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 😊.