It Hasn't Even Been a Year 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 

Hangman: Yesterday Trump posted calls for the arrest, imprisonment, trial, and execution by hanging of six Democratic members of Congress who he called traitors for their “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR OF THE HIGHEST LEVEL!” saying an “example MUST BE SET.”  The treasonous behavior in question is their video pointing out to members of the military that they should obey only “legal orders.” Reasonable advice since their oaths prohibit them from carrying out illegal commands.  Unlike Trump, the Democrats involved are all distinguished veterans of the military or national security agencies.  They include two Senators - Arizona’s Astronaut Mark Kelly and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin and four Representatives - Colorado’s Jason Crow, Pennsylvania’s Chrissy Houlahan, New Hampshire’s Maggie Goodlander, and Pennsylvania’s Chris Deluzio.  None of the Democrats involved are anti-military, socialists or even snowflakes. The actions that convinced the six to post their cautionary video involve Trump’s military campaign targeting suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea.  Those actions, which may violate both US and international law have resulted in the deaths of 83 people even though no evidence has been presented tying the boats or the victims to crimes. The Trump crowd claims that government lawyers have provided a legal opinion approving the legality of their “blow the boats out of the water” campaign but they haven’t publicly shared the secret opinion, and given its source who’d believe it anyway?  It’s likely that one of the reasons that the few survivors of the boat blow-ups have been returned to their countries of origin rather than taken into US custody is because trying them here would require the administration to defend their actions in court.  Our “special relationship” ally, the UK is so disturbed by the Caribbean campaign that they’ve stopped sharing relevant intelligence so as not to be implicated in what are likely extrajudicial murders.  Naturally, Speaker Johnson defended Trump’s statements though he said he would have used different words.  Senate Leader Thune said he disagreed with how Trump suggested the situation should be handled, although he also found the Democrats' video to be "ill-advised, unnecessary and clearly provocative."  Is it a stretch to believe that Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth has a few of his minions deleting all references to the Viet Nam My Lai massacre and Lt. William Calley from all military academy textbooks and syllabi?  In other military news, Homeland Security’s ICE Barbie Kristi Noem got a little more attention than she intended for her decision to no longer classify swastikas and nooses as hate symbols, downgrading them to the merely divisive list.  Last night it was reported that their reclassification has been unwound possibly because they actually are hate symbols.

Legal Mumbo Jumbo:  We may never see the opinion justifying the boat bombings, but we are watching the DOJ screw up in plain sight.  On Wednesday, when questioned by District Judge Michael Nachmanoff who is overseeing the James Comey case, Acting US Attorney/Beauty Queen/Insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan said that only the chairperson and one other member of the grand jury had signed off on the final indictment of Comey.  If accurate, that’s a screw-up that could result in Comey’s indictment being tossed which might be why the DOJ unwound her testimony on Thursday, asserting that the indictment had actually been signed off on by the full grand jury. Legal pundits say there are quite a few other things wrong about the Comey indictment, including Halligan’s misrepresentations and the inappropriate testimony of an FBI Agent not to mention Trump’s very public call for retribution so while the indictment kerfuffle may not be the thing that causes the case to be tossed it could be icing on Comey’s get out of jail free cake. In Halligan’s defense, reportedly she is a good insurance lawyer and was third runner-up in the Miss Colorado contest. DOJ’s plans to prosecute California’s Senator Adam Schiff may have hit a speed bump too.  Oddly enough a federal grand jury in Maryland is looking into whether people involved in the investigation into Schiff’s mortgage were legit government employees or whether they were just pretending to be government employees who may or may not have been working for William Pulte, the senior housing official who added the weaponization of mortgages to Trump’s retribution quiver and for Ed Martin, Trump’s weaponization chief. The exact details of what’s going on aren’t clear since their source is conservative activist Christine Bush who reports being twice called to testify. Last night Ken Dilanian from MSNOW (the new name for MSNBC) suggested that AG Pam Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche may be letting the Maryland US Attorney pursue this investigation because they’ve grown frustrated with being put into the position of prosecuting Trump’s enemies for crimes that aren’t crimes. Then again, they seem to enjoy their roles so maybe there is something else going on.  Also bigly frustrated is Jerry Smith, the one judge who dissented from the majority decision that concluded that Texas’ redistricting was an illegal racially motivated gerrymandering.  He released his dissenting opinion yesterday and it was an unprecedented partisan doozy.  He repeatedly blamed George and Alex Soros (dog whistle alert).  He also went off on California Governor Gavin Newsom who had nothing to do with Texas’ redistricting except that he managed to one-up it with a statewide referendum.  The case is likely to end up at the Supreme Court.  It’s not clear if Smith’s diatribe will provide fodder for SCOTUS’ ultimate decision or whether it will turn off a few in the usual conservative majority.        

More 💩: The Senate snuck a provision into the government funding bill that allows those Senators whose call records were obtained by Jack Smith as part of his investigation into January 6 to sue for upto $500,000.  Yesterday the House unanimously voted to repeal that provision.  There probably are enough votes in the Senate to do the same but Majority Leader Thune isn’t expected to bring the House bill up for a vote in part because one of its loudest supporters in Trump buddy Lindsey Graham.  Lastly, after saying that SNAP recipients would have to reapply to get their benefits, an impediment to many who are qualified but are also working and taking care of their families, Agriculture Secretary Rollins walked back her statement saying that recipients wouldn’t have to reapply. Maybe someone pointed out to her that depriving people of food isn’t a good look particularly in the run up to the holidays. It’s also not a good way to improve in the polls which currently show House Democrats with a 14 point lead over Republicans with a lot of the lead attributable to “affordability” concerns.    

 

 

