Presidents Day 😱 ✡️🌻😱 👿 🧤⛸️ 

 🧤,⛸️and DNA:  The quad god ⛸️is human, Susan Guthrie is still missing, and the Orange One keeps broadcasting his plans to steal the midterms and any that follow. Hopefully, Ilia Malinin will find his footing because while mortal, he is an awesome skater and, while the Susan Guthrie situation remains sad, maybe (well maybe) those gloves 🧤 will reveal some useful DNA. We can’t do anything about the skaters or the gloves, but we can and should pushback hard against Trump and his very devious election plans which include pressuring Republicans in the Senate to dispense with the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act already passed by their House colleagues and, if that doesn’t work, his plans to issue an executive order mandating voter ID and other voter suppressions. On the face of it, ID requirements, like naming election security legislation The SAVE Act doesn’t sound ominous but don’t be fooled, the whole point of the legislation is to controls who gets to vote. Most notably, the Act limits what type of ID can be used, requiring passports or birth certificates, rather than student IDS, driver’s licenses, or cards like the ones New Yorker’s are sent before each election.  Only 48% of Americans have a passport, the fee for getting one for the first time is $165, and assuming you have a copy of your birth certificate, it would only count as an acceptable ID if it’s in your birth name, an impediment for married women who’ve changed theirs. While supporters of the SAVE Act argue that IDs are necessary to keep non-citizens from voting, the reality is that non-citizens don’t vote and no one can cite legitimate statistics that they do.  Study after study by conservative think tanks like the Cato Institute have found few non-citizen voters because “People largely aren’t willing to risk their status in the United States for the ability to cast one more vote out of hundreds of thousands or millions in a state and hundreds of millions in the country.”  The SAVE Act would however impose a hefty poll tax on those who can least afford it, making voting expensive and inaccessible to those segments of the population who traditionally tilt independent or blue. It’s no coincidence that Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski who relies on a coalition of voters that includes her state’s indigenous population is against the Save Act while Maine’s Susan Collins whose voters are composed of more traditional whiter and older Republican voters came out in support of it this weekend.  As to Trump, he says that he will impose the SAVE Act requirements, and other voting impediments like banning or severely limiting vote by mail and the counting of postmarked votes that arrive after election day, by edict.  That’s probably not Constitutional but then again, the current Supreme Court doesn’t seem to mind that lots of what he does isn’t. Trump is pushing hard for these election changes because of how poorly he and Republicans are doing in the polls across a wide range of issues and voter groups. Polls indicating how fed up the majority of Americans are over how the INS and Border Patrol behaved in Minnesota, rather than the “successfully completion of the mission,” are why most immigration agents have been pulled from the state.  Likewise, polls are probably the reason that Republicans for the first time won’t field a candidate for Senator in the upcoming New Mexico Senate race. As to ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, the DHS Secretary who according to the WSJ fired her pilot for failing to transfer her blanket from her expensive love nest government jet to another one, her statement that “when it comes to election day, we’ve been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country” should be taken very seriously because though she’s saying the quiet part out loud to impress Trump and keep her job that doesn’t make it any less frightening especially since the INS and Border Control militias are under her control. Democrats have a lot on their plate, they’re being wildly out paced by Republicans on the fundraising front, and as usual they’re having a hard time acting in lock step when it comes to messaging because that’s who they are but if they can get it together and pushback against Trump’s threats to the election the midterms should be theirs to lose, well hopefully. On that note, Virginia has gotten the go ahead to vote on a redistricting plan that could result in giving Democrats another leg up in the House race because it increasingly looks like the gerrymandering war that was started by Republicans in Texas is backfiring on them.   

Epstein, Epstein 😱:  During last week’s House hearing AG Pam Bondi who never met with any of the Epstein victims couldn’t even find it within herself to acknowledge their presence at the hearing.  That says about all you need to know about how she’s been handling the release of the Epstein files. Every time we learn something horrible about someone in Trump’s orbit, we learn more about someone who isn’t or whose appearance in the files is incidental and has nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes. The bottom line remains that lots of people did really horrifying things or turned their eyes away from people who they knew were doing those things for business reasons or just to remain part of Epstein’s elite crowd, a crowd that included Steve Bannon. One item that continues to rear its head relates to an accusation from an underage girl about being raped by Trump.  It’s not proven but then again it doesn’t seem to have been investigated but one thing is clear, Bondi and her team redacted as many references to Trump as they could. Another group of files reveal mundane by comparison things such as how Epstein who lured lots of his prey by promising modeling gigs also promised acceptances into institutions of higher education, making generous contributions to get at least one of his girlfriends, Belarusian Karyna Shuliak, into Columbia University’s School of Dentistry.  Shuliak, who had overstayed her visa later secured citizenship by entering into a short-term sham marriage with another one of Epstein’s girlfriends, a woman named Jennifer, after receiving advice from Epstein’s lawyers that the marriage would solve her immigration woes.  The woman may be the same Jennifer that Epstein set up with Elon Musk’s brother Kimball.  The Columbia University officials involved with accepting Epstein’s girls has been removed and Kimball has now resigned from the Burning Man Project Board over these disclosures. Does make you wonder how another famous woman got her Einstein visa?