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.