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