Happy New Year 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🥂 🎉🍾

The Gift that Keeps Giving:  The Department of Justice has 5.2 million more pages of Epstein documents to review and has reassigned 400 US attorneys who normally work on national security and criminal cases in New York and Florida to redact away all those things that Trump doesn’t want the public to see. Where’s AI when you need it?  Marjorie Taylor Greene whose last day in Congress is January 5 doesn’t generally give interviews to the mainstream media but gave one to the NY Times.  She remains a conspiracist with extreme views and is supportive of most Trump’s policies, but his sitting on the Epstein files lost her because as a Q-ster she really is opposed to pedophiles and the people who abet them.  She says that while exerting pressure on her to vote against the Epstein file discharge petition, Trump told her that his “friends” would be hurt if the files were released. By friends he probably includes himself as well as some of his donors, or people who became donors in the hopes of getting the files squelched or at the very least having their names redacted.  When she pressed him to invite Epstein’s victims to the White House for a sit down, he said that they “did not deserve the opportunity to meet with him.”  Trump who once invited Taliban leaders to Camp David and has hosted Russian leaders in the Oval Office refused to meet with the victims, that says a lot, none of it good.  Last night the Wall Street Journal provided more color about Trump’s break-up with Epstein.  Apparently, Epstein was never a dues-paying member of Mar a Lago but was a Trump “friend with benefits,” meaning that he was allowed to use Mar a Lago’s facilities, a privilege that included having  “young women” from the spa provide him with massages at his nearby home.  Over time, it became an open secret among the spa staff and management that he was abusive to the girls, some of whom complained about Epstein making sexual demands. It wasn’t just management who knew about Epstein, second wife Marla Maples knew as well, she warned Mar a Lago management and Trump that something was “off” with Epstein. After the complaint of an 18-year-old beautician that Epstein had pressured her to have sex during one of her spa service trips to his home was put into writing and placed in the HR files, Trump finally banned Epstein from the club.  The WSJ article implies that Trump’s decision had more to do with the incriminating paper trail about Epstein’s behavior than the behavior itself. That observation is bolstered by the fact that Trump’s banned Epstein 2003, around three years after Epstein had poached 16- year- old Virginia Giuffre, who before committing suicide went on to become one of his most vocal accusers.  The bottom line, Trump knew about Epstein way before the ban and Marla did too which is consistent with an earlier NY Times report that the mother of a 14-year-old model who attended a Mar a Lago party in 1994 was warned by Marla to “keep her young teenage daughter away from these men, and especially my husband.”  Maples, who is tied up in non-disclosure agreements has nothing to say about any of this. Notably, Trump’s relationship with Epstein lasted longer than their marriage.  And finally, on yesterday’s Bulwark podcast, journalist Julie K Brown whose articles on Epstein have won her several journalism awards told podcaster/MSNOW pundit Tim Miller that she, like Epstein’s brother and Margie Q, believes that he was murdered.    

Shiny Object Alert: The Trump administration is going all in on attacking Minneapolis’ Somali community and Minnesota’s Governor Walz over a corruption scandal that involved the funneling of millions or billions of dollars, it’s hard to get a read on what the real number is, of federal COVID money from feeding children and day care facilities to luxury items, homes, and businesses.  The Trump party line is that the scandal was ignored until they started investigating it.  The reality is that the Biden DOJ had been investigating the fraud for a number of years and had charged and/or received guilty pleas from more than 50 individuals, so it wasn’t ignored.  In any case, though fraud is bad, or at least it’s bad when done by Democrats or people unwilling or unable to pay Trump for a pardon, it wasn’t ignored but the Trump team has jumped on it in part to distract from all things Epstein and also because they are hoping to unseat Governor Walz who is running for a third term. Also, Trump hates the Somalis who happen to be both Black and Muslim.  Yesterday CBS, conservative Bari Weiss’s domain, debunked a story that alleged that a lot of Minneapolis day care center were just fronts for fraud rather than real centers but not until the fake story had already gone viral on social media. Late yesterday, Health and Human Services froze hundreds of millions of dollars of childcare related funding for the whole state of Minnesota because why shouldn’t children suffer in the interest of politics?  In other HHS news, measles levels are now at levels not seen in three decades and we are in the middle of what appears to be a really bad flu season. Worth noting, that while the current flu vaccine is less effective than hoped, it does reduce hospitalizations and deaths.  Unfortunately, vaccination levels are down maybe because that’s what happens when a vaccine denier is in charge.  Experts say it’s not too late to get vaccinated (hint, hint).               

End of Year 💩:  It turns out that adding the Trump name to the Kennedy Arts Center is bad for business.  Like the Christmas show, the New Year’s Eve show has been cancelled.  Even before the name change, center revenue had declined with subscription revenue down 36% and single seat revenue down 50%.  Acting Director Richard Grennell who had served as Ambassador to Germany in Trump 1.0 had hoped to get a far better position in this administration but ended up with the art center as a booby prize.  He is now threatening to sue all the performers cancelling their gigs for millions, a sure way to attract future talent not named Kid Rock. For his part, Trump has posted pictures of “potential marble armrests,” for the seating at the center which he described as “unlike anything ever done or seen before” and really, who doesn’t want to rest their arms on slippery hard marble while attending a Kid Rock concert? On the subject of construction, Trump is now suggesting that his new East Wing Ballroom be used as the site for the next presidential inauguration.  To state the obvious, the location of the next inauguration should not be of any concern to him unless he’s seeking a third term.

Fog: Not much good to report on the Ukraine – Russia front.  Peace doesn’t appear to be at hand and Putin is now claiming that his home was attacked by Ukraine.  There’s no evidence of that but naturally Trump has said that the attack which didn’t take place was a bad thing because Putin told him to say that.  Also, it turns out that the CIA conducted a covert until Trump bragged about it attack on a Venezuelan “drug” dock earlier this month taking us one step closer to a land war. That’s not good unless you are Stephen Miller who is convinced, and maybe right, that war would allow Trump to justify using the Enemies Alien Act’s war time powers to round up and deport more of those migrants he hates so much, not to mention what it could do to the scheduling of future elections.

RIP Tatiana Schlossberg. May her memory be for a blessing.    

 

 

Bad Santa? 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🎆 🎇

🎅🎄: Trump began his Mar a Lago Christmas festivities with some of his not so traditional calls to children, telling the kids who he had earlier warned would have to live with fewer pencils and dolls that getting coal in their stockings would be a good thing and that it was important that we “make sure that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa.”.  He then spent the wee hours of Christmas Eve posting frantically on Truth Social.  Among his 100 posts were quite a few that repeated that the election had been stolen in 2020.  He called the Democratic Party a criminal organization and all of its member scum.  He applauded Press Secretary Karoline “lips” Leavitt’s handling of the “fake news” while calling for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to be deported.  He followed a post about the religious meaning of the holiday with one that said “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT.”  Ironically, he was one of those who loved Epstein and dropped him when he grew too HOT.  He also called for the DOJ to go after all the Democrats who had any association with Epstein, preferably while ignoring all the evidence of his friendship with the pedophile.  In one of his final X-Mas posts he said: “Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas!” Sadly, we’ve gotten used to Trump’s demented messaging.  We shouldn’t, because they are both evil and bonkers.  He goes further off the rails every day, and lest we forget, he’s not quite one year into this term and he controls the nukes.

