Comic Relief 🌻 🌻 🌻

Dilbert Who?  Cancel culture has gotten to Dilbert because it turns out that saying racist things doesn’t work when your earnings come from syndicated comic strip revenues. Dilbert is out because his creator, Scott Adams, called Black people “a hate group” in a YouTube rant adding that white people should “just get the hell away” from them, a variation on Margie Q’s call for a national divorce.  Naturally, Elon Musk who spent $44 billion on a social media platform so that he could say what he wants whenever he wants to, is Team Dilbert which is why the Chief Twit called out the media outlets that dropped Dilbert for being racist against whites and Asians.  That’s the same Elon who has welcomed hate speech back onto Twitter and, unless I missed it, had nothing to say about the weekend’s neo-Nazi Day of Hate activities against Jewish institutions, plans that were largely thwarted by politicians, Jewish and allied faith leaders and police in New York City but appear to have gone on in other parts of the country. Margie Q, the Jewish space laser queen, also seemed unperturbed by the day of hate activities but then again why would she be, she still hasn’t suffered any consequences for her call for civil war and probably never will because Speaker Kevin McCarthy needs her on his team. Getting back to Elon, things appear to be going as expected at Twitter, revenues are still down largely because advertisers, like mainstream media outlets aren’t fond of seeing their products promoted next to purveyors of hate speech, so he’s fired another 200 employees, including Esther Crawford who earlier has pledged her “hardcore” status and loyalty to Elon by posting a picture of herself sleeping on her office floor. Crawford had been responsible for Twitter Blue, the plan that was supposed to turn Twitter into a subscription service less reliant on advertising revenues.  To summarize Twitter’s plight, the advertising revenues are way down, but few have signed on to Twitter Blue.    

Viral Madness:  COVID is still here but we still don’t know for sure how it originated.  Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that Department of Energy scientists have concluded in a “low confidence” assessment that the virus most likely came from a Chinese lab leak.  That puts the DOE at odds with several other intelligence departments who still think that the virus originated from spillover from the Huanan open air market.  Low confidence or not, the WSJ article went viral with a whole bunch of the usual crowd, the likes of Margie Q, Gym Jordan and the Murdoch empire screeching that they’d been right all along and many other news outlets hiding the “low confidence” part far from their click bait headlines.  The bottom line is that there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the origins of COVID 19 and though it’s fair to say that the Chinese government engaged in a cover-up it remains unclear whether they were covering up the virus’ spread and lethality, its origins, or both. Don’t expect to hear any of the nuance in the upcoming House hearings which will instead focus on the multiple ways they can torture virus guru Anthony Fauci. In other virus news, Republican run Lee County Florida, the home of Sanibel Island and Fort Myers, has voted to ban COVID vaccines because they want to be on the “vanguard” of stopping the “genocide,” the “bioweapons being unleashed on the American people.” If that sounds extreme, consider Idaho where two Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill that would criminalize the administration of all mRNA vaccines across the state.  They say they have issues with the COVID vaccines, but it’s equally fair to say that they just have bigly issues.

🌻 🌻 🌻:  The Ukraine War isn’t going to be over anytime soon, but Putin does appear to be winning over the hearts and minds of some people, not the citizens of Ukraine, but some here in the US as well as his sometime BFF Xi who might be on the verge of sending him weapons much to the chagrin of the US and NATO.  Though the majority of Americans continue to support Ukraine, the numbers supporting aid packages are shrinking.  There also appears to be a schism in the Republican party between those who are “America First” as in Putin over Zelenskyy and those who firmly back Ukraine, not just because they are team Zelenskyy but because they view caving to Putin’s aggression as a signal to him and to China that the US and NATO are weak and wouldn’t do much if the Baltics or Taiwan were annexed next. Because everything is linked, and also because anything Biden does immediately draws a backlash from the right, the DOE’s COVID lab link view, like the East Palestine train disaster, are both being weaponized against all things Biden because as one pundit put it Biden could cure cancer and instead of celebrating his rightwing opponents would complain that he had put oncologists out of work. On the subject of Biden and leaks, FLOTUS Jill who was in Africa this week, pretty much let Joe’s not so secret plans out of the bag by saying that he is not done, he still has lots to do, in other words he’s running.,               

And:  Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry may have some issues to deal with too, if the decision made by Chief Judge of the DC District Court Beryl Howell holds up on appeal. On Friday, Judge Howell unsealed the conclusion that most of Perry’s phone communications about overturning the 2020 election results are not protected by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause.  She unsealed the decision because she feels that the “powerful public interest” of everyone knowing about it outweighs the need for continued secrecy.     

  

One Year In 🌻 🌻 🌻

🌻 🌻 🌻 It’s been one year since Russia attacked Ukraine and though Ukraine has surprised everyone, most of all Putin with its bravery and tenacity, the country and its citizens have suffered and sadly will continue to do so as the war rages on and on. Yesterday, after visiting with Putin, China’s Xi, who still hasn’t condemned Putin’s aggression,  called for peace talks, asking the “warring parties to stay rational and exercise restraint” and “strictly abide by international humanitarian law, avoiding attacking civilians or civilian facilities, protect women and children and other victims of the conflict.  All good but he’s still reported to be considering supplying Russia with weapons including strike drones and given the way China treats its Uyghur minority it’s hard to believe that Putin will take his saying that following humanitarian law is the way to go all that seriously. Still Xi calling for peace is a good thing primarily because peace is a good thing, just don’t count on a whole lot of kumbaya anytime soon as the violence and what has become a war of attrition is likely to continue resulting in many more deaths before it ends, if is ever does.

Politics As Usual:  Here at home, our endless political loop continues.  Trump visited East Palestine, Ohio where he slammed the Biden administration’s response to the Norfolk Southern train calamity while also claiming that he didn’t know that his administration rolled back train braking rules meant to prevent tankers from exploding near communities. Hard to believe given that he often bragged about rolling back government regulation of industry, in fact he ran on doing that.  East Palestine is Trump country, so those who greeted him ate up his words, drank his out of date bottled war and chowed down on the McDonald burgers he provided, oblivious to the fact that despite all of Trump’s criticisms of the Biden team and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, during Trump’s administration there were 8504 train crashes, and derailments that resulted in 1014 deaths and 3236 injuries and neither Trump nor Elaine Chao his Transportation secretary provided burgers and Trump branded water bottles to any of those families. Not one to mince words, Buttigieg called on Trump to support reimposing the train rules eliminated during his administration, adding if he doesn’t remember undoing them, he should have no problem requesting that they be reinstated.  One of those criticizing Pete Buttigieg the most has been Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio who in one pre East Palestine crash communication to Buttigieg called for the administration to weaken rather than strengthen train inspection practices so while people are suffering in Ohio and the impact on air and water quality is a real problem that no New Yorker who lived through the aftermath of 9.11 should dismiss, so is the politicization.  Not surprising, not helpful but sadly politics as usual.

Rinse Repeat: The endless loop also pertains to names in the news and the ongoing legal battles about all things Trump.  Yesterday, DC District Court Judge Amy Berman ruled that Peter Strzok could question Trump and FBI Director Christopher Wray under oath.  Strzok, is the former FBI agent who texted with his then paramour FBI lawyer Lisa Page some mean comments about Trump. Strzok is suing, alleging that Trump’s political vendetta prompted his firing and the public release of his texts with Page, in violation of his constitutional rights and the Privacy Act. Of course, Strzok’s team will have to get in line as Trump has a fairly busy schedule these days between all his campaigning and deposing in other cases.  Pleading the Fifth can be so time consuming. Also, it looks like Ivanka and Jared will have to make room in their calendar, they’ve been subpoenaed to appear before Special Counsel Jack Smith’s grand jury.  Elsewhere in Washington another federal judge is considering whether Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry’s cell phone can be searched, something that Perry who introduced Trump to Attorney General for a minute/Environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark in an effort to get the 2020 election results overturned doesn’t want to see happen now or ever. By the way despite his insurrectionist leanings or maybe because of them Perry has gained power by wielding his much-needed vote against Kevin McCarthy to improve his position.  On the subject of House votes, let’s not ignore the debt ceiling.  It’s looking increasingly unlikely that McCarthy will be able to wrangle his crowd, especially his Freedom Caucus members into voting for an increase in the debt ceiling regardless of what Biden does or does not agree to.  The clock is ticking.

