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.