Spreading Good Will?  While Trump didn’t drop any nukes this weekend, he did continue threatening Venezuela while blowing a few more “drug” boats and their crews out of the water and “diverting” more oil tankers.  He also bombed ISIS targets in Nigeria and in Syria, all the things that Nobel Peace prize seekers generally don’t do, but most certainly avoid doing over the Christmas holidays.  Via the NY Times, we learned a bit more about Trump’s Venezuela strategy. In summary, Trump has sidelined a lot of experts and is instead relying on the advice of Pete Hegseth, the one-time Fox weekend anchor whose chief qualification for his Secretary of War position is how he looks on camera and that he'll tell Trump whatever he wants to hear; Stephen Miller, a guy so totally blinded by his hate of immigrants that he doesn’t realize that creating more turmoil within Venezuela will result in more refugees seeking asylum; a weak and complicit Department of Justice whose Attorney General Pam Bondi is more than willing to opine that extrajudicial killings and war without authorization are okay even when they aren’t; and Secretary of State/presidential aspirant Marco Rubio, the man of many jobs who was supposed to be the adult in the room but whose advice is driven by long term personal and politically convenient animus against Cuba and Venezuela. Those advisors combined with Trump’s coveting of Venezuela’s oil and mineral reserves, have us pushing for regime change and teetering on the precipice of war. As to war, Trump who didn’t manage to resolve the Ukraine-Russia war on day one is still trying, that’s not a bad thing, it’s just that his motives and capabilities are questionable. Yesterday, after having what he described as a very good phone call with his peace seeking buddy Putin who despite bombing the bejesus out of Kyiv on Christmas weekend insists that he wants only the best for Ukraine, Trump met with Ukraine President Zelenskyy at Mar a Lago.  Trump keeps insisting that peace is near, Putin keeps bombing and insisting that peace will only happen when he gets all the land he wants, and Zelenskyy, he’s trying to hold on. The Ukraine leader is clearly aware that Trump’s motivations are less than pure, that the orange king is heavily influenced by his calls with Putin which conveniently seem to take place moments before his visits and calls with him and that Trump sees everything through a cracked and distorted Nobel Peace Prize lens.  Trump says the talks were productive but that negotiations are complicated and uttered something about going to Ukraine to convince its people to vote to give up the land they’ve been fighting to keep.  The pundits say that peace is not at hand, that there are no agreements on security guarantees and no Western partners, the US included, willing to pledge anything strong enough to deter Russia and convince Ukraine to concede land, soldiers, or anything else. Zelenskyy looks war weary and exhausted.  Worth noting, now both of Nappy Trump’s hands are sporting concealer.  

More💩: It turns out that what we suspected all along is true.  Elon Musk’s DOGE didn’t result in cost savings.  Federal expenditures went up, not down.  The contracts that DOGE supposedly cut, were either cut before Trump became president or were never actually cut.  Musk and DOGE engaged in lots of deception, claiming those fictional budget cuts either because they made lots of errors or because they were intentionally lying to us. Though those DOGE cuts did have a negative impact on crucial foreign health care aid, the NY Times reports that the cuts “amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.” On a human-resources note, Press Secretary Leavitt announced her pregnancy, she’s due in May.  Lara Trump assures all of us that Leavitt won’t miss a beat and will be back at work within days of delivery.  She noted that Leavitt returned less than a week after she had her first child.  It’s far from clear why Lara thinks that Leavitt returning moments after delivery would be a good thing for Leavitt, her baby, or us.  Late on Friday, the DOJ announced that they had just learned that there were about 1 million more Epstein files in the hands of the SDNY.  That means that the drip, drip of Epstein news will continue over an even more protracted period of time because the Justice Department has to subject those found files to more redacting of all things Trump and highlighting of all things related to Democrats and other Trump enemies.  The White House is not happy with the way that Pam Bondi has handled the Epstein files debacle. Trump’s solution is to move messaging about the files away from the DOJ to the White House’s communication team which means that there will be lots of name calling and nastiness directed at any member of the press who asks any questions about Trump’s ties to Epstein and Maxwell. And lastly, if you missed the 60 Minutes episode on the migrants shipped to CECOT, the truly deplorable gulag in El Salvador, no worries.  The segment, worth a watch, is all over the Internet, thanks to our Canadian neighbors because CBS failed to message its Canadian affiliates in a timely manner that it had been “cancelled.”  Oh Canada.

 

 

Feliz Navidad 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🎅🎄 

The E Files: The drip, drip, plop of the Epstein files continues.  Though the first drop frontloaded pictures of former President Clinton, the focus is now more on Trump who is popping up more frequently.  Not so coincidentally, Trump who initially bashed Clinton is now saying that he feels sorry for him because just because someone is in the files doesn’t mean that they did anything wrong. For his part Clinton had his spokesperson release a statement saying bring it on, reveal everything in the files, hardly the response Trump wanted to hear but not surprising given that Chief of Staff Susie said that Clinton had nothing to worry about as opposed to Trump who shows up all over the place. That may have been her way of softening the public for Trump’s frequent appearances including that he was a frequent flyer on Epstein’s plane, odd given that Trump had previously posted on Truth Social that he’d never flown on Air Epstein.  Apparently, he flew often enough that an unnamed Assistant US Attorney from the Southern District of NY felt compelled to give main DOJ a heads up about it and that there are pictures to prove it. The SDNY also felt compelled to share a photo they found of Donny dearest with his good friend Ghislaine on Steve Bannon’s i-Phone.  The SDNY tripped over that photo while investigating Bannon’s Build the Wall fundraising grift. That’s Bannon who Trump pardoned and Ghislaine who he has had moved to a Club Med prison.  Trump has such nice friends. Mostly, we haven’t learned much more than that we already knew, specifically: that Epstein and Maxwell engaged in horrible activities; that they abused and trafficked girls; that lots of men, some prominent, joined in, or got cozy while soliciting funds for their research projects; that many of them knew about but turned a blind eye to Epstein and Maxwell’s proclivities and crimes; or all of the above.  That said, there were references to forced marriages and a few payoffs that I had previously missed. A few other interesting and sad tidbits: there are references to Mar a Lago parties some with prostitutes and subpoenas of Mar a Lago employment records; a 1996 report to the FBI by Maria Farmer, one of the victims, about Epstein’s despicable acts wasn’t followed up; and the DOJ has been so sloppy with its redacting that names of some victims including some who’d specifically requested not to be identified have been included while some redactions can be easily undone by cutting and pasting the redacted sections into new files.  There’s incompetence everywhere, while the redaction SNAFU is somewhat funny, the tolerance of sexual predation is disgusting and, in the case of the failure to act on the early complaint from Farmer, a grossly negligent act that paved the way for more victimization and abuse.  

Disarray on the Right:  More than a dozen Heritage Foundation staffers are leaving the uber conservative organization to join a nonprofit run by former Vice President Mike Pence. The exodus follows the drama at Heritage that began last month after the foundation's president, Kevin Roberts, defended Tucker Carlson's extremely friendly interview with white nationalist/Nazi sympathizer commentator Nick Fuentes. The Heritage Foundation was responsible for Project 2025 so it’s not like those departing and joining Pence are the nicest guys in town, it’s just that they find Roberts’ tolerance of Fuentes and anti-Semitism a step too far. Just a reminder, VP JD Vance isn’t all that disturbed by the hate mongers except maybe when they criticize his wife and even then, it takes him a while to react. The Heritage breakoff follows the fireworks displayed at the Turning Point USA meet-up (Turning Point is the organization founded by Charlie Kirk that is now led by his widow Erika). It appears that some on the right are having a hard time with those who tolerate and platform Carlson, Fuentes, and Candace Owens who in addition to hating all things Jewish and pushing really ugly anti-Semitic tropes is being sued for defamation by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte over her claims that Brigitte was born male. It’s easy to dismiss Owen’s as a fringe nutcase but that would be shortsighted because she’s crazy as a fox and despite being a purveyor of hate and conspiracies, or maybe because of it,  has a huge following. Her eponymous podcast has millions of downloads and has achieved the number one spot globally for "Downloads & Views Per Episode."

