02/08/24

Good morning! It’s Thursday, February 8th.

Laugh and get rich day.

That’s… that’s it? That’s all I have to do? This whole time, all I had to do was laugh?!

Dang it! I wish I’d known that!

And now, the news.

Bipartisan Border Block

-via AP News

Let’s start with some knew that we saw coming but there’s still news about it to cover: Senate Republicans have officially blocked the bipartisan border bill that they worked on with the Democrats. Like, this is half their bill. But for some reason, after months of trying to get this bill going, it’s a no-go.

The bill would have $60 billion in aid to Ukraine and $14 billion to Israel, but Republicans backed out after saying that would have conflicted with help for the southern border crisis.

It’s possible that the Senate may vote the overseas aid out and on its way to the House, but even that will take days so I guess we’ll see.

Senator Lankford, the Republican who worked with Democrat Senator Murphy and Absurd Senator Sinema, told Senators before the vote that this was the time to decide “if we’re going to do nothing, or something. It’s an issue that’s bedevilled, quite frankly, this body for decades. It’s been three decades since we’ve passed anything into law to be able to change border security.”

Sinema said “Finally, it seemed, we had the opportunity to solve the nightmare my state has lived for over 40 years,” which is crazy because I didn’t know she’d been a senator for 40 years!

Just kidding. Come on--- too easy!

Missing Marine Helicopter

-via CNN

A rescue is underway for five marines who were in a helicopter that crashed in Pine Valley, in San Diego, close to Mexico.

The current rain and snow conditions making the search more difficult.

No real way to transition out of this story. It’s just very sad.

Biden Investigation Concluded

-via PBS

The Department of Justice inquiry into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is complete and a report is due out any time now, but no charges are expected.

As a reminder, this is like what Veep Pence did, which is accidentally forget to hand over documents, and different than what Trump did, which is put them in the world’s ugliest bathroom and then lie about it and it now sounds like he also changed the lock to one of the rooms while his lawyer wasn’t looking, so that no one could find them.

The report isn’t out as of this recording, so I don’t have a ton on this.

Netanyahu Dismisses Cease Fire

-via NY Times

On Wednesday, Israel’s Prime Minister dismissed a Hamas counterproposal for a cease-fire, and instead said, “there is no solution besides total victory.”

So uh… so that’s where things stand on that. Not super great.

In other middle eastern news: a US Special Ops drone strike in the Baghdad killed a senior leader of the group that the US believes was responsible for the strike that killed three American servicemembers and injured at least 40 others.

And that’s it. That’s the news.

Not a lot of news. The big story is the bipartisan border deal, but we kind of new that was coming. Senate Republicans were not-so quietly quitting that before Wednesday.

Also the big big news is coming today. Today the Supreme Court will hear Colorado’s argument for keeping Trump off the ballot. This is kind of what everyone’s bracing for. It’s a public hearing, so if you want, you can actually listen to arguments.

Trump’s lawyers are asking the justices to consider whether the 14th amendment applies to Trump as a former president; whether he engaged in insurrection; and whether state and federal courts can even enforce the 14th without legislation from Congress.

Interestingly, they also argue that the provision cannot be used to deny Trump access to the ballot because the 14th only prohibits someone from holding office, not running as a candidate or winning election.

Which is wild because what if they’re like – well yeah you did insurrection crimes. We saw it. So you can’t be president. But you can’t be kicked off the ballot?

Wild. What a terrible and interesting case this is.

But anyway, that’s today, so we’ll talk about it tomorrow.

In the meantime… more than how much we’re all just gonna laugh our way to the banks because apparently that’s all it takes. Because you’re rich in just being an A+ - I’m proud of you.