Groundhog Day Again ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Shadows: As you likely noted, Judge Engoron who had earlier said he would do his best to issue a ruling in Trump’s NY tax fraud case by the end of January has not. Instead, a court spokesman said yesterday that the much-anticipated ruling will come in early to mid-February.  One possible reason for the delay is that Barbara Jones, the retired federal judge serving as special court appointed monitor overseeing the Trump Organization’s financial reports has identified “certain deficiencies” in the company’s financial information. Specifically, she has uncovered an undocumented $48 million loan that Trump received from an entity affiliated with his building in Chicago. Trump reported the loan on his financial statement as a liability for several years but it’s not clear that the loan ever existed.  Since the fraud case is all about illegal financial sleight of hand, it’s thought that in addition to making sure that his final opinion is bullet proof, Engoron is taking the “now you see it, now you don’t” loan into consideration as he determines just how much to penalize Trump.  Also, there’s still no ruling from the Washington DC appeals court which largely explains why the January 6^th election interference case which had been scheduled to start on March 4 has been temporarily removed from Judge Chutkan’s schedule. That March 4 date had always been aspirational but seeing it erased from the docket is depressing. Nothing much is happening in Florida either though Judge “loose” Cannon did have a sit down with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, something about Smith wanting to keep the contents of some of the most top secret of the “purloined” documents away from the prying eyes of Trump and his legal team.  The news out of Fulton County is also somewhat depressing. District Attorney Fani Willis says that she’s not going to recuse over the allegations about whether her relationship with one of her special counsels involved him paying or more likely sharing costs of a vacation getaway but is due to explain more about their relationship today and is expected to have to go through the details with her judge.  All these delays and screw-ups are depressing and not just for us but for Nikki Haley who really needs Republican voters, or at least the few who care about presidential candidates being knee deep in slimy muck, to see Trump fined bigly for his misdeeds while also seeing more visible evidence of his other crimes. She needs some of that to happen before South Carolina’s February 24 Republican primary if she stands any chance of narrowing Trump’s SC lead, currently projected to be 26 points.  Worth noting that while Nikki Haley isn’t Trump, neither is she quite the model candidate that anti-Trumpers and even some Biden skeptical voters would like to believe she is, and it’s not just her anti-abortion position which while not as restrictive as some in her party, is pretty awful.  This week when asked about the shenanigans going on in Texas where Governor Greg Abbott, another one auditioning hard for Trump’s VP slot, has been threatening to secede Texas from the US, she said: sure, states can secede if they want to. She really needs to brush up on the events leading to the Civil War, that not so little skirmish that she earlier asserted had little to do with slavery.

Legislative Morass: On Wednesday, in an impressive bipartisan vote of 357 to 70, the House passed a $78 billion tax bill that would expand the child tax credit while also extending some business tax credits. In all 188 Democrats joined 168 Republicans in voting to approve the bill while 23 Democrats and 47 Republicans voted against it.  That’s the good news, the not so good news is that Senate Republicans, especially the so-called pro-life contingent have serious reservations about funding that benefits children and are especially concerned about passing a bill that would make President Biden “look good” in the run up to the election as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley put it.  Grassley isn’t the only Republican concerned about that, it’s just that his 90-year-old brain has no filter, so he says things out loud that others just think. It’s almost as if Republicans are playing a legislative version of rope a dope. House Republicans pass a tax bill but insist that they won’t consider a border security bill because Trump wants the border to fester and hates all things Ukraine.  Senate Republicans are still considering a border security bill that also includes funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan because House Republicans say they had to tie border security to foreign aid funding to get House support, but House Republicans then say that the bill should it make it to them will be dead in their water because that’s where Trump wants it.  To add to the mess, there’s another set of government funding deadlines coming up in March and if the House votes to impeach Homeland Secretary Mayorkas, then the Senate will have to push everything aside to hold an impeachment trial. The only possible good news is that it’s not clear that House Republicans have the votes to impeach Mayorkas. Republican Ken Buck says he’s a definite no on impeachment and even the Wall Street Journal is on record saying it’s a stupid thing to do.  One more House thing, early voting for the February 13 special election to fill the seat vacated by George of many names Santos begins tomorrow,  Tell your friends, to vote!  

