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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.