TGIF 2/8/19

Can it be time, already, to look back at who had a good week and who might have one that was, shall we say, less than stellar?

Afraid it is - and it's an interesting week for sure, in that some of the folks on the good side of the ledger also found themselves on the less than stellar side, too.

For example, there was the president, coming off his State of the Union address which Republicans loved, even though he sounds in many ways more like a Democrat than one of them, what with his plans for family leave and empowering women in other countries, and even in his goal of wiping out the spread of HIV/AIDS in the next 10 years. But he showed his rosy red colors, making sure to further inspire fear in the hearts of Americans when it came to immigration and abortion. So, that put him on the good list - ratings were good, ratings for his house network were good, and even some polls showed that the speech was well received.

But then, we learned today that there's apparently been a caravan of undocumented workers at Trump properties, including hotels and golf courses, for years - and, according to some of the workers, with the full knowledge of the people running the properties. Undocumented workers say they told their bosses they had no documentation, and it didn't matter - or even more interesting, when they showed fake documentation that was of poor quality, they were told to get better fake documents.

Now, because it's Trump, I'm sure none of this will matter, because nothing matters when it's him. But for some people, everything matters.

Take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC as she's known. She and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey dropped their remarkable life-changing Green New Deal on Thursday. This was the plan that most of the current Democratic presidential candidates - maybe all of them - had signed onto, sight unseen according to some reports.

The plan would completely remake our transportation, agriculture, energy, manufacturing and architecture and engineering industries, as well as creating millions of new jobs (while getting rid of equal number of old ones) and erasing poverty and, well you get the drift. Ambitious is an understatement, but paraphrasing AOC, it's a mobilization the likes of which we haven't seen since WWII and it's needed.

Good week for her, then, right? Not even six full weeks in Congress, and putting this plan out? Pretty impressive.

Yeah - except for the reaction from the right, and even from her own party.  The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel offered this:

By the end of the Green New Deal resolution (and accompanying fact sheet) I was laughing so hard I nearly cried... If a bunch of GOPers plotted to forge a fake Democratic bill showing how bonkers the party they is, they could not have done a better job. It is beautiful. 

But worse was this comment from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but  they're for it, right?

That comment planted one of the Speaker's feet in the less than stellar column, would you agree? Especially since she did reasonably well during the SOTU, and of course she launched the clap that launched a million memes, too - which put one foot in the 'good' column in many people's eyes.

Two people had good weeks - Jeff Bezos was one of them.

Say what you will about him allegedly cheating on his wife with someone else's wife, but boy did he fire off a shot against the National Enquirer, its parent company, and its CEO, the friend of Trump David Pecker.  In a blog post, Bezos accused Pecker's company of blackmailing him, threatening to post new compromising information unless Bezos stopped his investigation and issued a statement that there was nothing political about what they were doing to him, the world's richest man and foe of Trump.

In going on the offensive, Bezos included a list of the negative information the paper had on him - basically stipping it of any value to the tabloid, even though it incriminated him. And, federal investigators are now looking into whether a crime was committed; if yes, it would put Pecker and Company in a difficult position with the Special Counsel's office, which could add more pressure on the president...

The other was former Michigan Congressman John Dingell, who passed away at the age of 92 after battling cancer. That's not the good news part, obviously.

No, the good news was that Dingell was quite a capable Twitter user. Not nasty and self-serving like one user in particular, but often self-deprecating and occasionally throwing some gentle shade.

TGIF, everyone.