On Fire 🔥 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🔥 

🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥: Southern California, specifically Pacific Palisades and the surrounding, area is on fire, not figuratively but literally.  Check in with your west coast friends because they may need your help, or at the very least your commiserations.  In Washington DC, so far, it’s just snow, no fires not even figurative ones, though those are likely to come soon.  Congress completed the January 6 certification of the 2024 election results in a peaceful and timely manner.  There was no drama, no violent protests, no one was beaten over the head, and no one deposited a pile of 💩on Speaker Johnson’s desk because Vice President Harris, who presided over the certification, didn’t throw a tizzy fit and didn’t call for her supporters to storm the Capitol. Meantime, in a less well covered story, Republicans in North Carolina, with an assist from the state’s Republican dominated high court, are still trying to prevent state officials from certifying the victory of a Democratic judge who narrowly won her election to serve on the court. Sadly, that’s not an unusual approach for North Carolina’s Republicans. Even though North Carolina has a Democratic Governor and a closely split electorate, as the result of gerrymandering, both state houses are dominated by Republicans who used their dominant majority to redraw the state’s congressional map in a manner that heavily favors Republican House candidates.  That Republican favoring map resulted in the flipping of three North Carolina House seats to Republicans during the 2024 election.  Republican Mike Johnson is Speaker largely because of that finagling. That the same players are trying to block the seating of a Democratic Judge should surprise no one.  Nor should the fact that so little has been written about it because the MAGA party’s chief 🤡 continues to suck up so much of the news cycle with his promise to pardon the January rioters who beat the crap out of the Capitol police while trying to overturn the results of the last election and his assertions that he is going seize Greenland and the Panama Canal while turning Canada into our 51^st state and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Guff of America.  As to those hostile land grabs, maybe Trump’s serious, maybe he’s just engaging in threatening rhetoric in the hopes of negotiating favorable trade deals, or in the case of Greenland to obtain some valuable mineral rights, or maybe this is just his 2024 equivalent of “Mexico will pay for the wall” BS, or maybe he’s trying to one up Elon Musk who in addition to having just bought himself a US president is now trying to influence politics in the UK, Germany, and Canada.  Only time will tell.  Welcome to 2025.

Legally Yours:  Trump is still due to be sentenced on Friday in his hush money/election interference case despite the best efforts of his lawyers to have that sentencing put off, preferably forever.  So far two New York judges have ruled that the sentencing should take place as scheduled but it’s only Wednesday and Trump’s lawyers are appealing to higher courts.  His lawyers have also managed to stop, or stop for now, the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his January 6 and stolen documents cases.  They did that with an assist from his pocket judge, Aileen Cannon, the gift that keeps on giving, who even though she previously dismissed the purloined documents case against Trump, is still doing everything she can do to make him love her.  What’s the over/under on how long it will take for Trump to appoint her to a higher court?   Trump and his lawyers are trying to run out the clock and we’d be naïve to think they won’t succeed.     

Dark Brandon:  Sleepy or not, President Biden is pulling no punches on his way out the door.  He’s sent money to Ukraine to bolster their defenses and he’s also been doing his best to protect the environment.  To that end, he’s invoked a decades’ old law to block drilling for oil in more than 625 million acres of US ocean, the largest region a president has ever protected using this authority. Trump, who wants to “drill, drill, drill” very erroneously claimed that Biden’s actions represent the banning of drilling in “the whole ocean” even though the area represents only about 2% of the oceans, is furious and has promised to undo Biden’s ruling upon taking office.  The problem for him is that the law that Biden applied does not include a provision for revoking a prior president’s ruling and so Congressional action might be required.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow