Swift Action ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Dumb, Dumber and Malevolent:  The right is freaking out over the possibility that Taylor Swift is planning to endorse Biden, something she did do in 2020. To try to dissuade her and also because her overwhelming success drives them nuts, a number of prominent rightwing wingnuts are now attacking all things Swiftie, focusing of course on her relationship with Kansas City Chief Travis Kelce. The wingnut contingent has even suggested that the fix is in on the upcoming Kansas City Chief-San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl. When referring to Kelce, the crazies also manage to toss in a reference to his endorsement of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as if that’s a bad thing because, naturally, to them the idea of a prominent sports figure encouraging COVID and flu vaccination is beyond the pale. While the football conspiracy theory and endorsement drama are nuts and maybe just a bit amusing, what’s more troubling is that Swift has been targeted by malevolent actors who’ve used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create and post very graphic AI generated nudes of her on Twitter, photos that Twitter’s algorithms then amplified.  Even Twitter realized that was a bad thing.  Though Musk’s minions didn’t take the “pictures” down, they did temporarily freeze the ability to search Taylor Swift’s name on the site while they tried to “fix” the problem, something hard to do given the Chief Twit’s evisceration of Twitter’s content moderation capabilities.  Pushing AI generated Swiftie porn is a bad thing, but even worse for all of us is that someone or some group used an easily accessible AI application to generate robocalls intended to suppress Democratic turnout in New Hampshire’s presidential primary.  The call used an artificially generated “Biden” voice that told likely Democrat voters that voting for Biden in the primary would enable Trump. Sleuths have figured out which app was used to create those calls but still don’t know who originated the calls, whether the miscreant was a juvenile prankster, a Roger Stone like rightwing figure or even someone from Democratic challenger Dean Phillips’ team. There’s no indication that the call had any impact on the New Hampshire primary, but it doesn’t take much imagination to anticipate that a similar AI generated call could cause havoc in November.  Election regulators across the country are trying to develop protective guardrails but given what happened on January 6, we should all be very concerned.  Faux compromising nudes of Taylor could be just the canary in the coal mine.  

Impeach, Impeach:  House Republicans haven’t given up on impeaching Biden, but for now they’re focused on Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, not because he’s done anything impeachable but because going after him allows them to keep the migrants streaming through the Mexico border “catastrophe” in the headlines where they want it to remain through election day. Last night, without evidence that Mayorkas has committed anything that constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors, they voted two articles of impeachment out of committee in anticipation of a full House vote on Mayorkas’ fate.  At the same time, Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump’s puppet du jour, continues to make it clear that he opposes the very conservative immigration legislation that Biden supports and that many on both sides of the aisle in the Senate are still trying to send his way. Given that Johnson’s position is that there can be no aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan without legislation that deals with the border problem, his illogical position is a bigly problem and also evidence that Republicans, particularly House Republicans and their Orange god, don’t want solutions, they just want mayhem and anything that could grease the runway for another Trump presidency. To complicate matters, or to better showcase his hypocrisy, Johnson’s position is that Biden doesn’t need any legislation to clamp down at the border, he can do all he should do by executive action. An interesting position given that the courts have ruled against a lot of the types of executive action that Johnson says Biden could take without legislation but not an all that surprising position given Trump’s meddling and Trump’s view that presidents are kings who can do anything they want, courts and laws be damned.  The bottom line is that immigration reform remains a hot potato, Republicans claim they want to do something but really don’t if doing something effective diffuses the problem and to be fair there are left leaning Democrats who won’t sign on to anything they deem too restrictive.  And, of course, meantime in Texas Governor Abbott is trying to provoke a civil war.  Politics at its worst.

It’s January 31:  Judge Engoron said that he would rule on how much money Trump and his co-defendants owe for all their fraud as well as whether Trump can continue to do business in New York state by the end of January.  Today is the last day of the month so something, or a few hundred million somethings, should happen by day’s end. We’re also still waiting, impatiently, for the federal appeals court in Washington to rule on Trump’s claim of immunity, another thing that is expected momentarily. Both rulings are likely to cause the already seriously agitated Trump whose PACs spent a mere $50 million of donor money on his legal bills during 2023 to toss ketchup or worse. It does appear that Trump finally understands, or understands for now, that continuing to slime E Jean Caroll is costly which likely explains why his lawyer Alina Habba decided it was okay to go after the E Jean Caroll case judge, Lewis Kaplan, claiming he’d had an inappropriate mentor-mentee relationship with E Jean’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation) decades ago when they both were at the Paul Weiss law firm.  As she pointed out in a rather scathing response to Habba’s accusation, Roberta Kaplan said that though she and the judge overlapped for two years when she was a new associate, and the judge was a very, very senior litigator preparing to move on to his judgeship they had no contact so that mentor-mentee accusation is just another bigly lie.  Even Habba figured out that she’d gone too far, yesterday she withdrew her allegation, acknowledging that she had no reason to believe anything she’d said was true.  Trump however is still throwing verbal darts at the judge.

Fog:  On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that somewhere around 10% of UNWRA’s 12,000 employees have ties to Hamas or other militant groups meaning that the twelve who actively participated in the October 7 attacks represent just a drop in the bucket of a large problem. The number of countries who’ve frozen aid to UNWRA has now grown to fifteen which is also a huge problem that even Israel acknowledges because few question that Gaza’s aid needs are large, the dilemma is how best to provide that assistance when the organization that’s been responsible for providing aid has been so coopted. Also, difficult is figuring out how to retaliate to the attacks by Iran’s proxies, particularly the deadly attack on the US base in Jordan.  President Biden is facing the challenge of threading the needle, a retaliation harsh enough to discourage further attacks but not so harsh that it leads to war with Iran, a war that some hawks in the Senate like Lindsay Graham and Roger Wicker seem more willing to risk but that most would prefer to avoid.  Biden says he’s made his decision, so something is going to happen soon, more likely targeting an Iranian ship rather than an attack within the country.   

Complicated Lives: Trouble lies ahead for Democratic Congresswoman/Squad member Cori Bush whose financial records have been subpoenaed.  Something about paying her then boyfriend, now husband for security services that he wasn’t certified to provide. The payments which came from official House funds were over and above Bush’s already unusually high security expenditures. But some good news for Fulton Country DA Fani Willis. It looks like she won’t be called to testify in her special prosecutor’s divorce case as he has reached a temporary settlement with his estranged wife.                  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Escalation ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Defamation Day: On Friday after less than three hours of deliberation a New York based federal jury awarded E Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for the defamatory comments that Trump made as president and then continued to make, including the countless derogatory statements he made until the day of the verdict. The award includes $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million in compensatory damages, all in addition to $5 million that Carroll was previously awarded in last May’s sexual assault and defamation case. Naturally, Trump attacked the verdict, and the “corrupt” legal system as did a significant number of Republican politicians who when asked said there’s nothing wrong with a convicted sex offender, or at least one named Trump, becoming president again. Trump’s appealing the decision but is expected to be required to set aside funds or, to the extent he can get one, a bond with the court.  He’s already had to set aside $5 million to cover the earlier award.  For Trump, that initial $5 million was probably chump change but $83 million isn’t, especially since it’s highly likely that Judge Engoron who is overseeing his NY civil fraud case is expected to impose a fine in excess of $300 million as early as this week.  According to Suzanne Craig, the NY Times financial writer who’s been on the Trump financial beat for some time, as a result of the sale of his Washington hotel lease and another property Trump can probably can cover the $83 million out of funds on hand, but he likely doesn’t have enough liquid assets for all of the rest which means at some point he’ll have to start selling real estate because even though his delusional fan base has stepped up to cover his legal expenses, it’s not clear if their contributions can lawfully be used to pay fines and damages and even if those funds can be used for fines, he’d need them to contribute lots more, a bit challenging given that he also needs bigly bucks for his presidential run. 

