Fly Like an Eagle 😱💩 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 💩😱 🏈 🦅 

 🏈 🦅: In the run up to the Super Bowl, Trump who has delegated the day to day running of the country to his malevolent, chaos creating co-conspirator Musk and his hate spewing band of musk🐀s made himself the Chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Arts, took away temporary protected status from a lot of Black refugees white offering visas to white South Africans, fired the heads of the National Archives and the Federal Election Commission while reinstating the musk🐀 who’d been ousted for his racist social media posts, revoked the security clearances of a slew of mostly Democratic officials and critics from Joe Biden to Anthony Blinken to Letitia James to Alvin Bragg to Andrew Weissmann and so on, gave new life to plastic straws while killing pennies, and predicted that the Kansa City Chiefs would win the Super Bowl. They didn’t so he pathetically mocked Taylor Swift. Trump’s recently confirmed OMB Head Russell Vought halted the activities of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that actually earns money but is hated by the right because it’s the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Trump more than hinted that this week’s target will be the Department of Education.  Oh, and he promised, to open the week by imposing his oft promised 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum. Somewhere in the midst of all this, Musk who spent the weekend posting a series of mean lies about US AID and a number of his critics took a hatchet to the National Institute of Health’s research funding something that Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt noted is a bigly problem for the University of Alabama’s Medical Center, a major recipient of that funding. Her pearl clutching aside, Katie attended the Super Bowl with Trump where she may or may not have told him of her concern, a concern that likely only extends to red state research centers.

 

Viktor and Adolf:  To cap off the weekend, Trump, Musk, and occasional VP JD Vance slammed the judges who have put holds on their plans to shutter US AID and fire most of its staff, eliminate birth right citizenship, publicly shame and fire FBI agents, erase transgender people, and stop funding congressionally mandated programs around the country.  As to the federal judges who now have targets on their backs, it’s growing increasingly obvious that Trump and team aren’t following their orders because community health centers and Head Start facilities continue to report that their funding has stopped flowing and despite reassurances from Secretary of State Rubio, that “essential” USAID programs aren’t being affected by Elon’s cuts, they most certainly are.  Food continues to rot in ports, drugs aren’t being distributed and much to the joy of Russia and China, the US’s reputation is swirling the drain. We also learned this weekend that in addition to planning to continue to earn big bucks from a Chinese based retailer, FBI Director Nominee Kash Patel was paid by a Kremlin associated film maker whose films push anti-US conspiracies.  Also, despite all their kowtowing CNN and the Washington Post are among four more media outlets that are being rotated out of their Pentagon studio posts.  While analogies to Hitler and his Third Reich aren’t wrong, it’s not necessary to go back to 1930s Germany to find a model for Trump’s actions.  He’s aping Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban whose playbook includes a crackdown on “undesirable” immigrants, a purge of “gender ideology” and “wokeness,” erosions of academic freedom, limitations on judicial independence and attacking the free press all in alliance with Christian Nationalism.  Hungary has a sputtering, underperforming economy, but so what if economic distress is the penalty for hate and nationalism? Shame on everyone who thinks that normalizing this behavior and taking an axe to our democratic institutions is okay because in exchange they might get tax cuts. 

 

Fog:  Trump’s still talking about turning Gaza into a beach resort, something that Bibi Netanyahu and some of his most right-wing coalition members have latched on to but, again, hold off on booking a suite at Mar a Gaza because it’s not going to happen. Despite all the rhetoric, three more hostages were released on Saturday.  The good news is that the three men:  Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy, are home now.  The bad news is they’d been starved and tortured and according to the doctors who examined them upon their release, they don’t just look like concentration camp victims, they are suffering from the same physical deterioration and maladies. As to their gaunt state, the three were held in a part of Gaza where food has been consistently available throughout the war, so their deprivation had nothing to do with food availability but was all about intentional starvation.  Sadly, upon their release, the three learned for the first time about the death of their family members, hardly the homecoming that they’d hoped for.         

#BringThemAllHomeNow