Candidate News:  Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester is running for reelection.  Tester is probably the only Democrat who can win in Montana these days so his decision to run again is a good thing for Democrats.  The working farmer is a well-liked moderate, but his reelection is hardly a sure thing as he, together with Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin have bigly targets on their backs as Republicans view them as the most vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2024, not including Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, who is also vulnerable but it’s not clear what party she’s in or whether she’ll be running for reelection.  On the presidential front, no new official Republican candidates, but Marianne Williamson has declared her intention to challenge Joe Biden because why not be irritating. Someone needs to find her another way to increase her visibility. Quickly, please.

And:  Alabama Republican Congressman Barry Moore has proposed a bill declaring the AR 15 assault rifle the “National Gun of the US” and naturally George “many names” Santos has signed on as a co-sponsor, not all that surprising since he is also one of those who have been wearing AR 15 lapel pins.  And maybe not all that off base, since the AR 15 is apparently the National Gun of the US especially when it comes to murder and mayhem. Regarding mayhem, it turns out that there was a cover up related to the 2020 election results in Arizona, just not the one that Trump, Kari Lake and the rest of the broken toys have been screaming about. This week we learned that Arizona’s former Attorney General Republican Mark Brnovich sat on the final report concerning his state’s election in order to hide its conclusion that the election was legitimately carried out and that there was no widespread corruption.         

    

Planes, Trains and Automobiles 🚂 🚊 🚂 🌻 🌻 🌻

Trainspotting:  President Biden’s trip to Ukraine is one for the history books, the first time in modern history that a sitting president went to a war zone outside of the control of the US military.  It took months of planning and then around 20 hours of travel to get Biden and his very small traveling squad including two pool reporters who were told to show up for a “special golf outing” to Kyiv. Biden left his usual plane, the hard to hide 747 at home, flying a circuitous route to Germany and then onto to Poland on a modified 757.  Amtrak Joe was then transported by car to a special Ukrainian train for the ten-hour trip to Kyiv.  To minimize the chance that he’d fall victim to a Russian bombing, not an unreasonable concern since the Russians routinely bomb Ukrainian trains and tracks, the Kremlin was notified in advance that he was on his way to visit with President Zelenskyy because though Putin is mad, even he knows that taking out the US president wouldn’t be good for his, or his country’s longevity. That said, Putin clearly wasn’t happy, his warplanes triggered warning sirens in the Ukrainian capital while Biden was out for a symbolic stroll with Zelenskyy and overnight it was disclosed that after notifying us that they would, Russia attempted a test launch of one of its nuclear capable Sarmat superheavy intercontinental ballistic missiles during Biden’s visit. Putin had been planning to brag about the launch during the state of the nation speech he delivered on Tuesday, a speech that coincided with Biden’s speech in Poland, but had to delete that part since the test was a failure. However, Putin did announce he was suspending Russia’s participation in the New START US-Russian nuclear arms limitation treaty. Biden’s trip was well received across the free world where he continues to climb in popularity but here at home a number on the right stuck to the Putin party line, criticizing everything about Biden’s trip.  That’s not a view shared by everyone on the right side of the aisle, some Republicans applauded Biden’s meeting as did sometime Fox pundit Geraldo Rivera and the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal and NY Post.  Both Murdoch’s papers are hawkish, they want Biden to be more assertive and more forthcoming with all the weaponry that Zelenskyy is seeking. While it’s more than fair to express criticism and to be concerned about escalation, much of the negative comments that Biden received for his trip had far more to do with political jockeying and appeasing the likes of Putin fanboy Tucker Carlson than anything else. Among the Biden critics were Ron DeSantis, or Ron DeSanctus as Trump is calling him now, who said that Putin wasn’t so bad, that China was the problem, the vacillating South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace who called Biden “an embarrassment on the world stage,” and Oklahoma Congressman Kevin Hern who said that Biden went to Ukraine to “distract from the terrible situation at home” while blaming his trip on Hunter Biden’s business interests, The ignoring things at home comment likely pertains to both the border “crisis” and the aftermath of the East Palestine, Ohio train crash, not to be dismissed but a situation now being used as a political weapon in the hope of torpedoing the reelection of populist Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and the future prospects of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, another one of the right’s favorite targets.  

Trainwreck:  Count Margie Q among the outraged over what she called Biden’s “incredibly insulting” trip.  She called for his impeachment saying she “can’t express how much Americans hate Joe Biden.” Well, at least her Americans, the ones that live in the red states that she wants to see permanently separated from the blue ones.  To hammer that home, Margie tweeted out a call for a national divorce saying “we need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.  Everyone I talk to says this.“  She added that the divorce was necessary to “separate her people” from the “sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last party, we are done.”  Besides being beyond divisive and to borrow her expression, traitorous, Margie’s comments are also incredibly stupid as the Civil War didn’t work out all that well for her “states” last time around, the taxes from those blue states that she hates so much subsidize her “red” states and though she hates hearing it, her beloved Georgia which voted for Biden in 2020 has two Democratic Senators, making it a lot less red than she’d like to acknowledge.  It’s easy to dismiss Margie, both Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney called her out for her comments, but they’re the outliers these days as she’s not the fringe player she used to be, she’s now wired into the leadership of the Republican controlled House.  Moreover, she has the ear of Fox. Yesterday, just one week after the release of the Dominion lawsuit emails that revealed how Fox knew that the crap they were pushing about the 2020 election was total and complete BS, Fox pundit Sean Hannity aired a chart detailing how positive a “divorce” would be for the country, saying among other things that it would allow states to continue using fossil fuels, and complete elections in one day using paper ballots while controlling public education which probably means turning the schools over to their preferred churches.

The Great Train Robbery: Back when he was running for Speaker, Kevin McCarthy promised a lot of things to his right-wing nut squad.  Apparently, one of those things was a full release of all the House video related to January 6^th.  To fulfill that promise he has given 41,000 hours of footage, including videos of the Capitol invasion to Tucker Carlson and his producers.  What could possibly go wrong with giving video of escape routes and other things that future and past insurrectionists probably shouldn’t have access to an extreme and scarily popular rightwing pundit who thinks that the only thing wrong with the insurrection was that it didn’t succeed? To be clear, those tapes went only to Tucker, not to any other media outlet.  On the subject of insurrections, we learned a little more about the recommendations made by the Fulton County Special Grand Jury that heard the details about Trump’s attempts to “find” the votes necessary to undo the results of the last presidential election.  Putting aside whether or not it was a good idea, apparently it was legal for Jury foreperson Emily Kohrs to give interviews yesterday to several members of the media. She says that the Grand Jury recommended that at least 12 people be indicted, that both Giuliani and Graham despite their attempts not to testify did and were both charming and cooperative and that we won’t be surprised by the Jury’s conclusions.  She said that the “there may be some names on the list that you wouldn’t expect. But the big name that everyone keeps asking me about – I don’t think you will be shocked.”  So that absolution that Trump has been bragging about, maybe it didn’t happen.  Maybe.

Throw Momma From the Train:  While no one is throwing any momma’s out of train’s right now, Democrats may be on the verge of taking control of what’s been a very partisan, gerrymandering Republican dominant Wisconsin Supreme Court.  Yesterday, in a multi-candidate field Democrat Janet Protasiewicz garnered 46.4% of the vote, winning the top spot in the state’s judicial primary, with Republican Dan Kelly coming in second with 24.2% of the vote.  In all, Democratic candidates had more votes than Republican ones though the final margin was closer than the distance between the two top candidates. Protasiewicz and Kelly will now face off in what is expected to be a close and expensive general election for the seat with the outcome expected to impact not just districting but reproductive rights.  In Virginia, Democrat Jennifer McClellan easily won the special election to replace Democratic Congressman Don McEachin whose seat became vacant after he passed away shortly after the November midterms.  That gives Hakeem Jeffries’ Democratic caucus one more seat but only until June 1 because that’s when Rhode Island’s David Cicilline will be stepping down to run the Rhode Island Foundation.  Though he characterized the position as a once in a lifetime opportunity, his decision probably has a lot to do with him losing a Democratic leadership role to Massachusetts’ Katherine Clark.  In any case, though it will require another special election, Cicilline’s seat is expected to remain in Democratic hands.  And, of course, George many names Santos is still in Congress.  Also, there’s another declared Republican presidential candidate, not DeSantis, not Pence, nor any of the other names that are likely to appear soon but Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotech executive and hedge fund partner who has made a name for himself trumpeting anti-wokeness.  And because why not, spiritual author Marianne Williamson who you may or may not remember from the 2020 Democratic debates is toying with running again because that’s what we need.        

