The Mouse That Roared 🌻 🌻 🌻

Cue the Confetti: For a while it looked like Trump’s 🤡 🤡 indictment was never going to happen but it turns out that those scoops about the NY Grand Jury slinking away on vacation were way off the mark and that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is better at keeping things under wraps than he’d been given credit for because, finally, Trump has been indicted for something, though we’re still not sure of the details, and if we’re lucky, it’s the beginning of a trend.  Apparently, the NY indictment isn’t because silencing a porn star and a playmate in the run up to an election and screwing around with financial statements to hide those payments is illegal but rather it’s the furtherance of a witch hunt led by George Soros and implemented by his black puppet Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.  Of course, Soros is not responsible, and Bragg is no one’s puppet but that’s the go to anti-Semitic, racist trope that Trump and his large, pathetic echo chamber are using to explain away the “un-American” persecution of “your favorite president.”  That echo chamber includes presidential wannabee Ron DeSantis who behind closed doors has been telling the donor class that he should be their candidate because hush money Trump is both damaged goods and a loser but out in the open is so desperate to keep in the good graces of Trump’s base that immediately after the indictment went public he tweeted “Florida will not assist in any extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with the Soros backed Manhattan prosecutor.”  To drive that anti-Semitic part home, DeSantis repeated the reference to Soros twice in his tweet.  Mike Pence, the obsequious VP Trump wanted lynched, called the indictment an “outrage.”  Nikki Haley called it more about revenge than justice. Trump/Margie Q pawn Kevin McCarthy warned that the House would hold Bragg to account and NY Congresswoman Elise Stefanik who’s been known to call Bragg “a Soros backed woke prosecutor” this time called him a socialist while directing supporters to Trump’s fundraising website because grifters have got to grift and anyway, she’s hoping for a VP nod. Not to be outdone, Lindsey Graham took to Fox to also beg viewers to send Trump their hard-earned cash. The current expectation is that Trump won’t avail himself of DeSantis’s offer, maybe because that would strand him in Florida, and he never spends summers in Florida, and will instead turn himself in on Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan.  Even before the indictment went public NY police started prepping for the occasion but this is New York so maybe they should also get the Sanitation Department on board because there might be more confetti tossers than demonstrators.   By the way if your BINGO card had Trump’s indictment being revealed at the same time that the Gwyneth verdict came in buy a lottery ticket because you may be on a streak.  In case you missed it Gwyn was found 100% blameless.  If you have no idea what I am talking about, your news feed is classier than mine.    

Mouse Wars 🐭 🐭: Alvin Bragg isn’t the only one who knows how to keep a secret, it turns out that the Mouse is stealthy too.  Mickey and his friends at Disney have skilled lawyers and a good sense of humor.  Right before being dethroned by DeSantis, the Disney controlled former members of the Reedy Creek Development Board signed the Board’s power over to Disney and did that right in public pursuant to the state’s Sunshine law.   As a result, the five new members of the board appointed by DeSantis to punish Disney for speaking out against the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law have been rendered powerless.  Because Disney is all about princes and princesses, and also because of the common law rule against perpetuities, the power transfer agreement that ceded control to the clever Disney mice squad won’t expire until twenty-one years after the death of the last heir of King Charles, and by King Charles, we’re talking Will and Harry’s dad and George, Charlotte, Louis, Archie and Lilibet’s grandfather and so on and so on. I know nothing about how the rule against perpetuities works so I am probably missing some of the legal nuance here but who doesn’t love the Magic Kingdom citing a real King to screw a Governor who sees himself as all-powerful and whose wife is so obsessed by Disney that her sartorial taste includes princess dresses.  Did I mention that Ron and his wife Casey were married at Disney World?  Anyway, DeSanctimonious isn’t happy about Disney’s legal maneuvers and is now looking into legal remedies.  #TeamMickey! 

Health and Media Matters: Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s still hasn’t issued that anticipated ruling against the legality of the abortion drug mifepristone but another like-minded Texas federal District Court Judge, Reed O’Connor, took a chunk out of the Affordable Care Act this week by striking down the provision that requires most insurers to cover preventative services like screenings for cancer, diabetes, and mental health issues. O’Connor’s decision could affect as many as 168 million people since it blocks the enforcement of the preventative coverage requirement nationwide. This wasn’t O’Connor’s first attempt to kill the ACA, four years ago in a decision that was overruled by the Supreme Court, he ruled that the entire ACA was unconstitutional because really why does anyone need health insurance and if they have any, why mandate life/cost saving preventative care? The Biden administration is expected to appeal ASAP.  Nothing much has changed at Fox so far, but things might soon. The judge overseeing the Dominion Voting Machines defamation lawsuit allowed Dominion to release some more implicating texts and emails and they, like previously released internal communications, reveal that Fox management knew that the assertions that Dominion’s machines were responsible for Trump’s loss were boldfaced lies but aired them because they didn’t want to lose viewers and revenues. Fox’s lawyers continue to say that the released texts have been curated to make the company look bad.  Legal pundits say that Fox is in a pickle, that the company has probably tried to settle with Dominion, but that Dominion is so sure of victory that they have refused all offers. We should know soon enough who is right since the case is scheduled to go to trial in early April, as in very soon.  Lastly, under the category of things leaders do when they’re both desperate and evil, Evan Gershkovich, a respected journalist for the Wall Street Journal, was arrested in Russia yesterday on trumped up espionage charges. The 32-year-old Gershkovich is an American citizen who emigrated to the US from Russia as a child.  A Russian speaker he’d been doing what journalists do, using his reporting and language skills to speak with Russians about life and the war.    

 

Rolling Sevens 🌻 🌻 🌻

Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun, Gun: We’re on a roll, 87 days into the year and already there have been 130 mass shootings and, no surprise, far too many of the Republican politicians who could do something about gun proliferation still refuse to acknowledge that the common denominator for the resulting carnage isn’t a dramatic increase in trans people, or the reading of Judy Blume books, or Critical Race Theory, or wokeness or anti-Christian hatred, or too many doors, or unarmed teachers, it’s the proliferation of guns.  Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett came right out and said, we’re never going to fix “horrible, horrible” gun violence because criminals are going to be criminals, at least that’s what his “daddy” told him he learned from his fight with the Japanese during WWII, that if “somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.”  Burchett, who doesn’t worry about school shootings all that much because he home schools/indoctrinates his kids, is apparently unaware that we stopped fighting the Japanese a long time ago and that Japan doesn’t have school shootings because they mostly ban guns.  Then there’s Nashville Congressman Ogles, the one who falsely claimed to be an economist, an officer of the law, and an expert in sex trafficking, despite the killing of seven, six innocents and the shooter, at the Covenant School in his district, he doesn’t regret his Christmas card, the one showing his wife and kids hugging automatic weapons, because why should he? Naturally, Missouri Senator/fist bumper Josh Hawley blamed the Nashville shooting on anti-Christian hatred because it took place in a Presbyterian school, as opposed to a public school, synagogue or mosque as if that never happens and Ohio’s JD Vance blamed it on the extreme left for giving into trans ideology and allowing the use of all those awful pronouns because this time around as opposed to all the other times, the shooter identified as a transperson.  Keeping with that theme, Margie Q, took to Twitter to call for a “Trans Day of Vengeance,” something that even Elon Musk who’s been known to indulge in anti-trans humor thought was over the top, her Congressional Twitter account has been suspended for 7 days, but not to worry, she still has access to her personal account. Weirdly enough, or maybe an indication that she still has political aspirations, Liz Cheney took to Twitter to endorse NBC’s Jenna Bush Hager’s comment that instead of focusing on banning books we should focus on making kids safe by “stopping the horrific gun violence in our schools.” Then again Cheney used to be part of the guns for everyone problem and her father and Hager’s father allowed the Clinton era legislation banning assault weapons to expire.  Have her views really changed?  Who knows but credit to Bush Hager, her views probably have. 

