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.