New Year, New World, Sigh 🤡 🥂 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤡 🥂 

Catching Up:  Right before Christmas two Republicans, NY’s Andrew Garbarino and Ohio’s David Joyce, flipped their votes to join with all the Democrats on the House Ethics Committee and as a result, despite the opposition of Republican leadership, the report detailing Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz’s crimes and transgressions was released. The report found substantial evidence that Gaetz had violated state and federal laws, as well as a bunch of House rules.  It provides details about his many encounters with and payments mostly via Venmo and other like apps to prostitutes, the sex he had at least twice with a teen when she was an underage high school junior (that’s rape by Florida law), his illicit drug use, and his use of House facilities to arrange for some of his illegal activities.  Little in the report was a surprise.  His behavior was gross but it’s also gross and outrageous that he was Trump’s first pick to serve as Attorney General. This should be the end of Gaetz, but it isn’t because he’s due to join One America News Network as an anchor in January, he still has political aspirations, and he’s from Florida, the home of broken MAGA toys. Speaking of MAGA Floridians, Trump started his Christmas holiday by issuing one of his increasingly demented holiday messages. In it he called all his opponents “Radical Left Lunatics,” he cast aspersions on Canada and Panama while also being rude to President Biden who had way too graciously welcomed him to the White House after his election victory. On the subject of Canada, Trump then suggested that former hockey player Wayne Gretzky become its Prime Minister, or as he put it run to become Governor of what he’s taken to calling the 51^st state, because in addition to wanting to grab back the Panama Canal and glom on to Greenland, he has eyes on Canada too.  Nothing normal, but very Trumpian. Keep an eye on the presidential transition, while no one expects Democrats to attack the capitol, House Republicans may throw a few wrenches into things if they follow through on threats to oust Mike Johnson from his Speaker post.  They don’t appear to have a suitable replacement lined up but that didn’t stop them last time.   

Live and Let Die:  Before the holiday, President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 Federal inmates on death row. The three exceptions were Robert Bowers, convicted for the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue; Dylann Roof, convicted of the shooting at the Mother Emanuel AME Church; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who was convicted of the Boston Marathon bombing. None of the prisoners whose sentences were commuted were pardoned, they will all serve the rest of their lives in jail. Biden has long opposed imposing death sentences and during his presidency no federal prisoner have been executed so his action wasn’t surprising.  Trump however is all in on the death penalty, during his last administration 13 federal prisoners were executed.  He has promised to aggressively pursue its use once he’s back in office.  I am no fan of the death penalty for a variety of moral and practical reasons though I understand its appeal to those who have lost loved ones. Morality and emotions aside, imposing the death penalty is significantly more expensive than imposing a life sentence without parole, with estimates showing it costs between $700,000 and $1 million per case above and beyond the cost of life incarceration, due to the complex legal proceedings, lengthy appeals process, and specialized security requirements involved in capital cases. That money could be better spent elsewhere, maybe the DOGE guys should considering include that in their bucket of savings.

Flip Flopping:  There was a time when Trump was all in on banning Tik Tok.  In fact, four years ago he called the Chinese owned company a threat to US national security.  However, that was before Jeffrey Yass one of Tik Tok owner ByteDance’s major US investors contributed to his campaign and before some Tik Tok executives visited him at Mar a Lago, checkbook in hand, so now he’s asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ban passed by Congress which is intended to force Tik Tok’s Chinese owners to sell it to a US entity.  Absent a stay by the Supreme Court, the ban is due to go into effect in January. Trump’s current position is that Tik Tok is great because it’s a “unique medium for freedom of expression.”  On the subject of free speech, world’s richest man Elon Musk, that other advocate of free expression when that speech agrees with him, muzzled some MAGA voices on X this weekend.  Their transgression: they spoke out against his side kick Vivek Ramaswamy after he advocated for the expansion of the H1-B visa program.  H1-B Visas allow employers to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations like technology, authorizing the “temporary” employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the U.S.  In addition to endorsing the H1-B program Vivek attacked the American system of education for rewarding prom kings over nerds, using a peculiar reference to the old Saved by the Bell TV program which he believed undervalued the “brilliance” of Screech as proof of his point. Vivek’s endorsement of the H1-B visas unleashed a torrent of protest from lots of MAGA types, especially those who’ve deluded themselves into believing that Trump who is currently married to his second immigrant wife is opposed to all immigrants rather than just opposed to the mostly brown ones crossing the border from Mexico or the Black ones from Haiti. In support of Vivek, Musk squelched posts from Trump fan Laura Loomer for her criticism of Vivek’s pro immigrant stance. Much to Loomer and also Steve Bannon’s dismay, Trump then weighed in on Musk and Vivek’s side claiming that H1-B visas are so awesome that he uses them to staff Mar a Lago. For the most part Mar a Lago is staffed by people with H2-B visas, the visas used for unskilled seasonal workers but then again, it’s not like Trump cares about truth or details.  However, he does still care about making benefactor Elon happy.  By the way, Elon isn’t much for truth either.  He took to X to claim that he came to the US on an H1-B visa.  However, the truth as admitted by his brother is that he first came here on a student visa which he almost immediately violated. Visas aren’t the only thing that Elon weighed in on this week.  He wrote an op ed that was published in Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper where he doubled down on his support for the country’s far-right, as in Nazi sympathetic, AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, calling it the “last spark of hope” for the country. Musk who was born in South Africa, like other techie rich guy Peter Theil and venture capitalist David Sacks, have fond memories for the days when then South Africa was an apartheid nation ruled by a white minority.

Viral Musings:  To date most of the HSN1 bird flu cases in the US have affected animals, although 66 individuals have also been infected.  Fortunately, most of the human cases have been mild, however gene sequencing of the one severe case has shown signs that the virus is mutating in a manner that could make it more transmissible among humans.  A number of virus experts, the folks the MAGA community likes to demonize, are concerned that the HSN1 could spark another pandemic and are pushing for the development of a targeted vaccine but nothing to worry about because by the time the virus takes off, RFK Jr, you know the guy all in on eliminating raw milk restrictions who also opposes vaccinations and doesn’t want to fund vaccine research could be making health decisions.  Also, whooping cough, is on the upswing so if you aren’t up to date on your TDAP (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) shot now would be a good time to get one.

RIP Jimmy Carter.

#BringThemAllHomeNow 

 

Latkes and Jingle Bells 🎅 🕎 🎄 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🕎 🎅🎄 

After Midnight:  Late Friday, by a vote of 366 to 34, with only Republicans dissenting and Democrats providing a heavy lift, the Republican led House finally passed a continuing funding resolution.  After midnight, the resolution was passed in the Democrat controlled Senate by a vote of 85 to 11.  President Biden signed it into law on Saturday.  The resolution did not include those provisions that most upset shadow president Elon Musk like funding for childhood cancer research, the transfer of RFK Stadium to Washington DC, pharmacy benefit management rule changes that were intended to make drug pricing more transparent, Congressional pay raises, replacements for stolen food stamps because presumably you don’t need to eat when yours are stolen, and most notably limitations on technology business in China maybe, just maybe because that would have negatively affected Musk. Ironically, the extension of the debt limit, the one thing that Trump insisted had to be included, was not in the final resolution. Musk and his DOGE aide Ramaswamy crowed about how they had cut 1000 pages from the resolution but failed to mention that most of the deleted pages concerned the unique complexities of reforming the pharmacy benefit management. The government is now funded through mid-March when this whole exercise will begin again with Trump and Elon in the Oval Office and Republicans controlling the Senate and the House, the latter by one seat, since their three  “replacement” House members won’t be seated until sometime in April, and, even then, the Republican’s margin will be smaller than in 2024 as a result of Democrats having gained a seat in the November election. Providing further proof of how stupid and performative last week’s exercise was, on Saturday before decamping, the Senate voted to fund some, but unfortunately not all, of the pediatric cancer funding left out of the continuing resolution.  They also voted to permit the transfer of RFK stadium to Washington DC.  Since the House passed those provisions earlier in the year, another House vote is not needed for them to go into effect. Unfortunately, a provision providing for insurance reimbursement for cancer ridden children seeking out of state care was left on the cutting room floor in a puddle of their parents’ tears.  Can you imagine Trump or Musk standing in the way of any of their sixteen children or in Trump’s case his many grandchildren getting needed care?

