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.