Swine🐷🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🐷 

Epstein, Epstein,🐷:  The dam finally broke yesterday.  Everyone in the House with the exception of Louisiana’s Clay Higgins voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Bill that requires the Department of Justice to release its trove of Epstein files.  One of those voting for the bill was a clearly miserable Speaker Mike Johnson who asserted that he was confident that the Senate would fix the bill so that innocent people would be protected.  By innocent he didn’t mean the women who were trafficked and sexually abused when they were girls because the bill already protects them, but Epstein’s “friends,” including Trump. Apparently, Senate Majority Leader John Thune didn’t get Johnson’s message, or more likely chose to ignore it.  Instead, he allowed Chuck Schumer to bring the bill as written up for passage by unanimous consent.  The bill quickly passed through the Senate and is now sitting on Trump’s desk awaiting his signature.  Trump who was busy last night feting Saudi Arabian Prince Mohammed bin Salman A/K/A the bone cutter says he’ll sign it right after he throws all his ketchup bottles at the wall.  That said,  there’s plenty of wiggle room written into the bill and it’s more than possible that Attorney General Pam Bondi will manage to edit out what Trump doesn’t want released.  At Trump’s direction she’s already directed Jay Clayton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to open an investigation into Epstein’s ties to “prominent Democrats including Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, JP Morgan Chase and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”  If an investigation is opened, Bondi is expected use it as a reason to sit on the files, or at the very least the files that Trump doesn’t want out in the open.  A number of Democrats have already been tarnished by the emails that the Epstein estate recently released including former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers and Virgin Island Representative Stacey Plaskett. Summers announced that he is stepping away from his public commitments and though he’s still at Harvard, his position there is in jeopardy.  His “crime,” or at least the one we know about it, is that he continued to communicate with Epstein, even seeking romantic advice from him, even after Epstein had been outed as an abuser.  Though she survived a hastily called effort to censure her for texting with Epstein during a 2019 House hearing, Plaskett is now also tarnished.  So far, despite all the hoopla Trump remains, if anything, he’s emboldened.  On Monday night he told Bloomberg’s White House Correspondent Catherine Lucey to “Quiet Piggy” for asking a question about Epstein and on Tuesday he berated ABC News correspondent Mary Bruce for asking questions about former Washington Post reporter Adnan Khashoggi and the Epstein files, calling her a “terrible persona and a “terrible reporter” while suggesting that ABC should lose its licenses.  So nice that sex trafficker Epstein’s long term friend Trump remains so comfortable publicly targeting women while defending murderers and swine.

Saudi Time: Yesterday Trump gave Mohammed bin Salmaan (MBS) the full royal treatment because it turns out that caring about the dicing of and slicing of Washington Post reporter Khashoggi is so yesterday and anyway a “lot” of people say Khashoggi wasn’t a nice guy so maybe he deserved to be put through the bone chopper.  Also, even if our intelligence services and the intelligence services of a whole bunch of our allies agree that it was MBS who ordered Khashoggi’s death, they’re all wrong. He knew nothing, kind of like everyone else in Trump’s orbit knows nothing about anything that matters.  Trump didn’t just give MBS the royal treatment while hosting him in the increasingly garish, tarted up, faux gold White House and saying that he’s a great champion of human rights, he agreed to let Saudi Arabia purchase advanced F-35 fighter jets from the US as well as lots of advanced US computer chips, including the ones needed for artificial intelligence initiatives.  In exchange, Saudi Arabia will not be recognizing Israel or joining the Abraham Accords, the two things that those sales particularly the sale of the planes were supposed to make happen, but they promised to invest trillions if not zillions more in the US even though they probably won’t though there will be more Trump related properties built within the kingdom.  So basically, Trump came out ahead, the US not so much, and Israel, not at all. At least for now, we’re not helping Saudi Arabia with its nuclear program, so that’s something.

More 💩:   Acting US Attorney Lindsey Halligan, the former beauty queen/insurance lawyer who Trump and Bondi used to get the James Comey and Tish James indictments has hit a bigly speed bump.  It turns out that, at least in the eyes of magistrate judge William Fitzpatrick who is reviewing the James Comey indictment, she engaged in  “government misconduct”  tainting the grand jury proceedings. The judge called Halligan out for suggesting to the grand jury that Comey might have to testify at trial to explain his innocence and for also improperly suggesting that the grand jurors should assume that the government had more evidence against Comey than what it presented to them.   The judge went on to say that “the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”  Apparently, Halligan who had never before prosecuted a criminal case has also never watched Law and Order.  All of this is separate from the other proceeding looking into whether or not Halligan was legally appointed to her Acting US Attorney position.  The indictment mess isn’t the only one standing in the way of Trump achieving his objectives.  Yesterday,  a federal court blocked Texas from using its newly drawn congressional maps in next year’s midterms, ruling that the new map which was drawn to result in five more Republican seats is likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The court based its conclusion on a letter sent by the Trump administration to Texas in July by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon who has a history of opposing civil rights which is why she is now in charge of civil rights. In response to Dhillon’s letter which said that Texas’ districts were “unconstitutional” as drawn even though they weren’t, Texas Governor Abbot explicitly directed the Texas legislature to redistrict based on race in a manner that increased the number of Republican leaning districts while squishing minority voters into their own districts in a manner that decreased the number of likely Democratic districts. Texas is appealing the decision.  In other redistricting news, despite Trump’s threats and the resulting swatting of at least one Republican legislator, Indiana’s Republican controlled legislature voted against redistricting their map.  If the Texas decision stands, or at the very least stands through the midterms, then Trump’s efforts to make the Congressional map redder won’t have done much for Republicans but will because of the redrawing of the California districts in a manner that is expected to lead to five more Democratic seats make it bluer.  The California redistricting which California Governor Newsom clearly said was only done to counter Texas’ action is being challenged in court too but since it was achieved through a public vote, it is expected to withstand judicial review. Nothing good to report on the health care front where Trump is standing firm against extending the Obamacare subsidies while trying with the help of some Republican legislators to dismantle Obamacare altogether.     

 

 

TACO Time Again🐔 🌮😱 ✡️🌻😱 🌮 🐔

🌮 🐔:  Trump chickened 🐔 out again. He spent the weekend attacking and un-endorsing Marjorie Taylor Greene, threatening to do the same to anyone else who votes for the release of the Department of Justice’s Epstein files while directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an investigation into President Clinton, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers all of whom were mentioned in the Epstein estate emails though none were mentioned in the context of sexcapades.  Then late on Sunday, Trump pulled a TACO, telling House Republicans to vote in support of the Epstein file release.  Quite a turnaround given his insistence that the Epstein affair is a hoax perpetrated by his Democratic enemies, those people he called ”Radical Left Lunatics” in his social media post where he directed House Republicans to support the file release.  Trump really hasn’t changed his mind, he still fears the files so diversions like war with Venezuela and the “testing” of nukes lie ahead but with the House vote expected to take place on Tuesday more or less a fait accompli and the growing likelihood that a “jailbreak” was about to happen meaning that upwards of one hundred House Republicans are likely to join all Democrats in voting for the file release, he felt cornered.  A few cautions, if Trump really wanted to facilitate the file release, he could just direct Pam Bondi to do it, he doesn’t need the House and then the Senate, which still hasn’t committed to act, to vote on the files. Also, his direction to the House includes a caveat for Bondi to release what she deems appropriate and while that could just mean making sure that victims’ names are redacted, it could also be a veiled direction to pull a Rosemary Woods as in the Nixon secretary who erased 18 minutes of implicating tapes. And who doesn’t believe that Trump intends to pardon Bondi, as well as the rest of the miscreants in his administration before he leaves office, if he ever leaves.  On the subject of pardons, Trump issued a few more to some more undeserving people this weekend including a January 6^th rioter whose trove of unlicensed guns led to his rearrest and another who is a known fraudster.  Also, because he always attacks others for doing what he does, his staff had him re-execute some of his earlier pardons because they were initially signed using an autopen, the device that he asserts disqualifies all of Biden’s executive orders and pardons.

