Chicken Taco 🌮😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱 🌮 

Cheese🌮🌮🌮:   During the run up to the 2016 election, Trump warned that if nothing was done about Mexican immigration to the US, there would soon be taco trucks on every corner so it’s rather fitting that there’s now a Wall Street trade named TACO, as in Trump Always Chickens Out.  The TACO trade refers to profit opportunities associated with market rebounds like the one that took place on Tuesday after Trump delayed the imposition of his threatened 50% tariffs on imports from the EU from June 1 to July 9 (not June 9 as I mistyped on Tuesday). The implication is that those opportunities keep happening because the orange guy is a 🐔.  Yesterday, when asked about the TACO trade by CNBC reporter Megan Casella, Trump denied knowing anything about it before squawking that Casella is nasty while demanding she never ask that question again, not a problem because he’ll probably refuse to acknowledge her moving forward assuming he doesn’t yank her press credentials. It’s highly likely that today there will be another TACO rally, not because Trump chickened out again, but because last night a three-judge panel from the relatively low-profile but important Manhattan based federal US Court of International Trade stopped the enforcement of most of Trump’s wide-ranging tariffs, ruling that he’d overstepped his authority because in the absence of war tariffs are supposed to be legislated by Congress and despite Trump’s assertion we are at war with Venezuela, we’re not.  Notably, one of the judges who ruled against the tariffs was a Trump appointee and another was a Reagan appointee. Last night Trump’s legal team appealed the ruling but at least for now tariffs are out while tacos and the TACO trade are in which explains why Dow futures are up around 500 points this morning.     

Pardons R Us: One of the questions posed to Trump lawyer Emil Bove during oral arguments for the now infamous Supreme Court immunity case concerned whether or not presidents could sell pardons with impunity.  Unfortunately, we now know that wasn’t a stupid question because SCOTUS granted Trump immunity and he appears to be selling and awarding pardons like hot cakes, or should I say tacos.  Among others, this week he pardoned D-list reality TV “stars” Todd and Julie Chrisley, agreeing with their Trump supporting daughter that they’d been unfairly targeted by the Justice Department when they’d been found guilty of defrauding banks out of over $30 million in loans using fake bank statements and other financial records and concealing income from their reality TV show to avoid paying nearly $500,000 in taxes, failing to file returns and failing to pay taxes for several years. That so-called unfair targeting took place during Trump’s first administration but that appears to be one of those things that Trump’s sweeping under his coif. Trump also pardoned former Staten Island Congressman Michael Grimm who among other things had admitted and served time for concealing $900,000 in gross receipts from a Manhattan restaurant he was a member of called Healthalicious. Trump also pardoned John Rowland, the former governor of Connecticut who’d served two distinct stints in jail, the first for accepting gifts and favors from state contractors, the second for conspiring to hide his work on political campaigns.  These pardons followed the earlier pardon of a Florida fraudster whose mother “contributed” one million dollars to Trump.  Trump’s not done yet.  He’s now considering pardoning the group of men who had conspired to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. As to Emil Bove, the lawyer who argued that Trump could do whatever he wanted, yesterday Trump nominated him to serve as a Federal Appeals Court Judge for the 3^rd Circuit which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware to “end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” Currently Bove serves as a senior officer in the DOJ responsible for implementing Trump’s immigration enforcement and retaliating against prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on January 6 cases.  What could go wrong?

Tip of the Needle: Just a week or so ago, RFK Jr said that we shouldn’t look to him for medical advice because he’s not a doctor and, as we all know, he’s made lots of medically imprudent personal choices like shooting up heroin and swimming in bacteria infested waters with his grandchildren in tow to name a few.  Well so much for ignoring his advice, this week just as reports emerged about a new, highly contagious COVID strain hitting our shores, ignoring science, and circumventing usual procedures, RFK announced that he’s having the CDC remove the COVID vaccine from its immunization schedule for "healthy children and pregnant women." That follows last week’s FDA announcement that it plans to limit access to future COVID shots to people over 65 years old or those with an underlying health condition.  Removing the COVID vaccine from the schedule will limit access and insurance reimbursement which is a problem especially for those who can’t afford to spend the $200+ that they’ll likely be charged but even worse it will result in more illness and deaths particularly among pregnant women and children under the age of two.  Yesterday’s NY Times Daily included a good summary of the ramifications of RFK’s decision. They point out that while most young children will probably be okay without the shot, the youngest ones are very vulnerable and by discouraging pregnant women from getting the shots RFK is further exposing their newborns who benefit from their mom’s immunity but only until they’re around six months old.  So much for Making America Healthy Again and how ironic that instead of trumpeting how he got the COVID shot to the public so quickly during the pandemic, Trump has fallen down the anti-vaccine rabbit hole.  RFK also announced that the bird flu vaccine contracts that had been awarded to Moderna are being cancelled because why would we want to be ready in the event that bird flu becomes a human problem?  First the COVID shot, then bird flu vaccine development, RFK is unlikely to stop there. RNA based vaccines due in part to those fake conspiracy theories about how they change DNA and implant brain chips are just the low hanging fruit, next up Polio? By the way, Elon Musk, the guy whose Neuralink company does implant chips into human brains, announced last night that he’s bid farewell to the White House and is leaving his DOGE role.  On his way out the door he threw shade on Trump’s “big, beautiful budget,” criticizing how it further expands the already huge government deficit. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that though Musk’s criticism of the budget plan is valid, his willingness to go public with it may be rooted in his failure to upend, or at the very least get a part of, the AI (artificial intelligence) deal that his rival Sam Altman pulled off during Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East. And really, given how much other business, including access to our personal data, that Musk managed to get while serving as co-president with Trump why shouldn’t he have expected to also get a chunk of the AI pie.      

The New Dark Age: It's hard to write about all the damage that Trump is doing to higher education and medical research right now. He continues to target Harvard, threatening to pull the visas of all its foreign students, while also putting a halt on student visa interviews at US embassies across the globe, a move that goes well beyond just impacting Harvard.  An argument can be made that our universities, not just Harvard, have grown too reliant on the money provided by high paying foreign students so some gradual cutbacks might be warranted but closing the door on all overseas students is short sighted especially since it will result in a brain drain and, combined with all the cutbacks in research funding, will set back finding cures for cancers and other diseases. Anyone who believes that Trump is doing this to combat campus anti-Semitism is missing the big picture. If anything, he’s spurring more hate,  anti-Semitic and otherwise, while also dumbing down the country and killing innovation.  Also, the continued stories about non-criminal migrants being scooped up by the INS including high school students and sick children in the US on compassionate visas, is chilling, right up there with the stories of the migrants deported to El Salvador and South Sudan’s gulags. 