Indictment Watch:  Another week, so far no indictments and, despite Trump’s claims, it’s unlikely that there will be any by week’s end which isn’t to say that there hasn’t been some card shuffling.  Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg called in another witness to testify in front of his grand jury,  His newest testifier wasn’t a new witness, it was the National Enquirer’s “catch and kill” David Pecker who knows a thing or two about Trump paying off talkative porn stars.  Pecker may have been brought back in to corroborate convicted felon/former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s testimony, with Cohen’s testimony needing bolstering because he went to jail for lying about…..Trump’s crimes. Also, some progress on the Special Counsel Jack Smith front where federal district judge James Boasberg has ordered former VP Pence to testify in front of the grand jury about Trump’s conversations with him, the ones in which the mango maniac tried to get the fly landing field to undo the results of the last presidential election. No indication yet whether or not Flypaper Pence intends to appeal to the Supreme Court or whether Trump plans to do the same. I suspect you share my frustration with just how slow this whole Judicial process continues to be.  The clock is ticking and if things don’t accelerate, we’ll once again be back to one of those pre-election freeze periods.  As to freezes and the like, one person who really needs to speed up her proceedings is Fulton County DA Fani Willis.  It's highly likely that Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp will sign legislation allowing the removal of local DAs for not doing their jobs well or in the case of Willis for doing her job too well shortly and though that legislation won’t go into effect for a while, it could and probably is intended to impact Willis’ ability to do and keep her job.  

Mulligans:  Bibi Netanyahu has put his plans to rein in the independence of Israel’s Judiciary on hold for now, not because he wanted to but because of all those pro-Democracy demonstrations and also perhaps because of pressure from Washington, Israel’s Defense forces and a very nervous tech industry.  The debt ceiling clock is still ticking, louder than ever.  Speaker for the moment McCarthy sent President Biden a letter urging him to start “robust negotiations” but still hasn’t responded to Biden’s budget with the budget proposal that Congress is supposed to provide.  This standoff isn’t going in a positive direction.  Also not going anywhere good, is Twitter.  Elon Musk told his remaining employees that if he doesn’t fire them first and they stay on best behavior, and by best behavior maybe he means if they help him find the miscreant who leaked some crucial parts of Twitter’s proprietary code into the techno verse, they’ll qualify for a stock and option plan that values the company at $20 billion, less than half of the $44 billion that he paid for his broken toy.  Musk asserts that the still shrinking value shouldn’t concern employees because he's confident he can get the valuation up to $250 billion in no time at all.  Despite his Mensa membership, most analysts aren’t convinced of that, in fact they believe that Twitter’s current value is less than $10 billion and that even that is a stretch.  Chief Twit Musk plans to roll out his blue check redo on April 1, a fitting day for another cockamamie plan that isn’t likely to raise revenues or bring back fleeing advertisers.  Nothing much has changed at Fox where Sean Hannity just interviewed his best bud Trump. That may or may not change soon, Dominion Voting Machines is seeking to call most of Fox’s line up to testify in its lawsuit against Fox.  In addition to most of the anchors, that list includes board member Paul Ryan and Rupert Murdoch.  Also, fired Fox producer Abbey Grossberg who is suing the media company wants to Mulligan the deposition she previous gave about the network’s coverage of Dominion, saying that her testimony was heavily coached by Fox’s lawyers and not all that accurate.                

       

 

Wacko in Waco 🌻 🌻 🌻

 Cults and Cultists:  Watchers of HGTV know that Joanna and Chip Gaines of Fixer Upper and Magnolia Network fame are based in Waco, Texas. Their episodes which celebrate their impossibly cute family and unbelievably inexpensive rehabs of dated homes have gone far to improving the reputation of a town that was previously associated, at least outside of Texas, with the FBI siege that led to the death of David Koresh and his wacked out cult of anti-government, gun hoarding polygamists. Despite the Gaines’ best efforts, Waco is still attracting destructive gun loving, anti-deep state cultists, only now the cultist in chief is Donald Trump rather than David Koresh and as dangerous as Koresh was, at least he never had control of the nuclear football as Trump did and may have again if he has anything to say about it. While in Waco, Trump labeled Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the courts, at least the ones ruling against him, rather than Putin, Xi or Kim as the greatest threats to America. He also attacked that other Floridian, Ron DeSantis, governor of the state where discussing menstrual cycles may soon be illegal because once you go after books, periods are next?  Before going off to rally in Waco, Trump warned of “potential death and destruction” if he is indicted in the so-called hush money probe, one of a series of warnings and threats that led to one diehard cult member sending a threatening package of white powder to the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg but at least so far hasn’t resulted in any notable demonstrations in NYC, not counting the faux one staged for the newest Batman spinoff.  Penguins aside, Trump’s threats should be taken seriously, he’s nervous about impending indictments and he should be because his problems don’t just originate from New York as Special Counsel Jack Smith appears to be making progress with his investigation where a gaggle of former Trump officials, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Personnel Chief and aide John McEntee, personal aide Nick Luna, national security advisor Robert O’Brien, social media director Dan Scavino, Director of National Security John Ratcliffe, speech writer/advisor Stephen Miller, and Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli have been ordered to testify. Fani Willis and Fulton County still loom which likely explains why Trump’s House cultists, led by Kevin McCarthy, Gym Jordan and Margie Q, who together with Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz and wacko Dr. Ronny Jackson also appeared at his Waco rally, are threatening to pass legislation that would protect former presidents from being prosecuted for their crimes.

 

Senate Update: Mitch McConnell who is a threat to America but not in the way that Trump means, is out of rehab, finishing up his recovery at home in Kentucky.  He’s expected back in DC after the Easter break.  John Fetterman’s office reports that his stay at Walter Read is nearing its end and that he’ll be back in the saddle soon though they still haven’t said when.  No word though from Diane Feinstein as to when or even if she’ll be returning but one thing we do know is that California Congressman Ro Khanna will not be running for her seat. Yesterday he endorsed Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the 76-year-old African American progressive who is best known for being the only member of Congress to vote against authorizing the war in Afghanistan.  That endorsement frees Khanna from having to choose between the two announced candidates: Adam Schiff, who is currently leading in the polls and Katie Porter who currently trails Schiff by a significant margin.        

 

World on Fire: Ukraine is Ukraine and Vlad remains Vlad, now threatening to move tactical nukes to Belarus. France is still burning, a reaction to Prime Minister Macron’s decision to raise the country’s retirement age from 62 to 64.  That change puts France more in line with the US and most members of the EU while also responding to the reality of changing demographics, simply put: too few young people to support an aging population. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is what happens when you cross a Donald Trump with a Kevin McCarthy in a fractious parliamentary democracy with a barely there coalition government.  Like Trump, Bibi fears that losing his position, again, will result in him finally being jailed for his alleged crimes, like McCarthy he can only hold on to that power by placating the extremists in an already extreme hanging by a thread coalition.  As one of my former Israeli clients, a centrist former government official puts it, the insanity that’s going on in Israel right now “is a fight between those who want religious state that is controlled by them including full control of the courts.” Facing resignations, labor strikes, pushback from the US, and those impressively huge civil demonstrations Bibi appears to be freezing his plan to “rein” in the country’s fiercely independent judiciary, at least for now. Stay tuned.             

 

 

Holding Patterns🌻 🌻 🌻

Imminent?  Once upon a time imminent meant impending, as in about to happen; now it seems to mean someday, maybe if ever.  So, another week has passed and still no Trump indictment which probably shouldn’t be all that surprising because it was Trump who claimed the indictment was coming this week.  Naturally, Trump has raised more than one million dollars from his ardent followers with the warning that he was about to be handcuffed and perp walked out of Mar a Lago.  He has also further raised his diehard fans’ outrage levels, directing hate at Manhattan District Attorney who he is now calling a “Soros backed animal,” efficiently encapsulating racism and anti-Semitism into a mere three words. Also, because with Trump words, even inflammatory ones, are never enough, he also “truthed” an image of himself dangerously wielding a bat next to Bragg’s head just to make sure his motivated followers know how he wants them to react. Threatening a DA is a crime in NY not that Trump worries about the consequences of his crimes because so far there really haven’t been any.  Just a reminder George Soros is a Hungarian born Holocaust survivor whose continued existence infuriates the right largely because he is a very wealthy and generous contributor to the left leaning causes that they hate so much.  To be clear, they don’t mind rich people giving money to their causes, but rich people leaning left, that outrages them. It’s not just Trump who used racist tropes to insult Bragg, others Republican leaders did too, including, among others, Jim Jordan, Elise Stefanik and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis who all seem to think that pulling the Soros card is totally fine.  As to that maybe impending NY indictment, no one outside of Bragg’s office really knows why it didn’t happen this week though there’s been lots of speculation with Trump supporters suggesting that Bragg’s case was lethally damaged by the testimony provided by Giuliani compatriot, Robert Costello and others saying that Bragg either needed more time to call another witness to rebut Costello’s assertions or that he never planned to ask the grand jury to indict Trump this week anyway. None of that matters to the loathsome trio of Justice Committee Chair Gym Jordan, Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer who, likely because Trump told them to do so, sent Bragg a letter demanding that he testify before Congress about the inner workings of his “Soros” inspired investigation as well as the deliberations of the grand jury.  Bragg responded to that request with a big NO, schooling the three complicit nitwits on the Constitution pointing out that a Congressional committee may not inquire into matters which are reserved to the states, while also pointing out that in NYS grand jury deliberations are secret. With all the attention focused on Bragg and the timing of the “hush money” indictment, which is less about silencing a porn star and more about violating campaign finance law and illegal accounting practices, it would have been easy to miss that Special Counsel Jack Smith notched a few wins in the Federal courts this week.  He appears to have quickly convinced more than one judge that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran be required to hand over transcripts of and testify about his conversations with Trump in the Mar a Lago purloined documents case because helping your client lie, even if you didn’t know he was lying, is one of those things that allows prosecutors to pierce the veil otherwise protected by attorney client privilege. Curiously enough, while Corcoran is expected to testify today about Trump asking him to lie, he’s still representing Trump in his battle to prevent Mike Pence from testifying about their pre-January 6^th conversations.

