Failure to Launch 🌻 🌻 🌻

Tick Tock 💣 💣 💣 The good news is that a debt limit deal is in sight, the bad news is that it isn’t done yet and Fitch has put the US government’s AAA on “rating watch negative,” an action that adds to the country’s cost of borrowing.  Kevin McCarthy told his crowd that they can go home for the holiday weekend but that they should be prepared to come back as soon as he calls.  With the devil in the details, Congressional logistics, and getting the votes done in both the House and Senate where at least one Senator, Utah’s Mike Lee, is on the record wanting to blow up any deal and with just a few working days until June 1, it’s still too early to count those proverbial hatching chickens. As of now the compromise which won’t make everyone happy and surely will lose votes on the right and probably some on the left would raise the debt limit for two years while imposing caps on discretionary spending not related to the military or veterans.  That two-year period is key because it pushes off another debt ceiling fight until after the 2024 election.  The deal would shift $10 billion of the $80 billion of the increased funding that was allocated to the IRS over the next 10 years in the Inflation Reduction Act into other discretionary budget items.  The Republicans have been fighting to cut the entire $80 billion, an amount they claim is for funding an IRS militia but that really just staffs the IRS to do what it is supposed to do, so keeping most of it is a win for Democrats as is the shifting of the $10 billion into other discretionary items.  If we’re lucky, we’re at the point in the process where the communications teams take over with each side, most notably the Republicans who are much better at PR, declaring victory.

Tweet Bird: It turns out that launching a presidential campaign on an erratic social media platform run by an eccentric and nefarious billionaire was not such a good idea.  Sure, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis got an enormous amount of press, but that press was mostly focused on Twitter’s glitches and the inability of its Twitter Spaces platform to handle a large media event. In an effort to spin dreck into gold, Elon and Ron both blamed the glitches on what they called the unprecedented volume of people trying to log in.  The problem with that is that the number of listeners wasn’t all that remarkable. Three hundred thousand tuned in to hear DeSantis, but that pales in comparison to the 1.2 million who watched April the Giraffe give birth, the 430,000 who watched AOC play video games on Twitch, the 807,000 who watched Buzzfeed explode a watermelon, the 628,000 who watched Drake play Fortnite or the 700,000 who watched Cristiano Ronaldo accidentally record him in the sauna.  Notably all those other events also involved video, the DeSantis launch was audio only, so when his “interview” finally went live, all users got was audio of DeSantis answering questions from a pre-written script.  Both Biden and Trump called DeSantis’ fizzled launch out as the sputtering failure it was, with Biden quickly tweeting out what he noted was a functioning link to his fundraising site and Trump accurately calling it an all-caps DISASTER. Steve Bannon, who’s rarely worth quoting and who is also rarely correct weighed in also calling it a “complete disaster.” No one heard from Tucker Carlson, but he may be rethinking his plans to launch his new “show” on Twitter’s platform and it’s also fair to assume that at least for now Trump will stick to delivering his pearls of ignorance on Truth Social.  Those who put up with the glitches and stuck around to listen to DeSantis heard him promise to turn the rest of the country into Florida without the benefit of good weather, not counting those hurricanes and floods, because who doesn’t want to see reproductive rights stripped away everywhere, fewer to no books on “controversial” subjects like civil rights, the Holocaust and sexuality, no vaccines for future plagues, and the wholesale deconstruction of the administrative state whatever that really means.  It’s not clear who would win the race to the bottom, Trump or DeSantis, but what’s really scary is that many of those who like Trump’s policies but think that he is too damaged to win the 2024 general election are still pinning their hopes and giving their money to DeSantis. On the subject of banning books, DeSantis says that contrary to reports he hasn’t banned any, and technically that’s true.  He leaves the actually banning and restricting to school boards and right-wing mothers like the one who got access to poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s book restricted.  That mom “apologized” yesterday, not for her action against Gorman’s “triggering” poetry but for promoting the anti-Semitic Protocol of the Elders of Zion. She sounds nice, no?”

Trump Morass:  Because of course, there’s more news on the Trump legal front.  The Washington Post reports that the staff at Mar a Lago moved boxes of purloined documents around the day before the FBI’s scheduled visit something that Jack Smith’s team likely views as suspicious and an indication of obstruction. According to the NY Times, the box shifting reveal comes from a Mar a Lago maintenance worker who volunteered to help move the boxes when he came upon Trump valet Walt Nauta lugging them on his own. The maintenance worker was just being helpful, he didn’t realize that he was abetting obstruction. Worth noting, Trump headed to Bedminster right after the boxes were moved with some luggage accompanying him. Time to look under or even in Ivana’s coffin?  In addition, WaPo reports that Trump who really wanted to keep some of his favorite documents, some of which he like to show visitors, had his team do a few dry runs, kind of like practicing hiding the afikomen in the run up to Passover, only we’re talking state secrets, not matza.  Yesterday, one of Trump’s fan boys Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, the seditious conspiracy convicted Yale Law school graduate who wears an eyepatch because he once accidentally shot himself in the eye, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.  That’s only bad for him if Biden wins reelection because if either Trump or DeSantis win, he’ll likely be pardoned on inauguration day.  DeSantis also says that he’ll be happy to pardon Trump too, a not-so-subtle way of telling Trump that if he, rather than Trump, emerges as the Republican’s 2024 candidate Trump should back him rather than run a third-party campaign.

Enjoy Memorial Day!