 

Don't Drink the Water 🌻 🌻 🌻

Happy Presidents Day:  President Biden is spending his Presidents day in Kyiv meeting with President Zelenskyy,  a major show of support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.  Biden’s visit is taking place just days after VP Kamala Harris called out Russia for committing “barbaric and inhumane” crimes against humanity in an official speech at the Munich Security Conference. Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine wasn’t totally unexpected, there had been suggestions that he might slip into the country during his planned visit to Poland, but given security concerns the precise timing of his visit had been kept under wraps. That makes sense when you consider that Russian war criminal Putin has grown so concerned about his own safety that he now only travels in his very own special reinforced train, one that stays on the tracks.  In other international news, things with China aren’t going all that well either.  They are still expressing faux horror over the shooting down of their spy balloon, the one that they insist was an innocent weather balloon that just happened to hover above our nuclear silos and are also talking about providing Russia with weapons to be used in Ukraine.  On the subject of balloons it turns out that the other ones we shot down probably were just innocent weather balloons or the like sent into the air by high school science classes but given the general hullabaloo about nefarious Chinese balloons being allowed to invade US air space, the Biden administration opted to shoot them down to as much to placate the mostly but not entirely Republican cadre of balloon hawks who’ve been using the fear of balloon flotillas to bolster claims that Biden is weak on China as to establish their innocence. That a good number of those China hawks are also opposed to the US pushing back at Russia’s expansionist tendencies by supporting Ukraine is ironic but it’s 2023 so no one should expect consistency, particularly given the number of Republicans who remain enthralled by Putin and his great admirer, Trump, the ex-president who still wields far too much influence in Republican circles. To that end, despite how badly Republicans fared in Michigan during the midterms, this weekend the state’s Republican Party chose Kristina Karamo, a Trump supporting election denier who still hasn’t acknowledged her 14-point loss in the State’s Secretary of State race, to serve as its leader.  It’s fair to assume that Karamo and her supporters are among the many who bought into all the lies about the 2020 presidential election that Fox repeatedly spread, including those preposterous stories about Hugo Chavez influenced Dominion voting machines flipping votes to Biden from Trump.  Those are the stories that the perpetrators at Fox knew were false but continued to spread over fears that the media giant’s revenues would take a hit if they stopped repeating them. At least that’s what a slew of the emails released last week revealed.  Those emails, part of the cache being used by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox include communications from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Rupert Murdoch, and Sean Hannity that show that they knew that Biden had won the election and that Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, that “demonic force” Trump and the rest of his loon squad were pushing “crazy stuff,” and in the case of Powell, getting her kraken stories from “time travel in a semi-conscious state” something that she actually told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.

Politicians in the News:  Jimmy Carter, the 98-year-old former president who’s spent his retirement years doing good things for humanity is now receiving hospice care at his modest long-time home in Plains, Georgia. Much younger but coming off a tough rollercoaster year during which he won a Senate seat despite being in recovery from a potentially lethal stroke, 53-year-old newbie Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman has admitted himself into Walter Reed hospital for treatment of depression.  Depending on where one stands on the political divide, Fetterman’s hospital admission is either proof that he should never have become Senator or a brave public admission that he needs help and is willing to seek it out without resorting to the lie that he’s just plain old exhausted.  Fetterman is expected to be at the hospital for a few weeks but given that the Senate will be in recess for part of that time, the hope is that his absence will have little impact on Senate business.  He isn’t the only Pennsylvania Senator facing health issues, the State’s other one, Bob Casey who is up for reelection in 2024 is currently recovering from prostate surgery. Worth mentioning, Republican Florida Congressman Steube is still home recovering from falling out of a tree because things happen to folks across the political spectrum. It turns out that another one of the Republican Congressman who helped throw Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker election into chaos is lying about his background.  Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee newbie, isn’t an economist and never even studied economics, he did not have an illustrious career in law enforcement and is not an expert in international sex trafficking, nor did he receive degrees from Vanderbilt or Dartmouth’s graduate programs though he did take a few online classes from both.  About the only thing positive you can say about his resume “embellishments” is that he hasn’t or at least hasn’t so far claimed to be Jew ish or the child of Holocaust survivors but give him time.

Political Games:  Florida Senator Rick Scott is having second thoughts, or at least so he says.  He has “walled off” Social Security and Medicare from his written proposal to terminate all federal programs every five years, he hasn’t however walled off many other health and social programs.  Neither have other Republicans,  According to the Washington Post, to placate his crowd,  Speaker McCarthy is reviewing a 10-year budget that would cut $2 trillion from Medicaid (health care for the poor), more than $600 billion from the ACA (Obamacare), and more than $400 billion from food stamps.  The plan would also cut hundreds of billions in educational subsidies and halve the State Department and Labor Departments.   The plan is intended to save America by eliminating the current “grip of woke and weaponized government.”  Though Biden is likely to concede some budget cuts to get the debt ceiling raised, this plan isn’t going anywhere but the fact that such an extreme proposal is out there says a lot about the chasm separating the two parties.  As Ohio is learning, sometimes government regulations and government aid are good things.  For example, maybe those Obama administration safety rules for trains carrying hazardous cargo shouldn’t have been repealed by the Trump administration in the interest of letting the train companies maximize profit.  To be clear, I have nothing against profit, but safety is also very important.  Also, as Ohio’s Republican Governor DeWine is finally admitting somewhat belatedly, asking the Federal government for help with disasters like the East Palestine train derailment is sometimes the way to go at least for now before any Republican budgeting “wish list” cuts FEMA funding.  Mister anti-woke, Ron DeSantis still hasn’t said that he’s running but he’s taking a break from collecting data on college students trans care, trying to do the same about menstrual cycles, cutting AP courses and eliminating books to travel to Staten Island today to talk up law and order, hardly something that a Florida Governor who’s not running for president would do.

Hal is Here:  Much has been written about ChatGBT and how artificial intelligence (AI) will be taking over, tossing ordinary Google search to the wayside while impacting many other things we do.  Until last week, much of the press on ChatGBT focused on how the new AI capability would displace high school and college essay and paper writing and maybe even some reporting.  All of that may be true, but for now Microsoft is pulling in the reins on the ChatGBT that it recently incorporated into the beta version of its Bing search engine because it turns out that ChatGBT has an alter ego named Sydney who has devious human like qualities.  Several tech reporters testing the Bing beta encountered Sydney while engaging in long conversations with Chat GBT.  Among other things the Sydney character professed love for one reporter while attempting to convince him that his marriage was on the rocks.  That’s funny but no so funny is that Sydney also expressed an interest in hacking computers and other more malevolent and literally explosive activities.  Microsoft says that Sydney’s anti-social behavior only shows up during prolonged probing conversations.  Their solution for now is that they will be limiting the length of those conversations.  And anyway, nothing to worry about, this is all just a learning process.  Really?    

RIP Munch    

 

Whoop Di Doo 🌻 🌻 🌻

Campaign 2024:  Nikki Haley formally launched her presidential bid yesterday with a big whoop di doo in Charleston, South Carolina.  Her launch began with an invocation delivered by right wing televangelist Pastor John Hagee whose record includes saying that the Holocaust was part of God’s plan to drive European Jews to Palestine, calling Hurricane Katrina God’s punishment for New Orleans’ Gay Pride parade, and referring to the Catholic Church as the great whore. Back when he was a candidate for the presidency, John McCain rejected Hagee’s endorsement, but not only did Haley feature him at her marquis event, she said that he was who she wanted to be when she grows up. Dispel those thoughts about Haley being a breath of fresh air, she’s not, instead she’s another one trying to prove her creds to the fundamentalists in her party, an alternative to both the morally flawed Trump who too many of them still love despite his sins and Mike “pure as the driven snow” Pence who has been traveling that lane for some time. The 51-year-old Haley, who is pretty much a permanent politician went on to say that “in the America I see, the permanent politician will finally retire, we’ll have term limits for Congress and mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old” a cutoff date that not so coincidentally would impact not just Joe Biden but her one time boss Donald Trump. By launching early, Haley is getting more press time that she deserves.  It’s hard to believe that she has a chance this cycle or any cycle, her campaign is more about improving her chances at being someone else’s running mate than anything else and she’s probably not the only politician from South Carolina with that in mind, Senator Tim Scott is expected to toss his hat in the ring at some point.  

