Trick or Treat 🎃 🧙 💀🌻✡️ 🎃 🧙 💀

STFU: The government is still in shutdown mode.  More and more airports, including Newark’s, DC’s Reagan, LAX, and Orlando’s, have been experiencing ground stops, the result of air controller staffing issues rather than weather.  SNAP food stamp funding will run dry tomorrow.  Well, the funding well won’t really run dry, but the Trump administration has decided to stop SNAP funding rather than tap the available contingency fund or any of that tariff money that Trump keeps bragging about.  Twenty-five states and DC are suing to force the federal government to dispense those funds.  The judge hearing the case doesn’t appear to be buying the federal government’s argument that it can’t dispense the contingency money so the SNAP freeze could be put on hold in hours since she’s promised to issue a ruling soon.  Nevertheless, the idea of cutting off access to food for millions while shifting the blame to what the constantly prevaricating Speaker Johnson keeps calls those “radical” Democrats when Republicans control the presidency, House and Senate, is transparent bull shittery, though totally in line with the Trump, Vought, and Miller “let them eat cake” philosophy.  By the way, Stephen Miller, like Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth, is currently living in upscale military housing, something about needing extra protection from threats from the disgruntled masses. Threatening government officials is very bad but maybe if they weren’t all such ghouls 💀, they wouldn’t get so many threats?  Though funding for food stamps is in jeopardy, FBI Director Kash Patel’s cash pool appears unaffected by the shutdown. Patel who routinely commutes on his government provided jet to Washington from his home in Las Vegas has been shuttling his country-singer girlfriend to her appearances around the country including to her recent appearance at a pro-wrestling event at Penn State. 

Only One Less Royal:  The United Kingdom is now down one royal, but our wannabee king is still acting like one.  He’s back from his Asian sojourn and though he could put an end to the shutdown by acting presidential and convening an all hands meeting with Democratic leadership to hammer out a deal, so far, he’s hasn’t.  Instead, he’s ramping up pressure on Senator John Thune, demanding that the Republican Senate leader eliminate the filibuster to facilitate the passing of the disputed continuing budget resolution with only 51 votes. To date, Thune has resisted doing that but who knows how much longer he’ll hold out because he’s a Republican and Trump is his lord, master, and king.  As to Trump’s Asia trip, don’t buy into his claims that he came out on top. He did strike a deal, albeit one not yet written down and subject to monthly review, with China.  However. despite Trump’s claims of having achieved a massive victory with his bestie Xi, the general assessment of financial pundits is that he basically rolled things back to where they were before he started his tariff war.  China has agreed to let us continue to buy the scarce minerals we need, but only in the amounts that they dictate.  They’ve also agreed to start buying soybeans from our farmers but only at what they say are “market prices.” Those promised purchases won’t help farmers with the sale of this year’s crop which is why Trump is teeing up a $10 to $14 billion farmer bailout.  As to tariffs, with the help of Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate passed a resolution ending the national emergency that Trump used to declare global “reciprocal” tariffs, with the same group of four Republican senators crossing party lines to express disapproval of Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Brazil. That’s good but largely symbolic since the House, which remains out of session because of Speaker Johnson’s fear of all things Epstein, doesn’t plan to address tariffs until next March. Epstein jitters are also the reason that Representative-elect Grijalva, whose signature on the Epstein files release petition would force Johnson’s hand, still hasn’t been sworn in.   

More 💩: Tuesday is election day.  Enjoy it because even if your candidates don’t win, and mine probably won’t, it could be our last one, or at least the last one without military “oversight,” or in the case of California and New Jersey, only limited military oversight.  That’s not hyperbole because Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has issued a memo ordering the National Guard to build a “quick reaction force” of 23,5000 troops trained in crowed control and civil disturbance that can be deployed to US cities by early next year. Not so coincidentally, urban areas are where most Democrats reside.  As to those civil disturbances that Warpath Pete is prepping for, the DOJ absolutely doesn’t want anyone to confuse them with the one perpetrated by those nice tourists who invaded the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection which is why two well respected career prosecutors have been suspended.  Their “crime,” referring to the January 6 insurrection in a sentencing memo for one of those “nice tourists” Taylor Taranto that Trump pardoned.  Taranto was found guilty of illegal possession of guns and ammunition after being arrested near former President Barack Obama's Washington, DC home in June 2023. He was also convicted of illegally carrying two firearms without a license and unlawfully possessing ammunition.  In addition to referring to the January 6 insurrection, the suspended prosecutors also mentioned in their sentencing memo that Taranto knew Obama’s address because Trump had publicly broadcasted it; another no-no that contributed to their suspension.  The DOJ reissued the sentencing memo without the king offending inclusions.  The judge overseeing the case, a Trump appointee, didn’t appear pleased.  He went out of his way to compliment the two suspended prosecutors.  Nice, but they’re out of a job because they offended the king and though King Charles finally demoted his sex-offender brother, we’re still stuck.      

Viral Musings:  There are some interesting new facts about the benefit of vaccines that are worth noting.  Recent studies indicate that the shingles vaccine reduces the risk of dementia. Additionally with multiple studies indicating that COVID, the flu, and shingles are all linked to an increase in the risk of heart disease and stroke, now might be the right time to schedule those shots if you haven’t already.  Checking with appropriate medical professionals of course, 😊.        

 

 

SNAP, Crackle, and Pop🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

STFU:  The government is still closed. That’s not much of a problem for Trump who is traipsing across Asia, bragging about deals that sound good but are mostly smoke and mirrors since details haven’t been put down on paper and many countries haven’t agreed to make those upfront payments that he keeps asserting that they’ve agreed to.  However, our dear leader has received a boatload of medals and gifts from leaders who have figured out that feeding his ego and giving him fancy trinkets is the way to go.  He also delivered one of his rambling speeches to US troops which was chock full of lies. He asserted that grocery prices are way down; they’re up with turkey 🦃, most people’s Thanksgiving main dish of choice up, 40% over last year. He said that inflation had been defeated; it’s actually started inching back up.  He bragged about securing $17 trillion in investment; he hasn’t.  He justified his bombing of all those “drug” boats and the extrajudicial killings of their occupants by saying that they kill 25,000 people every year; they don’t.  He repeated that he’d won the 2020 election; he didn’t. He asserted he’d ended eight wars and that no other president had even ended one; neither is true.  And in one of his odder claims, he said that President Biden falsely claimed to be a pilot; Biden never made such a claim but then again Trump once said that the ”Continental Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports" during the Revolutionary War and we know his brain is unusually fixated on planes, perhaps one of the reasons that he had a previously undisclosed MRI during his recent “routine” second annual physical.  His lies are just the tip of the iceberg (dementia?), and we’ll never know the results of that MRI, but you get the gist.  He’s also keeps suggesting that he plans to run for a third term in 2028, assuming we actually have an election.  Last night after his usually eager to please make believe Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s got the House on a prolonged vacation and still hasn’t sworn in Rep-elect Grijalva, said that the Constitution as drafted limits presidents to two terms and that it would take at least ten years to amend it, Trump walked back his third term plan but that was last night, he’s got time to change his plans, like the way he’s had his flunkies change the government website which until recently acknowledged that there were $5 billion in contingency funds available to fund SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.  Somehow, that contingency fund no longer exists, or at least that’s his administration’s claim, so absent Congressional action, or a “reallocation” of those mysteriously disappearing funds, the 41.7 million, one in eight of Americans, who rely on SNAP are going to go without. According to Johns Hopkins, eighty percent of SNAP householders include either a child, an elderly individual, or a nonelderly individual with a disability and every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.54 in economic activity by benefiting farmers and grocery stores, but the good news is that under Trump’s Big Beautiful Tax Bill, purchasers of private airplanes will be able to achieve huge tax savings by immediately deducting the full cost of their ✈️✈️, so what’s a little food insecurity and hunger among friends? ☹🤯

Legally Yours:  We’re still waiting to hear from US District Court Judge Currie who is expected to rule soon on Trump insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan’s legitimacy to serve as a US Attorney, a ruling that could throw a bigly wrench into the proceedings against former FBI Director Jim Comey and NY Attorney General Tish James.  However, last night another one of Trump’s “faux” US Attorneys, Bill Essayli who has been serving as the US Attorney for Los Angeles, was disqualified after a Hawaii Judge ruled that because he’s overstayed his legally allowed interim period, Essayli is “unlawfully serving” in the role of US Attorney.  Essayli is another one of those US Attorneys who hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate because Trump and the DOJ has given up on go through that annoying confirmation process.  Overall, it wasn’t a good day in the courts for Team Trump.  The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to rehear a case over Trump’s authority to send National Guards troop into Portland, Oregon, this time the panel will include eleven judges.  At the same time the Appeals Court vacated the ruling made last week by a smaller three-judge panel that had allowed the troops to go into Portland. The DOJ’s lawyers have admitted that they misrepresented, as in lied about, the conditions on the ground in Portland when they claimed that the city was “ravaged.”  Also, Chicago Judge Sara Ellis has just about had it with Border Patrol boss Greg Bovino who has repeatedly violated her order to stop using excessive force against peaceful protesters, Halloween trick or treaters, and journalists.  She’s demanding that he show up in court everyday with video from vest cameras to document that his “troops” activities follow the law.  As to those trick or treaters, who were set upon over the weekend, she made it clear that “kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat to the safety of law enforcement” so under no circumstances should they be subjected to tear gas or barrages of rubber bullets. Kind of obvious, but then again, Trump’s ghoul Stephen Miller who doesn’t need a costume to be scary as 💩 on Halloween or any other day, is calling the shots and he has no problem with freaking out kids, especially brown ones.

