The nightmare for Kate Cox continues

The Texas supreme court has put on hold the restraining order that a lower court judge had imposed that would have allowed Kate Cox to get an abortion, stating that her condition met the requirements for an exception to the state’s almost total ban on the procedure. The Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a Republican anti-abortion zealot, had appealed to the supreme court for such a move. Even before the supreme. court stepped in, Paxton went even further and said that he would prosecute any doctor and hospital that allowed the procedure even if the courts rule it to be permissible. So much for the party that says that it is the upholder of law and order.
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The latest bonkers Republican debate

The debate on Wednesday debate involving the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination other than serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), saw most of them trying hard to claim the title of the main challenger to SSAT. This article summarized the main points.

The explosive fourth Republican presidential debate Wednesday night made plain why former President Donald Trump has so far skipped the 2024 primary debate circuit.

The four contenders onstage — former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — spent most of the two-hour debate hammering each other, overshadowing efforts to focus attention on the frontrunner in the race.

With the smallest debate field so far and with Iowa’s caucuses less than six weeks away, the candidates were better able to showcase their policy beliefs and explore major differences, but they followed the pattern of previous debates with a series of memorable personal shots.

Ramaswamy referred to Haley as “lipstick on a Dick Cheney.” Christie mocked Ramaswamy’s “smartass mouth.” DeSantis said Haley “caves every time the left comes after her.”

An AP article noted this interesting point: “By the end, moderators asked candidates which previous president inspired them. No one named Trump.” SSAT will not be pleased,

Will Saletan describes himself as a political moderate who now does not have a home because the Republican party is bonkers. He summarizes some of the evidence for this that he heard during the debate.

I’M A MODERATE. In 2018, I voted for Larry Hogan, Maryland’s Republican governor. Four years later, when Republicans nominated an election denier to replace him, I voted for the Democratic nominee, Wes Moore. Give me a sensible conservative party, and I’ll consider it. But that’s not what I’m seeing in Congress or in this year’s Republican presidential debates.
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THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S INSANITY leaves a big hole in this country. When progressives jerk their knees on one issue or another—deriding religious parents, overdoing COVID restrictions, calling every border-control policy racist—I’d like to hear alternative ideas from a sane conservative party. Instead, what we have is an extremist, authoritarian party in which—as Kelly essentially acknowledged—the one presidential candidate who tells the truth and adheres to principle has no chance of being nominated.

On The Daily Show, this week’s guest host Charlamagne Tha God highlighted some of the points raised, focussing on the most bonkers of the four, Vivek Ramaswamy, who endorsed a whole list of wacky conspiracy theories.

Will every abortion in Texas have to be approved by a court?

The sweeping restrictions on abortion that some states have imposed in the wake of the US Supreme Court invalidating Roe v. Wade means that some women have to go to court in order to get an abortion that should have been non-controversial. A judge in Texas yesterday issued a temporary restraining order against the state, thus permitting Kate Cox to get an abortion even though she was 20 weeks pregnant and thus exceeded the six-week limit in that state. Her baby had been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a condition under which it is not expected to live more than a few days outside the womb.

Kate Cox, who is 20 weeks pregnant, filed a lawsuit this week asking the court to temporarily block the state’s abortion ban, because she has been unable to get the procedure due to concerns of violating the law. Cox’s baby was diagnosed with trisomy 18 and is not expected to live more than a few days outside the womb, according to the suit.
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Cox has been to three different emergency rooms in the last month due to severe cramping and unidentifiable fluid leaks, according to her lawsuit. Cox has had two prior cesarean surgeries – C-sections – and, the suit said, “continuing the pregnancy puts her at high risk for severe complications threatening her life and future fertility, including uterine rupture and hysterectomy.”

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Another delusional person seeks Santos’s seat

Now that George Santos has been kicked out of Congress, there is a scramble to fill his seat in the special election scheduled on February 13, 2024. Under the rules for special elections, there will not be a primary and each party can pick their nominee. The GOP is reviewing 15 candidates and one candidate, Philip Grillo, seems to be the perfect successor to Santos. Who is Grillo? I’m glad you asked.