Fog: Iran is concerned about just how damaging the US response to their “surrogates” drones and bombs and other mayhem will be. There’s an expression for that: FAFO. The UN says that they’ll run out of funding for UNRWA in a few weeks.  FAFO applies there as well but unfortunately the sufferers are going to be civilians because somehow or other Hamas always seems to obtain resources. A lot of press yesterday about Biden sanctioning the Israeli settlers who’ve attacked Palestinians and Israeli peace activists in the West Bank.  Those sanctions, which include banning the settlers who’ve committed bad acts from using the US financial system and from obtaining visas, are probably as much to win back pro-Palestinian voters in swing states like Michigan as they are to punish the settlers because the presidential election looms and “the salty mouthed” Biden who Politico reports has taken to calling Trump a “sick f-ck” in private particularly when referring to said SF’s awful jokes about the assault of Paul Pelosi’s needs to win the swing states. Once again, we’re hearing that there’s a ceasefire/prisoner release in the works. But we hear that a lot.  Sigh.

#BringThemAllHomeNow 

Swift Action ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Dumb, Dumber and Malevolent:  The right is freaking out over the possibility that Taylor Swift is planning to endorse Biden, something she did do in 2020. To try to dissuade her and also because her overwhelming success drives them nuts, a number of prominent rightwing wingnuts are now attacking all things Swiftie, focusing of course on her relationship with Kansas City Chief Travis Kelce. The wingnut contingent has even suggested that the fix is in on the upcoming Kansas City Chief-San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl. When referring to Kelce, the crazies also manage to toss in a reference to his endorsement of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as if that’s a bad thing because, naturally, to them the idea of a prominent sports figure encouraging COVID and flu vaccination is beyond the pale. While the football conspiracy theory and endorsement drama are nuts and maybe just a bit amusing, what’s more troubling is that Swift has been targeted by malevolent actors who’ve used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create and post very graphic AI generated nudes of her on Twitter, photos that Twitter’s algorithms then amplified.  Even Twitter realized that was a bad thing.  Though Musk’s minions didn’t take the “pictures” down, they did temporarily freeze the ability to search Taylor Swift’s name on the site while they tried to “fix” the problem, something hard to do given the Chief Twit’s evisceration of Twitter’s content moderation capabilities.  Pushing AI generated Swiftie porn is a bad thing, but even worse for all of us is that someone or some group used an easily accessible AI application to generate robocalls intended to suppress Democratic turnout in New Hampshire’s presidential primary.  The call used an artificially generated “Biden” voice that told likely Democrat voters that voting for Biden in the primary would enable Trump. Sleuths have figured out which app was used to create those calls but still don’t know who originated the calls, whether the miscreant was a juvenile prankster, a Roger Stone like rightwing figure or even someone from Democratic challenger Dean Phillips’ team. There’s no indication that the call had any impact on the New Hampshire primary, but it doesn’t take much imagination to anticipate that a similar AI generated call could cause havoc in November.  Election regulators across the country are trying to develop protective guardrails but given what happened on January 6, we should all be very concerned.  Faux compromising nudes of Taylor could be just the canary in the coal mine.  

Impeach, Impeach:  House Republicans haven’t given up on impeaching Biden, but for now they’re focused on Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, not because he’s done anything impeachable but because going after him allows them to keep the migrants streaming through the Mexico border “catastrophe” in the headlines where they want it to remain through election day. Last night, without evidence that Mayorkas has committed anything that constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors, they voted two articles of impeachment out of committee in anticipation of a full House vote on Mayorkas’ fate.  At the same time, Speaker Mike Johnson, Trump’s puppet du jour, continues to make it clear that he opposes the very conservative immigration legislation that Biden supports and that many on both sides of the aisle in the Senate are still trying to send his way. Given that Johnson’s position is that there can be no aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan without legislation that deals with the border problem, his illogical position is a bigly problem and also evidence that Republicans, particularly House Republicans and their Orange god, don’t want solutions, they just want mayhem and anything that could grease the runway for another Trump presidency. To complicate matters, or to better showcase his hypocrisy, Johnson’s position is that Biden doesn’t need any legislation to clamp down at the border, he can do all he should do by executive action. An interesting position given that the courts have ruled against a lot of the types of executive action that Johnson says Biden could take without legislation but not an all that surprising position given Trump’s meddling and Trump’s view that presidents are kings who can do anything they want, courts and laws be damned.  The bottom line is that immigration reform remains a hot potato, Republicans claim they want to do something but really don’t if doing something effective diffuses the problem and to be fair there are left leaning Democrats who won’t sign on to anything they deem too restrictive.  And, of course, meantime in Texas Governor Abbott is trying to provoke a civil war.  Politics at its worst.