Elon Scissorhands:  To get the resolution through his caucus and signed off on by Trump and his boss Musk, Speaker Johnson promised to raise the debt ceiling $1.5 trillion next year in a package deal that would include funding for Trump’s border security and would cut $2.5 trillion in mandatory spending, a promise that he knows he can’t keep without cutting entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.  Musk’s okay with all that but Trump promised not to cut Medicare or Social Security. He can’t be trusted to make good on his promises, but he does care about power and cutting entitlements would just about guarantee that Republicans lose their tenuous control over the House in the 2026 midterms. That crowd that celebrated the murder of United Health Care’s CEO, and many of those who didn’t, won’t be all that happy when they and their elderly parents wake up one morning without any health care insurance and little in the way of retirement funds. Musk probably cares little about that, but Trump probably cares about losing the House and maybe even the Senate and anyway deficits don’t concern him, just billionaire tax cuts.  Speaker Johnson, the too religious for porn holy roller who insists that he, Musk, the father of eleven by three women, and Trump, the father of five by three wives, remain text besties.  However given the funding debacle, it’s not clear whether Johnson will be Speaker come January since a not-insignificant number of the Republican caucus have soured on him.  The only thing weighing in his favor right now is that it’s not clear that anyone else could win a vote and absent a Speaker Republicans won’t be able to swear in all the House members which would delay Trump’s crowning, and we know Trump won’t like that though 91-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley who as President Pro Tempore of the Senate would serve in the interim might enjoy it. I am discounting Senator Rand Paul’s suggestion that Elon Musk should replace Johnson as Speaker but maybe we shouldn’t.  Fun and games await. 

More 🤡 🤡: Eric Trump’s wife Lara will not be the next Senator from Florida.  She says she’s taken herself out of the running because she has other plans which likely means that Florida’s Governor DeSantis told her that he had no intention of appointing her to the seat being vacated by Marco Rubio who will be Trump’s Secretary of State, until some future date when Trump fires him. Texas Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger, 81, has been MIA from Congress for several months.  It turns out that she’s suffering from dementia and living in a Texas assisted living facility. That’s sad for her and her family but also totally nuts that no one in Republican leadership knew why she’d been absent so long.  Also nuts, Kash Patel who Trump has tapped to replace Chris Wray as the FBI Director included a list of sixty “traitors” in his last book.  That list includes a who’s who of the people who have spoken out against Trump, all the January 6 committee members including Liz Cheney, former AG Bill Barr, and a number of people like Cassidy Hutchinson who do not have the resources to defend themselves because even innocent people need lawyers. Patel is on record saying that he thinks that they should all be prosecuted and as FBI Director he can make that happen. Though he may try to distance himself from his “promise” during the Senate confirmation process and apparently has already convinced Democratic Senator John Fetterman that he won’t follow through on his promised revenge, Steve Bannon says he will. Over the weekend Trump named a few more Ambassadors and envoys, including Calista Gingrich who last administration was his Ambassador to the Holy See to be Ambassador to Switzerland and Apprentice producer Mark Burnett to serve as his Special Envoy to the UK.  It’s not usual to have special envoys to the UK but then again, Burnett is sitting on all those possibly incriminating Apprentice tapes, so Trump owes him bigly. Anyway, Trump’s been insulting allies right and left so maybe he really does need special envoys to smooth things over. He’s insulted all of Canada by calling its Prime Minister a Governor, over the weekend he demanded that Panama give back the Panama Canal, and he once again wants to “buy” or really grab Greenland from Denmark.  Also, he’s talking about pulling the US out of the World Health Organization (WHO) on “day one” while also insisting that members of NATO, another organization he hates, more than double their annual military expenditures or else.    

The Musk Mess:  Musk appears to be getting under Trump’s skin which could be why Trump joked this weekend that he doesn’t have to worry about Musk unseating him because as a foreign-born person he can’t be president. Trump may not be ready to ditch Musk, but a few more debacles and he might want to. It’s not just that Musk threw a wrench into the government funding process, over the weekend he publicly supported Germany’s AfD far right party, just as an AfD supporter killed five and injured more than 100 people at a Christmas market in Germany. AfD is the party of choice for lots of Neo-Nazis, it’s anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and oppose the teaching of the Holocaust because who wants to remember that?/ Then again, VP-elect JD Vance also expressed his support for the AfD crowd, so maybe being Nazi adjacent isn’t a problem in Trump world.  In any case, the problem for Trump is that Musk has repeatedly shown that he’s willing to skewer anyone he doesn’t like, or doesn’t like anymore, on X and having bought Trump for $260 million he’ll get viscous if he doesn’t get his money’s worth. 

Fog: During the Cold War, the US justified getting involved in the Viet Nam War by invoking the Domino Theory, the idea that political changes, like the adoption of communism in one country, would spread to neighboring countries in a domino effect without US intervention. Well things didn’t work out so well for us in Viet Nam but it turns out that the Domino Theory has merits at least with regard to the current situation in Iran, which despite having one of the world’s largest supplies of gas and crude oil is in the midst of a “dire” energy crisis because it turns out that sending boatloads of money and arms to surrogates and terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah while also supporting a Syrian tyrant, rather than spending on energy infrastructure, has come home to roost in the form of rolling blackouts and shutdowns. Apparently, Iran failed to anticipate that Israel’s forceful and relentless reaction to the October 7 attacks would be so effective at eviscerating Hamas, nor did they anticipate that Israel would be able to simultaneously dismantle so many of the Hezbollah forces attacking from the north. That strain on its resources left Iran incapable of providing Bashir Assad with the help he’d grown to rely on to keep his control over Syria, a problem exacerbated for Assad when Putin, his other major supporter, ran into some of its own dominos and had to divert military resources to continue its unending war against Ukraine.  As evidenced by the missiles that hit Tel Aviv this weekend, the Houthis, another one of Iran’s Middle East surrogates is still causing lots of harm so Iran isn’t out of the terrorist game yet but who knows what more countrywide blackouts will lead to?     

