Calling Maxwell Smart 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀🚢 

Peak Stupidity:  Just when you’d think or at the very least hope that things couldn’t get more stupid, they have, bigly.  Yesterday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer who despite knowing better continues to behave as if he still is his personal lawyer announced that the DOJ had obtained an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey. Handed down by a North Carolina grand jury, the indictment concerns Comey’s May 2025 instagram (X) post in which he posted a picture of bunch of seashells on a North Carolina beach which had been positioned to form the number 86 followed by the number 47. The DOJ’s position is that the devious and dangerous Comey’s shell formation was a clarion call for someone to do away with the wannabee king also known as the 47^th president.  That the indictment was revealed on the same day that a real King, one whose very limited power relies on respect and tradition rather than spiteful retribution makes it that much more absurd. Most legal pundits, or at least those not serving as mouthpieces for right wing politicians or media, do not believe that Comey’s case will make it to trial.  For the record, the Merriam Webster dictionary defines 86 to mean “to eject or ban” or “remove’ a customer or a menu item.  You have to go far down their list of synonyms before you find anything close to the threat that the DOJ asserts Comey meant with his silly shell formation.  Not so coincidentally James Comey wasn’t the only Comey in the news yesterday.  A federal judge in New York ruled that his daughter Maureen can proceed with her wrongful termination lawsuit against the Trump administration. Maureen who had been a highly regarded senior prosecutor in the DOJ’s Southern District of New York office responsible for a number of high-profile cases including the successful prosecution of the maybe soon to be pardoned Ghislaine Maxwell argues that she was fired for political reasons. The James Comey indictment wasn’t enough stupid for one day, the State Department announced that to commemorate the US’s 250^th birthday, US passports featuring a prominent picture of Trump’s face will be made available shortly. No other country has a picture of their “dear leader” on their passports. Don’t panic if you need to renew your passport before 2028 because the Trump passport isn’t mandatory, it will only be available by special request. And because passports and seashell indictments weren’t enough stupid for one day, shortly after Trump announced that he wants ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel 86’ed immediately for a joke he made on Thursday night before the WH Correspondent dinner attempted shooting but really because he hates that Kimmel mocks him all the time, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that he is opening an investigation into all of ABC ‘s TV licenses purportedly over their “discrimination practices” as in DEI, but really to curtail free speech and by free speech think anything that criticizes or mocks Trump whose approval according to yesterday’s Reuters/IPSOS poll is down to 34%.     

Gerrymandering Update: The redistricting pendulum which started in Texas and has swung back and forth all year, may be swinging back towards the red.  Though they haven’t yet ruled on the constitutionality of Virginia’s voter approved redistricting amendment,  Virginia’s Supreme Court declined to pause a lower court ruling that blocks election officials from certifying the results of last week’s redistricting special election, as they consider the Republican lawsuit seeking to nullify the vote altogether.  Meantime, even though Florida actually has a law on its books that prohibits the drawing of congressional maps that favor one political party over another, at the request of soon to be ex-Governor Ron DeSantis who is trying very hard to get back into Trump’s good graces, perhaps because he wants a cabinet appointment or even a SCOTUS seat, Florida is on the verge of approving a new map intended to shift the state’s congressional representation from 20 Republicans/8 Democrats to 24 Republicans/4 Democrats. The new map makes significant changes to the districts held by Democrats: Kathy Castor, Lois Frankel, Darren Soto, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz while also moving Jared Moskowitz to a new district. Assuming the new map is passed by the Florida legislature, and it will probably pass even though a few Republicans aren’t happy about it, it will be litigated. Even if it withstands legal scrutiny, it’s not clear that the map will gain Republicans the intended four seats because it pushes a few Republican seats towards “swing-land,” a problem for the GOP given the overperformance by Democrats in some recent elections combined with Republican concerns that Trump’s immigration policies and anti-Pope rhetoric could result in some Hispanics who moved red returning to blue.

More 💩:  Despite the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz blockade, War/Beer Pete managed to find the time to take his friend Kid Rock on an Apache helicopter joyride because of course he did and anyway he wasn’t chosen to be a member of Trump’s cabinet because of his military acumen.  As to that lack of acumen, The Atlantic reports that VP Vance isn’t happy about the Iran war. Based on sources close to Vance, maybe even Vance himself, they report that Vance “has repeatedly questioned the Defense (War) Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of US missile stockpiles.”  And lastly for today, and also very stupid, Trump is pushing hard for Congress to approve and allocate $400 million for his East Wing ballroom.  Odd because he’s told us repeatedly that the ballroom which is being constructed by a contractor who was awarded the job on a suspiciously generous no-bid basis, a no-no for government contracts, is being funded by donors not taxpayers. 🤯🤷‍♀️