Clear and Present Danger

Republicans, led by Oversight Committee chair James Comer in the House, are gearing up for a multi-year investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and whether it proves he used his father’s name and status to enrich himself overseas. And yet, wrote commentator Dean Obeidallah for CNN on Monday, we already know former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner did all of this — and the evidence is getting harder and harder for even Republicans to ignore.

Obeidallah pointed to a new bombshell report by The Washington Post, detailing how Trump turbocharged the rise of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman — and he and his family, Kushner included, are reaping financial benefit.

“If Comer reads this article, he will see red flag after red flag of how Kushner and Trump potentially pocketed money from recent business deals with the Saudi government after helping Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS, while in the White House,” wrote Obeidallah. “Don Fox, former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, told the Post that there was no requirement for Trump, a former commander in chief, or Kushner, a former senior White House official, to disclose financial ties to foreign governments. ‘He said their work has exposed a glaring shortfall in ethics laws that needs to be fixed by Congress,’ the paper reported.”

Trump, noted Obeidallah, was one of the most significant figures defending, and blocking efforts to sanction MBS after he ordered the murder of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, even saying, “I saved his ass.”

Then, when he left office, as he and Kushner faced “unprecedented business challenges,” both came upon Saudi money, with Kushner receiving a $2 billion infusion from the Saudis into his private equity firm and Trump getting to host LIV golf tournaments, bankrolled by the Saudi wealth fund, at his properties.

“Comer is correct that the ‘American people deserve transparency and accountability’ when it comes to anyone profiting off political connections — especially when the people officially served in our government,” concluded Obeidallah. “If Comer is sincere, we should be seeing letters demanding the same information from Kushner, Trump and daughter Ivanka as he sent to Hunter Biden. If not, then we know the congressman is doing nothing more than using our tax dollars to try to hurt the President and help the GOP.”

Of course, they struck at night because they are too cowardly to stand up and be recognized.

A township in Michigan is reeling from a 24-hour period from early Sunday morning to early Monday morning that featured two major acts of hate, although authorities do not know if the two incidents are related.

The first incident occurred early Sunday morning and involved the family of a well-known surgical veterinarian in the community, Dr. Lucretia Greear. Greear specializes in holistic treatments and treating cancer patients — and happens to be in an interracial marriage.

Lucretia’s husband Tony was alerted to the incident by his son. Video cameras show that a single individual who was joined by additional people in two other vehicles drove up to the Greear’s vehicles and used a white marker to write a racial epithet and a swastika, as well as other expletives and vulgar images.

“I was furious,” said Tony Greear in an interview with WXYZ-TV in Michigan. “My son called me and said, ‘Dad, come outside. You won’t believe this.'”

Lucretia Greear took the high road in her response to the hate, but still feels the repercussions of the violation of her home.

“It’s very scary,” she said. “It’s like not feeling safe in my home, you know, how far is this going to go?” Greear continued. “I was up all night and I don’t think it registered to me how hurtful and how hateful it was. I — just processing that there’s nothing about me that should be wrong for my children but today there is. They have a Black mom.”

Grear also took the time to directly speak to the assailants.

“I feel sorry that your heart is filled with that much hate and that much hurt,” Greear said. “You have a miserable life.”

Roughly 24 hours later, early Monday morning in Brownstown Township, police were canvassing the same neighborhood after anti-Semitic fliers were found placed in small plastic bags and thrown outside of an estimated 20 homes. The same fliers have been found across Michigan previously. The small plastic bags are weighed down with rocks and gravel so they won’t blow away in the wind.

The events of the last 24 hours were a shock to Brownstown Township Supervisor Ed Smith, another prominent African-American in the community.

“Hate does not go away, it just hides,” Smith said. “So it’s important for all of us to be proactive.”

Jim Jordan and other Republicons are “investigating” Hunter Biden’s laptop, including nude photos of him that were planted on his laptop after he dropped it off at a computer repair shop.

If we are going to investigate Hunter Biden naked, when will we investigate Melania Trump?

 

 

Who is behind those “Jesus Gets Us” ads on the Super Bowl?

Well, it’s NOT Jesus.

Instead, it’s a group of very wealthy “christian evangelicals” whose goal is to take over the US government.  Believe it.

 

Insider reported Sunday that new Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is giving up all of his political capital fighting for things that no one but Republican members cares about.

The GOP spent the 2022 midterm election talking about things like crime and the economy, but now that they’ve come to power, their first focus was removing Democrats from House Committees that they didn’t like based on conspiracy theories.

There were concerns from some Republicans about taking Omar off of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa since she was the only person in Congress from Africa. Still, she was booted but only from that specific committee.

In the last Congress members, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were taken off of committees after bad behavior that the whole of Congress voted was unacceptable. Gosar threatened to kill Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) and President Joe Biden. Greene was involved in many anti-Semitic statements and spoke to a white nationalist anti-semitism conference.

“If it was tit-for-tat we would’ve picked people, took them off all committees, and said nothing about it,” McCarthy told reporters.

The vote against Omar took a lot of political negotiations and McCarthy only secured the votes at the last minute.

At the same time, Republicans have chosen to focus most of their time on hearings that attack President Joe Biden.

Now the GOP is taking on Washington, D.C., which as not a state has to have all of its laws approved by Congress. It’s one of the main reasons that D.C. people have fought for statehood. Last week, two bills were passed by the Council of D.C. One would allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections and another overhauled the city’s criminal code. Republicans are against it, saying that it would make D.C. more dangerous.

As the GOP pushes more conservative bills, they’re not likely to bet on the same kind of whole-party unity, the report explained.

