Botox for the Brain  ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

A Wrinkle in Time: The picture of George of many names Santos carrying a telltale orange Hermes bag was a dead giveaway that something was seriously wrong with his finances so the results of the House ethics report detailing how he used donor money to fund his designer habit and his Botox treatments, while outrageous, isn’t all that surprising. The Botox part is funny, well almost, but the bi-partisan committee’s conclusion that his fraud included using campaign coffers to reimburse himself for loans in amounts that dwarfed the actual size of the ones he made and that everything he said about himself, his background or anything else for that matter, was false, not so funny. Santos attacked the report as a “grave miscarriage of justice” but also announcing that he’s no longer running for reelection. The House which failed during its first attempt to expel him is expected to hold another expulsion vote after Thanksgiving.  While a growing number, including more Republicans, appear inclined to kick Santos to the curb, getting the required two-thirds to vote him out isn’t a slam dunk since Speaker for now Mike Johnson can’t afford to see his slimmest of majorities shrink so despite all Santos might actually make it to the end of his term.  Johnson, who managed to avoid a government shutdown with the passage of his laddered continuing funding resolution, passed by the Senate and signed by President Biden, still faces an uphill battle getting any longer-term spending bills passed.  On Wednesday he couldn’t even get a procedural vote for the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill passed because 19 of his hardliners rebelled over their fury that the continuing resolution didn’t slash government spending.  That’s a bright neon warning sign that the government will be facing more shutdown deadlines come January and that Johnson’s days, like Kevin’s before him, could be numbered.

Legal Morass:  Santos and Johnson weren’t the only ones whose day was marred by bad news. The Hunter Biden quagmire, the gift that keeps feeding Republicans’ Trump false equivalency defense took still another turn after it was revealed that Special Counsel Weiss is using a Los Angeles grand jury to seek more documents and testimony in the ongoing investigation into his business dealings. President Joe’s brother James was one of those subpoenaed. It’s not clear that Weiss has found more crimes or whether this is still about Hunter’s failure to pay taxes when owed.  Most likely Weiss is just trying to turn the screws on Hunter to force another plea but whatever it is, it’s ugly. Worth remembering that while Hunter is scuzzy, he is not and has never been a government official. Though neither Special Counsel Jack Smith nor Judge Arthur Engoron are facing any charges, neither of them is having a particularly good week either.  Both have had their Trump gag orders lifted while higher courts decide whether it’s constitutional to stifle Trump’s right to rage post and engage in slimy free speech.  As a result, Trump and his lawyers are back to sliming because why shouldn’t they be able to influence jury pools, intimidate witnesses and inflame the masses. How else will Trump win his cases and also be able to dismantle government, go after his enemies and upset world worder?  It also turns out that Andew Weissmann’s concerns about Judge loose Cannon are warranted.  She has put off setting any deadline for Trump’s lawyers to tell prosecutors which of the purloined documents they plan to use as part of their defense. The concern is that her failure to set a schedule will almost certainly delay the Mar a Lago stolen documents trial, making it even more likely that the easiest case to win against Trump won’t take place until after the 2024 election, if ever. On the Fani Willis Fulton County front, another one of those much-anticipated Trump trials that is unlikely to happen anytime soon, we know for sure that one of the defense counsels, Jonathan Miller who represents co-defendant/former election supervisor Misty Hampton, shared the proffer video snippets with ABC News.  He admitted as much to the judge overseeing the case who has now put the kibosh on anyone else doing the same.

Anti-Social Media: The creep who bashed Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul’s head has been found guilty by a jury but Elon Musk the creep who spread conspiracies theories about that brutal attack is still spreading conspiracy theories and hate on his X (Twitter) platform.  Yesterday, IBM pulled its $1 million ad campaign from X after realizing that its ads were appearing side by side with Nazi, anti-Semitic content, the same messages that Elon has been actively retweeting to his 160 million followers.  Those retweets by Elon assert that Jews push hatred against white people. I am not sure what exactly that means though I do that it’s intended to whip up hate, a conclusion that IBM executives appear to have reached as well.  X’s pretend CEO Linda Yaccorino who was hired to increase ad revenues and likely considered getting IBM’s ads a big accomplishment, is heavy into bullsh-ttery.  Her response is that X is doing all it can to fight anti-Semitism.  As if.  Sadly, its not just X, Tik Tok, the popular Chinese owned app that is as much a propaganda tool as a device for sharing dance moves and make-up techniques, has been promoting an Osama bin Laden letter where he justified his horrendous 9.11 World Trade Center, Pentagon and Pennsylvania plane crash killings/attack, blaming them on the US’s support for Israel. Don’t dismiss the evil of promoting that letter, CNN reports that a number of the young people who viewed it on Tik Tok now sympathize with bin Laden. As Sacha Baron Cohen so aptly put it to Tik Tok’s US management, “if you think back to October 7, the reason Hamas were able to behead young people and rape women is that they were fed images from when they were small kids that led them to hate.”  As if any of that isn’t sickening enough, last night the NY Post reported that a pro-Palestinian group with 121,000 Instagram followers has shared a map of New York City newsrooms, businesses, and landmark buildings calling for “direct action” to “globalize intifada” against what they clearly imply are Jewish influenced institutions.  If we’re not there already, we’re about one minute away from Hamas being labeled the heroes and their hostages, down one from the last total because another women’s body was found, being the evil doers. Maybe not even down one, since reports are that one of the hostages may have given birth.  If only a ceasefire could really end all this. Depressing spoiler alert, it won’t

#BringThemHomeNow