the Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger, who previously broke the stories about Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker paying for two abortions, yesterday we learned more about Walker’s dissociative personality disorder, none of it good. A former girlfriend went on record discussing his demons and her belief, based on her experiences with him during their multi year relationship, that his condition which frequently results in him acting violently and playing with guns is worse than ever. It’s not clear that any of that will alter next week’s election outcome but Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, never much of a Walker fan, said that he waited on a voting line for more than an hour but left, not because of the wait but because he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Walker. The election takes place on Tuesday.  In other midterm news, faced with lawsuits officials in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania and Cochise County, Arizona finally certified their election results. And though her opponent Adam Frisch has already conceded, Colorado officials are conducting a mandatory recount of the votes in the Lauren Boebert race due to her small margin of victory. No one expects the outcome to change, but one can dream.

Legal Morass: Well, chalk up another legal loss for still free Teflon Don. Yesterday, as expected, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the requirement that a special counsel review the purloined Mar a Lago documents.  They concluded that Trump’s pocket judge Eileen Cannon never had the legitimate jurisdiction to order the review or to even intervene in the case. That said Trump accomplished one of his goals, he stalled the process and he may still be able to stall it further if he appeals to SCOTUS. The NY criminal case against his company is winding down and it should surprise no one to learn that the Trump legal team blames Allen Weisselberg for all of the Trump company’s financial finagling. A Federal judge has ordered two of Trump’s former White House lawyers, Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, to give additional testimony to one of the DOJ’s grand jury, rejecting their claims that they couldn’t tell all because of executive privilege. And in one of the odder legal stories,  Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz’s friend Joel Greenberg was sentenced to serve 11 years for a whole bunch of crimes including the sex with minors one that he testified involved Gaetz but so far at least Gaetz appears to be skating. Another one with Teflon, or complicit friends in high places?

Trains, Planes and Automobiles:  The trains will continue to run but the guys running them won’t be getting paid sick leave, particularly tough in these days of COVID forced absences. Six Republicans including Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, Mike Braun, John Kennedy and Marco Rubio joined all the Democrats except Joe Manchin in voting for the leave but falling short of 60 votes the provision failed. Am guessing that most of the Republican Senators who voted for the leave are planning to run for president and figure that voting for workers was a good thing to do for later bragging rights on the campaign trail. And doubly good because they knew that that the provision wouldn’t pass. As to Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, it’s legality will now be taken up by the Supreme Court but no ruling is expected until June.