More 💩 :  Trump who loves fossil fuels and hates windmills almost as much as he hates Democratic states has figured out a way to hurt Democrats and environmentally friendly energy projects.  This week he halted Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, the largest project of its kind in the US, as well as four other projects under construction off the East Coast in what is being called a devastating blow to the wind industry.  His action puts 17,000 mostly well-paying union jobs at risk.  So much for being the working person’s president, not that he ever was but lots of people thought that’s what they were voting for.  Keeping with the theme of the Trump-Kennedy Arts Center, the Trump Institute of Peace, Trump university, Trump casinos, Trump steaks and Trump airlines, Trump announced plans for the Navy to build 25 huge Trump class ships, golden ones with nuclear capabilities.  Military experts say that the bigly ships he envisions are relics of the past and are not what the Navy which does need more ships requires going forward.  At $5 billion apiece, they are hugely expensive and though he might manage to get one built before he leaves, the rest will probably never come to pass.  Also given that nothing he or the military builds ever comes in on budget, they’ll likely cost way more.  On the subject of wasting taxpayer money, FBI Director Kash Patel has had the FBI purchase a fleet of armored BMW vehicles. He asserts that they cost less than what he calls the usual “conspicuous” American cars that FBI Directors are typically driven in, but few are buying his assertion. Also, inconspicuous is not usually the term thought of when describing Patel.  One piece of good news, yesterday by a vote of 6 to 3 with Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas dissenting the Supreme Court ruled that at least for now Trump can’t send federalized National Guard troops into Chicago.  Basically, they said that Trump failed to show that troops were really needed and absent a real need, troops aren’t supposed to be sent to domestic locations, especially over the objections of local officials. The SCOTUS decision probably pertains to the other cities Trump has tried to occupy except for Washington DC because of its unique status.    

Fog of War:  We continue to inch closer to war with Venezuela and are now infuriating Denmark.  Last week when Tucker Carlson said that he thought Trump had cleared the airways to announce something important like the seizure of Greenland rather than to make an anemic economic speech, he may have been onto something. While Trump hasn’t yet seized Greenland, he took the unusual step of appointing Jeff Landry whose day job is Governor of Louisiana, to be his special envoy to Greenland.  That’s not normal, Denmark isn’t happy.    

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays! 🎅🎄 

 

 Claw Backs and Redactions 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🕎

The E Files: The recently passed Epstein Files Transparency Act set last Friday as the day that the files were to be released. To no one’s surprise the Department of Justice is slow walking the file release.  Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the frontman for the administration’s Epstein debacle, excused the failure to release all of the files, asserting that the “exhaustive” review process being undertaken by the DOJ which he says is necessary to redact sensitive information about victims and their families and anything else that might impede future prosecutions is enormously time consuming. Notably the “future prosecution” category is mostly a catchall for redacting anything the DOJ doesn’t want seen more than anything else although no one should doubt that AG Bondi will try to indict anyone not named Trump if she can manage to do so especially if that person’s name is Clinton. As expected, there were a boatload of fully redacted pages. Curiously, though Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said in the recently released Vanity Fair article that there was very little about former President Clinton in the Epstein files but lots of stuff related to Trump, the initial file dump included pictures of Bill Clinton on the Epstein plane and in a hot tub but few with Trump though at least sixteen files that did include pictures of Trump were quickly wiped from the DOJ website before being reposted after their mysterious (nefarious?) deletion was noted by several very attentive members of the press who’d managed to take screen shots of the files before they were deleted.  The DOJ’s excuse for the claw back was some gobbledygook about their obligation to protect the young women (girls?) who were in some of those pictures.  How is it that Trump was in pictures with girls when the Trump party line is that Trump never hung with any of Epstein’s young “friends?” Also, how is it that some of the other released files revealed the faces of some of the victims who were supposed to be protected? So, to summarize, the DOJ is trickling out the files, heavily redacting lots of them, screening out as much as they manage to catch that depicts Trump, sloppily revealing the faces of victims, all while frontloading anything that depicts other prominent people and celebrities, preferably Democrats, especially those named Clinton. Democrat Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie, the Representatives who pushed hardest for the legislation mandating the file release are now threatening to take some form of legal action, not easy given that Trump controls Justice but politically problematic given that the midterms are now less than a year away.  

Midterm Mania:  As to those upcoming midterms, upstate NY Republican Elise Stefanik will not be running for reelection, nor will she be running for NYS Governor.  Stefanik initially portrayed herself as a moderate and was viewed as the future of the Republican Party.  She quickly morphed, responding to Trump’s rise by aligning herself with him and all things MAGA. A Harvard graduate, she was instrumental in Trump’s attack on “elitist” “woke” institutions of higher education, fully riding the anti anti-Semitism wave, a popular position to take in New York state, especially for a Republican hoping to win statewide office. She was literally hours away from being confirmed to serve as Trump’s UN Ambassador when her nomination was pulled because Trump feared her absence from the House would jeopardize his and Speaker Johnson’s ability to pass his “big ugly bill.” After another Trump acolyte, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, announced his plans to challenge her for the Republican nomination for Governor, Trump once again pulled the rug out from under Stefanik, saying that because he loved them both, he couldn’t endorse either. Stefanik was likely to win the nomination even without Trump’s endorsement but with polls indicating that she’d likely lose against NY Governor Kathy Hochul she decided that an expensive, bruising primary, followed by an even more expensive and likely fruitless general election wasn’t worth the trouble. Without shedding a tear, Trump endorsed Blakeman over the weekend.  Stefanik isn’t the only MAGA not seeking reelection.  Though her announcement didn’t get much press, one term Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis isn’t running for reelection either.  Like Stefanik she says that she wants to spend more time with her family, code for get me out of here, I’ve had enough of this 💩hit show.  Loomis will likely be replaced by another MAGA type because it’s Wyoming. On the Democratic side, though Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ primary challenger, a Democratic Socialist who’d supported Mayor-elect Mamdani has dropped out of the race he was in for a minute, another Mamdani supporter, the onetime NYC Mayoral candidate former city Comptroller Brad Lander is challenging Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman. Lander, like Goldman is Jewish, but is hoping to capitalize on the anti-Israel positions he shares with Mamdani. He’s got Mamdani’s endorsement and as evidenced by the fund-raising text that I received and then reported as spam, Mamdani is already raising money for him.  That will fly among many in Goldman’s left leaning district but not with everyone which explains why Lander sidestepped questions about Israel in a local news interview, insisting that he was challenging Goldman for failing to pushback adequately against Trump, a bogus assertion given that Goldman is one of Trump’s most frequent and articulate critics and also served as counsel to the then Democratic led Judiciary Committee for the first Trump impeachment. Lander desperately needs a job, all politics is local, and lots of it is depressingly weird.