Fog:  Yesterday wasn’t a good day in Gaza.  After Hamas played hide and seek games with body parts from a previously released dead hostage (yes, you read that right, Hamas dug up, reburied, and then re-dug up body parts), Israel retaliated by dropping a few bombs.  The good news is that the ceasefire is back on this morning.  The bad news is that Hamas has a really sick and twisted sense of humor, doesn’t appear to care much about Gazans, and is still holding on to the bodies of dead hostages despite the agreement that they would all be returned ASAP.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow     

 

 

Vote While You Can 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯 💣

27 Days and Counting:  The government shutdown is about to get very real.  Open enrollment for Obamacare with its new inflated premiums begins on November 1, the same day that federal funding for SNAP (food stamps) runs out.  The Department of Transportation is warning that there will be more airport delays and shutdowns like the one experienced in Los Angeles on Sunday where flights were halted for two hours due to already stretched unpaid flight controllers calling in sick. Trump who has no plans to fill the SNAP gap, has been moving money around to pay military salaries but it’s not clear how much longer he’ll be able to do that which may be why a “secret” donor who turns out to be the ultra-right wing reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon, decided to donate $130 million to help pay those salaries. It’s inappropriate for a private individual to fund what’s supposed to be a non-political military but at the end of the day Mellon’s largesse won’t accomplish much since $130 million will only cover $100 per serviceman.  Over the weekend, Trump took to Truth Social to call for the DOJ to go after some more of his enemies.  This time the targeted group who he called “radical left lunatics,”  includes former AG Merrick Garland, former FBI head Christopher Wray, former Special Counsel Jack Smith, and former Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. He insists that they need to be investigated and prosecuted for their “illegal and highly unethical behavior.” Projection or just the pot calling the kettle black, or lots of both? It’s also reported that signoff has been granted for a Florida Grand Jury to be impaneled in January to investigate the “grand conspiracy” against Trump, because every witch hunt accuser needs his own witch hunt?  In other disturbing news, the Department of Justice announced on Friday that it plans to send election monitors to polling sites in California and New Jersey for the redistricting and gubernatorial elections scheduled to take place on November 4th.  Those monitors aren’t needed, so it’s fair to assume that they are being sent in to intimidate voters and, even worse, as a dry run for the 2026 midterms. And, of course, the plan is to name the ballroom that will be replacing the East Wing after Trump.  How about the Orange Room or Trump’s Folly?

Election Day 2025 🗳️:  Here in New York the focus is on the mayoralty race but as indicated by Trump and his DOJ’s mobilization of election monitors, that’s not the only election that matters this cycle.  Californians are being asked to vote on Proposition 50, a redistricting proposition geared to add five more Democratic seats to counter the redistricting already done or in process by Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio. As one Republican politician in North Carolina said out loud, the sole purpose of his state’s redistricting is to keep Republicans in power and the strategy could work because at this point the Republicans are likely to have guaranteed themselves at least eight additional seats, more if their efforts to get Indiana and New Hampshire, two holdout states, to join in.  In a perfect world, voting maps would be agnostic grids, adapted to accommodate bodies of water and mountains but, sadly, they aren’t.  Given that Trump and his policies have grown increasingly unpopular, he’s figured out that the only chance he has of keeping himself as de facto Speaker of the House role, is by gerrymandering and voter intimidation which is why he’s pushing for his maps and gearing up to station troops near midterm polling places. November’s elections aren’t just about gerrymandering, in New Jersey and Virginia, voters are choosing Governors.  Both of the Democratic candidates are moderate women with military backgrounds who’ve served or in the case of NJ’s Mikie Sherrill are still serving in the House.  In contrast, both of the Republican candidates, NJ’s Jack Ciatterelli and Virginia’s Winsome Earle-Sears, are very Trumpy and in Earle-Sears case also extremely bizarre.  Governorships matter now more than ever, particularly if you value health care, the environment, and reproductive rights so don’t buy into the “swift boating” spin that the Republicans are pushing, particularly against New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill.

The Big 🍎:  Then there’s New York City where our election choice is between former/ousted Governor Andrew Cuomo, cat lover/eccentric/ Guardian Angel Curtis Sliwa and Zohran Mamdani, a woefully inexperienced socialist whose views on Israel and its right to exist particularly as a Jewish state are extreme to say the least, that last part especially telling given that he’s okay that there are several Islamic countries. We got here because the soon to be former Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, though not bad at his job got caught accepting bribes from Turkey and engaging in campaign finance offenses, because NYC’s Republican Party has given up on nominating real candidates, and because NYC really is an expensive place to live. Moreover, to vote in New York State primaries you have to be registered in a party, a practice that because it leaves independents on the sidelines tends to skew primary results to the extreme. My vote is going to Cuomo because despite his “warts” I think he’ll be more effective as a Mayor, particularly at pushing back at Trump the way that San Francisco Mayor David Lurie (NYC Congressman Dan Goldman’s first cousin, once removed) did last week when he enlisted help from his city’s tech leaders to persuade Trump to put his planned military invasion on hold but also because Mamdani scares me.  That fear isn’t because of his religion, I could care less about his ethnicity, but because anyone who can’t come out and convincingly say that the Hamas terrorists and their actions on October 7 are evil, especially when running to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews isn’t going to step up when it matters.  As we learned on 9.11 and during too many threats and a few deadly occurrences since then, here in New York City, that’s very important. Also, New York is a big city facing complex problems with financial constraints that will only get worse under the erratic Trump who will probably be around at least until 2028.  We need a competent and experienced leader rather than someone making pie in the sky, populist promises about rent and free services. Bernie Sanders as Senator may work for Vermont, but he wouldn’t be my choice for Mayor of New York. In any case, vote, because even if you disagree with me your vote matters and the way things are going, it’s not clear how many more opportunities we’ll have.     

 

 

Oh Canada 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯 💣

Pardon Me:   Another day, another pardon.  No, this one wasn’t for Ghislaine Maxwell but the way things are going hers is likely in the offing.  Yesterday’s pardon was for Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance.  Zhao had pleaded guilty and was serving a four-month jail sentence for failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program which in plain speak means that under his watch the Binance exchange willfully facilitated transactions related to child sex abuse, illegal drugs, and terrorism. Hamas was one of those terrorist organizations that used his exchange to transfer money, because someone needed to facilitate the moving of the funds that paid for those terror tunnels. Zheng has spent months cozying up to Trump and his family in the hope of getting the pardon.  Part of that strategy included entering into a business deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto startup, which has contributed to Trump’s crypto portfolio growing to a current value of more than $5 billion.  Despite the glaring conflict of interest, Trump insists that he pardoned Zhao because he was only in jail because he’d been targeted by that very sleepy guy Joe Biden and “a lot of good people say that Zhao wasn’t guilty of anything,” because since when is financing child abuse and terrorism a problem anyway?  Keeping with the crypto theme, a number of crypto firms like Coinbase, Ripple, and Tether, along with crypto investors such as the Winklevoss twins, are among the donors/quid pro quo seekers for the ballroom to be built where the now totally demolished East Wing of the White House used to be. That’s the now $300 million project that Trump had originally promised would leave much of the East Wing intact and that would only cost $100 million. It’s only a matter of time before we learn that Trump’s plans include renting his new gilded ballroom out for bar mitzvah’s and weddings with the gross revenue going straight into one of his personal bank accounts.  Leonard’s on the Potomac?    

