WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A mad scramble erupted on Wednesday as hundreds of Democratic candidates across the nation begged Elon Musk to visit their states.

Democrats who previously thought their electoral prospects were dim pleaded with the South African businessman for a miracle that only his noxious presence can deliver.

Additionally, they implored Musk to don stereotypical regional headwear during his visit in the hopes of striking the most off-putting note possible.

“No one guarantees a Democratic victory like Elon Musk,” one party strategist said. “He fell apart in Wisconsin like a human Cybertruck.”

Even if Tim Kaine's measure on terminating Trump's tariffs on Canada — which passed the Senate tonight, 51-48 — dies in the House, it's still relevant:

It's the most striking bipartisan rebuke of White House policy since Trump's second term began

In short order, Donald Trump has done extraordinary harm to the relationship between the United States and Canada. There are plenty of lawmakers on Capitol Hill — in both parties — who believe the president is on the wrong track, especially when it comes to trade tariffs on our allies north of the border.

With this in mind, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia has championed a privileged resolution that would terminate the president’s Feb. 1 emergency declaration, which the White House used to issue tariffs on Canada. It would also, of course, eliminate the need the Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on American products.....

The Senate voted 51-48 to pass the resolution, with four Republicans — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul of Kentucky; and Susan Collins of Maine — joining all 47 Democrats in support of the measure.

The outcome is striking, though it’s not altogether surprising. Paul, for example, is a longtime tariff critic and co-sponsor of Kaine’s resolution, while Collins and Murkowski signaled their support for the Democratic measure ahead of the floor vote......

To the extent that reality still has any relevance in the debate, the idea that fentanyl is “pouring into” the United States is rather silly. In fact, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, only 43 pounds of fentanyl were found crossing the northern border in 2024 — as opposed to 21,100 pounds seized at the southern border.

Fighting a trade war with a trusted ally and neighbor over fentanyl that could fit in a single suitcase is absurd. The president might not understand this, but a bipartisan majority of the Senate got it right.

A couple of weeks ago, in a middle-of-the-night missive published to his social media platform, Donald Trump wrote that he was unilaterally invalidating Joe Biden’s pardons for Jan. 6 committee members.

The assertion — without precedent in American history — was apparently based in part on the Republican’s belief that his Democratic predecessor suffered from mental deterioration to such a horrific degree that he wasn’t aware of his own policies and preferences.....

What we did not know until this week, however, is that a Trump-aligned prosecutor decided to take all of this rather seriously. The New York Times reported:

Ed Martin, the ardent Trump loyalist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, is pursuing an inquiry into whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was competent to pardon his family members and others during his final days in office. The inquiry, which includes previously unreported letters to Mr. Biden’s family and former White House staff members, uses the levers of federal law enforcement to try to harass Mr. Biden’s family and allies and undermine his decisions as president, while scoring political points with President Trump.

The Times’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that the Republican lawyer has sent “provocative” correspondence to the former president’s aides and relatives, in addition to sending letters to some of the beneficiaries of Biden’s pardons. The efforts, the Times added, “highlight Mr. Martin’s hands-on approach and willingness to use one of the most important U.S. attorneys’ offices in the country to seek retribution against Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies.”....

Indeed, the former “Stop the Steal” organizer’s interest in Biden dovetails with a lengthy series of similar efforts launched by the Republican lawyer, who has no prosecutorial experience.

Martin’s “greatest hits” package features misguided fights with the dean of Georgetown University’s law school, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California and Democratic Rep. Eugene Vindman of Virginia. During his brief tenure, Martin has also:

demoted multiple senior officials involved in Jan. 6 insurrection cases;

falsely described himself as one of the president’s lawyers;

weighed in on a civil case involving the White House, which had literally nothing to do with his office;

intervened in a dubious Environmental Protection Agency investigation;

made a dubious decision in the case involving Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida;

launched the wildly unnecessary “Operation Whirlwind”;

also launched the wildly unnecessary “Project 1512” initiative;

also launched a wildly unnecessary "election accountability" unit;

made a creepy public vow to wield his prosecutorial powers against those who get in Elon Musk’s way;

engaged in brazen conflict of interest in a Jan. 6 case, in which he effectively took both sides of a criminal case;

and kicked off a radically unnecessary investigation into Jack Smith and a law firm that gave the former special counsel pro bono legal services.

.....What’s more, The New York Times reported that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary counsel to investigate Martin, arguing that the Trump-appointed Republican has “abused” his prosecutorial powers.

