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?