Speaker War ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Speaker vs Lettuce 🥬:  When it comes to staying power, the lettuce 🥬 keeps winning.  The House still doesn’t have a Speaker.  Yesterday morning, House Republicans held several rounds of closed-door votes which resulted in the selection of Minnesota Congressman/ Republican Whip Tom Emmer to be their Speaker Designate.  Then Trump weighed in against Emmer with a scathing Truth Social diatribe. After that it became clear that Emmer, who was already having a hard time cajoling party extremists to support him, didn’t have the votes necessary to win a floor vote so he dropped out. Chief among the very conservative Emmer’s so-called faults: he’s a RINO who voted to certify the 2020 presidential election and he voted in favor of same sex marriage.  The 🏡 🤡 🤡 then went back to the drawing board.  Last night, after another round of votes they selected Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as their Speaker Designate.  Johnson makes that other charmer Gym Jordan look almost rational.  He’s better at voice moderation but is one of the architects of the scheme to overturn the 2020 election and served as one of Trump’s impeachment defenders, he wants to ban all abortions but also opposes contraception, not only does he want to outlaw same sex marriages, but he also opposes interracial ones.  He opposes the violence against women act, voted against the infrastructure legislation and the funding of health care for veterans exposed to toxins. He did vote to raise the debt limit but voted against the continuing resolution that is keeping the government open at least until November 17.  In other words, with the exception of his debt ceiling vote, he’s a model Freedom Caucus Republican. Another floor vote is currently scheduled to start at noon today.  Mike Johnson is seriously flawed and anyone who opposed Gym Jordan should oppose him but at this point why should we expect the 🏡 🤡 🤡 to act rationally so we could end up with Johnson. As a back-up, a number of Republicans are once against talking about empowering Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry with a few others pushing the dream team of Kevin McCarthy and Gym Jordan as co-speakers.  Co-speakers are not a thing but the 🏡 🤡 🤡 are 🤡 🤡, so?

Trumpy Dumpy: Though his Speaker-slaying and intimidation powers remain depressingly intact and he’s still the Republicans most likely presidential candidate, Trump’s legal woes continue to mount.  Yesterday, Jenna Ellis, another member of his “elite strike force” legal team, tearfully pleaded guilty to a felony charge of “aiding and abetting false statements” in the Georgia election stealing case. Ellis has agreed to be sentence to five years of probation, pay $5000 in restitution and perform community service.  More significantly, like Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney “Kraken” Powell,  she’s agreed to cooperate with prosecutors as the case against Trump and the remaining Fulton County RICO co-defendants progresses. Ellis’ plea was far from a surprise. She’d earlier shifted her allegiance to Florida’s Ron DeSantis and frequently complains about Trump’s failure to fund her mounting legal expenses.  Though it’s definitely a good thing for DA Fani Willis’ case that the three lawyers have pleaded guilty, former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann and his podcast partner former Assistant US Attorney for National Security Mary McCord caution that their pleas don’t necessarily mean that they, especially Chesebro, will really throw Trump under the bus in part because of their exposure in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Washington election interference case.  As to Special Jack, it turns out that he too has notched a notable “get.” According to ABC News, in exchange for immunity, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has spoken under oath with prosecutors and before a grand jury about his final days working for Trump.  ABC reports that Meadows told Smith’s team that in the weeks after the 2020 election, he “repeatedly” told Trump that the allegations of voting fraud were baseless, and that Trump was being “dishonest” with the public when he claimed to have won the election.  Despite writing, as in fabricating, in his recent “The Chief’s Chief” book that the election was riddled with fraud, Meadows told Smith’s team that he has yet to see any evidence of fraud that would have kept Biden from the White House and that he agrees that the 2020 presidential election was the most secure election in US history.

Fog of War:  Two more hostages, both elderly Israeli women, have been released by Hamas.  The terrorist organization appears to be trickling the hostage outs, using them as human bargaining chips to forestall an Israeli ground force invasion. Reports are that negotiations about releasing more hostages, likely children and women rather than healthy men, continue but that Hamas has upped the ante, asking for fuel for Gaza hospitals and by hospitals they most likely mean fuel for military purposes because asking for fuel for neo-natal wards is an effective way of manipulating and playing upon public sympathies because who doesn’t feel for sick children?  As to the effects of Hamas’ sadly impressive press manipulation, yesterday the NY Times finally issued an Editor’s Note/mea culpa, albeit a rather anemic one, admitting that the paper shouldn’t have relied solely on Hamas sources for their reporting about the bombing of the Gaza hospital. Of course, the NY Times followed up today with an article questioning all the analyses completed by the US and other governments as well as other media outlets that attribute the hospital bombing to an errant Jihad Militant group missile.

 

Viral Musings: I pulled this section out of temporary retirement to highlight the results of a new study published on Monday in JAMA Pediatrics. According to the study severe neonatal morbidity, neonatal death, and admissions to the NICU were all significantly lower during the first month of birth in infants whose mothers were vaccinated against COVID.  Moreover, protection against COVID continued for up to six months after birth.  #TeamVax