🌮 🐔 🌮:  Trump didn’t just TACO on the Epstein tapes, he also pulled another tariff TACO.  Though he still insists that he’s brought the price of groceries down to levels never before seen he hasn’t and he knows it as do consumers who know when they have to cut back and/or purchase lower quality meat or just settle for more beans so on Friday he signed an executive order retroactively lowering tariffs on beef, tomatoes, coffee and bananas, as well as some other agricultural imports.  That’s progress in the right direction, but tariffs on lots of other products, including the components needed for housing construction remain.  Additionally cutting tariffs now won’t immediately translate into price reductions to consumers so those holiday meals will still cost more than they did last year.  Also, some of those tariffs were beyond nonsensical to begin with because tariffs were never going to lead to US grown bananas or more US coffee.  Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Treasury Secretary Bessent who knows better, spent part of his weekend sticking with the assertion that tariffs don’t increase consumers prices which begs the question why did tariff aficionado Trump decide he needed to lower them to get prices down?  Bessent also blamed higher meat prices on “illegal” migrants crossing the border with herds of their diseased cattle. Funny how even Fox doesn’t have video of that happening.  As to undocumented people, calling her newest invasion/round-up in Charlotte, North Carolina Charlotte’s Web, Kristi Noem had her INS troops invade another Democratic enclave this weekend because having them parachute into Chicago wasn’t enough. How cute to name the rounding up of brown people after a children’s book but maybe just a bit better than Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth’s naming choices. His NSFW choices include Operation Southern Spear, Operation Rough Rider, and Operation Midnight Hammer.  I guess we now know what he watches in his hotel rooms. Turning back to Ice Barbie Kristi, according to ProPublica, she spent more than $200 million on a television ad campaign intended to scare away undocumented workers.  A large part of that ad work was awarded, non-competitively, to a firm with close ties to a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides, not that you’d know that by looking at public documents since the firm’s name is intentionally obfuscated.  Noem is another one who is relying on getting a Trump pardon or a Thousand Year Reich.

More 💩:  Trump’s redistricting directives aren’t working as planned.  Since California’s voter approved redistricting has more or less neutralized his Texas seat pick-up, he now has the DOJ suing the Golden State.  Of course, he has no problem with Texas’ redistricting even though it was done without voter sign off.  His attempt to pick up a seat in Utah has been thrown off course by a state court’s ruling that rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map, instead approving an alternative map that creates a new, likely Democratic-leaning district. Not a lot of joy out of Indiana either where despite his intense lobbying Republican state legislators have so far refused to move forward with his plan to eliminate Democratic seats.  No surprise that Trump isn’t taking their decision lying down, he’s now calling for the ousting of the Indiana Republicans who are stymying his plans.  Though Trump pardoned those who participated in the various fake elector schemes, it’s unlikely that his pardons affect state prosecutions which is a bit of a problem for those being prosecuted in Georgia where a replacement for Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis has been appointed and in Nevada where the fake elector cases has been “revived” by the court.    

Parting Message:  Don’t buy into Margie Q being reformed.  Though she does deserve credit for standing by Epstein’s victims, she’s already trying to get back into Trump’s good graces by saying that she still adores him just disagrees on the Epstein front.  Also, when asked this weekend, she refused to criticize Tucker Carlson for hosting white supremacist/anti-Semite Nick Fuentes saying that Fuentes and presumably Carlson are entitled to air their opinions because after all what’s a little Holocaust denial and hate speech among MAGA friends.  Again, anti-Semitism is a both sides problem.        

 

 
The Dog That Didn't Bark 🐶🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🐶

Open Sesame:   The government shutdown is finally over, for now.  With the votes of six Democrats the resolution that funds the government through January, made it through the House and was signed into law by Trump.  The six included Maine’s Jared Golden, Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, Texas’ Henry Cuellar, California’s Adam Gray, North Carolina’s Don Davis,  and New York’s Tom Suozzi.  Their votes weren’t critical to the resolution’s passage since all Republicans except Kentucky’s Thomas Massie and Florida’s Greg Stuebe also voted yes but with the exception of Golden who has announced his retirement, may be critical to their reelection since they’re mostly from swingy districts that in some cases have been redistricted into lean red districts. The government reopening and those Democrats breaking from their caucus were supposed to be the story of the day, or at least that’s what Trump had planned but unfortunately for him it wasn’t because while Jeffrey Epstein may or may not have killed himself, he remains dead and his ghost is still out there, in full haunt mode so  to blunt the passage of the continuing resolution and also to bring Epstein back into the headlines a few wily Democrats released some implicating tidbits from the part of the huge Epstein file trove that they had access to.  Those emails landed with a big thunk and are now reverberating through the orange man’s head.

Epstein, Epstein, 🐶:  Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva whose swearing in had been held up for seven weeks has finally taken her oath of office.  As expected, the new Congresswoman immediately provided the 218^th signature on the discharge petition that forces a floor vote intended to compel the Department of Justice to release their complete set of Epstein files.  Those files should not be confused with the files that the Epstein estate has released or the set of files already in the hands of the House Oversight Committee some emails from each were just made public. Reluctantly, Speaker Johnson has now scheduled a vote on the DOJ files for next week when it’s expected that somewhere around 50 Republicans will join all the Democrats in voting for their release.  Those additional Republicans are expected to join in to avoid being labeled as abettors of the sex abuse of children, a bad look among many of their MAGA voters who have spent the past few years searching for child molesters in pizza parlor basements.  It’s still not clear whether Senate leader John Thune will hold a similar vote so the release of the DOJ’s complete set of Epstein files is not imminent. The content of the emails from the Epstein estate that were just released goes far to explaining why Trump spent part of this week trying to convince at least one of the three Republican Congresswomen, a group that includes Margie Q, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace who had joined Republican Thomas Massie in signing onto the discharge petition, to remove her signature from the petition. His efforts failed. Though the released tidbits don’t fully implicate Trump in participating in Epstein’s most horrific activities, they reveal that he was well aware of what Epstein was up to, spent some “quality” time with at least one of Epstein’s underage girls, and that Epstein and his partner in sex trafficking and molestation Ghislaine Maxwell were, together with the guidance of writer Michael Wolff, plotting ways to use what they knew about Trump to their benefit. In one email Epstein wrote to Maxwell “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” a reference to one of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries where the dog didn’t bark at the killer because the killer was known to the dog.  The 🐶 insinuation being that for years Trump didn’t condemn Epstein’s heinous acts because he was implicated in them.  The released emails also shine light on just how questionable Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s “interview” of Maxwell was because they provide further evidence that she lied to him and that he willingly bought her lies hook, line, and sinker all to appease Trump. No wonder that Trump has Secretary of War and Beer Hegseth ramping up hostilities against Venezuela and those “drug” boats.  He’s desperately in need of a distraction.  