Presidential Politics: At least for now the RNC isn’t calling off future primaries because even they get that the optics of doing so while not so “birdbrain” Nikki Haley, who Trump has taken to calling by a racially charged version of her name, is still in the race reeks. Not that pushing slimy decisions or nasty nicknames is a problem for Trump and his crew.  Over the weekend, he spoke out forcefully against the border/immigration reform bill that a bipartisan team of Senators have negotiated, telling Nevada rally goers that they can blame it on him when the bill fails.  That bill which would also facilitate the funding of foreign aid contains major concessions from Biden and the Democrats, but Trump is against it, not because of what it contains but because its passage would be a “win” for Biden, making Trump’s “hordes of infected migrant terrorists crossing the border” mantra a less effective campaign point so instead Houe Republicans are progressing with their impeachment of Homeland Security Mayorkas.  Even Oklahoma Republican Senator Lankford, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, thinks that Trump putting his personal aspirations ahead of a real opportunity for US border security and immigration reform is wrongheaded.  Lankford who was censured over the weekend by the Oklahoma Republican party for working with Democrats on a border solution hasn’t totally lost his Republican bona fides, he’s one of those who thinks that it’s okay that Trump’s a sex offender. As to Biden, who the press keeps saying is struggling, it turns out that he won the New Hampshire primary by an even larger margin than first reported.  With almost all of the write-ins counted Biden garnered 63.9% of the vote with Representative Dean Phillips, who was on the ballot and campaigned all over the state, getting a little less than 20%. Marianne Williamson who eked out 4% has now dropped out of the race that few remembered she was still in. Biden actually got far more votes in New Hampshire than Obama did during his reelection run and Obama had the advantage of actually being on the ballot. Shifting back to craven Republican acts, after former Congresswoman Liz Cheney pointed out that VP wannabee Elise Stefanik once issued a statement about how tragic January 6 was, calling the day’s violence un-American, Stefanik who now calls those who were convicted of committing acts of violence on January 6 hostages, wiped references to her statement off social media. On the VP front, Trump’s team is denying a NY Post report that he ever reached out to RFK Jr, about serving as his running mate which probably means that he did.  Wonder if Elise is into ketchup tossing?

Fog of War:  Friday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It was also the day that the UN’s top court issued what the Times of Israel called a yellow flag, telling Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire.  The court also called for Hamas to immediately release the hostages it took with the help of some of its “buddies” on October 7, but that part of the UN court statement got short shrift in the press.  As to those “buddies” it turns out that at least twelve of them were United Nations Relief and Works (UNRWA) officials. Israel has shared evidence of their complicity in the October 7 “festivities” with the UN, the US, and a number of other countries.  This morning the NY Times provided some details, reporting hat one of the implicated UN employees kidnapped a woman, another handed out ammunition and a third took part in the massacre of 97 kibbutzniks.  Sickening but the only real surprise is that the involvement of only 12 UNWRA employees has been documented so far, or at least publicly documented, because it has been an open secret for some time that Hamas is embedded in UNWRA. The US, Germany, Japan, Canada, The Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Finland, Australia, and Austria have temporarily suspended aid to UNWRA as a result of its employees’ involvement on October 7. Altogether that represents about $600 million in aid being put on hold with $344 million to have come from the US.  According to the AP, from 2014 to 2020 UN agencies spent nearly $4.5 billion in Gaza with Qatar donating an additional $1.3.  Given the extensive and highly sophisticated tunnel network running under Gaza and Hamas’ apparently endless supply of munitions and missiles it’s fair to assume that a lot of that aid money was not used to build the types of infrastructure that would have benefitted Gazans. How is it that so few of UNWRA’s 30,000 employees failed to notice the tunnel construction or the missiles and grenades? Or that no one at UN headquarters had a clue? And, now what happens?  People are suffering in Gaza, there’s no reason to believe that Hamas is going to change and beyond firing the implicated employees and expressing faux shock over their complicity, who really believes that the UN will do anything different but shift paperwork going forward. Elsewhere in the Middle East Iran is up to more no good. This weekend one of the militias it supports shot a drone into a US base in northern Jordan, killing 3 US soldiers and injuring at least thirty more. Escalation much.   

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

The Stuck Scab ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Zero Sum Game: The economy is doing well, interest rates and inflation are coming down, GDP growth is up, the stock market is humming along, and that much feared recession doesn’t appear to be in the cards. Even Fox’s reliably pro-Trump faux economist Lawrence Kudlow has been heard to admit, on air, that the gloom and doom scenario is behind us. President Biden’s challenge is getting that message out to Americans who still aren’t convinced and while messaging the economy’s improvement isn’t easy, it’s a far better challenge than having to explain a recession. Well, better for most people.  Trump is truly bummed because he’d much prefer a stock market crash, out of control inflation and skyrocketing interest rates because that scenario would have been easier to run on which isn’t to say that he isn’t still claiming things are awful, it’s just that some of his followers know better and by November more of them are likely to note that the economy is okay.  That takes us to the border “crisis.” With the economy on the upswing, Trump needs the border situation to continue festering which means more stories about smallpox infected terrorist hordes streaming in from Mexico which explains why he’s opposing the bipartisan immigration reform package that the Senate has been working on and a bunch of governors especially Texas’ Abbott are threatening a civil war.  The immigration package which until yesterday was fully supported by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell includes border funding tied to concessions from the White House as well as money for Ukraine, something that McConnell has long supported but that is anathema to Trump and his BFF Putin.  Mitch, however, is now wavering on the immigration package that his team negotiated.  On Wednesday, behind closed doors, he told Republican Senators that “we don’t want to do anything to undermine Trump,” translated to mean that with Trump having a lock on the Republican candidacy, it’s time to fully kowtow to his wishes.  If Trump wants more mayhem at the border, let’s give him mayhem.  As Mitt Romney puts it, the border is a very important issue for Trump. “And the fact that he would communicate to Republican Senators and Congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”  Yesterday, McConnell denied that he’d pulled his support from the border funding package, but that’s probably mostly because his remarks were made public rather than anything else.  He now has an optics problem, one that Biden’s team is already using against Republicans.  The bottom line, there is an immigration problem but it’s harder for Trump, Moscow Mitch, Houseboy Johnson, and the rest of his Republican toadies to run on it if they are vocally opposed to supporting any legislation to fix it, not that will stop them from trying.  

Bye Bye Birdbrain? Turning to Trump, to put it mildly he’s not happy with “birdbrain” Nikki Haley.  He wants her gone now so in addition to personally threatening her with “investigations” and insulting her intellect and sartorial choices, he’s making it clear to her big money contributors that he’s not happy with them either. He’s told them they better cut her off ASAP if they ever want to do any business with “his” administration.  He also says that he’ll refuse their money should they opt to throw some his way, but that part is pure BS, because Trump would never turn down money.  To hasten Haley’s departure, Trump and another one of his toadies, RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, are looking into cancelling the remaining Republican primaries and just declaring him the presumptive candidate.  That McDaniel is onboard for that goes far to explaining why she’s still RNC Chair because it’s not like she’s had a string of successes. When not campaigning, sweaty, resentful Trump is busy with other things like defending himself in court.  Yesterday he actually testified, or tried to testify, on his own behalf in the E Jean Caroll defamation case. He didn’t get to say much because the judge refused to let him deny that he knew or sexually assaulted Caroll because those facts aren’t in dispute anywhere except in Trump’s head and among his diehard acolytes especially those trying out for his VP slot.  The issue in front of the jury is only about the defamation, how much it will take to “fix” E Jean’s tarnished reputation and how much more Trump should be penalized for sliming and continuing to slime her, not that Trump plans to stop sliming her.  He was up for hours the night before his testimony slamming her with dozens of ugly Truth Social posts because that’s what Republican presumptive presidential candidates do these days. As to sexual assaults, remember those accusations about Matt Gaetz having sex with underaged girls, they haven’t gone away.  Apparently, though his archenemy Kevin McCarthy is gone, the House Ethics committee started on his watch is heating up, with the committee working on obtaining testimony from the young woman involved. Furious Gaetz is in full denial mode but doesn’t appear to be taking his ire out on Speaker for now Johnson whose majority may be on the verge of shrinking again since North Dakota’s one Congressman, Republican Kelly Armstrong has just announced that he’s running for Governor to replace Doug Burgum who is wants to be Trump’s Energy Secretary.     