It’s January 31:  Judge Engoron said that he would rule on how much money Trump and his co-defendants owe for all their fraud as well as whether Trump can continue to do business in New York state by the end of January.  Today is the last day of the month so something, or a few hundred million somethings, should happen by day’s end. We’re also still waiting, impatiently, for the federal appeals court in Washington to rule on Trump’s claim of immunity, another thing that is expected momentarily. Both rulings are likely to cause the already seriously agitated Trump whose PACs spent a mere $50 million of donor money on his legal bills during 2023 to toss ketchup or worse. It does appear that Trump finally understands, or understands for now, that continuing to slime E Jean Caroll is costly which likely explains why his lawyer Alina Habba decided it was okay to go after the E Jean Caroll case judge, Lewis Kaplan, claiming he’d had an inappropriate mentor-mentee relationship with E Jean’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation) decades ago when they both were at the Paul Weiss law firm.  As she pointed out in a rather scathing response to Habba’s accusation, Roberta Kaplan said that though she and the judge overlapped for two years when she was a new associate, and the judge was a very, very senior litigator preparing to move on to his judgeship they had no contact so that mentor-mentee accusation is just another bigly lie.  Even Habba figured out that she’d gone too far, yesterday she withdrew her allegation, acknowledging that she had no reason to believe anything she’d said was true.  Trump however is still throwing verbal darts at the judge.

Fog:  On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that somewhere around 10% of UNWRA’s 12,000 employees have ties to Hamas or other militant groups meaning that the twelve who actively participated in the October 7 attacks represent just a drop in the bucket of a large problem. The number of countries who’ve frozen aid to UNWRA has now grown to fifteen which is also a huge problem that even Israel acknowledges because few question that Gaza’s aid needs are large, the dilemma is how best to provide that assistance when the organization that’s been responsible for providing aid has been so coopted. Also, difficult is figuring out how to retaliate to the attacks by Iran’s proxies, particularly the deadly attack on the US base in Jordan.  President Biden is facing the challenge of threading the needle, a retaliation harsh enough to discourage further attacks but not so harsh that it leads to war with Iran, a war that some hawks in the Senate like Lindsay Graham and Roger Wicker seem more willing to risk but that most would prefer to avoid.  Biden says he’s made his decision, so something is going to happen soon, more likely targeting an Iranian ship rather than an attack within the country.   

Complicated Lives: Trouble lies ahead for Democratic Congresswoman/Squad member Cori Bush whose financial records have been subpoenaed.  Something about paying her then boyfriend, now husband for security services that he wasn’t certified to provide. The payments which came from official House funds were over and above Bush’s already unusually high security expenditures. But some good news for Fulton Country DA Fani Willis. It looks like she won’t be called to testify in her special prosecutor’s divorce case as he has reached a temporary settlement with his estranged wife.                  

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Escalation ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Defamation Day: On Friday after less than three hours of deliberation a New York based federal jury awarded E Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for the defamatory comments that Trump made as president and then continued to make, including the countless derogatory statements he made until the day of the verdict. The award includes $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million in compensatory damages, all in addition to $5 million that Carroll was previously awarded in last May’s sexual assault and defamation case. Naturally, Trump attacked the verdict, and the “corrupt” legal system as did a significant number of Republican politicians who when asked said there’s nothing wrong with a convicted sex offender, or at least one named Trump, becoming president again. Trump’s appealing the decision but is expected to be required to set aside funds or, to the extent he can get one, a bond with the court.  He’s already had to set aside $5 million to cover the earlier award.  For Trump, that initial $5 million was probably chump change but $83 million isn’t, especially since it’s highly likely that Judge Engoron who is overseeing his NY civil fraud case is expected to impose a fine in excess of $300 million as early as this week.  According to Suzanne Craig, the NY Times financial writer who’s been on the Trump financial beat for some time, as a result of the sale of his Washington hotel lease and another property Trump can probably can cover the $83 million out of funds on hand, but he likely doesn’t have enough liquid assets for all of the rest which means at some point he’ll have to start selling real estate because even though his delusional fan base has stepped up to cover his legal expenses, it’s not clear if their contributions can lawfully be used to pay fines and damages and even if those funds can be used for fines, he’d need them to contribute lots more, a bit challenging given that he also needs bigly bucks for his presidential run. 

