Dozing Don 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🕎

Manic and Loud:  CNN’s Medical analyst, Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at George Washington University, found Trump’s “manic” and “loud” Wednesday night speech to the nation extremely disturbing, an indication that there is something medically wrong with him. Dr. Reiner who tweeted about the speech appeared on CNN with Jake Tapper to discuss his concerns.  He said that it was time for the White House to come clean about the true state of Trump’s health, not that anyone expects that to happen any time soon. Health issues aside, there were lots of things wrong with his grievance filled pre-Festivus speech. It was full of lies or what much of the timid press calls misstatements. Almost one year into this term, when not falling asleep during his press conferences as he did again yesterday, Dozing Don is still blaming Sleepy Joe for everything, a litany of woes that include millions upon millions of drug dealers, and murderers crossing the border, men playing in women’s sports, record high crime, and the worst trade deals ever. He continued with his oft made assertion that inflation was at 9% when he took office. It wasn’t, it was 3%, pretty much where it is now, not that we know for certain what it is now because as Fed Chair Jerome Powell said this week, current government statistics are unreliable and in the case of job creation, another one of those areas that Trump is failing at but where Biden did very well, are likely overstated. Trump blamed the housing crisis on all those illegal border crossers, an assertion echoed by his VP during his recent speeches but failed to note that his tariffs have raised construction costs and that a lot of those “illegals” work, or used to work, in the construction industry.  Trump promised members of the military who he called “warriors” that he’d be delivering them checks for $1,776, a nice gesture but they were already supposed to get that money as it was previously allocated by Congress for their housing. Though it might have felt like an eternity, at just under 20 minutes Trump’s speech was relatively short for him due to a time constraint imposed by the networks who agreed to interrupt their regular programing because they thought Trump was about to announce a war with Venezuela or in the case of Tucker Carlson was confident he was about to announce the seizing of Greenland.

Healthy, Not Healthy: As to the men in women’s sports problem, yesterday RFK and Dr. Oz announced rules that ban hospitals that provide gender affirming care to youth under 18 from receiving Medicaid and Medicare funds and that would bar Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care for youth under 18. As part of that announcement Oz detailed the cost of creating penises ($150k according to him), putting aside the rarity of such surgery in minors and that genetics is complicated, the announcement is just another shiny object intended to draw attention away from the skyrocketing cost of health insurance. Those cost increases are freaking out some swing district Republicans who see the writing on the wall and their political careers circling the drain, so with the help of four of them, Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, and New York’s Mike Lawler, the House passed a discharge petition intended to force Speaker Johnson to hold a vote to extend the Obamacare health insurance subsidies for three more years.  Johnson could hold that vote tomorrow but won’t.  Instead, his plan is to defer the vote to January which absent a change of heart by any of those who voted for it will force a similar vote in the Senate.  That’s good but passage in the Senate would require sixty votes, and at least at this point, no one expects that to happen, though a compromise plan could be negotiated, theoretically but not likely. As to discharge petitions, they’re generally rare, the fact that three have passed, one for the Epstein files, one for restoring government worker’s collective bargaining rights and this Obamacare one, is viewed as an indication that Speaker Johnson has lost control of his caucus, or that Trump, who controls Johnson no longer inspires as much fear as he previously did.  Well, maybe.

More 💩: In other news, Trump announced that all of the members of the Kennedy Center’s board had voted to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. That came as a surprise to at least one board member who said that her mic was muted during the “unanimous” vote.  It’s also not legal, since changing the name, like changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War requires an act of Congress. No comment from RFK Jr who was too busy with that whole penis surgery thing, but lots of other members of the Kennedy family expressed their outrage.  In a further indication of his demented pettiness, Trump has had new brass plaques added below the pictures of those of his predecessors. Press Secretary “Hot Lips” Leavitt says that Trump wrote the brilliant text included on those plaques himself.  They can be seen online for their full despicability.  The plaques insult each of Trump’s predecessors except Reagan who he asserts despite no evidence “was a fan of young Trump.”  Also yesterday, OMB head Russel Vought announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research, located in Boulder, Colorado, will be closed and broken up because it was spreading climate alarmism and also because Colorado’s Governor and two Senators are Democrats. In response to a Senate hold placed on Coast Guard confirmations, the Coast Guard has changed its policy again.  They will once again consider swastikas and nooses to be hate symbols, at least for now. They had previously said that they weren’t going to remove them from their list of hate symbols but then had quietly gone ahead anyway raising the question: why is the Coast Guard so determined to justify swastikas and nooses? The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security so no one should be surprised that dog killer Noem has vacillated.  In other odd people news, it’s time to wave good-bye to Dan Bongino, who will no longer be the Deputy Director of the FBI come January.  Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and conspiracy pushing podcaster with no management experience was ill suited for the job not that anyone in Trump land cared about that, but Trump probably did care about how committed Bongino was to the release of the DOJ’s Epstein files. Those files are supposed to be released today.  Expect lots and lots of redactions and empty pages including the ones that detail how extensive Epstein and Trump’s friendship and one up man ship with regard to their competitive womanizing was, something reported on in yesterday’s NY Times.  One more thing, Alan Dershowitz, the once respected lawyer/professor who is now firmly down the Trump and Epstein rabbit holes has presented Trump with a memo detailing how he can serve a third presidential term. Trump says his ballroom project, that he now says will cost at least $400 million, won’t be completed until 2028.  Hard to believe that he’d be working so hard on something he won’t get to enjoy. In addition to freaking out most, if not all, of the rest of us, a Trump third term would be disappointing for JD Vance who last night received Charlie Kirk’s wife Erika’s 2028 presidential endorsement. I guess some people care about that.  

☹☹:  The Brown University killer who also murdered an MIT professor is dead.  We still don’t know his motives. In the wake of the Bondi Hanukkah massacre, Australia is expected to further restrict already restricted gun ownership, now the country’s leadership needs to work on hate.  May the memory of all the Brown University victims and the memory of the Bondi victims be a blessing for their families.