F Word Diplomacy? 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀

War, War:  Very early yesterday the weapons officer, a member of the two-person US flight crew shot down over Iran, was rescued by the US military with some help from Israeli forces. The pilot, the other member of the downed plane’s crew had been picked up by US forces shortly after the plane had been shot down. The rescue operation was impressive, a show of our commitment to never leave a soldier behind as well an indication of US military might at its best. That said the rescue came at a high cost because it involved the use of a considerable amount of resources, the complete destruction of two of our planes and injuries to several members of the rescue team.  Trump who had laid low during the weekend, igniting social media chatter that he had been transported to Walter Reed for some unspecified health crisis or maybe just one of those suspected monthly infusions, emerged to celebrate the success of the rescue mission.  He then followed up by threatening Iran over Truth Social, screeching: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped in one in Iran.  There will be noting like it!!! Open the Fuckin Strait, you crazy bastards or you’ll be living in Hell.  JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”  While it would be naïve to think that other presidents never expressed their frustration with similar language behind the scenes, it’s totally bonkers that Trump said what he said publicly and also bad that he’s threatening civilian infrastructure but then again, he is, as Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries put it, “disgusting and unhinged.”  Unfortunately, he’s also in charge. Overnight a Pakistani-brokered plan for an immediate ceasefire, to be followed by negotiations on a broader settlement to be concluded within 15 to 20 days, was proposed to Iran and the US.  At least at this point, the proposal doesn’t appear to be going anywhere because Iranian leadership who spent the night responding to Trump’s Easter threat by shooting off drones and missiles at civilian targets is also unhinged and doesn’t believe Trump can be relied upon. A pot calling the kettle black standoff with lives and nukes at stake.

Budget War:  The cost of the rescue operation and the entire Iran “incursion” goes far to explaining why Trump wants Congress to include an additional $1.5 trillion for defense spending in next year’s budget. Trump’s plan is for that money to be offset by extraordinarily steep cuts in funding for health, childcare, education, housing, the environment because we really don’t need those woke things especially since their funding gets in the way of keeping taxes for billionaires low.  As to that whole woke thing, apparently rooting it out of the military is one of reasons that Secretary of War/Beer Hegseth keeps firing generals.  It’s reported that Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, who was summarily kicked to the curb last week was ousted because he’d opposed Hegseth’s decision to remove two Blacks and two women from the one-star general promotion list.  To be clear, our military, whether one supports the Iran war or not, is performing impressively.  It was, until Hegseth stepped in, led by the “woke” generals, men, and women, white, black, and Hispanic that he with the enthusiastic support of Trump has been rooting out. It’s hard to miss the discordance.  Out of one side of their mouths Trump and Hegseth are celebrating the strength of the US military, out of the other side, they’re slamming it for its diversity, working to whitewash and single sex the leadership that got it there. Somewhere around 40% of the military identifies as non-white and women make-up just under 20% of active-duty forces. Alienating them by insulting their capabilities, reducing their promotion opportunities, and deporting their spouses while having INS agents waiting outside of military graduations to scoop up “undocumented” family members is more than discriminatory, it’s stupid and likely to have ramifications sooner rather than later.

Special and Weird: There are four special elections taking place in Georgia tomorrow.  One of the races is for the House seat vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene where Democrat Shawn Harris, a retired Army General, is running against Republican Clay Fuller.  The other three elections are for state seats.  It’s unlikely that any of these seats will flip so the focus will mostly be on margins of victory.  Margie Q won her ruby red district by 30 points in 2024, so it’s a stretch to think that Harris has a chance.  However, Republicans have spent way more on the race then Democrats, an indication of their concern about the optics of tightening margins in the run-up to the midterms.  The weird race to watch is the June 2 primary to replace termed out California Governor Gavin Newsom.  Democrats are worried about losing the governorship because though there are far more Democrats in blue California, regardless of their party affiliation, only the top two primary finishers will get to progress to the November election. The Democratic field is splintered, with many candidates and no clear leader.  Congressman Eric Swalwell is running neck and neck with former Congresswoman/one time Senate aspirant Katie Porter and one-time presidential candidate/billionaire Tom Steyer with five other Democrats also on the ballot.  The more concentrated Republican field has only two candidates: Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco. There’s a chance that the two Republicans who until yesterday were polling around 17+/- points each finish in the top two spots, advancing to the general election, leaving the Democrats who are mostly polling in the low teens in the dust. The good news for Democrats is that Trump may have just given them an assist.  Last night, he endorsed Republican Steve Hilton, that’s good for Hilton but will likely tank Bianco’s chances of coming in second, making it more likely that one of the Democrats will nab the second place slot and then go on to win in November.