Viral Musings:   Keeping with the depressingly weird theme, Health Secretary RFK had planned to announce plans to ditch the long-term CDC vaccine schedule recommended for children last Friday, replacing it with the one used by Denmark.  Though Denmark recommends a lot of vaccines, the country doesn’t routinely vaccinate healthy children against RSV, rotavirus, varicella (chicken pox), hepatitis B (at birth), hepatitis A, influenza, or meningococcal disease.  Denmark’s decisions are not based on concerns about vaccine safety or effectiveness; the country doesn’t buy into the vaccines cause autism mishigas (insanity).  Instead, their recommendations are based on a cost effectiveness analysis.  The Danes have concluded that since they have universal health care access, they can quickly and effectively treat sick children, sparing them death or long-term harm. To state the obvious, we don’t have universal coverage and don’t have the capacity to treat what would likely be an influx of sick kids were we to jettison our vaccine schedule. That’s a situation likely to get worse given that the Obamacare subsidies have expired and $1 trillion has been cut from our medical system.  At least for now RFK’s plans, like his plans to revise dietary recommendations to push more of the fats we’ve been told to avoid, have been put on hold but he’s got a brain hole and is persistent so don’t be surprised if they reappear soon.  Perhaps over a holiday weekend or when Trump is distracting the country with a war.     

More 💩:  As to wars, we keep inching closer to a full-fledged one with Venezuela.  Trump, his Department of War, and his Coast Guard, spent the weekend interdicting ships carrying Venezuelan oil. Trump’s trying to pressure Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro into stepping aside, alleging that he’s a dictator who illegally ignored the results of a legitimate election to maintain power. Trump’s right about Maduro, he’s a creep and he did steal the election, but who is he kidding, if anything Trump respects the whole election stealing thing. Secretary of State Rubio whose thought to be a primary mover behind the Venezuela strategy wants regime change, Trump mostly wants oil because that whole democracy thing isn’t as important to him.  Over the weekend, we also bombed ISIS targets in Syria in response to the ISIS’s killing of three Americans. No breakthrough on the Russia-Ukraine talks in part because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are in over their heads but mostly because Putin wants more Ukrainian land and has no plans to cede an inch of what he already has.

Even More 💩: One day before it was due to air Bari Weiss, the increasingly controversial new head of news at CBS, put the kibosh on a teed up, ready to go already teased on its website 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at the El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March. Weiss contends that her decision was because more editing was needed, among other things she didn’t like that the migrants were called migrants rather than illegal immigrants. For the record that not so liberal rag the NY Post called them migrants in its story about the last-minute “pull” decision. Weiss also felt someone like junior Goebbels Stephen Miller should appear to contest the allegations made in the segment.  Following usual practice, 60 Minutes had contacted the administration before finalizing the segment, but they hadn’t offered up Miller maybe because the contents were spot on and it’s easier to scream fake news if you wait until after a segment airs.  Anyway, it’s hard to miss that CBS’s parent company Paramount is trying to upend Netflix’s win, or win for now, in the battle to take over Warner Brothers Discovery and is hoping to get Trump to support its efforts.  And lastly, though fighting anti-Semitism is supposed to the reason that Trump has extorted a bunch of universities, it’s causing a lot of fights among his supporters. Steve Bannon, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson are fully in on blaming Jews for everything. Ben Shapiro is outraged about it as is Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom have very personal reasons for finding racial and religious hatred to be a bad thing.  Then there’s VP/Presidential wannabee JD Vance.  He finally said something mean back to the people making racist comments about his wife Usha, a practicing Hindu of Indian heritage, but then added that free speech, even hateful racist remarks are cool as long as we all recognize that the US is and was always meant to be a Christian nation. That whole Constitution thing, forget about it.          

 

 
Dozing Don 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🕎

Manic and Loud:  CNN’s Medical analyst, Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at George Washington University, found Trump’s “manic” and “loud” Wednesday night speech to the nation extremely disturbing, an indication that there is something medically wrong with him. Dr. Reiner who tweeted about the speech appeared on CNN with Jake Tapper to discuss his concerns.  He said that it was time for the White House to come clean about the true state of Trump’s health, not that anyone expects that to happen any time soon. Health issues aside, there were lots of things wrong with his grievance filled pre-Festivus speech. It was full of lies or what much of the timid press calls misstatements. Almost one year into this term, when not falling asleep during his press conferences as he did again yesterday, Dozing Don is still blaming Sleepy Joe for everything, a litany of woes that include millions upon millions of drug dealers, and murderers crossing the border, men playing in women’s sports, record high crime, and the worst trade deals ever. He continued with his oft made assertion that inflation was at 9% when he took office. It wasn’t, it was 3%, pretty much where it is now, not that we know for certain what it is now because as Fed Chair Jerome Powell said this week, current government statistics are unreliable and in the case of job creation, another one of those areas that Trump is failing at but where Biden did very well, are likely overstated. Trump blamed the housing crisis on all those illegal border crossers, an assertion echoed by his VP during his recent speeches but failed to note that his tariffs have raised construction costs and that a lot of those “illegals” work, or used to work, in the construction industry.  Trump promised members of the military who he called “warriors” that he’d be delivering them checks for $1,776, a nice gesture but they were already supposed to get that money as it was previously allocated by Congress for their housing. Though it might have felt like an eternity, at just under 20 minutes Trump’s speech was relatively short for him due to a time constraint imposed by the networks who agreed to interrupt their regular programing because they thought Trump was about to announce a war with Venezuela or in the case of Tucker Carlson was confident he was about to announce the seizing of Greenland.

Healthy, Not Healthy: As to the men in women’s sports problem, yesterday RFK and Dr. Oz announced rules that ban hospitals that provide gender affirming care to youth under 18 from receiving Medicaid and Medicare funds and that would bar Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care for youth under 18. As part of that announcement Oz detailed the cost of creating penises ($150k according to him), putting aside the rarity of such surgery in minors and that genetics is complicated, the announcement is just another shiny object intended to draw attention away from the skyrocketing cost of health insurance. Those cost increases are freaking out some swing district Republicans who see the writing on the wall and their political careers circling the drain, so with the help of four of them, Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, and New York’s Mike Lawler, the House passed a discharge petition intended to force Speaker Johnson to hold a vote to extend the Obamacare health insurance subsidies for three more years.  Johnson could hold that vote tomorrow but won’t.  Instead, his plan is to defer the vote to January which absent a change of heart by any of those who voted for it will force a similar vote in the Senate.  That’s good but passage in the Senate would require sixty votes, and at least at this point, no one expects that to happen, though a compromise plan could be negotiated, theoretically but not likely. As to discharge petitions, they’re generally rare, the fact that three have passed, one for the Epstein files, one for restoring government worker’s collective bargaining rights and this Obamacare one, is viewed as an indication that Speaker Johnson has lost control of his caucus, or that Trump, who controls Johnson no longer inspires as much fear as he previously did.  Well, maybe.