Fog:  Trump is so upset with his one time and still BFF Putin that he’s working on one of his “two-week” plans. #LOL      

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Crazy Meet Emotional😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Memorial Day Memories:  To commemorate the Memorial Day holiday Trump posted one of his depressingly bizarre long Truth Social posts calling his opponents “scum” with “warped radical left-wing minds” while labeling the judges who have ruled against him “USA haters” and “monsters” who “suffer from an ideology that is sick and very dangerous.” Donning his MAGA red campaign hat, he warned a confused audience of West Point graduates that a lot of “trophy wives don’t work out too well,” and then told them that he couldn’t stick with the tradition of greeting each of them individually because he had to deal with China and Russia, code for my tee time beckons.  He also spoke at Arlington where with his current trophy wife MIA, after laying the traditional wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he went political, saying that he was fixing the republic “after the long and hard four years we went through.” Later in the day he expressed excitement about his upcoming June 14^th military parade.  Estimated to cost between $25 and $45 million, the parade will celebrate both the Army’s 250^th anniversary and the dear leader’s 79^th birthday. Nothing says Trump better than spending tens of millions on a birthday celebration after passing a budget that cuts hundreds of millions of dollars from health care and food for the needy and hungry. As to that budget, while it’s made it through the House, it’s not clear what it will look like once it comes out of the Senate. With no Democratic support, it will need almost all of the Republicans onboard and at least for now concerned about it further exploding the deficit Senators Rand Paul and Ron Johnson want more cuts while Missouri’s Josh Hawley isn’t happy about the cuts to Medicaid   They’re just the ones speaking out, it’s likely that a few more including Maine’s Susan Collins are also twisting pearls concerned over how the Medicaid cuts will bankrupt the rural hospitals that her state relies on.  As noted last week, don’t spend that increased SALT deduction yet because by the time the bill makes it out of the Senate, that low hanging fruit is likely to be gone. Another thing to watch, the 1000 plus page House budget includes a provision that weakens judicial independence by allowing the federal government to defy court contempt orders with impunity. Clearly the intent of that provision is to facilitate Trump’s deportation orders, due process be damned. Since the Senate budget is being passed through reconciliation, the process that allows budget bills to be passed with only a majority rather than a 60- vote supermajority, provisions that have nothing to do with funding are theoretically prohibited.  In all likelihood the Senate parliamentarian will rule against the curb on Judicial power, but Republicans have been known to ignore the parliamentarian’s ruling and dear leader Trump and his Veep JD keep telling us that judges or at least the ones that rule against them, are sick and hate America.

Tariffs, Tariffs, Harvard:  Tariffs have reentered the dialogue.  Really, they never went away but for a while they were getting less press but then on Friday, fresh off his House Big Beautiful Budget win, Trump threatened to roll out his 50% tariffs on products from the European Community (EU) on June 1 only to announce on Sunday that he’s delaying those tariffs until July 9 pending negotiations.  As CNBC put it this morning “investors should “buckle up” for more volatility as the potential for a trade war has not completely dissipated.”  It’s not just tariffs, over the weekend Trump also ramped up his war against Harvard, obviously angry that so far, the courts won’t sign off on his efforts to banish the university’s foreign students, Trump said he wants to redirect $3 billion of Harvard’s grants to trade schools.  Funding trade schools wouldn’t be a bad thing however don’t count on that happening but the defunding of Harvard, that’s clearly something Trump is focused on doing. Just a reminder, if the Trump administration really cared about eradicating anti-Semitism, the purported reason for going after Harvard, it wouldn’t keep on hiring anti-Semites, people like Paul Ingrassia who  currently serves as the White House liaison to DHS and who as NPR detailed has ties to multiple figures widely known for promoting anti-Semitism like Andrew and Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, and others who have called Jews a “plague of locusts.”  Also, there’s Rachel Cauley who serves as Communications Director for the OMB but previously handled media requests for a Hitler friendly white supremacist organization and Ed Martin who like Cauley championed Nazi sympathizer,  January 6 insurrectionist, Timothy Hale Cusanelli calling him an “extraordinary man.”  Though Martin has been replaced by former and maybe future Fox commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro as the acting US Attorney for Washington DC, he is still at the DOJ, now heading the Weaponization Committee because doesn’t every DOJ have a weaponization committee?       

Fog:  Remember how Trump was going to end the Ukraine war on day one of his administration.  Well. it turns out that diplomacy is complicated especially when the guy on the other side of the table is former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.  Over the weekend after Vlad escalated his drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, Trump said that that Putin has gone “absolutely crazy.” The Kremlin countered by saying that Trump appears to be suffering from “emotional overload.” Two things can be true, though wily, focused, and evil are probably more appropriate descriptors of Putin than crazy, and crazy seems more apt than emotionally overloaded for the orange guy. Though Trump keeps talking about ramping up sanctions to punish Putin so far, he hasn’t because he still dreams of Trump branded hotels in Russia and maybe also that much maligned and denied pee tape is real? As to the Middle East, supposedly progress is being made by Steve “Dora the Explorer” Witkoff in his nuke negotiations with Iran but maybe not or maybe just what Obama negotiated back when his team was in charge.  On the Gaza front, Hamas appears to be doing a Lucy with the football thing, moving the goal posts while Israel keeps bombing.  We keep hearing that a hostage/ceasefire deal has been agreed to only to hear that it hasn’t been. 

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 
Broken Heart💔😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱💔

Super Grift: I didn’t think it would really happen, but I was wrong, the US Military has officially taken custody of Hamas Force One, the 747 “gifted” by Qatar.  The back story on the plane is even more convoluted than initially reported.  According to CNN and confirmed by other outlets including the NYTimes, upset that his two Air Force Ones were old (in the 30s rather than the 40 plus that Trump frequently claims) and don’t have the requisite gold bathrooms and the other superficial accoutrements that he prefers, early in the year Trump directed Man Friday Steve Witkoff to find him a suitable “interim” plane, preferably one with gold toilets.  Witkoff learned from Boeing that a Qatari Shiekh had been trying to sell his decked out, economically inefficient thirteen-year-old 747 for several years. At Witkoff’s request, the Shiekh had the plane flown to Mar a Lago for Trump to inspect its toilets. The Shiekh’s intention had been to sell it to Trump but instead of entering into a price negotiation, Trump just thanked him for the gift.  In other grifting news last night Trump hosted a dinner at his Washington DC area golf club for the 220 largest holders of his $TRUMP meme coin. There was a time when Trump dissed all things crypto but that was before he realized that he could monetize the presidency and take in billions from those willing to spend bigly bucks on a worthless meme coin to buy access and “favors.” The majority of last night’s guests were from overseas and included $TRUMP’s top investor, a Chinese-born crypto mogul who until Trump’s DOJ dropped them was facing civil fraud charges in the US. So, to put it simply, despite prohibitions from taking gifts from anyone but especially from foreigners Trump just accepted a $400 million plane and held a private dinner with rich foreigners who bought an otherwise worthless coin to get access to the president of the USA. That’s the same president who instead of dissing crypto schemes is now insulting world leaders.  In an Oval Office meeting reminiscent of the embarrassing one he held earlier in the year with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy, Trump laid into South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa, calling him out for committing Afrikaner farmer genocide, no point Googling that up because it’s not a thing.  To prove his accusation Trump shared images of thousands of graves that he asserted belonged to slaughtered Afrikaners. The problem is that the graves in the video were from a Reuters video showing humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot after deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels. Though South Africa has a violence problem, it doesn’t have an Afrikaner genocide problem. No one should be surprised to learn that despite his much- ballyhooed departure from DOGE, South African born Elon Musk, who yearns for the good ole days when South Africa was an apartheid state, attended the meeting with Ramaphosa and in all likelihood is the person who “educated” Trump on the Afrikaner genocide that isn’t.

Red Budget Blues:  Yesterday by a vote of 215 to 214 with two Republicans not voting, one Republican voting present and two Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting no, the House passed its version of Trump’s “big beautiful” budget bill. One of the not voting Republicans, Long Island’s Garbarino says he accidentally slept through the vote but maybe he just was hiding, another Arizona’s Schweikert was awake when he elected to abstain.  The present voter was Maryland’s Harris and the two no voters were Ohio’s Davidson and Kentucky’s Massie who Trump is already threatening with a primary.  Shortly before the vote took place Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly of Virginia died, succumbing to esophageal cancer.  He was the third Democrat to die this year, joining Texas’ Sylvester Turner and Arizona’s Raul Grijalva, making it quite possible that had they remained among the living, absent more Trumpian arm twisting and threats, the bill would not have passed in its current form.  Among other things, the 1000 plus page House bill that few who voted on it read continues the tax cuts that were passed during Trump 1.0, raises the deficit bigly, cuts Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps), raises the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction, eliminates taxes on tips, cuts many of Biden’s climate related projects, and basically enriches the really rich while doing little for most others while hammering those at the bottom. Despite a warning from Speaker Mike Johnson that they do so at their own peril, the Senate is expected to make lots of changes to the bill so if you are from a high tax state, don’t count on that SALT deduction going from $10,000 to $40,000. The Senate is likely to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts and restore some of the Biden era projects, especially the ones that benefit red states, so the bill is far from set in stone.