Enjoy 🎅 🕎 🎄 

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

School House Rock 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️  

How a Bill Doesn’t Become a Law:  Elon Musk is the world’s richest person, but he clearly never saw Jack Black’s School of Rock.  He did however spend somewhere north of $260 million on Trump’s presidential campaign.  Yesterday he made it clear that he didn’t give Trump all that money out of the goodness of his heart and that chairing the DOGE efficiency committee isn’t the only thing he wants in exchange.  Musk wants to be in charge and apparently the Orange Dude who won the election, is okay with that, or at least he was until yesterday when, with his help, Musk blew up the continuing funding resolution that had been painstakingly negotiated between House and Senate Democratic and Republican leadership. Musk did that by spending Wednesday night tweet trashing it relentlessly on his X platform. In one of those tweets, many of which were false and misleading, Musk said that “any member of Congress who voted for the outrageous spending bill deserved to be voted out in 2 years,” a threat to be taken seriously given Musk’s willingness to bank roll campaigns. Trump, who until Musk weighed in had been onboard with the funding resolution, then made it clear to Speaker Mike Johnson and the rest of the Republicans in Congress that he was withdrawing his support putting Johnson’s Speakership in jeopardy. Trump, or in reality Musk, then demanded a new continuing resolution, a “Plan B,” with cuts in funding as well as the addition of a provision lifting the debt limit so that it won’t be reached for two years.  On the face of it raising or even eliminating the debt limit all together sounds like a good idea, but Trump’s motive is far from pure, he wants it lifted to make it easier for him to pass all those tax cuts he’s promised without any offsets. Since eliminating the debt ceiling takes away the Democrats remaining cudgel to rein him in, they are almost uniformly against doing so.  Among other things, Plan B also included the elimination of funding for pediatric cancer research, early cancer detection, requirements that pharmacy plans pass rebates back to consumers, and a Congressional pay raise, a provision that no one will admit to including in the first place. Without consulting Democrats, whose votes are always needed to pass any funding bill largely because Republicans who can’t even get funding bills out of the Rules committee are incapable of passing funding bills by themselves, Johnson acceded to Trump and shadow president-elect Musk’s demands. The Plan B funding bill was brought up for a vote last night and as expected it went down in flames by a vote of 235 to 174 with 38 Republicans joining all but two Democrats in voting against it. As a result, we are now hours away from a midnight government shutdown and this time it feels like that shutdown is really going to happen because not only do House Republicans need to come up with a Plan C, they need to get a significant number of their House Democratic colleagues on board, and then they need to get Chuck Schumer and the still Democratic controlled Senate to sign off.  Closing the government is not the holiday present that anyone expected or wants but whether it happens or not, just the fact that it’s a real possibility is an indication of how chaotic the next four years will be. Republicans of course are blaming the chaos on President Biden because that’s what they do.  To be clear, this mess is all due to Trump and his boss Musk.  Any bets on how much longer the Musk-Trump bromance continues?  Those memes of Musk behind the Resolute Desk with Trump shining his shoes have got to have Trump launching ketchup bottles right about now.

Ethical 🐄 🐄 :  The House Ethics Committee quietly voted to release the Matt Gaetz ethics report before they go home for the holidays so assuming they ever go home, we should see it shortly. By resigning Congress, Gaetz had thought that the report would remain squashed so he’s far from pleased.  He is now admitting that he slept around, “partied” a lot, and sent a few women, even a few he didn’t know, money via Venmo as one does?  He continues to insist that none of the recipients of his cash or his other favors were underage. He’s now threatening to do whatever he can to get the House to release the names of all the members who’ve settled harassment suits because why should he be the only one to be exposed? Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is another one who is not having a good week.  Yesterday, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified her from continuing to prosecute the election interference case against Trump.  Their decision overturns the ruling of the trial court judge who’d said that despite her inappropriate relationship with one of her prosecutors she could continue. Given presidential immunity, the case against Trump wasn’t going anywhere anyway but by tossing Fani and her entire team aside, the Appeals Court also made it unlikely that the remaining cases against Trump’s co-defendants will ever be prosecuted.  Willis is appealing. California’s cows 🐄 🐄 are also suffering, not because of any ethical lapses though who really knows what Elsie and her pals have been up to, but because so many of them have tested positive for H1N1 bird flu which some in the state are now calling Cow COVID.  The good news is that pasteurization still protects the milk supply, the bad news is that RFK Jr who could be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services is still all in on eliminating restrictions on raw milk and vaccine development and a few people have already gotten bird flu, one of whom is currently very ill.        

#BringThemAllHomeNow 

Free Press? 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️  

Autocracy 101: Last week, Disney owned ABC agreed to pay fund Trump’s foundation for his “someday library,” pay his legal fees, and apologize for calling him a rapist because after all he was “only” found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E J Carroll, a distinction due to the peculiarity of NY State law rather than the actual violent assault. The most unsurprising thing about ABC and Disney’s capitulation is that it has emboldened the highly litigious wannabee king Trump so yesterday he followed through on his earlier threat to sue the Des Moines Register and its pollster Ann Selzer for publishing the poll predicting that Trump would lose the state by three points. Trump’s accusation is that the paper and Selzer engaged in “brazen election interference,” and he wants “accountability.”  His lawsuit is absurb, frankly if anyone has grounds for suing, it’s those of us who hoped beyond hope that Selzer’s prediction was correct, and to be clear we don’t have the right to sue either. Saying the suit is without merit, the Des Moine Register is standing up to Trump, at least for now but the lawsuit will cost them, which is Trump’s intent.  He’s going after them to intimidate every other media outlet who is even thinking about offending his orange ego.  It’s not just Trump, his FBI Director pick, Kash Patel has threatened legal action against former VP Pence counterterrorism aide Olivia Troye for saying on MSNBC that he would “lie about intelligence,  “lie about making things up on operations,” and that as a result of his lying he “put the lives of Navy SEALs at risk.” In the same vein, Republicans on the House’s Administration Subcommittee on Oversight have called for the FBI to investigate Trump critic Liz Cheney for “potential witness tampering” related to her role on the January 6 committee.  Current FBI Director Wray wouldn’t do that, but you know who would, Trump’s FBI Director nominee Kash Patel.  As Anne Applebaum, who writes about anarchists and the end of democracy, would put it, Trump is following the anarchist’s playbook and sadly it’s working.  Media outlets are already muting their criticism, and some are likely to be sued out of existence because even if they don’t fold like ABC, their legal bills will bleed them dry.  While Trump’s critics are panicking, those who reported that Hunter and Joe Biden had accepted bribes from Ukrainian oil company Burisma don’t seem all that concerned that their countless faux stories were based on the lies of an ex-FBI informant who pleaded guilty this week to inventing those false stories because with Trump in power who really cares about all that?  And of course, the runways in Palm Beach are getting crowded as more and more corporate executives make their way to Mar a Lago to kiss Trump’s ring.  The most recent visitor with his hat in his hand, and probably a bigly check in his pocket, is Tik Tok CEO Shou Chew who is pursuing a two-track effort to get the legislative requirement that Tik Tok be sold to a US company or be shut down by January 19 reversed.  He’s appealing to the Supreme Court while trying to get Trump’s support.  Trump who previously opposed Tik Tok’s continued Chinese ownership is now saying nice things about the company because they’ve been saying nice things about him and that inauguration fete isn’t going to pay for itself.

Polio For All: RFK Jr has been meeting with Senators this week, trying to convince them that they should ignore the many times that he’s publicly said that no vaccine is safe and effective and that he was just kidding when he said that the “proposition that smallpox and polio were abolished due to vaccinations is controversial, and not a proposition that is universally accepted.” As daft at many Republican Senators can be, most if not all of them know that RFK is blowing smoke up their collective you know what’s, the question is whether they’ll be willing to cross Trump who is positively salivating about having a member of the Kennedy family in his cabinet even if that member is a killer 🤡.  For his part Trump wants us to know that he is all in on the polio vaccine but not for schools mandating it because really why would we want to maintain the herd immunity that has protected the vulnerable to date.  He also wants more research on the vaccine’s ties to autism which is his way of saying that if RFK wants to suspend vaccine authorizations, why not?  Apparently that Kennedy halo goes only so far because while RFK stands a chance of charming himself into the cabinet, his daughter-in-law Amaryllis Fox Kennedy who RFK was trying to get appointed to the number two spot at the CIA has had her chances torpedoed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton and the Senate Intelligence Company.  But no need to cry for her just yet, she’s still in the running for a position on DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard team’s or even in the White House.   