And:  Biden won the coveted United Auto Workers endorsement.  Not surprising since he’s been demonstrably pro-labor and even appeared on a UAW picket line when the union was striking the major auto companies while Trump showed his “solidarity” by visiting a non-union shop.  UAW president Shawn Fain pulled no punches, calling Trump a scab during his Biden endorsement speech.  Trump may never see the inside of a prison cell, but his former advisor Peter Navarro may.  Yesterday he was sentenced to four months in the slammer for contempt of Congress, relating to his refusal to comply with a January 6 committee subpoena. Naturally, he like Steve Bannon who was also found guilty and sentenced for lack of compliance, is appealing hoping he can put off his jail time until after Trump is reelected (ugh) and grants him a pardon.  The clock is ticking on Trump’s immunity appeal.  Pundits predicted that the Appeals Court would have acted by now.  They haven’t, but it’s Friday so maybe by the end of the day we’ll hear something.  And, we still haven’t learned very much about the accusations against Fulton County DA Fani Willis.  It appears that she had a personal relationship with one of her prosecutors but it’s not clear that her canoodling will derail the RICO case because while salacious it has nothing to do with election interference.      

 

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Palmetto On Tap ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Granite:  Likely because from here on out the 2024 presidential primaries won’t matter, the press rolled out all their pundits, fancy maps, and leader boards, treating New Hampshire’s race as if it was a nail biter. It wasn’t.  As predicted by the polls, Nikki Haley lost to Trump by more than 11 points, hardly the close race she needed. Moreover, many of those who made up the 43% who voted for her were either independents or Democrats who’d shifted their registration for the day to stick it to Trump. The Republican Party, even in somewhat independent New Hampshire, is all in on MAGA and Trump.  Unfortunately for Nikki Haley, absent a political earthquake she’s unlikely to approach 40% again. Despite that, instead of conceding, last night Haley delivered a rousing speech to her supporters, promising to stick it out at least through South Carolina’s February 24 primary. Maybe she will or maybe her financial backers, who like her know that even though South Carolina is her home state she’ll lose bigly there, will cut their financial cords. That’s what Trump, the all powerful MAGA god wants them to do and these days most in his party heed his demands.  Instead of giving an upbeat victory speech, he seethed, targeting Haley, insisting that she should move aside immediately. He called her an imposter, attacking her for her enthusiastic speech, saying he had to be mean because “I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullsh-t.” That from the king of bullsh-tery.  Worth noting that South Carolina Senator Tim Scott who, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Doug Burgum, was with Trump in New Hampshire responded to Trump’s nasty Haley remarks by saying to Trump “I just love you.” If Trump is looking for an obsequious running mate who’ll never second guess him, he need look no further. By the way, North Dakota Governor Burgum announced that he’s not running for reelection, he’s likely angling to be Trump’s Energy Secretary.  President Biden had a pretty good night too. Though he wasn’t on the New Hampshire Democratic ballot, through the magic of write-in ballots, he’s received 51.5% of the votes so far, easily beating the more than twenty candidates that were on the ballot, including Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips (19.8%),  guru Marianne Williamson (4.7%) and some fellow named President Bodie (<.1%). It’s fair to assume that a significant share of the 14.3% of the write-in ballots that still need to be processed will end up in Biden’s column. Not bad for a guy who wasn’t officially in the race.  Phillips insists that he’s remaining in the race to make a point and to increase his name recognition.  It is not clear why Williamson is still in.  It’s not just Democrats and Republicans who matter, the No Labels party is still out there, threatening to put up a candidate, something that despite an earlier suggestion that he might, Phillips clarified he won’t entertain.  Two of No Labels’ early funders, members of the Durst real estate family, are now suing the group, claiming it pulled a bait and switch. The Durst’s say that they only provided funding to promote bipartisanship, that supporting a third-party presidential candidate wasn’t supposed to be part of the group’s mission. Also out there are RFK Jr and former Bernie guy Cornell West both of whom have the potential to be spoilers, ala Jill Stein and Ralph Nader.

Legal Morass: Scott, Burgum and Ramaswamy weren’t the only ones with Trump last night, lawyer Alina Habba was there too.  That’s notable because the maskless Habba managed to get Trump’s E Jean Caroll defamation case postponed over her exposure to her parents’ COVID.  Habba told presiding Judge Kaplan that though she had tested negative she wasn’t feeling well and was running a fever. The case was supposed to resume today, but late last night it was put off until Thursday at which point maybe Kaplan will ask Habba how someone exposed to COVID and running a fever was well enough to travel to New Hampshire when she was too ill to appear in court. In other Trump legal news, yesterday, the Washington DC federal appeals court declined to rehear arguments over Judge Chutkan’s decision to impose a gag order to stop him from talking about witnesses and court staff while he awaits trial in the January 6 election interference case.  Still no news about Trump’s immunity appeal.

Fog:  Nothing but death to report out of the Middle East right now where there may or may not be a ceasefire under discussion.  Israel wants the hostages released, Hamas not so much. On the Congressional front, the Senate is still working out kinks in a potential bipartisan immigration – foreign aid package. If, and it’s a big if, the package makes it out of the Senate it could still die in the House where Speaker for now Mike Johnson fears doing anything without Trump’s blessing. Think about that, everyone agrees that immigration reform is necessary, and Ukraine is running out of weaponry, Biden has made concessions, but Trump and his crowd want the situation to fester because the worse things are the better it is for his candidacy. America first?            

 

#BringThemAllHomeNow 

The Demented Emperor ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

And Then There Were Two:  On Friday night during a New Hampshire rally speech Trump repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming that Haley was responsible for failing to protect the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and destroying 10,000 implicating documents.  He also asserted that Joe Biden was leading the country into World War II, a historically bizarre comment that he’s made before. The audience ignored his dementia level gaffes because when a naked orange emperor asks you to admire his new clothes, you do?  On Sunday, the press which stepped away from their Biden is the demented one narrative to focus on Trump’s troubling gaffes, quickly pivoted back to their Trump’s The Man reporting after Florida’s Ron DeSantis pulled out of the presidential race.  Keeping with the emperor theme DeSantis fully endorsed the demented, mentally challenged guy for president.  DeSantis’ withdrawal isn’t a surprise nor is his endorsement, he was running as a Trump mini me. He focused a lot of his resources on Iowa and despite his second-place finish had failed to win a single district. Moreover, he was only polling in the single digits in New Hampshire.  Most pundits had expected him to pull out but thought that he’d wait until after Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary to do so, but Trump’s team, which scarily is far more professional and experienced than the crew that ran his 2016 and 2020 campaigns had been pressuring DeSantis to move aside ASAP and their efforts paid off.  Those same efforts have also resulted in endorsements from the other former presidential contenders, those not named Chris Christie or Asa Hutchinson. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott who Nikki Haley appointed to the Senate when she was governor, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, and Vivek Ramaswamy have all endorsed Trump.  Nikki Haley, received the endorsement of New Hampshire’s conservative Union Leader paper over the weekend and still has NH Governor Chris Sununu’s support as well as one from the all-important Judge Judy who has been out campaigning with her but who are we kidding, Haley will be gone too, it’s just a matter of whether she sticks around to lose her home state of South Carolina where all pundits and pollsters expect her to go down in humiliating flames.  She’s expected to do better in New Hampshire, but better is a relative term.  Even before DeSantis’ weekend pullout, Trump’s lead over her had widened likely because Ramaswamy’s supporters had migrated into his camp.