Playbook Politics:  Yesterday, taking a page from the Viktor Orban playbook augmented by Project 2025, the Trump administration took its battle against Harvard to another level by having Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem announce that DHS would halt the university’s ability to enroll international students by closing it out of the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS).  Cosplay Noem ordered existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status. International students make up about 27% of Harvard’s student body, on average they pay more tuition than domestic students many more of whom receive aid or other subsidies, so losing them would further dent Harvard’s finances. Late yesterday, federal judge Jeffrey White, a Bush appointee, banned the Trump administration from detaining and deporting international students, barring the federal government from arresting those students or revoking their visas while the case plays out in court. His ruling applied to all “similarly situated individuals” who participate in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program so it appears that thought they face further uncertainty, at least for now foreign students can remain at Harvard.  We should not have to rely on judges for sanity but that’s where we are.  In other judicial news, yesterday with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing because of a conflict of interest unique to the particulars of the case, a concept that she unlike some of her brethren actually recognizes, by a vote of 4 to 4 the Supreme let stand an Oklahoma ruling that blocked funding for Oklahoma religious charter schools. It’s good that four Justices, probably the three liberals and the Chief Justice, recognized that the US is supposed to separate church from state.  The bad news is that four of the Justices had no problem allowing public funding for a religious school and it’s quite likely that another similar case where Justice Amy doesn’t have a conflict will make it up to the Supreme Court sooner rather than later and that she could sway the outcome in a different direction. In another less satisfactory ruling SCOTUS allowed Trump to fire certain independent regulators at least for now though they specifically said that their ruling doesn’t allow for the firing of Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell.           

Fog and Murder:  What’s there to say?  On Wednesday night on their way out of an event that was focused on promoting peace held at Washington DC’s Jewish Museum, two young Israeli embassy staffers, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, were shot and killed by a murderous thug shouting free Palestine. Yes, you can disagree with Israeli policy and not be anti-Semitic but cut the bull shxt, when two young people are killed after attending an event at a Jewish Museum it is anti-Semitism. Period. And it’s sickening and frightening and evokes the run up to the Holocaust. May their memories be a blessing.  💔 💔 💔  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 
Trumptopia 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Big and Ugly:  At around one this morning the House started its final hearing on what Trump calls his “Big Beautiful Bill,” the one that balloons the deficit while cutting taxes, mostly for the rich.  As I write, the bill hasn’t been passed yet but it’s early so it may have passed by the time you read this.  To placate the conservative holdouts, Speaker Johnson appears to be accelerating cuts in the tax credits for some of the clean energy infrastructure projects funded during Biden’s administration and accelerating Medicaid work requirements, something that sounds good on paper but since most Medicaid recipients who can work do, mostly imposes an administrative burden that makes it harder for qualifying recipients to get the aid they’re entitled to. To placate the so-called moderates from blue states, the bill may include an increase in the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted, although Trump who promised he’d fix the SALT “problem” he caused during Trump One, told the moderates to suck it up and move on.  This hearing is taking place during the wee hours to limit transparency but late last night we learned that one of the items that Johnson and his crowd have been trying to obfuscate is that in addition to taking a huge bite out of Medicaid and Obamacare funding, because the bill increases the deficit by $2.3 trillion over the next ten year, it triggers automatic Medicare cuts of approximately $500 billion. That’s the conclusion of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (the CBO). By the way, Medicare is one of the safety net programs that Trump promised not to touch.  Nothing to worry about though because Trump announced yesterday that he plans to spend $175 billion on a huge golden dome missile defense system that he claims will be put in place by 2029 as if that’s even possible.  The CBO estimates that the system will cost $542 billion so it’s not clear why Trump says he’ll only be spending $175 million but math, like economics, isn’t one of his strengths.  To summarize, less health care but maybe you or your final resting place won’t be wiped out by a missile.  Also, would it surprise you to learn that Elon Musk’s Space X is leading the group that has emerged as a frontrunner to win a major part of the dome project?  Maybe spending more time on the lucrative missile defense project and a need to focus on resolving dwindling sales at Tesla are among the reasons that Elon announced that going forward he’ll be dialing back his political spending, whatever that really means because given the $290 million that he spent during the last election cycle and the $20 he and his related entities threw at this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Elon’s concept of dialing back could still involve tens of millions of dollars.   

Cabinetry:  Homeland Security cosplay leader Kristi Noem who clearly wasn’t selected for her great intellect but does have gleaming new choppers doesn’t know what habeas corpus means, worse yet she thinks it means that Trump can deport anyone he wants whenever he wants which might explain why despite warnings that there would be consequences for doing so, the INS appears to have flown at least one migrant, maybe more, to a gulag in war torn South Sudan last night. The judge who told the INS not to do that is now threatening to start holding staff, including the pilots who flew the planes, in contempt.  Health Secretary RFK and his team of anti-vaxxers at the FDA plan to limit access to the COVID vaccine to people 65 and older and to certain others who can show that they are at high risk of illness. Though COVID no longer dominates the headlines and fewer people have been opting to get shots, the disease is still out there, people are ending up in hospitals, getting long COVID, and, in far too many cases, dying.  Limiting access to the shots is such a shortsighted decision especially given the cutbacks in health care coverage and the impact that those cutbacks will have on hospitals especially in already underserved areas.  Then again, RFK was chosen for his marquee name and his appeal to certain fringe voters rather than his medical acumen. Though he’s not yet confirmed, it’s clear why former Congressman Billy Long is Trump’s nominee to serve as IRS Commissioner.  Yesterday, during his confirmation hearing, Long denied knowing that the Tribal Tax Credit scam scheme he marketed during his hiatus from Congress was fraudulent. Obviously, he’s totally qualified to serve as Trump’s tax guy, after all the orange guy has been known to say that only “idiots pay taxes.”  Saving the best, and by best, think the worst for last, presumably with the approval of Attorney General Pam Bondi, NJ’s Interim US Attorney Alina Habba dropped charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka but quickly followed up by levying with charges against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver.   The allegation against McIver is that she roughed up INS agents during the fracas that took place outside a New Jersey INS facility that she, two other members of Congress and Mayor Baraka were trying to visit. A review of the videotape shows some squishing and maneuvering by everyone in the scrum but alleging that the mild-mannered McIver roughed up anyone is a push but, then again, she’s a Black woman and Trump and presumably his garage lawyer, Habba, are all in on going after Black female politicians.  Apparently Habba tried to get McIver to plea to a lesser violation, but she stood her ground and refused.  Habba is on shaky ground here since by law members of Congress are permitted to show up at federal facilities unannounced but defending herself will cost McIver money while the incident can be used as a pretense for House Republicans to strip her of her Congressional committee assignments which is likely the point.  By the way, I seem to remember that Trump pardoned a whole bunch of people who beat up law enforcement and did lots of damage at the Capitol on January 6 but apparently that’s okay in Trumptopia.  Also, having dropped charges against New York’s Trump friendly Mayor Adams who is now seeking reelection as an Independent rather than a Democrat, Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice is reported to be investigating former Governor Andrew Cuomo, something having to do with the testimony he gave to Congress about COVID but really because he’s the frontrunner in a congested Democratic race for NYC Mayor.  Apparently weaponizing the DOJ is cool when done by Trump’s team. 

