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.