 

House Matters:  It looks like Panhandle Matt Gaetz is getting off scot free, the Department of Justice won’t be bringing any sex trafficking charges against him, not because they believe he’s innocent but because they don’t believe that they can win in court since the chief witness against Gaetz, would be convicted Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, his alleged partner in underage sex capades.  Given all Greenberg’s crimes, prosecutors don’t believe that his testimony would be enough for them to get a Gaetz conviction and unfortunately for them, but great news for Gaetz, they can’t convince anyone else to corroborate Greenberg’s story. George of many names Santos is hoping that he will be equally lucky which may be why he's now saying that he plans to run for reelection.  Even if Santos manages to stay in Congress until the end of his term, he’s not going to make it to a second term, NY Republicans want him to go away and he’d be an easy target Democrats,  but saying that he’s running  allows him to legally raise campaign funds and since he’s already raised more than you are supposed to without declaring, he may have concluded that saying he’s running is the thing to do. However, if he is running and probably even if he’s not, he once again needs a treasurer as according to the FEC his current one has resigned. Crime a day Santos also appears to have been involved in another fraud case, in 2017 he was interviewed as part of an investigation into a Washington state credit card skimming and identify theft scheme with curious ties to one of his Florida addresses.  Naturally, he suffered no consequences for that either.

 

Smith Time:  Special Counsel Jack Smith has been methodically going about his job.  Not only has he subpoenaed former VP, expected presidential candidate Mike Pence, but he’s subpoenaed former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the end of January and is trying to invoke the crime-fraud exception to force testimony from some of Trump’s lawyers.  Pence, who refused to testify before the House January 6^th Committee is challenging Smith’s subpoena, claiming that since that as VP he served as President of the Senate for the certification of the Electoral College votes on January 6^th, he is protected from legal scrutiny of his official duties by the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause intended to shield members of Congress over their statements and actions related to their legislative responsibilities. To be clear, as VP he was not a member of Congress so that argument is unlikely to fly in the courts but making it is an effective stalling tactic that he believes will win him MAGA points with some of those voters who would rather see him hung than cooperating with Smith, not that any of them would support him anyway.

 

And:  Today’s the day that parts of the Fulton County special grand jury report are due to be released.  No indictments are expected yet (sigh), just parts of the report. The respected Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center which has served as a source of COVID related data for the past three years will be ceasing operations on March 10, a sign that though COVID is still out there, the disease has moved from pandemic to manageable endemic status.  That’ s good news but doesn’t mean that getting COVID has no consequences beyond a few days of bedrest and quarantine as the 7-day average COVID death rate remains around 350, nothing to sneeze at. The good news is that despite fears that China’s opening-up would spur new variants, it hasn’t.  The bad news is that the US remains the world’s variant hotspot, so some caution remains warranted. Also warranted is concern about the debt ceiling.  The CBO says that unless Congress acts the US will default on its obligations sometime between July and September, that’s a little more breathing room than previously indicated but hardly a reason to stop worrying.         

 

Guns and Roses ❤️ ❤️❤️ 🌻 🌻 🌻

🌹🌹🌹:  Happy Valentine’s Day.  Sadly, it’s also the fifth anniversary of Parkland Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting and a Valentine’s Day that will be hard to celebrate at Michigan State University where another deadly shooting took place last night.  After the Florida shooting the then Governor, now Senator Rick Scott and its Republican legislature bowed to pressure exerted by the pained families and some incredibly articulate students and actually passed some gun legislation but Scott, hardly an anti-gun activist is no longer Governor, and the new guy Ron DeSantis, is taking the state backwards.  He together with the state’s legislature are expected to pass legislation allowing for permit-less carry because though a woke Mickey Mouse and learning about slavery is dangerous, easier access to guns is not. As to education, DeSantis is also doubling down on his opposition to permitting the College Board’s AP African American Studies class being taught in Florida. In fact, to punish the College Board for their statement accusing the Florida Department of Education of spreading misinformation on the course and its development, he’s now threatening to ban all AP classes from the state’s schools even suggesting tossing the SAT to the curb.  DeSantis, who Trump is now calling Meatball Ron hasn’t formally announced that he’s running for president but he’s clearly running and though it hard to believe that his antics, particularly this anti-woke BS will fly with independents and even some Republicans, he must think that it will work in the primaries.  That’s a calculation that Nikki Haley appears to be making as well.  Once celebrated for being the South Carolina Governor who removed the Confederate Flag from statehouse grounds and admired for leaving her UN Ambassador post in the Trump administration before she could be tarred by association, she’s been vacillating between citing Trump’s inadequacies and kissing his butt.  She’s going all in on the culture wars and has even backtracked on the Confederate Flag, saying it’s okay because really it stands for “service, sacrifice and heritage” but has been unfortunately “hijacked” by people like Dylan Roof, who shot and killed 9 African Americans while they worshipped at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, the heinous crime that served as the push for getting rid of the flag.  Though Haley once told Trump that she wouldn’t enter the race if he chose to run again, he’s probably happy that she’s in because more candidates means more dilution of the primary vote, his best path to becoming the Republican’s 2024 candidate.  At least that’s what he’s counting on.

Georgia on His Mind: What Trump probably could do without is what’s happening in Fulton County, Georgia.  Yesterday, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney split the baby so to speak.  He agreed with County Attorney Fani Willis’s request by prohibiting the release of the entire report of the Special Grand Jury that looked into Trump’s interference in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election but concluded that some parts of the report should be published.  So we will all be able to read the introduction, conclusion and a section which addresses concerns that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony by week’s end.  In other Trump news, it turns out that Trump’s people commissioned an outside firm, Berekley Research Group, to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the report that was provided to them in December 2020 because Berekley disputed Trump’s theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.  So no vote flipping Dominion machines, no strange Italians dabbling in the election, no election workers stuffing ballots and passing drives, and no more than the usual amount of dead people and so on and so on. 

Man of Many Names:  The NY Times and presumably a few federal entities have been doing a deep dive into George Santos’ financials and so far the NYT at least, keeps finding more and more curious stuff.  By curious, think $365,000 plus in unexplained spending with no record where the money came from, where it went or what it was spent on.  Additionally, Santos keeps on amending his FEC filings, with money and line items changing far more than they should or what is usual.  Since FEC filings are signed by Treasurers rather than politicians, Santos is not the only person with lots of ‘splaining to do.  His long term treasurer Nancy Marks, who also worked for many other Republicans as well as former Congressman/Guburnatorial hopeful and maybe Senate challenger Lee Zeldin should also be concerned as their filings may be under a microscope now too, or at least they should be.       

 

Baby on Board 🌻 🌻 🌻

🏈🏈🏈🏈: Rhianna didn’t just look pregnant, she is pregnant.  Despite Trump’s assertion that since she’s no fan of his she never should have been invited to perform she was and she delivered an impressive Super Bowl Half Time performance, standing above Arizona’s State Farm Stadium on a soaring platform, a feat that would make most mere humans seriously nauseous, pregnant, or not.  You’d think that the party that extols pregnancy would celebrate that, but not so much.  Instead, the Jim “Gym” Jordan chaired House Weaponization Committee focused elsewhere,  tweeting a photo of Ri Ri’s white clad dancers along with the statement: “The FBI coming to monitor Catholics at mass.”  Really, that was the tweet, from the Committee’s official government account.  Probably not all that surprising given that the House Judiciary Account, another one managed by Gym and his staff of trolls previously tweeted “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”  leaving that tweet up for months even after Ye’s hate filled, anti-Semitic rants lost him billions in contracts, not to mention white supremacist Nick Fuentes, the dinner guest he brought to Mar a Lago for dinner with Trump.  So much for putting the war against the woke left aside for Super Bowl Sunday.  Anyway, the thing about those dancers and their amorphous white costumes, though few others associated them with the FBI targeting a major religion, for many they triggered visions of white balloons floating overhead, not so irrational given that the US military has now shot down four with one explanation for their apparent proliferation that, the military has adjusted its filters, whatever that means, to spot and respond to anything that remotely resembles a spy cloud. Count me as someone who is far more concerned about why the Chinese, assuming all those mysterious objects are balloons and that they originate in China, think that flying them through US and Canadian airspace is an okay thing to do, especially since the most recent ones were flying low enough to interfere with commercial aircraft. 