Fog:  Trump spoke with Putin yesterday.  In a nutshell, he reports that the call was great, Putin agrees that the call was great for him.  To quote the Washington Post “Trump’s unwillingness to push Russia into a truce indicated that he may be stepping away from involvement in the talks, something that his team has been flagging for weeks. Trump said Monday that ‘the conditions for a ceasefire could only be agreed by the warring parties because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.’” In other words, peace is not near and those additional sanctions that Trump hinted he’d impose on Russia, they’re not happening anytime soon either.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

   

 

 
Like Ships in the Night 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

🚢 🛳️ 🚢 🛳️: The weekend started out on a positive note with the Supreme Court ruling 7 to 2 that the Trump administration had violated the due process rights of Venezuelan migrants by hurriedly removing them from the US by using the Alien Enemies Act. The Court’s ruling extended the pause on Alien Act removals but did not determine whether the Trump administration can ultimately carry out those removals under the Alien Act.  Instead, it sent the case back to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to determine whether the use of the Alien Act was legal and how much notice is due to those targeted by the act for removal to places like the El Salvador gulag.  Naturally, the two dissenting Justices were the not so charming Sam Alito and his sidekick Clarence Thomas who apparently could care less about migrants being hastily dispatched off to gulags.  As he usually does when courts rule against his wishes Trump responded by posting “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” on Truth Social, adding “This is a bad and dangerous day for America!” ……not allowing me to do what I was elected to do” and his Border Czar Tom Homan ramped up his threats to prosecute members of Congress with the help of US Attorney’s like traffic lawyer Alina Habba.   After the SCOTUS ruling the weekend took a more ominous turn.  First, citing fiscal concerns, Moody’s downgraded the sovereign debt rating of the US to Aa1 from Aaa.  Of course, since blame shifting is so Trumpian, while saying that the Moody’s downgrade wasn’t of concern to him, Treasury Secretary Bessent blamed it on Biden saying it was his programs, the ones that combated climate change and increased health care coverage that were responsible for the downgrade.  Funny how he failed to mention all the times that Republicans blew holes in the deficit or that the current budget bill, should it pass, will do more of the same in a bigly way. Then, perhaps as a metaphor for what Trump’s policies are doing to the economy, the Cuauhtémoca, a Mexican tall ship crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge leaving the bridge intact but killing two sailors and injuring 22 others, some critically,  Maybe the bridge incident was an omen because the weekend ended with the sad news that Biden, whose mental acuity rather than the current President’s obvious failings, had been the talk of the town all week, had been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer.  Notably, the NY Times reported that while not curable, Biden’s cancer is treatable and that as a result of his “moonshot” effort to find cures for cancer, there are now more treatments available, even for the type of cancer he has.  That’s another reminder why the Trump and DOGE efforts to defund cancer and other health related research will be so impactful, in a really bad way.

Budget Update:  House Republicans continue to fight with each other over Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the one that cuts health care for anywhere from 8 to 13 million while extending and adding tax cuts and further expanding the debt load that concerns Moody’s but apparently only matters to most Republicans when Democrats are in control.  On Friday, the bill failed to make it out of the House Budget Committee after four conservative Republicans including Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, and Andrew Clyde of Georgia who wanted deeper and more immediate cuts in Medicaid, joined all the Democratic members of the committee by voting against it. After a weekend of negotiations with nothing put in writing but plenty of promises made to add or accelerate more cuts, the four outliers relented by voting present and as a result the bill will now go to the House Rules Committee. However, issues still remain since the promises made to the four have yet to be formalized or even shared and it’s not clear that the so-called Republican moderates, mostly from swing districts, will vote for those new provisions especially since most of them are also unhappy about the SALT (state and local tax) provisions included in the bill.  Anyway, should the bill make it out of the House to the Senate, it will be altered significantly, because one crowd’s big and beautiful is another’s fat and dumpy. Oh, and consumer sentiment has dropped to the second lowest reading on record over tariff and inflation concerns and Walmart says it will be passing tariff related expense increases on to consumers because of course.  And Trump is now threatening to sue ABC again, upset that they more than implied that the 747 plane he claims is a gift to the US military from Qatar is really a gift for him.  Me thinks he doth protest too much.  

Fog: The Trump effect influenced the outcome of another election, this one in Romania where much to the dismay of the misogynist and “allegedly” criminal, rapey, mansplaining Tate Brothers the centrist candidate beat his hard right pro-Trump rival.  Unfortunately, though the Trump effect has been helping moderates win elections it’s doing little for Ukraine because despite Trump’s assertions that his buddy Putin would agree to an end in hostilities he hasn’t.  The two are scheduled to talk today, not that we’ll really know what transpires on the call because Trump doesn’t release transcripts of his calls anymore.  Over the weekend, Bridget Brink, the former US ambassador to Ukraine said she left her post and also exited the Foreign Service last month “because the policy since the beginning of the administration was to put pressure on the victim Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia,” She added that while she “fully agrees that the war needs to end” she believes “that peace at any price is not peace at all. It’s appeasement and, as we know from history, appeasement only leads to more war.”  Over the weekend there were also reports of some hostage talks between Hamas and the US and maybe Israel but so far there’s nothing to show for them and the Gaza situation continues to worsen, as if that’s even possible.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Different Stuff 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Groceries:  The press has been having a field day citing the sections of the new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper that detail the prior president’s age-related frailties.  Meantime, the current president keeps uttering nonsensical sentences and abject stupidities not the least of which is a riff about that “old fashioned” and beautiful term groceries which he weirdly describes as "a bag with different things in it." The orange guy is displaying his mental deterioration while grifting away, accepting gifts, and engaging in transactional diplomacy and private business deals with Middle Eastern emirs whose autocratic leadership, disdain for the free press, and ability to lock up, and sometimes chop up dissidents, he so admires.  It’s not just the Qatar plane, which some in the press have nicknamed Hamas Force One because its current owner who frequently utters the types of anti-Semitic rhetoric that Trump conveniently finds offensive when it benefits his anti-immigrant policies and efforts to dictate to American universities has used it to fly Hamas leadership around. Good for Tapper that he’s getting richer selling books, but since Biden is no longer president, how about focusing in real time on the guy who is because, sleepy or not, Joe wasn’t out to take away our rights, health care, and turn the country into an autocracy while also defunding election security and teasing a third term.

The Supremes:  Yesterday SCOTUS heard oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case, well sort of. Yesterday’s arguments were more about whether a single federal district court judge should have the power to block a policy across the country while a case involving that policy percolates its way up to the Supreme Court.  While it’s true that Trump wants to eliminate birth right citizenship and spent part of the night before the Supreme Court hearing posting about it to make sure “his“ Justices knew how he wanted them to rule, the focus yesterday was about the DOJ’s efforts to restrict the ability of meddlesome district court judges to stop the implementation of  Trump’s questionable and frequently unconstitutional policies, only one of which is his executive order restricting American born babies from being American. It goes without saying that the DOJ and the MAGA universe have done more than their fair share of forum shopping and are positively gleeful when federal judges like Texas’ Matthew Kacsmaryk who upheld the Texas law that was the first to strip away reproductive rights, rule in their favor, it’s just that they are far less sanguine when other judges issue rulings they don’t like. How SCOTUS comes out on this case is hard to predict because if we’ve learned anything from the presidential immunity case, it’s that this Court cares little about precedent and seems only to take the Constitution literally when it suits them. Most of the so-called expert legal pundits believe that the executive order eliminating birthright citizenship should be rejected by the Court as unconstitutional but even some of them believe that there is a chance that the Justices might be more sympathetic to curtailing the power of district judges to issue rulings that effect all fifty states. So, depending on how the Court rules, babies born in red states like Texas might not be citizens while those born in blue ones like New York will be at least until they move to Texas where they could find their rights stripped while they’re flown to El Salvador. Ridiculous but possible.

