It appears that James Comer is quite the financial operator Roger Sollenberger at the Daily Beast broke a story about Comer’s shady financial dealings with his brother a couple of weeks ago. When confronted with it in a hearing by Florida Congressman Jared Moskowitz, he got so mad he lost control and called Moskowitz a smurf. Now the AP has filled in some more blanks on Comer’s finances: Rep. James Comer, a multimillionaire farmer, boasts of being one of the largest landholders near his rural Kentucky hometown, and he has meticulously documented nearly all of his landholdings on congressional financial disclosure documents – roughly 1,600 acres in all. But there are six acres that he bought in 2015 and co-owns with a longtime campaign contributor that he has treated differently, transferring his ownership to Farm Team Properties, a shell company he co-owns with his wife. Interviews and records reviewed by The Associated Press provide new insights into the financial deal, which risks undercutting the force of some of Comer’s central arguments in his impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden.
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Let’s hope it goes better than it did 23 years ago The Republican party’s descent into post-ideological madness has been well documented over the years, here and elsewhere. Those of us who have been around a while started seeing it back in the 1980s when Newt Gingrich and his gang started to adopt scorched earth tactics to destroy their political opponents and it gained steam during the Clinton years with a tabloid strategy designed to titillate the electorate and offend the allegedly pious right wing Christians. But it shifted into something more dangerous in the 2000 election when they decided that there were no holds barred when it came to holding on to power. I was reminded of all that yesterday when this popped up in my social media feeds: I assume that you all know what went down in that case so I won’t belabor it. In a nutshell, when the Republicans pulled out every shady stop in a state run by the candidate’s brother to ensure that recounts were stopped so that his rival would never go ahead in the election, we should have known that our democracy was more fragile than we thought.
Paul Ryan on MAGA Howie Klein (Down With Tyranny!) posts this morning on former speaker Paul Ryan’s interview from two weeks ago. “The entertainers took over Congress,” Ryan told Teneo Insights [timestamp 2:10]. When “a handful of nihilists who go to Congress not to legislate but to be provocative entertainers, this is what happens.” The Party of Trump was not amused, Howie observes: Mediaite adds: Ryan has been on Fox Corporation’s board of directors since 2019. This has been a recurring point of contention for Trump, his allies, and Trump media backers like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have accused Ryan of meddling behind the scenes. Maybe yes, maybe no. But why not get well paid for doing it, eh? Somewhere recently I read that once the war against the Axis powers was over, people all over France began claiming they were part of La Résistance against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy régime. A national case of stolen valor. So it may be in this country once MAGA is no more. Cheney and Kinzinger earned their plaudits for standing up to Donald Trump while they were still in office.
Dreamy Paul Ryan has some thoughts about Donald Trump The Guardian has a write up on his comments on a podcast from last month that’s only now making the rounds. He doesn’t say anything we all didn’t already know but it might mean something to a few swing voters who remember him as a normal Republican: Ryan, from Wisconsin, left Congress in 2019 and now sits on the board of Fox Corp, parent company of Fox News. He was speaking to Kevin Kajiwara, co-president of Teneo Political Risk Advisory, in a podcast interview recorded in November but widely noticed this week. Voices on both sides of the main political aisle have criticised Ryan for not strongly opposing Trump when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, or through four chaotic years in the White House that ended in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. When stepping down Ryan praised Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, widely blamed for increasing inequality and the national deficit, as one of his biggest achievements along with increasing defense spending.
They sneaked it into the defense bill The Hill reports: Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress. The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden. The provision underscores Congress’s commitment to the NATO alliance that was a target of former President Trump’s ire during his term in office. The alliance has taken on revitalized importance under Biden, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “NATO has held strong in response to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s war in Ukraine and rising challenges around the world,” Kaine said in a statement. He added the legislation “reaffirms U.S. support for this crucial alliance that is foundational for our national security.
It’s overrun by horrible people and the bots that impersonate them The First lady shared this innocuous Christmas video and then all hell broke loose: Here’s a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with Xitter. First look at this fun White House Christmas video shared by the First Lady: So what’s the problem? Well: They seem nice, don’t they? It goes on like that for days. I think Amanda Marcotte nailed it. It’s obvious: I know! It’s tap-dancing, it’s not pole dancing fergawdsakes. And the choeography dancing through the White House was impressive! But yeah, some of the dancers are black and some are gay. And they are (apparently) too exuberant which means they don’t know their place. It’s pretty clear what these critics are upset about. Honestly, there is nothing these homophobic racist jerks won’t whine about. Nothing… It’s Happy Hollandaise time, folks. If you’d like to participate, you can do so below. 🙂
Driving America into the ditch Donors were peeved over the bad publicity. In a House hearing on campus antisemitism last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) demanded university presidents from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT answer for antisemitic campus protests over the war in Gaza. Asked whether calling for genocide against Jews would violate codes of conduct, amount to bullying and harassment, and prompt expulsions, the administrators hedged. A video extract went viral. Michelle Goldberg responded, “If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing … I might have felt the same way.” The administrators “acquitted themselves poorly.” “But while it might seem hard to believe that there’s any context that could make the responses of the college presidents OK, watching the whole hearing at least makes them more understandable,” Goldberg added. “In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap Stefanik laid.” But the trap was sprung. Over the weekend and under pressure from university donors, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill and board chair Scott L.
Follow the data Take good news where you find it. Politico: Special counsel Jack Smith has extracted data from the cell phone Donald Trump used while in the White House and plans to present evidence of his findings to a Washington, D.C. jury to demonstrate how Trump used the phone in the weeks during which he attempted to subvert the 2020 election. In a court filing Monday, Smith indicated that he plans to call an expert witness who extracted and reviewed data copied from Trump’s phone, as well as a phone used by another unidentified individual in Trump’s orbit. The data from Trump’s phone could reveal day-to-day details of his final weeks in office, including his daily movements, his Twitter habits and any other aides who had access to his accounts and devices. The data, for example, could help show whether Trump personally approved or sent a fateful tweet attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Today is the day the MAGA House plans to officially vote for an “impeachment inquiry” I know this will come as quite a shock, but the current U.S. Congress is the least productive congress in almost a hundred years. Not since the first years of the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover has the legislative branch been so ineffectual. This may seem surprising considering that the Republican majority has dominated the news from the moment it took the oath last January, but it has barely managed to do the one thing it’s supposed to do which is pass legislation. They certainly have been busy though. They started with an epic battle for the Speaker’s office that ended even before the year was up with the dramatic defenestration of that same Speaker for committing the cardinal sin of compromising with the Democratic Senate and White House to keep the government running. That took weeks of effort leaving little time for anything else. Then they had to hold “oversight” hearings to yell at administration figures and provoke fights with witnesses and there was the huge issue of the Senate dress code.
He’s right there. Why won’t they talk to him in public? Hunter Biden wants a public hearing for good reason! The Democrats are backing him: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., backed that call for a public hearing while speaking to reporters on Wednesday. She was one of multiple Democratic lawmakers to address Republicans’ impeachment inquiry of Biden, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who described in the investigation as “more like a what-is-it, not a whodunnit.” “I won’t even call it an investigation, I’ll call it an exercise in futility,” Ocasio-Cortez said about the Hunter Biden investigation, describing it as “groundless and unsubstantiated.” The New York congresswoman said there is more pressing business than Hunter Biden. “We need to do far more than worry about baseless investigations that are conducted more on podcasts than, frankly, on a grounding of evidence,” she said. Aaaaand, needless to say, Republicans are having a hissy fit: Lol. Here’s how that ended: Hunter Biden did the right thing.