Margaritaville 🌻 🌻 🌻 🍷 🍷 🍷 🍷 

Parrot Heads:  President Biden went to Florida to commiserate with those affected by Hurricane Idalia.  He was snubbed by Governor DeSantis who is afraid that being seen in the same frame as the President would further sink his anemic poll rankings while also highlighting his relatively diminutive physical stature despite his usual high heel cowboy boots. Biden was greeted by former governor, current Senator Rick Scott who said nice things about what a good job he was doing helping Florida deal with the hurricane aftermath. Scott is up for reelection in 2024, he couldn’t disagree more with Biden on just about every issue, but he’s a shrewd politician and no fan of DeSantis. His willingness to greet Biden, made him look good despite his advocacy for phasing out Medicare and Medicaid, not an easy feat, while making DeSantis look petty.  Overall, it wasn’t a good week for DeSantis, a Florida District Court Judge ruled that the redistricting plan that he pushed through the gerrymandered Florida legislature violates the state constitution by intentionally diminishing the ability of Black voters in north Florida to pick a representative of their choice in violation of the Florida Constitution. The judge ordered that the map be redrawn to give the Democrats back the seat he tried to steal.

 

Frozen Margarita: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is another one who had a rough week. He had another one of those disturbing “freezing” episodes on camera for all to see. It’s not clear what’s causing his freeze frames, McConnell’s people deny that he’s experiencing mini-strokes and to be fair a number of TV doctors including CNN’s Sanjay Gupta agree with that assessment.  McConnell’s team attributes his episodes to a challenging recovery from the concussion that he suffered earlier in the year. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the 81- year-old McConnell has grown increasingly fragile. For now, the three Republican Senators most likely to replace him should he retire or end up in the deep freeze have his back, at least they do in public.  What the three, a group that includes Senators Barrasso, Thune and Cornyn, are saying in private is another matter.  However, Presidential candidate Nikki Haley is talking about it, referring to the Senate as a “privileged nursing home,” she’s using McConnell’s infirmity and the sad case of the even more fragile and diminished Dianne Feinstein as a cudgel against the candidacies of both the 77-year-old Trump and the 80-year-old Biden.  As to the nursing home analogy, at least with regard to Feinstein, Haley is right but no surprise that Haley never mentions that Feinstein is still serving because McConnell, diminished or not, is still doing his judge thing and has made it clear that he won’t let Democrats appoint anyone else to replace her on the Senate Judiciary Committee even if she resigns from the Senate. Feinstein stepping down would tie up the committee, making it impossible for the Democrats to vote in any more of Biden’s judicial nominees. Worth noting that if Feinstein exited her Senate replacement would be another Democrat appointed by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom but if McConnell is frozen out, his replacement would be another Republican because even though Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear is a Democrat, a recently passed Kentucky law mandates that the Governor appoint someone from the same party as the Senator being replaced.  Naturally, the press, just about everyone on the right and some on the left, have quickly pivoted to focusing on Biden’s age too and while it’s fair to note that his speech, never one of his strong points, seems more labored than ever, Biden appears to be functioning and legislating (fingers and toes crossed).  Evidence of that is that he just announced the first drugs for Medicare price negotiations, that’s one of those bigly things that Trump said he’d do but never did.

 

Haven’t a Clue: Curiously, many of those who swipe at Biden have no problem with Trump’s age, his increasingly threatening statements, and his social media posts. As to those posts, Trump posted on X (Twitter) following his Fulton County arrest for the first time since he was banned before pivoting back to his Truth Social platform.  Truth Social needs all the help it can get, its SPAC merger with Digital World faces a key September 8 deadline.  If shareholders fail to vote to either move forward with the merger or to extend the merger deadline again, Digital World will be required to liquidate and return $300 million to its shareholding leaving Trump and Truth Social with nothing from the much-hyped transaction.  Who but everyone could have anticipated that another Trump business would implode?  Trump steak anyone?   Trump’s response is that reports of Truth Social’s demise is just more fake news from those Communists on the left and who knows, maybe Truth Social will find a savior someone like Elon Musk, whose weekend antics included holding an X (Twitter) poll on whether or not to kick the Anti-Defamation League off his platform.  The ADL’s crime, pointing out all the neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and racist message propagators who have been welcomed to his platform. To be clear, in Musk world hate messages qualify as free speech but pointing out hate, not so much.  Another one of those things that appears to be spinning Trump out of control and feeding his Truth posting, is NY AG Letitia James request that the NYS judge responsible for her civil case against the Trump Organization just go ahead and rule that the Trump Organization grossly overstated the value of its assets even before the trial starts because, as she points out, they obviously did. Trump who continues to insist that he’s richer than rich, says if any “mistakes” were made, he had nothing to do with them as all decisions were made by his son Eric.       

 

 

Wasting Away: Add Rudy Giuliani to the list of people who have hit rock bottom and are still sinking.  Last week Federal Judge Beryl Howell found that he defamed Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss and is liable for damages after he failed to comply with discovery obligations in their lawsuit over his “baseless” claims that they committed election fraud when all they did was share a ginger mint.  A civil trial will now be held to determine the amount of the damages that he will be required to pay them.  Rudy will probably appeal, stall, plead poverty and do whatever else he can to avoid paying up.  Then again, maybe Freeman and Moss’ attorneys can put a lien on that $6.5 million NYC apartment that Rudy is trying to unload? Rudy whose faces a boat load of other charges in Fulton County is still out and about, but a few Proud Boys aren’t as last week some of them were sentenced to serve a whole lot of time as in 18 and 10 years for their January 6^th actions.  As to Fulton County, it’s hard to keep what’s going on there straight given that some of the defendants want speedy trials, some don’t, and some want their cases severed while others haven’t specified what they want yet.  District Attorney Fani Willis has her hands full but one thing she may not have to worry about is being kicked out of office.  Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, one of the few Republicans who has figured out how to win without kowtowing to Trump says that he won’t support efforts to oust her.  That sets him far apart from Mark Meadows who during his unexpected testimony last week said that he did what ever Trump asked him to do, even all that election interference stuff which he argued was part of his job, because he didn’t want to be yelled at by Trump.  Then there’s Margie Q, the Georgia representative who cares little about being yelled at, in fact she appears to like fighting.  Her newest battle, she says she’s going to hold up funding the government until impeachment proceedings against Biden are initiated, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations are defunded, Special Counsel David Weiss who is responsible for the Hunter Biden investigation is fired, the FBI is reined in, all vaccine mandates are rescinded, and the US stops funding Ukraine.    

 

RIP Jimmy Buffet, Bill Richardson, and Mark Schneider