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