Bringing Up Baby 🤮 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤮

Epstein, Epstein, Epstein: Trump is really freaking out over the Epstein affair.  We know that because over the weekend, he ramped up his shiny objects’ generator, taking to Truth Social to threaten to stand in the way of the Washington Commanders building of a new stadium in Washington DC unless the team returns to its old Redskins moniker.  Keeping with that theme, he also called for baseball’s Cleveland Guardians to go back to calling themselves the Cleveland Indians, asserting that returning to their old name would improve their league standing. On a more serious note, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence who Hillary Clinton correctly called a Russian asset and who of late has been relegated to a kid’s table in the outer suburbs, emerged from whatever hole she’s been hiding to trumpet a report that accuses top members of the Obama administration of having engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” with their assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, that’s the assessment that was confirmed by a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, including then Senator Marco Rubio, as well as by the Mueller Report. Nothing screams “let me back into the cool kid’s club” better than ginning up a report that “legitimizes” Trump’s claims that the Russia investigation was an Obama/Clinton led witch hunt. Fox news is all in on the Gabbard report and Trump supplemented it by posting an AI generated picture of Obama being taken off to jail by FBI agents and a group picture of various members of the Obama administration including Barack “Hussien” Obama, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, and Ben “Hamas” Rhodes donned in orange jumpsuits calling them the Shady Bunch while arraying them in Brady Bunch format.  Though Adam Schiff wasn’t included in the array, Trump also gratuitously threw in a call for his immediate arrest as he frequently does.

Lawsuit Time:  Trump dropped his lawsuit against the Omaha pollster who erroneously predicted he’d lose Iowa in 2024, and a judge has dismissed his lawsuit against author Bob Woodward but that hasn’t stopped him from trying again because that’s what he does, besides, he has garnered millions in extortion settlements from lots of media outlets. This weekend, his legal team filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, News Corp, Dow Jones, Rupert Murdoch, and the two Journal reporters who wrote Wednesday’s story about the birthday card and accompany lewd doodle that Trump “allegedly” gifted Epstein to celebrate the pedophile’s 50^th birthday.  Trump’s claim is that the WSJ defamed him.  The problem for Trump is that truth is not defamatory, and the WSJ stands by the accuracy of its story.  Assuming social media is correct, and it was when several posts teased that the WSJ birthday card article was forthcoming, there’s more to come, maybe even a picture of the Trump card. Already, several media outlets including the NY Times have published articles about Trump’s close friendship with Epstein, his history of sleazy behavior around young women including some teenage model wannabees, most of which isn’t new to anyone who’s been paying attention but was likely missed or dismissed by the MAGA universe who seems to be finally waking up to Trump’s past actions. As to Trump’s assertion which was repeated by the desperate to please his daddy son Don Jr that he never doodles, it has already been proven false.  Trump frequently contributed his doodles to be auctioned off by charities and pictures of quite a few of them were published over the weekend. Trump’s assertion that the word “enigma,” included in his birthday message, is not one he uses, and to be fair, it did seem uncharacteristic given his usual monosyllabic utterances, that’s a lie too, there’s video of Trump saying it in a public setting. Pam Bondi who Trump is reported to be growing tired of having to defend has formally requested permission from the courts to release the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxell grand jury testimony.  It’s not clear that they will but whether they do or not, it will be only a small fraction of what the DOJ has on Epstein and his friends which likely explains why Bondi had 1000(!) agents working overtime sorting through the voluminous Epstein files, flagging places where Trump’s name appeared. According to DOJ tipsters somewhere at the DOJ there is an EXCEL spreadsheet of the results of their analysis as well as a training video that provided the agents with instructions on what to look for in the Epstein files. Lastly, while we were all gawking at Trump’s cankles, VP Vance made a brief trip to Montana where he met with Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and some others senior executives from NewsCorp. A fundraising trip, an attempt to get the WSJ to quash their birthday card story, or maybe laying the groundwork for a coup? Coup or not Vance is jockeying for position to be the Republican’s 2028 presidential candidate as is Secretary of State Marco Rubio who is really outdoing himself these days.  Rubio who not long ago was considered a serious person announced on Friday that the visas of Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes, his “allies on the court” and immediate family members have been revoked over the ongoing “political witch hunt” against Brazil’s disgraced former Brazilian president.  It’s not clear how much lower Rubio can go in his efforts to garner favor with and an endorsement from his dear leader because at some point he will have hit rock bottom, assuming there is a bottom.

Meat, Potatoes, and 👶👶:  While the impact of many of the worst components of Trump’s big ugly bill won’t be felt until after the midterms, some of Trump’s policies are already having a bigly impact. KFF, a nonpartisan health care policy research group says that largely due to the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, insurance premiums for people who purchase their health insurance through the ACA (Obamacare) are expected to go up 75%. It’s highly likely that many of the people who have been buying their insurance through those markets are going to decide to wing it, going without coverage, something that will lead to more people avoiding doctors until they need emergency care, not that there will be as many hospital emergency rooms once the big ugly bill’s effects kick in.  Additionally, though the full impact of tariffs has not kicked in yet, it’s not your imagination, costs are going up: prices for imported goods on Amazon have gone up and beef prices, already at record levels, are expected to go up further during 2026.  Maybe it’s time for switch to veggie burgers but then again, the pool of migrants picking those vegetables is also shrinking as Trump’s growing INS army keeps hunting more of them down. The okay news on the migrant front is that despite Trump’s assertion that he couldn’t get the migrants he’d had deported to the El Salvador gulag released because they were no longer under his control, he actually did get 200 Venezuelans sent back to Venezuela in exchange for ten Americans who have now been returned home to the US. The bad news is that INS agents keep arresting and incarcerating Americans and those with valid Green cards, including disabled veterans and peace abiding 82-year-olds.  If you are wondering why there’s so much talk about building more detention facilities it’s because despite the publicized transports of some migrant “gang” members to far flung countries, Trump and Stephen Miller’s gestapo-like forces are picking up far more people than they can deport, thus we get people in cages in places like Florida’s hurricane prone, sweltering alligator alley, at military bases and maybe even a multi-billion dollar rehab of San Francisco’s Alcatraz island prison.  One more thing for today, a pregnant Tennessee woman has been denied prenatal care by her local OB-GYN, she’s not seeking an abortion, she just wants routine care throughout her pregnancy.  The doctor has denied her care because he doesn’t approve of her lifestyle, she’s not married to the 👶’s father with whom she’s been in a long term committed relationship, not that any of that should be relevant.  A recent Tennessee law says that doctors don’t have to treat anyone whose values conflict with theirs.  So, to be clear, Republican policy is to encourage women to have 👶👶, but when they get pregnant, they want to be able to limit who gets care and once the 👶👶are born, forget about them.    

#BringThemAllHomeNow