More 💩: In other news, Trump announced that all of the members of the Kennedy Center’s board had voted to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. That came as a surprise to at least one board member who said that her mic was muted during the “unanimous” vote.  It’s also not legal, since changing the name, like changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War requires an act of Congress. No comment from RFK Jr who was too busy with that whole penis surgery thing, but lots of other members of the Kennedy family expressed their outrage.  In a further indication of his demented pettiness, Trump has had new brass plaques added below the pictures of those of his predecessors. Press Secretary “Hot Lips” Leavitt says that Trump wrote the brilliant text included on those plaques himself.  They can be seen online for their full despicability.  The plaques insult each of Trump’s predecessors except Reagan who he asserts despite no evidence “was a fan of young Trump.”  Also yesterday, OMB head Russel Vought announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research, located in Boulder, Colorado, will be closed and broken up because it was spreading climate alarmism and also because Colorado’s Governor and two Senators are Democrats. In response to a Senate hold placed on Coast Guard confirmations, the Coast Guard has changed its policy again.  They will once again consider swastikas and nooses to be hate symbols, at least for now. They had previously said that they weren’t going to remove them from their list of hate symbols but then had quietly gone ahead anyway raising the question: why is the Coast Guard so determined to justify swastikas and nooses? The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security so no one should be surprised that dog killer Noem has vacillated.  In other odd people news, it’s time to wave good-bye to Dan Bongino, who will no longer be the Deputy Director of the FBI come January.  Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and conspiracy pushing podcaster with no management experience was ill suited for the job not that anyone in Trump land cared about that, but Trump probably did care about how committed Bongino was to the release of the DOJ’s Epstein files. Those files are supposed to be released today.  Expect lots and lots of redactions and empty pages including the ones that detail how extensive Epstein and Trump’s friendship and one up man ship with regard to their competitive womanizing was, something reported on in yesterday’s NY Times.  One more thing, Alan Dershowitz, the once respected lawyer/professor who is now firmly down the Trump and Epstein rabbit holes has presented Trump with a memo detailing how he can serve a third presidential term. Trump says his ballroom project, that he now says will cost at least $400 million, won’t be completed until 2028.  Hard to believe that he’d be working so hard on something he won’t get to enjoy. In addition to freaking out most, if not all, of the rest of us, a Trump third term would be disappointing for JD Vance who last night received Charlie Kirk’s wife Erika’s 2028 presidential endorsement. I guess some people care about that.  

☹☹:  The Brown University killer who also murdered an MIT professor is dead.  We still don’t know his motives. In the wake of the Bondi Hanukkah massacre, Australia is expected to further restrict already restricted gun ownership, now the country’s leadership needs to work on hate.  May the memory of all the Brown University victims and the memory of the Bondi victims be a blessing for their families.         

 

Raging Lunatic in Chief 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🕎🤧🤒

Deranged: On Monday Trump took to Truth Social to share his thoughts on the tragic deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner. His post was deplorable but not shocking because he is deplorable.  In short, he asserted that the beloved and talented Reiners had died because they were liberals suffering from extreme Trump Derangement Syndrome. When asked about his post, he showed no remorse, instead, without missing a beat, he doubled and tripled down. Sadly, he got the deranged part right, missing that the derangement wasn’t about him or in the minds of Rob and Michele Reiner, rather it was their son’s long term and severe psychosis complicated by his drug addiction, horrible mental illnesses responsible for the deaths of around 300 parents each year. Most people liberal, conservative, or just somewhere in between, at least those with any shred of decency, were thoroughly saddened by the Reiners’ deaths and disgusted by Trump’s remarks. Jim Geraghty of the very conservative National Review wrote that “The president of the United States is a hateful raging lunatic with all the empathy of Jeffrey Dahmer.” I can’t say it any better, so I’ll leave it there. 

Whippled:  Just one day after Trump made his dreadful Reiner remarks, Vanity Fair released Chris Whipple’s interview, actually the first two of eleven interviews, with Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Wiles who had been advised by one time Trump Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to never give the skilled Whipple an interview, showed why that advice was worth following.  She revealed many things that in an ordinary administration would get her fired and maybe will shorten her tenure, but this is Trump-land, so who knows 🤷‍♀️. She says that she sees herself as a facilitator rather than a gatekeeper.  No surprise there because a competent gatekeeper would not have allowed Trump’s despicable Reiner post to see the light of day. Her other remarks confirmed what’s long been known. She said that Trump has an alcoholic’s personality because despite his sobriety he thinks that there’s nothing he can’t do. Last night Trump said he agrees with her on that; that JD Vance is a conspiracy theorist, something that he self-owned yesterday by saying all those conspiracies are true; that AG Pam Bondi totally whiffed her handling of the Epstein files; she called OMB’s Russell Vought a “right wing absolute zealot;” and said that the erratic and odd Elon Musk who she blamed for unilaterally disbanding US AID is an “avowed” ketamine user.  She also admitted that Trump appears frequently in the Epstein files but added that’s okay because he and Epstein were just guys doing what young single playboys do as if forty plus year old men sexually abusing young girls was just one of those ordinary things. She added that despite Trump’s multiple assertions that former President Clinton had frequently traveled to Epstein’s island, there’s no evidence in the files that he had ever been there.  She insists that neither she nor Trump know who made the decision to move felon Ghislaine Maxwell to her current “Club Fed” digs, adding that they were both very distressed when they learned about the move. No comments about how they felt when it was revealed that Ghislaine was further rewarded with a cuddly puppy. She says that Trump promised her that he would stop his retribution shtick at the end of his first 90 days in office but that she couldn’t blame him for still pursuing his enemies especially NY AG Tish James who has “$500 million of his money.”  She excused his January 6^th pardons, saying that most of those pardoned had already served their sentences and then said, despite evidence to the contrary, that the ones still serving had received longer than typical sentences so deserved to be released.  Also, despite Trump using his war against drugs, including fentanyl which he just officially categorized as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD), as the rationale for his war against Venezuela, she admitted that he’s attacking all those “narco-boats” because he wants regime change and is hoping to wear Maduro down. It’s not clear what Wiles was thinking when she sat for the interviews, but she does appear to have some remorse, not for facilitating Trump’s every whim but for what Vanity Fair published.  She doesn’t accuse author Chris Whipple of lying, except about asserting she said that Musk is a ketamine user but instead attacked Vanity Fair for taking her remarks out of context. For the record, Vanity Fair has receipts, her Musk comment, like everything else reported, was taped. Trump world and Trump have rallied to Wiles’ defense, for now.  

More 💩;  Despite panic from swing state Republicans, Mike Johnson’s House will not be voting on extending the Obamacare subsidies. That probably increases the likelihood that Johnson will no longer be speaker after the midterms, good for Democrats but very bad for those who will be priced out of health insurance. War/Beer Pete Hegseth who shared top secrets on his Signal chat has no plans to release what he is calling the supersecret “double tap” video though he will be sharing it with members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Hegseth’s Pentagon is continuing to investigate Senator/Astronaut Mark Kelly for speaking the truth about illegal orders being illegal.  Australia is planning to further restrict its already limited gun sales which is a good thing but maybe they should also focus on doing something about surging anti-Semitism. The Brown shooter remains on the loose.  FBI Director Kash Patel is on the case, at least when he’s not appearing on Stephen Miller’s wife Katie’s podcast with his girlfriend, the one who he flies everywhere and who has SWAT protection. Erika Kirk, who had the grace to express her sympathy to the Reiner family perhaps because Rob Reiner had expressed horror about her husband Charlie’s assassination, is trying to make nice with Candace Owens, who blames everything, including Charlie’s death on the Mossad, Israel and “the Jews,” a view shared by Tucker Carlson. Tucker and VP Vance will both be featured at the upcoming Turning Point USA conference and why not since Vance is into a lot of the conspiracies that Tucker’s into and Tucker’s son Buckley is on his press team.  Unemployment is up and job creation is anemic. Trump is making a speech to the nation tonight. Either he’s announcing something crucial or just going to brag about what a great job he’s doing while prepping kids for fewer dolls and pencils.  It’s probably not a coincidence that the speech was hastily announced just after the release of Wiles’ Vanity Fair interview or that the DOJ Epstein file release deadline is Friday or that facilitator Wiles can’t stop him from making it.