Cabinetry:  Because we truly are living through truly stupid times cosplay Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security is seriously considering being part of a television show in which immigrants would compete for potential US citizenship. Survive a swim in Florida’s Alligator Alley or emerge from a skinny dip with RFK, who doesn’t want you to take any medical advice from him, in sewage sludge without coming down with giardia or hepatitis and you get your papers.  Die while trying, no biggy but don’t try to get medical care if you just come down with dysentery or lose a limb because then you won’t win a visa and the undocumented aren’t entitled to Medicaid.  Also, maybe because Trump is trying so hard to get that plane offered up by Qatar, Noem is emulating him by trying to get a new one too.  Apparently, Homeland has snuck funding for a new gulf stream jet into their budget because how can someone with a $40,000 Rolex and free new gleaming teeth fly on an old one? By the way Texas’ children may need to start saving up for new teeth too because Ken Paxton, their Attorney General who is primarying current Senator John Cornyn in 2026 wants fluoride removed from their toothpaste. Also, remember when Elon Musk and his dodgy DOGE guys decided to eliminate the ability to call Social Security to make certain requests arguing that 40% of those calling were committing fraud, well it turns out that they were exaggerating by a lot.  Only two out of 110,000 calls made to the Social Security were deemed potentially fraudulent, but the limitation resulted in a 24% degradation in services which was probably the point anyway.  ProPublica reports that the State Department spent a full month pushing Gambia to approve Musk’s Starlink license application or risk losing US aid, while those services to Social Security recipients were being degraded.  Apparently, that counts as efficiency in Trump world.  Then there’s Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence who when it when it’s convenient argues that intelligence shouldn’t be politicized.  This week she fired the two long term government intelligence experts whose report concluding that the Venezuelan government doesn’t control the Tren de Aragua gang makes Trump’s argument that we are at war with Venezuela so he can invoke the Alien Enemies Act to ship Venezuelan “gang members” to a gulag/concentration camp in El Salvadoran without due process that much more absurd.  And last in this morning’s stupid things column, though certainly not the last stupid thing to be done by this administration, while MAGA members of Congress continue to press for the immediate arrest and prosecution of virus guru Dr Fauci and NYS Attorney General Letitia James, the FBI has opened an investigation into former FBI head, Trump nemesis James Comey.  Comey’s crime, he posted a photo on Instagram of seashells that spelled the numbers "8647" with the caption: "Cool shell formation on my beach walk." Apparently, the 86 thing is an illegal threat, who knew? Not Comey, nor most of the rest of us.

Budgeting:  House Republicans are still fighting over what to include in their budget reconciliation bill.  The budget hawks on the far right want more and quicker cuts to Medicaid and also want to eliminate all of Biden’s clean energy credits.  High tax state representatives want higher State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions and those whose districts benefit from clean energy credits, many from swing districts, want the credits to remain intact which is of course why Sleepy Joe made sure that so many clean energy projects and the related jobs were located in red areas. Even if Speaker Johnson gets everyone on board, and with arm twisting and threats from the orange guy he might, the expectation is that the Senate will make changes and will face some of the same disputes between their warring factions.

Fog:  Guess who didn’t show up in Istanbul for peace talks Thursday. Putin who the WSJ Editorial Board notes “keeps tapping the US along.” The paper goes on to say that “nothing is going to happen until Mr. Putin feels he has an incentive to show up and negotiate. Mr. Putin’s no-show is the latest evidence that the Russian isn’t serious about ending the war, and it’s no surprise. Mr. Putin thinks Mr. Trump might abandon Ukraine and make it easier for him to keep taking Ukrainian territory.” Sadly, Putin is right.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Gimme, Gimme 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱✈️ 

👀👀: Trump spent yesterday basking in the glow of his Saudi admirers.  Okay, they’re not really his admirers, but they know that treating him like fellow royalty pays in bigly dividends so Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), of bone cutter fame, greeted him at the Riyadh airport and then rolled out a custom-built McDonalds truck to meet his dietary needs. Afterall, what’s the point of Trump taking two different cholesterol drugs everyday if he doesn’t get to eat his favorite fat laden happy meal wherever he goes?  Trump, who had only the best things to say about MBS, expressed jealousy-tinged admiration for the way that the prince gets to squelch his critics, and by squelch think chopped-up Washington Post Journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump announced that Saudi Arabia will be making a $142 billion purchase of US military equipment while also investing $600 billion in the US.  The orange one has a history of exaggerating sales and investment figures so it’s not likely that either will come to pass at that magnitude though some money has already made its way into the Trump family coffers.  Though the Saudi’s sovereign wealth is huge, its assets under management equal $925 billion, so it is unlikely to put such a large percentage into the US. That said Trump’s announcement made for a good sound bite.  In exchange for the Saudi “largesse” Trump announced that he will move to normalize relations and lift sanctions on the new government in Syria to give the country "a chance at peace." This morning, he met with new Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former, or maybe just pretending to be former al-Qaeda rebel leader.  Next up he’ll be going to Qatar, the country that plans to gift him the $400 million gilded 747 which he equated to a golf gimme, as in if someone offers you a gift or allows you to skip a putt you take it. The plane that will require hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even a billion dollars, of retrofitting before it can be added to the Air Force One fleet. All that retrofitting will likely take a few years and might even require Boeing to redirect some of the specialists currently working on the two planes Trump ordered during Trump One, delaying their delivery even more. The bottom line is that despite Trump’s posts denying that the Qatar plane won’t be available for his use after he leaves office, there’s little question that it will be which is why he wants it so much.  The optics 👀👀 of the Qatar ✈️ are so bad that even a number of Republicans politicians including Senators Rand Paul, John Thune, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz, who noted that the Qataris host and support US hating terrorists like Hamas are questioning it, well questioning it for now.  In addition to Laura Loomer, the naysayer list includes MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro and the NY Post’s Editorial Board.  Naturally, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who not so coincidentally previously earned $115,000 per month as a lobbyist for Qatar, is totally copacetic with Trump accepting the ✈️ because what’s an emoluments violation among friends?

Optical Delusions:  The optics of the plane gift sucks to put it mildly but then again so does flying in 59 white South African Afrikaner farmers to save them from “genocide” on the same day that the administration terminated temporary protected status for the Afghans who supported our troops.  Despite cosplay Kirsti Noem’s assertion that the Taliban are so much nicer these days, the Afghans are not going to be welcomed home with open arms. To be clear, white immigrants are okay, especially those from Elon Musk’s home country, Black and/or Muslim ones not so much. Musk’s position, that Trump who complained during Trump One about so few Scandinavians immigrating to the US, is that the Afrikaners are victims of genocide.  South Africa has problems that shouldn’t be dismissed but given that 72% of its farming and agriculture land remains in the hands of the white minority which represents only 7.3% of the population, genocide is not one of them. That’s the position of the Episcopalian church which announced that helping Afrikaner refugees over others is unfathomable to them. Yesterday, the church announced that it is ending its nearly 40-year refugee resettlement partnership with the US government.  They did that after refusing a Trump administration request to help resettle the Afrikaners.  Flying former hostage Edan Alexander, the Israeli who was released as part of a deal arranged by Trump and Qatar, to Doha to greet and kiss Trump and the Qatari Emir’s rings would have been optically awful too.  We will be spared that sight, since despite early reports that at Trump’s insistence Edan would be flown to Qatar, his family announced that the 21-year-old, who spent 584 days in captivity, requires immediate medical attention because of course he does. He’ll be going to the hospital instead but will fly to the White House at a later date to feed Trump’s ego and presumably to ask for help freeing the rest of the hostages. And lastly, a federal judge in Pennsylvania is okay with the Alien Enemies Act being used to deport the alleged Tren de Aragua members.  Her decision affects only her area of Pennsylvania, at least for now.  

