After the Fire

Behind the palaces, pools, and now casinos, a fire is burning. It's an unusual variety but a common one. Like an underground coal fire, it smolders, smokes, and keeps the curious at bay.  There's no documenting the start or, to some degree, the cause, though the reasoning varies little and confounds instantaneous logic. 

Near the fire is warm.

Duties Day

It was yesterday, it's been all week. To be honest, it's been forever. The counting coup is through round one, and the bill of fair calls for action; the payment comes due. 

There were 19 in chairs, looking at each other and staring straight ahead. An aide stands center stage holding a medal on a ribbon for deeds done for freedom and politics. 

A judgment might conclude it was a necessity, required, expected, and, in the odd case, deserved. Like a bag of apples, passed over and re-packaged. An honor or a gesture. All the same apples by association. A disgrace at some level. 

Long is the line of duty paid, collected, accrued, and yet to come due.

Promises Paid

The line around the palace leading to the conflagration expects cake. The popular meme cake by the ocean. A chicken in every pot, even if you don't have a pot. That was the paraphrased version in the legacy of politics. To expect relief is rational; to believe in politics is not. 

This is the stage for the War of the Losers. Congress versus the president and Congress always wins. A president can only do so much, and the act of executive power is costly in the only currency that matters: politics.  

Congress has losers on every side. The proper right, the wrong right, the old right, the new right, and the insane, and that's just the Republicans. The democrat party lost, and with Pelosi directing traffic, Congress is sure to be a parking lot. 

The question has been asked: what happens when delusions don't come true? Or is it already too late? 

It's been already too late all of our lives.

Matches Made 

There's always a crowd around an accident. The exception also draws a crowd. Not everyone in the crowd is always a fan, and the weather changes often in Washington. It has been an exceptional series of events in a long line of extraordinary and unusual events. Coincidental or spontaneous combustion, indeed to a degree. 

Other fires are the impetus and means to an end.  Not a match made in heaven. 

The contest in the big game of politics is always for all the marbles. It's carved in constitutional stone and now affirmed. A president can do no evil. Whether we see it, hear it, or talk about it. 

How long could  that possibly last?

The New Nerve

It's embarrassing even from. afar, these claims boasts, and outright lies that pass as policy or the seed stuck in the craw of a crony in Congress with newfound purpose in a president willing to cut a deal for a piece of the action.  

Things we think unkind, perhaps cruel, logistically challenging, counterproductive, but the mantra they've adopted solves all arguments; a simple "We're gonna do it anyway..." is the phrase that pays. No one is sure what policies are real, and being accustomed to politicians' promises provides little providence to think any of them are probable. It doesn't matter; it will all even be out. 

Even out at a level, and you may be able to keep your head above it.

Maybe.

But they are doing it.

Coming Out Red

You can see the blood in the president-elects -- er, eyes. ( I can't resist a meme. ) He knows he must grab and grab fast before anyone can do anything about it. Chances are he's already breaking federal law and not even inaugurated. 

I'm sure the FBI has rooms full of tapes and evidence, more every day. More opportunities for witnesses, more lawyers, more witness tampering, more appeals, endless, endless, endless games of catch me if you can, and he's not even inaugurated yet.

More non-disclosures and civil suits.

A full court press, more than usual even to press the case of impunity and inevitability, a freight train that will be powerful enough to keep anyone from ever writing the truth about the president and his family.

Good luck with that.

Blood in the Water 

No one feels safe or secure. No one. No one is safe or secure. As it turns out, neither is the president-elect. He has been manufacturing chum for years, the more red, the more he gets away with.

The markets, too, swarming with sharks seeing the end of easy money, scouting the schools of investors for prey, M and A activity is sure to peak as the big fish eat the little fish. Regulation, that's their hope. To get away with enough while he's in office to stay even for the duration and maybe pay off the third home on the island. 

The investment community is multifaceted. Like most things in economics, the mistakes or ignorance of the masses keeps the imbalance where it is. A retail investor is easy to bait. Look at NVDA.  

Blood in the water, and yesterday was your first birthday. 

You were born in the USA.