Presidential Politics: At least for now the RNC isn’t calling off future primaries because even they get that the optics of doing so while not so “birdbrain” Nikki Haley, who Trump has taken to calling by a racially charged version of her name, is still in the race reeks. Not that pushing slimy decisions or nasty nicknames is a problem for Trump and his crew.  Over the weekend, he spoke out forcefully against the border/immigration reform bill that a bipartisan team of Senators have negotiated, telling Nevada rally goers that they can blame it on him when the bill fails.  That bill which would also facilitate the funding of foreign aid contains major concessions from Biden and the Democrats, but Trump is against it, not because of what it contains but because its passage would be a “win” for Biden, making Trump’s “hordes of infected migrant terrorists crossing the border” mantra a less effective campaign point so instead Houe Republicans are progressing with their impeachment of Homeland Security Mayorkas.  Even Oklahoma Republican Senator Lankford, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, thinks that Trump putting his personal aspirations ahead of a real opportunity for US border security and immigration reform is wrongheaded.  Lankford who was censured over the weekend by the Oklahoma Republican party for working with Democrats on a border solution hasn’t totally lost his Republican bona fides, he’s one of those who thinks that it’s okay that Trump’s a sex offender. As to Biden, who the press keeps saying is struggling, it turns out that he won the New Hampshire primary by an even larger margin than first reported.  With almost all of the write-ins counted Biden garnered 63.9% of the vote with Representative Dean Phillips, who was on the ballot and campaigned all over the state, getting a little less than 20%. Marianne Williamson who eked out 4% has now dropped out of the race that few remembered she was still in. Biden actually got far more votes in New Hampshire than Obama did during his reelection run and Obama had the advantage of actually being on the ballot. Shifting back to craven Republican acts, after former Congresswoman Liz Cheney pointed out that VP wannabee Elise Stefanik once issued a statement about how tragic January 6 was, calling the day’s violence un-American, Stefanik who now calls those who were convicted of committing acts of violence on January 6 hostages, wiped references to her statement off social media. On the VP front, Trump’s team is denying a NY Post report that he ever reached out to RFK Jr, about serving as his running mate which probably means that he did.  Wonder if Elise is into ketchup tossing?

Fog of War:  Friday was Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It was also the day that the UN’s top court issued what the Times of Israel called a yellow flag, telling Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire.  The court also called for Hamas to immediately release the hostages it took with the help of some of its “buddies” on October 7, but that part of the UN court statement got short shrift in the press.  As to those “buddies” it turns out that at least twelve of them were United Nations Relief and Works (UNRWA) officials. Israel has shared evidence of their complicity in the October 7 “festivities” with the UN, the US, and a number of other countries.  This morning the NY Times provided some details, reporting hat one of the implicated UN employees kidnapped a woman, another handed out ammunition and a third took part in the massacre of 97 kibbutzniks.  Sickening but the only real surprise is that the involvement of only 12 UNWRA employees has been documented so far, or at least publicly documented, because it has been an open secret for some time that Hamas is embedded in UNWRA. The US, Germany, Japan, Canada, The Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Finland, Australia, and Austria have temporarily suspended aid to UNWRA as a result of its employees’ involvement on October 7. Altogether that represents about $600 million in aid being put on hold with $344 million to have come from the US.  According to the AP, from 2014 to 2020 UN agencies spent nearly $4.5 billion in Gaza with Qatar donating an additional $1.3.  Given the extensive and highly sophisticated tunnel network running under Gaza and Hamas’ apparently endless supply of munitions and missiles it’s fair to assume that a lot of that aid money was not used to build the types of infrastructure that would have benefitted Gazans. How is it that so few of UNWRA’s 30,000 employees failed to notice the tunnel construction or the missiles and grenades? Or that no one at UN headquarters had a clue? And, now what happens?  People are suffering in Gaza, there’s no reason to believe that Hamas is going to change and beyond firing the implicated employees and expressing faux shock over their complicity, who really believes that the UN will do anything different but shift paperwork going forward. Elsewhere in the Middle East Iran is up to more no good. This weekend one of the militias it supports shot a drone into a US base in northern Jordan, killing 3 US soldiers and injuring at least thirty more. Escalation much.   

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

The Stuck Scab ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Zero Sum Game: The economy is doing well, interest rates and inflation are coming down, GDP growth is up, the stock market is humming along, and that much feared recession doesn’t appear to be in the cards. Even Fox’s reliably pro-Trump faux economist Lawrence Kudlow has been heard to admit, on air, that the gloom and doom scenario is behind us. President Biden’s challenge is getting that message out to Americans who still aren’t convinced and while messaging the economy’s improvement isn’t easy, it’s a far better challenge than having to explain a recession. Well, better for most people.  Trump is truly bummed because he’d much prefer a stock market crash, out of control inflation and skyrocketing interest rates because that scenario would have been easier to run on which isn’t to say that he isn’t still claiming things are awful, it’s just that some of his followers know better and by November more of them are likely to note that the economy is okay.  That takes us to the border “crisis.” With the economy on the upswing, Trump needs the border situation to continue festering which means more stories about smallpox infected terrorist hordes streaming in from Mexico which explains why he’s opposing the bipartisan immigration reform package that the Senate has been working on and a bunch of governors especially Texas’ Abbott are threatening a civil war.  The immigration package which until yesterday was fully supported by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell includes border funding tied to concessions from the White House as well as money for Ukraine, something that McConnell has long supported but that is anathema to Trump and his BFF Putin.  Mitch, however, is now wavering on the immigration package that his team negotiated.  On Wednesday, behind closed doors, he told Republican Senators that “we don’t want to do anything to undermine Trump,” translated to mean that with Trump having a lock on the Republican candidacy, it’s time to fully kowtow to his wishes.  If Trump wants more mayhem at the border, let’s give him mayhem.  As Mitt Romney puts it, the border is a very important issue for Trump. “And the fact that he would communicate to Republican Senators and Congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”  Yesterday, McConnell denied that he’d pulled his support from the border funding package, but that’s probably mostly because his remarks were made public rather than anything else.  He now has an optics problem, one that Biden’s team is already using against Republicans.  The bottom line, there is an immigration problem but it’s harder for Trump, Moscow Mitch, Houseboy Johnson, and the rest of his Republican toadies to run on it if they are vocally opposed to supporting any legislation to fix it, not that will stop them from trying.  