Trump has nevertheless nominated Martin to be the permanent U.S. attorney in the nation’s capital — one of the nation’s largest prosecutorial offices — though Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California this week placed a procedural hold on the nomination. Watch this space.

Mike Waltz's big problem: There's fresh evidence of his incompetence.

Mike Waltz's other big problem: There appear to be several White House insiders who are eager to talk to reporters about his incompetence.

Unfortunately for Team Trump, political controversies can sometimes persist, even as some of those involved try to move on. The Washington Post reported:

Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.

The Post’s report hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, and national security council spokesperson said after the original article was published that Waltz “has never sent classified material over his personal email account or any unsecured platform.”

Nevertheless, the allegations — which obviously have some notable parallels to the 2016 hysteria surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email protocols — don’t do the beleaguered White House national security advisor any favors. There’s the surface-level problem, involving the accusation that Waltz conducted government business over personal email, coupled with the related problem that some of his colleagues apparently wanted the Washington Post to know about all of this.

Indeed, let’s not lose sight of the larger pattern. The day after the revelations raised by the Post, Politico reported that Waltz’s team “regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work ... according to four people who have been personally added to Signal chats.”.....

The revelations about Waltz are notable in their own right, but just as important is the story behind the stories: There are insiders willing to talk to news organizations about Waltz’s troubles, which is never a good sign for an official feeling political heat.

How’s that working out? The Alligator, the university’s student-run newspaper, reported this week on the controversial doctor’s tenure.

Ladapo’s work calendar shows monthslong stretches with little or no activity. Instead of attaining grants and conducting research, he spent his first year revising manuscripts and writing his memoir, ‘Transcend Fear,’ which details his skepticism of vaccines. He also promised to bring hundreds of thousands in research dollars from the University of California at Los Angeles, his previous employer. That never happened. ... A review of internal reports and public directories indicate Ladapo hasn’t secured any research grants for UF.

The same report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that Lapado’s classroom contributions have been “sparse”; one of his proposed courses “has yet to materialize”; and there’s “little evidence” that the internal medicine program he was supposed to lead has done meaningful work.

“Although UF leaders initially welcomed Ladapo, issues with absenteeism, funding shortfalls and clashes with colleagues quickly emerged,” the article added. (Ladapo and university representatives didn’t respond to The Alligator's requests for comment.)

Officials can’t say they weren’t warned......

A Florida Department of Law Enforcement report later told policymakers that Ladapo’s views led to “stress and acrimony among his coworkers and supervisors.” Soon after, the GOP-led legislature confirmed the physician anyway at the urging of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

While in office, Ladapo has made a wide variety of radical and potentially dangerous decisions, leading the editorial board of The Washington Post to conclude two years ago, “By playing loose with the facts, Dr. Ladapo ... betrayed the trust of the people of Florida and the nation.”

The University of Florida report, in other words, is striking — but not surprising.

Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist whom Republicans put in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, left little doubt that he would soon announce mass layoffs at the federal agency. Unfortunately, as NBC News reported, he did exactly that this week.

The Trump administration carried out mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday, aiming to slash around 10,000 full-time jobs from the federal agencies long tasked with regulating food and drugs and overseeing the nation’s public health policies. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is trying to reduce HHS’ workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 across several agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Robert Califf, the former FDA commissioner, said the agency as Americans have come to know it, is now “finished.” The New York Times added that the agency has now lost nearly all of its traditionally nonpolitical experts on food, drugs, vaccines and medical devices......

What’s more, for Kennedy and his radical agenda, it’s the latest in a series of related steps. Indeed, the layoffs come on the heels of free measles vaccine clinics closing in Texas — during a measles outbreak — because of Kennedy’s HHS cuts.

That came on the heels of Dr. Peter Marks, who oversaw the FDA’s vaccine division as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, resigning at least in part because of Kennedy promoting “misinformation and lies” in his claims about vaccine safety.

Which came on the heels of RFK Jr. making a bizarre choice to oversee research on the nonexistent connection between vaccines and autism.

Which came on the heels of news of some measles patients in Texas getting worse because people followed bad advice they got from Kennedy during a Fox News interview.......

Which came on the heels of the department also canceling funding “for dozens of studies seeking new vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 and other pathogens that may cause future pandemics.”

Did I mention that these developments — literally all of them — are from just the last week? Because they are.

On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, partnered with independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in calling Kennedy to testify about his “proposed reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services.”

That’s a worthwhile move, though I wish the hearing had been held before Kennedy started dismantling the nation’s public health infrastructure, not after.

The problem(s) with the White House’s defense of Elon Musk’s DOGE endeavor.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested DOGE will help prevent national “bankruptcy.” There’s reason to believe she has this backwards.

But as The Washington Post noted, the White House’s latest line on the Republican megadonor’s efforts included some talking points the public doesn’t often hear:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday defended Elon Musk, who leads the U.S. DOGE Service, and its efforts to shrink the federal government, saying he ‘is trying to save democracy.’ ... ‘The United States of America will cease to exist. Our government will fail if we continue to go down the road of bankruptcy,’ she said during a Fox News interview, labeling some federal program spending as ‘wasteful and useless priorities.’

The president’s chief spokesperson delivered the lines with apparent confidence, as if the public should take such rhetoric seriously
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3llou2xdmfd2b
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1906756039447351695

......It’s a problem, of course, that DOGE has struggled at times with arithmetic, at one point famously confusing $8 billion with $8 million. But it’s a bigger problem that DOGE-driven disruptions at the Internal Revenue Service are poised to be extraordinarily expensive. The Washington Post reported last week:

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue. ... ‘The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,’ said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.

To be sure, these figures are based on projections that may or may not prove true — we’ll know more after the April 15 tax deadline — but the dire assessment, the Post’s report added, is based in part on the White House’s “rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.”

If Leavitt is correct and the United States of America “will cease to exist” without fiscal reforms, shouldn’t the White House do largely the opposite of what Trump and Musk have spent the last 10 weeks doing?

Vance flubs key details after the Trump admin acknowledged an ‘administrative error.’
Among other things, the vice president really ought to know that the Biden administration didn’t exist in 2019.

It was against this backdrop that JD Vance decided to add some related thoughts to the public conversation, which did not go especially well for the vice president. NBC News reported:

Vice President JD Vance weighed into the case and falsely said on X Tuesday that Garcia was a “convicted MS-13 gang member.” Garcia has no criminal convictions in the U.S. or in El Salvador, his legal team said in the lawsuit. In a follow-up post on X Tuesday, Vance stood by his comments and called Garcia “an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country,” despite the 2019 protection order against his removal from the U.S.

Even for a vice president who routinely struggles with factual details, this was a mess.

Initially, the Ohio Republican, by way of social media, took aim at a journalist who'd fact-checked him and said that Garcia was a “convicted” gang member, which wasn’t true and which was not supported by the administration’s own court filing.....

Usually, when Republicans get this wrong, they claim that Joe Biden was in the White House in 2020, despite the fact that the Democrat was inaugurated in January 2021. Vance flubbed this even more dramatically, however, suggesting that Biden was president in the third year of Trump’s first term.

As for Garcia, he remains in El Salvador, though his case is scheduled to be heard this week by a judge in Maryland. Watch this space.

Trump finds a curious new job for a defeated former Republican congressman
www.yahoo.com/news/maddow-... yet another dirtbag. President Donald Trump tapped a former House member who lost a scandal-tinged re-election bid last year to serve as the Labor Department’s

Roughly 10 weeks later, the White House still needs to replace many of the IGs who were ousted, and it was against this backdrop that Politico reported:

President Donald Trump tapped a former House member who lost a scandal-tinged re-election bid last year to serve as the Labor Department’s internal watchdog as part of a slate of nominations for top jobs at the agency announced late Monday. Former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, who worked as a New York City Police Department detective before being elected to Congress, was selected to serve as Labor’s inspector general.

The Politico report added that D’Esposito might be an “awkward fit” for the position, and it’s worth appreciating why.

The New York Republican arrived on Capitol Hill in early 2023, and it didn’t take long for the congressman to run into some trouble. Indeed, The New York Times reported in September 2024 that D’Esposito hired his fiancée’s daughter to work as a special assistant in his district office, paying her $3,800 a month in taxpayer money. Around the same time, the GOP congressman also reportedly added his mistress to his official payroll, generating a series of questions about the legal and ethical lines he apparently crossed.....

This was not persuasive to his constituents: D’Esposito, after having served just one term, narrowly lost his re-election bid in his competitive Long Island district.

Roughly six months later, Trump — who has a curious habit of finding jobs for Republicans whom voters have rejected — has decided that D’Esposito should be the inspector general at the Department of Labor, where he would be expected to serve in an independent capacity, investigating ethical lapses, despite his own alleged ethical lapses.

This is a Senate-confirmed position. D’Esposito’s confirmation hearings are bound to be interesting.