The Daily Reid - Censure and Sensibilities

My daughter says I should commit to the bit, so Reid it is! Also: who needs the V.A. when you've got plenty of ketamine?

The Republican push to censure Rep. Al Green for disrupting Donald Trump’s joint session address … a deeply ironic move given the history of the maga coven…

And any censure would take place with loud opposition from Black Democrats who are rallying around Representative Green, and as he rises to the status of icon for the people. This AP photograph is going on my wall… framed.

Licensed from AP Images.

Meanwhile the latest victims of the six-figure doge gang: veterans! Trump and Elon’s little helpers, who seem to earn more than anyone at the agencies they’re randomly slashing, are set to lay waste to the Veterans Administration, cutting more than $76,000 jobs.

Perhaps if they were quality, meritorious employees like Speaker Mike Johnson’s chief of staff, who reportedly went on a Hegsethian bender after Trump’s joint address, crashed into a car and got arrested for a DUI. Luckily law enforcement only exists to serve Donald Trump now, so he’ll probably get a presidential medal of freedom … presuming he can beat Derick Chauvin to the punch. Did I mention Ben Shapiro has kicked off a campaign to get George Floyd’s convicted killer a pardon? Count on this happening and maybe Chauvin, Enrique Tarrio and Elmer “Stuart” Rhodes getting cabinet positions in the neo-fascist Trump regime. Trump and maga seem to be working really hard to make extrajudicial violence against Black people great again.

Meanwhile…

The Atlantic asks: should Americans worry about Boss Elon’s ketamine use?

Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, “I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can’t really get work done,” then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Musk’s “associates” worried that ketamine, “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.” (Musk did not respond to my requests for comment. In a post on X responding to The New Yorker’s story, Musk wrote, “Tragic that Ronan Farrow is a puppet of the establishment and against the people.”)

Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.

Sounds perfectly normal for that guy to have access to our Social Security numbers…

Meanwhile, Adam Serwer ponders why Why Trump Thanked John Roberts…

Any casual observer of the Supreme Court can see what many prestigious constitutional lawyers can’t, which is that the conservative justices are frequently accomplices to Trump’s assault on democracy—a flag signaling support of the January 6 insurrection flew outside Justice Samuel Alito’s house. (Alito, vital specimen of right-wing masculine energy that he is, blamed his wife.) That sort of open partisanship is a bit inconvenient for Roberts, however, who during his confirmation hearing famously compared justices to umpires calling balls and strikes in a baseball game. A more appropriate sports analogy for how Roberts and his right-wing comrades approach cases appeared a few months later, when several referees in the Italian soccer league were implicated in fixing matches for top teams during the 2006 Calciopoli scandal.

Trump has threatened to criminally prosecute those who criticize the Court, declaring that they should be “put in jail,” consistent with the right-wing belief that the right to free speech allows people to say only what conservatives want them to say. But as is often the case, no critic of the Court could implicate the conservative majority’s partisanship as effectively as Trump’s own behavior.

In his own way, the president agrees with the liberal critique that the Roberts Court is a partisan institution, with a majority that will generally do what he wants. He just believes that this is both good and exactly how it should be. Perhaps the only person who is still in the dark about what the Supreme Court has become is Roberts himself.

Also … now THIS is a lawsuit…

Failure report

The Trump administration has quietly backed off their expensive, performative military plane deportations … They’re also rethinking the whole Gitmo thing. Turns out conducting the largest mass deportation in the history of the world is harder than it sounds on the campaign trail…

This as the Centers for Disease Control urgently asks its layed off workers to please come back in yet another doge screwup. From the AP:

Emails went out Tuesday to some Centers for Disease Control and Prevention probationary employees who got termination notices last month, according to current and former CDC employees.

A message seen by the AP was sent with the subject line, “Read this e-mail immediately.” It said that “after further review and consideration,” a Feb. 15 termination notice has been rescinded and the employee was cleared to return to work on Wednesday. “You should return to duty under your previous work schedule,” it said. “We apologize for any disruption that this may have caused.”

About 180 people received reinstatement emails, according to two federal health officials who were briefed on the tally but were not authorized to discuss it and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s not clear how many of the reinstated employees returned to work Wednesday. And it’s also unclear whether the employees would be spared from widespread job cuts that are expected soon across government agencies.

We’re being governed by idiots…

Meanwhile…

Am I a … Working Families Party person now???

Rep. Lateefah Simon used one of the biggest speaking platforms of her career to argue that Democrats should embrace — not shy away — from progressive ideas in their quest to win back working-class voters.

Simon — a freshman Democrat from Oakland and rising star on the left — delivered progressives’ “prebuttal” to President Donald Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night. Her pre-recorded speech was broadcast around the same time as Trump’s remarks, and before the official Democratic response offered by Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin.

But Simon’s message wasn’t only a refutation of the Republican in the White House, whose culture-war speech assailed Democrats, undocumented immigrants, transgender people and others. Her comments served as a counter punch to those in her party who’ve argued Democrats must move to the center and avoid identity politics in order to regain power. Simon argued the party should instead swing left to bring around low-income voters who have been “betrayed” by Trump’s proposed cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other safety-net programs.

“There are folks in the Democratic Party who are saying we should not honor the beautiful fabric (of diversity) that we have fought to weave together,” Simon told Playbook in an exclusive interview a few hours before her speech. “I say, ‘Absolutely not. That is not how we win.”

She added, “You’re abandoning the very premise of the civil rights and human rights movement of this country. I think it is reprehensible.”

Simon was selected to deliver the speech on behalf of the Working Families Party, the ultra-progressive organizing arm that aims to elect candidates who will move the Democratic Party away from the party of Joe Biden and closer to that of Bernie Sanders. It’s a movement that’s competing for oxygen with more centrist forces like Third Way that have blamed the party’s left flank for Trump’s return to power and pushed Democrats to ditch identity politics.

Someone should listen to that sister. And finally …

Sleep well, Mister Turner.

Rest in peace to Rep. Sylvester Turner of Houston, Texas, who took over the seat formerly held by the late Sheila Jackson Lee. Rep Turner attended the Trump joint address, and was taken to the hospital shortly afterward. He was released the following morning, but passed away yesterday, from enduring health complications, according to a statement from his family. I had the pleasure of interviewing Rep Turner back when he was the mayor of Houston. He was a stand up guy and a fighter for his community. Deepest condolences to his family.