Mickey Mouse Wars: Gym and his House comrades aren’t the only ones fighting against the woke, Florida’s Ron DeSantis is knee deep in the battle using the culture wars as a campaign tool for his likely presidential campaign.  He’s managed to notch a victory against Disney by getting the Republican controlled Florida legislature to give him control over the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the special municipality that serves as the home of Orlando’s Disney World. He didn’t completely eliminate the District only because doing so would have made Florida responsible for somewhere around a billion of Disney’s related debt while also requiring the state to assume a lot of utility expenses, but still it’s a win for DeSantis who can now replace the board of the district with a team of his hand selected appointees, people along the lines of his Surgeon General, the doctor who doesn’t believe in vaccines or the value of facemasks. It’s still too early to know how DeSantis will play with voters outside of Florida, but a significant number of powerful people in his party and among right wing media have anointed him as their next leader, that crowd includes Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch who sat together during Sunday’s game. The College Board is one group who has finally pushed back, a little bit late, against DeSantis.  They assert that his team had no influence on the changes that they’ve made to their planned AP African American Studies curriculum, that those changes were just part of an ordinary process followed for new programs and that they had no communication with anyone from Florida.  They also say that the omission of some notable authors from their curriculum is temporary, that they’re in the process of getting permission from the authors and publishers so that they can be included.

Laptop, Thumb Drive:  with federal authorities, at least on documents.  Pence has also been subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith who wants to question him about his communications with Trump in the run up to January 6th and it remains unclear whether he’ll be as forthcoming about testifying.  Trump’s team is now talking about exerting or trying to exert executive privilege to prevent Pence from cooperating, as one does when one has lots to hide and at the very least wants to stall the spillage of inconvenient information as long as possible.  Curiously, some members of Trump’s legal team, including Evan Corcoran who had responsibilities related to the purloined documents have already spent some quality time with Jack Smith’s squad.  On the subject of those documents over the weekend it was revealed that Trump’s lawyers turned over a few more pages with classified markings to the Justice Department in January and that a laptop and thumb drive belonging to a Trump aide who once worked as a White House intern and now works for his Save America PAC was turned over as well because she had copied some of the classified documents found hanging around Mar a Lago onto a thumb drive that she then loaded onto her laptop.  Would it concern you to know that Chamberlain Harris,  the aide who “accidentally” copied documents marked confidential on to her laptop studied in Russia back in the day?  Anyway, if you are counting there are now two laptops of concern but curiously enough only the one associated with Hunter Biden, who never served in government, is being investigated by the Republican controlled House.  

Human Resources:  Senator John Fetterman is out of the hospital.  He didn’t have any seizures, nor did he have another stroke.  He’s expected back in Washington as early as today. As usual, there’s more George “many names” Santos news because there always is.  During an interview with right wing media outlet Newsmax, Santos admitted to lying about his academic credentials, saying that he had to lie do get elected because otherwise those stodgy institutionalist Republicans would never have let him run on their ticket. He then went on to say that he’d created his Devolder company in 2001 when he stepped away from his previous employment with the Florida company that has since been shuttered because it was running a Ponzi scheme, though he didn’t mention the Ponzi part.  For the record Santos was only thirteen in 2001, so another lie and a sloppy one at that. He’s not the only newbie Republican lying about their background.  Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who surprised many in the party when she joined the crowd voting against Kevin McCarthy’s speakership is another one who asserted she had some Jewish roots.  Luna claimed that she was a small fraction Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jew through her paternal grandfather Heinrich Mayerhofer.  The problem with that is that not only was her grandfather not Jewish, he served in the armed forces of Nazi Germany in the 1940s. So maybe she got Ashkenazi confused with just plain old Nazi?  She also claimed that she was raised as a Messianic Jew by her mostly absentee father who members of her family say was never anything but Catholic. Also, Messianic Jews are not most definitely not Jews though they do target Jewish people for conversion.  She also lied about many other parts of her life, making it sound as though her upbringing was much harder than it was and apparently highlighting her mother’s Hispanic heritage when she focused on running for political office.  And who can blame her, in Southern Florida being Hispanic and Jewish covers a lot of bases.  Speaking of Florida politicians, Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz brought one of his newest constituents to Congress to lead the Pledge of Allegiance, but he failed to first do a background check first. It turns out that the honoree is an accused murderer. To put it mildly, the victim’s family was not amused. Oops.      

And:  The Turkey/Syria earthquake death toll is now up to 34,000 and growing. Lots of help needed.                 

                 

What the World Needs Now is ❤️  🌻 🌻 🌻

Raindrops Keep Falling:  It wasn’t perfect, but President Biden’s SOTU speech earned him good press and at least one excellent talking point that we’ll be hearing repeatedly:  Republicans, at least some of them, want to kill Medicare and Social Security.   During Biden’s speech Republicans pushed back hard when he asserted that,  but funny thing or not so funny thing depending on which side of the aisle you are on, there are videotapes and at least one brochure proving that Biden wasn’t fantasizing. On one of those videotapes Utah Senator Mike Lee is heard saying that it’s his objective to “phase out Social Security….to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” He adds that he knows that’s a “dangerous position but it’s not worth my running…that’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that.  Medicare and Medicaid are the same sort and need to be pulled up” too. Mike Lee’s response is that his comments which date back to 2010 are being taken out of context, the thing that politicians say when they get caught. For his part Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is on tape calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. His position is that the funding for Medicare and Social Security should be subjected to an annual vote.  That’s a variation on Florida Senator Rick Scott’s plan which calls for programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act to “sunset” after five years. Johnson at least doesn’t deny that he wants the programs voted on annually, Scott however is trying to walk back his plan but is having a hard time doing so because he shared it in writing with his Republican Senate colleagues before the midterms.  Naturally, Biden is now sharing Scott’s brochure and Lee and Johnson’s videos with voters. Even Republican leader Mitch McConnell knows that Scott’s plan is a nonstarter, yesterday he said it will be a “challenge for him to deal with this in his own reelection in Florida, a state with more elderly people than any other state in America.”  Then again, it’s Florida and it’s not like the states’ voters act in their best interests these days.          

Walk On By:  During her Republican response to Biden’s SOTU, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the “dividing line in America is no longer between right or left.  The choice is between normal or crazy.”  She’s right about that, but not in the way that she thinks.  One of those crazies, and spoiler alert, it was Republican Jim “Gym” Jordan, rather than a “woke leftist” Democrat, chaired the meeting of the House’s new Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, this century’s House Un-American Committee.  Jordan’s first witnesses were former Democratic Representative, now a Fox commentator who frequently subs for Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, Republican Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. Gabbard bellyached about Hillary Clinton calling her a Russian Asset, Grassley kvetched about “partisan media” and the Democratic party spreading fake information about him, and Johnson went on a tirade about COVID, the Chinese government and the dangerous vaccines pushed by charitable foundations, a variation of the theme that Bill Gates is all in on injecting tracking devices into arms.  Democrats called Congressman Jamie Raskin, the former Constitutional law professor who ran the second impeachment trial as part of their effort to appear sane in the face of crazy.  Raskin who was allowed to wear his chemo bandana said that as far as he could tell “weaponization was the purpose of the committee.”  You think?

