Virginia is for Lovers 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀🚢 

War Chronicles:  After threatening to bomb Iran out of existence while also teeing up the Kushner, Witkoff, Vance team to head to Pakistan to negotiate with the Iranians, Trump pulled a TACO yesterday.  After a tense meeting in the White House that included VP Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, War/Beer Hegseth, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Dan Caine, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Real Estate Bro Witkoff, and son in law Kushner but excluded Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, he extended the about to expire ceasefire indefinitely while maintaining the blockade of all of Iran’s ports. Top Iranian officials haven’t publicly responded to Trump’s announcement, but they did attack two ships overnight making it clear that they are following their own playbook. Iran’s situation isn’t good, but the country’s leaders, whoever they are, perceive that they’ve got Trump stuck between a rock and a hard place, that hard place including the upcoming midterms in the face of declining popularity at home. At least for now the truce between Lebanon and Israel, while fragile appears to be holding, more or less.

Virginia!  On the home front, much to the chagrin of Republicans Virginians voted to redraw their state congressional map for the remainder of the decade.  As a result, Virginia’s congressional delegation is expected to shift from six Democrats and five Republicans to ten Democrats and one Republican. It turns out that the redistricting battle that Republicans started in Texas isn’t working out as planned because this time around Democrats fought fire with fire, engaging in their own voter approved gerrymandering.  At this point, it appears that with a big lift from California and Virginia,  Democrats have cancelled out most, maybe even all, of the 9 to 12 seats that Republicans hoped to pick up with their redrawing of the maps in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri.  The fight isn’t over yet because Florida may join the battle, although Governor DeSantis has been wavering, not because he doesn’t want to hand the Republicans a few more seats but because he’s afraid that with voter sentiment especially among Latino voters shifting blue, a Florida redistricting could backfire instead resulting in a “dummymander," a failed gerrymander where a political party draws district lines to maximize their seats but spreads their own voters too thin, leading to unexpected losses, especially during unfavorable political tides like the one that’s expected to occur this November, assuming that Trump’s plans to disrupt the elections don’t come to pass. Thought last night’s Virginia election results have Democrats smiling and Republicans outraged, all is not necessarily hunky dory for Democrats because it’s widely expected that the Supreme Court will further dismantle the Voting Rights Act handing a few Democratic seats in Louisiana and Ohio back to Republicans.

Peeps:  Labor Secretary Lori Chavez–DeRemer has resigned.  The only thing surprising about her departure is that it took so long to occur. A few months back the NY Post, hardly a radical left paper, did an expose on her “problems.”  Her list of infractions included an affair with her bodyguard, daytime drinking of alcohol in her office, and “travel fraud” by having her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff “make up” official trips to destinations where she could spend time with family or friends on the taxpayers’ dime. They also reported that Chavez-DeRemer’s husband had been banned from her office building for sexually harassing Labor Department employees. So far all of the cabinet members booted by Trump have been women and if reports hold true, another one is likely to follow Noem, Bondi and Chavez-DeRemer out the door because the exit drums appear to be beating for DNI Tulsi who reportedly has been told that “she has until the midterms to pack up her bags and leave.” 🤷‍♀️ Though he hasn’t been booted yet, FBI Director Kash Patel is lashing out and probably also sweating profusely. As promised his lawyers filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic for their weekend article about his many failings.  The detailed complaint which claims that the reports of his absences and drinking are all unequivocably false even though just about everyone saw him downing champagne with the USA Hockey team and there are probably quite a few waiters and waitresses who also saw him at Las Vegas’ Poodle Club or at Washington DC’s Ned Club, two of the places cited in the Atlantic article, not to mention all the FBI agents he recently fired for failing to be sufficiently loyal to Trump.  A number of media outlets have already done FOIA requests for his bar receipts. It’s expected that his lawsuit, which was filed by a law firm known for filing complaints that go nowhere will go nowhere because discovery won’t be fun for Kash.   On the House front, Florida Democrat Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick who has been indicted for fraud has resigned to avoid what was expected to be an expulsion.  Florida Republican Cory Mills who is being investigated for violating campaign finance laws and for engaging in sexual misconduct as in threatening a few former girlfriends is still hanging on but won’t be for long if his fellow Republican, the also quirky Nancy Mace has anything to do with it.  She’s introduced a resolution to have him expelled but at least so far he’s got the backing of Speaker Mike Johnson, whose response so far is that lots of people in Congress screw around.        

Wow:  Something remarkable may be happening with regard to the treatment of pancreatic cancer.  One potential treatment involves experimental drug daraxonrasib, the other involves a personalized vaccine using mRNA technology.  The study results associated with both of these drugs have some in the medical field believing (hoping) that they could be the breakthrough for pancreatic cancer that Herceptin has been for those with HER2 positive breast cancer. Notably, one of the patients in the daraxonrasib study is former Senator Ben Sasse who disclosed in December that he had metastatic state 4 pancreatic cancer and was expected to die within three to four months.  He posted this week that the drug had shrunk his tumors, allowing him to reduce his reliance on pain medication. That might not sound like much, but for a cancer study it really is especially given his dire prognosis. The potentially awesome news is that there could be one or more treatments for pancreatic cancer on the not so distant horizon, the not so good news is that RFK’s crowd is still defending their decision to defund mRNA research because they are so blinded by their hate of the technology and its role in preventing COVID deaths that they refuse to recognize its lifesaving potential.

More 💩:  The UAE, home of Dubai, is asking the Trump administration to provide a wartime financial lifeline, possibly a currency swap line to help with the negative financial impact that the Iran war is having on its economy.  Tucker Carlson’s son who had been part of JD Vance’s team is no longer working for the VP, perhaps because dad Tucker now says that he regrets ever supporting Trump. And lastly, Pete Hegseth who apparently knows nothing about the 1918 flu epidemic that killed 45,000 members of the US military has removed the requirement that members of the military get flu shots.  What could possibly go wrong with bunches of unvaccinated young men and women in close quarters in barracks, subs, and other navy vessels?