More 💩:  Senator John Fetterman was hospitalized yesterday after injuring himself in a fall that occurred as a result of him becoming “light-headed” during a ventricular fibrillation episode. As of last night, the bruised Senator was staying in the hospital to have his heart medications adjusted. Trump’s Federal Housing Agency goon, Bill Pulte has referred Congressman Eric Swalwell to the Justice Department, claiming that he’s another one of Trump’s enemies who committed mortgage fraud. It’s fair to assume that Swalwell did not but that’s not the point because he is a vocal Trump critic and that’s all that matters. In other Pulte news, the AP reports that he’s been freaking out staff by sharing confidential Fannie Mae information with its competitor because rules don’t apply to him.  Former Fox host/current podcaster Megyn Kelly who may or may not have a heart and also writes her own rules has been known to defend black face.  Now she wants everyone to know that older men like Epstein and maybe even Trump having sex with underage teens doesn’t count as abuse unless the girls in question are under 15 and are someone other than her teen daughter.  As detailed in the NY Times, the 17-year-old high school junior that former Florida Congressman, one time Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz allegedly had sex with during a party came from a broken home, was emotionally damaged and got involved with Gaetz and his middle-aged male friends to raise money for braces for her teeth. And lastly, yesterday Trump appointed Paul Ingrassia the lawyer who couldn’t get Senate confirmation to lead the Office of Special Counsel because of his Nazi affinity and his disdain for Martin Luther King to be the Deputy General Counsel for the Government Services Administration (GSA) because apparently the only anti-Semites and bigots worth condemning reside on the left. Only the best in the Trump universe.       

 

 

Boondoggle Ranch 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

Dems Whining: Democrats need to get a grip.  Republicans control the Senate and the House and though Trump’s control is starting to show some cracks, and he really is corrupt, tone deaf, and possibly certifiably crazy, through a combination of threats and a shared philosophy, he controls the Republican Party. Democrats managed to bring their Republican counterparts’ collective disdain for their constituents’ health care, even their need to eat, and the affordability issue (this year’s version of it’s the economy stupid)  to the attention of voters but even the most progressive among them had to know that they weren’t going to get the Republican caucus to extend the Obamacare subsidies just as they couldn’t get them to rebel against the $1 trillion cut in Medicaid benefits.  It’s not popular to say that, but it is true.  As shown by last week’s elections, voters, or at least a lot of voters, know that Republicans and Trump are responsible for their suffering, extending the shutdown through the holidays ran the risk of redirecting that rage.  So enough with the circular firing squad.  Democrats need to regroup and move forward because while it may be cathartic to blame Chuck Schumer, it’s not productive especially since not even the loudest kvetchers want his job.  Afterall who wants to be a lightening rod? They just want someone to yell at, and some of them are probably just as mad at him for failing to endorse New York’s Mayor elect Mamdani as they are angry that he couldn’t force everyone in the Democratic coalition to coalesce, something Senate Democrats rarely do. Does anyone remember Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema?   Elections have consequences.  Like it or not, Trump and his forces won in 2024. Democrats need to turn last week’s election results into a trend, win the 2026 midterms, and then focus on doing the same in 2028.  In other words, stop the back biting, move forward, and extend last week’s wins. As to moving forward, there probably will be a vote on extending the Obamacare subsidies in December, odds are they won’t be extended which sucks, but if Democrats regroup and control their messaging vulnerable Republicans, a larger crowd than before the shutdown, will suffer as the ballot box.

State of Play:  The House is back in session.  Speaker Mike Johnson, who is far more deserving of ire than Schumer called his members back from their extended paid vacation to vote on the Republican’s version of the funding resolution which in addition to including provisions to protect some government workers now also includes a sneaky provision that allows the Senators whose call records were “seized” by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith to sue for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Those call records weren’t seized, they were legally obtained to help Smith determine who Trump called during the January 6 insurrection, but facts don’t really matter much anymore and though he looks smooth, Senate Leader Thune is another one who follows the dear leader’s commands.  Johnson plans to finally swear in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva today, not because he wants to but because he can’t avoid doing so anymore.  In theory, that should also mean that the discharge petition intended to release the Epstein files will get the crucial 218^th vote needed but count me as among the skeptical as to whether the release ever happens.  On the Epstein front, Trump who continues to pardon fraudsters, appears to be paving the way to commute Epstein’s partner in sex abuse Ghislaine Maxwell. She has been getting super special treatment at her new club Fed prison where with the help of prison officials, she’s been working on her commutation plea.  She’s clearly going to get one, it’s just a matter of when.    

More 💩:  We’re still waiting for judges to rule on whether or not insurance lawyer/beauty queen Lindsey Halligan’s appointment to serve as US Attorney is legitimate.  However, we have learned more about the origins of the “mortgage fraud” charges against NY Attorney General Letitia James and the possible future charges against California Senator Adam Schiff.  Despite Director of Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte’s assertion that he learned about James’ and Schiff’s faux mortgage fraud from public sources, he didn’t.  The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that mortgage agency Fannie Mae’s ethics and investigations group received internal complaints alleging senior officials had improperly directed staff to access James’ and Schiff’s mortgage files. In response Fannie Mae’s investigators started looking into who had given the orders and whether Pulte had the authority to seek the documents.  Naturally, this being Trump-land, the ethics investigators involved have all been removed from their jobs. The excuse for their removal, that they were DEI hires, the justification that Trump and his cronies use to root out anyone not sufficiently MAGA.  Pulte has been in the news a lot this week, because he’s the one who suggested to Trump that the housing affordability crisis could be solved by facilitating the issuance of 50-year mortgages. For a variety of reasons, that’s a bigly bad idea, so bad that a number of people in Trump’s inner circle are furious with Pulte for bringing it up. Pulte sold the idea to Trump by telling him that 50-year mortgages would lower borrowers’ monthly payments, technically accurate but the mortgages would be costly in the long run as borrowers would pay much more interest over the life of their mortgages, and with the interest front loaded it would take far longer for them to recoup their equity.  Fannie Mae has also lowered their credit standards, another idea that seems good on paper especially for those home buyers with lower credit ratings but lowering standards tends to result in more mortgage defaults which leads to and exacerbates financial crises. It may be time to get Margot Robbie and her bubble bath back to explain a few things about mortgage math to Trump, but only with a bodyguard.  