Republican Fisticuffs: Trump is off to Waco Texas this weekend for one of his campaign rallies because who doesn’t rally at the site where Robert Koresh and his Branch Davidians had a 51-day violent standoff against Federal agents.  In the 20^th anniversary month of that standoff no less?  That’s the standoff that resulted in 80 deaths.  Trump hasn’t just been gearing up for his rally, he’s also been engaging in a social and verbal battle with Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who still hasn’t formally declared his run for the presidency.  Their exchanges are entertaining in a bizzarro world way and would be even more fun to watch if we could get a guarantee that neither would make it to the Oval Office.  DeSantis, who kind of walked back his earlier description of Ukraine’s fight for survival as a mere regional squabble by agreeing that Putin is an evil villain in a soft pedal interview with Fox’s Piers Morgan called out Trump’s chaotic approach to “presidenting” and his moral failures while saying that with him you’d get all of the awful policies and a whole lot of culture war “successes” without any of that chaos.  Trump responded to those swipes first by suggesting that DeSantis had engaged in dalliances with underage girls and maybe even some boys back in the day and then by detailing how despite his skill at spinning the success of his governorship, that DeSantis’s has really been rather crummy at his job.  The accusations about DeSantis’s moral failings have been around for a while, they’re unproven and ugly but right up Trump’s alley.  However, yesterday’s social media posting about DeSantis’ track record as governor which was clearly drafted by someone else appears to be largely accurate.  In it, Trump details how DeSantis embraced vaccines before he didn’t, how he embraced lock downs before he criticized them, that COVID deaths in Florida are among the highest in the country, that Florida’s crime statistics are among the worst in the country pointing out that the state ranks third in murder, aggravated assault, and rape.  He goes on to note that Florida ranks 30^th in education and childcare and 50^th in affordability and that DeSantis is all in on cutting Medicare and Social Security.  Trump has been gaining in the polls, a twisted side effect of those maybe never impending indictments, but in the event that he falters and loses the nomination to DeSantis, he has just handed Biden’s team some very potent talking points.  Points that don’t even mention DeSantis expanding the “don’t say gay” law that was supposed to just “protect” the youngest students through to 12^th graders, or the 6-week limit on abortions, or the fact that a Florida school just fired a principal for, horror of horrors, including a picture of Michelangelo’s “unclad” David statue in her Renaissance curriculum.       

Tick Tock Tik Tok: The debt ceiling still looms, Mitch McConnell has still not emerged from rehab, nor has John Fetterman or Diane Feinstein returned to the Senate. Tik Tok is skating on thin ice. And, my favorite story of the day, a portrait painted by a South American artist, one of those presidential gifts that Trump was supposed to leave with the National Archives but didn’t, has been located, discovered by a nosy hotel guest who was noticed it collecting dust in a Doral hotel yoga room.           

 

 

Come Protest For Me 🌻🌻🌻

Indictment, Indictment: House Republicans were in Orlando this weekend, holding their annual legislative retreat, itself an oxymoron because it’s not like they ever really legislate. Little was reported about the retreat because once again all things Trump dominated the airwaves. The former guy took to Truth Social to announce that he would be arrested on Tuesday and naturally he called for “protests to take our nation back,” a message that eerily mirrors the incitement he pushed in the run up to January 6.  Given his rallying cry, it’s not surprising that there are also reports that NY law enforcement officials are preparing for unrest in the event that Trump really is indicted this week. As to the timing of the likely indictment, only Trump is speaking out. DA Alvin Bragg’s office has not confirmed Trump’s statement because that’s not what DAs do.  It should surprise no one that Bragg, who Trump is now calling a woke George Soros funded leftist radical, has jumped to the top of the ever expanding Trump enemy’s list. Over the weekend it was reported that Trump’s team has asked the Manhattan grand jury hearing the Trump case to call in attorney Robert Costello who once worked with Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to offer evidence that they claim will contradict some of Cohen’s key testimony about the hush money payments at the center of this crime. For his part Cohen says he’s been told to be on standby to rebut Costello. It’s not clear what’s really going on but whatever is might delay the indictment but probably won’t stop it.  And of course the usual Republicans, including Margie Q are screaming and Kevin McCarthy is making it clear that he’s part of the problem. One more thing on Trump’s legal front, on her final day as Chief Judge of the DC Federal court Beryl Howell handed Special Counsel Jack Smith a win. She ruled against Evan Corcoran, another Trump lawyer, saying he had to hand over his notes and that and he couldn’t hide behind client lawyer privilege because lawyers can’t when they’re abetting a crime. The crime in question involves Corcoran writing and then telling another Trump lawyer Cristina Bobb to certify that Trump had turned over all the purloined Mar a Lago documents when he hadn’t.

Russia, Russia, Russia: A day after the International Criminal Court accused him of war crimes, soulless Putin traveled to occupied Mariupol where many of them were committed. China’s president Xi has just arrived in Moscow on a “mission of peace” which probably has little to do with peace though I’d like to be wrong. On that subject Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s has contributed $1 million of his ice cream money to an organization that espouses Putin’s Ukraine talking points while blaming the U.S. for Putin’s aggressive actions. Who had that on their BINGO card?

💰 🏦 🏦 : On the banking front UBS of Switzerland is taking over Credit Suisse, another casualty of years of not so great management and this year’s  rising interest rates. Doing their thing, FDIC regulators have sold part of Signature Bank to Flagstar, a subsidiary of New York Community band. Signs outside of Signature Bank branches are being changed as I write this. 

And: Florida’s Ron DeSantis has remained largely silent about Trump and his indictment problem, something that Steve Bannon find outrageous because, of course. However, the anti woke Governor has had a few things to say on another subject. He wants working folks in western Pennsylvania and Ohio to know that despite his Florida roots and his Ivy League education he’s really like them, not like any of those Floridians or at least not like the ones who speak other languages?  Is this your guy Florida? 

Raccoon Dogs 🌻 🌻 🌻

Indictments, Indictments: For years now, or maybe forever, we’ve been waiting for Trump to be indicted, for something or anything.  Our wait may be over soon, perhaps as early as this afternoon, that’s what many wishful pundits are saying. They may be right this time, at least that’s what Trump and his team seem to believe. Trump’s favorite whisperer, the NY Times’ Maggie Haberman, reports that he and his team have plans to go nuclear on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, the likely winner of the indictment sweepstakes, the moment an indictment is announced.  Borrowing a theme once pushed by the pre-conviction Michael Cohen, Joe Tacopina, one of Trump’s newest defense attorneys, recently appeared on MSNBC’s Ari Melber hour to combatively deny that Trump ever knew “horseface” Stormy Daniels, whose receipt of hush money in the run up to the 2016 election is expected to be the crime that earns Trump his first of what could be many indictments. And naturally, because the pundits need to do their thing, they’ve been all over the airwaves questioning whether it’s prudent for a payment to a porn star to be the first indictment out of the Trump gate while also predicting that such a nansy pansy indictment, or any indictment will rev up Trump’s base. Trump’s team isn’t just focused on Alvin Bragg, they’ve also started ramping up their attack of Florida Governor Ron DeSanctimonius which may explain yesterday’s Daily Beast reveal about Meatball Ron’s peculiar, or maybe just juvenile, eating habits.  In case you haven’t heard, not only does the dour Governor Ron sloppily stuff his mouth during staff meetings but he eats his chocolate pudding dessert sans utensils, scooping the gooey mess into his mouth using the three-finger method, a technique that makes Trump’s ketchup habits appear quaint. Gross, but that’s not what concerns me about Ron, rather I am more concerned about what he’s doing and saying: his “anti-woke” culture war, his anti-reproductive choice position, and his characterization of Ukraine’s battle against Russian aggression as a minor regional conflict. Some of the Republican base appears to be losing interest in him as well with some presidential polls showing an erosion in his popularity.  Also, his efforts to mold the mind of Florida’s college students took a hit yesterday when a federal appeals court refused to lift an injunction on his anti-woke bill put in place by another judge who called it “dystopian” while also saying that the First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.” As to the war between Russia and Ukraine, it’s concerning and getting worse but characterizing it as a mere regional altercation seems delusional.  

Curation: Somehow or other Tucker Carlson’s curated selection of January 6 videos missed the one that showed Capitol police hurriedly whisking Republican Senator Chuck Grassley to safety.  Grassley was then serving as president pro tem of the Senate, the third in line to the presidency. The rest of us only got to see that video this week after the Department of Justice released it in relation to the criminal case of QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley who Tucker wants us to believe was just another tourist roaming the Capitol in horns. Something else you probably won’t hear about on Tucker’s show is that new genetic data links the origin of the Coronavirus to raccoon dogs sold at the Wuhan market.  That newest nugget lends more credence to the virus originating from an infected animal rather than by the lab manipulation theory that the right prefers largely because it feeds their Fauci in cahoots with China fantasies. Not sure that we’ll ever know for sure how the virus came to be but being open to all possibilities and to the science seems like the right approach to take, no need to vilify Fauci.  One Chinese guy that probably deserves all the attention he’s getting, is Guo Wengui, the exiled Chinese billionaire who was arrested at his Sherry Netherland floor through apartment on Wednesday morning on charges related to wire, securities and bank fraud as well as money laundering.  Shortly after he was arrested a fire broke out in the apartment forcing FBI agents to leave while the FDNY did their thing.  Nothing but everything suspicious and weird about that. By the way, Guo Wengui is a financial benefactor of Steve Bannon and the owner of the yacht where Bannon was arrested for his build the wall fundraising scam.  

And:  Remember Truth Social, the Twitter wannabee founded by Trump’s media company?  Well, it’s usage is down from its previous anemic levels, it’s been laying off staff, has again lost its chief technology officer and its SPAC merger still hasn’t been approved.  Also, the ongoing federal criminal investigation into the Trump media company has been expanded to include possible money laundering linked to an $8 million loan with Russian ties because with Trump it’s always about Russia.  On a far more positive note, Biden’s plan to reduce the price of insulin appears to be working. Sanofi and Novo Nordisk are now capping prices of the lifesaving drug. Together with Eli Lily which earlier capped its prices, the three companies make up most of the US insulin market.  Tik Tok hasn’t been completely banned yet but if the administration gets its way, the company’s American arm will soon become a US owned company.  Then again, as Trump, who first floated that plan back when he was president learned, that’s easier said than implemented.  Kind of like putting out the bank contagion, that too isn’t so easy.  Yesterday, bank authorities in Switzerland provided problem child Credit Suisse with a $54 billion credit facility and here in the US a consortium of banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Truist stepped up to provide a $30 billion lifeline to bolster California’s First Republic Bank’s liquidity.  One more thing, keep an eye on Texas where Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is expected to issue a ruling soon on abortion drug mifepristone.  

Take a deep breath and enjoy the weekend. 

  

Prosthetics! 🌻 🌻 🌻

 

💰 💰 💰 Forget about COVID, the pathogen to worry about is the woke virus.  At least that’s the position being pushed by Fox and their Republican echo chamber. Naturally, their position is that Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed because their managements’ intense focus on wokeness distracted them from managing the business of banking.  To be clear, it wasn’t about having a mismatched investment portfolio, a concentrated depositor base made up of an unusually high percentage of accounts having large uninsured balances, or in the case of SVB, no risk manager for the better part of a year, it was all that wokeness and in Senator/Running Guy Josh Hawley’s words, a confidence that they were “too woke to fail.” There’s plenty of blame to pass around, but when the dust settles and the investigations are over, I am confident that the reason for the two banks’ failures will have nothing to do with too much wokeness, whatever wokeness is, but probably a lot to do with some combination of poor management, bad decisions, weakened regulations, a failure of oversight by some regulatory authorities, and a loss of confidence spurred on by a group of quick to run venture capitalists.  Wokeness, not so much.  As to those loosened regulations, the ones rolled back by a then gleeful Trump who marketed himself as the anti-regulation guy, he didn’t act alone, 17 Democratic Senators joined 50 Republican ones in supporting the regulatory rollback legislation, those Democrats mostly because of their reelection concerns. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, never one of those 17, is now pushing hard for the regulations to be put back in place but with the Republican led House, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.  By the way, the debt limit still looms. 

 

🌻 🌻 🌻 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who depending on who you ask is either the Republican’s Trump replacement or just the flavor of the month made it clear yesterday that he’s no fan of Biden’s Ukraine policy by telling Fox pundit/Vladimir Putin fanboy Tucker Carlson that “while the US has many vital interests….becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” Worth noting that’s a different position from the one he took back when he was a member of Congress advocating for more aid for Ukraine but that was before he was running for president and trying to lure away Trump’s base.  Putting aside that DeSantis’ comments bolster Putin while jeopardizing Ukraine and the NATO alliance, they aren’t shared by all Republicans. Several Republican Senators led by usual hawks Rubio and Graham but also including Wicker, Cramer, Thune, Tuberville, Kennedy, and Rounds criticized DeSantis’ remarks, calling them way off the mark with Graham saying the “Neville Chamberlain approach to aggression never ends well.”  Even Trump criticized him because though DeSantis’ position is the same as his, he doesn’t buy that it’s anything more than a craven attempt to glom on to his voters.  Trump is also going after Ron DeSanctimonius for calling for cuts in Medicare and Social Security, not that Trump cares about either but he does understand that his voters rely on both.  No comment from Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, probably because he’s out of the loop right now, no longer in the hospital but now in rehab recovering from a concussion and broken rib.  When not throwing shivers down the necks of Ukrainians fighting for their lives, DeSantis, a fierce opponent of that dire woke virus, continues to transform Florida into his personal Hungary.  Yesterday his office announced plans to revoke the Hyatt Regency Miami’s liquor license because management allowed a Drag Queen Christmas show to go forward in the presence of some minors. All of those minors were with their parents, but since DeSantis wouldn’t expose his little darlings to the horrors of Drag Queens and their “prosthetic female genitalia” they’re not allowed to either. To be clear, the Republican position is that regulation is bad unless it’s about eliminating things like wokeness or restricting reproductive rights which may explain why 25 South Carolina’s Republican lawmakers are proposing that the state’s criminal code be changed making anyone who gets an abortion eligible for the death penalty.  They plan to do that by redefining “person” to include a fertilized egg, giving it at the point of conception equal protection under the state’s homicide laws.  

 

2024 Preview:  One politician counting on DeSantis not being able to go the distance is Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin who has been meeting with big donors, trying to source 💰 for a potential run.  Youngkin positioned himself as a moderate while running for the governorship but immediately started pivoting right once in office because moderation doesn’t sell well with the wider Republican base.  Virginia governors can’t serve two consecutive terms, he has ambitions and will need another job at the end of his term so why not president or vice president? Pennsylvania Republican Doug Mastriano lost his 2022 gubernatorial run to Democrat Josh Shapiro by 15 or so points but that was then, and this is now so election denier Mastriano is gearing up to challenge incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey who is up for reelection is 2024.  Despite his poor performance in the statewide election Mastriano is leading another likely opponent, the more mainstream Republican hedge fund guy David McCormick who ran last time but lost to Mehmet Oz, by 18 points in the first Republican primary poll because Republican primary voters are who they are.  That’s a bummer for Mitch McConnell who can’t be happy because to retake the Senate, Republicans need more acceptable candidates and Mastriano is not one of them. And of course, George Santos, who is now also being investigated for masterminding a credit card crime scam that snared one of his former colleagues while also getting him deported back to Brazil, has filed for reelection.  Santos probably isn’t really running but for campaign finance purposes he had to announce the run or give back some fundraising proceeds he probably already spent.