More 🤡 🤡:  Trump has nominated a few more ambassadors, few of them up to the task, but that’s one of those things that both sides tend to do.  Last night he announced that football hero/failed Senate candidate Herschel Walker, is his pick for the Bahamas, kind of inevitable since he needed to pick at least one Black person for something, and he really likes Herschel.  Earlier he nominated businessman/golf buddy Lou Rinaldi to be Ambassador to Uruguay because “he’s a great golfer and Uruguay is a country with some terrific golf courses.”  Rinaldi who was born in Urugray may or may not be a good pick, but we should all agree that the golf course thing should not be what makes him an appropriate choice.  Not that it will affect anything, but the NY Times ran a story last night about how Elon Musk and Space X are being investigated because he routinely disregards disclosure protocols intended to protect state secrets. The Air Force has even had him banned from certain meetings. The ketamine usage and public pot smoking isn’t a good thing either for those seeking security clearances either.  None of these concerns or limitations have done much to affect Musk’s behavior as he still fails to report his meetings with foreign adversaries and has been known to show up to meetings for which he doesn’t have security clearance. Musk has been sitting in on some of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders because Trump isn’t all that into protecting national security either and anyway, as he did with son in law Jared, he can just grant Elon security clearance regardless of any concerns expressed by the various intelligence departments.

Abortion Rights?  Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a New York doctor for prescribing abortion drug mifepristone to a Texas woman as part of a teleconference appointment.  New York law protects the doctor, but should this case make it to the Supreme Court, which is Paxton’s intent, she could be in trouble as could the availability of mifepristone because in addition to punishing the NY doctor Paxton and the anti-abortion movement want to invoke the out of date but still on the books 1887 Comstock Act which bans the distribution of contraceptives and abortion education, instruments or drugs through the mail.  Their goal is to make it impossible for women to obtain abortion inducing mediations no matter where they live.  Women in states like Texas where abortion has been effectively banned rely on mifepristone for their reproductive care so invoking the out-of-date Comstock Act is what Paxton’s crowd wants.  It’s not just Paxton, one of Trump’s senior appointees to OMB, is on record calling for no exceptions to abortion bans because ten-year-old rape victims as mothers is okay with him and as far as he’s concerned there’s never been a case of a pregnancy, even an ectopic one, that caused the death of a mother or more likely he just doesn’t care.     

And:  NY Judge Juan Merchan has ruled that the hush money decision stands. That’s great but Trump is appealing his decision so don’t celebrate yet.  On the legislative front, last night Congressional leaders reached a funding deal to keep the government open through March. DOGE be damned the continuing resolution, which Elon Musk has already spoken out against, has $100 billion in disaster relief and $10 billion in aid for those farmers still suffering from Trump’s first term tariffs and a whole bunch of other goodies. Republicans will need lots of Democrats on board to get the package passed. That’s not at all surprising but an indication that extending the expiring Trump tax cuts will be near impossible to do without further exploding the deficit because when push comes to shove, slashing and burning all the things, including entitlements, that Elon and Vivek want cut will not be so easy to accomplish, particularly with such a teeny House majority.  In other news, flight trackers report that Nancy Pelosi was flown home to San Francisco yesterday. That’s Pelosi who posed for a picture in Luxembourg with her House compatriots after she broke her hip but before she was transported to the hospital.  Busy Nancy also managed to help torpedo Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign to become the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, a position that opened up after Maryland’s Jamie Raskin unseated New York’s Jerry Nadler for the ranking position on the Judiciary Committee.  By a vote of 131 to 84, the Oversight position went to Maryland’s Gerry Connelly.  AOC had promised to stop primarying Democratic members of Congress whose positions weren’t “left” enough for her but apparently that promise mostly fell on deaf ears.  Odds are that if she follows through on her promise at some point the 35-year-old AOC will replace the 74-year-old Connelly, but not yet.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

    

 
Hey Siri 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Killer 🤡 🤡:  Hey Siri:  How can I kill hundreds of thousands of people and/or put them on respirators or in wheelchairs and leg braces for the rest of their lives? Answer: Confirm RFK Jr as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, then you likely missed the news that one of RFK’s closest advisors is a lawyer named Aaron Siri.  Siri specializes in vaccine lawsuits.  In 2022 he asked the FDA to revoke approval for the polio vaccines.  He’s also petitioned the FDA to “pause distribution” of 13 other vaccines, including combination products that cover tetanus, diphtheria, and hepatitis A. As if those “requests” aren’t concerning enough, RFK, who wants Siri to be the FDA’s chief legal counsel, has Siri advising him on employee selection, a process that involves a touchy-feely questionnaire that asks about their sex lives as well as their views on vaccines.  Their goal is to load HHS with as many vaccine skeptics, also known as anti-vaxxers, as possible. The news about Siri touched a nerve with outgoing Republican Senate leader and polio survivor Mitch McConnell who issued a statement saying that “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous….Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.” That’s great, but McConnell who will be just another member of the Republican Senate caucus when the confirmation votes are taken has a habit of falling into line, so we won’t know where he really stands on RFK’s confirmation until the vote.  Lawyer Siri is not an outlier, Trump’s pick to run the Center for Disease Control is physician Dave Weldon, a former Florida congressman whose views are aligned with RFK’s.  Despite all evidence to the contrary Weldon stands by claims that vaccines cause autism, basing his assertions on the debunked, withdrawn, falsified study responsible for that lie.  Over the weekend, possibly because he’s a favorite of Melania, Trump finally appointed Ric Grennell, his former ambassador to Germany who managed to totally offend most of Germany during his tenure and who also briefly served as his Director of National Intelligence, to serve as an envoy for special missions.  That’s a consolation prize for Trump loyalist Grennell who had lobbied hard to get the Secretary of State spot.  By the way, one of the reasons that Melania likes Grennell so much is because he helped her get two $500,000 speaking gigs during Trump’s campaign.  Trump has also picked Devin Nunes, the former Congressman, current CEO of Trump’s Truth Social, to serve as Chair of the Presidents Intelligence Advisor Counsel.  Before leaving Congress, Nunes was the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, a job he took seriously until he became a complete Trump toady.  Sadly, Pete Hegseth is still Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Defense. Trump and JD Vance brought Hegseth to the weekend’s Army Navy football game, their way of making it clear that Trump really wants him confirmed.  Keeping with that theme, Senator Lindsey Graham once again questioned the veracity of all those accusations about Hegseth being a rapist with a drinking problem, insisting that those assertions have to be in front of the cameras and on the witness stand to count.  He also claimed that Hegseth will release his rape accuser from her NDA.  It’s not clear that Hegseth will but we know that if he does, he and the MAGA crowd will eviscerate her, tearing her life apart while they also see to it that any Fox person who comes forward about him repeatedly showing up for work inebriated loses their job. For what it’s worth, given its current leadership vacuum, it’s reported that Hegseth is now cooperating with the FBI on a background check.  Though Trump hasn’t appointed him to anything yet, he and Vance brought former Marine Daniel Perry, the guy now being deified for having been acquitted in the NYC subway vigilante chokehold death of Jordan Neely, the mentally ill knife wielding subway rider.  Regardless of how you feel about the verdict, Perry becoming the newest MAGA hero ala Kyle Rittenhouse is kind of gross.  Tulsi Gabbard is still Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, but reports are that her meetings with Senators haven’t been going well, not only because of her affinity for Putin and Assad, but because she’s been coming off as an airhead with little expertise in any relevant areas.  Maybe she has a hard time expressing her views without Putin whispering in her ear?