Peeps:  Keep an eye out for news about Kelly Hayes, the Maryland federal prosecutor who has notified Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche that she sees no basis for indicting Democratic Senator Adam Schiff for mortgage fraud.  Shiff is one of those in the crosshairs of Trump’s retribution campaign. It’s only a matter of time before Hayes is replaced by another one of Trump’s flunkies, perhaps one or more of his divorce lawyers is available or the attorney who got Melania her genius visa?  NY Attorney General Letitia James is due to be arraigned today for her alleged mortgage fraud.  Recent news on that front indicates that the evidence shows that despite the claims included in her indictment, she didn’t make $18,000 in “ill-gotten” gains for renting out her vacation home to her niece, instead she received somewhere around $1800 as a reimbursement for utility bills, likely one of the reasons that the US Attorneys who were initially assigned the responsibility of indicting her and who were subsequently fired refused to go forward with the indictment. Also, keep an eye out for Jack Smith, the Special Prosecutor who was supposed to rid of the troublesome Trump.  He sent a letter to Congress saying that he’d be happy to answer all their questions about the investigations he oversaw and the prosecutions of Trump, in public not behind closed doors, as long as he gets an assurance from the Department of Justice that he will not be punished for doing so. The government is still closed, food stamp funding is about to run out but none of that is a problem for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem because she will soon have two new Gulfstream jets, because spending $170 million to make sure that she gets to cosplay around the country is so much more important than feeding the hungry.  Proving that Nazi affinity is a thing on both sides of the aisle, oyster farmer/veteran Graham Platner, who is vying with a few others including Governor Janet Mills to be selected as the Democrat’s nominee to run against Republican Senator Susan Collins has apologized for the Nazi tattoo on his chest.  We’re all to believe that he didn’t know until it was caught on camera that the tattoo “resembles” the skull-and-crossbones symbol used by Nazi forces during World War II. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has endorsed Platner says that since he’s really a nice progressive guy the tattoo should be written off a minor youthful transgression. Platner, who has hired some new campaign advisors to help him convince the Maine electorate as well as anyone else who might be interested in funding his campaign that he’s not pro-Nazi,  has “covered up” the tattoo with new ink, kind of like hiding the name of an old flame, only this time the old flame are those who sent millions to burn in gas chambers.   

Fog:  The trade war with Canada is back on bigly.  Last night, the petulant dear leader,  “TERMINATED” all negotiations with our neighbors to the north, after he became infuriated by televised ads run by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Those ads which use unauthorized excerpts from a public address given by former president Ronald Reagan include Reagan’s warning that "high tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars". Reagan argued that tariffs lead to higher prices, less competition, shrinking markets, and job losses. Reagan was right which is why the orange guy is so upset.  The orange one is also down on Putin this week so in addition to cancelling his Budapest summit with Vlad, he’s imposed new sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies.  Bad news on the Venezuela front as Trump is ramping up his war against the country and says that he can do whatever he wants without Congressional approval because he’s Trump and they’re not. Also, not so good that INS and Homeland Security have been buying lots and lots of military grade arms, far more than what they should need for their function, assuming that their purpose doesn’t include invading US cities and intimidating voters.  Somewhat good news that as a result of the Mayor of San Francisco Daniel Lurie enlisting help from some of Trump’s tech buddies, the occupation of San Francisco by INS and Homeland Security has been put on the back burner….for now.   Lastly, the newly approved Pentagon Press Corps which no longer includes anyone from mainstream media now includes right wing outlets such as The Gateway Pundit, Human Events; LindellTV, and an arm of Turning Point USA.  What could go wrong with The Pillow Guy providing all Pentagon updates?    

  

The People's House No More🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯 💣

Wrecking Ball 💣:  In 1979, Trump acquired and then knocked down NYC’s old Bonwit Teller building, replacing it with his eponymous faux gold gilded Trump Tower monstrosity. Before destroying the building, he promised to preserve and donate its Art Deco Friezes to the Metropolitan Museum.  He didn’t, instead he pulverized them so no one should be surprised about what is happening to the White House.  This week after promising that the structure of the White House would remain intact during the construction of his new MAGA sized ballroom, he destroyed the entire East Wing without seeking the approval of the National Park Service NPS, the National Capital Planning Commission NCPC, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and the Commission of Fine Arts, the entities that are supposed to approve major White House renovations.  He’s already taken a wrecking ball to government and demolished the Rose Garden, so why shouldn’t the dear leader be allowed to do the same to the People’s House? In theory, the $250 million ballroom project is being funded by a combination of corporate donors and contributions from Trump however it’s fair to assume that those corporate donations come with strings attached and that Trump’s promised contribution will disappear kind of like those Bonwit Tellers friezes.  Then again, maybe Trump plans to redirect the $230 million that he is now demanding that the Treasury pay him as compensation for the costs he incurred defending himself from the various investigations into his criminal activities, those things that he’s gotten away with doing because he’s King and maybe even president for life, the latter because what’s the point of building a bigly ballroom if you aren’t going to be around to use it?  The government officials who will be tasked with signing off on that mega sized “reimbursement” are mostly the same people who served as his defense lawyers for those cases, something that would be a bigly conflict of interest for anyone else but he’s king so the concept of a conflict of interest is moot. To summarize the week, the government is still closed, lots of people have been furloughed or fired, health care premiums are skyrocketing, food costs are doing the same, there are few if any new jobs, Argentina, the country that US farmer have lost their soybean market to, is getting somewhere between $20 and $40 billion, an Appeals Court is okay with Trump sending the National Guard into Portland, and the White House has been partially demolished to build what will probably be called the Big Beautiful  Trump ballroom. One more thing, because sending Argentina billions of dollars isn’t enough, Trump is pushing for the importation of more Argentine beef, something about lowering the cost of hamburgers while sticking it to US ranchers and anyway, who doesn’t want a little hoof and mouth disease with their Big Mac? Certainly, MAHA RFK of the brainworm wouldn’t mind.  Apparently, he’s about to release new dietary guidelines which will encourage the consumption of foods like butter, cheese, and red meat because now saturated fats are good for us. 

Peeps:  Last night the White House officially pulled the nomination of Paul Ingrassia, who Trump had tapped to lead the Office of the Special Counsel, a job that he was woefully unqualified for but then again protecting whistleblowers and enforcing the Hatch Act aren’t Trump priorities.  Ingrassia’s confirmation process which was supposed to take place over the summer had already been stalled once but hit a wall after Politico published his text chat with some Republican buddies.  In the chat, he said that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell” and bragged about having a “Nazi streak.” the Nazi part of the chat not all that surprising given that he’s been known to hang with Nazi aficionados including Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi who dined at Mar a Lago with Kanye West, another one who is all in on Nazis. In another chat, Ingrassia used an Italian slur for Black people to say that there should be no “mxxlignon” holidays---from Kwanzaa to MLK Jr day to Black history month to Juneteenth,” adding: “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”  A few Republican Senators, including John Thune, Rick Scott, James Lankford, and Ron Johnson publicly said that voting for his confirmation wouldn’t be a good thing, surprising because they generally rubberstamp everything Trump wants and even before the “chat” release Ingrassia’s hateful positions were well known.  Politico is on a tear with it’s chat reveals, they’re the ones who published the Young Republican chats that caused an uproar and a bunch of resignations last week.  It’s not just Republicans getting caught up in chat hell, Maine’s Oyster farmer/Democratic Senate wannabee Graham Platner is getting slammed for old Reddit posts where he called himself a "communist," said all police are "bastards," and suggesting rural White Americans "actually are" racist and stupid. He also advocated for armed political action and downplayed sexual assault in the military. None of that is of concern to Vermont’s Bernie Sanders who still supports him and probably likes the Communist part, but if it’s bad for Republicans to 💩 post, it should be bad for Democrats.  It’s not just Platner, Virginia’s Democratic Attorney General Candidate Jay Jones is also in trouble due to some three-year old texts in which he suggested that Republican Todd Gilbert, then Virginia’s House speaker, get “two bullets to the head.” Another text from Jones discussed violence against Gilbert’s children. Jones has expressed regret, but what was he thinking?  In more current news, Christopher Moynihan, one of the January 6^th insurrectionists that Trump pardoned, has been arrested for threatening to kill Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. When asked whether pardoning Moynihan had been a good idea, Speaker Johnson who generally answers questions with some variation of “that’s news to me” quickly pivoted to his current favorite, that it’s only Democrats who are violent, citing once again all those anti-American grannies who demonstrated over the weekend.  Sadly, Jone’s posts certainly don’t help. 