 

Run For the Money 🌻 🌻 🌻 💰 💰 💰

Everything, Everywhere:  Money makes the world go round but only when depositors are convinced that the banks holding their 💰 are solvent so after closing California based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), bank regulators stepped in and closed New York based Signature Bank too.  Simplistically, SVB ran into trouble after the big kahunas in tech investing, whose clients relied on SVB for funding their tech businesses, sounded the alarm about the bank taking bigly losses on what appears to have been a treasury and mortgage security portfolio too long dated and inadequately hedged to withstand this year’s steep run up in interest rates.  Signature Bank, whose client base was made up of Real Estate companies including certain ones run by people named Kushner and Trump, and law and accounting firms had “diversified” by taking on crypto sector deposits just before that sector hit the skids. Whether Signature suffered from the same mismanaged treasury and mortgage portfolio that SVB suffered from became academic when their depositor base, freaked by what was happening at SVB, started heading for the doors too.  To control what was starting to look like a major bank contagion, Federal regulators decided Signature needed to be closed too.  The good news for depositors, even those with deposits above the FDIC $250,000 insurance threshold, is that they will be made whole.  The bad news for equity investors and debt holders is that their positions are circling the drain. Naturally there’s a lot of irony here as many of the tech venture capitalists, people like Peter Thiel who fed the SVB panic by being one of the first to withdraw funds from the bank and by encouraging the firms he had funded to do the same, are the very same people who back political candidates who hate big government and regulation but then again as one Tweeter put it there are “no atheists in a foxhole, no libertarians in a bank run” so don’t expect to hear them squawk too much about regulators cleaning up the mess that may have been partially caused by the loosening of bank regulations for mid-sized banks.  If anything, expect them to blame regulators for not acting sooner.       

Dumb and Dumber:  With so many eyes focused on the banking industry and some others focused on who wore what on the Oscars’ red carpet it would have been easy to miss that former VP Pence told the audience at the annual Gridiron dinner that “history will hold Trump accountable” for the horrible events of January 6. Contradicting the Tucker Carlson narrative, Pence went on to say that “tourists don’t injure 140 police officers by sightseeing, tourists don’t break down doors to get to the Speaker of the House or voice threats against public officials.” Nice words but Pence is still fighting Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena for him to testify in front of a grand jury because hypocrites are going to hypocrite. On the subject of hypocrites, more Fox texts and other communications keep on seeing the light of day as a result of the document dump from the Dominion Voting Machine defamation case against Fox.  In one of my favorites Alex Pfeiffer, a former producer of Tucker Carlson’s nightly diatribe show, called the “delicate dance” of not offending Fox’s viewers “surreal,” “like negotiating with terrorists, but especially dumb ones, Cousin f—king types, not Saudi royalty.”  

And:  Something is cooking over in Texas where a ruling that could overturn the FDA’s 20 plus year approval of abortion drug mifepristone is expected any day now.  Uber-conservative, anti-abortion judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday but over “security” concerns asked lawyers to sit on the notice about the meeting until Tuesday.  Hard to miss that a judge who may be about to upend women’s reproductive choices is “concerned” about the public learning about court schedules.  Reminiscent of SCOTUS getting all bent out of shape about the leak of its shattering Dobbs opinion. Here’s an idea, maybe the focus should be on leaving women’s reproductive choices intact rather than trying to hide?  Just saying.  As to reproduction, Colorado’s 36-year-old Congressperson Lauren Boebert’s 17-year-old son is about to become a father because maybe, just maybe prohibiting sex education comes with consequences.  Boebert, who dropped out of high school when she became pregnant with her first son, professed total glee about becoming a “gigi” saying that children having children is one of the great things that distinguishes rural America from those blue places where heathens can get abortions. Alternative fact or not, that sounds like something the about to become single Kellyanne Conway might say while discussing her made-up Bowling Green Massacre even though we know she’d keel over if one of her children followed the Boebert model.  Kellyanne and her husband George put to rest suspicions that their obvious differences about Trump were just a publicity grabbing act by announcing last week that they are getting a divorce. 

Wake Up 🌻 🌻 🌻

Salvos: If you are one of the truly wealthy people who President Biden wants to see pay more in taxes, don’t fret.  His ambitious budget plan is only aspirational. It’s more about messaging than anything else because he knows that most, if not all, of his proposed tax increases won’t happen, not with the current Republican led House, not even in a Democratic led House and that’s not even considering that he would have to get those increases passed in the Senate where several of the Democrats’ most vulnerable Senators are up for reelection this cycle. Biden’s plan is an opening salvo. The ball is now in Speaker McCarthy’s hands to respond.  He is supposed to counter with a plan of his own so that budget negotiations can begin.  Well, at least that’s the way it usually works.  Unfortunately, it’s not clear that McCarthy, who has no real control over his caucus and no experience legislating, has anything close to a reasonable counter plan because proposing dramatic cuts in Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, food stamps and other social programs isn’t going to fly, not even with his fractious majority some of whom come from swing districts that Biden won in 2020.  The bottom line is that Kevin’s crowd is unlikely to agree on much of anything, a bigly problem because the debt ceiling looms and though raising the debt limit should be independent of agreeing upon a budget, McCarthy wants to use budget negotiations as a cudgel to get Biden on board to some of his cuts.  Regarding bigly, problems, it looks like that hush payment, the one that Trump had his former lawyer Michael Cohen make on his behalf to porn star Stormy Daniels in the run up to the 2016 election is about to bite him in the butt.  Yesterday afternoon the NY Times reported that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has invited Trump to testify in front of his grand jury, inviting targets to testify is what NY District Attorneys do right before they proceed to an indictment.  If the NY Times is right, Bragg will beat Georgia’s Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith to the punch, becoming the first to indict Trump and while making payments to a porn star pales in comparison to trying to upend an election, it’s something and was enough to land Michael Cohen in jail.

The Sick List:  Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has joined Senators Diane Feinstein and John Fetterman on the Senate disabled list.  He fell while attending a dinner for his leadership PAC and is now hospitalized, receiving treatment for a concussion. The 81-year-old McConnell, who had polio years ago, falls more often than most people so it’s likely that his fall wasn’t caused by another health ailment, not that he is the healthiest specimen or that any details have been provided.  Senator Feinstein hasn’t returned to Washington, but she has been released from the hospital where she was being treated for shingles.  Senator Fetterman hasn’t returned to the Senate yet either, but he appears to be improving.  He’s been engaging with staff on Senate business. CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp isn’t hospitalized but he may wish that he was, on an island far, far away, as his accuser has come out from the shadows. The accuser is long term political aide Carlton Huffman who twelve years ago was involved with a white supremacist radio program and website. While that might be a disqualifier for some jobs, in CPAC land that kind of background is probably not all that unusual, maybe even a plus, still Schlapp is using it to impugn the accusations against him or as justification for engaging in sexual harassment?  Schlapp may not be the only prominent Republican trying to hide things.  Shortly after Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced that he would sign a bill criminalizing public drag shows a high school yearbook photo of him dressed in drag started circulating. He’s not the only hypocrite in Tennessee, his Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally has been “liking” provocative pictures posted by one of his gay constituents for years. McNally’s explanation is that just because he supports anti-LGBTQ legislation doesn’t meant that he hates gay people; after all Randy is his first name.  Count Jenna Ellis, the lawyer who teamed up with Rudy Giuliani to push Trump’s election lies as another hypocrite. She was censured by a disciplinary judge in Colorado on Wednesday for making false statements about the 2020 election. She signed a stipulation admitting that several of the comments she made about having evidence the election was stolen violated professional ethics rules barring reckless, knowing or intentional misrepresentations by attorneys. Ellis doesn’t appear to have changed her stripes at all, yesterday she issued a statement calling the Colorado censure “politically motivated from the start from Democrats and Never Trumpers” who “ultimately failed to destroy me and failed in their attempt to deprive me of my bar license.”  Judging by that statement she’s learned nothing which isn’t all that surprising given that her hero, Trump is seeking another term and says he'll keep doing so indicted or not.  Ellis for Attorney General?

And:  Don’t tell Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley who are both campaigning on eradicating the “woke virus” but It turns out that according to a USA Today/IPSOS poll 56% of us have a positive association with the term “woke,” understanding it to mean being informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices. Like just about everything else these days or maybe always, opinions on “woke” are different depending on where you stand politically: 56% of Republicans say that “wokeness” means being overly politically correct, while 78% of Democrats understand the term as being informed on social justice issues.  By any definition, California Governor Gavin Newsom is among the woke.  He announced that he’s ordered California officials to not renew an expiring $54 million contract with Walgreens to purchase certain drugs for California’s prison health system.  Given the size of California’s economy, its buying power is huge. By dunking on Walgreens, Newsom is making it clear that its decision to deprive women of critical reproductive medicine has economic consequences.   