More 🤡 🤡:  Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Congresswoman who brought us Jewish Space Lasers is set to run the House DOGE subcommittee which is probably all you need to know about what is likely to come out of that committee. Add Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, to the growing list of Tech CEO’s contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee.  Depressing but not surprising to see all these techies line up to support Trump, they are doing their best to curry favor and hinder future regulation of their businesses, one of the reasons that Elon Musk is so invested in Trump.  Count Disney among the complicit.  Just days before Trump and ABC were due to sit for discovery depositions, ABC which is owned by Disney, agreed to apologize to Trump and to give $15 million to his future ”presidential library” to make Trump’s defamation lawsuit go away. Trump had been suing ABC and George Stephanopoulos for Stephanopoulos calling Trump a rapist.  ABC decided to settle even though the New York judge who presided over the E Jean Caroll case where it was adjudicated that Trump had sexually assaulted Caroll was on record saying that despite the limitations of the NY State definition of rape, it was okay for E Jean to characterize Trump as a rapist.  Given the judge’s statement, ABC’s decision to capitulate is confusing, either Disney has decided that being on dictator wannabee Trump’s good side is more important than standing on principle or they feared the outing of some incriminating emails and texts during the discovery process or both.  Regardless of their reasoning, the decision is expected to empower Trump and his MAGA crowd, already a litigious bunch, to continue to intimidate the press which is why many fear that the whole concept of the free press took a major hit with the Disney decision.   Also, given Trump’s aversion to reading, isn’t $15 million a lot for his library?   

Droning On:  Either we’re being attacked by an army of drones from some extraterrestrial force, Iran, China and/or Russia or our collective imaginations have gone into overdrive and we’re experiending a War of the Worlds mass panic moment.  At least so far the authorities who are supposed to be in the know insist that most of the sightings are planes, commercial and private, and the ones that aren’t planes are garden variety drones rather than poison spewing attack missiles.  Time to chill. The drones are likely the least of our problems, at least until some 🤡 starts shooting at passenger planes in an effort to protect us from an ET or Chinese attack.  Of course Trump has taken to Truth Social to suggest that we do just that and Joe Rogan is very concerned too.

And:  On Friday Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi broke her hip in Luxembourg while attending a conference. She was flown to Landstuhl Air Force Base in Germay where she had hip replacement surgery.  Reports are that she’s recuperating. Wishing her well and also recommending that no one, least of all an 84-year-old, wear four inch heels 👠 while walking on marble floors.  Congress is up against another funding deadline and ironically negotiations are  being held up because a group of mostly red state representatives want more money for their farmers, the ones still suffering from Trump’s last round of tariffs.  How’s that DOGE thing going?   

 #BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Friday the Thirteenth 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Person of the Year:  Adolf Hitler was Time’s person of the year in 1938.  Joseph Stalin made it on to the cover twice, in 1939 and again in 1942. Ayatollah Khomeini got the nod in 1979 as did Vladimir Putin in 2007.  This year’s pick, Donald Trump, who also made it to the cover in 2016, fits right in with that crowd. His accompanying interview should dispel any doubt about that. In the interview Trump mostly rambles on, often coherently and frequently with lies significant enough for Time to have refuted some of them.  Incoherence aside, Trump clearly said he’d start pardoning January 6 rioters within the first minutes of being inaugurated and that he’ll employ the military to the “maximum level of what the law allows,” whatever that means, to round up and deport undocumented migrants and probably a few US born children because we know how he feels about birthright citizenship, the Constitution be damned. That’s consistent with the promises made by his aide de horror Stephen Miller and his Border Czar Tom Homan who want to station INS agents and maybe even the military outside usually off-limits areas like schools and places of worship to catch those very dangerous kids and their doting parents.  Some but not all of that is okay with NY Mayor Eric Adams who appears to be angling for one of those Trump pardons for all of his alleged crimes.  The Trump interview is chock full of nuggets of horror, befitting for a Friday the thirteenth, including one where he says he’d be willing to halt certain childhood immunizations because RFK Jr, the faux health expert told him they cause autism. The next four years are going to feel like 1461 Friday the thirteenths.

More 🤡s:   Jeff Bezos who very conveniently decided shortly before the November election after his editorial board had already written its Kamala Harris endorsement that his Washington Post would no longer endorse presidential candidates, is donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.  He joins Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg who once said that it was important for him and his companies to be neutral. Both are hoping to cozy up to Trump, Zuckerberg to avoid having Meta’s social media companies punished for refusing to allow the posting of rightwing conspiracies, Bezos to avoid having his rocket and internet service companies banned from government contracts.  For his part, FBI Director Chris Wray who was appointed by Trump to replace James Comey after his unceremonious firing, has announced that he won’t wait for his formal Truth Social pink slip. In an act of what is being called anticipatory obeisance, Director Wray notified his agents and the rest of us that he plans to leave his position in the new year before Trump is inaugurated.  So much for FBI Directors serving for ten years to avoid the politicalization of their tenures.  Not only was Trump thrilled about Wray’s decision, but Kash Patel who promises to go after Trump’s enemies, ala notorious FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, particularly those in the press and those who “went after” Trump as soon as he’s confirmed and scary as it seems, he could actually be confirmed, despite or maybe because of his threats. We keep learning more about Department of Defense pick Pete Hegseth, another one of the broken toys that Trump has nominated. In the most recent of his five books/diatribes, titled “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth calls out policies allowing gay people to serve in the US policy, denouncing them as part of a Marxist agenda aimed at prioritizing social justice above combat readiness. If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s the same reason that he believes that women shouldn’t serve in combat positions and that too many people of color have been promoted.  It’s not clear how Hegseth thinks the Pentagon will find enough recruits if he “roots out those gay Marxists” and limits advancement opportunities for women and people of color but then again, maybe all that drinking he’s been accused of has rotted his prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for critical thinking.  On the subject of critical thinking, judging by the number of elections she’s lost, the majority of Arizonans are convinced that Kari Lake is not all that rational which likely explains why Trump has decided to appoint her to lead the Voice of America because nothing promotes democracy better than an election denier?  Yesterday’s funniest human resources tidbit, well only in a sad kind of way, is about Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, the “billionaire mogul” who Trump has appointed as his advisor on the Middle East.  It turns out that Boulos is not even close to being a billionaire, rather he is a small-time truck salesman who married a woman with family money.  Also, the University of Houston has no record of Boulos obtaining the law degree that he says he received there. 

Brain Worms: Not only is Trump considering allowing RFK Jr, should he be confirmed as HHS head, to start eliminating vaccine requirements for all those nasty childhood diseases, but according to the Wall Street Journal his transition team has started to explore “pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate or even eliminate the top bank watch dogs in Washington” because apparently they’ve forgotten about the Great Depression, the 2008 banking crisis and the Silicon Valley and Signature Bank debacles to name a few of the more recent failures. Revisiting and maybe streamlining regulations isn’t entirely bad, dismantling protections, including even those provided by the FDIC, probably not such a good idea but, then again, a lot of people in Trump’s orbit seem to have been visited by RFK’s brain worm and/or share his fascination with hallucinogens.  That may be the excuse that Elon Musk opts for if he’s ever called in to explain why it is that his ginormous charitable foundation keeps failing to make the legally required amount of contributions.  According to the NY Times for the third year in a row Musk’s foundation did not give away enough of its money, it missed that mark by a whopping $421 million.  Moreover, some of the funds it did dispense went to other Musk controlled charitable entities which seems a bit sketchy, at least to me.