Bye Bye Birdbrain? Turning to Trump, to put it mildly he’s not happy with “birdbrain” Nikki Haley.  He wants her gone now so in addition to personally threatening her with “investigations” and insulting her intellect and sartorial choices, he’s making it clear to her big money contributors that he’s not happy with them either. He’s told them they better cut her off ASAP if they ever want to do any business with “his” administration.  He also says that he’ll refuse their money should they opt to throw some his way, but that part is pure BS, because Trump would never turn down money.  To hasten Haley’s departure, Trump and another one of his toadies, RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, are looking into cancelling the remaining Republican primaries and just declaring him the presumptive candidate.  That McDaniel is onboard for that goes far to explaining why she’s still RNC Chair because it’s not like she’s had a string of successes. When not campaigning, sweaty, resentful Trump is busy with other things like defending himself in court.  Yesterday he actually testified, or tried to testify, on his own behalf in the E Jean Caroll defamation case. He didn’t get to say much because the judge refused to let him deny that he knew or sexually assaulted Caroll because those facts aren’t in dispute anywhere except in Trump’s head and among his diehard acolytes especially those trying out for his VP slot.  The issue in front of the jury is only about the defamation, how much it will take to “fix” E Jean’s tarnished reputation and how much more Trump should be penalized for sliming and continuing to slime her, not that Trump plans to stop sliming her.  He was up for hours the night before his testimony slamming her with dozens of ugly Truth Social posts because that’s what Republican presumptive presidential candidates do these days. As to sexual assaults, remember those accusations about Matt Gaetz having sex with underaged girls, they haven’t gone away.  Apparently, though his archenemy Kevin McCarthy is gone, the House Ethics committee started on his watch is heating up, with the committee working on obtaining testimony from the young woman involved. Furious Gaetz is in full denial mode but doesn’t appear to be taking his ire out on Speaker for now Johnson whose majority may be on the verge of shrinking again since North Dakota’s one Congressman, Republican Kelly Armstrong has just announced that he’s running for Governor to replace Doug Burgum who is wants to be Trump’s Energy Secretary.     

And:  Biden won the coveted United Auto Workers endorsement.  Not surprising since he’s been demonstrably pro-labor and even appeared on a UAW picket line when the union was striking the major auto companies while Trump showed his “solidarity” by visiting a non-union shop.  UAW president Shawn Fain pulled no punches, calling Trump a scab during his Biden endorsement speech.  Trump may never see the inside of a prison cell, but his former advisor Peter Navarro may.  Yesterday he was sentenced to four months in the slammer for contempt of Congress, relating to his refusal to comply with a January 6 committee subpoena. Naturally, he like Steve Bannon who was also found guilty and sentenced for lack of compliance, is appealing hoping he can put off his jail time until after Trump is reelected (ugh) and grants him a pardon.  The clock is ticking on Trump’s immunity appeal.  Pundits predicted that the Appeals Court would have acted by now.  They haven’t, but it’s Friday so maybe by the end of the day we’ll hear something.  And, we still haven’t learned very much about the accusations against Fulton County DA Fani Willis.  It appears that she had a personal relationship with one of her prosecutors but it’s not clear that her canoodling will derail the RICO case because while salacious it has nothing to do with election interference.      

