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.