Brain Freeze🌻 🌻 🌻

Fox Trumpery:  The online Thesaurus includes Trumpery as one of its twelve synonyms for “deception.”  Given the latest dump of selected emails, texts, and depositions from the Dominion Election Machine defamation case against Fox and Tucker Carlson’s bizarrely deceptive exposé about the January 6 Capitol invasion maybe it’s time to add Tuckery and Ruperty to that list?  The newly released lawsuit information reveals more about how Rupert Murdoch, others in Fox management and the network’s hosts knew that Trump and his Kracken lackeys’ assertions that the outcome of the 2020 presidential race was corrupted by the Dominion machines were lies, crazy ones at that.  They also reveal that some at Fox were looking forward to being rid of Trump.  One of those looking forward to Trump-free days was Tucker Carlson who texted “we are very very close to being able to ignore Trump…I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately…I can’t handle much more of this.”  Of course, that’s the same Tucker who has spent the past few nights airing selected snippets of the video of the January 6 riot at the Capitol exclusively gifted to him by Kevin McCarthy, part of their efforts to rewrite history by characterizing the marauders, those nice people who broke in, bashed heads, peed and defecated inside the seat of government, as innocents.  Tucker’s efforts, abetted by McCarthy, may be working with some Fox viewers, but they’re not going over well with some of his usual fans including more than a few Republican lawmakers including Senators Mitch McConnell, John Kennedy, Mitt Romney, Thom Tillis, John Thune, Chuck Grassley and Kevin Cramer among others.  Tillis spared no words, calling Carlson’s characterization of the insurrection bull sh-t while Cramer said, “breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the US Capitol against borders of police is a crime.” Thomas Manger, the usually apolitical Chief of the Capitol Police expressed his ire with Carlson in a strong worded memo to his officers where he called Tucker out for “conveniently” cherry-picking from the “calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video to incorrectly portray the violent assault as more akin to a peaceful protest” while also slamming him for making a “disturbing accusation” about Brian Sicknick, the officer who died the day after the January 6 assault. Contradicting Carlson’s claim, Manger also said that he had not approved what Carlson shared.  McConnell referred the press to Chief Manger’s memo, saying he was team Capitol Police. Of course, Kevin McCarthy doubled down on his decision to share the video with Carlson and had no problem with Tucker’s misleading editing of his “exclusive” cache.  Most members of the House had little to say, except of course Margie Q who is working with Oversight Chair James Comer to lead a committee trip to the prison where some of the January 6 invaders are being held to shed light on the injustice of them being punished for their crimes. Perhaps Senators Josh Hawley and Mike Braun will join her as they were among the few Senators who had no problem with Tucker’s broadcast.  It’s doubtful he’ll go but maybe Trump too as defending the marauders would fit in well with his grievance filled, retribution campaign particularly since everyone knows he’ll pardon all of them if he ever makes it back to the Oval Office.

Blueprint? Ron DeSantis appears to be on a roll.  Sure, his presidential poll numbers aren’t great, at least so far, but he’s having a grand ole time hawking his pre-announcement book, The Courage to be Free, Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, and bragging about his accomplishments in Florida.  And to be fair he has accomplished a lot in Florida, turning the one-time swing state into a Hungary south.  During his state of the state message, DeSantis made it clear that he’s not done because as he bragged “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”  Among the items on his plate, DeSantis says he’ll sign the six-week abortion ban legislation percolating through the state’s Republican super majority legislature when it hits his desk, turning Florida where the current law restricts abortions after 15 weeks into even more of a hell hole for women.  He also wants to roll back gun ownership limitations, allowing for permit-less carry while also expanding the restrictions in his don’t say gay law through eighth grade. Clearly, he’s trying to outdo Texas where five women are now suing, saying that the state’s restrictive abortion ban and the fear that it has stoked in the medical community among doctors who are knowingly withholding lifesaving treatment over concerns that providing such care will lose them their licenses or land them in jail, has put their lives and future fertility in jeopardy.  Frankly, the DeSantis as Republican savior thing is baffling, at least to me. I get that his extreme views appeal to the right wing of the Republican Party, but a number of those people are solid Trumpers as evidenced by a New Hampshire poll released this morning that shows Trump leading him by 41 points so it’s not clear how he’ll win enough of them over in the primaries.  It’s also not clear that his culture war tactics will appeal to those independents who voted for Biden in 2020 in the general election, especially those who care about reproductive rights, but then again, I never understood Trump’s appeal so take my observations with a grain of salt.  As to Trump, he may be about to pull one over on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as the Georgia legislature appears to be close to passing legislation that will allow for the removal of County Attorneys they deem too liberal and Governor Kemp says he’ll sign that bill when it crosses his desk.  Allegedly the bill is intended to deal with local attorneys who are too soft on crime but it’s hard not to get that their concern about crime wouldn’t extend to going after Willis for her prosecution of the biggest criminal of all, in fact it would provide a handy cover for ridding Trump of one of his biggest foils. By the way, getting rid of local district attorneys is a practice successfully implemented by Ron DeSantis, who got rid of a state attorney who said he wouldn’t enforce the state’s current 15-week abortion ban.  Getting back to the New Hampshire poll, Trump didn’t just trounce DeSantis he also left third place finisher popular NH Governor Chris Sununu, in the dust.  Sununu is one of those that mainstream Republicans, to the extent that there are any left, would like to see run for president and though he still might, he also might decide to bow out at least until 2028, following in the footsteps of Maryland’s Larry Hogan, another Republican who knows he doesn’t have a chance at unseating Trump, especially in a crowded field.     

Tweet Shaming:  Elon Musk is doing more of the same.  Yesterday he got into a very public Twitter feud with a now former employee Halli Thorleifson. The Finland based Thorleifson, better known as Halli, was locked out of his company account last week but couldn’t get anyone in Human Resources, possibly because there’s no one left in HR but that’s a separate issue, to confirm that he’d been fired so he took to Twitter to get a confirmation of his employment status.  For some reason Musk thought that it was okay to mock the wheelchair bound Halli who has muscular dystrophy, by calling him out for the limitations caused by his disease.  Musk didn’t come out as the better man and by the end of the day backed down on his sh-it-posting. That said Musk might have enjoyed the distraction that his battle with Halli provided because it was better than the news that because Twitter has so few remaining engineers, Monday’s Twitter outage was the result of only one engineer supervising a system update. Is anyone else relieved that the FDA refused to sign off on Elon’s Neuralink company’s plans to start testing its neural lace implants in live human subjects’ brains?                  

 

Stud Muffin 🌻 🌻 🌻

The 🤡 🤡 Car: The CPAC conference went about as expected this weekend.  Trump gave a ninety plus minute grievance speech, mostly made up of his usual lies.  Among those, he claimed that his administration had the best jobs record ever.  It didn’t.  He claimed that he’d finished the wall, he didn’t.  He asserted he’d won the 2020 election. Nope. He said that he stopped NATO from imploding.  Not only didn’t he do that, but withdrawing from NATO was top on his second term agenda.  The list goes on and on, but you get the picture. He also said that he will stay in the presidential race even if indicted, which he likely will be and refused to confirm that he’d support any other Republican candidate if he doesn’t win the party’ nomination.  Naturally, he called out everyone not named Trump as a RINO, globalist or worse.  Not that it means much, but Trump went on to win the CPAC presidential straw poll, trouncing second place candidate Ron DeSantis, who wasn’t there but who did speak in front of the Conservative Club for Growth though he avoided press questions because he doesn’t like free press,  62% to 20%.  Third place went to some businessman named Perry Johnson who attempted to run for governor in Michigan but was blocked from participating in the state’s primary. Notably Johnson’s 5% showing placed him ahead of fourth place finisher Nikki Haley who spoke at the conference to a lukewarm, small audience, she got 3% of the vote.  A long list of others, including Mike Pompeo who also attended and spoke and had the gumption to point out that the national debt ballooned by $6 trillion under Trump proving that he wasn’t a real conservative, received 1% or less.  Maybe because she called Steve Bannon a patriotic stud muffin or maybe because the crowd at CPAC is just who they are, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake who still hasn’t conceded her loss won the VP poll with 24% of the vote, beating DeSantis with 14% and Haley with 10%.  Naturally, there were lots of culture warriors in attendance with one right wing commentator, Michael Knowles, calling for the eradication of transgender people, because what’s a little genocide among the pro-life crowd?  And although accused harasser Matt Schlapp banned white supremacist Nick Fuentes from attending CPAC due to his hateful rhetoric, anti-Semitism reared its ugly head in Michigan where a heavily armed man was arrested for targeting Jewish government officials including State Attorney General Dana Nessel.  

