Crooked Media - What A Day: Hooked on a ceiling

- Tucker Carlson, who apparently believes American History started in 2021. James Buchanan and Andrew Jackson would like a word.

Taking a quick survey of the landscape, it would seem the Republican Party of 2023 is, scientifically speaking, a huge fucking mess. 
 

• As soon as Republicans won their gossamer-thin majority in the House, we knew they would try to hold the debt limit hostage for major cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other social safety net programs. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. For years now, Republicans have been able to paper over factional divisions by uniting behind a fiscal agenda of low taxes on the rich and tattered government services for the poor and working class. But unlike past episodes where they tried to extort Democrats to gut popular programs, this time it’s driving a wedge into their own party, and we love to see it. 
   

• Specifically, disgraced former president Donald Trump is driving the wedge. In a video message for his 2024 presidential campaign released to Politico today, Trump says, “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” Trump has long been out-of-step with the rest of his party on so-called “entitlement reform” (which is politically shrewd of him because it’s so wildly unpopular nationwide) but he then suggests making cuts elsewhere like foreign aid, eliminating “left-wing gender programs from our military” and “billions being spent on climate extremism,” the latter two of which are spending programs that only exist in the Fox News cinematic universe. 
   

• So the GOP now has to contend with its de-facto leader pushing its House majority into a political corner. Or into abandoning its own dreams of soaking the elderly. Adding insult to injury, the majority of Americans view most high-profile Republican leaders and lawmakers with deep unfavorability. The majority of Republican voters, on the other hand, agree that they want their party to continue going in the MAGA direction, but are divided over who precisely should lead them to their dystopian future. 

So the bad news is, Republicans are crazy, but the good news is, voters seem to hate their crazy shit, and so do at least a few good judges. 
 

• As the GOP gears up for 2024, their main guy isn’t looking particularly strong. On top of his mounting legal jeopardy, Trump faced another blow today when a Florida judge ordered him and his attorney Alina Habba to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions, calling the former president “a mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process,” in a blistering 46-page order. U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks said Trump’s lawsuits against Hillary Clinton and dozens of former Justice Department and FBI officials was an eye-poppingly egregious abuse of the legal system. Damn, Trump isn’t even safe in his beloved Florida anymore; that’s gotta hurt.
   

• In another blow to Trump and the larger GOP, one of its major dark money groups, The BH Fund, dissolved itself three days after receiving inquiry about whether it helped to facilitate the multimillion-dollar sale of former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway’s polling company. Formed in 2016, the BH fund has distributed millions of dollars to conservative judicial “activist” Leonard Leo’s network of dark-money groups meant to boost MAGA judicial nominees. The director of federal campaign-finance reform for the Campaign Legal Center put it best: “Nothing screams ‘efforts to conceal’ quite like folding up an organization just as you start getting questions about it.” Undoubtedly a new crop of dark money groups will spring up in the BH Fund’s place, but until then, we clink champagne glasses.

To recap: the Republican Party is, top-to-bottom, full of deeply unpopular figures pushing an equally unpopular political agenda that no longer unifies the party. That should be great news for Democrats, right? It depends. Republicans seem to think they can continue alienating big majorities of the public, then win elections anyway, either through minority-rule institutions like the Senate, Electoral College, and a gerrymandered House, or through outright theft. It’s therefore the work of the Democratic Party to be as good at staving off those efforts and exploiting the GOP’s weaknesses as the GOP is at cheating.

We see all you friends of the pod out there, growing and improving in the new year. The Crooked Store decided to follow suit and update our Friend Of The Pod merch for our ever-evolving listeners. The new and improved pieces include classic t-shirts, crewnecks, and hats in fresh new colors. There’s even some camo so you can blend in with the forest and/or your uncles who like hunting. 
 

It’s all available now at crooked.com/store.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) announced that he will seek reelection, easing fears of what a vacancy would mean in an election cycle that will already prove difficult for Senate Democrats. 

Iowa Republicans want to further restricting the food people can buy with SNAP benefits, a state-level version of their ghoulish national strategy.

Western defense leaders meeting in Germany today failed to resolve divisions over whether Berlin would provide advanced battle tanks to Ukraine. 

Rock legend and founding member of the Byrds as well as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young David Crosby died at 81 yesterday. Never has a man committed so hard to a mustache for his whole life. RIP.

Google’s parent company Alphabet announced that it will lay off 12,000 workers, six percent of its total workforce, as the tech sector continues to downsize and put all of its eggs in the basket of artificial intelligence. 

In a depressingly similar story, Vox Media announced in a memo today that it will lay off seven percent of its workforce.

The Biden Administration is directing $930 million toward reducing wildfire dangers in 10 western states by clearing trees and underbrush from national forests. That’s the kind of spending the GOP would like to see reduced or eliminated entirely, what disgraced former president Trump calls “billions being spent on climate extremism.” Wanting to curb the destruction of land and homes is very extreme, after all! But fires won’t be the only problem. If fossil-fuel emissions continue to go unaddressed, a new study published in the Journal of Nature Climate Change says that California could have a 31 percent increase in downpours by 2050, even worse than the flooding that plagued the state earlier this month. Of course, the only “extremism” when it comes to climate change is continuing to support the fossil-fuel industry as the planet becomes hotter and hotter and weather events become more destructive, which is, you know, the official position of the Republican Party.

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Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego will challenge Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) for her seat in 2024. 

The first Native American woman in space stepped out onto the spacewalk today.