Fog:  Trump’s trip to Budapest to meet with on again, off again BFF Vlad is now off, or off for now.  It turns out that Vlad isn’t all that interested in pursuing peace, he’s sticking to his position that Ukraine needs to surrender all of the Donbas and maybe even more.  Veep Vance is in Israel,  at least he was yesterday.  He reported that the ceasefire is going better than expected whatever that means.  Hamas has returned two more bodies of murdered Israeli hostages, bringing the total returned to fifteen with thirteen remaining.  Having kicked out most of the press, Secretary of War and Beer Hegseth is now limiting what anyone at the Pentagon can say to anyone.  Also, would it surprise anyone who has seen the clips of the rather chunky INS guys threatening and sometimes beating up brown people, that more than 33% of those applying to work for Kristi Noem’s brown shirts have failed to pass the fitness test that Hegseth is all in on.  

 

Resistance Grannies 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯💩🚫👑

No Kings 🚫👑: Seven million of us participated in No Kings marches on Saturday, up from the five million who participated in this summer’s march.  Much to the disappointment of the dear leader and his MAGA echo chamber the marches were not violent and were not populated by anti-American antifa radicals but instead included lots of peaceful people (and dogs) distressed, frustrated and even apoplectic about the way Trump and his co-presidents, Vought and Miller, are trampling rights, defunding health care, mistreating migrants, targeting adversaries, and ignoring the Constitution.  As evidence of the lack of violence, a number of police departments, including the NYPD posted thank you notes to the participants on social media after the events.  Unable to cite any violence, a number of right-wing pundits instead characterized the participants as a bunch of “resistance grandmothers,” wrong because the marchers crossed all age and ethnic lines and anyway, “grandmas” are high propensity voters who matter bigly.  Trump responded to the rallies by posted an AI generated video of a crowned version of himself flying in a fighter jet and dumping what the NY Times sane washed as brown liquid but what the rest of us would more accurately call shxt 💩.  Trump’s post was weirdly tone deaf, disrespectful, and deplorable; it would have disqualified any Democratic politician for life but that we’ve grown sadly used to him doing 💩 like that. Remember those halcyon days when Fox skewered President Obama for, OMG, wearing a tan suit. Trump’s post was also a self-own given all those assertions by people in the know that he routinely wear’s stinky extra-large adult diapers.  While Trump was dissing the demonstrators,  VP Vance was off in California overseeing a “celebration” of the 250^th anniversary of the Marine Corps.  That “celebration,” intended as a show of force warning to dissenters,  involved a live-fire demonstration of artillery shells shot off over California’s Interstate 5, the main north-south artery between Los Angeles and San Diego.  Vance and his handlers disregarded California Governor Gavin Newsom’s prescient concern that shooting live artillery in such a populous area would put motorists at risk.  The Vance contingent called Newsom’s wise decision to close down the highway overreach. Well, who but everyone with half a brain would have guessed that Newsom was right.  Certainly not Vance, whose protective California Highway Patrol was showered with shrapnel when one of the artillery shells exploded prematurely. Score one for karma. In other news, the government is still closed but that’s not a problem for Trump who flew off to Mar a Lago over the weekend because golf is more important than meeting with Congressional leadership. And because things aren’t screwed up enough the Secret Service found what they are calling a “suspicious hunting stand” near a part of Palm Beach International Airport frequented by the peripatetic Trump. Oy.

Fog:  It turns out that the Israel-Hamas ceasefire isn’t or at least wasn’t this weekend when Hamas attacked some Israeli soldiers and Israel responded by shooting a few missiles.  Death and injuries followed.  So far twelve of the twenty-eight promised bodies of murdered Israeli hostages have been return to Israel. Hamas keeps claiming that they either can’t unearth some bodies and/or don’t know where all of the bodies are, some of which could be true but then again, they’ve said that from the start and have managed to turn over twelve not including the one that was misidentified. A team possibly including highway shooter Vance is off to work on phase two of the ceasefire, what could go wrong?  Having achieved “peace” in the Middle East, Trump has turned his sights to Ukraine and Russia.  After months of making nice, or pretending to make nice, to Ukraine’s Zelenskyy he’s now shifted gears to reupping his bromance with on again off again BFF Putin. Last week Trump put the kibosh on approving the delivery of the Tomahawk missiles that Zelensky needs and thought he was about to get, instead opting to lecture him on how he needs to play nice with Putin, and by nice think give up land, lots of it.  We probably will never know what Putin said to Trump on the call they had last week but whatever it was it worked out well for Putin, not so much for Zelenskyy.  Trump, who ran on putting an end to all wars, is now ramping a few up closer to home, not just with Venezuela but also with Colombia, the country he confuses with Columbia University.  The US has spent boatloads of money helping Colombia fight its drug cartels, but despite Trump’s claims that he’s all in on the war against drugs, he’s now mad at Colombia, cut all aid and imposed tariffs because its leader Gustavo Petro called him out for his extra judicial killing of a few of its fisherman, or as Trump prefers to call them, drug traffickers.

More 💩: Trump commuted the seven-year sentence of George of many names Santos on Friday. You may remember Santos, he was the Long Island Congressman/fabulist who lied about his ethnicity, education, and athletic prowess.  However, none of that was why he was in jail.  He’d been convicted of various charges related to defrauding campaign donors and misusing campaign funds.  One of his victims was Republican Representative Max Miller of Ohio who together with his mother had been defrauded out of $30,000 by Santos.  Trump whose Homeland Security Czar was filmed by the FBI accepting a $50,000 cash bribe in a Cava bag doesn’t care about that kind of thing, especially when the criminal is one of his fans or rounding up migrants.  However, he does hate it when DOJ prosecutors stand up for the law so over the weekend it was reported that Lindsey Halligan, his Virginia plant, fired Elizabeth Yusi, the top criminal prosecutor for the Norfolk, Virginia office, and her deputy Kristin Bird, the latest firings in one of the most important federal prosecutorial offices in the country that oversees sensitive national security and terrorism cases. They were fired for resisting the bringing of charges against NY AG Letitia James.  In other legal news, the White House has hired Kurt Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer who worked on the effort to overturn the 2020 election to investigate the 2000 election and voting-related issues because Trump is still relitigating the election he LOST, at our expense of course.           

 

 

No More Kings 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

Shutdown:  The government has now been shutdown for seventeen days.  By comparison, the last shutdown, which was also the longest, took place during Trump One; it lasted thirty-five days.  Extension of the Obamacare subsidies continues to be the issue blocking the passage of a funding resolution although Democrats are also seeking a guarantee that any funding resolution includes a commitment from the administration to adhere to Congressional funding decisions.  That’s not a surprise given that Trump and OMB Director Russel Vought, who together with Stephen Goebbels Miller, is serving as co-president, keep cutting and eliminating Congressionally mandated programs. Punchbowl News reports that Republican leadership has hardened its position and is signaling that it has no intention of caving on the subsidy issue, but that may just be a negotiating tactic because skyrocketing insurance premiums are a voter turnoff.  Then again, Republicans appear to believe that extreme gerrymandering will keep the House in their hands so they may not care about voter dissatisfaction with their policies. Republicans are also likely to receive a leg up from their friends on the Supreme Court which is expected to demolish what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.  Who’s to say that gerrymandering and SCOTUS won’t provide the knockout punch Republicans need to retain control of the House allowing Trump surrogate Mike Johnson to retain his Speakership, or what is really Trump’s speakership?  By the way, Congresswoman-elect Grijalva still hasn’t been sworn in and still doesn’t have an official email or computer though she now has a bare office.  Seating her won’t tip the current balance of the House so it’s fair to assume that she’s being left in the lurch to keep her signature off the Epstein file discharge petition which again raises the question: what is in those files that has Trump so rattled. 

