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