April Showers, Then What? 🌻 🌻 🌻

Paper Pushers: There was a lot of talk about President Biden’s document discoveries this weekend and to be fair, the fact that Biden was document sloppy is an issue, a far smaller one than Trump’s which involves way more documents and seems more intentional, but still an issue, hopefully, but probably not, mostly a distraction, one that new Special Counsel Robert Hur, not to be confused with that other Trump focused Special Counsel Jack Smith, will address and report back on someday.  For now, ignore the finger pointing, the false equivalency claims and the calls for Biden to release Delaware House visitor logs that are coming from Republicans and their echo chamber.  They know logs don’t exist because presidents and the Secret Service Agents protecting them, including their favorite Florida man don’t keep visitor logs for their private homes.  Anyway, Biden’s home isn’t a frequently visited country club and Trump wouldn’t even release the logs for the White House when he was asked.  Let’s allow Hur to do his job, hope that Biden’s lawyers don’t find more documents under his bed, or in Hunter’s laptop which we will be hearing lots more about shortly and move on to what really matters, the impending debt ceiling crisis.  

Fiscal Derangement: Only two countries have debt ceilings, the US and Denmark, with ours put in place in 1917 to streamline debt issuance during WW I.  To say that our debt ceiling has outlived its usefulness, is an understatement.  It’s now a cudgel used by members of the Freedom Caucus and other deficit hawk Republicans to get cuts in social and safety net spending.  Naturally, those concerns about deficits peak during Democratic administrations only to get sidelined when there’s a Republican in the White House when tax cuts for the rich take precedence. Late last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin announced that the US will reach the current $31.4 trillion debt ceiling this Thursday but that she’ll be able to take the usual “special measures” to delay any payment defaults until sometime this Spring.  That a debt ceiling would need to be raised this year isn’t surprising, but that we’re hitting it this soon in the year is, the expectation had been that we had until August. Ordinarily, after some performative handwringing and speechifying, a debt ceiling vote would take place, almost all the Democrats and some Republicans would vote to raise it and Congress would move on but nothing’s normal right now because Kevin McCarthy obtained his Speakership by promising the Freedom Caucus and those to the right of them that he’d hold raising the debt ceiling hostage in exchange for cuts in Social Security, health care and the like. Since a lot of Republican representatives and their constituents either don’t understand or don’t care to understand that raising the debt ceiling is about paying for items already bought, not about budgeting future expenditures we’re about to have an impasse that could soon turn into a full-fledged financial crisis. The last time, the country faced a debt ceiling impasse was in 2011 when Obama was president and Republican’s controlled the House.  Standard & Poor’s grew so concerned that they took the unprecedented step of downgrading the US debt rating.  It took the economy a while to recover, but at least the US didn’t default on any Treasuries.  The fear is that this time, given his slim majority McCarthy will prioritize holding on to his speakership over maintaining economic order.  McCarthy says that he has already started conversations with Biden about making budget cuts but Biden is not going to commit to any cuts in the items that McCarthy’s hostage takers want cut. There is a discharge petition process that could be used by Democrats to force the debt ceiling issue to the floor of the House without McCarthy’s signoff but it’s a complicated and time consuming and might be hard to pull off.  That lion that comes in at the beginning of March, she may be around for the whole season, the lamb not so much.

The Ripley Saga: George Anthony Devolder Santos, pick your choice of names, is still a member of Congress largely because Kevin McCarthy, who has known for some time that Santos is a fraud and also knows that he really should kick Santos to the curb, won’t until he absolutely has no other choice because he desperately needs his vote, so the Santos saga continues to have legs, really hairy ones.  Since Friday, we’ve learned that Santos claimed having two knee replacements due to injuries from all that volleyball playing for Baruch College’s championship volleyball team, where he “slayed” Harvard and Yale.  Putting aside that Baruch isn’t in the same division as those Ivy league schools, Santos never attended Baruch or any other college.  Also, there’s now a video of Santos attending a 2019 LGBTQ event where he introduced himself as Anthony Devolder, a founding member of United for Trump, whatever that was,  because who doesn’t use different names at different venues?  Of more concern for Santos and McCarthy, more information about Santos’ sketchy financial doings continue to surface, including that he knew that Harbor City, a company he actually worked for, was likely a Ponzi scheme.  Santos admitted that he didn’t understand how Harbor City made its money but had no problem assuring a 20% return to at least one mark who he lured into investing his life savings.  Naturally, there is also a Russian link to Santos’ campaign funding as he received contributions from cousins of Viktor Vekselberg, a sanctioned Russian energy oligarch whose name surfaced back when the focus was on Trump’s Russian connections. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Santos’ days in Congress are numbered, the question is how big is that number. 

And:  The Trump organization was fined $1.6 million for the tax fraud that it committed, the crimes that sent Allen Weisselberg to Rikers for a few months, proving once again that for Trump, who has been spending his days at Mar a Lago posting on Truth Social and considering running mates, crime pays.  While both Truth Social and Twitter still exist, though Twitter has been auctioning off furniture and abandoning offices, it looks like Parler, one of the right-wing Twitter wannabees is now circling the drain.  Parler is the company that Kanye was going to buy before his anti-Semitic rantings lost him his lucrative clothing and shoe contracts.  Sadly, China which previously acknowledged only 5,272 or so COVID deaths is now admitting to 60,000 and even that number which continues to grow is likely vastly understated.  The death toll is also growing in Ukraine because though we keep hearing that Putin’s long-term prospects are poor, his forces remain depressingly lethal.