Fog:  Lots of talk out there about a Hamas hostage deal in the works, not that we haven’t heard that many times before.  WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich who really was released after being held prisoner by Russia for one year and four months is back at work. Today’s WSJ includes his must-read article entitled “Tracking Putin’s Most Feared Secret Agency From Inside a Russian Prison and Beyond.”  Welcome back Evan.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow 

Bring in More Clowns 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

🤡 🤡 🤡: Despite the rumors, Trump is not appointing Arizona’s Kari Lake, the election denier who still hasn’t admitted that she lost both her gubernatorial and Senate races, to serve as Ambassador to Mexico.  Instead, he has nominated Ron Johnson a former Green Beret and CIA official who previously served as his Ambassador to El Salvador. This Ron Johnson is not the 🤡ish Ron Johnson who in addition to being the Republican Senator from Wisconsin played a role in the fake election saga. While Kari is out, or at the very least hasn’t yet secured a position, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who until very recently was son Don Junior’s fiancée is in. Last night Trump announced that Kimmy is his choice to serve as Ambassador to Greece.  Don Jr has been seen out and about in Palm Beach with a new and younger socialite paramour so Guilfoyle’s appointment may be Trump’s way of placating her while getting her as far away as possible.  No comment yet from officials in Greece about how they feel about being a fiancée dumping ground, or how they feel about the fact that Kim, the former Mrs. Gavin Newsom, was reportedly fired from her one-time position as a Fox host for sexually harassing her assistant, another one of those who Fox silenced with an NDA. Oh, to be a fly on the wall the next time Prime Minister Kiriakos Mitsotakis has a tete a tete with his French counterpart Emanuel Macron who will soon be hosting Jared Kushner’s father, who was once jailed for setting his brother-in-law up with a prostitute to hide his financial crimes.  In other ambassadorial news, Trump announced that he’s nominating his fundraiser and his and Jeffrey Epstein’s billionaire friend Tom Barrack to serve as Ambassador to Turkey.  Unlike Jared’s dad, Barrack hasn’t served jail time, but he was once indicted, though acquitted, for serving as an unregistered agent for the United Arab Emirates.  He also has lots of other business dealings in the Middle East that could but probably won’t complicate his confirmation because it’s not like Trump or his MAGA enablers are sticklers for ethics rules.  Proof of that disdain is that Trump has Elon Musk, a bigly beneficiary of government aid, devising a slash and burn plan to make the government more efficient, a plan sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy believes should include “scrutinizing” the loan to Tesla competitor Rivian while leaving money awarded to Musk’s businesses untouched. Trump has also announced that he plans to replace Lena Khan, the current chair of the Federal Trade Commission.  Khan who has taken her job a bit too seriously for many by blocking some big mergers and by suing Amazon and Facebook parent Meta will be replaced by the way more “big” corporation friendly Andrew Ferguson who will not need to be confirmed because he is already an FTC commissioner.  Rounding out recent announcements Trump has nominated: Harmeet Dhillon who mostly opposes civil rights to head up the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division; losing 2022 Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, who like United Health Care CEO shooter Luigi Mangione admires the writings of Unabomber murderer Ted Kaczynski who killed his victims by mailing them packages of explosives, to head up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and he announced that Alina Habba, his favorite incompetent lawyer will be counsel to the President. Unrelated, but worth noting that unlike Mangione’s family, Kaczynski’s brother called authorities after he realized his brother was the Unabomber because he didn’t to put anyone else at risk.  He then donated the reward money he received to his brother’s victims.   

Sane Washing 🤡 🤡: The sane washing of Trump’s other really bad nominees continues.  It’s not clear to me why the right-wing Heritage Fund is so invested in Defense pick Pete Hegseth, but they are.  They plan to spend $1 million to lobby Senators to support his nomination. That said, Hegseth is still not a shoe in for confirmation, though he might manage to make it to the top of the Pentagon, which is both nuts, offensive, and dangerous for the country. It would also be dangerous for Trump to have Tulsi Gabbard who gets most of her news from Russian media and maybe some from Vlad himself distilling his intelligence reports, but she remains in the mix.  So does RFK Jr, who has reached out to Mark McAfee, the Fresno, California raw milk purveyor who has been at the center of several bird flu related product recalls. RFK Jr, a raw milk advocate who apparently hasn’t met an E. coli bacterium that he doesn’t think should be spread far and wide, wants McAfee to become an advisor to the FDA on raw milk policy and standards development. That’s loony but maybe not as out there as Trump telling NBC’s Kristen Welker that he wants RFK to examine the already thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism. To repeat, those theories and the retracted study that propagated them have been debunked but sure let’s waste more money on them instead of on trying to figure out actual causes and treatments.  RFK’s anti-vaccine position and probably also his raw milk fascination likely explain why more than 75 Nobel laureates are urging the Senate to reject the “unqualified” RFK’s nomination, not that Trump or his MAGA crowd will ever be persuaded by actual award-winning scientists after all a whole bunch of his nominees, including Mehmet Oz, Kash Patel who is still in the mix but shouldn’t be, Mike Huckabee, and Surgeon General nominee Janette Nesheiwat are still raking in cash pushing miracle cures and dubious supplements.  While the current Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has declared gun violence a national emergency, Nesheiwat who at the age of 13 accidentally set off the handgun that killed her father, is not expected to embrace a similar gun violence message because NRA.

#BringThemAllHomeNow, journalist Austin Tice, who may or may not be still alive somewhere in Syria, too.

 

Buckle Up Buttercup 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Syria, Russia, Iran:  Well, so much for my prediction that Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth would be a history burger by now.  He’s still the Defense Secretary nominee because Trump has “spoken to people that know him very well, and they say he does not have a drinking problem." Also, some of the Republican Senators Trump has spoken with think Hegseth is “fantastic” because apparently alleged rapists with drinking problems are in vogue with the MAGA set.  It’s far from certain that Hegseth is confirmable but at least for now he’s still in the game and why not given that Trump who once told us all that “I alone can fix it” probably doesn’t think he needs a sober Defense chief since he’s the one making all the decisions and, anyway, he’s got deposed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s one time and maybe still friend Tulsi Gabbard, his DNI pick, whispering in his ear. Unfortunately, as this weekend’s events in Syria indicate the world is an unpredictable place but sure who really needs a sober and experienced military advisor? As to Syria, the rapidity of the toppling of Assad’s regime was surprising but the fact that he was ousted less so because with Putin, one of Assad’s backers otherwise occupied in Ukraine and Assad’s other major supporter, Iran, dealing with Israel’s overwhelming response to the October 7 attack by Hamas, one Iran surrogate, and dismantling of one of its other surrogates, Hezbollah, Syria had become an expendable friend at least for now. While it’s great to see the brutal Assad dynasty toppled, it’s worth noting that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the jihadist rebel group that sent Assad packing to Putin’s Moscow is led by a “previously” al-Qaeda linked Islamist named Abu Mohammed al-Jalani. Syria is an ethnically diverse country with several Islamic sects, significant Kurdish, and Christian populations and even some Jews.  Though al-Jalani insists that he and his group will tolerate the beliefs of the difference groups, under his leadership the northwest Idlib region of Syria that he’s been running is currently governed by hardline Sunni Islamist principles. Moreover, the US and other Western countries consider HTS to be a terrorist group.  Also, Russia will want to keep its Syrian based Mediterranean bases, Israel which has already moved forces into the Golan Heights, is wary of an Islamic state on its border, Turkey, with its Ottoman Empire aspirations, disdain for all things Kurdish, and large population of Syrian refugees is involved and the US, which continues to battle the pockets of ISIS remaining in Syria is likely to stay in the mix even under Trump. It, like everything else about governing, is complicated.  

