This isn’t on some obscure corner of the internet. It’s on Newsmax which is watched by many MAGA Republicans and on which many GOP elected politicians appear: I just thought you’d want to know what your fellow Americans are watching. Now, go have a drink.
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Above banner this a.m. from the Washington Post Let the follies begin (Washington Post): The Senate passed a $95 billion national security package to aid Israel, Ukraine and other U.S. allies early Tuesday morning after a monthslong debate that has deeply divided congressional Republicans. The bill passed 70 to 29, after 22 Republicans joined Democrats in approving the aid. God immediately told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to reject the Israel aid because the package wasn’t harsh enough on strangers in the land. Johnson dismissed it premptively Monday night. “In the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will o these important matters,” Johnson said in a statement. “America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.” Johnson’s statement comes after he and other House leaders helped torpedo an earlier version of the legislation that includes sweeping border security measures and other reforms. The whiny voice of God Johnson is hearing is Donald Trump’s, if not Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speaking through Donald Trump.
Republicans plan “Jan. 6 hearings” on age Tired: Benghazi-Benghazi-Benghazi. “But her emails.”Wired: Ageism. “Joe Biden is better on his worst day than Donald Trump is on his best day,” Lawrence O’Donnell noted Monday night, referencing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s accomplishments in office and physical condition when he ran for a fourth presidential term. There are serious stakes for these United States in this fall’s elections, particularly regarding who wins the White House. But Republicans are proving themselves no more serious today than they were in 2016, 2018, 2020 or 2022. They plan to campaign on ageism. Paul Krugman wrote on Monday, Lincoln’s birthday: But watching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered. And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now.
The Senate stayed in session all night to pass the Ukraine funding bill. Now Mike Johnson says he won’t bring it to the House floor because it doesn’t have border funding. I know it’s hard to believe. But it shouldn’t be. They have discovered that nothing matters to their people except owning the libs and licking Trump’s boots. They’re very busy anyway. There’s a lot of important business on the agenda: House Republicans have reached out to special counsel Robert Hur to discuss having him testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee about his report on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Hur’s report released last week did not charge the president with a crime, but it painted a picture of a forgetful commander in chief who failed to properly protect highly sensitive classified information – a depiction that could hurt Biden politically and that Republicans have seized on. Hur has retained Bill Burck as his personal attorney.
Trump’s been channeling Hitler so I guess this is just par for the course. It’s still startling: Anthony D’Esposito, a congressman from New York, posted a picture on X last week of an undocumented immigrant flashing two middle fingers after being arraigned for allegedly assaulting two NYPD officers. “We feel the same way about you,” D’Esposito wrote. “Holla at the cartels and have them escort you back.” But Republican Congressman Mike Collins took it a step further: “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back.” His post was flagged as violent speech, but it was allowed to stand on the grounds that “it may be in the public’s interest for the Post to remain accessible.” Collins probably considers his statement a joke intended to communicate his views of migrants, and it is best not to overreact to behavior that is designed to provoke. But his post also reflects the mainstreaming of authoritarianism in the GOP.
Somebody’s on the hot seat again: A chief witness and onetime friend of Representative Matt Gaetz is cooperating in an unfolding House Ethics Committee investigation into whether the Florida politician had sex with an underage girl while in Congress, a lawyer for the witness said Friday. Fritz Scheller, who represents Joel Greenberg, said that he had provided documents to the committee and that Greenberg “has and will cooperate with any congressional request,” The New York Times reported. In May of 2021, Greenberg pled guilty to several charges, including sex trafficking, and is currently in his second year of an 11-year sentence. The former Florida tax collector was able to secure a more lenient punishment by agreeing to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into Gaetz. In February of 2023, the department announced that it was closing the investigation without charging the Florida Representative with any crimes.
That’s no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a train. We’ve seen this movie. We watched it in 2016. The press, driven by capitalist imperative to sell newspapers and attract eyeballs, promoted every right-wing smear against Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president, most importantly the faux scandal about her private email server. Clinton was likely the most qualified presidential person Democrats have ever fielded for the presidency. To win the presidency, Clinton first had to be an excellent candidate. She was not that, nor was her campaign up to the job. (Don’t get me started.) Nevertheless, the race to defeat Donald Trump, the TV celebrity and failed casino operator, was close. Her campaign suffered death by a thousand media cuts, flogged by right-wing outlets and in the eleventh-hour by grandstanding of FBI Director Jim Comey. It’s happening again with the stream of media attention to President Joe Biden’s age. Republican’s all-but nominee Trump is only three years younger and in obvious cognitive decline.
Go, and do thou likewise. The New York Times, writes Jamison Foser after years of reading “is, politically, a Republican newspaper.” Okay, so I’m on a rant about the media’s obsession with Biden’s age. Thankfully, Jamison Foser offers suggestions on how to do more than complain or suggest, as lefties regularly do, that the left build its own media platforms. (In the next few months?) Foser writes at his substack, Finding Gravity: First, it is important to note that there is a difference between acknowledging that the Times and its ilk won’t change much in response to criticism and thinking they won’t change at all. Forceful, reasoned media critiques can shift behavior around the margins — a little more coverage of something that’s been underplayed, a little less of something over-played, a reconsideration of a unsupported assumption or an underlying bias. It isn’t particularly efficient, it isn’t going to lead to the wholesale changes it should, but in a closely-divided country changes at the margins can be decisive.
He and the rest of the MAGA weirdos are making the Senate work around the clock because they’re having a tantrum. From @SenWhitehouse on Sunday night,here’s an explanation for the weekend activities in the Senate: If you’re sitting around wondering what is happening in the Senate, (a) you need to get a life, and (b) here’s a handy-dandy overview. We begin with the rule that spending measures have to originate in the House, so to start a bill like our Ukraine funding measure in the Senate you need to bring a House-passed measure to the Senate Floor. The first step is to proceed to that House-passed measure. A group of Republicans objects to all this, so the Majority Leader had to file cloture on that motion to proceed to the House-passed measure, requiring 60 votes. Getting cloture on that motion was our first vote, 67-32. Cloture rules require thirty hours of post-cloture debate, so that debate took place, and then after that came the actual vote to proceed, which only required a simple majority, cloture having been invoked.
Thank goodness Trump’s going to build a big dome over the whole country so we won’t need any As we all, know, the biggest story in the world is the breaking news that President Joe Biden is old. Sure 9/11 was something of a big deal and the war in Iraq and the global pandemic required all of our attention for a time, but this is the most important news of our lifetime, maybe anyone’s lifetime and there’s no telling when, or if, the nation will ever recover. Still, it’s probably important to at least pay a tiny bit of attention to other things that are happening in the world just in case they might also be affected by Biden’s age in some way. In fact, we probably should be just a little bit curious about what the former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson was doing in Moscow last week interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin. Carlson has demonstrated his affinity for Putin for years now and is commonly extolled on the Russian state television channels as a model American with all the right ideas.