Cabinetry:  We probably shouldn’t be all that surprised that the Health Secretary with a wormhole in his brain who is also a former heroin addict with an affinity for bear and shark carcasses and who has probably had hepatitis and a few bouts of giardia, thought that swimming in Maryland’s sewage contaminated Rock Creek was a good way to spend Mother’s Day.  However, what’s with bringing the grandchildren along?  Anyone else subjecting their young ones to a disease cocktail would risk a visit from child services, and where are their parents in all this? No comment of course from EPA head Lee Zeldin who given his recent pro-pollution actions probably is all in on sewage infested waters, though I suspect he’s way too smart to swim or let his kids swim in giardia infested creeks. Polluted water swimmer RFK’s plans to fire almost all of the workers at NIOSH responsible for miner’s lung disease related issues have been undone.  The workers have been hired back because apparently firing people based in red states like West Virginia isn’t as easy as firing people based in Maryland. Since there’s a video for everything, there’s one of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg asking Congress for funding to hire more FAA staff.  That’s a bit inconvenient for current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy who keeps trying to blame current flight controller staffing shortages on Pete.  He’d be better off working to fix the staffing and technology problems but blaming others is so Trumpian.  Remember all those pointless infrastructure weeks he held during Trump One?   As to infrastructure, the House budget going to the Senate for reconciliation negotiations undoes a lot of Biden’s climate related projects because cleaning up the environment and making for a better future is no longer acceptable.   That’s a problem for some Republican Senators whose states benefit from those funds.  The House budget would also kick somewhere between 8 and 13 million people off of Medicaid, something that also concerns some swing staters but is of less concern to those who wanted deeper budget cuts.  There’s lots of other stuff in the House deal, but since it’s not clear what will make it out of reconciliation with the Senate there’s little point in going there now.

Fog: Gaza is a sad, deteriorating mess and Hamas is still holding hostages and bodies.

#BringThemAllHomeNow         

 

 
Habeas What? 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱✈️ 

Grifter in Chief:  Republicans in Congress spent four years eviscerating Hunter Biden, his Burisma business, and the curiously high prices he received for his paintings.  Well, Hunter’s monetization of his name and his art sales pale in comparison to Trump and his family’s crypto shenanigans. Their crypto grifts are raking in cash, largely from foreigners, many of whom are upfront about their “investment” in Trump crypto being nothing more than the purchase of access to the orange president. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes today, Trump’s self-enriching crypto ventures are full of ethical lapses that in addition to looking awful, are jeopardizing efforts to pass rational crypto legislation while writing Democratic ad campaigns. Perhaps because that crypto money grab isn’t enough, and also because the planes used as Air Force One are old and lack the gold fittings Trump prefers to surround himself with, this weekend we learned that Trump plans to accept a golden flying chariot from Qatar. Worth about $400 million, the 747-8 series ✈️ is being gifted to the US military to be adapted for use as a temporary Air Force One until the long-awaited new ones, arrive.  Then, once Trump leaves office, assuming he ever does, the Qatar plane won’t be returned but instead will be transferred to Trump’s “library” foundation for his personal use. Naturally, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the lawyers working in the White House Counsel’s office have concluded that there’s nothing wrong with this emoluments violation scheme because there is no part of the US Constitution that they aren’t willing to trample on behalf of the orange schemer. Trump friend Laura Loomer, whose opinion sometimes matters and sometimes is ignored isn’t fond of the plane thing either.  On Sunday she tweeted “I love President Trump. I would take a bullet for him but, I have to call a spade a spade. We cannot accept a $400 million ‘gift’ from jihadists in suits.” Loomer’s jihadist reference has to do with Qatar’s unusually cozy relationship with Hamas.      

Constitution? It’s not just the emoluments clause that Bondi and her crowd are planning to bulldoze. On Friday, Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller, Trump’s favorite bigot, teased that the Trump administration plans to suspend habeas corpus, the right of a person to challenge their detention in court. Habeas corpus is another one of those rights enshrined in the Constitution but as evidenced by their efforts to deprive non-citizens of due process, this administration doesn’t believe that migrants and anyone they believe to be migrants are entitled to any of those rights. Anyone who thinks that they’ll stop there hasn’t been paying attention and also probably missed the highly orchestrated activity that occurred in New Jesey this weekend or only receives news from Fox and the rest of the right-wing media.  In a nutshell, the INS arrested and threw Newark’s Mayor Ras Baraka into jail for a few hours, asserting he’d trespassed into an INS detention facility.  A review of the videotape reveals that the Mayor and the three members of Congress, one of whom was the petite and polite 80-year-old Bonnie Watson Coleman, who were also seeking to tour the facility were pretty much doing what politicians do.  Their efforts were fairly ordinary, nothing more than what Mayors and members of Congress generally do as part of their jobs. The event would have been a nothing burger, but the INS officials, goaded on by Trump’s acting NJ US Attorney Alina Habba, of traffic court fame, thought that creating a news event that they could spin into a full-on onslaught by the Mayor and the Congressional entourage on the facility suited their purpose better than just defusing the situation by inviting the politicians in for the tour they requested and, in the case of the Congresspeople, ultimately got.  Ironically, nothing that the Mayor and the Congressional delegation did resembled the actions of the violent January 6th “tourists” who Trump pardoned. Furthermore, Mayor Baraka has achieved what was probably one of his objectives, he’s using the arrest to fundraise for his campaign to be NJ’s next Governor. And of course, Habba and her cronies at the DOJ are now threatening to arrest the Congresspeople who accompanied Baraka as well as any others who cross their paths.  America, 2025.    

Tariffs, Tariffs, Tariffs:  Politico reports that Trump is hyper focused on the mid-terms because he doesn’t want to be impeached again and fears with reason given his grifts that he will be if Democrats retake the House. That fear combined with the eerie quiet at the ports is why he sent Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Switzerland for trade negotiation with the Chinese. The news this morning is that the US and China will temporarily lower tariffs on each other’s products for three months to buy time to work toward a broader agreement.  The combined 145% US levies on most Chinese imports will be reduced to 30% including the rate tied to fentanyl by May 14, while the 125% Chinese duties on US goods will drop to 10%.  The relief is only temporary, it’s tinged with uncertainty, and only affects trade with China, but the markets are already celebrating, Dow futures are up by 1000 or so points this morning.  Still, it’s not clear when activities at the ports will pick up and whether parents will be able to afford to find and purchase any of those much-discussed dolls and other toys.   

Fog:  Veep Vance, the America only guy, wanted to ignore the risk of a full blown war between Pakistan and India because Asia’s faraway but then someone, probably the newly anointed National Security Advisor Secretary of State Little Marco, pointed out that nuclear clouds know no boundaries, so someone in Trumpland spoke with both countries in an attempt to defuse their attacks and counterattacks.  At least for now that intervention, which Trump is taking full credit for, has defused things somewhat.  On the Russian-Ukraine front, Putin has agreed that it’s time for Russia to meet directly with Ukraine.  Zelenskyy wanted a 30-day ceasefire as a pre-condition for a meeting, Putin not so much.  Trump told Zelenskyy to show up even without a ceasefire, and at least for now Zelenskyy plans to do so. The much-anticipated meeting is scheduled to take place on Thursday in Istanbul though it’s not clear if Putin will attend in person or if he’s instead sending a representative in his place.  Over the weekend, Hamas agreed to release US-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander, the last remaining US citizen held by Hamas.  The release is part of an effort to get a Gaza ceasefire and to restart aid deliveries.  The Times of Israel reports that Israel was not in the loop with regard to any of this, which jibes with the NY Times report that Trump is starting to distance himself from Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu, not sharing information and going his own way on Iran, something that Netanyahu and Trump real estate buddy Steve Witkoff deny. Fifty-nine hostages remain in Gaza, one third of them are thought to still be alive. Trump walking away after Alexander is returned, assuming he is returned, possibly as soon as today, would put their lives in further jeopardy but would be very Trumpian because achieving peace isn’t easy, nor is Netanyahu, and Trump prefers easy and, after all, he’s got resorts to build in Qatar and that ✈️.