Peeps🧍🏽‍♂️🧍: The Wall Street Journal has been digging into FBI Director Kash Patel’s misdeeds.  He didn’t just fly his country singer girl friend to her wrestling match concert, he also used his FBI plane to go to a private, invitation only Texas hunting resort called the Booddoggle Ranch as one does when their boss embellishes the White House with gold tchotchkes and holds Gatsby themed parties during shutdowns.  On a more serious note, Patel also infuriated many at the Department of Justice and the FBI by prematurely announcing the uncovering of a Halloween terrorist plot. His too early announcement allowed some of those implicated to flee the country to avoid arrest. Put this into the category of things that happen when incompetent conspiracists are given key government posts. It fits in right next to the reports that the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida is continuing to go after everyone and anyone from the Obama years, Obama included, who had the nerve to investigate Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, the election that Trump did win before losing in 2020, the election he insists he also won.  A number of prosecutors in Florida have resigned or been pushed out for refusing to cooperate. Yesterday, the increasingly visible and very uncowed former President Obama, who Trump is once again insisting was born in Kenya, spent his Veterans Day pleasantly surprising some World War II veterans by accompanying them on an honor flight to Washington DC.  That falls into the category of things honorable leaders do.

Synchronized Swimming and Crabcakes 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

The State of the Shutdown:  Late yesterday eight members of the Senate’s Democratic caucus joined all Republicans except usual holdout Rand Paul in providing the sixty votes needed to pass a procedural vote, the first step in ending the government shutdown.  The eight include Maine’s Angus King, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez-Masto, the three who had previously voted against the shutdown, plus five additional Democrats including New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, Virginia’s Tim Kaine,  Illinois’ Dick Durbin, and Nevada’s Jackie Rosen. The Senate’s funding resolution which will keep the government funded through January 30 has a few new sweeteners, including a reversal of the mass firing of government employees that took place during the shutdown and a provision barring future layoffs through January 30 but does not include Obamacare subsidies, the issue that triggered the shutdown. Republican leader John Thune has promised to hold a separate vote on the subsidies, but it’s highly unlikely that it will pass both Houses, so the sharp increase in the cost of insurance as well as the increase in the number of people going without will remain an issue through the midterms which despite progressive squawking will probably benefit Democrats in the long run. Democrats, even those who voted for the Senate’s version of the funding resolution, aren’t happy with it; they signed on after concluding that there was not a thing they could do to get Republicans, most notably the callous and tone-deaf Trump to agree to anything better.  The increasing chaos at the airports in the run up to Thanksgiving, the concerns of unpaid constituents, and the SNAP mess contributed to their decision.  The Senate resolution now needs to make it pass the House.  Don’t expect instant relief because that could take some time since ersatz Speaker Mike Johnson sent his caucus home again last week to avoid a vote on the Epstein files discharge petition and the swearing in of Democrat Congressman-elect Grijalva besides even members of Congress, or at least those not flying private, are impacted by flight cancellations.

Snip SNAP 🤯: Trump gives new meaning to both the “Nero fiddled while Rome burned” and “Let Them Eat Cake” adages.  While food pantry lines got longer, he spent part of his weekend golfing and at another Mar a Lago event, this one featuring synchronized swimmers alongside shellfish filled banquet tables all while a film of how he really won the 2020 election ran as a backdrop. He spent the rest of his weekend flying to and then attending a Washington Commanders football game, part of his campaign to intimidate the team’s owners into naming its new stadium after him. While he was dining, flying, and being booed by less than adoring football fans, SNAP food stamp payments remained in limbo. It’s hard to accurately describe the SNAP trajectory, it went something like this: Trump declared no SNAP payments during the shutdown despite the availability of contingency reserves; then two federal district judges said that the administration had to make the payments; then the Trump administration began to make partial payments; then the district courts said make the full payments; then Trump said no payments will be made; then the Department of Agriculture indicated to the states that they should initiate full payments which several states started to do; then in an effort to legalize halting all payments the DOJ skipped over the Appeals court and went directly to the Supreme Court which issued a stay halting payments while the case was first reviewed by the Appeals Court; then the Trump administration started threatening the states ordering them to claw back the payments already made with the permission of the Department of Agriculture.  Last night the Appeals Court said that the payment should be made but their decision remains stayed for another 48 hours pending a full Supreme Court review. Confused?  Imagine being one of the 42 million Americans reliant on food stamps.  Fairway, my local supermarket, is “selling” food baskets to be sent to local food pantries; it might be worth checking with yours because if ever there was a time to do a mitzvah it’s now.          

Health Planning: Trump didn’t just cause SNAP chaos this weekend he also made it clear that it’s not just the Obamacare subsidies that he wants on the chopping block, he’s after the whole program. To that end, in addition to reposting obviously false claims that former President Obama receives royalties from Obamacare renewals, on Sunday Trump posted that he was “recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by Obamacare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, Obamacare!”  He then posted that his plan would involve sending all of us $2000 from the money “earned” from his possibly illegal tariffs to be used for health care.  Putting aside that the tariff revenues are taxes that we are already paying and that no one likes their insurance companies, his health care plan is nonsensical pie in the sky bull 💩, a return to the time when people who didn’t get their insurance through their employees and couldn’t afford insurance were left high and dry.  And that $2000, how far will it go when someone needs chemo or even just maternity care? Trump is delusional, callous, and evil, and his Project 2025 abettors, who don’t believe in food subsidy programs like SNAP, most certainly don’t believe that everyone is entitled to affordable health coverage. As to affordability for anything, Trump’s plan to bring down prices, or at the very least curb inflation, continues to involve a combination of smoke and mirrors and jazz hands.  He’s mostly just bragging about lowering costs and inflation, hoping that enough of us, or at the very least, enough of his base believe him despite reality and why not, a lot of people still think he’ll be releasing his “health plane” in two weeks, when he releases his tax filings.  

More 💩: Trump is still pardoning people willy nilly.  Not just fraudsters and donors, now he’s granting pardons to anyone who helped him challenge the results of the 2020 election, the one he lost but that he continues to insist that he won. Last night his pardon attorney revealed that Trump had pardoned a long list of his political allies for their support or involvement in alleged plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election.  The list includes Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among dozens of others including the false ballot crew. In other crappy news, as our military prepares for a new war or two, Secretary of War and Beer Pete Hegseth continues to fire and impede the promotion of lots of competent experienced officers maybe because he doesn’t want anyone around to stand in the way of Trump’s next war and his election interference plans? And because despite all the 💩, there are decent people on both sides of the aisle, warning of an “existential threat to democracy” Federal District Court Judge Mark Wolf who was appointed by Reagan, announced in a “searing first-person essay”  published in The Atlantic that he had stepped down from the bench to speak out against Trump who he accused of “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”

 

