'Twas the Weekend Before Christmas ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻 🎅 🎄 🎅 🎄 

Centennial State Blues:  Congress has gone home and there’s still no funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.  In terms of timing that’s more of a problem for Ukraine where the needs are most immediate.  Staffers are expected to keep working over the break in the hope of breaking a stalemate over border funding, the issue that appears to be holding the funding package hostage.  Though expectations are that something will eventually be worked out, concern remains that Trump will try to sabotage anything that the Senate leaders agree to by having his minions in both the House and Senate throw countless monkey wrenches into the works just because he can and because we all know how he feels about migrants and Ukrainians.  Senate staffers aren’t the only ones who’ll be working over the holiday stretch as just about everyone at the Supreme Court will be too.  Not only is the Court dealing with Trump’s immunity and double jeopardy claims but the Justices now also have to deal with issue of whether the State of Colorado can keep him off their ballot.  That’s because by a vote of 4 to 3 Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled that Trump is disqualified from appearing on the ballot under the 14^th Amendment’s insurrection clause which says that those who took oaths to support the Constitution can’t engage in efforts to overthrow the government. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed with a lower Colorado court’s conclusion that Trump did insurrect, but disagreed with the lower court’s assessment that Trump’s insurrection was copacetic because the prohibition against doing so doesn’t apply to presidents.  Colorado is supposed to print ballots for the upcoming state Republican primary by January 5 so the Colorado Supremes stayed their ruling pending what they knew would be an inevitable appeal to SCOTUS.  Depending on who you ask, Colorado’s court did the right thing because Trump is an insurrectionist and the Constitution clearly states that such miscreants can’t hold office or Colorado’s court did the wrong thing because the only way to get rid of someone like Trump, regardless of the Constitution’s intent, is for the public to vote him out.  The split on that issue doesn’t fall cleanly along party lines as some very conservative constitutional experts such as retired Judge Michael Luttig firmly believe the prohibition should apply to presidents while others are afraid of the havoc that tossing Trump to the curb would have.  In any case the decision, which no doubt has a few Justices wishing they’d gone the lucrative law firm route, is now, or will be shortly, taken up by SCOTUS.  It will be interesting to see how those Justices who believe that the Constitution should be taken literally wiggle their way out of this one because in all likelihood they will conclude that he can stay on the ballot even if it requires that they have to twist themselves into contortionist level pretzel positions to get there.  Naturally, despite his wife’s complicity in the insurrection, Justice Clarence Thomas, the favorite holiday guest of right-wing billionaires, won’t recuse because why would he?  Also naturally, the Colorado judges are now getting boatloads of death threats for ruling against Trump though a YouGov online poll, there are always polls, says that 54 percent of us either strongly or somewhat approve of the Colorado decision with only 35% disapproving.  Among the disapproving are all of Trump’s Republican primary opponents who were asked to opine on air rather than online where they could have anonymously said what they really believe.     

💰💰💰: Rudy Giuliani has filed for bankruptcy.  He’s still defaming mother/daughter election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, insisting that he’s right about them passing votes rather than mints because he’s a Trump fanboy creep and that what he does.  Though both his bankruptcy filing and the rules at his NY co-op probably make it likely that Ruby and Shaye will never get to move into his Upper East Side coop, in the event they do visit the Big Apple for a site visit, my book group would like to invite the ladies to join us for a celebratory lunch where we will also be toasting to the fact that Senator Tommy Tuberville has finally thrown in the towel on his remaining military promotion holds.  The Alabama Senator, who by the way resides in Northern Florida when not mucking up the works at the Pentagon, has finally given up disrupting the country’s defenses but has nothing to show for his awful behavior as the Pentagon will continue to fund reproductive health related travel at least until the next Republican moves into the Oval Office.  Like Tuberville, Harvard’s Claudine Gay may be fighting a losing battle.  Though she appeared to have survived her battle of words with Congresswoman Elise Stefanik she may ultimately lose the war to maintain her lofty Harvard position, not over her inability to condemn calls for Jewish genocide as despicable but over her plagiary problem.  Gay’s supporters insist that she didn’t plagiarize intentionally, that she was just a very sloppy person and that her sloppiness is only an issue because of those on the right who’ve been examining her rather short list of published papers and her dissertation.  They have a point but she’s the president of Harvard so maybe sloppiness isn’t much of an excuse.  It’s fair to assume that a few equally sloppy Harvard students are probably all in on her survival because what a defense they’ll have when their professors call them out for similar “mistakes.”  Not supportive of her continuing in her role are a few more billionaire donors and NY Times opinion writer/Columbia professor John McWhorter who like Gay is a Black academician.  He wrote in this morning’s paper that “for Harvard, her own dignity and our national commitment to assessing Black people (and all people) according to the content of their character, she should step down.”  

Fog of War: The calls for a humanitarian ceasefire or at the very lease a long pause in fighting in Gaza are getting louder but those nice Hamas leaders, who live in the lap of luxury in Qatar aren’t all that concerned about sparing Gazans from the horrors of war maybe because they see their polls rising, particularly among the younger set, and who’s to question that assessment because it appears to be true. The current stalemate is because Hamas leadership refuses to agree to the release of more hostages until fighting stops while Israel insists that the promise of a release of more hostages is a condition for a pause or ceasefire whatever it’s called.  Now is as good a time as any to consider that Hamas’ charter calls for the complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia);  the need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective; the deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land; and the reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories. (Source The Atlantic).  So maybe not the easiest, most trustworthy crowd to negotiate with nor the best people to lionize? And though no one has threatened me with Jihad this week some Hamas supporters did respond to my support of a pro-Israel posting on Threads, the supposedly nicer social media site, by suggesting that I “go back to Europe.”  I am not sure what they mean by Europe since my grandparents fled pogroms in what was then either Russia, Poland, or Ukraine.  Something like Fiddler on the Roof without the humor, a singing Tevye or a Fiddler but with the bad guys on their tails. By the way none of that qualifies me for a Euro zone passport.       

Merry Christmas 🎅 🎄 

Safe Travels