Squirrels and Rhinos 😱 ✡️🌻😱 💣🚀🚢 

War TACO:  Press Secretary Lying Leavitt, due to have her second child momentarily is out on maternity leave.  She returned from her first maternity leave four days after having her first child and plans to do the same this time around.  That’s kind of nuts but then again nothing about this administration approaches normality and really, who needs maternity leave anyway? Given her plans, Trump has decided against appointing an interim fill-in and is instead rotating her role through his cabinet.  Yesterday was Secretary of State and many things Marco Rubio’s turn.  During his stint at the podium, he announced that Operation Epic Fury was over, replaced with Project Freedom, Trump’s moniker for his strategy of escorting ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Rubio probably shouldn’t have bothered discussing Project Freedom because last night despite Secretary of War and Beer Hegseth’s assertion that all was going swimmingly with the plan and that Iran’s shooting at the transiting ships and their US sherpa boats wasn’t enough of a provocation for Trump to move forward with his threat to rain all hell on Iran if they attacked any of them, Trump announced that the short lived Project Freedom was on hold since he’s on the verge of striking a permanent peace deal with Iran.  That would be nice, especially for the 1500 to 3000 commercial ships stranded in the area, but who knows if “peace is at hand” or if having seen the polls and prices at the pump Trump who keeps bragging about how many times he’s passed a dementia test and that he can distinguish a squirrel 🐿️  from a rhinos 🦏 is just engaging in rhetorical spit balling.  This morning oil prices are down on the news. 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Gerrymandering Chaos:  While Iran remains a mess, Trump did have some success yesterday in Indiana where at least five of the seven state’s Republican legislators he opposed lost their primaries to the MAGA opponents he’d endorsed.  Trump’s beef with the “losers” was over their failure to vote for a redistricting that would have netted Republicans at least one, possibly two, more House seats. It’s fair to assume that Indiana’s Republican led legislature will now have the votes to proceed with a redistricting in time for the 2028 election.  It’s growing increasingly clear that Republicans have given up on appealing to voters by developing policies they’d like.  Why should they bother when they can just gerrymander their way into control because while there’s still a good chance that Democrats will win the House during this year’s midterms, future Republican gerrymandering in states like Tennessee, Mississippi, and maybe even Georgia will make it increasingly difficult for Democrats to win House majorities in future elections.        

More 💩:   Last week, the Department of Justice announced that the Southern Poverty Law Center (the SPLC) had been indicted, something about deceiving its donors about how their contributions were used to pay informants as part of their strategy of outing racist organizations like the KKK. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche doubled down, saying that neither the DOJ nor the FBI had any idea about the way that those “lawbreakers” at the SPLC were conducting their investigations, and really why should they want the SPLC or anyone to go after white supremacists.  The SPLC called that assertion out as bull, saying that the FBI knew what they were up to because they frequently kept them in the loop. The SPLC has brought Blanche’s deceptive public statements to the attention of the Alabama court, requesting a copy of the grand jury testimony used to get the inditement.  SPLC’s assertion is that the DOJ lied when seeking the indictment. In response, Blanche took to Fox to kind of tap dance around his lies.  This case could be on the way to imploding in the DOJ’s face, or at the very least it should be.   On the subject of deception, remember when Trump asserted multiple times that donors were paying for his East Wing ballroom project.  Apparently, they are not as evidenced by the $72 billion budget reconciliation bill presented by Senator Chuck Grassley to his Senate colleagues.  The bill includes $1 billion for “Secret Service security upgrades related to the White House East Wing Modernization Project,” in other words, Trump has or at least is trying to shift the full cost of his ballroom onto taxpayers, is anyone surprised?  In other ballroom news, the contractors who demolished the old East Wing dumped the associated dirt and debris, including lots of toxic chemicals, onto the East Potomac Park public golf course.  To add salt to that now festering wound, Trump is trying to take over the golf course turning it into a “lavish” Trump facility, albeit one sitting on lots of poison.  On a more positive note, for the moment Mifepristone is available again, at least until the Supreme Court renders a final decision on whether or not it should be. And because a week doesn’t go by without learning more about bad behavior by politicians, it turns out, that in addition to the girlfriend threatening Cory Mills, there’s another Republican one being investigated in the House. This one is Chuck Edwards who represents North Carolina, something about singling out female aides for “special attention.”