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