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