Who's On First 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡

Happy Birthday 🎂: The US Park Service provides free entrance to national parks on certain holidays. Going forward, Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, two holidays previously included on the list, will not be among those “free” days but Trump’s birthday will.  Currently only one other country, North Korea, celebrates the birthday of a living leader.  Keeping with that theme, last week Trump added his name to the US Institute for Peace, the independent not for profit organization whose mission is to build peace through non violent methods rather than through double-tap boat attacks and extrajudicial killings. Trump has been trying to wrest control of the organiation from it’s board for months but  has been stymied by the courts though it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that the Supreme Court will ultimately decide that he can fire and replace it’s leadership because these days “his” Justices mostly let him do whatever he wants.  To that end, on Friday, SCOTUS agreed to decide the legality of Trump’s order to heavily restrict the right to birthright citizenship, the constitutional principle that individuals born on US soil are automatically United States citizens. When Trump issued the executive order telling government agencies not to recognize citizenship of children born in the US if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident main stream legal pundits scoffed at him, saying that there was no way that the courts would sign off and the lower courts haven’t but as we’ve since learned this SCOTUS habitually disappoints.  The Justices have repeatedly shown precedent doesn’t concern them so who knows what they’ll do.  Just the fact that four of them agreed to hear the case provides an indication that some of them are willing to toss birthright citizenship out the window.  Justice Kavanaugh has already said that race based immigration policing is okay, so why should we doubt that he and a critical number of his colleagues wouldn’t be willing to limit granting citizenship to newbies, especially brown and Black ones?

Pardon Me:  During his first term, Trump issued clemency through pardons and commutations to 327 people.  Not even one year into this term and he’s already granted more than 1600 get out of jail free cards to a diverse crowd that includes the January 6 insurrectionists, George of many names Santos, former Honduran leader Juan Orlando Hernández who played cocaine footsie with the Sinaloa Cartel leader El Chapo, and Binance’s crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao whose company funneled funds to sex traffickers and terrorists groups like Hamas.  All of these individuals thanked Trump profusely with many compensating him with “donations” to his “library” and/or ballroom project.  Last week, Trump surprised Speaker Johnson by granting Texas’ Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar one of those coveted pardons.  Cuellar thanked Trump profusely but then immediately registered to run again in his swing district as a Democrat.  It turns out that Cuellar’s decision to stick with the Democratic party caught Trump by surprise and not in a good way so over the weekend Trump bashed him on Truth Social for showing “such a lack of LOYALTY” promising not to be so nice “next time.”  So basically Cuellar, and his daughters who had written Trump flattering letters to get the pardon have pulled a fast one on the Mango Maniac at least for now.  That’s amusing but also provides evidence of what most of us have long believed, Trump’s pardons are transactional, most cost bigly bucks and even those that don’t come with expectations. The Cuellar “affair” also confirms what Real Estate buddy/negotiator Steve Witkoff advised Russian negotiators, that to influence Trump, slather him with praise and “make nice” phone calls.  The Cuellar pardon is small potatoes in the scheme of things, especially when compared to how much Trump has changed US policy in response to Russian cajoling (pee tape diplomacy?).  Last week Trump unveiled the US’s new National Security Strategy, which slams Europe for policies leading to “civilizational erasure” while recasting Russia as a good buddy,  No surprise that Russia is welcoming the new strategy calling it largely consistent with its vision, possibly because they helped write it?  Over the weekend, while attending the Doha Economic Forum in Qatar, first son Don Jr suggested that his father would walk away from Ukraine unless the “corrupt” country didn’t get with the Russia peace program. Very self owning for a Trump to highlight corruption but sadly, he may also he right.   

Cabinetry:  There are lots of rumors about which cabinet member Trump will defenestrate first.  Since so many of them are awful and incompetent, it’s a race to the bottom. There’s Pete Hegseth who spent the weekend doubling down on his assertion that killing “narco-terrorists” dangling from blown-up boats is okay while also asserting that due to fog of war and his early departure from the Situation Room, for a beer run maybe, he had nothing to do with those extrajudicial killings anyway. By the way, Congress is voting on the next defense authorization bill.  It doesn’t change the Department of Defense’s name to the Department of War but does remove IVF funding for military families because Speaker Johnson believes IVF is ungodly. Back to “who’s on first,” while growing, Hegseth’s death count pales in comparison to the number of deaths that RFK Jr will be responsible for once the policies passed by his Advisory Committee on Immunizations go into effect.  Last week ACIP said no to the decades long, live-saving policy of innoculating babies with the Hepatitis B vaccine before they leave the hospital.   Estimates are that by cutting down, almost eliminating, liver disease and liver cancer, the Hep B vaccine has saved the lives of 90,000 US children since 1991.  ACIP didn’t totally nix the vaccine, instead they said that babies could get it later during one of their follow-up visits.  The problem with that is that lots of babies, particularly from lower income families, including those who are being priced out of the insurance market, don’t make it to those follow-up visits and many others will see the policy change as just one more reason not to vaccinate their kids. Then there’s ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, Trump doesn’t really care that she’s responsible for “accidentlly” incarcerating and/or beating up citizens and sending migrants, largely those without criminal records, to deadly places  but apparently he’s grown weary of the stories about her not so secret affair and questionable business dealings, including the purchase of engineless planes from Spirit Airlines, with Corey Lewandowski, his one time campaign manager. For what its worth, a number of media outlets are reporting that she is likely to be replaced by Virginia’s outgoing Governor Glenn Youngkin in January. Also, we shouldn’t forget about Kash Patel.  Granted a momentary reprieve for capturing the guy who left bombs at the RNC and DNC on January 6, he’s now fending back accusations that he had the SWAT team inappropriately protecting his girlfriend serve as chauffeur for her inebriated friends. Nice that he cared enough about their safety to get them rides home, but isn’t that what UBER is for?  As to the RNC/DNC bomber, turns out that he may be a Trump supporting election skeptic.  If true, maybe he can get one of those Trump pardons.  If not true, it’s a great legal strategy by his lawyers to say he's one.

More 💩:  Fresh off receiving the first ever and totally made-up FIFA peace award and hosting his first awards event at the Kennedy, soon to be Trump, Center, Trump is expected to go back on the road this week to brag about how well the economy is doing.  His work is cut out for him and it’s far from clear that lying about the price of gas or all the marvelous things that tariffs are doing will help because people who shop for groceries know when things are costing more and also know when they or their friends have been laid off and their kids can’t find jobs. According to Fox 76% of voters view the economy negatively. That’s worse than the 67% who felt that way in July and the 70% who said the same at the end of Biden’s term.  Moreover 46% of the respondents to a recent Politico Poll said that the cost of thngs is worse than they can remember it being.  That includes 37% of those who voted for him in 2024.  In addition, despite his assertion that all things bad are Biden’s fault, 25% of his voters say Trump’s responsible for the current state of the economy.  So maybe calling affordability a “con job” is an early holidy gift for Democrats, one that that will fuel political ads for much of next year.  And turning back to that FIFA peace award “ceremony” putting aside how seriously weird it was, how nuts is it that Trump thinks it is a real prize. As they said in the Apollo 13 movie, “Houston, we have a problem.”  A bigly one.