Morning! Splash here, and I am large and pretending to be in charge. That’s me on the bottom in the middle, but look at those pics! We looked at the graphic over coffee this morning on The Patio. We thought it was a cover of TV guide or something, not the start of the Cabinet Selection process.

The celebrity nominations don’t get down to the one we are most interested in which is #4 at Dod, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. That is three levels below where Pete from Fox is supposed to go, but this Deputy is in charge of the three letter zoo: NSA NGA, and DIA. Plus, sensitive activities. We are sensitive to that since we used to work for the people who ran the three letter agencies, so the individual to whom they report actually gets close to a neighborhood issue. So, we are watching with interest.

Our section leader DeMille is nursing some 151 hangover- not purely alcohol, but a consequence of the break time his Socotra House Creative Section got after the stress of the election was over. That stress, anyway. He claims he will have a summary of the last four years when he gets around to it and will be back at the table when he feels up to it. He has a certificate issue to deal with and will be back later.

We were at Lena’s because it was old and new like everything else in town. She runs an established pizza place with wood-fired stoves to bake her pies. We used to hit the location in Del Ray it for dinner in between visits to Old Town clubs down in Alexandria. Times being what they are, Lena wanted an activity with better margins on the property she owned, so they plopped down a couple bucks and did a little Havana-themed place upstairs. It is fun, even if we have to help Vic up the staircase in front and hope no one steals his walker.

We are trying to help his find a bike-lock to attach it to the stairs, since the neighborhood pirates are ecumenical and don’t stick to porches to collect packages. We also told him to just take the elevator Lena put in, but he is a little hard of hearing. Accordingly, DeMIlle gave him the medical stuff to follow and he is off looking at the RFK Jr. nomination at HHS.

Vic is a likely choice for that portfolio, since he has hard nine surgical adventures since the Covid thing started. They were stem to stern in scope and we will leave that to him, since he he is now as experienced in public health matters as anyone except the people with the scalpels. We may let him launch on that but will wait until Melissa is on break for reasons of potential liability.

We talked about all sorts of stuff in the Cuban atmosphere at the Club 151 without anyone from Legal to stifle our speech. It was liberating. I kept notes from the conversation to recycle into some mildly ironic stories we can use in the Daily, which we hope will get better. In order to stay focused, we told Vic to sample the popular media outlets during the day to ensure there is some balance in our pitches.

We all laughed at that, since he just asked Kristina to ask one of her classmates at George Mason to tell us what was up. Apparently the ladies on The View have been in a tizzy since last week. Sonny Holstin and Whoopi both got into it this week trying to sort things out. Sonny had to read a short on-air note from the ABC Legal Department saying one of the Cabinet nominees accused of improprieties has previously denied the appalling things. And the folks who go to Holtermann’s Bakery on Staten Island were relieved to discover they don’t hate Whoopi’s politics, they just had a boiler burst.

So, we turned all that over to Melissa to try to decrypt what is happening in LawFare Land now that part of the anti-trump legal fight is now going to be deferred until after the term he hasn’t started yet, or we think 2028. We won’t attempt to sort out who the hacker was who got into the local court documents to pilfer the sealed testimony of the women who accused Mr. Gaetz of that that made headlines yesterday.

That affair actually gives a little preview of what is coming when the Epstein and P. Diddy sealed testimony gets leaked. The point, of course, is to destroy other public figures deemed un-useful to whatever other narratives are in progress and misses the real story. That is, almost everyone in the know got invites to private parties in which all sorts of things were going on. Some of it was legal, of course, but some of it used to be worth jail time. It was going on for more than a decade, so we are standing by to binge watch the whole thing.

We will handle this season’s Cabinet level stuff at our level until everyone get the vapors about real estate prices. That will come when the hundreds of well-to-do jobs get turned over in the next three months, in and outbound, all with decimal points in the prices. We will let Melissa track it until something needs to be signed by the Chairman upstairs in the suite on the 8th floor. He keeps it since a long ago Speaker of the House lived up there when the Big Pink building was new. Hope Carl Albert is resting in peace wherever he is these days. The view across the River is pretty cool.

So, that is what is coming as we get settled in the narrative harness again. DeMille told me to lead the discussion on Cabinet picks, Rocket gets the two wars, Vapor gets to share the rest of the national stuff. We are all looking at the weather to see if we need to break out the down jackets for the season.

It is time to be careful with that part now. Oh, and the nuclear war thing. You would think that would be a bigger deal, but as you can see there is a lot going on.

It is sort of important, since there are targets here in the County that could disrupt travel down to Del Ray or anywhere except eternity. They say Mr. Putin was able to shoot down most of the eight ATACM missiles we said it was OK for Mr. Zelenskyy to shoot into Mother Russia although one of them managed to send the ammo depot at Bryansk sky-high. So, the eerie escalation continues and we don’t know if it means part of Arlington is likely to do the same or an armistice will break out. We assume something else will happen. Seems like a safe bet.

So, that is in the “excitement to come” file on DeMille’s desk. He will sort it out after he gets that Virginia Medical Marijuana Certificate he was issued for passing- or failing- the 45-second telephone examination he took yesterday. He says it is to encourage his appetite, but we were subject to urinalysis on active duty, so our knowledge is dated. We will follow with interest.

In fact, we asked Vic to keep an eye on it and evaluate DeMille’s leadership performance? if he gets the certificate.

Forward!, right?

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