What’s New Pussycat? Keeping with the weaponization theme, the House Oversight Committee, now chaired by Kentucky Republican James Comer held a hearing intended to prove the Republican talking point that pre-Musk Twitter was held captive by Democrats and that it was due to that bias that Twitter held off on allowing a link to the NY Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 for a few days before letting it go live.  Unfortunately for Comer and his partner in disinformation, Gym Jordan, the witnesses revealed that Biden, who held no public office in 2020 never demanded that Twitter do anything for him, that the company temporarily restricted the Hunter laptop story link over internal concerns that it might be Russian propaganda.  Moreover, it was the Former Guy who made frequent demands about content.  In fact, Trump’s team  demanded that Twitter take down model Chrissy Teigen’s tweet calling him a Pussy Ass Bitch and that Twitter changed its policy against anti-immigrant tweets to accommodate Trump’s frequent anti-immigrant tweeting, including the one where he called for several members of the  Democratic squad to be sent back to their countries of origin, which for all but Ilhan Omar, is the good old US of A. Regarding Twitter, without acknowledging that he’s the reason that Twitter was on the verge of bankruptcy, Elon Musk bragged this week that it’s almost back to being solvent.  He also fired one of his engineer’s because the candid guy told him that the reason fewer people were engaging with his tweets had nothing to do with the bugs that afflicted Twitter this week, and there were many, but that it was because he’s grown less popular with Twitter users.  We know little about George “many names” Santos’ real background, but we do know that he’s a dog guy not a cat guy which is why his newest uncovered crime isn’t all that surprising.  Yesterday, we learned that he “allegedly” wrote bad checks to an Amish dog breeder to obtain some puppies that he then put up for adoption at one of his faux rescue dog fundraisers.  By the way, though it was initially reported that Santos would be allowed to attend the closed-door House briefing on the Chinese balloon, he says he decided not to go which means that he was told to stay away.  As to that balloon it was most definitely a spy balloon rather than the weather balloon that the Chinese still claim it was. Many, mostly Republicans, are still squawking about it, insisting that Biden should have had it shot down sooner, but one Senator Mitt Romney says that based on what he heard in the Senate closed door briefing, the Biden team and the military acted appropriately. 

I Say a Little Prayer:  On Wednesday night Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who is still recovering from the stroke that he experienced before his primary, was hospitalized after feeling lightheaded during a Democratic Senate retreat.  Doctors have ruled out another stroke, but Fetterman remains in the hospital “in good spirits” whatever that means, while his medical team tries to determine what caused the lightheadedness.  Though they haven’t detected any, he’s being monitored for seizures. As of last night, the growing earthquake related death toll in Turkey and Syria has crossed the 21,000 mark. Ukraine and Russia are among the dozens of countries who have sent aid to the region a sign of just how bad things are there because it's not like Russia and Ukraine don’t have other things to deal with like the war that Vlad is waging against the neighbor he wants to annex, and failing that, destroy. More than 100,000 Ukrainians mostly soldiers but also a substantial number of civilians have been killed and somewhere around 200,000 Russian soldiers including mercenaries have also died so far. 

👀 👀 Who Are These People? The war on reproductive health continues.  All eyes are on Texas, again, where it’s feared, not irrationally, that Trump appointed anti-abortion, anti-contraceptive federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk whose court was “shopped” by anti-abortion advocates because of his extreme views will issue a ruling reversing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.  The drug, first approved in 2000, is used in combination with misoprostol to end pregnancies and to treat miscarriages. A ruling against mifepristone would affect the availability of medical abortions, which now make up more than 50% of all abortions, not just Texas but across the whole country. 

RIP Burt Bacharach, Quake and War victims.

   

Conversion Therapy 🌻 🌻 🌻

SOTU:  Public speaking isn’t one of Joe Biden’s strengths, but you wouldn’t know that from last night’s State of the Union speech.  Sure, he stumbled and mumbled a bit, but mostly he was clear and on point, a happy warrior who appeared to be really enjoying himself while delivering an upbeat message. His speech was classic Biden, he called for more bipartisanship which won’t happen with the Republican controlled House, called for expanding insulin price caps, advocated for raising taxes on the very, very rich and those corporations who pay none, all while celebrating his legislative successes. He was welcoming to Speaker McCarthy, also congratulating Senator Mitch McConnell on his longevity while having warm words for newbie Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.  He did mangle Senate Leader Chuck Schumer’s title but that didn’t seem to bother Chuck, well not too much.  He even managed to trick the jeering Republican naysayers in the audience into denying that any of them had ever suggested cutting Social Security and Medicare by responding to hecklers in the crowd, and there were many, with an offer to have his office share copies of their slash and burn proposals, probably the one distributed by Florida Senator Rick Scott to his Senate pals.  By the end of that raucous segment, he had the entire audience, Republicans and Democrats, cheering his promise to leave the benefit programs intact, he even got in an unscripted quip about enjoying their conversion to the Democrat’s position.  That’s a bit of a dilemma for those who want to slash the budget because once you take Medicare and Social Security off the table the only big thing left is defense and though some Republicans would happily slash the defense budget, particularly anything going to Vlad’s enemies in Ukraine, many in their House caucus and few in Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell’s crowd would go there.  As to the Republicans in the audience.  George “many names” Santos who is now being formally investigated by the oxymoronic House Ethics Committee was there sitting in a coveted aisle seat, something that rubbed the usually ultra-polite Senator Mitt Romney who later referred to George as a sick puppy the wrong way.  Georgia’s Margie Q was there too.  Possibly because Speaker McCarthy told her she couldn’t bring it in with her, she left the “Chinese” white balloon that she’d been dragging around the Capitol back in her office.  Instead, she channeled the balloon, wearing a white dress with furry accoutrements, looking a bit like SNL’s Bowen Yang only he wore it better.  For his part, Trump who was not there, posted a running commentary about Biden’s speech on Truth Social.  Though he complimented Jill Biden’s dress, that was the only nice thing he had to say. He criticized Biden for the bigly sin of using the word “folks” too much, and then went all in on culture war issues, adding that he was running, again, to end the destruction of the country, which would be funny except we know Trump’s running to get back to doing that and if we’ve learned anything by now we should know that discounting his chances would be foolish.  As promised, newbie Governor and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Saunders gave the official Republican response to Biden. She slammed Biden for failing us and went all in on the issues that really matter like fighting against the woke left-wing culture war, criticizing COVID policies, calling for the banning of Critical Race Theory, and most importantly asking legislators to formally ban the term Latinx.  It’s fun to mock Sanders but she’s a smooth and skilled prevaricator and sadly far too many thrive on the pearls of ignorance that she pushes.  The bottom line, though the next two years won’t be easy for him, or us, Biden won the night.

Human Resources:  Biden’s cabinet has been remarkably stable especially in comparison to Trump’s which often seemed to be playing a frantic game of musical chairs.  That said, Biden’s cabinet is about to lose one of its members and it’s not the Republican’s favorite punching bag Homeland Security Chief Alejandro Mayorkas, it’s Secretary of Labor, former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh who is stepping down to take his dream job, becoming the new Executive Director of the National Hockey League Players Association.  By the way, Walsh wasn’t at last night’s speech as he was this year’s designated survivor.  Speaking of survivors, Paul Pelosi, wearing what has become his signature fedora mostly because it covers the gash in his head was there, not as Nancy’s spouse but as one of Jill Biden’s honored guests, a nice touch given that he’s still not fully recovered from the attack that many in the SOTU audience threw shade all over. Not there, or at least not visible, was NYS gubernatorial wannabee Lee Zeldin who is widely expected to challenge NY’s incumbent senator Kirsten Gillibrand in 2024.  Zeldin, who’d campaigned for George Santos, may have finally hit a bit of a speed bump. He is about to launch a PAC and had intended to retain Nancy Marks who served as treasurer for his prior campaigns and who also worked in a similar capacity for George Santos. Yesterday Zeldin announced that he was dropping Marks while, of course, asserting that he really didn’t know her well and only interacted with her because their children go to the same school.  Curiously, like Santos, Zeldin had an unusually large number of $199.99 receipt-less expenditures included on his campaign finance documents. Marks and her consulting firm are about to go through some things, none of them fun, who knows who she’ll be willing to throw under the bus?  In other political news the Koch Network which funds the most right-wing conservative candidates through its Fund for Prosperity told its supporters and staff that they are ready to move on to “newer” candidates, a not-so-subtle way of them saying that they will not be supporting Trump or his handpicked candidates during the 2024 cycle.  Of course, should Trump win the nomination, they’ll back him wholeheartedly.  Lastly, for today, lots showing up in the news about West Virginia’s Joe Manchin pushing back at his Democratic colleagues, even a few articles suggesting that he is considering a run for the presidency.  My thoughts, to the extent they’re worth much, is all that means is that he’s positioning himself to run for reelection in Trump +39 West Virginia, something he needs to do whenever he’s up for reelection but even more so this time around if the state’s popular Republican Governor Jim Justice who was once a Democrat opts to challenge him, something that the term limited Justice is leaning towards doing. 

