More Please ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Thanksgiving 🦃 🦃:  There’s something to be grateful for today, well maybe.  Assuming the deal goes through, fifty of the hostages being held by Hamas will be returning home soon.  All of the to be released hostages, including the three who are Americans, are women or children. One of those Americans is a three-year-old child name Abigail who is now an orphan, the result of her parents being murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7. After what is supposed to be the first in a series of exchanges, somewhere around 189 hostages will remain in Hamas hands. That remaining total is down one because one of the hostages, an elderly woman named Hannah Katzier has died in captivity.  Naturally, her Hamas captives are blaming her death on Israeli procrastination rather the fact that they kidnapped her and held her for 45 days despite her obvious medical frailty.  In exchange for the release of the first of what is supposed to eventually be more of the hostages, Israel will release 150 Palestinians, all women and teenagers, and will pause military attacks while also letting in “humanitarian” aid.  Humanitarian in quotation marks because it’s hard to believe that some of that needed aid won’t end up back in terrorist hands because Hamas. Let’s all be thankful for the impending release and the pause in fighting, but let’s not forget that so many more remain in captivity and that given the players, the likelihood of the hostages, particularly the men and soldiers ever being released alive still remains remote.  #BringThemAllHomeAlive    

The X Files:  On the subject of difficult players, Elon Musk, who asserts that despite his repeated amplification of hateful and anti-Semitic tweets he is not at all hateful or anti-Semitic, is now following through on his threat to launch a thermonuclear defamation lawsuit at Media Matters, the left leaning media watchdog group that reported on X’s posting of hate messages near the advertisements of mainstream companies like IBM.  Musk holds Media Matters, rather than his actions and his company’s ad placements, responsible for X’s plummeting advertising revenues. He asserts that Media Matters made-up it’s accusations, an assertion that his CEO Linda Yaccorino, who recently hired her son tasking him with soliciting business from Republican-friendly digital advertising firms, doubled down on by calling Media Matters manipulative and misleading. Discovery for the lawsuit, to the extent it doesn’t explode first, should be interesting.  Then again Musk filed in Texas where the recently impeached but not convicted state Attorney General Ken Paxton is now investigating Media Matters for what he, in a display of loyalty to Musk, is calling its potentially fraudulent activity, so maybe there will be no discovery, just a ruling in Musk’s favor.  Yesterday, a few days after calling Musk out for his boosting of anti-Semitic tropes, the White House expanded its social media campaign to include posts on Threads, Facebook’s Twitter competitor.  They say that the timing was coincidental, that their plans to join Threads had been in the work for some time; they probably were but still the timing speaks volumes.  Trump’s Truth Social platform is circling the financial drain but with X making it clearer than ever where its loyalty lies, it’s only a matter of time before Trump returns full time to X as it assumes the Truth Social mantra.

Boomerang:  In other tech news, as of this morning tech superstar Sam Altman, who was fired from OpenAI on Friday and hired by Microsoft on Sunday has now be rehired by OpenAI, a story that even OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot would not have dared to write.  On the subject of stories that should not be real, but sadly are, the Federal Appeals Court for the 8^th District ruled on Monday that contrary to practice only the federal government, not private citizens, or civil rights groups, is allowed to sue under a key section of the Voting Rights Act.  That matters because the federal government, even when dominated by Democrats, doesn’t have the resources to initiate every lawsuit. The circuit court decision will be appealed and is likely headed to the Supreme Court where the conservative majority, especially Clarence Thomas whose last dissenting opinion left an opening for this voting rights killing opinion, has been mostly hostile to enforcing voting rights protections.  On the media front, Univision, the Spanish language television network, recently aired a Trump interview that treated the twice impeached, multiply indicted, sex offender, insurrectionist former president with kid gloves. The right says that the soft-ball treatment was warranted because Trump is as sweet as pecan pie, others, including some of Univision’s staff and Democratic leadership are outraged, attributing the tone of the interview to son-in-law Jared’s very close relationship with executives at Univision’s new parent company Grupo Televiso.  Democratic concern was further raised when Univision canceled previously purchased ads scheduled to run during the Trump interview in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida attributing the cancellation to a previously unannounced policy about opposition advertising in single-candidate interviews.  All this matters mucho because the Hispanic vote is so important.  Trump, with the help of the quiet, yet effective Kushner, is making the kind of inroads into the Hispanic vote in places that have the power to swing the 2024 election his way.  Como se dice OY in Espanol?

Happy Thanksgiving 🦃 🦃 🦃 🦃 🦃 🦃