Viral Musings: Gavin Newsom’s California is hiring former CDC officials because someone needs to do the work that RFK is abandoning.  A school in Kansas sent everyone home early for the holidays because 25% to 35% of its kids and staff called in sick with respiratory viruses, likely some combination of flu, COVID, and RSV.  The measles outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah, and Arizona are still on the upswing. Buckle up, it’s viral out there. 😷🤧🤒

 

 
Déjà Vu All Over Again 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🕎

Guns, Guns, Hate: On Saturday, a shooter killed two and wounded nine others at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. For two of the survivors the shooting was one of those increasingly American déjà vu moments as each of them had earlier survived other school shootings. Late yesterday, authorities in Providence released the “person of interest” they had in custody, announcing that their investigation is moving in “another direction,” police talk for we zeroed in on the wrong guy and are now searching for the real and very dangerous shooter. So maybe not such a good time to be in or around the Brown campus or Providence or anywhere else if you happen to be Jewish because while we were digesting the Brown horror, a father and son terrorist team in Sydney Australia said hold my beer, we can top that and went on a shooting spree at Bondi Beach, killing fifteen people and hospitalizing 27 more who were celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. Among the dead are a ten-year old girl, an elderly Holocaust survivor and two rabbis.  Among the injured is an Israeli survivor of October 7, a human rights lawyer who had moved to Australia to work with the country’s Jewish Community on combatting anti-Semitism. Clearly, he’s needed in Australia where anti-Semitism and acts against Jews and Jewish institutions have surged since October 7. Australia’s total population is around 25.7 million of which somewhere around 117,000, or 0.4%, are Jewish.  So few people being the target of so much hatred should be shocking but sadly if history has taught us anything, it’s not and as Bret Stephens put it in today’s NY Times when globalization of the intifada is a rallying cry and leaders fail to pushback, murderous rampages like Bondi Beach happen. Because the events at Brown and Bondi Beach weren’t awful enough for any weekend especially one marked by what’s supposed to be the joyous Hanukkah holiday, last night we learned that actor/director all around nice guy Rob Reiner, first introduced to many of us as Archie Bunker’s son-in-law Meathead, and his wife Michele were stabbed to death at their Brentwood, California home. In their case, it wasn’t guns, anti-Semitism, or a random act of violent crime.  Instead, it’s reported that the likely murderer was the Reiner’s troubled adult son.  If only we could roll the clocks back and start the weekend over again.

More 💩:  It’s tiresome to hear again and again, but Trump who has his Department of Justice looking into how the 2020 election which he clearly lost was rigged was complaining about it again this weekend. This time he also added in the 2024 California results.  To state the obvious, he did not win in 2020, and he did not win California in 2024. Also, as if lying about election results, inflation, grocery prices, boats in the Caribbean, and his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein isn’t enough he’s now ranting again about snakes.  This time his assertion is that 28,000 people were killed by Peru’s “most venomous in the world snake.”  Between 2000 and 2015 only ten people died in Peru of snake bites and the most venomous snakes in the world reside in Australia not Peru. The snake thing, while trivial in the scheme of things is indicative of his instability and how much he lies, about everything, lots of which affects all of us much more than those Peruvian vipers. One of those things is health care.  His plan, the one he was going to release in two weeks, doesn’t exist.  Some Republicans are trying to come up with something, anything, that they can pass quickly but at this late date just about the only thing that would spare people from seeing their health insurance premiums skyrocket would be a clean extension of the Obamacare subsidies.  Funny thing about sending Congress home for months to avoid a vote on the Epstein files is that when time is needed to hammer out a compromise plan, there’s no time left to do so though oddly enough RFK and his anti-vax health fantasists have found the time to plan putting black box warnings on COVID vaccines, the ones that saved millions worldwide.  Anyway, the Trump administration has its priorities and apparently as they said last week going after antifa, an amorphous organization that doesn’t exist except in the mind of Trump’s FBI is apparently its focus.  Of course, the neat thing about an amorphous organization is that the FBI can label anyone it doesn’t like, as in anyone who loudly criticizes Trump or organizes a rally against his policies as antifa and so it’s fair to assume they will. The few remaining WW II veterans might want to weigh in on what being anti-fascist really means.  As to the DOJ, while Lindsey Halligan is still a faux US Attorney, the lesser-known Julianne Murray who until last week had been the faux US Attorney from Delaware has resigned her post. There’s a good chance that a few more of Trump’s unconfirmed “acting” US Attorneys will follow suit though they’d be wise to act fast because while Murray like Alina Habba before her is going to work elsewhere at the DOJ, it’s not clear how many more people AG Bondi can absorb into make-work jobs in her office.

         

 

Pillow Talk 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Dumb and Dumber:  Yesterday, Mike Lindell the election denying pillow man announced that he is running for Governor of Minnesota. The field of Republicans lining up to challenge Democratic Governor Tim Walz who is running for a third term is large so Lindell might not end up as the Republican’s candidate but his entrance into the field says a lot about the 🤡 🚗 that the GOP has become.  Also, yesterday we learned that the Department of Justice had once again failed to convince a Virginia grand jury to indict NY Attorney General Letitia James.  AG James hasn’t committed mortgage fraud, but Trump is so down the retribution rabbit hole that his abettor AG Bondi keeps trying to placate him, wasting our tax dollars on frivolous indictment attempts. Bondi is also trying to force a confirmation vote for insurance lawyer/beauty queen Lindsey Halligan in order to legitimize her status as a Virginia US Attorney, but at least so far, that’s not going anywhere because as much as he’d like to please Trump, Senate Leader Thune continues to abide by the blue slip convention and neither of Virginia’s Democratic Senator are willing to provide a blue slip for Halligan. Thune is doing that because he knows that while Trump will be gone someday, Republicans will want that blue slip privilege if Democrats ever regain control of the Senate.  Because all of this wasn’t enough wheel spinning and stupidity for one day, last night Trump announcing he was pardoning Tina Peters, the former Republican clerk of Mesa, Colorado, who was found guilty of trying to breach the state’s voting systems to “prove” Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud in 2020.  Tina Peters, currently serving a nine-year jail term in a state facility, was found guilty of a state crime, so Trump’s pardon is performative, even he knows that, but much of his base, or what’s left of it doesn’t and those who do love that he’s trying. Clearly, given the state of the economy and the health insurance crisis Trump needs that base more than ever because as evidenced by recent election results and yesterday’s Indiana redistricting fail, his hold over Republican politicians is starting to crack. Despite his threats, which included promises to primary anyone who voted against the redistricting amplified by death and bomb threats from his crazies, the redistricting attempt which had already passed in the Indiana House failed in the Indiana Senate by a vote of 31 to 19 with 21 Republicans joining all ten Democrats in opposition. In theory the redistricting would have resulted in two additional red congressional seats leaving all nine of Indiana’s House seats in the hands of Republicans. When asked about the loss, Trump said he hadn’t really been involved in the debacle, odd given all the tweets proving otherwise, including one threatening to cut off federal funding for Indiana’s roads, National Guard bases, and other major projects if the redistricting plan didn’t pass.  Indiana is a very conservative state but as evidenced by former VP Mike Pence, every now and then conscience trumps conservatism.  Who knows, maybe a few of the state’s legislators aren’t happy that Trump was okay with their former governor being hung on January 6.  