Don’t Cry for Argentina: Though extending health care benefits and keeping education programs for the disabled alive is a step too far, apparently giving Argentina $40 billion to bolster their currency and economy is okay even though that money probably won’t solve Argentina’s problems because having defaulted on its debt nine times there’s little reason to believe that they won’t again. The Argentina bailout is not sitting well with America’s farmers who as a result of Trump’s onerous tariffs have lost the Chinese market for soybeans to Argentina.  Trump continues to say that he’ll make it up to them with subsidies and he might, but maybe just removing the tariffs would work, or work a little because some of those soybean markets will take a while to recapture. Those soybean farmers in Iowa voted for Trump, but New Jersey and New York did not which explains why the retribution man is now threatening to permanently cancel all federal funding for the Gateway Tunnel project that connects the two states.  Beyond being stupid, vindictive, and shortsighted, trashing the project would put a lot of construction workers, the majority of whom probably voted for Trump, out of work, but Trump did promise that his policies could cause “short term” pain, he just didn’t say that by short term he meant decades.  At least for now the tunnel construction remains ongoing, but at some point, the loss of federal money will have a dire impact on the project’s viability. Viability is also becoming an increasing problem for those on the “drug running” boats that Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth keeps obliterating.  No one knows for sure if the ships are really full of drugs. Normal procedure would involve the Coast Guard shooting out their engines and boarding them to be sure and even then, extra-judicial murders would not be involved but then again these are not normal times and apparently Trump and Hegseth don’t think Hispanic lives matter.  That appears to be the concern of Admiral Alvin Holsey who was serving as the US Military’s Southern Command.  He stepped down yesterday, and though he hasn’t issued a statement, word is that he stepped down due to his concerns about those attacks.  Concern about the Trump administration’s targeting of Hispanics is also a problem for a number of district judges, which is why a few of them keep putting the administration’s National Guard takeovers of Democratically controlled cities on hold.  It doesn’t help the government’s credibility that Homeland Security has been trying to pass off videos of violent events in states like Florida, North Carolina, Nebraska, and Texas as proof that Chicago is a war zone.  As to war zones, the Republican talking point is that most, if not all of the millions of people expected to participate in tomorrow’s No Kings Rallies will be marauding members of antifa and the like. Keeping with that theme Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who wouldn’t know the truth if it smacked her in the face insists that the Democrats “main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Remember when Hillary Clinton was pilloried by the right for suggesting that some of Trump’s followers were deplorable, apparently that was very bad but Karoline saying worse is copacetic.  

More 💩:  War/Beer Pete has achieved his objective.  Just about everyone with any journalistic integrity regardless of their media company’s bias has turned in their press credentials rather than sign on to his free press squelching, highly abnormal and inappropriate pledge that would have penalized them for engaging in routine newsgathering activities like asking a source for information. The news will still get reported but it will be harder to obtain. It’s fair to assume that the leaks coming out of the Pentagon will be epic.  On the retribution front, yesterday former National Security advisor John Bolton was indicted for possessing and sharing secret and top-secret documents. Unlike the James Comey and Tish James indictments, the Bolton indictment has some meat on it. It was signed on to by some real prosecutors, not just Trump’s stooge Lindsey Halligan whose appointment Comey is challenging. That said, it’s obvious that Bolton who like Comey probably wouldn’t win a lot of popularity contests, was targeted because he’s written a book about Trump’s failings and is a vocal and persistent Trump critic. Worth noting that the Biden administration dropped the investigation into Bolton that was initiated during Trump One.  Ironically, the crimes that Bolton is alleged to have committed are similar to those that Trump “allegedly” committed when he took super-secret documents to Mar a Lago. As to Halligan, if Comey’s lawyers are successful with their challenge, the charges against him will disappear because the statue of limitations for his so-called crimes has expired.  In other DOJ news, a few more career prosecutors including the respected US Attorney Todd Gilbert have left for refusing to participate in an inquiry into the legitimacy of the Russia investigation because like eliminating most references to slavery from the Smithsonian, Trump wants to erase that investigation from the records, or at the very least delegitimize it.  Lastly, though Trump and Vought have been using the shutdown to fire people willy nilly, the courts, or at least the lower courts have put the kibosh on that, at least for now.  

Fog:  Ukraine’s Zelenskyy is meeting with Trump at the White House today. He’s seeking Tomahawk missiles.  It appeared that Trump was leaning towards providing them but that was before he had what he characterized as a “lengthy and productive” conversation with his on-again BFF Putin.  Now Trump plans to meet with Vlad in Budapest. The Tomahawks could be off the table, maybe.  Israel has received two more hostage bodies raising the total returned to nine and is holding up some aid to pressure Hamas to meet its obligation to return the remaining nineteen.    

Stay safe and march!    

 

 
Telegramming Hate 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

Back to Abnormal:  Trump’s back from his overseas junket.  The government remains shut. Speaker Mike Johnson called the Obamacare health insurance subsidies out as “boondoggles” while saying that he has no strategy for moving forward, not much of a surprise because he doesn’t strategize, he just takes orders from the White House.  Florida Representative Byron Donalds whose run for Governor Trump has endorsed does have a strategy, saying the quiet part out loud he called for the repeal and replacement of Obamacare.  Of course there is no replacement plan, but that’s the whole point, whether said out loud or hidden behind accusations of fraud and boondoggle the position of a lot of Republican legislators is that health care isn’t a right, just a privilege for those who can afford to buy a private plan or who are lucky enough to work for a company that provides one. Democrats are sticking to their guns, metaphorically not the AK 47s that Republicans love so much, they’re holding out for the subsidies to be reinstated.  Their hope, which polling indicates is more popular with voters, is that warts and all, most people want health insurance and those enrolled in Obamacare have grown to rely on it and expect it to remain affordable and available.  Trump’s response to the shutdown stalemate is to up the pain on Democratic states and cities, disproportionately cutting the funding to their projects, while also cutting education and health care services and research and no one should be surprised about that because he never said that he would be the president for all the people just the ones who adhere to his MAGA vision, praise him to the hilt, and send money his way.  Also, his OMB guy Russell Vought has long advocated for the radical shrinking of government.  How ironic that this week’s Alaska floods occurred in an area of the red state that recently lost a $20 million flood protection grant as a result of a cut made by EPA’s Lee Zeldin. Alaska may be controlled by Republicans but when budgets get cut eventually even red states are collateral damage.

Telegramming Hate:  Who is surprised to hear that a group of Young Republicans Leaders from Kansas, New York, Arizona, and Vermont including the General Counsel of their New York branch, engaged in a month’s long Telegram chat where they joked about gas chambers, rape, and slavery.  They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.  They expressed admiration for Hitler while dissing Jews.  Politico published sections of the 28,000 chats yesterday,  When asked about the Politico article, Veep Vance called it a big nothing,  just college frat talk, bad enough but these weren’t frat guys and some of the participants were in their 40s. The Republican party in Kansas has shutdown, or maybe just shutdown for now, their branch of the Young Republican Leadership group and NY Representative Elise Stefanik who is gearing up a run for Governor and who like a few other prominent NY Republicans is now trying to wipe all those pictures of her with the NY offenders from her social media condemned the chat mostly because endorsing Hitler doesn’t play well with the moderate voters they’ll need come election time. Yesterday a number of individuals who had the nerve to call Charlie Kirk’s opinions ugly and racist had their visas cancelled because calling out Kirk, who Trump gave a posthumous Presidential Medal of Honor to yesterday, is bad but Republicans celebrating Hitler and gas chambers isn’t, or at least isn’t, to Veep Vance.  Nothing yet from the dear leader who, like Stefanik, only finds anti-Semitism a problem when it takes place at the “liberal” colleges he abhors and wants to defund.

Peeps and Politics:  Janet Mills the popular term limited Maine Governor is running for the Senate.  She’s a “get” for Schumer but before she takes on Republican Susan Collins, she’ll first have to beat some Democratic contenders including the Bernie Sanders endorsed oyster farmer/veteran Graham Platner. The Cook Political Report has moved Maine to toss up but that assumption is based on Mills being the candidate because at least in their view Platner, while cool, isn’t likely to beat Collins. In other news, a Florida Judge has imposed a restraining order against Republican Representative Cory Mills, no relation to Janet, something about the very married Cory threatening one of his girlfriends.  In a normal world that would get him sanctioned, possibly even kicked out of the House but as evidenced by Speaker Johnson’s continuing refusal to swear in Arizona Democrat Grijalva these are far from normal times. Also, not so normal Secretary of War and Beer, Pete Hegseth is trying to clamp down on what the press can and cannot do while reporting on the Pentagon.  So far only OAN has signed on, no one else.  Not even his former employer Fox or Newsmax.  Also, a number of airports are refusing to broadcast Kristi Noem’s message, the one where she blames Democrats for the government shutdown.  In MAGA land politicizing the government and violating the Hatch Act only matters when Democrats do it, not so much when Republicans do. And add North Carolina to the list of Republican controlled states trying to gerrymander in more Republic House seats.       

