Both Sides Now ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

They’re Acting Strange:  There’s a problem at the southern border because despite our political discord boatloads of people, especially those from economically depressed and violent locales, really want to come here.  House Republicans decided to tie border legislation to aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan as a way of torpedoing any aid package but instead of dismissing what looked like an intentionally impossible task a bipartisan group of Senators including Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy and quirky but strangely effective Arizona Independent Kyrsten Sinema hashed out a plan to deal with the border problem. Sure, it’s not perfect but by increasing border funding, restricting the numbers of migrants who can cross on any given day and by speeding up processing it goes far towards dealing with the situation.  So now that there is a proposed bill, one that President Biden has signed on to and that those on the right should like more than those on the left, Republicans, especially House Republicans are dumping all over it, not because of what it contains but because with the US economy outperforming everyone else’s as well as economists’ expectations Trump has made it clear to them that he needs the “migrant hoard invasion” to worsen rather than improve.  To complicate matters, over the weekend Speaker Mike Johnson who doesn’t sneeze or poop 💩 without Trump’s permission announced that he plans to bring a large standalone aid bill for Israel to the House floor this week.  No Ukraine, no Taiwan, no border funding, and no offsets,  just Israel.  Don’t be fooled, he’s not doing that because he’s suddenly woken up to the urgency of funding Israel; if that was the case, he would have supported a clean Israel aid bill when it first came up.  He's doing that because he knows that funding Israel will be disruptive and he’s right.  Some Democrats won’t vote for the bill because it ignores Ukraine, others, especially the squad contingent won’t vote for the bill because it’s for Israel and others won’t vote for it because they want the border reform that Johnson demanded in the first place.    

Ice Cream Castles in the Air 🍦  🏰:  If you weren’t paying attention, you may have missed that South Carolina held a primary on Saturday, not the Republican one scheduled to take place on February 24 where Trump is likely to squash what’s left of Nikki Haley’s presidential aspirations, but the Democratic one.  Biden who, unlike in New Hampshire, was on the ballot for this one walked away with 96.2% of the votes.  Second place went to Marianne Williamson who I thought had dropped out but apparently hasn’t.  Williamson managed to eke out 2.1% of the vote with third place going to Congressman Dean Phillips who despite his best efforts and $5 million of his own money garnered only 1.7% of the vote which he actually “celebrated” on X by saying how impressive it was that he managed to break into the four digits by finding 2,239 people to vote for him.  The turnout wasn’t high but then again, no one expected it to be given that everyone knew that Biden would win bigly.  Still Biden’s margin of victory was huge and African American turnout was higher than expected.  That said Biden is still struggling in the polls because a lot of Americans, or at the very least those who answer the phone when pollsters call, remain all in on Trump despite his 91 indictments, and the $83 million awarded to E Jean Caroll to penalize him for sexual assault and defamation.  As to those 91 indictments, everything remains up in the air. The way things are going the much-maligned NY DA Alvin Bragg case could make it to trial before any of the others. The Washington DC appeals court still hasn’t weighed in on Trump’s assertion of immunity leaving a number of the usual TV legal pundits a bit panicked as they can’t understand what’s taking so long since in their view the decision could write itself as presidents aren’t supposed to have the power of Medieval kings.  Similarly, nothing’s cooking elsewhere except that Fulton County DA Fani Willis has admitted that she does have a personal relationship with one of her special prosecutors but that there’s been no financial impropriety involved even though the optics kind of suck.  We’re also still waiting for Judge Engoron to announce his verdict in the NY fraud case, the issue there isn’t whether Trump and his business engaged in bad acts, it’s about how much they should be penalized for those bad acts.  Also, arguments on whether Trump can be kicked off the ballot will be made to the Supreme Court this week. Spoiler alert:  he should be kicked off but no one except the most delusional expect that he will be, and many are concerned that when SCOTUS says he can stay on the ballot, Trump will get a boost in the polls. On the subject of bad acts, Roberta Kaplan the attorney who represents E Jean Carroll revealed during an interview with George Conway, Kellyanne’s ex, that after she deposed Trump, he more or less called her the “C” word by saying he’d “See You Next Tuesday” as she left their session, baffling to her since they didn’t have a meeting planned on Tuesday.  She said that she didn’t respond because she didn’t get what he was saying until one of her staff explained it to her.  What a guy.

Tears and Fears:  The US is dropping bombs in multiple Middle Eastern locations to punish Iran’s surrogates for attacking the US and our allies in the Middle East.  War is still raging in Gaza and despite hints of a deal, the hostages are still hostages.  And because Putin really is one of his BFFs and maybe also because he’s about to drop a one-on-one interview with him, former Fox guy Tucker Carlson was seen hanging in Moscow this weekend.  It would be nice to think that he’d bring WSJ journalist Evan Gershkovich and the other American prisoners held in Russia home with him when he returns but then again, that’s probably not going to happen.       

 

#BringThemAllHomeNow