Déjà vu Again:  With his favorite billionaire, or as one reporter dubbed him his BOTUS Elon Musk in tow, Trump,  weird handshake, and all, attended the reopening of Notre Dame this weekend.  FLOTUS Jill Biden was there too, but naturally Trump got all the attention because that convention of the US having one president at a time is so quaint.  Bucke up, it’s going to be a long, long four years.  Trump also sat for an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker where he said a lot of scary and also stupid things.  He admitted that those tariffs he is so enamored with might raise consumer prices but so what. He also talked again about getting rid of Obamacare because it “stinks.”  He has no planned replacement but, just as he said during the campaign, he has some concepts.  If his Obamacare fascination sounds familiar, it’s because it is. As in 2016, the last time he tried to strip away health insurance from millions of Americans, he clearly has some advisors telling him that he needs to save money to pay for the tax cuts that he has pledged to extend and increase. Cutting Obamacare in its entirety didn’t fly last time, and probably won’t this time either but there will be drama, and there is a chance that he will manage to cut some of the Medicaid expansion that benefits the working poor because really why do those folks need help paying their medical expenses if that money comes out of the pockets of billionaires with multiple mansions, planes, yachts, and even rocket ships?  Trump also talked about eliminating birth right citizenship as part of his deportation plan. He claimed that the US was the only country in the world that has birthright citizenship.  He’s wrong but then again, he was also surprised when Welker pointed out that birthright citizenship is explicitly protected by the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, a document he’s probably never read.  And no one should be surprised that the guy who’s promised retribution believes that all the members of the House January 6^th Committee should be jailed.  He didn’t say that he would order their prosecution, but since his wannabee FBI Director Kash Patel has said that they should be arrested for treason and his Attorney General is likely to do whatever he wants, no one should be surprised if they are prosecuted which is why President Biden is seriously considering pardoning all the committee members, not that most of them want to be pardoned.     

 Fog:  Over the weekend Hamas released a proof of life propaganda video of Israeli hostage, 24-year-old Matan Zangauker, and this morning the Times of Israel reported that Hamas and Israel have started exchanging “release” lists, again. One can only hope something good comes of this.

#BringThemAllHomeNow  

  

 
Twisting in the Wind 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Facing Fire:  Pete Hegseth, whose chances of becoming Defense Secretary continue to circle the drain, spent yesterday pleading his case to more Republican Senators, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “I’ve Faced Fire Before I Won’t Back Down,” and via his mommy who told Fox he was a changed man, as in he used to be a woman abusing drunk but not so much anymore. He also told fawning former Foxy Megyn Kelly that he likes to drink but that he’ll stop if confirmed, an easy promise to make but a very difficult one for someone with a drinking problem to keep.  All that pleading is likely for nought in part because Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, a member of Republican leadership, an Army reservist and a member of the Senate Armed Services committee who has spoken in the past about her own sexual assault, has more than implied that she won’t support Hegseth’s appointment.  The loss of just one Republican vote on the committee will do him in so Ernst’s vote really matters.  Certainly, the deluge of news articles about Hegseth isn’t helping his cause.  Yesterday the NY Times reported that Fox’s human resources department had “spoken” to Hegseth about his inebriated state at one Fox Christmas party and that he was so drunk at a Fox colleague’s wedding that he had to be carried out of the men’s room. The NY Times also reported on his involvement in a right-wing Christian movement that celebrates and pines for the Crusades, that time when Christians wantonly murdered Muslims and Jews on their way to Jerusalem.  It’s reported that Trump who has stopped making calls on Hegseth’s behalf isn’t considering only Florida’s Ron DeSantis as a Hegseth replacement but is also considering Ernst and Florida Congressman Mike Waltz who he previously tapped to be his national security advisor.  All three, unlike Hegseth, would be easily confirmed.  Hegseth is an awful candidate, it takes a lot of hubris to think that you’re so great that your bad acts won’t catch up with you, but the expected failure of the Hegseth nomination is more Trump’s fault than anyone else’s.  It tuns out that not taking advantage of the FBI’s vetting resources while picking Fox commentators whose chief skill set is an ability to look and sound good on camera while “auditioning” for an appointment is not the way to go.  Hegseth is expected to be gone shortly, however, it’s not clear how many more of Trump’s picks can be kicked to the curb but knives do appear to be out for Tulsi Gabbard, with many in the intelligence community hoping that when the Senate Intel Committee sees the very real reasons that her appointment to the Director of National Intelligence is so alarming to them and to our “Five Eyes” allies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK) who should she be confirmed are likely to stop sharing some key intelligence with us over fears that she’s a direct conduit to Putin.  To be clear, it’s not just Tulsi, Patel and RFK are also scary dudes for those who find retribution and death to be bad things.              

More Picks:  In another staffing news Trump has announced a slew of immigration and deportation related appointments, no doubt each one has been selected for their willingness to carry out those mass deportation plans Trump promises to initiate on day one when he’ll become that “dictator for a day” that he also promised to become.  He announced that former Georgia Senator for a minute Kelly Loeffler who wanted to be Secretary of Agriculture but lost out to right wing think tank head Brooke Rollins is his pick for the Small Business Administration and that former one term Georgia Senator/failed Gubernatorial candidate David Perdue is his choice for Ambassador to China. He’s also announced that billionaire supporter David Sacks who shares his anti-Ukraine/pro-Russia views will be his AI/Crypto czar.  This week’s funniest pick was Jared Isaacson to be head of NASA. Funny because the friend of Elon Musk who Trump described as an accomplished astronaut is not an astronaut but one of those who paid Musk’s SpaceX for a seat on two of his private space flights.  

DOGE Ditties: As to Musk, it turns out that he “bought” his way into Trump’s heart by contributing $274 million to his presidential campaign and that he also was responsible for the strategy that painted Trump as moderate on abortion.  Together with sidekick Vivek Ramaswamy and carrying son X-Æ-12 on his shoulders, as one does when one is the richest man in the world and your money is why people give you the time of day, Musk made the first of what is likely to be many sojourns to Congress yesterday.  On the one hand it’s impossible to ignore the DOGE government efficiency effort, on the other hand it’s hard to take it too seriously.  That’s not just because Musk had little X of the weird name in tow, though need I point out that any woman who brought her toddler along for such meetings would have been laughed out of the chamber and eviscerated by Fox and the right, it’s because as smart as they are neither Musk nor Ramaswamy have yet grasped that the lion’s share of the government budget is made up of things that will be near impossible to cut by more than a hair and targeting those areas on their list like cancer research, law enforcement, veterans’ health care, Alzheimer’s research, and Head Start, not to mention those programs that right wing Republicans have wanted to cut for years and are now again talking about cutting, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security might not be all that politically palatable to House members in swing districts.  Similarly, cutting the funding for Biden’s infrastructure projects, many of which are in red states and swingy places won’t be easy either.  Worth mentioning that Musk whose businesses benefit from billions of government funding and Ramaswamy showed up just as many in Congress were leaving town so maybe they need to get familiar with the House and Senate schedule before they lobby for their cuts.  Also, why is it that neither Ramaswamy nor Musk are talking about closing the tax loopholes that billionaires use to avoid paying a fairer share of taxes? 😊

Factoids:  Taking a page from Russian and North Korean state media Fox has awarded Trump the Patriot of the Year Award 🤮 🤮. By the way, despite his claims to the contrary, Trump did not win a majority of the popular vote.  He won but with “only” 49.9% of the vote to Harris’ 48.4%. Though it’s not yet clear whether President Biden will actually hand them out, reports are that he has his team preparing preemptive pardons for the likes of Liz Cheney, virus guru Tony Fauci, General Mark Milly, California Senator-elect Adam Schiff, and a whole bunch more of those on Trump and Kash Patel’s list of “treason” targets. Sad that he thinks he needs to do that, but he may really need to that given the times and the players. House Republicans are continuing to sit on the Matt Gaetz ethics report, claiming its release would set a bad precedent.  New York Congressman Jerry Nadler is relinquishing his Democratic ranking member role on the House Judiciary Committee, handing it without a public fight to Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin. Lastly, and quite concerning, health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are dealing with what they believe is a new probably airborne illness that they are currently calling Disease X.  So far 400 people have come down with the flu-like disease and 79 have died.  We better hope that this turns out to be an isolated nothing burger or that raw milk is the cure because Trump’s health appointees, most notably RFK Jr, who questions that AIDs is caused by the HIV virus, don’t believe in vaccines and aren’t much into disease research.

