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.