Going After E Jean 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀🚢

Texas Two Step:  With 63.8% of the vote, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton easily won his state’s Republican Senate runoff primary. He will face off against Democratic candidate State Representative James Talarico in November. Trump is doing another victory lap.  While his endorsement helped turn Paxton’s victory over Senator John Cornyn into a rout, Paxton likely would have won without it which is why Trump went with his last-minute endorsement in the first place. Paxton is seriously flawed, his list of crimes as well as his ongoing very messy ongoing public divorce rivals Trump’s offenses but it’s Texas where the unctuous Paxton has won three statewide elections so despite his negatives and a lot of enthusiasm among Democrats for Talarico, Paxton stands a decent chance of winning the Senate race though it is notable that only 1.4 million Republican voters showed up for the Paxton-Cornyn runoff, far fewer than the 2.3 million that showed up for March’s Talarico-Crockett primary race. Republicans have already spent around $130 million on this race, much of which was spent on ads that disparaged Paxton. Those ads as well as the anti-Paxton pages on the National Republican Senatorial Committees website are now gone.  The new ones, and there will be lots of them because this election is going to be very expensive, are likely to follow the playbook that Paxton has already started implementing. They’ll attack Talarico, or as Paxton is now calling him Talafreako, as an unmanly vegan who loves illegal immigrants and who is all in on trans surgeries for kids.  Talarico isn’t a vegan, not that there’s anything wrong with that, his quotes about “open” borders and sex change operations have been taken out of context but Paxton is a smooth operator and a scarily effective communicator who shouldn’t be discounted though Talarico is no slouch.  Last night, turning Paxton’s slime into a revenue producer Talarico announced that “I am a Talafreako” t-shirts are now available on his campaign website for $36.  Texas is littered with onetime Democratic Senatorial hopefuls; it would be great if Talarico goes the distance but again it’s Texas.  One of those earlier hopefuls was Colin Allred, who beat out his Democratic opponent, sitting House member Julie Johnson on Tuesday.  He is expected to win in November in the heavily Democratic Dallas area district. Johnson unfortunately is a victim of the Republican gerrymandering that pitted Democrats against each other in the few remaining blue districts.  She’s not alone in losing out, long time Representative Al Green lost his election to Representative Christian Menefee.  The Democratic “castrate the Zionists” candidate who had received funding from a dark money right wing group deceptively and disingenuously called the Lead left PAC, lost to her opponent Sheriff Johnny Garcia.  Sadly, she did win 40% of the votes cast because her hate the Jews comments while deplorable weren’t as offensive as they should have been for lots of voters, a sad sign of the times.  In other election news, South Carolina’s Republican State Senators decided against redistricting away the seat currently held by long-time Democratic Representative and civil rights leader Jim Clyburn mostly because some of them thought that it was unethical to toss out early voting ballots that had already been cast, especially since some of those ballots were from members of the military.  Also, in a decision that is already being appealed to the Supreme Court, a federal appeals court ruled against Alabama’s attempt to eliminate one of its majority Black districts saying that the state’s redistricting plan was discriminatory to Black voters. Unfortunately, SCOTUS is kind of discriminatory to Black voters too so there’s a good chance that they will overturn the appeals court ruling.    

Iran War:  Though the official line is that the ceasefire is holding and that Trump and his Cracker Jack negotiators are close to inking a deal of some sort with Iran, last night the US carried out “defensive strikes” against Iran again.  That’s the second time this week for anyone who is counting.  Also, yesterday during a Kim Jong Un style cabinet meeting that was supposed to take place at Camp David but was moved at the last minute back to the White House, Trump threatened Oman saying that the country “will behave just like everybody else, or we'll have to blow them up" after Iran proposed that the Omanis might partner with them as part of Tehran’s bid to keep control of transit through the Strait of Hormuz.  As to the shift of the cabinet meeting venue, the decision was made around the same time as Trump’s third “annual” physical leading some wish-casters to suggest that the orange one’s doctors requested that he remain near Walter Reed Medical Center and/or the White House’s medical facilities. 🤷‍♀️ Though Trump’s doctors don’t appear to have issued an official statement about his exam, in between nodding off during his cabinet meeting Trump assured us that he’s perfect, healthier than everyone else in the universe.       

More 💩:  The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into 83-year old adjudicated sexual assault victim E Jean Caroll, asserting that she may have committed perjury during at least one of the depositions she gave in her civil case against Trump when she said that she’d received no outside financial help because she later told the judge overseeing the case that she did receive some help from Linked-in cofounder Reid Hoffman’s non-profit for her legal expenses.  The investigation is a stretch but then again E Jean was subsequently awarded $63 million, money that she still hasn’t received because Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court. Apparently weaponizing the DOJ is only a problem when committed or allegedly committed by Democrats. Acting AG Todd Blanche says he has recused himself from the case because he represented Trump 🤷‍♀️ 🤷‍♀️.  As to the weaponization slush fund that Blanche set up for Trump to compensate those who were victimized” for “touring” the Capitol grounds and/or causing election disruption, California and New York are threatening to impose a 100% tax on proceeds received from the fund by any of those nice tourists who reside in their states and a bipartisan group of more than 30 ex-judges have filed a request in federal court to investigate the settlement that led to the creation of the slush fund, arguing the DOJ "deceived" the presiding judge.  In other legal news Federal prosecutors in Chicago dropped all charges against a group that have become known as the "Broadview Six" activists. The group which included some Democratic politicians had surrounded, pushed, and allegedly damaged a federal agent's vehicle during an anti-INS protest. The charges against them were dropped after a federal judge discovered major grand jury abuses by local US prosecutors.  The misconduct included prosecutors improperly coaching jurors on the strength of the evidence, communicating with jurors outside the grand jury room, and actively dismissing jurors who disagreed with the government’s case. Pam Bondi who was the Attorney General when the Broadview prosecutorial misconduct took place, is back in the news. Shortly after she was terminated by Trump she was treated for thyroid cancer, her prognosis is good. Unrelated to her diagnosis, Trump who understands the value of keeping potential tattle talers within his tent has appointed her to serve on his advisory committee on AI policy.  It’s only a matter of time before he comes up with an appointment for Tulsi Gabbard too, maybe she can become his chief ET emissary.