The People's House No More🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯 💣

Wrecking Ball 💣:  In 1979, Trump acquired and then knocked down NYC’s old Bonwit Teller building, replacing it with his eponymous faux gold gilded Trump Tower monstrosity. Before destroying the building, he promised to preserve and donate its Art Deco Friezes to the Metropolitan Museum.  He didn’t, instead he pulverized them so no one should be surprised about what is happening to the White House.  This week after promising that the structure of the White House would remain intact during the construction of his new MAGA sized ballroom, he destroyed the entire East Wing without seeking the approval of the National Park Service NPS, the National Capital Planning Commission NCPC, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and the Commission of Fine Arts, the entities that are supposed to approve major White House renovations.  He’s already taken a wrecking ball to government and demolished the Rose Garden, so why shouldn’t the dear leader be allowed to do the same to the People’s House? In theory, the $250 million ballroom project is being funded by a combination of corporate donors and contributions from Trump however it’s fair to assume that those corporate donations come with strings attached and that Trump’s promised contribution will disappear kind of like those Bonwit Tellers friezes.  Then again, maybe Trump plans to redirect the $230 million that he is now demanding that the Treasury pay him as compensation for the costs he incurred defending himself from the various investigations into his criminal activities, those things that he’s gotten away with doing because he’s King and maybe even president for life, the latter because what’s the point of building a bigly ballroom if you aren’t going to be around to use it?  The government officials who will be tasked with signing off on that mega sized “reimbursement” are mostly the same people who served as his defense lawyers for those cases, something that would be a bigly conflict of interest for anyone else but he’s king so the concept of a conflict of interest is moot. To summarize the week, the government is still closed, lots of people have been furloughed or fired, health care premiums are skyrocketing, food costs are doing the same, there are few if any new jobs, Argentina, the country that US farmer have lost their soybean market to, is getting somewhere between $20 and $40 billion, an Appeals Court is okay with Trump sending the National Guard into Portland, and the White House has been partially demolished to build what will probably be called the Big Beautiful  Trump ballroom. One more thing, because sending Argentina billions of dollars isn’t enough, Trump is pushing for the importation of more Argentine beef, something about lowering the cost of hamburgers while sticking it to US ranchers and anyway, who doesn’t want a little hoof and mouth disease with their Big Mac? Certainly, MAHA RFK of the brainworm wouldn’t mind.  Apparently, he’s about to release new dietary guidelines which will encourage the consumption of foods like butter, cheese, and red meat because now saturated fats are good for us. 

Peeps:  Last night the White House officially pulled the nomination of Paul Ingrassia, who Trump had tapped to lead the Office of the Special Counsel, a job that he was woefully unqualified for but then again protecting whistleblowers and enforcing the Hatch Act aren’t Trump priorities.  Ingrassia’s confirmation process which was supposed to take place over the summer had already been stalled once but hit a wall after Politico published his text chat with some Republican buddies.  In the chat, he said that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell” and bragged about having a “Nazi streak.” the Nazi part of the chat not all that surprising given that he’s been known to hang with Nazi aficionados including Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi who dined at Mar a Lago with Kanye West, another one who is all in on Nazis. In another chat, Ingrassia used an Italian slur for Black people to say that there should be no “mxxlignon” holidays---from Kwanzaa to MLK Jr day to Black history month to Juneteenth,” adding: “Every single one needs to be eviscerated.”  A few Republican Senators, including John Thune, Rick Scott, James Lankford, and Ron Johnson publicly said that voting for his confirmation wouldn’t be a good thing, surprising because they generally rubberstamp everything Trump wants and even before the “chat” release Ingrassia’s hateful positions were well known.  Politico is on a tear with it’s chat reveals, they’re the ones who published the Young Republican chats that caused an uproar and a bunch of resignations last week.  It’s not just Republicans getting caught up in chat hell, Maine’s Oyster farmer/Democratic Senate wannabee Graham Platner is getting slammed for old Reddit posts where he called himself a "communist," said all police are "bastards," and suggesting rural White Americans "actually are" racist and stupid. He also advocated for armed political action and downplayed sexual assault in the military. None of that is of concern to Vermont’s Bernie Sanders who still supports him and probably likes the Communist part, but if it’s bad for Republicans to 💩 post, it should be bad for Democrats.  It’s not just Platner, Virginia’s Democratic Attorney General Candidate Jay Jones is also in trouble due to some three-year old texts in which he suggested that Republican Todd Gilbert, then Virginia’s House speaker, get “two bullets to the head.” Another text from Jones discussed violence against Gilbert’s children. Jones has expressed regret, but what was he thinking?  In more current news, Christopher Moynihan, one of the January 6^th insurrectionists that Trump pardoned, has been arrested for threatening to kill Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. When asked whether pardoning Moynihan had been a good idea, Speaker Johnson who generally answers questions with some variation of “that’s news to me” quickly pivoted to his current favorite, that it’s only Democrats who are violent, citing once again all those anti-American grannies who demonstrated over the weekend.  Sadly, Jone’s posts certainly don’t help. 

Fog:  Trump’s trip to Budapest to meet with on again, off again BFF Vlad is now off, or off for now.  It turns out that Vlad isn’t all that interested in pursuing peace, he’s sticking to his position that Ukraine needs to surrender all of the Donbas and maybe even more.  Veep Vance is in Israel,  at least he was yesterday.  He reported that the ceasefire is going better than expected whatever that means.  Hamas has returned two more bodies of murdered Israeli hostages, bringing the total returned to fifteen with thirteen remaining.  Having kicked out most of the press, Secretary of War and Beer Hegseth is now limiting what anyone at the Pentagon can say to anyone.  Also, would it surprise anyone who has seen the clips of the rather chunky INS guys threatening and sometimes beating up brown people, that more than 33% of those applying to work for Kristi Noem’s brown shirts have failed to pass the fitness test that Hegseth is all in on.