Oligarchy of America 🔥 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🔥 

Confirming Chaos:  The confirmation hearings continue to amaze and not in a good way, watching them is like watching a slow moving trainwreck, you know the disaster is coming but there’s nothing that you can do to stop it. Pam Bondi, who Trump nominated after the outrage about his first-choice, teen rapist Matt Gaetz, proved too much for a handful of Republican Senators to bear, is in many ways scarier than Gaetz.  Having served two terms as Florida’s Attorney General her experience lends her a patina of respectability.  However. despite that appearance, it’s clear that she’s a Trump loyalist to her core and won’t stand in the way of his worst plans, no matter how outrageous and illegal. During her hearing, she refused to say that Trump had lost the 2020 election and, though she said there will be no enemies list in her Department of Justice, she also made light of the list that FBI nominee Kash Patel’s has repeatedly discussed and written about having as well as his statements that judges, lawyers, journalists, and members of Congress like Liz Cheney should be prosecuted for their investigations of Trump. She went so far as to assert that “she doesn’t believe that Patel has an enemies list” adding that he is the “right person at this time for the job.”  And Trump’s statements about this being his retribution term, she probably missed those too because selective hearing and memory is a thing among her crowd. She’ll be easily confirmed, as will all the other Trump nominees who appeared before Congress this week because Republicans don’t really care if the incoming Treasury Secretary doesn’t know what Medicaid is and believes that tariffs are awesome, or if the incoming Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and EPA Head Lee Zeldin want to “drill baby drill” and so on because if Trump wants them, then they must be okay? Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State nominee, is Trump’s most normal pick, he’ll easily pass muster with lots of Democrats voting for him, but odds are that if he ever asserts himself, he’ll be the first cabinet member that Trump fires.  He’d be wise to stay away from airplane toilets. Adding to the absurdity of the moment, yesterday Trump appointed Mel Gibson, Jon Voight, and Sylvester Stallone as his “special ambassadors to “a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California” to be “his eyes and ears to the moviemaking town.” No doubt Trump’s Hollywood cronies are invited to next week’s hell freezing over inauguration, which will also be attended by his tech bro buddies, a crowd that now includes Shou Chew the head of Tik Tok in addition to Elon, Zuck and Bezos who will all be seated on a prominent dais.  The bros have all written bigly checks for their seats and have also eliminated all those DEI policies that Trump hates so much because who cares about grocery prices when you can eliminate wokeness whatever that is.  As to Tik Tok, it’s hard to tell what’s happening there.  The Supreme Court hasn’t issued its ruling yet and Trump as well as various politicians on both sides of the aisle, are now calling for it to be allowed to continue operating even if SCOTUS rules that the legislation that mandated it be sold or closed down is kosher.  The oligarchy is here. Biden is right.  

Politics Unusual: Lara Trump will not be the next Florida Senator.  Yesterday Governor DeSantis announced that he’s selected current Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody.  Moody is a charmer, she’s supported lawsuits to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, advocated against restoring voting rights to felons despite Florida voters approving that those rights be restored, and she joined in the Texas lawsuit that sought to contest the results of the 2020 election.  In other words, she’s perfect for her new role. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine still hasn’t announced who he’ll be picking to replace VP elect JD Vance but he’s being pressured by Trump to pick Vivek Ramaswamy, the one-time presidential candidate/current DOGE co-chair and what could be more perfect than Vivek in the Senate 🤮 🤢.  Until now it had been expected that the term limited DeWine would choose his Lt. Governor Jon Husted.  We should know later today if DeWine, a conservative who in the past has shown an independent streak but who recently made a pilgrimage to Mar a Lago and also met with Vivek, will be caving to Trump’s command. Proving that he jumps when Trump whistles, yesterday Speaker Mike Johnson announced that he’d taken the unprecedented and rather “shocking” step of ousting Congressman Mike Turner from continuing on as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, replacing him with Arkansas’ Rick Crawford.  Turner’s sin, he’s been a traditional Republican hawk, meaning that he’s been supportive of the intelligence community and has stood up for Ukraine. As committee chair, he’d been a member of the Group of Eight, in on all of the key intelligence reports, including those revealing Russian efforts to influence US politics and bolster Trump. Demoting him while staffing intelligence roles with the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and replacing the heads of the FBI and CIA with his other flunkies, allows Trump to erase the past while creating a new “reality.” The House Intel move might sound like inside politics, but it’s not, it affects all of us, because it further ensures that Trump’s second term team will all walk to the beat of the same drummer or else. Not in the same league but also an indication of the types of people who hang with Trump, Rudy Giuliani has apparently struck a deal with Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, the election workers whose lives he ruined with his smears and lies.  He gets to keep his NY apartment and Florida condo as well as his World Series rings and though we don’t know what the two ladies got in return, it’s likely that they got some cash, hopefully boatloads of it. That’s good for them, but since Rudy claimed he was down to his last penny, it does beg the question of where that money is coming from?  

Fog:  Assuming the deal holds, a ceasefire will go into effect between Hamas and Israel and some of the live hostages that Hamas is holding will be released on Sunday in exchange for thousands more Israel held Hamas prisoners/terrorists. Under the six-week first phase of what’s supposed to be a three-stage deal, Hamas will release 33 Israeli hostages, including all women (soldiers and civilians), children, and men over 50. The remaining men and bodies of the dead are to be released in the later stages. Holding my breath in anticipation and trying to put aside my fears about the hostages due to be released later making it home alive.            

#BringThemAllHomeNow