Buck You ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

It’s On:  Last night both President Biden and his predecessor clinched their respective party’s nominations. While 2024 will be a rematch of 2020 at least with regard to the Democratic and Republican nominees, the line up of third-party spoilers will be different. We still don’t know who, if anyone, the No Labels party plans to run, largely because they haven’t yet found anyone to take their mantel, but as of now both RFK Jr and Cornell West are running as independents.  None of the minor league candidates can win, they can and will draw votes from Biden and/or Trump so while it’s fun to ridicule their runs and RFK Jr’s current plan to choose either fellow anti-vaxxer/football player Aaron Rogers or former Minnesota Governor/wrestler Jesse Ventura as his running mate, a vote for anyone of them, particularly in one of the swing states can affect the outcome of the race. Helped along by a number of third-party candidates, most notably by the Green Party’s Ralph Nader who garnered 97,499 votes, George W Bush beat Al Gore by only 537 votes in Florida, enough to deliver him an electoral college win and the presidency. Remind your frustrated friends and family, that they don’t have to love the person they vote for, but they shouldn’t waste their vote or stay home because this election, tax cuts or not, is about the continuation of democracy as we know it.  One of the major party’s candidates admires Adolph Hitler, is infatuated with Vladimir Putin, and adores and wants to model his “rule” on the authoritarian/dictatorial ways of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, North Korean dictator Kim Jong un and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.  He is also a business fraud and a sex offender who has been multiply indicted for election interference and for taking and sharing secret documents, is viewed as a risk to national security by many of his former advisors and appointees, is proud of having eliminated reproductive freedom and is promising to be a dictator on day one of his next administration should he win.  Presumably, day one is when he’ll pull the US out of NATO and start rounding up tens of millions of the undocumented, many of whom are the same long-term residents fueling our economy and providing the services that many citizens won’t.  He plans to throw them into detention camps and since that will take far longer than one day so will his dictatorship.  Listen to what he says and believe him, because while he’s often incompetent, he is very determined, and retribution is his mantra.    

The Other Guy:  It turns out that Robert Hur, the former US Attorney who was responsible for determining whether or not the other guy, Joe Biden, had criminally mishandled the documents that he took with him at the end of his time as Vice President isn’t such a good guy after all.  Hur, a Trump appointee, who appears to be competing for Attorney General in Trump’s next administration should he get a next administration, gratuitously slimed Biden in his report.  That’s the report that concluded that Biden, like former VP Pence but unlike Trump hadn’t broken any laws but where Hur threw in inappropriate, and also inaccurate comments about Biden’s mental acuity.  Yesterday, at the invitation of House Republicans Hur testified in front of Congress giving members of both party’s opportunities to score some soundbites.  Hur who tried to make Biden out as a sympathetic doddering old man in his report, failed to include a lot of far more flattering details of his five-hour interview of Biden, including the part where he complimented Biden on his photographic memory.  Additionally, it turns out that despite Hur’s assertion otherwise, Biden did recall the details of his son’s tragic death during their meeting, a particularly odd thing for Hur to mischaracterize given how frequently Biden talks about his grief over losing Beau. Mostly, what Biden was vague about related to the color coding of his files, largely because, surprise, surprise, he had nothing to do with choosing the colors that his staff picked out. Bottom line, Biden’s memory is fine, but Hur is just another political operative along the lines of former Attorney General Bill Barr, and with his hands off approach to all things that could possibly be viewed as political, current AG Merrick Garland handed Republicans some talking points that will live on and on, a distressingly useful counter to the very obvious mental deterioration of the Republican’s Orange god.  As to the Orange one and his purloined documents, Brian Butler, the long- term Mar a Lago worker previously known only as Trump Employee Number 5 was interviewed by CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, another one of the impressive interviews that she’s done since taking over CNN’s Cuomo slot.  Butler recounted how he “unwittingly” helped Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta move boxes of what turned out to be classified documents onto Trump’s private plane as well as the pressure campaign that followed as he and others in the Trump Mar a Lago universe were offered Trump-aligned lawyers. Trump’s Bedminster property was never searched by the FBI but based on Butler’s comments, it should have been.  Makes you wonder what’s under or maybe even in Ivana’s coffin. Butler also recounted that Anthony Pratt, the Australian billionaire businessman with whom Trump shared classified submarine information shared some of that information with him while he was chauffeuring him around Palm Beach because who doesn’t play telephone tag with top secret submarine details that were just criminally shared by a former president? Given how Judge Eileen “loose” Cannon keeps stalling and helping Trump with those purloined documents charges, this may be as close to hearing Butler’s testimony as we’ll ever get.  

Speaker Hakeem?  Okay, Hakeem Jeffries isn’t Speaker but given that Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority keeps shrinking he could be soon. Yesterday, without giving Johnson a heads-up, Colorado Republican Ken Buck who had already said that he wasn’t seeking reelection gave Johnson the finger by announcing that that he’ll be departing Congress next week. With a few House seats currently vacant, Buck’s departure leaves Republicans with only a two-seat majority. The special election to fill Buck’s seat will take place on June 25.  Concerned that she can’t win in her current purple district, Lauren Boebert, who has been endorsed by Trump is moving districts and is one of the Republicans competing to take over the safely Republican Buck seat.  If Republicans appoint her as their candidate for the special election, she will have to give up her current seat, meaning they will remain down a Colorado House seat with no time left for another special election to fill the one she vacates. There are a few more open seats in the House that will be filled by special elections in other states, but things could get really dicey for Johnson come this summer.   

#BringThemAllHomeNow