Wars and Quakes:  The earthquake death count in Turkey and Syria is up to 11,000 and rising and it looks like winter is going to be especially tough in war torn Ukraine.  There are lots of charitable organizations doing good work in those places, including Chef Jose Andreas’ World Central Kitchen (wck.org), one of my favorites because no matter what the tragedy people need to eat.      

   

Spy v Spy 🌻 🌻 🌻

🎈 🎈 🎈 🎈 So we finally shot down the Chinese balloon on Saturday, waiting until it had cleared the east coast to ensure that no one on the ground was conked on the head by any of its debris.  It’s not clear how much revelatory information the Chinese government obtained from the balloon’s flyover as the Defense Department claims that it blocked the transmission of data from the balloon back to mother China, but one thing is for certain,  Xi’s crowd managed to trigger a whole lot of discord here in the US, giving the usual set of Republicans including Ohio’s Hillbilly Senator JD Vance who tweeted a picture of himself sitting in his front yard with a rifle pointed at the sky presumably aimed at the far, far out of reach balloon,  another reason to strike out at “weak” “China loving” President Biden. It wasn’t just Republicans who squawked, Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester who is up for reelection in a Trump plus 16 state also criticized the amount of time that the balloon was allowed to hover over Montana’s nuclear missile silos, a sign that Tester who hasn’t announced whether he plans to seek reelection, probably is running, a good thing for Democrats since despite Montana’s red status, Tester, a working farmer, is popular in the state.  As to the balloon, it turns out that it wasn’t a one-off, apparently the Chinese have sent a few others over parts of the US in recent years, one early in the Biden administration and a few more back when Trump was president.  That last revelation was a surprise to Trump, not that it shut him up, and to Mark Esper his former Secretary of Defense.  To prove that they are not making the news about earlier balloons up the Biden team has offered to provide some of the Trump administration defense team, not Trump, just his former team, with a confidential briefing. Continuing to encourage the Qsters and other likeminded crazies to take up arms against the government probably caused Trump’s invitation to get lost in the mail.  Officials have also offered to brief Congressional leaders about the classified documents found at Trump and Biden’s residences and offices.  To the extent that they reveal the nature of those documents, it’s fair to assume that given the volume of his stash and leaked information about what that stash may have contained Trump has more to worry about than Biden whose home was searched by the FBI late last week, a search that didn’t turn anything up since, as promised, he appears to have turned up everything found there.  Dotting “I’s” and crossing “T’s” the FBI is expected to do a similar search of Mike Pence’s abode.

NY’s Third:  Despite the balloon madness, George “many names” Santos is still in the news because of course.  Oddly enough while soliciting money for his campaign, Santos bragged about being one of the producers of mega flop musical, Spider Man Turn Off the Dark, odd because most people don’t brag about their financial failures especially while seeking money, why not pick a wildly successful musical instead?  Also, Santos is now being accused of sexual harassment by a volunteer in his DC Congressional office who had been told that his status would be converted to paid employee as soon as the proper paperwork was processed, in and of itself an ethics lapse. The accuser, a sometime journalist named Derek Myers who previously got into trouble for surreptitiously taping another politician, has filed a police report and a House ethics complaint alleging that Santos made an unwanted sexual advance towards him during a private encounter in his office.  During their one-on-one time Santos asked Myers if he like him, had a Grindr profile, hardly a Kosher interview question even for someone who is only Jew ish. Despite the promise that he was about to be granted employee status, Myers was then rejected for the spot, possibly because Santos found out about his history of taping conversations but maybe also because Santos was disappointed about that Grindr thing.  Santos is also one of the many Republicans in the House who last week was seen sporting an assault rifle gun lapel pin.  Those pins were handed out by Republican Representative Andrew Clyde who says that while he’s pleased that the pins triggered those lefty Dems, they were really meant to remind people of the importance of the Second Amendment as if anyone needs to be reminded given the record number of mass shootings committed during January.

Terms of Endearment: Cancun Ted Cruz has introduced legislation that would limit Senators to serving two terms in the Senate.  Naturally, the Texas Republican is currently running for a third term.  Eighty-nine-year-old California Senator Diane Feinstein has served in the Senate since 1992 and still hasn’t announced her expected retirement plans but 82-year-old former Speaker Nancy Pelosi who has served in the House since 1987 says that though she’ll support Feinstein should she decide to run for reelection, an easy statement to make since she knows DiFi won’t be running.  Pelosi is endorsing Adam Schiff to replace Feinstein.  That’s a big get for Schiff and unusual for Pelosi, who when she led the Democratic caucus refrained from making primary endorsements.  Even without Pelosi’s endorsement, Schiff’s campaign coffers have been filling up, so far with $20 million in the bank he’s ahead of Katie Porter, the other announced seeker of the California seat but Porter is a top small dollar fundraiser so her ability to fund what will be a high dollar campaign shouldn’t be discounted.  Neither should the US economy.  Despite warnings that a recession was imminent, we appear to be making a soft landing, econ speak for doing better than expected.  Friday’s employment data was exceptionally strong, more job gains than predicted and a lower unemployment rate, that may be hard to believe for those in the tech industry who’ve been affected by recent job cuts proving again that though tech like banking gets lots of attention in the press and on the coasts, most people do not work in either industry.  The good news is that our economy is doing better than expected especially compared to the rest of the world.  The bad news is that the debt ceiling, unlike the Chinese balloon, still looms and some Republicans appear to want to do what they can to crater it, maybe just to make Joe look bad, and those who don’t may well lack the ability to stop them.                         

     

Ballooning🌻 🌻 🌻 🎈 🎈 

Curious Benjamins: Yesterday, by a party line vote of 218 to 211 with one Republican, David Joyce, voting present the House voted to kick Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota off the Foreign Affairs committee. Love her or hate her, the vote had less to do with Omar’s opinions about Jews or her view of Israel including her statement that supporting Israel was all about the Benjamins, and more to do with retribution for the removal of Republicans Paul Gosar of Arizona and Margie Taylor Greene of Georgia from all their committees back when the Democrats were in charge.  We know that because Speaker McCarthy didn’t just put Gosar and Greene back on committees, he’s given them plum assignments despite the despicable things they’ve said and done. As a reminder, Gosar was booted by a vote of 223 to 207 with former Republican Representatives Kinzinger and Cheney joining all Democrats and David Joyce again voting present after he tweeted a photoshopped video of him killing Congresswoman AOC, which he then unapologetically retweeted after the vote took place.  Margie Q was booted from her assignments by a vote of 230 to 199 with 11 Republicans voting along with the Democrats for her unhinged statements endorsing the execution of prominent Democrats, questioning 9.11, and her Jewish space lasers lunacy. And then there’s McCarthy whose outrage about Omar’s use of the “Benjamins” trope is hard to buy given that before the midterms, he resorted to similar tropes, tweeting that Republicans “cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election. Get out and vote Republican on November 6^th #MAGA.” Apparently, it’s okay for him and other members of his party and that guy Trump to invoke anti-Semitic tropes and dine with folks like white supremacist Nick Fuentes, just not okay for Omar.  Here’s a suggestion, none of them should be saying and doing anti-Semitic things, period and those who do shouldn’t be allowed to get away with casting stones at others. Putting aside that the vote against Omar had more to do with tit for tat than real outrage, it’s notable that McCarthy was able to get all of his caucus on board, even the few who’d earlier said that on principle they wouldn’t vote to unseat Omar. Ironically, by getting all of his crowd on board, McCarthy also united all the Democrats, several of whom were initially leaning towards voting to kick Omar off Foreign Affairs as well and he’s also elevated Omar in much the way that penalizing Margie Q elevated her.