Cabinetry: It turns out that flying migrants to faraway prisons, flying in white South Africans,  and paying for Kristi Noem’s various and sundry cosplay outfits is burning a hole through the DHS budget, so much so that it appears that DHS will run out of funding sometime in July.  At least Noem appears to be enjoying her job.  FBI Director Kash Patel, not so much.  Reports are that he rarely shows up in the office, preferring instead to fly gratis to his home in Las Vegas while also attending sporting events.  Who would have guessed that running the FBI could be so much more taxing than hosting a podcast?  Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also appears stressed because it turns out that while his Fox and reality TV experience made him TV ready, running the historically underfunded aviation system when all the communication wires are fraying isn’t easy particularly given the Musk cuts and the firing of the last confirmed FAA chief.  At least for now, maybe avoid Newark airport, although it’s likely that Newark’s problems aren’t unique, so maybe drive, but not a Cybertruck because of their glue problem.  Not stressing, RFK Jr, the brain worm guy seems to be having the time of his life dismantling the health care system and hiring his likeminded friends. Maybe he’ll stop smiling during fall flu season when no one has access to an updated flu vaccine, but then again maybe not because with no one collecting or sharing data anymore maybe we won’t know how many people are sick and dying, at least until grandma and grandpa stops answering their phones.    

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

 
Bob 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

@drprevost: His friends call him Bob, his X (Twitter) handle was @drprevost and going forward the American born and raised Robert Francis Prevost will be known as Pope Leo XIV.  The white smoke indicating a new Pope had been selected wafted above Vatican City not long after Trump announced that he had achieved his first tariff deal.  The good news for Catholics is that they really do have a new Pope, the not so good news for Trump and the rest of us is that he merely has a concept of a tariff deal with the UK.  Given their post Brexit desperation, negotiating a deal, or the outlines of a deal with the UK, is the equivalent of picking the lowest hanging fruit first. The UK is only our ninth largest trading partner behind Viet Nam. We ran a trading surplus of $11.9 billion with them in 2024.  Already US car makers General Motors, Ford and Stellantis are more than a bit perturbed, concerned that the deal that Trump bragged about striking with Prime Minister Starmer will harm the US auto sector since British carmakers will be given a quota of 100,000 cars a year that can be sent to the United States at a 10% tariff rate, almost the total number of cars Britain exported last year, compared to 25% for Mexico and Canada and nearly all other countries. The bottom line is that the deal, or concepts of a deal with the UK is better than nothing but it doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of tariffs, the equity markets rallied yesterday because after announcing his “deal” Trump hinted that tariffs on Chinese goods could come down soon.  Whether they will or won’t is still a big unknown since he also dismissed concerns about the lack of ships at our ports by saying that the slowdown is a "good thing" for US trade as we will "lose less money,” a nonsensical and delusional remark right up there with his absurd statements about dolls and baby carriages and his threats to set tariffs on all Mattel toys at 100%. After the Pope selection was announced, Trump posted a congratulatory note on Truth Social highlighting Pope XIV’s American roots, because an American Pope is so American First.  However, the MAGA crowd is already questioning the new Pope’s selection because it turns out that though he’s American, he’s not sympatico with all things Trump and MAGA. His recent twitter history includes criticism of JD Vance’s views on Catholicism and Jesus, the posting of an article opposing Trump’s immigration policies and retweeted criticism of Trump and El Salvador’s Bukele laughing about the deportation of migrants to El Salvador’s gulag.  In 2018 he retweeted a post saying that there was nothing remotely Christian, American, or morally defensible about a policy that takes children away from parents and warehouses them in cages.  As the Grateful Dead’ song says: Trouble ahead, Trouble behind because the Pope is likely to continue to inflame MAGA with his concerns about migrants and the markets, including the currency markets, are going to react to tariff uncertainty.  

Surgeon Who? MAGA or at least Laura Loomer, who seems to have an “unusually” close relationship with Trump these days, wasn’t all that fond of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Trump’s first choice to serve as Surgeon General.  Dr. Nesheiwat, another one of those Trump had picked from the Fox swamp, had been scheduled to appear before the Senate health committee on Thursday, but her nomination was pulled after Loomer argued that Nesheiwat, who had fudged her resume to claim that she received her medical degree from the University of Arkansas rather than the Caribbean School of Medicine in St. Maarten, “was not ideologically aligned” with Trump.  Yesterday after pulling Nesheiwat’s nomination, Trump announced that his new Surgeon General pick is Casey Means who though she graduated from the more prestigious Stanford Medical School, unlike Nesheiwat, never completed her residency and has never practiced medicine.  Means who describes herself as a health influencer and “chronic disease entrepreneur” was recommended to Trump by the brain hole guy, RFK.  RFK’s former running mate and chief funder, Nicole Shanahan so dislikes and distrusts Means that she conditioned her support for RFK’s confirmation on the administration not appointing Means to serve in any capacity.  That probably doesn’t matter much to Trump but what might matter is that Loomer, whose time at the White House far exceeds Melania’s paltry 14 days, is also upset about Means’ nomination.  Yesterday Loomer posted “This is honestly insane….I do not believe for one second that Donald Trump made this decision.” She went on to label Means a “Marxist tree hugger,” adding in caps “PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PICK FOR US SURGEON GENERAL CASEY MEANS SAID SHE PRAYS TO INANIMATE OBJECTS, COMMUNICATES WITH SPIRIT MEDIUMS, USES SHROOMS AS ‘PLANT MEDICINE’ AND TALKS TO TREES! SHE ALSO DOESN’T EVEN HAVE AN ACTIVE MEDICAL LICENSE.” As Rachel Maddow frequently says: “watch this space.”

Shuffling the Deck:  Controversial Washinton pick Ed Martin is no longer Trump’s choice to serve as the US Attorney from Washington DC.  Yesterday, after it became clear that as a result of a few Republicans, most notably North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, finding his support of Nazi loving insurrectionists a step too far, Martin didn’t have the votes needed for confirmation, instead of arm-twisting Tillis, Trump pulled the nomination.  That’s the good news.  The ridiculous news is that, again dipping into the Fox swamp, he’s picked the almost always outrageous Jeanine Pirro to serve as DC’s interim US Attorney. Pirro has real experience. Before running for and losing a NYS Attorney General race, she served as a judge in Westchester County, NY and also served as the county’s elected prosecutor from 1993 until 2005.  Long a Trump supporter, she’s since descended into Rudy Colludy, toady territory which makes her the perfect pick. In case you were concerned about Martin, don’t be, Trump’s found another job where he’ll be able to do even more damage.  He’s moving to the Department of Justice as a special prosecutor responsible for rooting out DC corruption, meaning he’ll get to go after all those who opposed his US Attorney confirmation. And just because, late last night, while few were watching Trump “abruptly” fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, another step in his purging of those perceived to oppose his agenda.  Her crime, encouraging reading while being a Black woman.