Economics 101:  Fed Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced a 25-basis point cut in the federal funds rate but also expressed concern about inflation saying that but for Trump’s tariffs, inflation, currently at 3%, would be closer to 2%.  Clearly that’s a message that the tariff loving Trump who is itching to replace Powell before the May end of his term as chair with someone like his oozing economic advisor Kevin Hassett didn’t like hearing. Trump also couldn’t have been happy with Powell saying that plans for future rate cuts should be put on hold for the immediate future. As to inflation, it’s not just about the cost of housing and groceries, health insurance costs, a component of core inflation is going up, up and away.  Yesterday, the Senate voted down several health insurance options although Republican Senators Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Josh Hawley of Missouri all crossed the aisle to support Democrat’s preferred solution, the extension of the expiring Obamacare subsidies for three more years.  There are also around a dozen House Republicans who would vote for some form of a subsidy extension so while the subsidies will probably expire at year end maybe a lifeline is still possible, though probably not. Obamacare isn’t perfect but it continues to be hard to understand why so many Republicans think pushing people off insurance or providing them with only $2,000 to pay for their care or to buy useless plans is an acceptable alternative.  But then again, this House and Senate voted to cut Medicaid and other related health care programs by $1 trillion to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest and all that bailing out of farmers and bombing fishing/drug boats costs money too, not to mention the costs associated with increasing the department of Homeland Security’s fleet of planes or all those ads featuring ICE Barbie Noem.  On the health care front, measles is still out there.  South Carolina is experiencing an “accelerating” outbreak with the majority of the cases occurring among unvaccinated children and teenagers and we’re entering flu, COVID, and RSV season.  Though as reported in Bloomberg a study from the CDC notes that COVID vaccines reduced the risk of an emergency or urgent care visit by 76% for children aged 9 months to 4 years and by slightly more than one-half for those in the 5 to 17-year age bracket, RFK’s crowd continues to attack the COVID vaccine while also casting aspersions at the ones for flu and RSV.  What could go wrong this winter when swarms of sick people of all ages, many without health insurance show up at financially strained hospital emergency rooms assuming that is that they can find one that’s still open.

More 💩: ICE Barbie is either woefully ignorant or a bad liar or both.  Yesterday when asked during her Congressional testimony how many US Military veterans had been deported, she said that none had been.  Unfortunately for her Democrat Rhode Island Representative Seth Magaziner had the receipts in the form of a zoom call with a decorated veteran who’d been deported to Korea. A few other family members of deported vets were also in the audience.  The flustered Noem rushed out of her testimony claiming she had to leave early to attend another “important” meeting that everyone knew was cancelled.  It’s hard to figure out what exactly is going on with our “war” with Venezuela except that we’ve now moved on from only bombing drug boats to capturing ships full of oil, and a number of members of Congress are concerned that War/Beer Hegseth is destroying or planning to destroy the videos of the so-called double tap murders. That’s a concern that extends to the DOJ’s Epstein files, the ones that are due to be released soon.  Keeping with the theme of pedophilia and misogyny, the NY Times has a piece out about how the infamous Tate brothers, who’ve been credibly accused of violence against women of all ages were allowed to fly to the US from Romania where they were being held for their criminal activities. The NYT reports that son Barron was one of the people who pushed for their release.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And lastly, as a parting shot Margie Q is trying to get enough Republicans on board for a motion to vacate the chair to unseat Speaker Mike Johnson.   

Happy Hanukkah.

 

 

 

Calling Warner Wolf 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Trump Taj Mahal: Trump’s casinos have all gone belly-up but, apparently, he still likes gambling so he went to one in the Pennsylvania Poconos last night to brag about how well the economy is doing.  The rally was because his Chief of Staff-Ice Maiden Susie Wiles, who he called Susie Trump, told him that he needs to get back on the campaign trail or face more truly dreadful, for him, not the rest of us, election results. He stuck to the script on his teleprompter for a few minutes asserting that inflation and prices are way down. Then he went rogue, attacking and blaming “autopen” Biden for everything bad, trashing Black Somali immigrants, questioning why more Scandinavians don’t move here, calling those who criticize his international jaunts stupid, bragging about the zillions of dollars of tariffs he’s collected including the $12 billion he now plans to hand to the farmers who need to be bailed out because of those tariffs, and calling affordability concerns a hoax perpetrated by evil Democrats. There was also a nonsensical riff on school children needing fewer lead pencils, a variation on girls needing less dolls. Some in the crowd bought what he was selling, no surprise because why else would they have shown up, but as evidenced by the results of two more elections, one in Miami and the other in Georgia, fewer voters are buying his shtick. With 59% of the vote, Democrat Eileen Higgins was elected mayor of Miami. She is the first Democrat to win the city’s mayorship in 28 years. Her Republican opponent, Emilio González, was endorsed by both Trump and Ron DeSantis.  In the Athens area of Georgia, Democrat Eric Eisler eked out a victory in a special election for a state house seat. The retired Republican he replaced had previously won the seat with 60% of the vote. Maybe it was the news about those election results that spun Trump out of control, or maybe he is just in a permanent state of crazy, but last night after returning from Pennsylvania he posted a very lengthy and loonier than ever message on Truth Social in which he said no president has ever worked as hard as him, stopped as many wars, created the “Greatest Economy in the History of the Country,” and so on before launching into a diatribe about how healthy he is, how no one has taken and scored such high scores on as many medical and mental acuity tests as he has.  He then said that anyone who comments on his health, especially those NY Times reporters and editors who have are  “true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.”  Though he didn’t call for anyone at the NY Times to be shot at sunrise he did say the “horrible, biased, and untruthful” paper should cease publication. We don’t know if Dr Twitter is right about him taking medication for Alzheimer’s, but he sure seems to be exhibiting paranoia, one of the signs of the dreaded disease. And yes, he’s still president weighing in on media mergers and tossing Europe and Ukraine to the Russian bear.

Let’s Go to the Videotape: Last week Trump said that he’d be okay with the Pentagon releasing the tape of what is now known as the “double tap” incident, but what should more accurately be called evidence of the extrajudicial killing of two alleged drug runners who to the extent that they were running drugs were transporting cocaine rather than fentanyl to Suriname, a country near Venezuela, rather than the US. Having either forgotten about his earlier statement or just totally annoyed that everyone else hasn’t, he denied ever saying he’d have no problem releasing the full video,  lashing out at ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, another Black woman if anyone is counting, calling her “the most obnoxious,” and her assertion “fake news” after she asked whether his administration would commit to releasing the tape. Emboldened by Trump’s remarks, Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth now insists that the Pentagon needs more time to evaluate the “double tap” tape to ensure that it doesn’t reveal anything about our super-secret strike capability, an odd assertion from a guy who shared top secret intel on a Signal chat with a journalist, some friends, and all the foreign adversaries listening in.  The boat video isn’t the only evidence haunting members of the Trump administration; there’s also the Fox News program where Hegseth went on and on about how members of the military should never follow illegal orders as well as a brief written by Attorney General Pam Bondi in which she echoes what the six “seditionist” Democratic lawmakers said about how military officers should not follow unlawful orders.  Awkward and likely a problem if she decides to move forward with the prosecution of any of the targeted Democrats. If she does move forward maybe she can get Alina Habba to help her out.  Habba resigned from her position as New Jersey’s faux Interim US Attorney and is now serving as Bondi’s senior advisor.  At least that’s what she’s doing for now, Bondi is still trying to get the decision that left her twiddling her thumbs in NJ overturned. As to Hegseth, he may be spending more time in Washington since House legislators have stuck a provision in the defense authorization legislation that cuts his travel budget until he releases the “double tap” tape which could mean that he’ll miss the opportunity to do pull ups with RFK and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy who want more exercise sites at airports, not more air traffic controllers, just more pull-up bars.  And who doesn’t want to sit next to a sweaty traveler, even one in Duffy mandated professional attire.  