The Supremes:  At least for now, the Supreme Court might punt on a North Carolina election case.  That’s a good thing because there was a risk that the conservative dominated SCOTUS might rule in favor of the “independent state legislature theory,” which would allow state legislatures to override the result of federal elections in their states.  However, SCOTUS’s reason for punting the case has more to do with what’s going on in North Carolina where Republicans have regained a majority on the state’s Supreme Court than disdain for the idea that in a democracy a state legislature should be allowed to toss out the results of a legitimate election.  The North Carolina court is now planning to revisit the election law case, decided when the Republican judges were in the minority, that was the subject of the appeal to SCOTUS so the outcome could still be bad for North Carolina but at least for now not have a nationwide impact.  SCOTUS is however, expected to rule on the legality of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. The Court could rule that the none of the plaintiffs in either of the cases argued last week have standing to sue the administration for forgiving student loans.  Though it’s likely they will reach that conclusion in at least one of the cases, the expectation is that  that they will issue a ruling on the other case, concluding that the HEROES Act passed after 9.11 which gives the Secretary of Education the authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs” wasn’t intended to allow for the broad student loan forgiveness plan that the Biden administration wants implemented.  SCOTUS is expected to base its conclusion on the “major questions doctrine” which holds that “courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations that concern questions of vast economic or political significance.”  Basically, the doctrine, an invention of the Roberts led court that was used to limit the EPA’s authority to do its job in the West Virginia v EPA case, requires that agencies have clear Congressional authorization on major issues to “promote democratic accountability” and to avoid “entangling the judiciary in political questions.”  The irony being that the doctrine is doing exactly what it claims the courts shouldn’t do, making political decisions something that was made clear by the questions about equity and the like made by some of the Justices during last week’s arguments. Also ironic is that a ruling against Biden’s student loan plan is likely to further polarize the electorate.       

Fox and Friends: The Dominion Voting Machines defamation case against Fox is scheduled to go to court in April and things continue to look bad for Fox.  Over the weekend the NY Times detailed some of the conversations that went on at Fox News and the panic that ensued after they enraged Trump by being the first to call Arizona for Biden in November of 2020, a decision that turned out to be both prescient and bold.  Instead of celebrating the accuracy of their advanced prediction modeling, management and just about all the hosts at Fox, including Brett Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two who are supposed to be Fox’s straight shooters as if there is such a thing,  grew increasingly concerned that being both first and right about the election’s outcome was costing them viewers who only wanted to hear that Trump had trounced Biden even though he clearly hadn’t.  The fear over alienating viewers and losing money won out over presenting facts, leading to Fox’s decision to let its hosts push the lies they all knew were lies about Dominions machines flipping votes from Trump to Biden and the like.  It also led to Fox firing the members of its well-respected Decision Desk and the dumping of its new high quality, accurate election model.  All to chase profits.  It’s not just about Dominion, Smartmatic is also out there waiting its turn to sue as are a lot of stockholders who aren’t going to be all that happy about seeing Fox make large payouts to plaintiffs. So maybe fun times ahead for the Murdochs.  

Reproductive Rights?  In response to threats from Republican Attorneys General Walgreens has said that it will not distribute the abortion pill mifepristone in 21 states. To be clear that is not kosher or medically appropriate and is likely to impact a lot of women trying to make their own reproductive decisions as well as those going through miscarriages but that doesn’t appear to be a concern for any of them.  Notably one of those states is Kansas, where the electorate recently voted to keep abortion legal. By the way New Yorkers, to the extent you are wondering how you can protest the Walgreens decision, our local Duane Reades are owned by Walgreens.  Just saying.  Sadly, the ban on mifepristone may be about to go nationwide, or at least it might if the anticipated ruling from Texas District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryck is handed down soon. It’s feared that Kacsmaryck will rule that the FDA never should have approved mifepristone, even though the drug was approved 20 years ago and is considered both safe and effective.           

And: The Texas Republican Party has voted to censure GOP Representative Tony Gonzales who represent Uvalde, Texas.  Their gripe is that Gonzales voted in favor of gun safety and legislation protecting same sex marriage. Censuring Gonzales opens him up for a primary challenge. Then there’s Don Jr who called Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman a vegetable this weekend, has he considered his own limitations? And of course, there’s always something out of Florida where a local legislator has introduced a bill requiring that bloggers criticizing a politician should have to register first with the government or face suitable penalties. Very Putin/Orban like and so dystopian that even Newt Gingrich called it insane.              

Shifting Puzzles🌻 🌻 🌻

 The Injured List:  Another Democratic lawmaker is in the hospital.  Yesterday, California Senator Diane Feinstein who was notably absent from a Senate Judiciary meeting this week, revealed that she is currently hospitalized in San Francisco being treated for shingles. Though very painful, shingles rarely kills but it can lead to pneumonia which can be lethal especially for 89-year-olds.  The frail Feinstein who isn’t running for reelection says that she expects to be back in Washington in a few weeks which probably makes California’s Governor Newsom’s life easier because he probably would prefer to let the electorate decide which of the many Democrats seeking her seat get it, well at least he should prefer to let them decide. Though Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman remains hospitalized, he appears to be gearing up for his return to the Senate. Yesterday he tweeted that he’s joined a bipartisan group of senators co-sponsoring legislation aimed at preventing future freight train derailments. In a rare show of unity, that legislation was introduced by Ohio’s two Senators, Republican newbie JD Vance and up for reelection in 2024 Democrat Sherrod Brown.  Not sick but maybe about to claim his bad behavior and lying was due to the brain tumor he never had, or the pain killers he was taking for the knee replacements he also never had, Congressman of many names George Santos is finally being probed by the House Ethics Committee which unanimously voted to open an investigation into his sundry crimes. Beau Biden died several years ago from a brain tumor that may have been caused by his exposure to burn pit toxins during his time in the military which should make him untouchable but then again it’s 2023 and if we’ve learned anything it’s that there are a large number of shameless politicians, most though probably not all of them on the right side of the aisle, which explains but does not justify why House Oversight Chair James Comer thought it was okay to express disappointment that Beau who had served as Delaware’s Attorney General never faced criminal charges over a state political scandal in which he was found to have done nothing wrong. Not surprisingly, Comer’s totally out of line remark didn’t go over well in the White House, nor did it please veteran’s groups, though his fellow Republicans have said nothing. Then there’s Trump, another one who still hasn’t suffered the consequences of his many bad acts, the Department of Justice said yesterday that he can be sued by injured Capitol Police officers and Democratic legislators over the January 6th insurrection because “no part of a President’s official responsibilities includes the incitement of imminent private violence” as “such conduct plainly falls outside of the President’s constitutional and statutory duties.” All that comes as a surprise to Trump who took leadership tips from the likes of Putin and Xi.

 

Wray’s Way:  Count the FBI as another Federal Agency believing that COVID 19 “most likely” resulted from a “potential” Wuhan lab leak. According to Director Chris Wray, the FBI has a moderate level of confidence in that conclusion, which makes them a little more confident than the Department of Energy which has only a low level of confidence in the lab leak theory as opposed to all the other intelligence agencies who still think with various levels of confidence that the virus originated in the wild. To be clear, so far at least, no one, well no one other than a whole crowd of conspiracy theorists, and maybe author Dan Brown whose Inferno book was all about a mad scientist unleashing a population control virus upon the world, think that the Chinese intentionally foisted the virus upon all of us.  Assuming the Washington Post’s latest reveal is accurate and there’s no reason to think that it isn’t because at least one of its authors Carol Leonnig appears to have really good sources in the intel community, Wray’s got some problems within his ranks.  WashPo reports that last summer there was a “tense showdown” between some senior FBI agents and the DOJ over how best to retrieve the government documents that Trump had with him at Mar a Lago with the agents believing that asking Trump nicely to return the documents and then taking his lawyers’ assurances that he had turned all of them over despite evidence on video that the purloined documents were being moved around Mar a Lago like pieces in a shifting puzzle game was far preferable to “raiding” the premises.  As we know, largely because Trump told us and keeps telling us about the “raid,” the DOJ finally prevailed over the reluctant FBI agents but the delay caused by the dispute ultimately benefited Trump by slowing down the investigation, giving him time to declare his run for the presidency, the action which led Attorney General Garland, who was close to making an indictment decision, to punt the whole investigation to Special Counsel Smith.  It’s not clear if the FBI Agents who opposed the so-called raid did so because of their personal political leanings and their affinity to Trump or whether they feared suffering the kind of career ending repercussions that others who have crossed Trump have experienced or both but whatever, their forceful pushback against the DOJ was unusual.  Worth noting that several of the senior FBI agents who were team Trump have since retired.   