 
Nancy Was Alone 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

STFU:  The government is still closed.  SNAP funding is still up in the air, but planes are grounded and Trump who for a nano second appeared to understand that Tuesday’s Democratic victories were significant and likely (hopefully) an indicator of things to come, is back to ignoring reality and still impeding shutdown negotiations.  Yesterday, after announcing that he’s gotten the prices of what he called “fat shots,” but what the medical establishment calls GLP-1 agonists, down to more affordable levels, he went on to lie, prevaricate, and fantasize about everything else.  He claimed the economy was in the best shape ever, even though Treasury Secretary Bessent acknowledges that parts of it may already be in a recession and corporate job cuts, to quote CNBC, “surged past 1 million so far this year, with 153,000 layoffs just in October. The worst October since 2003.”  Trump went on to claim that grocery prices were way down, citing Walmart’s “bag” of Thanksgiving foods to prove his point.  The problem with that assertion is that prices aren’t down, and even his delusional base can’t ignore their grocery store receipts.  Additionally, the bag he cited includes only 15 products, six fewer than the 21 products included last year when the Sleepy guy was president.  On the SNAP front, Trump who never misses a meal, is still standing in the way of feeding people.  Yesterday, after a Rhode Island District Court judge ordered the administration to restart all rather than just a portion of SNAP funding using the contingency funds set aside for that purpose, the DOJ announced plans to appeal. To clarify, a Gatsby themed party at Mar a Lago, $20 billion maybe even $40 billion to Argentina, another billion to retrofit a “gifted” plane, $300 million for the Trump or maybe the Epstein Memorial ballroom and Trump actually said that there isn’t enough money for SNAP payments because the US has to remain “liquid for catastrophes, wars, anything” but absolutely not for feeding 42 million hungry Americans even though those SNAP payments ultimately contribute more back to farmers and grocers than they take.   By the way liquidity isn’t an issue, for better or worse the US unlike the rest of us can print money when it’s needed.  And wars?  Why is the end all wars, Nobel Peace prize seeking guy planning wars against Venezuela and maybe even Nigeria while revving up his nukes? Is it Wag the Dog time?  Lastly, during a hearing on the legality of Trump’s tariffs Chief Justice Roberts said what most of us know, tariffs are taxes.  The rest of the justices, or at least those other than Alito and Thomas also appear to get that tariffs are taxes and that taxing power belongs to Congress.  That said this SCOTUS never fails to disappoint and Amy Coney Barrett is concerned about how the tariffs already levied will be refunded so we’ll only know what they court does when what’s supposed to be an “expedited” decision is released.       

More About Tuesday:  Tuesday’s election results were even more stunning across the board than originally reported.  The ban the book crowd was ousted from lots of school boards including in Texas where control of the third largest school board is no longer in the hands of those who had removed textbook chapters on climate change, vaccines, Covid, and diversity. Mississippi Democrats broke the Republican super majority in their very red state’s Senate.  Maine voters rejected a voter ID initiative that would have created new voter ID requirements and made absentee voting less accessible, both intended to suppress voting by members of the Democratic base.  Perhaps influenced by the repeated reports of the tear gas and rubber bullets, and plastic handcuffs being used on school age children around the country by Kirsti Noem’s weaponized forces, voters in Bucks County Pennsylvania which voted for Trump in 2024, ousted their incumbent elected sheriff who had signed a deal to collaborate with ICE earlier this year.  All of this is on top of all those resounding Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey, two states that Speaker Johnson dismissed as not being indicative of anything.  And in a final irony, given the significant shift of Hispanic voters to Democratic candidates, Republicans in Texas are now a wee bit nervous that their aggressive redistricting might not pan out as planned as some of those “red” leaning Hispanic voters might actually turn a few red districts blue come the midterms. That doesn’t appear to be a concern for Democrats in California where Ken Calvert, a Republican incumbent, has already announced plans to challenge another Republican in one of the state’s newly drawn districts.  Still it’s going to be a long slog to the midterms, and as Democracy Docket’s Mark Elias warns, Trump and his cohorts have lots of vote suppressing plans in their bag of tricks and lots of military like people to enforce them.   

Peeps:  Yesterday, Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi announced that she won’t be seeking reelection to Congress in 2026. The 85-year-old Pelosi was first elected to Congress in 1987. The daughter of a former Mayor of Baltimore, she didn’t formally enter politics until the youngest of her five children was six.  She was the first and, so far, only women to become Speaker of the House.  Republicans, many of whom secretly admired her grit and competence, loved to dump on her, portraying her as that radical socialist from San Francisco. She was neither, but she was ahead of her time, a hugely competent legislator whose vote counting skills and backroom cajoling was remarkable.  She is largely credited with getting the ACA (Obamacare) passed.  While some Republicans, including former Speaker Paul Ryan who fled Congress because of Trump and who is now cashing it in as a Fox Corporation board member came out from under his protective rock to praise her yesterday.  Trump not so much; the vindictive self-obsessed wannabee king called her retirement a “great thing” adding “She was evil, corrupt, and only focused on bad things for our country.” Not much of a surprise from the master of projection but still despicable.  In other retirement news, citing incivility in politics and threats against his family, Democratic Congressman Jared Golden, the centrist from Maine announced that he won’t be running for reelection. Golden who frequently crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans, will be missed because despite being a party outlier, he was part of the Democrat’s headcount.  Moreover, it’s not clear that another Democrat can win in his district even after Tuesday’s Democratic trounce of most things red. The beleaguered Sean Duffy, busy cancelling flights across the country because overworked and now also unpaid flight controllers have been calling in sick, remains the Secretary of Transportation.  However, despite the unqualified reality star’s best efforts to convert his second job as interim Head of NASA into a permanent one, he will soon lose that job.  Trump has nominated, or more accurately renominated tech industry’s Jared Isaacman to serve in that capacity.  Isaacman, who was Elon’s Musk’s preferred appointee and who also had bipartisan support was nominated early in Trump 2.0 before Trump unexpectedly withdrew his nomination, citing a “thorough review of his prior associations.” Those associations included his past donations to the campaigns of Democrats, not a secret but an excuse for Trump, with the urging of his then head of personnel Sergio Gor, to dump him back when he was feuding with Musk who, in addition to having just secured a $1 trillion compensation package, is now back in Trump’s good graces. Gone for good is former VP Dick Cheney who passed away earlier in the week.  By current Republican standards, Cheney, the father of former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who was credited (discredited?) with pushing the US into a war with Iraq, seemed almost normal in comparison to what we have now, in part because he recognized Trump for what he is and publicly announced his intent to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. Though she might not be for long,  Lindsey Halligan is still the interim attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.  Halligan who was appointed by Trump when no one else in the Virginia office would proceed with obtaining indictments of former FBI Head James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James is now also a Special Attorney.  That title was bestowed on her by Trump toady/Attorney General Pam Bondi who despite her assertions otherwise knows that Halligan’s appointment as interim US Attorney is likely not legitimate. Bondi provided further evidence of her acknowledgement of Halligan’s questionable status by backdating her “special” appointment to September 22, not so coincidentally three days before Comey’s indictment.  Though the Comey’s and James’ indictments may not survive judicial review, Bondi’s team isn’t discouraged.  Word is that they’ve moved on to seeking an indictment of the next name on Trump’s retribution list, Obama era head of the CIA head John Brennan.  Sean Charles Dunn, also known as the “Sandwich Guy” who was tried on a misdemeanor assault charge for throwing a hero at a dressed for war Homeland Security officer, was acquitted yesterday by a jury of his peers who weren’t buying that what he did was a punishable offense. The charges against Dunn had been downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor after Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox host who is now the US Attorney for DC had failed to get a felony indictment. One more thing, NY Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik who was Trump’s pick for UN Ambassador before she wasn’t and who has gained notoriety and traction for her loud condemnation of anti-Semitism and college wokeness announced this morning that she’s running for Governor of New York against incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul. Stefanik’s no shoe in, one of her reasons for running is that her district could move blue as the result of redistricting but before she went full MAGA she was viewed as a moderate so she’s a skilled shapeshifter.  Moreover, she is expected to capitalize on downstate fears about NYC’s Mayor-elect Mamdani.  