 

Spring Cleaning  😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀 🐣🫓

War and Babies:  As promised, Trump spoke to the nation on Wednesday night, but he didn’t say much.  In a nutshell, the Iran war which he insists is going great is neither going great nor about to end, the Strait of Hormuz which was open before the bombing began is still mostly unpassable, he’s pretty much given up on getting Iran’s nuclear materials and is still threatening to blow Iran’s infrastructure to smithereens.  He’s angry with all of the other countries, especially the members of NATO, who refuse to join in the battle to get the Strait reopened, pointing out that they need safe transit through the critical chokehold more than we do.  He’s not wrong about that, but applying the Pottery Barn rule, they want him to fix what he broke because he owns it.  Before his speech there were concerns that Trump would announce that he was pulling the US from NATO, however he didn’t but he’s doing a depressingly good job at neutering the treaty.  Things don’t appear to be going well for Trump on the birthright citizenship front either. He attended the beginning of Wednesday morning’s Supreme Court hearing, sticking around long enough to throw intimidating glares at “his” Justices. It’s likely that SCOTUS’s decision, not expected until June, will leave birthright citizenship intact.  Though it should be unanimous it probably won’t be because Justices Alito and Thomas appear to believe that they are on the Court to rubberstamp their king. Most pundits believe that at the very least Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Coney Barrett will join the three “liberals” in upholding birthright citizenship with many others believing (hoping) that Gorsuch and maybe even Kavanaugh will join them too.

You’re Fired: Attorney General Pam Bondi is out.  Trump fired her during their joint car ride to the Supreme Court’s birthright hearing but didn’t announce his decision, via a Truth Social post, until yesterday. According to his post, Pam, who “did a wonderful job” will be “transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.”  Reports are that though she knew her days were numbered, Bondi had hoped to be allowed to make a more graceful exit, sticking it out until the beginning of summer, but Trump wanted her out, pronto. Bondi was fired for failing to successfully prosecute all of Trump’s “enemies” while also bungling the handling of the Epstein files. That she was as obsequious as possible while pretty much dismantling the Department of Justice, ferreting out all the competent career attorneys who had anything to do with prosecuting the January sixers or participating in any of the investigations into Trump’s bad acts wasn’t enough for Trump because former FBI Director Comey, NY AG Letitia James, former CIA Director John Brennan, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell remain free.  For now, Trump’s one-time personal lawyer, the unctuous Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will serve as the Acting AG while Trump decides who to nominate to the permanent slot.  In addition to Blanche, the list of contenders is thought to include: EPA head Lee Zeldin who despite his lack of substantial legal experience has impressed Trump by dismantling environmental protections;  DC US Attorney/former Fox host Jeanine Pirro who has lots of legal experience but hasn’t had any success indicting Trump’s enemies; and maybe the lesser known Harmeet Dhillon the Assistant AG for Civil Rights who has been chipping away at what she’s supposed to be protecting.  Blanche is probably the most deviously competent of those under consideration but the sweetheart interview he conducted with Epstein partner in pedophilia Ghislaine Maxwell and her subsequent transfer to a cushy jail might make it difficult to pass him through even this Senate.  Not to be outdone by Trump, yesterday Secretary of War/Beer Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George because who doesn’t fire competent, experienced Generals during a war? The firings may be only beginning.  The twitter-verse reports that a few other heads are also thought to be on the spring-cleaning chopping block. Names floating around include: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard who almost every knows opposes Trump’s warmongering but who may hang on because Trump knows she’ll go to the airwaves the second she gets her pink slip;  Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick who has foot in mouth disease and is mired in the Epstein mess;  Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer who is involved in a corruption scandal that should have seen her booted by now; and FBI Director Kash Patel who is more into partying and conspiracy theories than security at a time when competency in his job really matters. RFK, whose CDC has suspended testing for monkey pox and rabies, has got to be happy that all these people are ahead of him because he should go too but probably won’t.

More 💩:  The Department of Homeland Security remains unfunded.  On Wednesday it was reported that with Trump’s backing Speaker Johnson had finally agreed to bring the Senate passed deal to fund all of DHS except for ICE and Border Patrol up for a vote in the House, pushing the funding of ICE and Border Patrol into a subsequent reconciliation bill, however that doesn’t appear to be happening because Johnson doesn’t have the votes to get the Senate plan through his caucus. He’s back to the drawing board, now talking about two reconciliation bills, one that would fund just ICE and Border Patrol to be passed almost simultaneously with the Senate DHS funding bill and a second one that would further slash benefits to fund the Iran war because who needs Medicare, Medicaid, and child services anyway. Late yesterday Trump said that while the House dithers he will sign another executive order to pay the DHS salaries not funded by the executive order that funded TSA workers.  To state the obvious, that’s not the way things are supposed to work.