 

#BringThemAllHomeNow

Palmetto On Tap ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Granite:  Likely because from here on out the 2024 presidential primaries won’t matter, the press rolled out all their pundits, fancy maps, and leader boards, treating New Hampshire’s race as if it was a nail biter. It wasn’t.  As predicted by the polls, Nikki Haley lost to Trump by more than 11 points, hardly the close race she needed. Moreover, many of those who made up the 43% who voted for her were either independents or Democrats who’d shifted their registration for the day to stick it to Trump. The Republican Party, even in somewhat independent New Hampshire, is all in on MAGA and Trump.  Unfortunately for Nikki Haley, absent a political earthquake she’s unlikely to approach 40% again. Despite that, instead of conceding, last night Haley delivered a rousing speech to her supporters, promising to stick it out at least through South Carolina’s February 24 primary. Maybe she will or maybe her financial backers, who like her know that even though South Carolina is her home state she’ll lose bigly there, will cut their financial cords. That’s what Trump, the all powerful MAGA god wants them to do and these days most in his party heed his demands.  Instead of giving an upbeat victory speech, he seethed, targeting Haley, insisting that she should move aside immediately. He called her an imposter, attacking her for her enthusiastic speech, saying he had to be mean because “I find in life you can’t let people get away with bullsh-t.” That from the king of bullsh-tery.  Worth noting that South Carolina Senator Tim Scott who, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Doug Burgum, was with Trump in New Hampshire responded to Trump’s nasty Haley remarks by saying to Trump “I just love you.” If Trump is looking for an obsequious running mate who’ll never second guess him, he need look no further. By the way, North Dakota Governor Burgum announced that he’s not running for reelection, he’s likely angling to be Trump’s Energy Secretary.  President Biden had a pretty good night too. Though he wasn’t on the New Hampshire Democratic ballot, through the magic of write-in ballots, he’s received 51.5% of the votes so far, easily beating the more than twenty candidates that were on the ballot, including Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips (19.8%),  guru Marianne Williamson (4.7%) and some fellow named President Bodie (<.1%). It’s fair to assume that a significant share of the 14.3% of the write-in ballots that still need to be processed will end up in Biden’s column. Not bad for a guy who wasn’t officially in the race.  Phillips insists that he’s remaining in the race to make a point and to increase his name recognition.  It is not clear why Williamson is still in.  It’s not just Democrats and Republicans who matter, the No Labels party is still out there, threatening to put up a candidate, something that despite an earlier suggestion that he might, Phillips clarified he won’t entertain.  Two of No Labels’ early funders, members of the Durst real estate family, are now suing the group, claiming it pulled a bait and switch. The Durst’s say that they only provided funding to promote bipartisanship, that supporting a third-party presidential candidate wasn’t supposed to be part of the group’s mission. Also out there are RFK Jr and former Bernie guy Cornell West both of whom have the potential to be spoilers, ala Jill Stein and Ralph Nader.

Legal Morass: Scott, Burgum and Ramaswamy weren’t the only ones with Trump last night, lawyer Alina Habba was there too.  That’s notable because the maskless Habba managed to get Trump’s E Jean Caroll defamation case postponed over her exposure to her parents’ COVID.  Habba told presiding Judge Kaplan that though she had tested negative she wasn’t feeling well and was running a fever. The case was supposed to resume today, but late last night it was put off until Thursday at which point maybe Kaplan will ask Habba how someone exposed to COVID and running a fever was well enough to travel to New Hampshire when she was too ill to appear in court. In other Trump legal news, yesterday, the Washington DC federal appeals court declined to rehear arguments over Judge Chutkan’s decision to impose a gag order to stop him from talking about witnesses and court staff while he awaits trial in the January 6 election interference case.  Still no news about Trump’s immunity appeal.

Fog:  Nothing but death to report out of the Middle East right now where there may or may not be a ceasefire under discussion.  Israel wants the hostages released, Hamas not so much. On the Congressional front, the Senate is still working out kinks in a potential bipartisan immigration – foreign aid package. If, and it’s a big if, the package makes it out of the Senate it could still die in the House where Speaker for now Mike Johnson fears doing anything without Trump’s blessing. Think about that, everyone agrees that immigration reform is necessary, and Ukraine is running out of weaponry, Biden has made concessions, but Trump and his crowd want the situation to fester because the worse things are the better it is for his candidacy. America first?            

 

