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.