Veep Without Selina: With the Republican candidates exiting the presidential race the focus is now on Trump’s Veepstakes.  Trump has teased that he already knows who he’s going to pick.  Whether that’s true or not is anyone’s guess because in classic Apprentice mode he’s got all the possible candidates visiting his lair, professing their loyalty, and kissing his butt.  Tim Scott has even announced his engagement to his once secret girlfriend/beard because nothing says Veep material better than marriage. According to Politico the long list of candidates includes NY Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Ohio Senator JD Vance, Arizona wannabee Kari Lake, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Kristi Noem, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Doug Burgum, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott.  Notably absent from that list is Nikki Haley but who knows, if she pulls out of the race, endorses him quickly, and tosses in her first born as collateral, in exchange for forever fealty, maybe she could jump to the head of the line.  Though Stefanik, who asserts there’s no way that Trump sexually assaulted E Jean Caroll despite the jury’s conclusion that he most certainly did, seemed on top of the Veep list last week, my guess is he’ll stick with one of the more physically attractive options because Trump is who he is.  As to the E Jean Caroll case, with the issue of Trump’s culpability established, the jury is deciding how much 💰 💰 he owes her.  Trump says he’ll be there to testify on his own behalf today or then again maybe not because the last time he promised to do so, he bailed at the last minute.

Line Crossing:  If you are wondering why there’s been little mention of New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, it’s because much to the dismay of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee decided that small, mostly white states shouldn’t go first making next month’s South Carolina primary rather than New Hampshire’s the first official Democratic primary of this presidential cycle. As a result, President Biden is not on the NH primary ballot.  That said, the primary is still taking place tomorrow with twenty-one other candidates including Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips on the Democratic ballot. Biden is expected to garner enough write-in votes to win, but his margin over Phillips will likely be slimmer than elsewhere given the awkward mechanics. Elsewhere in Biden land, son Hunter has finally agreed to testify behind closed House doors.  No doubt the “leaked” snippets of his testimony will be far more implicating than the entirety of his testimony leaving it to Democratic committee members like Maryland’s Raskin and NY’s Goldman to tell us what really takes place.  Lastly, keep an eye on the courts.  We should be hearing news about Trump’s civil penalty in the NY case as well as his immunity appeal shortly.  No one expects the Appeals Court to agree with Trump’s assertion that presidents should have total immunity, always so that “even events that ‘cross the line’ must fall under total immunity, or it will be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad.”  Is it me, or is Trump telling us that he’ll be crossing all the lines should he make it back to the Oval office? Trauma ahead.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Reality Bites ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Groundhog Day:  It’s not Groundhog Day yet but it might as well be.  Yesterday, following a 77 to 18 bipartisan vote in the barely Democratically controlled Senate, the House passed another two-tiered continuing resolution to keep some parts of the government funded through March 1 with the rest funded through March 8. Like former Speaker McCarthy before him, Speaker Johnson couldn’t even muster the votes to get the resolution out of the Freedom Caucus controlled Rules Committee, so he instead had to go with the “suspension of the rules” procedure to get the funding resolution to the House floor.  That procedure permits leadership to bring resolutions up for a floor vote without Rules Committee signoff but also requires passage by a two-thirds rather than just a simple majority.  As a result, Speaker Johnson had to turn to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his caucus to obtain the votes to keep the government open.  The continuing resolution passed the House by a vote of 314 to 108 with all but two Democrats but only half of Republicans voting for it.  To put it mildly the right most wing of Speaker Johnson’s right-wing party is less than happy with him and are unlikely to be all that supportive going forward which explains why Johnson is opposing an immigration deal that a lot of Republican Senators have worked out with their Democratic counterparts and President Biden.  The deal, which uber Trump supporter Senator Lindsey Graham characterized as good as, if not better, than any deal they’d be able to hash out even if Trump is reelected, includes concessions intended to address the “crisis” at the border while also funding Ukraine. With his Freedom caucus whispering threats into one ear, and a certain spiteful Orange god doing the same into his other ear, the desperate Johnson is seriously considering scuttling any immigration reform package for political purposes because who cares if getting things done is good for the country when one’s job is at stake?

Primarily Yours: When not insulting judges or listening to his embarrassingly inept lawyer Alina Habba get schooled by the judge overseeing his E Jean Carol defamation case, the Orange one has been basking in the glow of his Iowa caucus victory.  He’s ramped up his attacks on Nikki Haley, doubling down on his claims that she like Barack Obama is not American born.  Haley was born in the US and is qualified to run but pointing out that she’s not lily-white works with a lot of Trump supporters.  For her part, during last night’s CNN townhall, Haley still couldn’t directly acknowledge the country’s racist past.  It was tortuous to listen to her word salad about how the founders said all men, with the emphasis on men, were created equal. That whole slave as a three-fifths of a person thing never crossed her lips. One of the sad things about Haley is that she knows better but is so fearful that speaking the truth will alienate the right side of her party. There’s a reason that Chris Christie who was heard off mic saying that she’s “going to get smoked” didn’t endorse her when he suspended his campaign.  The New Hampshire primary takes place on Tuesday.  While Haley is still dreaming of a New Hampshire victory, something that she desperately needs, polls, for whatever they’re worth show her 14 points behind Trump.  As to polls, while it’s highly likely that they’re right about Trump leading Haley, in general they’ve grown increasingly unreliable, particularly since Trump’s team has quite effectively managed to flood the zone with polls from right leaning pollsters, part of a successful effort to dismiss concerns that he’s unelectable in a general election, a strategy that appears to have worked.  It’s an approach that was also employed during the midterms and partially explains why so many in media were convinced that a huge red wave was coming when it wasn’t.  That said, polling for the upcoming election between Democrat Tom Suozzi and Republican Mazi Pilip for the Long Island seat vacated by George Santos indicates that they’re running neck and neck with Republican ads painting the moderate Suozzi as a left wing socialist and Democrats going after Pilip, another one with sketchy financials, who, rarely voted and until recently wasn’t a Republican, as an anti-abortion MAGA.  One more thing about Iowa, the turnout was lower than usual, perhaps due to weather but also do to a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates, a bigly problem for Haley which helps explain her third place finish but give Haley credit, taking a page from Trump’s book, she’s dismissed DeSantis’ second place finish and has decided to ignore him, asserting only she and Trump remain in the race which is how she justified pulling out of the scheduled pre-New Hampshire debate with the “irrelevant DeSantis.”  Also, in case anyone cares, Andrew Yang has endorsed Dean Philips, the Minesota Congressman challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination while Philips has eliminated references to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from his website likely to placate large donor Bill Ackman, the hedgie who helped dethrone Harvard’s Claudine Gay and is now getting skewered about his wife’s plagiarism problem.   