#BringThemAllHomeNow       

 

Petering Out 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Bye Bye Pete? Who could have possibly guessed that failing to vet cabinet and other confirmable candidates could result in the nomination of some seriously compromised individuals?  And how ironic is it that reports that his Defense Secretary pick, former Fox guy Pete Hegseth, is a binge drinker, possibly an alcoholic, are likely to be the final straw for Trump because though he can tolerate serial cheating, “alleged” raping, and running not for profit organizations into financial ruin, given his late brother Fred’s problem with the bottle, he tends to draw the line at excessive drinking.  Pete Hegseth’s problems took a huge turn for the worse on Monday, after The New Yorker’s highly respected me-too reporter Jane Mayer released her deep dive into his troubled past. In addition to the credible rape accusation  previously reported, she detailed how the multiply married, serial cheating Hegseth was known for drinking excessively at work related events which included trips to strip joints;  that in addition to the rape accusation that we know of he also had a habit of sexually harassing women who worked for him during those alcohol infused events; that he bankrupted two conservative not for profit organizations with his profligate spending on frequently inappropriate activities; and that during one of his trips to a bar, he shouted for all to hear that all Muslims should be killed. The Trump team’s response to the Mayer article was to call the allegations “disgusting and completely unfounded” but apparently some of Hegseth’s former Fox colleagues find them totally believable.  Yesterday NBC reported that ten of them, some still at Fox, witnessed his excessive drinking firsthand, at times found it necessary to baby-sit him, and frequently had to contend with him showing up for to his weekend morning show late with alcohol still on his breath. The Defense Secretary position involves reacting, soberly, to emergencies at all hours and also involves the oversight of an $840 billion plus budget and, though it may seem a big quaint given Trump’s marital history, cheating on wives is a big no-no for military officers, one that could get them court martialed. Though few of them will go on the record, reports are that at least six Republican Senators are against Hegseth’s confirmation which likely explains why Trump’s team is now floating Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as his replacement. DeSantis is strident and far from a charmer, but as a former Congressmen, current Governor, and presidential candidate, any skeletons he may have had in his closet, were shaken out a long time ago and like him or not his marriage appears to be solid. Don’t be surprised if Hegseth exits stage left while DeSantis, who likely has the ability to actually implement some of Trump’s worst plans, enters stage right.  Also, don’t be surprised if the tradeoff for DeSantis’s nomination is the appointment of daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the seat that Florida Senator Mario Rubio is vacating to become Secretary of State.    

Who’s Next 🤷‍♀️ Yesterday another one of Trump’s picks, Hillsborough County, Florida Sheriff Chad Chronister, flew the coop. For three days Chronister had been Trump’s pick to serve as head of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency).  Though he lacks the international drug enforcement experience needed for the position, it wasn’t that gap that did him in, rather it was outrage from the right over the fact that he actually enforced health restrictions during the COVID lockdowns and that as part of those efforts he’d arrested a pastor who had violated a ban against large gatherings. Again, while that might seem like a stupid reason to force a candidate out, and clearly that’s what happened, a little vetting would have uncovered his past “infraction.”  Assuming Hegseth really is toast, and he probably is, he probably won’t be the last Trump nominee to go up in flames because with him out of the picture, attention will move to the next most egregious Trump pick, possibly Kash Patel, or maybe Tulsi Gabbard, or, if former Mayor/Public Health advocate Mike Bloomberg has his way, RFK Jr. There are so many, it’s hard to pick.  It’s not just Bloomberg who finds the RFK nomination distressing and scary, former Trump FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has also weighed in telling CNBC that RFK’s appointment will “cost lives in this country.” He went on to say “You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down” …… “And like I said, if we lose another 5%, which could happen the next year or two, we will see large measles outbreaks. For every 1,000 cases of measles that occur in children, there will be one death.”  Trump’s strategy of quickly announcing all of his appointees may turn out to be a blessing for some Senate Republicans because though many of them don’t want to be seen publicly voting against the confirmation of a Trump pick, they’re okay with letting the press do the job for them. Their hope is that the worst picks, or at least some of the worst, will be gone before any hearings take place and there’s plenty of time for that because the hearings won’t even start until the next year after the new Senate is sworn in. One of those “worst” picks, Kash Patel’s plans include shutting down the FBI’s intelligence unit, the group that’s supposed to protect the country from the next 9.11.  He’s also got a long list of people he wants to investigate, prosecute, and fire, a list that until this week included Hunter Biden, which is likely one of the reasons that Daddy Joe pardoned his son.  Frankly, I am surprised by and disagree with the number of Democratic politicians upset (or faux upset?) about the Hunter pardon because what parent wouldn’t try to protect his son, even a compromised one, from a promise of retribution by a blood thirsty mob and Patel and his crowd do act more like January 6^th rioters than anything else. As legal expert/pundit Andrew Weissmann pointed out this week, Hunter was over prosecuted for the types of non-violent crimes that are typically either not pursued or resolved with a fine and payment of owed taxes. With the likes of Patel threatening to go after him, the circumstances behind Biden’s earlier promise to not pardon his son had changed dramatically. There are probably a lot of people who should be pardoned by Biden before January 20, because many of them, like Alexander Vindman who features prominently on Patel’s list, haven’t committed any crimes, not that any of that matters to either Patel or DOGE oligarch Elon Musk who have both called for Vindman to be tried for treason.

Election Results:  The election is now over.  Yesterday Republican incumbent John Duarte conceded his close California race to Democratic challenger Adam Gray.  As a result, absent any deaths or illnesses and there probably will be some, the final House count is 220 Republicans, 215 Democrats, a count that will be 217-215 in January, until special elections are held in the Spring, as a result of the two seats being vacated by Republican appointees Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz and the one seat already vacated by Panhandle Putz Matt Gaetz.  Though the 2024 election is behind us, some jockeying is going on within the House caucuses as members fight for key committee chair positions.  Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin (age 61) has announced plans to challenge New York Democrat Jerry Nadler (age 77) to become the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee currently chaired by Republican fire thrower Jim “Gym” Jordan.

Fog:  Something bad for Democracy occurred in South Korea yesterday when President Yoon Suk Yeol announced and then after protests and market reaction cancelled martial law. Yoon justified his one Scaramucci length martial law imposition by asserting that the opposition party was too closely aligned with North Korean interests but that was a ruse, the reality is that he was angry that he couldn’t get his plans enacted and saw martial law as a solution. There is now chaos and calls for him to resign or be impeached. No doubt Trump who routinely disses American support for South Korea but who would really love to impose martial law is closely watching events play out there. As we keep on learning, democracy is a fragile thing.  In other distressing news, we learned yesterday that Israeli American Omer Neutra who was thought to be a Hamas hostage, captured during the October 7 attack on Israel, was actually killed that horrible day.  Hamas has not released his body.  May his memory be a blessing. Trump’s response to the announcement of Neutra’s death was to threaten Hamas that there will be “all hell to pay” if the hostages are not released asap. Good luck with that, as far as I can tell Hamas doesn’t care much about hell being rained down on Gazan civilians.

#BringThemAllHomeNow