#BringThemAllHomeNow 

The Demented Emperor ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

And Then There Were Two:  On Friday night during a New Hampshire rally speech Trump repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming that Haley was responsible for failing to protect the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and destroying 10,000 implicating documents.  He also asserted that Joe Biden was leading the country into World War II, a historically bizarre comment that he’s made before. The audience ignored his dementia level gaffes because when a naked orange emperor asks you to admire his new clothes, you do?  On Sunday, the press which stepped away from their Biden is the demented one narrative to focus on Trump’s troubling gaffes, quickly pivoted back to their Trump’s The Man reporting after Florida’s Ron DeSantis pulled out of the presidential race.  Keeping with the emperor theme DeSantis fully endorsed the demented, mentally challenged guy for president.  DeSantis’ withdrawal isn’t a surprise nor is his endorsement, he was running as a Trump mini me. He focused a lot of his resources on Iowa and despite his second-place finish had failed to win a single district. Moreover, he was only polling in the single digits in New Hampshire.  Most pundits had expected him to pull out but thought that he’d wait until after Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary to do so, but Trump’s team, which scarily is far more professional and experienced than the crew that ran his 2016 and 2020 campaigns had been pressuring DeSantis to move aside ASAP and their efforts paid off.  Those same efforts have also resulted in endorsements from the other former presidential contenders, those not named Chris Christie or Asa Hutchinson. South Carolina Senator Tim Scott who Nikki Haley appointed to the Senate when she was governor, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, and Vivek Ramaswamy have all endorsed Trump.  Nikki Haley, received the endorsement of New Hampshire’s conservative Union Leader paper over the weekend and still has NH Governor Chris Sununu’s support as well as one from the all-important Judge Judy who has been out campaigning with her but who are we kidding, Haley will be gone too, it’s just a matter of whether she sticks around to lose her home state of South Carolina where all pundits and pollsters expect her to go down in humiliating flames.  She’s expected to do better in New Hampshire, but better is a relative term.  Even before DeSantis’ weekend pullout, Trump’s lead over her had widened likely because Ramaswamy’s supporters had migrated into his camp.

Veep Without Selina: With the Republican candidates exiting the presidential race the focus is now on Trump’s Veepstakes.  Trump has teased that he already knows who he’s going to pick.  Whether that’s true or not is anyone’s guess because in classic Apprentice mode he’s got all the possible candidates visiting his lair, professing their loyalty, and kissing his butt.  Tim Scott has even announced his engagement to his once secret girlfriend/beard because nothing says Veep material better than marriage. According to Politico the long list of candidates includes NY Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Ohio Senator JD Vance, Arizona wannabee Kari Lake, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Kristi Noem, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Doug Burgum, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott.  Notably absent from that list is Nikki Haley but who knows, if she pulls out of the race, endorses him quickly, and tosses in her first born as collateral, in exchange for forever fealty, maybe she could jump to the head of the line.  Though Stefanik, who asserts there’s no way that Trump sexually assaulted E Jean Caroll despite the jury’s conclusion that he most certainly did, seemed on top of the Veep list last week, my guess is he’ll stick with one of the more physically attractive options because Trump is who he is.  As to the E Jean Caroll case, with the issue of Trump’s culpability established, the jury is deciding how much 💰 💰 he owes her.  Trump says he’ll be there to testify on his own behalf today or then again maybe not because the last time he promised to do so, he bailed at the last minute.

Line Crossing:  If you are wondering why there’s been little mention of New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, it’s because much to the dismay of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, the Democratic National Committee decided that small, mostly white states shouldn’t go first making next month’s South Carolina primary rather than New Hampshire’s the first official Democratic primary of this presidential cycle. As a result, President Biden is not on the NH primary ballot.  That said, the primary is still taking place tomorrow with twenty-one other candidates including Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips on the Democratic ballot. Biden is expected to garner enough write-in votes to win, but his margin over Phillips will likely be slimmer than elsewhere given the awkward mechanics. Elsewhere in Biden land, son Hunter has finally agreed to testify behind closed House doors.  No doubt the “leaked” snippets of his testimony will be far more implicating than the entirety of his testimony leaving it to Democratic committee members like Maryland’s Raskin and NY’s Goldman to tell us what really takes place.  Lastly, keep an eye on the courts.  We should be hearing news about Trump’s civil penalty in the NY case as well as his immunity appeal shortly.  No one expects the Appeals Court to agree with Trump’s assertion that presidents should have total immunity, always so that “even events that ‘cross the line’ must fall under total immunity, or it will be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad.”  Is it me, or is Trump telling us that he’ll be crossing all the lines should he make it back to the Oval office? Trauma ahead.

#BringThemAllHomeNow

 

Reality Bites ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Groundhog Day:  It’s not Groundhog Day yet but it might as well be.  Yesterday, following a 77 to 18 bipartisan vote in the barely Democratically controlled Senate, the House passed another two-tiered continuing resolution to keep some parts of the government funded through March 1 with the rest funded through March 8. Like former Speaker McCarthy before him, Speaker Johnson couldn’t even muster the votes to get the resolution out of the Freedom Caucus controlled Rules Committee, so he instead had to go with the “suspension of the rules” procedure to get the funding resolution to the House floor.  That procedure permits leadership to bring resolutions up for a floor vote without Rules Committee signoff but also requires passage by a two-thirds rather than just a simple majority.  As a result, Speaker Johnson had to turn to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his caucus to obtain the votes to keep the government open.  The continuing resolution passed the House by a vote of 314 to 108 with all but two Democrats but only half of Republicans voting for it.  To put it mildly the right most wing of Speaker Johnson’s right-wing party is less than happy with him and are unlikely to be all that supportive going forward which explains why Johnson is opposing an immigration deal that a lot of Republican Senators have worked out with their Democratic counterparts and President Biden.  The deal, which uber Trump supporter Senator Lindsey Graham characterized as good as, if not better, than any deal they’d be able to hash out even if Trump is reelected, includes concessions intended to address the “crisis” at the border while also funding Ukraine. With his Freedom caucus whispering threats into one ear, and a certain spiteful Orange god doing the same into his other ear, the desperate Johnson is seriously considering scuttling any immigration reform package for political purposes because who cares if getting things done is good for the country when one’s job is at stake?