 

 
Bimbofication 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀 🐣🫓

Bimbo BINGO: Congratulations if you had Kristi Noem’s cuckolded husband Byron being a cross-dressing bimbofication fetishist on your BINGO card, extra points if you even know what bimbofication is, because if you did and do, you’ve won this episode of WTF is going on in Trump-land.  You also have a far more bizarre and inventive imagination than most and possibly also spend lots of time on NSFW/Fetish subreddits. Joking aside, the real issues aren’t Byron’s hard to unsee balloon boobs and tight pink undies but that his fetish and the accompanying pictures he posted sans mask for all to see provide evidence of how Trump and his crackerjack team failed to undertake serious background checks on his cabinet and top aides, the people whose access to super top secret information, including the president’s daily brief (PDB) could make them targets of foreign espionage agencies because while Trump probably didn’t know about Byron Noem’s predilection, Vlad Putin, Xi, and a number of our sneakier allies and erstwhile friends, probably did. Worth noting, while ICE Barbie Kristi’s alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski is probably not into bimbofication, he’s another one who wasn’t vetted but who did have access to the PDB.  

War, War, TACO? On a more serious note than bimbofication, we’re still at war with Iran, at least we will be until tonight when, unless he changes his mind, at 9 PM EDT during a speech to be carried by all the major networks while some of us are otherwise occupied at Passover Seders, TACO man Trump is expected to announce that: he’s won; the war is over or will be in a rolling two weeks; that Iran no longer has any uranium, or if they do and they probably do, who other than Bibi cares; and that it doesn’t matter that the Strait of Hormuz which was open before the war, isn’t open now because that’s the problem of the countries that used to be our allies so they should just deal with it. However, since Trump has been known to TACO his TACOs, there’s also a non-zero chance that he could instead announce that he’s sending in the troops until the equity markets tank again and oil prices shoot upward once more at which time he will TACO, TACO, TACO.     

The Courts:  A number of legal rulings didn’t go Trump’s way yesterday.  Judge Radnolph Moss of the US District Court for DC found that his executive order defunding NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment and is therefore "unlawful and unenforceable." Judge Richard Leon, also of the DC court, ruled that construction be halted on his pet project, the humongous, East Wing replacement ballroom with the stairway to nowhere, until the project receives a go-ahead from Congress. As indicated by his reaction, including a few longer than usual Truth Social posts, the East Wing decision in particular is freaking Trump out in a bigly, multiple ketchup bottle way. The White House plans to appeal both decisions but Trump isn’t happy so to further show his dismay with the courts, he plans to take the unprecedented step of attending today’s Supreme Court arguments on birth right citizenship, another one of those issues that has his tidy whities, not to be confused with Byron Noem’s pink undies, tied into knots.

Voting Rights?  Courts or no courts, Trump hasn’t given up on issuing questionable executive orders. Since, despite his aggressive efforts and accompanying threats, he hasn’t been able to get Senate Leader John Thune to dispense with the 60-vote filibuster rule to get his voter squelching SAVE Act passed, last night he signed the mother of all  executive orders, to eliminate the “legendary cheating” that he insists with zero evidence goes along with mail-in voting. This order would create state lists of US citizens who are eligible to vote, with an instruction to the US Postal Service to send mail ballots only to “verified” voters. He also says that he will cut aid to states that don’t cooperate.  Naturally, the verified voter list will be dominated by those most likely to vote the way Trump wants them to, presumably a mix of white Republican males, with a smattering of trad wives and other similar thinkers.  According to the Constitution, the document that Trump only cares about when it benefits him, elections are run by states not the federal government so Trump’s order will be immediately litigated and probably will be almost immediately put on hold but since we’ve heard that refrain before we should all be very concerned.  As to mail-in ballots, it’s worth noting that lots of people, including Trump, Melania and Barron, and people in red leaning states vote by mail. Eight states, including California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont,  Washington and Washington, DC allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.  Two states, Nebraska and North Dakota, permit counties to opt into conducting elections by mail. Nine states, including Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming allow specific small elections to be conducted by mail. Four states including Idaho, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New Mexico permit mostly mail elections for certain small jurisdictions. Also, lots of other states, including New York make it very easy to obtain mail-in ballots. Trump’s executive order is nothing more than an attempt to disrupt the midterms and all the other future elections he can subjugate. Spooked by the results of recent elections, his declining polls, and the millions of marchers taking to the streets, he’s concluded that the only way he can hold on to power is by taking it away from voters who don’t like him and sadly he’s surrounded by people who don’t just support him but who are also egging him on.

Stupid 💩:  Some military helicopter pilots did a couple of flybys past Kid Rock’s house presumably to reward him for his Trump loyalty but also maybe because they like what he passes off as music.  Their bosses suspended them upon further investigation because unscheduled flybys aren’t supposed to be a thing but then, as expected War/Beer Pete suspended the suspension. Don’t be surprised if the pilots in question soon get medals of valor from the orange one.