Fog:  Mudslinging is afoot in Fulton Country. The judge overseeing the Fulton County election interference RICO case is now looking into allegations that District Attorney Fani Willis had an inappropriate relationship with one of the outside prosecutors she hired to help her with the case.  The prosecutor in question is involved in an increasingly contentious divorce. The allegations of impropriety were raised by co-defendant Michael Roman because apparently only orange ex-presidents are allowed to have dicey private lives.  Switching gears, the embattled Bibi Netanyahu, who is fighting for his country’s survival and also for his political career, not necessarily in that order, got skewered yesterday for dissing a two-state solution.  That’s not much of new position for Bibi.  Given current events, he’s likely not totally wrong about the reality of negotiating a two-state solution right now because it takes two or maybe in this case three or more to tango and none of the other “dancing partners” appear all that interested in a diplomatic tango still it’s just not what anyone wants to hear. There are around 130 +/- hostages in Hamas captivity and the most recent negotiating accomplishment isn’t progress on their release, but that Hamas is allowing the Red Cross to distribute drugs to each one needing medicine as long as 1000 Gazans also get theirs. Kfir Bibas, the youngest hostage, to the extent he’s still alive, “celebrated” his birthday yesterday.  Reality bites.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

  

Emissary of Crazy ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻 

The Hawkeye State:   Over the weekend Trump used his Truth Social platform to share a bizarre video that proclaimed he was “God’s emissary on earth sent to delivery America back to prosperity.”  Apparently, a large swath of Iowans, including the state’s significant evangelical population bought in because though they mostly voted for Ted Cruz in 2016, this time they were all in on their orange god.  Multiple marriages and infidelities, sexual assaults, and insurrection, who really cares about that stuff anyway.  Trump won the Iowa caucuses with 51% of the votes.  With 21% of the vote Florida’s Ron DeSantis edged out South Carolina’s Nikki Haley who despite last-minute poll results projecting a second-place finish, instead came in third with 19% of the vote.  With just under 8% of the votes, Vivek Ramaswamy placed a distant fourth.  After the caucus was over Ramaswamy suspended his campaign, throwing his support to Trump.  Deep down, Ron DeSantis, who has got to know that his days on the campaign trail are numbered probably wished he’d come in third because then, with a shove from his dwindling number of financial backers, he would have been able to justify throwing in his towel too, but his second-place finish means he’ll be sticking around to get beaten resoundingly in New Hampshire.  Trump’s victory was totally expected but the press treated it like it was the second coming, breathlessly interviewing every Iowa snowflake and pulling out their crack election teams to analyze every boring detail when all they really needed to say was that the Republican Party is Trump’s MAGA party.  They’ll go all in on New Hampshire too because though it won’t matter long run, there remains a not-insignificant chance that Haley will eek out a victory before she too succumbs to the MAGA wave, and it certainly is a wave.  Yesterday Florida’s “little” Marco Rubio endorsed Trump as did North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, the one-time presidential candidate who had previously said that as a successful businessman he’d know better than to do business with a character like Trump.  No business, but an endorsement to become leader of the free world who’s running on retribution, why not?  Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds who’d previously endorsed DeSantis also said that she’d support Trump because winning is more important than anything else even if that means backing a twice impeached, multiply indicted rapist with a Jesus complex.  For his part, Trump is off to New Hampshire but not before making a pit stop in NYC to attend E Jean Caroll’s second defamation trial where presiding federal Judge Lewis Kaplan has ruled that the facts concerning her sexual assault are not in dispute because it’s already been established that Trump is a sexual predator. 

Tick Tock:  Over the weekend, Speaker for now Mike Johnson surprised and upset his right-wing 🤡 🤡 by standing firm for the funding deal he agreed to with Schumer, McConnell, Jeffries, and President Biden.  He also plans to bring the short-term continuing funding resolution initiated by Schumer up for a vote on the House floor because.  Like Kevin McCarthy before him, he’ll need lots of support from Jeffries’ Democrats to get the resolution passed.  That’s not a problem for Jeffries as virtually all of his team is expected to vote for the resolution.  Johnson’s problem is that he has to deliver at least 75 Republican votes with more being far more preferable for his Speakership longevity because that one vote motion to vacate looms over his head.  Even obtaining the 75 votes Johnson needs to deliver will be challenging, he temporarily lost still another Republican House member over the weekend after 86-year-old Kentucky Representative Hal Rogers was hospitalized following a car accident.

Fog of War:  It’s now over 100 days since October 7.  The Israeli hostages including some Americans, at least those still alive, are hidden somewhere in Gaza with Hamas dangling a few in videos to further torture their loved ones because nothing screams “we want peace” better than sharing videos of tortured, possible dead people?  The war in the Middle East keeps expanding as the Houthis launch more missiles at US and ally ships off the coast of Yemen and the US and its allies respond in kind.  For the record, the Houthis are not nice guys.  They are part of an Iran supported “Axis of Resistance” that serve Iran as anti-US and anti-Israel proxies so naturally many of the same folks who have no problem with Hamas attacking and raping residents of Israel, stealing civilian bound food, medical and building supplies, and hiding behind Gazans are now Team Houthi. Yesterday, there were more pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrations throughout NYC with the protestors closing roads and targeting NYC hospitals, including Sloan Kettering for their “complicity” in genocide.  Again, nothing builds support like going after healing institutions funded in part by Jewish donors as families try to visit their ailing family members.  The world has gone mad. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow        

TGIF ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Tick Tock:  Just about everything has happened this week but hold on because the week’s not over yet and things tend to happen on Fridays. Staring with the mundane, at least mundane for this House, Speaker for the moment Mike Johnson is considering reneging on the budget deal he agreed to at the start of the week.  He’s facing serious pushback from the MAGA wing of his caucus, the same crowd that toppled Kevin McCarthy’s speakership so that one vote motion to vacate looms. That’s not just a problem for Johnson, it’s a problem for everyone because absent an agreement and another continuing funding resolution parts of the government will be forced into shutdown mode at the end of next week. To avoid that pending shutdown, Chuck Schumer is pushing a continuing funding resolution through the Senate but it’s not clear if Johnson will be able to get enough of his clowns on board to bring it to the House floor for a vote even though that vote would pass with a lift from the Democrats. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.

Presidential Politics:  On Wednesday, Chris Christie suspended his campaign, but he didn’t go down quietly, instead, he delivered a blistering speech.  He trashed Trump, saying that he’s unfit to return to the presidency because, among other things. he’s a self-centered criminal who will continue to put his own interests way ahead of the country’s.  Christie went on to dash Nikki Haley’s hope for an endorsement by saying that he couldn’t, or at the least wouldn’t right now, throw his support to anyone who wasn’t man or woman enough to publicly call Trump unfit to serve. The expectation is that Christie’s New Hampshire voters, many of them independents and most more moderate than Trump and DeSantis’ supporters, will probably shift their votes to Haley. It’s not clear whether their support will result in Haley winning the state’s primary, but it might and at the very least it will place her in a tight second.  That’s good news for Haley but does little to change what’s likely to happen in Iowa or in any of the other early states that matter because most of the rest of the Republican primary voters are MAGA and solidly in Trump’s camp.  The bottom line, Trump, warts and all, is still likely to be the Republican’s 2024 candidate.  As to Christie, his phone is ringing off the hook, the No Labels party would love him to be their candidate and Biden and the Democrats would love for him to join their team.  Christie, who criticized Biden and the Democrats in his sayonara speech didn’t trash them as much as he trashed Trump and the other Republican candidates so anything’s possible, especially if a cabinet position is dangled so who knows.  As to No Labels, it’s hard to see how joining with them would do anything other than throw the election to Trump but then again, Christie’s got a big ego, and as anyone who tried to cross the George Washington Bridge on September 9, 2013, knows, his early Trump endorsement is only one of the stupid things that he’s done in the past.

