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.