Fog:  The twenty live hostages are home, but Hamas is having a hard time delivering the bodies of the 28 slain hostages.  As of last night, they’ve returned seven (eight less one that was “mistakenly” provided). The Jewish religion places a high value on and calls for bodies to be buried before shiva can begin.  Though it’s possible, even likely, that some will never be found and others will take months to locate, Israel believes that Hamas isn’t trying hard enough to keep up their end of the ceasefire deal which requires a more concerted effort and in response has held up some aid deliveries.  Hamas has also publicly executed and engaged in clashes with rival armed groups in an effort to reestablish control.  On his flight back to the US, Trump said that was okay because those other guys were “very bad gang members” so it didn’t bother him, but really, he was just blathering, maybe conflating them with Tren de Aragua. Yesterday he backtracked threatening a violent response if Hamas doesn’t totally give up its arm so basically, he’s doing a TACO dance, one with deadly consequences. It’s terrific that the twenty hostages are home, and kudos to Trump and everyone who made that happen, but peace remains elusive.  For his part Trump appears to have shifted his sights to Ukraine, Zelensky is due to meet with him in the Oval Office on Friday. That’s good but it’s fair to say that he’s also trying to divert attention from problems at home, China playing hardball, and the ever problematic Epstein files.

One more thing, has anyone gotten a check from George Soros.  Just wondering because the Trump crowd says that he’s paying people to attend Saturday’s No More Kings marches 😊.

 

 

Split Screens ✡️🎉🙌 🎗️

Home בבית!   They’re home!  Very early this morning Hamas released the remaining live Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023. The hostages were released in two groups, first seven, then the remaining thirteen. Some, although not all, of the bodies of the Israelis who did not survive are to be released shortly.  In exchange Israel will be releasing 1700 Palestinian prisoners, including more than 200 who are currently serving long sentences for having committed heinous terrorist attacks, a particularly difficult and controversial move for Israel given that the now deceased former head of Hamas Yahya Sinwar who was the architect of the October 7 massacre had been among the more than 1000 Palestinians prisoners released in 2011 in exchange for Gilad Shavit, an Israeli soldier who had been held by Hamas for five years.  As the second group of hostages were being prepared for release, Trump arrived in Israel to take a victory lap and to lament the Nobel committee’s failure to award him their peace prize. He declared that “war is over, this is a new beginning” and as much as it would be nice to think that he’s right, the Middle East has a habit of disappointing.  After a short stop where he is being warmly embraced, both out of gratitude that the hostages have been freed and because Israelis, especially Bibi, know that the secret to keeping Trump happy and on your side is to lavish praise and tell him he’s the greatest ever, he will be departing to attend a Gaza “peace” summit in Sharm el-Sheikh hosted by Egypt’s Al-Sisi.  A who’s who of European and Middle Eastern leaders including the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas and Qatar’s Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani will be in attendance but no one from Hamas, Israel or Iran has been invited, curious because Israel still controls a large portion of Gaza and Hamas, machine guns and probably missiles too, controls much of the rest. On Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that Qatar, the country that continues to host Hamas leadership and who funded Hamas’ terror apparatus including its tunnels and projectiles, would be building an air force base in Idaho because who doesn’t invite a terrorist abettor to build an air force base on one’s home turf?  After getting lots of pushback from politicians across the ideological spectrum, Hegseth walked back that statement saying he misspoke, they wouldn’t be building their own base but would get expanded training at one of our existing bases. Gifting a gold plane to Trump, slow walking the shutting down of the terrorists you funded while continuing to host their leadership, and then “brokering” peace appears to have been a brilliant strategy on the part of the Qatari’s Emir who has now solidified his position as one of Trump’s BFFs.  It’s too early to say that the Emir has supplanted Putin because despite Trump’s occasional dissing of Vlad, Melania has a special relationship with him.  She revealed that she’s been privately chatting away with him and has used her influence to reunite eight Ukrainian children with their families.  That’s nice, but what about the other 19,000+ that Putin forcibly tore away from their families and deported to Russia?

 

The Homefront:  While Trump is playing world diplomat, things continue to deteriorate at home. The #TrumpShutdown continues. INS raids keep getting uglier. Epstein is still lurking. Despite Veep Vance’s efforts to shrug it off, the Tom Homan $50K bribe really happened and the stock market tanked on Friday in response to Trump’s announcement that he would be levying 100% tariffs on China.  That tariff hike threat is his way of trying to get China to stop playing hardball which Xi is doing by depriving us of the things we need, including those coveted rare earth minerals.  Unfortunately, China’s Xi has a lot of staying power and doesn’t appear willing to cave to Trump’s bully tactics, a problem particularly for manufacturers and our farmers who’ve seen the market for the soybeans they previously sold to China disappear.  The farmers, like Argentina, will probably be bailed out by Trump but the rest of us not so much so don’t expect grocery prices to go down but do expect jobs to keep on disappearing with virtually no new hiring taking place all while inflation continues to rear its ugly head. As to those jobs, after getting both a COVID (!) shot and a flu shot during his second “routine annual” check-up Trump fired large swaths of the CDC, including the people responsible for keeping Ebola off our shores, responding to all those measles cases that are still springing up around the country, the entire Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, because if you don’t report disease maybe it’s not happening?  The good news is that someone, somewhere realized that they’d goofed by firing some of those people and lots, though not all of them, were rehired.  The bad news is that it increasingly looks like the government is being run by a bunch of headless, vindictive chickens.  And in case you are wondering, Trump who has swollen cankles and a permanently bruised hand has the heart of someone 14 years younger, or at least that’s what the White House physician wants us to believe.  Even Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor turned Congressman knows that’s a crock.  He spilled the beans by saying what we all suspected: that Trump’s visit was to monitor his chronic venous insufficiency.  As to those vaccines, has anyone checked to see if RFK is still standing, he and the anti-vax squad must be furious.  Unfortunately, it’s not just the CDC people who’ve been laid off, notices have been sent to 4000 government employees.  It’s not clear that those notices are kosher, but who are we kidding, does Trump or Russel Vought really care.  By the way, in case anyone’s counting, former National Security Advisor John Bolton is likely to be indicted soon, another one that Trump wants jailed or at the very least tortured.  Don’t be surprised if Former FBI Director Chris Wray is next.  Over the weekend, before departing for the Middle East, Trump went on a Truth Social rant, post screeching: “THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM – DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT.”  Worth noting, Biden was not president on January 6, 2021, Trump was.  Unfortunately, for Wray, he was the FBI Director and though he didn’t place 274 FBI plants into the January 6 horde, someone needs to be the scapegoat. Wray better watch out; he could also be one of those on mega rich guy Peter Thiel’s antichrist possibility list.  I am not sure what an antichrist is, but Thiel’s been out on a speaking tour saying that if we don’t keep moving towards autocracy we’re at risk of being taking over by an antichrist and since he’s the billionaire who brought us Veep Vance, we should listen to him.  La di dah.    

 

 
And the Prize Goes to Maria Corina Machado 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯 🎉🙌 🎗️

Retribution:  Early yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s September 21 Truth Social post, the one where he demanded the immediate indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, NY Attorney General Letitia James, and California Senator Adam Schiff, was meant to be a private direct message to Attorney General Bondi and would have been had he not hit the wrong button.  Yesterday, Comey who was indicted on September 25, for the Trumped up charges of lying and obstruction after Trump’s insurance lawyer/stooge Lindsey Galligan managed to get a grand jury to indict him, despite the conclusion of several career prosecutors that there was no credible evidence that he’d committed any crimes, was arraigned with the assistance of two junior attorneys from North Carolina, who were drafted after Halligan failed to get anyone from her Virginia office to accompany her to court. The Comey case may never make it to trial because Comey’s lawyers intend to cite Trump’s errant thumbs social media post as evidence of vindictive prosecution.  They also plan to challenge the legality of Halligan’s appointment. Late yesterday, Trump’s second Truth Social target Letitia James was indicted, again by Halligan over the objections of career prosecutors.  James’ alleged crime: violating the terms of a mortgage on her second home by failing to disclose that she might rent it out, something that probably has countless Airbnb landlords a wee bit concerned. To state the obvious, James’ so-called mortgage infraction wasn’t the issue, she was indicted for prosecuting Trump. It’s not clear if or when Adam Schiff will be indicted for his so-called mortgage infraction, but he has started raising money to cover his legal costs because while it’s unlikely that he, Comey, or James will be found guilty, good defense lawyers don’t come cheap and none of the three have Trump’s financial resources which is one of the points of this vengeful exercise. Trump won’t stop with Comey, James, and Schiff.  He’s got three more years; there will be many more targets. This sucks for them and for us.