Trump Dump:  Trump who gets away with saying lots of dumb things out loud because he’s who he is and his base either agrees with him, doesn’t care, or doesn’t pay attention told a conservative interviewer this week that he hopes the economy crashes this year.  Obviously, that’s because a crashing economy, rather one that’s actually improving, would be good for his candidacy and as Christie said in New Hampshire, Trump is far more concerned about himself than the country. He’s also all over the place on abortion and still calling for the end of Obamacare, which has grown increasingly more popular.  On the one hand he’s been trying to distance himself from onerous abortion bans, painting himself as more moderate on the issue than 6-week ban advocates like Ron DeSantis but on the other hand he knows that a lot of his fundamentalist supporters love that Roe has been overturned so this week while DeSantis and Haley were engaged in a pointless debate on CNN, he was participating in a Fox townhall where he gave Democrats some more fodder for their ads by bragging about how he delivered the three Justices who spelled Roe’s demise.  He then went on to say that he’s okay with certain life-saving exceptions, as if women across the country haven’t been learning how well those so-called exceptions work in places like Texas and other states with onerous abortion laws. On the legal front, Judge Engoron the NY Civil Court judge overseeing Trump’s NY trial whose home was “swatted” on Wednesday night ended up allowing Trump to deliver closing remarks yesterday, a surprise because as of Wednesday the judge said he would only allow Trump to speak if he promised not to go into campaign speech mode.  Needless to say, Trump did do his usual thing within the court and afterwards outside to the press, calling the NY case a political witch hunt instigated by “corrupt” AG Letitia James.  Everyone expects Engoron to rule against Trump, the only question relates to the severity of the penalties he imposes and since Trump will appeal, the case won’t end with Engoron’s ruling.     

Fog of War:  Last night the US and the UK, with the backing of Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands, launched airstrikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebel targets in Yemen in retaliation for Houthi attack on ships transiting through Red Sea shipping lanes.  The Houthis, long at war with Saudi Arabia, initially were attacking only Israeli owned ships, or ships they thought were owned by Israeli entities, to show their and Iran’s support for Hamas but had expanded their targets beyond Israeli owned ships.  The US/UK strikes weren’t surprising because keeping those shipping lanes open is important and because allowing Iran’s surrogates to act with impunity only encourages Iran to keep at it, think Hezbollah in Lebanon. Meantime, spurred on by South Africa, the World Court at the Hague is pursuing charges of genocide against Israel, not against any of the other countries who routinely slaughter people because anything Israel does is bad but not so much if it’s Hamas calling for Israel’s destruction, killing its residents or raping its people.   

And: To further liven the week, Hunter Biden and his lawyers staged a surprise visit to the House Oversight Committee part of their effort to point out the hypocrisy of the committee’s Republicans going after Hunter for contempt over his refusal to testify in private when he’s willing to testify in public.  Hunter has a point because it’s not like a whole bunch of Republican characters haven’t also refused to honor Congressional subpoenas but it’s not clear that his shenanigans are all that helpful to his father who as much as he loves his son probably wishes he and his problems would go away. Yesterday, Hunter pleaded not guilty to federal tax charges in Los Angeles.  Just a reminder that while Hunter didn’t pay his taxes when they were due, he has since paid them in full and were he not Joe’s son, it’s more than fair to assume that his case would have been plead out.       

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Evan Gershkovich too.

 

  

SEAL Team Six ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Bedlam:  Three US Court of Appeals Judges for the DC Circuit heard arguments yesterday on whether the Constitution makes former presidents immune from criminal prosecutions.  During the hearing Trump lawyer John Sauer argued that only presidents who are impeached and convicted can be prosecuted for their crimes.  In response to a theoretical question from one of the judges, Sauer suggested that even a president directing SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent couldn’t be prosecuted.  None of the three judges seemed to buy Sauer’s “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it” logic.  It didn’t help when Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutor James Pearce pointed out that by Sauer’s theory, a president could step down after assassinating a rival and/or selling a pardon for bigly bucks before impeachment proceedings could even begin and as a result manage to walk away free.  After the hearing, Trump who has promised retribution and perhaps some of that Seal Team Six treatment to his rivals should he be returned to the Oval Office claimed that he was being prosecuted because he’s leading President Biden in the polls and warned that if the courts rule against him the result would be “bedlam.” It’s not clear when the judges will rule, but the expectation is that they won’t rule in Trump’s favor and that he will then appeal, first by asking for a review by a full panel of the DC Circuit judges and then to the Supreme Court because what he’s really trying to do is to stall and stall some more, pushing off the start of the election interference trial as much as he can.  Who can blame him, while his arguments may be falling flat with judges, they appear to be working with his party’s leaders.  Yesterday, Senator John Barrasso, number three in Republican Senate leadership and one of the three “Johns” competing to replace Mitch McConnell, endorsed him saying “we need Donald Trump back in the White House.”  Also, because it’s a strategy that’s worked so well for him in the past and because he’s not happy that his New Hampshire lead over Nikki Haley has according to a CNN poll shrunk to seven points, Trump is now questioning Haley’s citizenship, claiming that even though she was born in the US, she’s not really natural born.  Getting back to bedlam, it’s already happening, a number of politicians and judges have been the victims of  “swatting” of late including Jack Smith and Judge Tanya Chutkan because nothing is better than having a fully armed FBI team show up on your doorstep to “rescue” you from a devious “prank” call.  And then there’s Trump associate, Roger Stone who was taped last year in a Florida restaurant suggesting to a now former NY Policeman that it was time to “do it” to Democratic Congressmen Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler.

The Sick List:  We now know more about why Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is hospitalized.  It turns out that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in December and like many men didn’t want to talk about it even to his boss, Biden.  He tried to sneak in what was supposed to be a fairly routine surgery over the Christmas break. His effort to slip under the radar was upended when after returning home from a one-night stay at Walter Read, he experienced severe pain due to a urinary tract infection.  That’s an unusual but not unheard-of complication.  He returned to the hospital, was placed in the ICU while the UTI and a related blockage were treated. Not fun and were he anyone else, only those near and dear to him would have learned the gruesome details but since he’s Secretary of Defense, he and his Chief of Staff who apparently was out of pocket suffering from the flu, should have been more forthcoming especially with Biden.  Austin, who is now out of ICU is expected to fully recover medically, though his lack of candor and its impact on Biden’s reelection run could do him in eventually. Also, on the medical front, Melania Trump’s 78-year-old mother, Amalija Knavs, passed away last night.  Her illness, rather than a tiff with the Donald, is the reason that Melania wasn’t in the Mar a Lago Christmas pictures.

Funding Fun: As predicted, the members of the House Republican lunatic fringe are less than pleased with Speaker for the moment Mike Johnson acting like a grown up with regard to government funding with at least one of them, Chip Roy who last November ranted about the Republican Party being useless for getting nothing done, is dangling a motion to vacate threat.  Roy and his crowd are unlikely to be all that pleased that another continuing resolution is on the table because as Mitch McConnell said yesterday, a short-term funding measure to avoid a partial government shutdown later this month is “obviously” needed.  So maybe Speaker Johnson spoke too soon when he said that he was “done” with continuing resolutions.  But then again, maybe his 🤡 🤡 🤡 can be distracted with their DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas impeachment and their Hunter Biden stuff.

#BringThemAllHomeNow     

           

Secrets and Lies  ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Déjà vu: Last week while Supreme Court watchers waited to find out when the Court would weigh in on whether states could keep Trump off their presidential ballots, the Justices further chipped away at the skeleton of abortion rights by allowing Idaho to continue to enforce provisions of a strict new abortion ban that makes it near impossible for doctors to perform abortions in emergency rooms. A federal court had earlier said that the onerous provision of Idaho’s new law conflicted with federal law about emergency care.  SCOTUS will hear oral arguments about the Idaho law and its impact on emergency care in April, with a final ruling expected in June, cold comfort to women enduring lethal pregnancies until then. Either the Justices have no sense of what emergency means or, more likely, at least five of them are okay with denying reproductive care to women facing life threatening crises until they are on their death gurneys.  As to the ballot issue, the Court agreed to hear Trump’s appeal of Colorado’s decision to rule him ineligible to run for president, scheduling oral arguments for February 8.  For now, the Colorado decision is on hold and Trump’s name is on the ballots that due to time constraints were printed last week. Naturally, Trump who views January 6 as the day when his patriotic supporters were oppressed by the Capitol police is now doing what he does, warning of “big trouble” if the Court doesn’t rule in his favor.  Keeping with that theme fresh off her victory lap for helping to dethrone the presidents of U of P and Harvard, Representative Elise Stefanik, fourth in House Republican leadership, refused to commit to certifying the results of the 2024 election while also referring to the January 6^th defendants as hostages during an appearance on Meet The Press because when auditioning for a Trump VP spot, it’s important to stick to his lies.  Keeping with that theme, Trump refused to sign a pledge not to overthrow the government, a traditional, though not mandatory, requirement for candidates running in Illinois and one that he did sign in both 2016 and 2020. It’s no wonder that Biden’s January 6 speech focused on the threat that Trump and his MAGA acolytes present to democracy.