More 💩: ProPublica reports that in 1993 Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence. He’s never resided in either.  Both houses are used as rental properties.  Lisa Cook and Tish James would like to have a word. 😊  How is it that Trump is so frequently guilty of the “crimes” he accuses other of committing?     

 

 

Who's On First 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Happy Birthday 🎂: The US Park Service provides free entrance to national parks on certain holidays. Going forward, Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, two holidays previously included on the list, will not be among those “free” days but Trump’s birthday will.  Currently only one other country, North Korea, celebrates the birthday of a living leader.  Keeping with that theme, last week Trump added his name to the US Institute for Peace, the independent not for profit organization whose mission is to build peace through non violent methods rather than through double-tap boat attacks and extrajudicial killings. Trump has been trying to wrest control of the organiation from it’s board for months but  has been stymied by the courts though it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that the Supreme Court will ultimately decide that he can fire and replace it’s leadership because these days “his” Justices mostly let him do whatever he wants.  To that end, on Friday, SCOTUS agreed to decide the legality of Trump’s order to heavily restrict the right to birthright citizenship, the constitutional principle that individuals born on US soil are automatically United States citizens. When Trump issued the executive order telling government agencies not to recognize citizenship of children born in the US if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident main stream legal pundits scoffed at him, saying that there was no way that the courts would sign off and the lower courts haven’t but as we’ve since learned this SCOTUS habitually disappoints.  The Justices have repeatedly shown precedent doesn’t concern them so who knows what they’ll do.  Just the fact that four of them agreed to hear the case provides an indication that some of them are willing to toss birthright citizenship out the window.  Justice Kavanaugh has already said that race based immigration policing is okay, so why should we doubt that he and a critical number of his colleagues wouldn’t be willing to limit granting citizenship to newbies, especially brown and Black ones?

Pardon Me:  During his first term, Trump issued clemency through pardons and commutations to 327 people.  Not even one year into this term and he’s already granted more than 1600 get out of jail free cards to a diverse crowd that includes the January 6 insurrectionists, George of many names Santos, former Honduran leader Juan Orlando Hernández who played cocaine footsie with the Sinaloa Cartel leader El Chapo, and Binance’s crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao whose company funneled funds to sex traffickers and terrorists groups like Hamas.  All of these individuals thanked Trump profusely with many compensating him with “donations” to his “library” and/or ballroom project.  Last week, Trump surprised Speaker Johnson by granting Texas’ Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar one of those coveted pardons.  Cuellar thanked Trump profusely but then immediately registered to run again in his swing district as a Democrat.  It turns out that Cuellar’s decision to stick with the Democratic party caught Trump by surprise and not in a good way so over the weekend Trump bashed him on Truth Social for showing “such a lack of LOYALTY” promising not to be so nice “next time.”  So basically Cuellar, and his daughters who had written Trump flattering letters to get the pardon have pulled a fast one on the Mango Maniac at least for now.  That’s amusing but also provides evidence of what most of us have long believed, Trump’s pardons are transactional, most cost bigly bucks and even those that don’t come with expectations. The Cuellar “affair” also confirms what Real Estate buddy/negotiator Steve Witkoff advised Russian negotiators, that to influence Trump, slather him with praise and “make nice” phone calls.  The Cuellar pardon is small potatoes in the scheme of things, especially when compared to how much Trump has changed US policy in response to Russian cajoling (pee tape diplomacy?).  Last week Trump unveiled the US’s new National Security Strategy, which slams Europe for policies leading to “civilizational erasure” while recasting Russia as a good buddy,  No surprise that Russia is welcoming the new strategy calling it largely consistent with its vision, possibly because they helped write it?  Over the weekend, while attending the Doha Economic Forum in Qatar, first son Don Jr suggested that his father would walk away from Ukraine unless the “corrupt” country didn’t get with the Russia peace program. Very self owning for a Trump to highlight corruption but sadly, he may also he right.   

Cabinetry:  There are lots of rumors about which cabinet member Trump will defenestrate first.  Since so many of them are awful and incompetent, it’s a race to the bottom. There’s Pete Hegseth who spent the weekend doubling down on his assertion that killing “narco-terrorists” dangling from blown-up boats is okay while also asserting that due to fog of war and his early departure from the Situation Room, for a beer run maybe, he had nothing to do with those extrajudicial killings anyway. By the way, Congress is voting on the next defense authorization bill.  It doesn’t change the Department of Defense’s name to the Department of War but does remove IVF funding for military families because Speaker Johnson believes IVF is ungodly. Back to “who’s on first,” while growing, Hegseth’s death count pales in comparison to the number of deaths that RFK Jr will be responsible for once the policies passed by his Advisory Committee on Immunizations go into effect.  Last week ACIP said no to the decades long, live-saving policy of innoculating babies with the Hepatitis B vaccine before they leave the hospital.   Estimates are that by cutting down, almost eliminating, liver disease and liver cancer, the Hep B vaccine has saved the lives of 90,000 US children since 1991.  ACIP didn’t totally nix the vaccine, instead they said that babies could get it later during one of their follow-up visits.  The problem with that is that lots of babies, particularly from lower income families, including those who are being priced out of the insurance market, don’t make it to those follow-up visits and many others will see the policy change as just one more reason not to vaccinate their kids. Then there’s ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, Trump doesn’t really care that she’s responsible for “accidentlly” incarcerating and/or beating up citizens and sending migrants, largely those without criminal records, to deadly places  but apparently he’s grown weary of the stories about her not so secret affair and questionable business dealings, including the purchase of engineless planes from Spirit Airlines, with Corey Lewandowski, his one time campaign manager. For what its worth, a number of media outlets are reporting that she is likely to be replaced by Virginia’s outgoing Governor Glenn Youngkin in January. Also, we shouldn’t forget about Kash Patel.  Granted a momentary reprieve for capturing the guy who left bombs at the RNC and DNC on January 6, he’s now fending back accusations that he had the SWAT team inappropriately protecting his girlfriend serve as chauffeur for her inebriated friends. Nice that he cared enough about their safety to get them rides home, but isn’t that what UBER is for?  As to the RNC/DNC bomber, turns out that he may be a Trump supporting election skeptic.  If true, maybe he can get one of those Trump pardons.  If not true, it’s a great legal strategy by his lawyers to say he's one.

More 💩:  Fresh off receiving the first ever and totally made-up FIFA peace award and hosting his first awards event at the Kennedy, soon to be Trump, Center, Trump is expected to go back on the road this week to brag about how well the economy is doing.  His work is cut out for him and it’s far from clear that lying about the price of gas or all the marvelous things that tariffs are doing will help because people who shop for groceries know when things are costing more and also know when they or their friends have been laid off and their kids can’t find jobs. According to Fox 76% of voters view the economy negatively. That’s worse than the 67% who felt that way in July and the 70% who said the same at the end of Biden’s term.  Moreover 46% of the respondents to a recent Politico Poll said that the cost of thngs is worse than they can remember it being.  That includes 37% of those who voted for him in 2024.  In addition, despite his assertion that all things bad are Biden’s fault, 25% of his voters say Trump’s responsible for the current state of the economy.  So maybe calling affordability a “con job” is an early holidy gift for Democrats, one that that will fuel political ads for much of next year.  And turning back to that FIFA peace award “ceremony” putting aside how seriously weird it was, how nuts is it that Trump thinks it is a real prize. As they said in the Apollo 13 movie, “Houston, we have a problem.”  A bigly one.