Philip Grillo, a candidate in the special election for Santos’s vacant Long Island seat, was convicted this week of charges relating to the January 6 attack, when he entered and exited the building multiple times, at least once through a broken window.

At one point during the protest Grillo, 49, was interviewed on camera about why he was there.

“I’m here to stop the steal,” he said, according to the justice department. “It’s our fucking House!”

He then made his way further into the Capitol. He also recorded videos of himself in the Capitol. “We fucking did it, you understand? We stormed the Capitol,” Grillo said in one. “We shut it down! We did it! We shut the mother..!”

On his third entrance to the building, the justice department said, he could be seen in multiple instances pushing up against police officers and, in another recording, from his cell phone, smoking marijuana inside the building and high-fiving other rioters.

Recently, during his trial, he testified that he had “no idea” Congress convened inside the Capitol.
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At trial, his attorney’s argued that their client had “was acting under actual or believed public authority at the time of the alleged offenses” and said “he was and believed he was authorized to engage in the conduct set forth in the indictment”.

So basically Grillo is both highly ignorant and highly delusional. Given that these are the qualities that the GOP’s leader serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT) also embodies, what is there for the GOP not to like about him? Grillo should be a shoo-in for the nomination.

The real problems that Tuberville’s hold highlighted

I posted on Tuesday about how Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville finally caved and released the holds on all but 11 of the hundreds of military promotions that he had held up for over nine months, disrupting the lives of the people and the functioning of the units in which they serve. He did this because he objected to the military reimbursing members of the military for medical treatment that required them to go to another state. He was not objecting to all treatments, just for those getting abortions.
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Bye, bye, Kevin

The ex-speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy has said that he will leave Congress at the end of this year. That will result in two vacancies, since George Santos was unceremoniously kicked out last week and leaves the body split 220-213 in favor of the GOP. The current speaker can now afford to have only three defections om any bill he brings to the floor. (Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that the GOP now has a majority of only one, showing that she has not yet grasped this thing called arithmetic.)

After his ouster, he had said that he would not leave and that indeed he would run for re-election in 2024. But now McCarthy has released a statement saying that although he was leaving Congress he will not stop fighting for the country. I translate that to mean that he will quickly seek to make a ton of money as a lobbyist.

I was planning to write something about how awful McCarthy was but I see that Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said it much better:

“In his short time as speaker, Kevin McCarthy managed to plunge the People’s House into chaos in the name of serving one person and one person alone: Donald Trump. At every turn, Kevin sought to give his puppet master a lifeline, even after the horrific events of January 6, and spent his embarrassing speakership bending the knee to the most extreme factions of the MAGA base.



This anticlimactic end to Kevin’s political career is in line with the rest of his time on Capitol Hill – plagued by cowardice, incompetence, and fecklessness. Our country will be better off without Kevin in office, but his failed tenure in the House should serve as a stark warning to the country about the future of the GOP – no matter how much he kowtowed to the extreme right, no matter how much he kissed the ring, none of it was MAGA enough for the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump.”

Yep, that’s about right.

McCarthy was apparently furious with serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) for not calling off his attack dog Matt Gaetz when the latter was working to oust him, after all the groveling he had done to gain SSAT’s favor. But even after being ousted, he never said anything publicly, maybe hoping for some kind of rehabilitation. These guys never seem to learn that a sense gratitude is not part of SSAT’s qualities. He wants unquestioned loyalty and obedience and gives nothing in return. If you want something from him, you have to get it in writing and notarized before you give him anything.

Tommy Tuberville caves on abortion issue

The arcane rules that the US senate has set for itself gives enormous powers to even a single senator to gum up the works. Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville used this power to hold up the promotions and transfers of 451 military personnel for nine months. The reason? He was unhappy that the military would pay for the abortions of personnel who were forced to travel to another state to have them because the state they were in banned them. This policy is not specific to abortions but is part of the military’s general health care policy that covers any treatment that requires such travel. He was demanding that the abortion requirement be removed beforehe would release the holds.