More:  JD Vance has suddenly noticed that Putin isn’t all that nice or reliable.  Yesterday, the Veep said that Putin is asking for too much to end the war with Ukraine, including a few sections of the country that Russia hasn’t occupied, or at least hasn’t occupied yet.  House Republicans are finding out that math is hard, even when further ballooning the deficit is on the table.  Adding further complications to their budget nightmare, Trump is now talking about raising taxes on those earning more than $2.5 million while taxing carried interest at the same rate as ordinary income rather than at the capital gains rate.  Speaker Johnson is also trying to placate those vulnerable blue state Representatives pushing for the elimination or lifting of SALT (State and Local Tax) cap, many of whom are also among those concerned about how cutting Medicaid will hurt their reelection bids. Note that I didn’t say that they were concerned about millions losing health care coverage, it’s mostly their reelection chances that concern them, people not so much. In North Carolina, the Republican judicial candidate who had been trying to overturn the election results has finally conceded that he lost his election meaning that Democratic candidate’s victory is now official.  And lastly, Kari Lake who still hasn’t conceded her election losses is now planning to make far right-wing news outlet OANN the provider of news to what’s left of Voice of America. All the news that’s fit to flush?

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Not for Sale 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Oh Canada: Fresh off his election victory, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited the White House yesterday.  During the public part of his meeting with Trump, Carney told him that as a real estate guy he should know that certain real estate like for example the White House, Buckingham Palace, and Canada are not for sale. Carney went on to say that the owners of Canada, and by owners he made it clear he meant the Canadian voters who had just voted him into office, had zero interest in becoming the 51^st state. How sad for us that Carney had to go there in a public setting, but he did, and he said it in terms that simpleton Trump appears to have understood, at least for now. Maybe Carney can get someone “impressive” like Jon Voight to repeatedly whisper that into Trump’s ear because apparently it was the actor’s suggestion that Trump impose tariffs on movies produced overseas that resulted in the announcement that he would be imposing a 100% tariff on films.  That announcement surprised everyone, including Voight, and was quickly walked back by the White House which instead said: “Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again.” When in doubt or saying something that makes no sense, tack on Making whatever suits Trump’s purpose Great Again because MAGA this and MAGA that apparently is the magic deflector for all things idiotic and ill planned. To that end, while Pakistan and India, two countries with nuclear capabilities, got into a shooting match yesterday and another $60 billion fighter jet fell into the sea off the coast of Yemen probably with the help of the Houthis, the White House went with Making Soccer Great Again by  announcing that Andrew Giuliani, scion of the increasingly bizarre Rudy, will be serving as Executive Director of the President’s Task Force on the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and aren’t we all relieved to know that the 2026 soccer (football for those overseas) matches will be in such competent hands?  Wonder if Trump will add Steven Miller, cosplay Kirsti Noem, or Tom Homan to the task force to make sure that none of those soccer players overstay their welcome.  Also, Trump once again influenced the outcome of an election, this time in Australia where voters delivered a surprisingly strong victory to the Labor Party he opposed.

Mid-Term Madness:  A number of Senate seats will be up for grabs in 2026 midterms and lots of Democrats have indicated and continue to indicate an interest in running to fill the seats opening up in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire as a result of Senate retirements but it’s not just open seats that will be up for grab.  A lot of attention is also focused on North Carolina where Republican Senator Thom Tillis is up for reelection.  Tillis who publicly hedged and hawed before casting the deciding vote for Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense, has announced that he won’t be supporting the confirmation of Ed Martin as US Attorney for the District of Columbia.  That’s a problem for Martin because without Tillis’ vote he can’t make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee to a floor vote.  Tillis, who has been known to change his mind when pressured by Trump, said that though he could support Martin for any other district he can’t support him for DC because of his representation of so many of those January 6 insurrectionists, those “nice tourists” that Trump has pardoned. That’s great, but it’s not just Martin’s association with the insurrectionists that’s a problem, he’s also friends with lots of Nazis and lacks credible credentials but if Tillis wants to base his vote on January 6^th that works.  Tillis is stuck between a rock and a MAGA place.  He needs to appeal to North Carolina’s centrists to win reelection but also wants to avoid being primaried by a Trump endorsed candidate from the MAGA wing of his party. Tillis’ balancing act will become further complicated if North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper decides to run against him.  As to wish list governors, Republicans, especially Senator Tim Scott who has been tasked with the job of keeping the Senate red, had been hoping that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp would agree to run against Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff who is up for reelection in 2026, but those hopes were dashed this week when Kemp announced that he isn’t interested in the Senate seat.  Kemp is as conservative as you get but he has consistently distanced himself from supporting or criticizing Trump and appears to be keeping his powder dry for a possible presidential run in 2028.  Early polls had shown him running 3 points ahead of Ossoff so his decision not to enter the Senate race is a good thing for Ossoff and the Democrats.  A number of Republicans are likely to raise their hockey sticks in the air now, including MAGA Margie Taylor Greene of Jewish space laser fame. Turning back to North Carolina, it looks like the 2024 race for the open seat on the State Supreme Court is finally coming to an end.  On Monday, a federal judge ordered the North Carolina Board of Elections to certify Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs’ victory. Taking a page from Trump, her Republican opponent Jefferson Griffin has been trying to throw out enough votes to overturn her win in what was a close race.  He has seven days to appeal this ruling. Even if Democrat Riggs’ victory is finally confirmed, Griffin’s multiple appeals and effective delay tactics are likely to serve as a model for mayhem for other Republicans going forward. 

Cabinet Kerfuffle: Despite Trump’s assertion that he is personally negotiating big, beautiful trade deals with 200 countries, there are no deals. Yesterday, the increasingly distressed and flustered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted that there were no ongoing negotiations with China.  He mumbled that while repeatedly refusing to answer a question posed to him by Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan about who actually pays those tariffs, the ones that are supposed to be bringing in so much revenue that income taxes will be eliminated.  Later in the day the Treasury Department announced that Bessent will be traveling to Switzerland to meet with, or maybe stalk, a Chinese economic official for the first time since the US imposed tariffs on China. The Wall Street Journal reported on too many more Signal calls to count made by Defense Secretary Hegseth who apparently uses Signal for everything. Reuters reports that the use of Signal isn’t Hegseth’s only misstep.  Apparently, on January 30, before receiving White House authorization, he halted military shipments to Ukraine. His order came as a surprise to those in the Pentagon as well as to the White House which then restarted the previously approved shipments, characterizing Hegseth’s halt as a mere “pause.” Despite all, Hegseth who has also been having loud arguments with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy still has Trump’s “full” support because he’s doing such a good job de-woking the Pentagon, getting rid of Black and Female senior officers, and firing transgender troops, something that the Supreme Court said he can continue doing while related cases make their way to their docket.  As to Duffy, the former reality TV star has been learning the hard way as measured by more near misses and a mess at Newark Airport, that overseeing airports and air traffic is complicated.  It doesn’t help that there’s only an acting head of the FAA since Elon Musk forced out the recently hired Mike Whitaker in January because he was looking into how Musk’s Space X launches were disrupting the atmosphere and spewing dangerous debris.

More:   Noting that the Trump administration had “failed to demonstrate the existence of a war, invasion or predatory incursion,” another US District Court Judge, Alvin Hellerstein from New York, said that the Alien Enemies Act could not be used to deport the alleged Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members to the El Salvador gulag.  Further complicating Trump’s use of the Alien Act, a declassified memo released on Monday confirms that US intelligence agencies rejected a key claim President Trump put forth to justify invoking it to summarily deport the Venezuelans.  The spy agency memo concluded that “while Venezuela’s permissive environment enables Tren de Aragua (“TDA”) to operate, Venezuela’s Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United State.” The memo originated from the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s office. Awkward and should also make for good reading by the Supreme Court, assuming they ever rule on Trump’s use of the Act to send people to a gulag.  By the way, we now know the name of one of the other people who was illegally sent to El Salvador, it’s 20-year-old Daniel Lozano Camargo, whose asylum application was in process but had not yet been resolved.  Judge Stephanie Gallagher, who was appointed to the bench by Trump, has ordered officials to “facilitate” Lozano-Camargo’s return to the US. So far, the administration has not complied.

#BringThemAllHomeNow