Governing:  Late yesterday, Congressional leaders including Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Speaker for now Mike Johnson announced that they had agreed to topline spending numbers for 2024.  They still have to work out individual spending bills and address foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, but the hope is that they have averted a government shutdown and are on their way to clearing the remaining funding hurdles.  Both sides conceded a little, but mostly the agreement sticks to the framework previously agreed to between President Biden and Kevin McCarthy and we know what happened to old Kevin after that so count me as one who thinks that Speaker Johnson may find his crowd growing restless with his leadership.  Already a number of his “fiscal” conservatives aren’t happy with him trying to act like a grown-up and then there’s Trump who hates anything orderly happening on Biden’s watch.  It doesn’t help that Johnson’s already shrinking majority, is short another vote as Steve Scalise, second in the Republican House hierarchy is having a stem cell transplant to treat his multiple myeloma this week and won’t be available for any floor votes for at least a month, maybe longer. Earlier this year, Kevin McCarthy ended the COVID era rules that allowed House members to vote from home, so Scalise won’t be able to cast proxy votes during his recovery period.  Though Scalise didn’t mention the possibility that he might be out of pocket for a bit when he was running for the Speaker spot at least he’s being forthcoming now.  The same can’t be said for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin who spent some time incommunicado while in the Walter Read ICU over the holiday, something that neither he nor his staff told anyone, including Biden.  The Austin story remains murky.  Apparently, he had an undisclosed elective procedure, went home and then was readmitted to the hospital in pain, ending up in the ICU.  He hasn’t yet disclosed what that elective procedure involved, maybe a heart procedure or scope of some kind,  but cover-ups, intentional or not, aren’t a good thing so there could be consequences for him or for his Chief of Staff who appears to be taking heat for failing to keep people informed because of her own overlapping illness. It’s not like there are any wars going on, right?       

No Time for Tee: NY Attorney General Tish James is no longer asking the court to fine Trump $250 million, her new ask is $370 million combined with a lifetime ban on him, CFO Allen Weisselberg, and ex-controller Jeff McConney from real estate in NYS.  The new number includes $168 million of interest saved through his alleged fraud, $152 million from the sale of the Old Post Office/hotel lease in Washington, $60 million from the transfer of the Ferry Point Golf Course contract and $2.5 million for severance agreements for Weisselberg and McConney. Closing argments for the NY civil case are set for Thursday not to be confused with Tuesday when the federal appeals court is scheduled to hear oral arguments as to whether or not Trump is immune from prosecution for election interference or Wednesday when Trump is participating in a Fox townhall as counterprogramming to a CNN debate between DeSAntis and Haley, or a week from today when the Iowa caucuses take place, or next Thursday when damages for E Jean Caroll’s defamation case, not to be confused with her earlier NY case, is scheduled to place.   

Fog:  For some inexplicable reason the NYTimes decided to jump the shark by running an essay questioning Taylor Swift’s sexuality, something about hairpins and whatnot.  Maybe they were trying to distract from criticism over the Hamas appointed Mayor of Gaza City Op-Ed and figured that enraging Swifties was the way to go, who knows?  Or maybe they were trying to push the Claudine Gay firing out of the news, as if that’s even possible given that  Hedge funder Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman plagiarized her MIT dissertation from a few places including Wikipedia 😂.  At least Oxman, an MIT professor, is not a university president but still, Ackman should have checked with her before going all in on Gay because glass houses and stones. Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu is another one with a bigly problem at home, like maybe explaining to his right wing partners that wishcasting outloud about sending Gazans to Africa is a very bad thing. And though he isn’t throwing actual stones, Elon Musk’s habit of getting stoned got the WSJ treatent this weekend, because just maybe the guy in charge of a number of companies, including ones that control 50% of satellites and send US rockets into space shouldn’t be indulging in and sharing hallucinatory recreational drugs?            

 

 

 

It's Not Me, It's You  ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Leather Anniversary:  Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, Republicans like Margie Q and her Orange leader are commemorating the day as a tragedy when nice Trump supporting tourist were thwarted in their justified attempt to take over the Capitol to return the Oval Office to its “rightful” occupant while others, mostly Democrats, led by President Biden, plan to remind Americans that people died because Trump tried, and is still trying to end democracy as we know it.  Margie Q’s plans to hold a rally to bemoan what could have been on January 6^th have been put on hold for now only because the managers of the venue she reserved in Kissimmee, Florida were alerted that her planned book signing was just a cover for an insurrection anniversary party but she’s relentless so don’t count her out yet.  As to Trump, despite the press focus on Haley and DeSantis, his MAGAfication and control of the Republican Party remains tighter than ever.  He now has 100 endorsements from members of Congress, including ones from Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer both of whose runs for Speaker he successfully blocked.  By comparison DeSantis has only five House endorsements and Haley has one.  Trump has the endorsement of 19 Senators with at least two more expected before the Iowa caucuses, DeSantis and Haley have none. Republican Representative Elise Stefanik who is making as much hay as she can out of college presidents Gay and Magill’s resignations mostly because she’s competing to become Trump’s VP partner or at the very least one of his cabinet members has pulled an endorsement for an Ohio Congressional hopeful because he once said some not nice things about Trump.  While House Republicans are trying to impeach President Biden for loaning his errant son a few thousand dollars to help him buy a truck, none of them seem to care that Trump’s businesses racked up $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments, with China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar paying the most during his four-year presidential stint because he’s their Orange god and apparently everything he did and does is cooler than cool even if some of that money was followed almost immediately in the case of Qatar by a change in US policy.  Shifting back to DeSantis and Haley, last night during their CNN hosted townhalls both stuck with the Republican/NRA gun playbook blaming yesterday’s Iowa school shooting on mental health rather than too easy access to guns and DeSantis stood firm on his six week abortion ban, calling Trump, who stacked the Supreme Court with three more anti-abortion judges as too wishy washy on the issue, a criticism that Trump will take to the bank as he tries to woo back suburban housewives.    

Bizarro World:  The cases against Trump mostly remain quiet at least on the surface, though Trump’s team has asked for Special Counsel Jack Smith to be held in contempt for submitting filings while appeals are taking place because of course.  At least for now, SCOTUS is laying low, but despite their preference to keep their collective heads in the sand, they’ll have to weigh in soon, probably on Colorado, because Trump has asked them to and because the number of states trying to remove Trump from the ballot is growing with Oregon expected to be the next to join the list. To complicate matters a number of Democratic members of Congress want Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse from the Colorado case and presumably from any other insurrection cases because his wife Ginni and acknowledged best friend and confidant was insurrection adjacent. While the SCOTUS crowd continues to twiddle thumbs about the 14^th Amendment and elections, focusing instead on the legality of the abortion pill, the DC Appeals court is set to hear oral arguments on Trump’s immunity and double indemnity challenges on January 9. It really isn’t an understatement to say that democracy as we know it is in jeopardy.  Biden keeps trying to tell us that so Trump, the branding king who wants to be the country’s King of Kings, is now attacking Biden and the Democrats for being the ones trying to take democracy down.    

