Contagion 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Epstein, Epstein, Maxwell: The controversy that won’t go away continues to haunt Trump.  Yesterday a group of Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell accusers appeared outside of the Capitol.  While the women took to the microphones to talk about being targeted and abused by the creepy duo, Trump who appears increasingly desperate to prevent the release of the full trove of Epstein files, continued to call the Epstein affair a Democratic hoax while his enabler Speaker Mike Johnson did his best to impede the release of the full set of Epstein files. The two of them have made it clear to House Republicans that they shouldn’t vote for the Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie sponsored discharge petition that would force the release of all the Epstein files rather than the selectively filtered cache of files that the Department of Justice released earlier this summer and again earlier this week.  In addition to Massie, only three other Republicans including Nancy Mace, Marjory Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert have signed on to the discharge petition.  Assuming all 212 Democrats sign on, and it’s expected that they will, two more Republicans are needed for the petition to pass.  The bottom line is that there must be something really, really incriminating in the full set of files that Trump fears because why else would he be working so hard to prevent their release and why else would Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice have had 1000 FBI agents scour the files for all references to Trump? Naturally, Trump being Trump his efforts also include throwing lots of shiny objects, as well as a few missiles, into the air as a diversionary tactic so he also had his Pete Hegseth led Department of Defense shoot a Venezuelan drug smuggling boat out of the Caribbean, killing eleven people, rather than just forcing the boat to stop, the normal, and by normal think legal, way that those boats are typically handled. While the boat incident including the military build-up in the seas outside of Venezuela and the Epstein saga are dominating the news cycles, Trump and his administration have also continued their war against the environment, cancelling and defunding renewable energy projects especially those that include the windmills Trump hates so much, and issuing factually inaccurate reports that deny that climate change is real while also continuing to put the nation’s health at risk by demonizing vaccines. So basically, a normal Trump 2.0 month.  

Legal Morass:  Trump hasn’t been faring well in the courts this week, or at least in the lower courts.  On Tuesday, US District Court Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act when it used the military to patrol the streets in Los Angeles. The Posse Comitatus Act is the 1878 law that prohibits the use of the US military for domestic law enforcement. It’s okay for the military to protect federal buildings but street patrols are not supposed to be within their remit because in theory the US is not a dictatorship or a banana republic.  Breyer’s ruling only applies to California and will be appealed, so Trump is still planning, or at least loudly threatening to send the military into other cities, most notably Chicago despite the equally loud but much more articulate pushback from Illinois Governor Pritzker.  Also on Tuesday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reinstated Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, the Democratic appointed Federal Trade Commissioner who Trump had fired from the agency that is responsible for consumer protection and antitrust enforcement. In a split 2-to-1 decision, the court said that the Trump administration’s attempt to block Slaughter, from resuming her role at the FTC. had “no prospect of success” because she’d been fired without cause rather than on the required grounds of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” When he fired Slaughter, Trump had also fired Alberto Benoya,  another Democratic appointee, but since he subsequently resigned citing personal financial reasons, he was not reinstated as a result of the Court’s ruling.  Keeping with the Tuesday string of Trump losses,  by a vote of 2 to 1, a 5^th District US Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that Trump can’t use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed the deportations of people that he and his abettors Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem accuse of being in Venezuelan gangs like Tren de Aragua, the gang that they claimed based on tattoos rather than real evidence that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a member of.  Abrego Garcia is the migrant who’d been sent to the El Salvador gulag before being flown back to a US prison after his deportation received so much bad press.  The Alien Acts case is another one “destined for a showdown” at the Supreme Court.  It’s a good thing for Trump that SCOTUS is stacked with his appointees and a few other like-minded justices because he’s going to need them to get all his nefarious plans back on track.

Viral Musings:  Southern California health officials are encouraging residents to don masks to impede the spread of the COVID that is “surging” through their communities. While masking up is depressing, it’s a rational response to the upswing, particularly for those who are vulnerable or just need to go stay healthy enough to work.  The California recommendation which is partially in response to the very high levels of COVID in the sewer system, a tool used to measure COVID spread, stands in stark contrast to the idiocy that’s going on in Florida.  Yesterday with Florida Governor DeSantis’s support, the state’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo who first came to attention for his cavalier attitude towards COVID and his total and complete disdain for masks, even in hospital settings, announced that Florida will work to eliminate all vaccine mandates.  He emphasized that by saying he means “All of them. All of them, Every last one of them” because they are all “wrong and drip with disdain and slavery." The polio virus, in concert with the measles, German measles, chicken pox, and all the other viruses that we should be protecting children from are celebrating.  The folks at Disney World should be shaking in their boots because the park will soon be the virus epicenter (Epcot center?).  Maybe it’s time to add a virus exhibit next to the It’s a Small World ride? Sure, most parents in Florida will probably continue to get their little ones vaccinated but herd immunity only works when somewhere around 95% of us are protected and that’s not going to happen as long as the criminally dopey Ladapo eliminates school vaccine mandates. Parents with young children, particularly those too young to have received all their shots, should really think about that when they make their holiday travel plans. And young kids are just part of the problem, it’s more than fair to assume that Ladapo’s disdain and “slavery” claims will impact the uptake of HPV, meningococcal, tetanus vaccines as well. And it won’t be only Florida because idiocy, like viruses, is contagious, and viruses don’t respect state lines.

#BringThemAllHomeNow