 

On to the Midterms 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

Yesterday:   Republicans lost bigly last night. Trump who never takes responsibility for anything that doesn’t go his way, posted IN CAPS, of course, that the losses were because he wasn’t on the ballot and because of the shutdown.  While the part about him not being on the ballot was literally true, the winners did their best to make it seem like he was, putting him and his policies front and center in their races.  As to the shutdown it looks like his efforts to shift responsibility for it to the “radical” Democrat fell flat. By the way, though the shutdown is still on and is now record setting, there has been some movement with some behind the scenes talks among moderate Democrats and some Republicans, so something might break soon which isn’t to say that Trump is being all that cooperative.  Yesterday, despite a court order and assertions from some in his administration that SNAP funding would be turned back on, Trump first said that it was only coming on half-way and then shocked many in the White House and his party by saying that he wouldn’t turn it back on at all because hunger is a good thing?         

Virginia:  As expected, former Congresswoman/CIA agent Abigail Spanberger won the Governor’s race, easily defeating her Republican opponent Winsome Earle-Sears by 15 points. By comparison, in 2021 the current Governor Republican Glenn Youngkin who couldn’t run for reelection because Virginia Governors can’t serve consecutive terms beat his Democratic opponent Terry McAuliffe by less than 2 points. Approximately 150,000 more voters participated yesterday than in 2021.  Less expected, Democrat Jay Jones won the Attorney General’s race, defeating Republican incumbent Jason Miyares by 7 points despite the resurfacing of some earlier totally inappropriate texts in which he had jokingly suggested that then Virginia House Speaker Republican Todd Gilbert deserved “bullets to the head.” Because of those texts a lot of Democratic politicians including former President Obama had distanced themselves from Jones.

New Jersey: Despite some late polling that suggested that New Jersey’s gubernatorial race would be a squeaker and a barrage of awful ads that portrayed the former Navy pilot as indecisive and weak, Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill also scored an impressive victory, beating her Republican opponent Jack Ciatarelli by 13 points.  By comparison, in 2011 the current term limited two term Governor Democrat Phil Murphy won his reelection, also over Ciatarelli, by a little over 3 points. It’s also notable that it’s been a long time since one party has been able to retain the NJ governorship for more than two terms.  As in Virginia, turnout was up in NJ, with almost 600,000 more voters casting their ballots.  Significantly, Sherrill picked up many of the Hudson Valley Hispanic voters who deserted Kamala Harris for Trump in the 2023 presidential election, achieving levels that exceeded those achieved by Biden in 2020.  If Sherrill’s Hispanic pick-up spills over to other states in the 2026 midterms, Republicans will be in bigly trouble. Maybe the dragging and beating up of “brown” people at the direction of Stephen “Goebbels” Miller, Homeland Barbie Kristi Noem, Cava bag Tom Homan, and all those wannabee chunky and brutal INS storm troopers isn’t going over quite as well as Trump thinks.         

California:  Proposition 20, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s tit for tat response to Texas’ elimination of about 5 Democratic Congressional seats passed easily.  The proposition authorizing the redrawing of California’s Congressional districts was approved with 4.8 million or 62.8% of those who voted pretty much saying “screw you Texas” versus 2.1 million or 36.2 in opposition.  As a result, Democrats are expected to pick up the 5 seats they expect to lose in Texas.  Anticipating the loss, even before the results were in, Trump posted on Truth Social that the election was rigged.  Of course he did.   

Pennsylvania and Georgia:  The election in perennial battleground Pennsylvania was also consequential. Voters approved the retention of three state Supreme Court justices, preserving Democrats’ 5-2 majority on the state’s high court. Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht all survived an up-or-down vote to keep their seats on the bench. Dougherty and Wecht each won another 10-year term, while Donohue will serve until 2027, when she’ll reach the mandatory retirement age of 75. As a result, Democrats will control the courts at least through the midterms when we know that Trump and his cohorts will be launching lawsuits right and left.  In Georgia, Democrats flipped two Public Service Commission seats that haven’t gone blue in twenty-five years. That bodes well for Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff who is up for reelection in 2026 in what is expected to be one of the Senate’s most costly and competitive races.

New York City 🍎:  Saving my least favorite election for last, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani will be the next Mayor of the Big Apple because at the end of the day in NYC the winner of the Democratic primary almost always wins the Mayor election especially when the Republican candidate is an eccentric cat guy.  Also, that free bus and no rent increase promise is deceptively alluring. Mamdani won 50.4% of the vote, beating former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 41.6% and cat guy Republican Curtis Sliwa’s 7.1%.  In an attempt to sway some of those voters in heavily Republican Staten Island who were “wasting” their votes on Sliwa as well as a few of what he called those “stupid” Jews voting for Mamdani, Trump weighed in with an unhinged social media post endorsing “bad Democrat” Cuomo over “Communist” Mamdani before same day voting started. He also threatened to defund New York if Mamdani won. We’ll probably never really know if his endorsement carried any weight, but odds are if it did, he offended as many voters as he convinced. By NYC standards voter turnout was high with 2.1 million casting ballots as opposed to the 1.15 million who voted in 2021. Despite the large turnout, Mamdani’s share of the electorate was actually way lower than what Democrats typically achieve in Mayoral general elections. By comparison, outgoing Mayor Adams picked up 67% of the vote in 2021 and former two-term Mayor Bill de Blasio won with 67% in 2017 and 73% in 2013.  Cuomo garnered more votes than either Adams or de Blasio did in their winning elections.  Last night during his victory speech Mamdani ridiculed Trump, saying “Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: turn the volume up!”  That may be funny, and Trump is deserving of lots of ridicule, but Mamdani needs to be better than that because he’s not Gavin Newsom, Trump holds lots of purse strings, and despite his promises, Mamdani may try, but he isn’t going to be able to make up lost funds by taxing rich New Yorkers more and more.  Moreover, his populist plans are going to cost a lot in what is already a very resource constrained environment.  We also better hope that Mamdani isn’t able to move forward with some of his other plans because he’s already alienated a lot of New Yorkers with his promises to boycott companies that do business with Israel (that’s lots of companies), divest Israel related holdings from New York City pension funds (something that incoming comptroller Mark Levine has said he won’t do), arrest Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (probably not within his powers), and displace Cornell’s joint Roosevelt Island campus with Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology. How lovely to be a New Yorker, a crazy man running the country and a Hamas friendly ideologue running our city.