Primarily Yours: When not insulting judges or listening to his embarrassingly inept lawyer Alina Habba get schooled by the judge overseeing his E Jean Carol defamation case, the Orange one has been basking in the glow of his Iowa caucus victory.  He’s ramped up his attacks on Nikki Haley, doubling down on his claims that she like Barack Obama is not American born.  Haley was born in the US and is qualified to run but pointing out that she’s not lily-white works with a lot of Trump supporters.  For her part, during last night’s CNN townhall, Haley still couldn’t directly acknowledge the country’s racist past.  It was tortuous to listen to her word salad about how the founders said all men, with the emphasis on men, were created equal. That whole slave as a three-fifths of a person thing never crossed her lips. One of the sad things about Haley is that she knows better but is so fearful that speaking the truth will alienate the right side of her party. There’s a reason that Chris Christie who was heard off mic saying that she’s “going to get smoked” didn’t endorse her when he suspended his campaign.  The New Hampshire primary takes place on Tuesday.  While Haley is still dreaming of a New Hampshire victory, something that she desperately needs, polls, for whatever they’re worth show her 14 points behind Trump.  As to polls, while it’s highly likely that they’re right about Trump leading Haley, in general they’ve grown increasingly unreliable, particularly since Trump’s team has quite effectively managed to flood the zone with polls from right leaning pollsters, part of a successful effort to dismiss concerns that he’s unelectable in a general election, a strategy that appears to have worked.  It’s an approach that was also employed during the midterms and partially explains why so many in media were convinced that a huge red wave was coming when it wasn’t.  That said, polling for the upcoming election between Democrat Tom Suozzi and Republican Mazi Pilip for the Long Island seat vacated by George Santos indicates that they’re running neck and neck with Republican ads painting the moderate Suozzi as a left wing socialist and Democrats going after Pilip, another one with sketchy financials, who, rarely voted and until recently wasn’t a Republican, as an anti-abortion MAGA.  One more thing about Iowa, the turnout was lower than usual, perhaps due to weather but also do to a lack of enthusiasm for the candidates, a bigly problem for Haley which helps explain her third place finish but give Haley credit, taking a page from Trump’s book, she’s dismissed DeSantis’ second place finish and has decided to ignore him, asserting only she and Trump remain in the race which is how she justified pulling out of the scheduled pre-New Hampshire debate with the “irrelevant DeSantis.”  Also, in case anyone cares, Andrew Yang has endorsed Dean Philips, the Minesota Congressman challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination while Philips has eliminated references to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from his website likely to placate large donor Bill Ackman, the hedgie who helped dethrone Harvard’s Claudine Gay and is now getting skewered about his wife’s plagiarism problem.   

Fog:  Mudslinging is afoot in Fulton Country. The judge overseeing the Fulton County election interference RICO case is now looking into allegations that District Attorney Fani Willis had an inappropriate relationship with one of the outside prosecutors she hired to help her with the case.  The prosecutor in question is involved in an increasingly contentious divorce. The allegations of impropriety were raised by co-defendant Michael Roman because apparently only orange ex-presidents are allowed to have dicey private lives.  Switching gears, the embattled Bibi Netanyahu, who is fighting for his country’s survival and also for his political career, not necessarily in that order, got skewered yesterday for dissing a two-state solution.  That’s not much of new position for Bibi.  Given current events, he’s likely not totally wrong about the reality of negotiating a two-state solution right now because it takes two or maybe in this case three or more to tango and none of the other “dancing partners” appear all that interested in a diplomatic tango still it’s just not what anyone wants to hear. There are around 130 +/- hostages in Hamas captivity and the most recent negotiating accomplishment isn’t progress on their release, but that Hamas is allowing the Red Cross to distribute drugs to each one needing medicine as long as 1000 Gazans also get theirs. Kfir Bibas, the youngest hostage, to the extent he’s still alive, “celebrated” his birthday yesterday.  Reality bites.

#BringThemAllHomeNow