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!