Still Closed:  The House is still not in session. Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva still hasn’t been sworn in and, with the government closed, efforts to pay members of the military during the closure are going nowhere because Speaker Johnson knows that as soon as the House is reopened, he’ll have to swear in Grijalva who will immediately provide the 218^th signature on the Epstein files discharge petition.  To be clear, he could swear in Grijalva right now, there’s plenty of precedent for swearing in new members when the House isn’t in session, but Johnson, another Trump stooge, is using the closure as an excuse to delay her swearing in because he’s afraid that Trump will have him defenestrated if or, hopefully, when the Epstein files are released, just another reason to assume that something really gross and implicating is in those files. Trump keeps trying to send some of those soldiers who aren’t being paid to roam the street of Democratically controlled cities but keeps facing impediments in the form of federal district court judges who, looking out their windows, aren’t seeing the violent hellscapes that he and his complicit lawyers keep insisting justify the deployment of the troops.  Yesterday, Illinois Judge April Perry issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Texas National Guard, including the troops who’ve already arrived in Chicago, from deploying.  The DOJ is already appealing an earlier order preventing the deployment of troops in Portland, Judge Perry said that she anticipates that her order will be appealed as well. How is it that we have no money for health care but plenty of money for domestic troop deployments? 

Viral Musings:  Yesterday during one of Trump’s more bizarro Cabinet meetings, RFK Jr whose brain worm appears to have devoured the part of his brain that appreciates satire, cited a Tik Tok post of a pregnant woman chugging “lethal” Tylenol as evidence that liberals are so infected with Trump derangement syndrome that they’ll intentionally “infect” their children with autism rather than take Dr. Trump’s medical advice.  He then claimed that early circumcision was another cause of autism, something to do with babies being administered Tylenol during their brises and khitans.  That’s quite a shock to the parents whose daughters are on the spectrum. Naturally, Trump chimed in saying that he concurs because he’s been studying this link for years. For the record, autism rates aren’t higher among Jews and Muslims, two groups where circumcision is nearly universal, nor is it lower in countries, like Japan and Sweden, where circumcision rates are 10% or less.  In fact, Japan and Sweden have the third and fourth highest autism levels, probably not because they don’t circumcise but because they screen more but that’s a whole other discussion that exceeds RFK and Trump’s level of comprehension.  Shifting to COVID jabs, another one of those things that RFK disdains, the CDC and its independent vaccine advisory panel, the one that RFK has stacked with his cronies, have “quietly opened the door” to wider access to COVID vaccines during pregnancy, perhaps because evidence indicates that making sure moms-to-be are protected is the best way to make sure that their newborns are too.  In other health news, six former surgeons general who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, including Jerome Adams from Trump 1.0, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where they warned that RFK is "endangering the health of the nation." They’re right.

Fog 🎗️ 🎗️ 🎗️:  The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this morning to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.  Machado who lives in hiding won the prize FOR FIGHTING DICTATORSHIP in her country.  We’ll probably hear more about that from wannabe dictator Trump this morning, assuming he’s not covered in ketchup.  There’s always next year, especially if the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel leads to something more permanent.  While the Times of Israel gave Trump and his negotiating team lots of credit for brokering the deal, on yesterday’s podcast they credited Turkey’s Prime Minster Erdogan, given Turkey’s membership in NATO and his “good” relationship with Hamas, for getting the deal over the final hump. Also, while it seemed rather risky and extreme at the time, Israel’s Qatar incursion probably went far to convincing Qatar’s leadership that it was time for them to do what they should have done from the start, as in push Hamas to cooperate rather than fund terror tunnels and missiles.   

If all goes according to plan, Israel will be welcoming Matan Angrest, Gali Berman, Ziv Berman, Elkana Bohbot, Rom Braslavski Nimrod Cohen, Ariel Cunio, David Cunio, Evyatar David, Guy Gilboa-Dalal, Maxim Harkin, Eitan Horn, Segev Kalfon, Bar Kuperstein, Omri Miran, Eitan Mor, Yosef Haim Ohana, Alon Ohel, Avinatan Or, and Matan Zangauker home sometime early next week.

  

 

Stoking Fear 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

STFU:  The government is still closed. Effects of the shutdown are becoming apparent as notices regarding next year’s health care premium bills have begun appearing in mailboxes and overtaxed, unpaid flight controllers have started calling in sick resulting in flight delays and sporadic airport shutdowns throughout the country.  Trump’s response is his usual song and dance of lies, threats, and blame shifting because everything is the fault of those radical Democrats, particularly Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. To build up pressure against those two radicals and their nefarious caucus, he’s threatening to fire government workers and to withhold the backpay that is typically paid when shutdowns end.  It’s unlikely that either threat is legal, ironically Trump signed a law requiring that backpay be paid during his first administration, but legality doesn’t appear to be an impediment to Trump or to OMB’s Russell Vought, whose office has circulated a memo justifying the elimination of backpay, a plan that’s caught both Speaker Johnson and Senate leader Thune off guard with both stammering that, of course, workers will get their backpay. And by the way, Johnson who is still refusing to swear-in Democratic Congresswoman in waiting Adelita Grijalva because he fears triggering the discharge petition that will force the release of the Epstein files, doesn’t know who Bad Bunny is but thinks it’s a bad idea for him to headline the Super Bowl show. 😊  As to health care, the issue that Democrats are hanging their hat on because it is a real issue, Trump claimed that he was negotiating with Schumer and Jeffries but then after they denied that he’d was, he backtracked, a problem for MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene whose bigly upset that her adult children, and her constituents but mostly her children, have received notices informing them that their health care premiums will double as a result of the expiration of the Affordable Care Act subsidies. Greene is now lashing out at Republican party leadership saying that no one warned her that premiums would skyrocket as a result of the big ugly bill that she voted for.  She’s now calling for the subsidies to be reinstated.  The Republican position as articulated by Thune is that he’s open to discussing a healthcare “solution,” but that Democrats have to first provide enough votes to pass the continuing funding resolution. At least so far, that’s not happening, and it shouldn’t because even if Thune genuinely means that, and he probably doesn’t, Trump who keeps on defunding Congressionally mandated programs, can’t be trusted.  Even Maine Independent Angus King, who usually votes with the Democrats but who voted for the continuing resolution has his doubts about Thune’s credibility.  He’s now threatening to flip his vote.

Civil War? The shutdown is a problem, but it pales in comparison to Trump’s military build-up in Democratically run cities, those places he’s taken to calling warzones. His efforts to send troops into Portland were put on hold after one of his appointees, Oregon federal district court judge Karin Immergut, issued a temporary restraining order preventing their deployment but after another district court judge, Illinois’ April Perry, opted to schedule a hearing for Thursday morning rather than issue a similar restraining order against Texas National Guard troops being sent to Chicago, they started arriving last night.  Again, troops from a southern Republican run state are in the process of marching into a northern Democratically run one over the objections of that state’s Governor Jay Pritzker.  To make matters worse, Trump insists that if judges continue to block his plans, he’ll invoke the Insurrection Act.  There is no insurrection, the cities while not crime free, are not war zones overrun by “illegal aliens,” in fact while Trump was railing against Portland, runners there completed a full 26.2-mile marathon.  As Pritzker put it, Trump and his goons are all in on stoking fear with the intent of instigating violence to “justify” a military response.  He’s already told us that Warlord Pete Hegseth’s troops should consider US cities as good training grounds.  Trump might not be planning to cancel future elections, but he is trying to make people fearful about turning out to vote.  Why else would his thugs be pointing guns at citizens, threatening to arrest and in some cases physically accosting those brave enough to lawfully capture them on phone cameras.