Fog:  COVID is spiking again. The variant is new again but probably because the virus isn’t as novel to our immune systems as it was when the virus first hit, it isn’t as deadly which isn’t to say that people aren’t dying, become some are.  Remember hydroxychloroquine, the horse dewormer/anti-Malaria drug that did nothing for COVID despite Trump’s assertion that it was worth trying, according to researchers in France 17,000 people in six countries, including the US, died from its heart arrhythmia causing side effect and that number is probably an underestimate. We shouldn’t dismiss the impact of scientific ignorance, because Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo the Harvard MD who should know better and who Governor Ron DeSantis appointed and continues to support, is calling for the banning of COVID mRNA based vaccines, contending that the shots could contaminate recipients’ DNA, a claim that has been debunked by the real experts but that will probably cause a number of vaccine averse people to avoid getting vaccinated. What could go wrong?  For those hoping to learn more icky details about sex deviant Jeffrey Epstein, forget about it, though the document dumps aren’t over yet,  so far there’s just been a lot of what we already knew. Lastly, ISIS has taken responsibility for the suicide bombings in Iran that caused around 80 deaths. So, despite Iran’s initial finger pointing, it wasn’t the US and it wasn’t Israel. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Welcome to 2024 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

New Year, Same Mess:  It’s a presidential election year and both the Senate and the House are in play.  Trump despite his indictments, court schedule, and ballot challenges is the likely Republican presidential candidate, a bizarrely competitive one.  Joe Biden whose first term has included a number of impressive legislative accomplishments, who has managed to avoid a much feared recession, and who has even brought down the cost of insulin, continues to suffer in the polls in part because people aren’t yet convinced that the economy is okay, but also because of the ever present but more present in election year migrant “surge,” the “progressive” left’s response to his standing up for Israel rather than Hamas, and because the country’s polarization leaves election outcomes to a few voters in a few key states.   Both candidates are old, but for some reason or other only Biden’s age matters.  And, out there on the fringes, are third party candidates, including those amorphous no-labels guys, RFK Jr,  Cornell West. Unlike Japan, our year didn’t start with an earthquake, tsunami and plane crash but all that may seem like a big nothing compared to what we may experience come November.     

Ballot News: Maine has joined Colorado in kicking, or at the very least trying to kick, Trump off their primary ballots.  California and Michigan officials have concluded that he can remain on theirs, a decision that quite a few other states have reached to less fanfare.  Efforts to keep Trump off the ballot are pending in a number of other states and though a few more may join Colorado and Maine, ultimately, even though presidential elections are run by states and Trump seems like the poster boy for the kind of insurrectionist activity the Fourteenth Amendment is supposed to prevent,  the decision as to whether or not he can be kicked off ballots will likely be made by the Supreme Court and odds are that they’ll conclude that he can run. Iowa’s Republican caucuses take place on January 15 and the New Hampshire primary is on January 23. Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy who was just endorsed by former Iowa Congressman/white supremacist Steve King, and even Asa Hutchinson are still running for the Republican nomination, but few expect any of them to overtake Trump though there’s a small chance that one of them, maybe Nikki Haley will give him a run for the money in New Hampshire and that she or Ron DeSantis could push him in Iowa.  Odds are that Trump will have the nomination sewn up by March 5 super Tuesday which means that he will be the presumptive candidate before either of Special Counsel Jack Smith cases against him makes it to trial because the Washington DC case is on hold while Trump’s presidential immunity claims meander their way to the Supreme Court and the Florida document case is going nowhere because Eileen “loose” Cannon.  Though he is most certainly running, and the New Hampshire Democratic primary also takes place on January 23, Biden’s name will not be on the New Hampshire ballot, because the DNC, wanted South Carolina to get New Hampshire’s first primary slot.  Dean Philips, the Congressman who few have heard of and Marianne Williamson who many have chosen to forget will be on the NH ballot alongside a bunch of other even less known luminaries and quacks.  Voters will still be able to cast their ballot for Biden by writing his name in though it’s likely that some independents who might have voted for Biden will opt instead to vote in the Republican primary for someone other than Trump.  Democrats are skipping the Iowa presidential caucus altogether; their Iowa decision process will involve a primary held on Super Tuesday.

Legal Morass: On the legal front not much has changed since last week except that we learned that one time Trump legal advisor Kenneth Chesebro’s Michigan testimony how much effort was made to fly fake elector ballots to Washington DC so that they could be counted on January 6, 2020, and former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is still trying to have his case removed from Fulton County to federal courts.  There still are lots of pending cases, hearings, and decisions some of which are expected to drop shortly.   The Washington DC Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments related to Jack Smith’s election interference case on January 9 and have put both sides on notice that their lawyers should be prepared to address issues brought up in some amicus briefs including one by a watchdog group that makes the argument that Trump “cannot appeal his immunity defenses until after he is tried and convicted” since “he should not be allowed to use an improper appeal to delay the scheduled March trial date.” Trump of course is arguing that he was and will forever be entitled to do anything at all because he’s Trump, he was president and will be again, forever.  In what may or may not have been a tongue in cheek tweet, billionaire soon to be ex Shark Tank guy, ex-basketball team owner Mark Cuban who may or may not be positioning himself for a future run for office suggested that Biden thank Trump for his novel legal ideas, announce that he’s never going to leave the White House, while adding that there is nothing anyone can do to him which would, at least by Cuban’s logic confirm why SCOTUS should keep Trump off the state ballots and why Trump should not get immunity.  Not going to happen and likely to unleash an avalanche of death threats like the ones currently being experienced by the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine Secretary of State if it does, but Cuban has a point.

Nothing New: We’re still facing budget deadlines but not to worry, Speaker Mike Johnson and his crew are set to go back to work on impeachments.  If they can’t pull off a Biden impeachment, they’ll settle, at least for now, for going after Homeland Secretary Mayorkas. Speaker Johnson’s already skinny vote margin is about to shrink again as Ohio Congressman Bill Johnson, no relation to the Speaker, announced that he plans to exit the House on January 21 which means he’ll be gone before anything can be done to fill Kevin McCarthy’s now empty seat and before the February 13 election to replace George Santos takes place.  Right now, the Republicans are up by only 7 seats, once Johnson of Ohio leaves, they’ll be up by 6 seats but that will change again on February 2 because New York Representative Higgins has announced that’s when he plans to step down because why should any of these guys fulfill their obligation to serve their terms when there are higher paying options on the table? And it will change again depending on who replaces Santos.  Over in the Senate, no one’s left yet but staying is getting a bit more difficult for New Jersey’s Senator Menendez who is now also charged with taking gifts from Qatar.  A federal Judge has rejected Menendez’s request for a trial delay. 

Fog:  The Sunday NY Times story on how Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7 was truly horrifying and difficult to read.  Not a problem for far too many on Twitter and Threads who are now accusing the NYTimes of targeting those nice Hamas guys by propagating such “obvious” lies.   Israel is gearing up to pull some troops from Gaza but is still all in on war.  Though they have not formally acknowledged it Israel’s military took out a senior Hamas leader in Lebanon who was reportedly the “linchpin” of Hamas’ relationship with Iran for which lots of retribution is being promised in return. Some of the same people who were happy that the US flew into Pakistan to extinguish Bin Laden are outraged that Israel did the same in Lebanon because consistency is not a thing.  Late yesterday Israel said that Hamas was “softening” on hostage release whatever that means.  Basically, lots of fog and still lots of war.  Also foggy, has been the response to the resignation of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay with some bemoaning that she was forced out not because of all her recently uncovered plagiarism and her failure to be able to condemn calls for violence against Jewish students but because Black women are held to a higher standard which is probably true. But two things can be true at the same time because while it’s true that Gay’s plagiarism which should have been caught during the Harvard vetting process might have remained hidden had it not been for efforts on the right that were fueled by Harvard’s effort to promote Black and minority women, it’s also true that she plagiarized, repeatedly and probably wasn’t a good choice in the first place.  Harvard needs to do better because doing worse only feeds the Elise Stefanik contingent and they don’t need any help.            

#BringThemAllHomeNow