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.