And: It looks like President Biden is winning the insulin war. First he managed to include a provision in last term’s Inflation Reduction act that capped out of pocket insulin charges for Medicare recipients at $35 per month,  Though he wasn’t able to extend that protection to other diabetics patients, it looks like he managed to shame Eli Lilly, the country’s largest producer of insulin to slash their prices by 70%, placing a cap of $35 a month on patients who rely on Humulog and Humulin, two of its commonly used insulin products. Pressure is now on the country’s other two largest insulin suppliers, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi who together with Lilly make up 90% percent of the US market, to do the same. By the way, the Republican party line, best or should I saw worst, expressed by Florida Senator Rick Scott is that the wily and nefarious Biden cut Medicare funding by lowering the cost of insulin, a truly bizarre way of characterizing that the Inflation Reduction Act saved Medicare money by reducing the cost of insulin. Double speak at its worst, well almost at its worst.  According to the NY Times, the first three witnesses called to testify privately before the House committee on the “weaponization” of the federal government are a group of aggrieved former FBI officials who traffic in right-wing conspiracy theories, don’t qualify as whistleblowers, and who are receiving financial support from Trump ally and former Trump official Kash Patel. Lastly, one reason that Florida autocrat Ron DeSantis, who appears to be modeling his approach to education and governance on Hungary’s Viktor Orban, hasn’t formally announced his very obvious run for the presidency is that current Florida law would require him to step down from the governorship upon his announcement so first he’ll have to get his all too friendly legislature to change the law, something he will most definitely be able to do because they do whatever he wants. DeSantis will be speaking at the uber-conservative Club For Growth Florida retreat this week as he’s their newest fave.  Trump was not invited.

  

It's Not Easy Being Green 🌻 🌻 🌻

The Big Lie: More of the depositions given in the Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox have been released and they provide further evidence that just about everyone at Fox News, including Rupert Murdoch, others in senior management, members of the company’s board and on-air hosts knew that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were false but pushed them anyway, concerned that calling them out as fake would depress ratings and profits by sending Trump infatuated viewers to Newsmax and OANN.   Notably, Murdoch admitted that his hosts, including Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo endorsed the cockamamie assertions about the so-called “Hugo Chavez” Dominion machines flipping votes from Trump to Biden even though he “would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing” all that as he was always “dubious” of Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. Murdoch also said he knew it was wrong to let Tucker Carlson host election conspiracist Mr. Pillow Mike Lindell but did nothing to stop Tucker because the Pillow pusher spends boatloads of moolah on Fox ads.  To make that point clear Murdoch added “It is not red or blue, it is green.” Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, now a Fox board member, repeatedly warned Rupert and his son Lachlan to stop allowing the spread of election lies warning that many of those who thought the election had been stolen did so “because they got a diet of information telling them the election was stolen from what they believe were credible sources.”  Of course, the not so principled Ryan didn’t step down in protest over Fox’s refusal to stop airing election lies, because he too appreciates the value of the “green.” This is all relevant because to prevail in their lawsuit Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information but that it did so knowingly. Though the depositions released to date appear to show that Dominion has done that, the Fox position is that what’s been released so far is one sided. It’s hard to see how there’s a lot of “both sides” here but that’s their public position and proving defamation against a media outlet is hard.  Moving away from who knew what when, the depositions also reveal that in 2020 Rupert Murdoch gave his good buddy Jared Kushner “confidential information” about Biden’s ads, a preview before they became public along with “debate strategy.” According to the NY Times, at most news organizations that would result in an investigation and disciplinary measures, but Fox is Fox and Murdoch does what he wants, so there’s that. Regarding debates, RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel is once again insisting that only candidates who pledge to back the ultimate Republican nominee for president will be allowed to participate in primary debates, though even she has got to know that Trump will only make that commitment with all his fingers crossed and will only stick to it if he wins the nomination. And as hard as it is to envision Trump being the party’s nominee again, the one time and hopefully one term president is rising in most polls widening his margin against Ron DeSantis the unannounced candidate viewed right now as his strongest challenger. Maybe voters aren’t buying into DeSantis’ war against Disney or his turning Florida into a one-party autocracy where only conservative views can be taught in schools and universities or maybe it’s because they saw all those pictures of Trump handing out of date water bottles to people in East Palestine, Ohio.  Or maybe its because polls mean nothing.  Who knows?  Understanding the psychology of Republican voters is something I can’t even begin to understand. Not kidding about that one party thing, apparently a Republican State Senator in Florida is seeking to outlaw the Democratic Party.  He’s introduced a bill that would cancel the filings of political parties that previously supported slavery; that would disqualify the Democratic Party since it supported slavery during the Civil War.  His bill would automatically change the registration of Florida Democrats to “no party affiliation.”  Florida, what gives?

The Injured List:  Senator John Fetterman’s office reports that he remains hospitalized, on a path to recovery. Hopefully 48-year-old Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro is also on a road to recovery.  He revealed yesterday that he “successfully underwent surgery to remove gastrointestinal neuroendocrine tumors” and that the “small, slow growing and mostly asymptomatic tumors were discovered last summer.”  He says that his doctors have told him that his “prognosis is good” and that he expects to return to Washington in a few weeks. In other health news, Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin is half way through the chemotherapy series that he is undergoing for the treatment of his lymphoma but aside from his head scarf, you’d hardly know what he was going through as yesterday he thoroughly schooled Colorado’s gun loving high school dropout Lauren Boebert during a House Oversight Committee hearing where she was doing her thing extolling Trump, slamming Biden and going after mask mandates and the like. Raskin reminded her about the more than twenty occasions that Trump defended the Chinese government in terms of COVID, saying that if there was a problem with the Chinese government unleashing the virus, “you would have to pin that on your favorite President Donald Trump not Joe Biden.”  In keeping with the China theme, Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz also dug himself a bit of an embarrassing hole.  During a House Armed Services Committee hearing about aid to Ukraine, Gaetz who is team Putin asked Undersecretary of Defense Colin Kahl if Ukraine’s far right Azov Battalion was getting access to US weapons. Kahl answered that he wasn’t aware of such a thing and asked Gaetz for his source.  In response, Gaetz entered into the record an article from the Global Times, a newspaper which the Trump administration designated as a Chinese propaganda outlet. Kahl then dryly responded that “As a general matter, I don’t take Beijing’s propaganda at face value.” Even Gaetz seemed to acknowledge that he’d screwed up. Also admitting his screwed up was Oklahoma Republican Congressman Andy Ogles, whose latest excuse for misrepresenting his academic credentials is that he didn’t know that his major was Liberal Arts rather than International Relations.  By the way, despite claiming to be an economist, during his 17-year journey to getting a college degree, he only took one economics course.  In case you are wondering he got a C in that course and his overall GPA was 2.4.

And:  Though he’s still running the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Matt Schlapp does appear to be suffering some consequences for allegedly sexually harassing a Herschel Walker aide, well only some.  Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel won’t be attending this week’s annual conference which is being held in DeSAntis’ home state. But not to worry, because Trump, his buddy and fellow election denier/former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro, Nikki Haley, Joe Pompeo, Margie Q and Ted Cruz all will be in attendance because what’s a little sexual harassment among friends?  Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her primary, as expected Democratic Congressman Barbara Lee has added herself to the field of Democrats seeking to replace the retiring Senator Diane Feinstein, and Democratic Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin formally announced that she’s running for the Michigan Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow. As of now Slotkin appears to have a clear path to the Democratic nomination as several other potential Democratic candidates have announced that they will not be running.  Her path may extend all the way to Washington as one of the most visible potential Republican candidates, Congressman John James who previously lost when he ran against Stabenow in 2018 and Senator Gary Peters in 2020, has announced he plans to stay in the House.