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.