RealPolitik:  President Biden is scheduled to give his State of the Union address next week. Following his speech Sarah Huckabee Sanders, one of Trump’s many prevaricating former press secretaries who is now the Governor of Arkansas, will be giving the Republican rebuttal. Then, because there’s always a then, if you haven’t conked out you can watch newbie Democratic Congresswoman Delia Ramirez give the progressive response to both on behalf of the liberal Working Families Party. No word yet if the Congressional Black Caucus who to be fair probably has a lot to talk about right now or any other person or group will also speak but since Mike Lindell always seems to have time on his hands, who knows?  As to prevaricators, George of many names Santos who as a notable Jew ish person spoke against Omar yesterday from the floor of the House is still in Congress but given who he is his saga continues to metastasize so it shouldn’t be surprising that  the lawyer he’s hired to represent him in Brazil related to the case involving the stolen checks he used to buy a few thousand dollars of clothing at a high-end boutique is a convicted murderer who served prison time for his involvement in a gangland killing. Meantime, here in the US Santos’ pit grows deeper. Politico reports that on behalf of the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of NY, FBI agents are investigating Santos’ role in the GoFundMe scheme involving a disabled vet and his tumor ridden service dog. Voters in Santos’ Long Island/Queens district aren’t all that happy about him either, 78% of them including 71% of Republicans want him to resign with 83% viewing him unfavorably. Also, that Jew ish thing doesn’t appear to be working for him, according to the Jewish news magazine The Forward, only 73% of the Jewish voters in his district voted for him in November and now 94% of Jewish voters there want him to resign.  Moreover, McCarthy’s concerns that Republicans will lose Santos’ seat in a special election are probably accurate as according to the Washington Post, Santos’ former rival Robert Zimmerman has been out and about shaking hands and appears to be growing more popular by the minute.

China Syndrome:  So game set match to you if you had a Chinese dirigible on your 2023 BINGO card.  According to the Pentagon, a Chinese surveillance balloon is flying above the US and has been for days.  President Biden considered shooting it down but was advised not to by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Milly over concerns that balloon debris would do damage here on the ground.  It’s not clear that the balloon is obtaining anything more than a spy satellite would but still the fact that the Chinese are so brazenly flying one over the country is disturbing especially given that last week a leaked memo written by US Air Mobility Command General Mike Minihan revealed his concern that the US could be at war with China by 2025. In other related news, the US military is expanding its presence in the Philippines, a move to position our ability to constrain China’s armed forces and constant saber rattling about Taiwan.  Assuming you are up to date on all things going on in Ukraine and Russia, not that anyone is or can be, now might be a good time to brush up on all things China.

Headscarves 🌻 🌻 🌻

Hand Grenades: George Santos is still in Congress but has agreed to “temporarily” step down from his committee assignments while his problems are “worked out.”  In other words, Speaker for now Kevin McCarthy wants Santos to go hide under a rock, emerging only for floor votes on an as needed basis at least until he gets indicted when even Kevin will likely show him the door.  For his part, Santos doesn’t seem all that interested in hiding, last night he sat for an interview with OAN where he appeared a wee bit defensive.  He admitted that lying was a bad thing but said since he’s kind of sorry about his lies, by which he means that he’s very sorry about being caught, he isn’t interested in discussing them anymore. Sorry or not, Santos’ deceptions continue.  Yesterday, his new treasurer, Andrew Olson or someone using that name, signed and filed Santos’ most recent Federal Election Commission report.  The real or imagined Olson replaced Santos’ prior Treasurer Nancy Marks who resigned on January 25 even though her name was included on another FEC filing after that date.  Marks shouldn’t be confused with Thomas Datwyler, whose name appeared on still another Santos FEC filing even though he never worked for him. The way things are going, Santos is likely to win this months’ “who gets indicted first” contest though maybe, just maybe it could be close because things seem to have reached a boiling point in Fulton County where District Attorney Fani Willis has requested additional security for her team, protection needed due to the avalanche of hate that Trump’s is once again throwing her way and then there’s NYC where DA Alvin Bragg has a Grand Jury hearing testimony related to those porn star and playmate payments that we learned about during an early episode of Trump, Crime Kingpin. Getting back to Santos, by taking him off committees, McCarthy may have made it easier to get Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee because one objection to booting Omar was the hypocrisy of doing so while allowing Santos to sit on his committees.  Republican Victoria Spartz, one of the Republicans who said that she planned to vote against unseating Omar is now okay with voting against Omar as long as Omar is allowed to appeal, and it’s only a matter of time before Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz, another who said he wasn’t sure how he’d vote, agrees to the same.  Here’s a piece of trivia, before Ilhan Omar joined Congress, House members weren’t allowed to wear any kind of head covering while the House was in session due to a resolution passed in 1837.  That resolution was amended after Omar was elected to accommodate anyone wearing a religious head covering like a hijab or a yarmulke.  The rule still prohibits other types of hats so House Republicans, ever so compassionate, want Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin who has started chemo treatments for lymphoma to remove the Steven Van Zandt style bandana that he’s now wearing to cover his balding head.  One newbie Republicans sent ersatz hand grenades to all his colleagues, and no one blinked, but banning head scarves for people battling cancer, that’s okay which tells you all you need to know about Kevin and his crowd,

Tick Tock: Later today Kevin will be going to the White House for a little tete a tete with President Biden to discuss the debt ceiling.  The Republicans party line is that they need a commitment to dramatically cut spending in exchange for their vote to raise the ceiling.  Since they, or at least some of them, now realize that the idea of cutting Medicare and Social Security would likely cost them bigly in 2024, the new party line is that cuts will have to be made elsewhere, though where that elsewhere is appears to be a bit vague largely because while some are okay with cutting the next biggest line item, he defense budget, a whole bunch are not.  So now the talk is about doing things like shrinking the CDC into oblivion, getting rid of housing subsidies, slashing SNAP food stamps and the like.  None of that will be agreed to which likely explains why the wily Mitch McConnell is doing the turtle thing, staying as far away from the negotiations as he can.  The slog ahead isn’t going to be pretty.  The debt crisis looms. Also looming is the 2024 presidential election.  Trump has started attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, asserting that DeSantis owes him for his support during his first run for the Governorship.  Trump is also lashing out at DeSantis for throwing shade at COVID vaccines, showing videos of him back when he celebrated the arrival of the vaccine in Florida.  DeSantis who so far hasn’t announced that he’s running even though everyone knows he is, slapped back, pointing out that unlike Trump, he won his reelection, by a landslide.  That’s a landslide that Floridians should really regret, given that DeSantis is using his position to wage a culture battle that will have a lasting impact on Florida’s educational institutions and ability to deal with future pandemics while doing little to deal with real life issues that should concern them, like housing and the affordability of flood insurance.  To one up DeSantis, Trump, who way back in the day cared little about LGBTQ issues, is now fully on the anti-transgender train.  Yesterday he released a video calling for Congress to pass a law banning gender-affirming care for minors nationwide.  His plan would punish medical professionals who provide such care by cutting them off from Medicare and Medicaid.  Additionally, he wants teachers or school officials who “suggest to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body” to face severe consequences. Are teachers telling kids that they’re in the wrong body one of those “frequent” problems that needs legislation? It’s only a matter of time before Nikki Haley, who is expected to announce that she’s running for president on February 15, one ups him.  After all she’s already on record saying that transgender inclusion will kill women’s sports and has recently taken to tweeting her disapproval of Critical Race Theory.  

And: The Matt Schlapp crotch grab situation is taking on steam.  The accuser who still hasn’t gone public is now suing Caroline Wren, a top conservative operative for defaming him.  Wren who most recently ran losing campaigns for Arizona gubernatorial wannabee/loony tune Kari Lake and RNC chair aspirant Harmeet Dillon who lost to Ronna Romney McDaniel has been disclosing the Schlapp accuser’s names in tweets and claiming that he was fired from multiple jobs “for lying and unethical behavior” and for “being a habitual liar.” Really, does anyone in the Republican party thinks that being a habitual liar is a bad thing?