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