“While the House resolutions will likely hit a brick wall in the Senate, McCarthy knows that while ultraconservative bills could pass with the slimmest of margins, they would be purely symbolic,” Insider said. “Many GOP members would welcome such actions ahead of the 2024 presidential election, in an attempt to create a foil in President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats. But for McCarthy, continually arm-twisting to pass bills that won’t go anywhere may not inspire confidence among Independents that will decide legions of House races next year.”

If the House can’t do anything useful, particularly after making a number of campaign promises, it could make 2024 very difficult for House members that won in 2020’s pro-Joe Biden districts.

Another newly elected Republican House member has had doubt cast on her backstory after a deeply-reported Washington Post profile found several discrepancies.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) has described herself as a Hispanic conservative who grew up poor, survived a home invasion and lost her grandmother to HIV/AIDS due to heroin use. But those details have come as a surprise to family members and friends who knew her before she entered politics about five years ago, reported the Washington Post.

“She had everything, what she needed and more,” said her aunt Jolanta Mayerhofer, “and not only did [her mother] Monica provide for her, but my father-in-law did, too.”

Luna grew up in Los Angeles and joined the U.S. Air Force in 2009, at age 19, the Post reported. Friends who knew her then, when she used her given last name of Mayerhofer, say she described herself variously as Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European and supported then-president Barack Obama. She was a registered Democrat as recently as August 2017.

“She would really change who she was based on what fit the situation best at the time,” former roommate Brittany Brooks, who lived with Luna for six months and was a close friend during her military service, said in the report.

Luna graduated from the University of West Florida in 2017 with a degree in biology following a six-year stint in the Air Force, where she met her husband Andrew Gamberzky. After leaving the military she works as a model, a cocktail waitress at a gentleman’s club and an Instagram influencer.

She was ushered into politics by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk after making online statements about human trafficking and the Second Amendment, and she was named that conservative group’s director of Hispanic engagement. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress against Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) in 2020.

Luna started publicly embracing her Hispanic heritage around that time, and she changed her last name to Luna at age 29, the same year she updated her ethnicity on voter registration records to Hispanic after identifying herself as “White, not of Hispanic origin” in 2015, the Post reported.

Her mother Monica Luna disputed to the Post that her daughter had only recently identified her Mexican ancestry, although she herself only recently took steps to make her own mother’s family name part of hers.

“Anna has never not identified as being Hispanic as far as I know,” she wrote in an email, adding that Luna’s father spoke Spanish around her when she was a child. “Anna can check both boxes. She’s bicultural and biracial. It’s not easy to figure out what box to choose.”

Luna’s campaign website claims her father was incarcerated off and on throughout her childhood, but the Post was unable to find any public records of felony charges or prison sentences for George Mayerhofer in California, where she lived in those years. Monica Luna and Jolanta Mayerhofer told the newspaper that he was jailed several times for failure to pay child support.

Monica Luna said Mayerhofer, who she never married, served at least a year on a drug-related charge in Orange County, but corrections officials say they have no record of that.

Luna has claimed her father raised her as a Messianic Jew, which her mother corroborated, but her extended family say Mayerhofer was Catholic and they had no recollection of him practicing any form of Judaism.

Her paternal grandfather, Heinrich Mayerhofer, emigrated in 1954 to Canada from Germany, where he served in the Nazi Army as a teenager, though relatives told the Post he had no choice and did not harbor antisemitic views.

“It hurt for him to talk about it,” Jolanta Mayerhofer, who was married to one his sons, told the Post. “He said, ‘You getting the letter, you need to show up, otherwise your life is over. … He did not like it, but that’s what life was.”

 

 

 

Gym Jordan’s Congressional committee has asked Hunter Biden’s lawyer for thousands of documents.

Hunter Biden has hired Abbe Lowell as his attorney.

On Thursday, Feb 9, Lowell — on Hunter Biden’s behalf —  rejected a request from House Republicans for records and information related to his business dealings.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., the lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the committee “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose and oversight basis for requesting such records from Mr. Biden, who is a private citizen.” Lowell said they would not comply with the Republicans’ request but offered to meet with committee members “to see whether Mr. Biden has information that may inform some legitimate legislative purpose.”

Lowell’s response is the same response used by Gym Jordan and Kevin McCarthy when they did not respond to the J6 Committee subpoenas. If it was okay for Kevin and Gym, then it’s okay for Hunter.

This will be fun to watch

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made a scene and disrupted a classified briefing about the spy balloon that traveled over the continental U.S., reported The Hill on Thursday.

“Biden administration officials briefed House members behind closed doors in the Capitol Thursday morning on this weekend’s downing of a Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast, which capped off a days-long saga of following the balloon as it floated over the U.S.,” reported Mychael Schnell. “One lawmaker who attended the briefing said the exchange between Greene and the officials included profanities.”

“When she got to ask questions, she was yelling out saying ‘bulls—’ and, you know, ‘I don’t believe you,’” said that lawmaker. “Just screaming and yelling, irrational in my estimation.”

In a statement to The Hill, Greene was unapologetic for her behavior: “I had to wait in line the whole time. I was, I think, the second to last person, and I chewed them out just like the American people would’ve,” she said. “I tore ‘em to pieces.”

The balloon, which Chinese officials tried to claim was just a weather instrument that was blown off course, sparked an intense debate over whether to shoot it down immediately or wait for a more strategic moment. The military decided to wait until it was over the water, in part to prevent falling debris from threatening people and structures on the ground, and also partly to make sure it landed in an advantageous place to recover the pieces.

Greene’s outburst in the hearing comes after she drew controversy for loudly heckling and shouting down President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address, including when he was discussing how to tackle the fentanyl epidemic.