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