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