The Usual Suspects 🌻 🌻 🌻

September Fun:   The multiply indicted, twice impeached candidate for president who is running to stay out of jail on a theme of retribution is currently tied in the polls with the current president, the nice guy whose record includes major legislative accomplishments and making lifesaving insulin affordable.  Polls at this point probably don’t mean much but still that’s about as scary and disturbing as it gets.  The chief complaints about Biden appear to be his age and his handling of the economy.  Biden is only four years older than the guy described as a strawberry blonde by Fulton County prison officials and the economy, despite all those warnings of an impending recession, is doing fine and most economist no longer believe that a recession is coming. As to health and age, first lady Jill Biden who is younger than both of them has what is being described as a “mild” case of COVID, not all that surprising because who doesn’t know a half a dozen people who have or have recently had COVID including dozens of tennis players at the US Open where a “mystery” virus otherwise known as COVID has been making the rounds?  Perhaps a little more surprising is that Mitch McConnell who makes Biden look like a spring chicken didn’t have a stroke and is not suffering from either epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease, at least that’s what the medical report he shared says.  To the extent the report is accurate, his freezing episodes are just part of his concussion recovery.  Among the skeptics are his fellow Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the non-practicing ophthalmologist who created his own medical society because he couldn’t pass the boards offered by the real one.  Pick your poison, one of these guys, is fudging the facts.  Speaking of facts, George Santos the Congressman who wouldn’t know one if it wore a neon hat and punched him in the nose, may be negotiating a plea deal with Federal prosecutors.  If true, that means that he’ll be gone perhaps as early as October, decreasing Kevin McCarthy’s already slim majority by one. That‘s a bigly problem for McCarthy but also not so good for budget negotiations because McCarthy’s already slim majority is making it very difficult for him to manage his caucus since the likes of Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz and Margie Q insist that they won’t vote for any budget that doesn’t defund the FBI, investigations into Trump, Ukraine, and COVID vaccines.  They also insist that McCarthy first hold a vote on opening an impeachment inquiry into Biden, a problem because so far McCarthy doesn’t have the votes to do so in part because Biden’s only “crime” appears to be that he loves his screwed-up, sleazy son. On the subject of passing a budget, Senate Republicans are not in line with their House counterparts largely because they know that Republicans will be blamed if budget hijinks throw the government into shut down mode.  Getting through the budget nightmare will test McConnell’s competence. Successfully imposing some rationality on his House colleagues, if that is even possible, would go far to proving that Mitch has still got all his marbles as would getting Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville to stop standing in the way of confirming the growing list of military officers who are currently in limbo as concerns keep building that Tuberville’s antics are weakening our military position, not good when Russia’s Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong un are playing footsie and sharing weaponry.

Racist Much? Tuberville who isn’t really a resident of Alabama but pretends to be one for Senate qualification purposes is sadly representative of his state’s zeitgeist, at least the state’s white one, which goes far to explaining why state officials thought that ignoring a recent Supreme Court ruling that threw out their obviously racially gerrymandering legislative map.  The map that SCOTUS rejected screwed Black Alabamians who make-up more than one quarter of the state’s population out of an additional Congressional seat.  Alabama’s answer to SCOTUS was to present an almost identical map. Yesterday their revised map was rejected by a panel of federal judges who ruled that it needed to be redrawn again because “Republican lawmakers had failed to comply with orders to create a second majority Black district or something close to it.” Noting that state officials didn’t even “nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy” the court has appointed a special master to come up with new fairer districts.  News out of Texas is a bit unusual too. A few months ago, the Republican dominated state house voted to impeach another Republican, State Attorney General Ken Paxton.  Yesterday the state’s Senate, also dominated by Republicans, voted to proceed with his impeachment hearing, despite Paxton’s efforts to get them to vote to drop all of the charges. It’s still not clear that the Texas Senate will find Paxton, who clearly did a lot of things that he shouldn’t have done, guilty but they might and that would be both remarkable and a warning to a certain other guy that eventually the law can catch up with you, well maybe.  As to that other guy, his Truth Social platform escaped a bullet yesterday when its SPAC partner managed to get another extension.  In other social platform news, because blaming Jews is sadly still a thing, Elon Musk is threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for defamation, holding them responsible for the 60% decline in X’s (Twitter’s) advertising revenue.  ADL’s “crime,” telling advertisers that having their ads appear alongside Nazi and white supremacist hate messaging is not a good thing. Maybe, the Wall Street Journal is his next target, last night the paper reported on how he used SpaceX to partially fund his Twitter acquisition and last week they reported that he was being investigated by the Department of Justice for using Tesla money to fund his new very large glass house.      

And:  Gabe Amo won Rhode Island’s Democratic Primary for the seat vacated by Democratic Congressman David Cicilline. Given the make-up of the district he is expected to make it to Congress. Amo, the son of Ghanaian and Liberian immigrants, previously served in both the Obama and Biden administrations.  He won in a crowded field that also included a “progressive” candidate endorsed by the trio of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Jane Fonda.  So maybe Biden’s brand isn’t all that unpopular after all?