This hold caused a lot of problems for the officers involve since it complicated the planning of them and their families since where they would live was in limbo. It even irritated Tuberville’s Republican colleagues but they were unwilling to do anything drastic to overcome his hold.

Then today, Tuberville suddenly announced that he was lifting the hold on all but the promotions of 12 four-star officers.

Tommy Tuberville is dropping most of his months-long holds on military officer nominations in the Senate, backing down from his vow to block them until the Pentagon changes an internal abortion policy.

The Alabama Republican plans to continue his holds on four-star nominees, he told reporters, but will release the rest effective immediately. That means the Senate can move to confirm most of them as soon as Tuesday evening, and possibly all of them before the new year.
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Schumer told reporters the Senate will move “as soon as possible” to confirm the outstanding nominees, which are typically approved via unanimous consent. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said that “should be today.”

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told POLITICO he expects Democrats will discuss voting on the other four-star officers this month. The Senate only has one more full week of session and confirming those officers one at a time would take several days. Reed suggested individual roll-call votes on the four-star nominees could happen “if necessary.”

Another example that what Republicans do best is create obstacles over their pet obsessions.

That was quick: Film about Santos already in the works

To no one’s surprise, there is going to be a made-for-TV film about serial fabulist and no ex-congressperson George Santos. In Santos’s case, the film will be based on a book on his life that was released last week.

A book about the improbable rise and rapid fall of former congressman George Santos has been optioned by HBO Films, it was reported Saturday, and will be produced under the guidance of Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist known for executive production credits on Emmy awards-winning Succession and Veep.

HBO reportedly optioned the rights to Mark Chiusano’s The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, published last week.
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“He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years,” Chiusano said.
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According to Deadline, the adaptation of The Fabulist will be written by Mike Makowsky, who wrote the screenplay of HBO’s crime drama Bad Education, and will tell the “Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream”.

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Trump faces even more lawsuits

Following the riot on January 6th 2021, a Democratic congressperson and two Capitol police officers brought lawsuits against serial sex offender Donald Trump (SSAT), accusing him of inciting the mob with his speech that day to the crowd.

The lawsuits seek civil damages for harms they say they endured when rioters descended on the Capitol as Congress met to certify Biden’s election victory, smashing windows, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police officers and sending lawmakers running into hiding. One of the lawsuits, filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, alleges that Trump directly incited the violence at the Capitol “and then watched approvingly as the building was overrun.”

Two other lawsuits were also filed, one by other House Democrats and another by officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, who were both injured in the riot. Blassingame said Friday that he “couldn’t be more committed to pursuing accountability” in the case.

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Santos soap opera comes to an end – maybe

The House of Representatives voted today to expel George Santos from the body by a vote of 311-114, well above the 290 votes needed, making him only the sixth person to be so treated. It did not help his case that two of the people he is alleged to have ripped off in his fraudulent credit card scheme were a fellow Republican congressperson and his mother. That is not how you win friends and influence people.

10 members either voted present or did not vote. 112 out of 222 Republicans and 2 out of 213 Democrats voted not to expel him. All four members of the Republican leadership team also voted not to expel him. After the vote, he refused to answer any questions and left in the style to which he has become accustomed, in a Jaguar SUV. There will now be a special election within 90 days to fill his seat.

Yesterday at a news conference Santos had leveled all manner of accusations against his fellow members and promised a scorched-Earth response if he were expelled. But that did not seem to sway enough of his colleagues to support him. He also said that he planned to continue in politics. It may have been bluster on his part, like so many of his other claims, or he may be saving it all for a tell-all book or a made-for-TV film. You can be certain that he will seek to monetize his 15 minutes of fame to help pay for his legal expenses to avoid prison time for all the frauds that he has been accused of committing.