 

 Careless People 🤯😱🌻✡️😱🤯

 STFU:  Two more days and this Trump shutdown will reach the previous 35-day record set during Trump 1.0.  Trump, who could end the shutdown by convening a meeting to hammer out a deal with Congressional leadership from both sides of the aisle instead blamed his mess on the “radical” Democrats and flew to Florida where he spent Halloween partying at a Great Gatsby themed shindig, one that featured scantily clad “showgirls” dancing alongside the usual Mar a Lago Botox and filler crowd of nameless and not so nameless people.  While he may have selected the Gatsby theme to punk us, odds are that he hasn’t a clue that the book is about the corrupting influence of wealth and that author, F Scott Fitzgerald depicted his wealthy characters as careless, wasteful, and morally bankrupt. Keeping with that theme, Trump also posted pictures of the remodeled Lincoln bedroom bathroom. Saying that because its previous “art deco green,” was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln era he’s had it redone in white and black statuary marble with accompanying gold fixtures, as was the look in Lincoln’s log cabin? Despite his assertion, there’s nothing about the new décor that says Lincoln era though it does scream Trump hotel.   It’s fair to assume that gold fixtures will figure prominently in his new two football field sized East Wing ballroom. To make sure that his design plans get appropriate approval, Trump has fired all the members of the National Capital Planning Commission, replacing them with fellow goldleaf aficionados.  In addition to partying, Trump sat down for a 60 Minutes’ interview with CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, parts of which were broadcast last night with its entirety posted online. Naturally, Trump bragged about the $16 million payoff he extorted from CBS and its parent Paramount Global, the amount they say they paid to get rid of his lawsuit over the legitimate pre-election editing of their Kamala Harris interview but what was really paid to get approval for their sale to David Ellison’s Skydance. He also celebrated the hiring of Bari Weiss who was hired as CBS News’ new editor-in-chief to eliminate all “liberal” bias from future CBS News broadcasts, and by liberal bias think that which offends Trump.  Weiss walks to the beat of her own drummer, so Trump might not totally appreciate her in a few months but only time will tell. When shown video of his INS militia beating the crap out of people, Trump said that he “doesn’t think that they’ve gone far enough.” When asked about his decision to pardon Binance chairman Changpeng (CZ) Zhao, he said that he has no idea who the convicted money-launderer, funder of child abusers and terrorist organizations is. Zhao’s Binance helped fund Trump’s crypto venture, so either Trump is far down the dementia hole or was lying bigly, or both.  Trump also asserted that his plan to start testing nuclear bombs was necessary because he needs to keep up with the Joneses, in this case Russia, China, and North Korea. North Korea hasn’t tested a nuclear bomb since 2017, other countries with nuclear weapons, including Russia, China, France, the UK, India, and Pakistan, have not conducted explosive nuclear tests since the 1990s.  Trump’s stated plans are alarming but since Chris Wright, his Energy Secretary, says that the ordered testing doesn’t involve nuclear explosions but instead focuses on “the other parts” of nuclear weaponry to make sure they are working properly, maybe not so bad though more than a wee bit distressing that the man who controls the nuclear codes has no idea what he ordered.  More dementia, perhaps? And that war he’s threatening to start with Venezuela, we will have to wait and see. Overall, the interview was classic Trump, chock full of lies, braggadocio, and blame shifting with everything bad, like inflation and the economy, Biden’s fault, naturally    

SNAP, Crackle and Pop:  After finding the federal government’s attempt to suspend SNAP benefits to 42 million Americans unlawful, US District Courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island separately ordered the government to use the available contingency funds to make full benefit payments since that’s the purpose of those funds.  When asked about the court’s decision Trump mumbled some gobbledygook about his government lawyers having advised him that he can’t but that he’ll ask the courts to “clarify” their very clear orders and subject to them saying again what they said, it would be his “HONOR” to provide the funding.  Speaking in marginally clearer English, Treasury Secretary Bessent told CNN’s Jake Tapper that there’s a process that has to be followed, so we’ve got to figure out what the process is,” but that he thought that SNAP would restart midweek. Stay posted but don’t give up your spot on the food pantry line just yet.  In other snappish news, totally pissed that everyone now knows that his government plane is being used to ferry him and his country singer girlfriend to her appearances at wrestling events, FBI Director Kash Patel fired Steven Palmer, the long term agent, who served as head of the FBI’s critical incident response group which is responsible for handling major security threats as well as overseeing the FBI’s fleet of jets. Firing Palmer won’t hide Patel’s flight itineraries because there are lots of people who spend their days tracking plane from available flight data but who needs a major threat handler anyway?  By the way, Patel says his girlfriend is a patriot and obviously anyone who questions her free flights on taxpayer funded jets is not.

Politics:  Tomorrow is election day. There are lots of key races, especially in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York.  Odds are that Zohran Mamdani will come out on top in NYC.  Maybe that’s why the emboldened candidate isn’t even bothering to hide his scary biases.  Yesterday, his campaign held a phone bank featuring Jeremy Corbyn, the former head of the UK’s Labour Party who was forced to resign (ousted) from the Labour Party in response to allegations of his handling of complaints of widespread anti-Semitism within the party. To be fair, anti-Semitism isn’t just a problem on the left, it also lives boldly on the right.  Over the weekend, the conservative Heritage Foundation which has become increasingly MAGA-tized, defended its support of Tucker Carlson platforming and legitimizing white nationalist Nick Fuentes who blames everything he doesn’t like about the country on “organized Jewry in America.” Apparently normalizing the hate which has always lived behind closed doors or at least in whispers is back in vogue.  By the way, it’s great that Marjorie Taylor Greene has been calling out the Republican Party and Speaker Johnson for failing to deal with health care and for avoiding a vote on releasing the Epstein’s files but let’s not forget that she also blamed the California fires on Jewish Space lasers funded by the Rothschilds, who she now asserts she didn’t know were Jewish.  Wait until she finds out that the Pope is Catholic. Anyway, odds are that Greene is positioning herself for a run for a higher office in purplish Georgia in 2026 when Governor Kemp’s office will be up for grabs and Senate Democrat Jon Ossoff is up for reelection.