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