DL Open Thread Monday, Feb. 5, 2024

The FBI didn’t bother opening a locked closet at Mar-a-Lago when it searched for stolen documents. Trump’s White House pharmacy handed out drugs like a pill mill. Stories that once would have caused days of outrage now rush by with hardly a nod, such is the pace of the Great Unraveling as Trump and the Republican Party circle the drain. Trump’s trial calendar is light this week, just some Colorado activity punctuated by tomorrow’s Nevada primary, so the media will have to find other things to cover. Just warnin’ ya.

What make me think the MAGA moment has passed? That “trucker convoy” from Virginia reached their gathering spot near the Rio Grande with a total of 19 vehicles, none of them trucks. Meanwhile, the anti-censorship contingent at a Brevard County, Florida school board meeting vastly outnumbered the lone Mom for Liberty who showed up. The popularity of this nonsense might be less than we’ve been led to believe.

A CIA-employed hacker who gave the agency’s manual for its hacking tools to Wikileaks was sentenced to 40 years in prison for that, plus a laundry list of tacked-on crimes. I wonder what a guy who hides top-secret documents in a secret closet after trying to overturn an election would get?

In the Capitol Hill production A House Divided, Kevin McCarthy might be gone but he’s still trying to get revenge on Matt Gaetz via the ethics committee investigation into the pumpkin-headed provocateur’s pursuits. Hard to know who to root for on that one – everyone hates Gaetz, but McCarthy is such a fuck-up he’s sure to fail.

While the media concentrates on important stuff like that, it mostly ignored the Air Force’s announcement that the price tag for its new intercontinental ballistic missiles, complete with updated and improved nuclear warheads, will be [fiddles with slide rule] about $131 billion:

The new estimate—and it’s just an estimate—includes the cost of developing the missile, buying 634 of them, installing 450 in silos (the rest will be for tests and spares), and connecting their launch-control centers to the command-control network. It does not include the costs of maintaining the missiles over the next 20 years, which would likely raise the total cost to well over $200 billion. Nor does it include the $15.9 billion price tag for the new nuclear warhead, called the W87-1, to be perched on top of the missile.

Sure, it’s expensive, but think of how much bang you get for the bucks!

One thing that’s easy for the media to cover is itself. In today’s media news, “Saturday Night Live” is catching flak for giving Nikki Haley a cameo in a cold-open Trump sketch, thereby engaging in what’s sure to be called libwashing. Meanwhile, spoiled brat Tucker Carlson, desperate for the attention he once commanded, is in Moscow – one wag said the Kremlin must have rescinded its work-from-home policy – so expect a Putin interview and surrounding controversy soon.

The floor’s yours.