Welcome to Sunday morning at Crooks and Liars, where the coffee is hot and the conversation is great. Today is the first day of Daylight Savings Time, which should just be the standard year-round. Anyway, this is your Sunday morning cartoon, in lieu of our old Bobblehead thread. If you're dying to know who is yakking on today's shows, you can find that list here. Otherwise, sit back, pour yourself a cup of coffee and let us do the watching for you.
Speaking of George Santos, he's quite the slime, isn't he? The latest about his ATM fraud is so in character. It's no surprise he is a Republican congressman. He really has the resumé for it.
This week, Dan Goldman rocked the house over in the ridiculous Weaponization of Government subcommittee, as did Stacey Plaskett and all the Democrats, really. They left people wondering why Jim Jordan is such a sucker for punishment. To be fair, Republicans had pretty sketchy witnesses. Matt Taibbi was absurdly hyperbolic about his spoon-fed, cherry-picked "Twitter files" story, as was his cohort Michael Shellenberger. All in all, no performance by Republican witnesses was worthy of any Oscar.
If you haven't already, take a time out and go read the article about Teneo Network over on ProPublica. I wrote about Teneo in 2014 when it was just a bunch of millennials networking, mostly around the legal profession. Now Leonard Leo is the chairman looking to churn out a bunch of culture warriors to defeat "the left" (whatever that means in wingerspeak) on their own turf. Now that Leo has conquered the legal profession, he's looking to aim his billion-dollar gift at the rest of the country. Josh Hawley was one of the early leaders of that group, by the way. This group is the real definition of what "grooming" means, at least in a professional sense.
Let's not leave Tucker Carlson out of the nominations for Biggest Liar. After his stunt on Monday where he pretended the January 6 protesters were just tourists being so respectful of the Capitol, even Republicans called bullshit on him. And then we discovered that Tucker really hates Trump and never thought the election was stolen. We also found out he hates the "news" side of Fox, as if there even is one. Bret Baier was blubbering like a bitty baby about the Arizona call, begging the Decision Desk to retract the call because viewers were yelling at him. Yeah, real straight news guy there. Have you ever seen a "news" channel so afraid of its viewers? They created the monster and now they can't tame it. Pathetic, really.
It's been a terrible week for Donald Trump, even though I'm skeptical that the Manhattan DA will actually drop an indictment on him. Of course, if Bragg does indict him, it won't change his plans to run for president and he'll still have his rabid base. The real questions are whether he'd ever be convicted of anything, and whether the "fall in line" Republicans would still fall in line. On the other hand, if Fani Willis doesn't move soon, she won't be in any position to do anything at all.
Tonight is the Academy Awards. We'll be running an open thread and give you ways to watch online later in the day.
Who are your picks for winners today?
- Your favorite Managing Editor, Karoli