Bondi Bombs:  The Attorney General isn’t supposed to be the President’s lawyer, she’s supposed to enforce laws and protect the public interest, not her dear leader. While testifying before Congress, the AG is supposed to be respectful and as responsive as possible because Congress’ role is to provide oversight.  However, these are not ordinary times so yesterday AG Pam Bondi was combative, rude, and evasive during her Senate appearance. California’s Adam Schiff aptly summarized her performance as follows: she refused to say whether she’d consulted with career ethics lawyers when approving Trump’s $400 million gifted plane from the Qataris; she refused to discuss her role in having the FBI scour the Epstein files for Trump’s name including any possible pictures of him with scantily dressed minors; she refused to answer questions about Border Czar Tom Homan’s on video acceptance of a $50,000 bribe and whether or not that money, which he still hasn’t denied receiving, was ever returned to the FBI and if it wasn’t whether or not he declared it on his taxes; she refused to answer questions about why former FBI Director Comey was indicted when career prosecutors found insufficient evidence to pursue charges and whether he was charged because Trump’s insisted he be charged something we all know because Trump posted his demand on Truth Social; she refused to answer questions about the legality of engaging in military strikes on boats in the Caribbean; she refused to respond to questions about the firing of career prosecutors who participated in the January 6 investigations while also refusing to say whether she supported a restoration fund for convicted violent insurrectionists; and she refused to say whether immigration officials have to abide by court orders. Those questions were primarily asked by Democratic Senators however, Louisiana Republican John Kennedy, the Rhodes Scholar who frequently plays dumb but isn’t, also threw a few tough ones into the mix. In response to Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s statements on a recent NY Post Pod Force One podcast that his one-time NYC neighbor Jeffrey Epstein was the “greatest blackmailer ever” and a pervert and that anyone who ever spent anytime with him had to know it and probably participated in his crimes, Kennedy asked if the DOJ had any plans to interview Lutnick.  Bondi hemmed and hawed saying that interviewing Lutnick, like finding out whether Homan paid taxes on his ill-gotten $50,000 bribe would be a decision for FBI Director Kash Patel to pursue. Of course, she is Patel’s boss so that buck stops with her, but only when convenient. When it comes to pardons and commutations the buck stops with Trump and it’s fairly obviously he’s going to pardon Epstein’s partner in pedophilia Ghislaine Maxwell because after he was asked about the Supreme Court’s recent announcement that they would not take up Maxwell’s appeal he said he said he’d be “allowed to pardon her if he wanted.”  As to the firing of career prosecutors who don’t follow his commands, another one is probably on the chopping block.  It’s been reported that career federal prosecutor Elizabeth Yost who oversees major criminal cases in the Norfolk office for the eastern district of Virginia plans to tell Lindsey Halligan, the Trump stooge who was hired to indict Comey that she does not believe there is probably cause to file criminal mortgage fraud charges against NY AG Letitia James. It’s highly likely that Yost has started cleaning out her desk. Queue the ketchup bottles.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

No More Tiny Violins 🎻 🎻  🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

STFU: Though it’s hard to tell, the government is in shutdown mode. Trump and his many Republican abettors are blaming the Democrats, asserting that they are responsible because all but three of them including, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, and Maine’s Independent Angus King, have refused to sign on to the continuing funding resolution.  The Republican claim is that Democrats are holding out because the resolution doesn’t fund health care for “illegal aliens.”  That’s a lie. Except for emergency care, undocumented people are barred from having their health care paid for by Medicaid or any other government program.  Democrats are holding out in an attempt to get the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that were put in place under Biden renewed. The three who voted with all the Republicans except for frequent naysayer Rand Paul want the subsidies renewed, but fear that holding out will leave Democrats holding the bag and since Trump has already started defunding important “blue” projects, like the tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York, while still building his mega Maga ballroom that’s a genuine concern.  Democrats would also like to get some or all of the $1 billion that was cut from Medicaid reinstated but that’s less likely to happen at least until the dead bodies start piling up.  The Medicaid cuts included in Trump’s big ugly bill don’t take effect until after the midterms so though they are likely to have a dire effect on hospitals and those cut from the program, many affected voters don’t realize what lies ahead.  However, unlike the Medicaid cuts, the Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of the year. Estimates are that the premiums included in the insurance company annual renewal notices that are due out during the next few weeks will be more than double 2025 levels.  Democrats, not all that skilled at messaging, are hoping that those premium notices will drive their point home.  Republicans are hoping to get the sixty votes they need by getting enough Democratic Senators to fold before the notices go out by promising to take up the subsidy issue at a later date, a variation on Trump’s oft promised rolling “two weeks.” Trump, with the assistance of Project 2025 scribe/OMB Director Russel Vought, whose lifetime goal is to radically shrink government, is using the threat of massive firings as a cudgel to get the requisite number of weak-kneed Democrats on board.  Though not entirely legal, that threat is real because the Supreme Court keeps  “reinterpreting” law to allow Trump to do whatever he wants.  The bottom line is that if Schumer and Jeffries hold firm, this shutdown will go on for weeks until the premium notices go out at which point those Republican and swing voters, who don’t regularly pay attention to the news or who just watch Fox, and the other MAGA media outlets, might notice just how much they are being screwed and beg for help, like the help that Trump is giving to Argentina and those farmers who’ve lost their Chinese soybean market because of his tariffs.      

INS and Outs: Among the reasons that few have noticed the shutdown that so far no one has missed a paycheck and because Trump with the help of cosplay Kristi Noem continues to send INS agents into “war ravaged” cities, and by that think Democratic cities mostly in states with Democratic Governors, many of whom hope to someday be president.  The administration which has been hogtying unclothed children in Chicago is also trying really hard to also send National Guard Troops into those cities, because as both Trump and Secretary of War, Preening, and Stupidity Pete Hegseth keep telling us, those troops need to practice brutality somewhere because if they were less diverse and meaner they would have emerged victorious from Viet Nam and Afghanistan. C’mon, it’s not like history is among heel spur Trump and Hegseth’s strong points.  Over the weekend, noting that she saw no evidence of war or ravage, District Court Judge Karin Immergut issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump from sending Oregon’s National Guard troops into Portland, one of those cities that he insists, based on videos from several years ago, is overrun and controlled by antifa and the like.  Trump who appointed Immergut in 2019, responded to her order by lambasting her and saying that the idiots who advised him to appoint her had failed him miserably because his judges need to do what he says, law be damned. Trump’s Pocket Fascist, Stephen Miller, pretty much called for actions to be taken against uncooperative judges, and it may not be a coincidence that the house of one of those judges, South Carolina’s Diane Goodstein, who ruled against Republican efforts to get hold of voter rolls, was blown up this weekend, though we still don’t know for sure what caused the explosion.  After Immergut’s ruling Trump ordered the California National Guard to go into Portland.  Unimpressed with his “work around” the Judge then barred him from sending any state’s National Guard into Portland, a problem for Trump who’s ever willing MAGA buddy, Texas Governor Abbott volunteered his National Guard instead. Of course, all of Trump’s National Guard problems could be short lived because he’s got friends at SCOTUS, and these days enough of the Justices have shown that they’re willing to throw the law and precedent aside to meet his demands.  That said, at least for now SCOTUS isn’t willing to allow him to fire Lisa Cook, the Black woman at the Federal Reserve Bank who he’s trying to fire for committing mortgage fraud, the “crime” that’s she doesn’t appear to have committed and that’s only a problem for Democrats, like Senator Adam Schiff and NY Attorney General Letitia James, but not for the members of his cabinet who may have actually committed mortgage fraud. Turning back to Kristi Noem, she and her “aide” AKA boyfriend Corey Lewandowski announced plans to flood the Super Bowl with INS agents because the “woke” NFL has selected Puerto Rico born Bad Bunny as its half time entertainment.  They and many in MAGA and on Fox are outraged that Bad Bunny sings in Spanish.  I don’t know about you, but I am going to do what Senor Bunny suggested on SNL, practica mi Espanol and escucha to his music so that I can keep up come February, assuming of course that I can stop listening to Taylor Swift’s newest, and how can you not love the woman who celebrates wood while warning not to send tiny 🎻 🎻 to a knife fight.

Fog:  The hostages may be released soon and that would be an excellent thing.  However, it’s rather disturbing that Trump has promised to protect Qatar from all further “enemy” incursions, giving the country who has hosted Hamas leadership and funded Hamas’ worse actions the Article 5 like protections that he only reluctantly agrees to give our NATO allies.  It looks like that plane, the one that needs around $1 billion in refurbishment to become Air Force One, came with strings after all.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow