IT’S POLITICAL: Under pressure from far right Joe Biden hating Republicans, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has directed committees to open impeachment investigations of the President.

  The question is whether Biden made any money from his son Hunter’s business dealings, among other issues, McCarthy said. “These are allegations of abuse of power, obstruction and corruption and warrant further investigation by the House of Representatives,” McCarthy told reporters. “We will go wherever the evidence takes us,” he said.

  The NY Times reports that Donald Trump has been quietly urging Republican lawmakers to impeach Biden.

  McCarthy does not appear to be whole-hearted about impeachment, but he’s trying to keep from being toppled by his party’s extremists. Florida’s fire breathing Matt Gaetz said in a floor speech yesterday threatening McCarthy, “Subpoenas for Hunter Biden and the members of the Biden family. Impeach Joe Biden. Do these things or face a motion to vacate the chair.”

  While juggling the demand for impeachment, McCarthy is confronting the same party extremists who threaten to shut down the government unless he approves a spending bill that includes substantial cuts and stringent new border policies that have almost no chance of passing the Senate.

  They are also threatening to depose McCarthy if he asks Democrats for their votes on spending to avoid the shutdown. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “I have a very simple agenda in Washington this week: Hold Joe Biden accountable and defund his weaponized government. I’m not willing to fund this government until we hold Joe Biden accountable. The American people are demanding it! Do you agree?”

ORANGE ALERT: An influential Republican lawyer is examining the question of whether the 14^thAmendment bars Donald Trump from returning to the presidency, The Washington Post reports. The importance of this is that it’s coming from dedicated Republicans.

  The paper says that “Jason Torchinsky, a partner with the Virginia law firm Holtzman Vogel, has in recent days initiated conversations about the idea of trying to disqualify Trump with a range of figures, including a Democratic secretary of state, fellow election lawyers and a retired federal judge.”

  Other lawsuits and efforts to block Trump under the 14^th Amendment are also under way. The 14^th, ratified three years after the Civil War, was designed to block from office any public official who had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US government. 

  The question of course is whether Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and his encouragement of the January 6^th mob fits the bill. Ultimately it may be decided by the Supreme Court.

WASHED AWAY: The enormity of the flooding disaster in Libya is just coming into focus, with 5,000 people dead and counting. The toll immediately outstrips that of the Morocco earthquake, but both countries will be finding the dead for some time to come.

  A torrential storm dumped 16 inches of rain, about three quarters of the country’s annual total, sending torrents downstream to Derna, a city of 100,000 people, and collapsing two dams along the way. Much of Derna is destroyed with entire neighborhoods washed away.

  The flooding left wreckage, cars and buildings mired in mud, major roads cut, and bodies in the streets.

FULL DISCLOSURE: A Democratic candidate in a crucial race for the Virginia General Assembly is crying political foul after the public release of a video showing her and her husband performing live on a sexually explicit streaming site. 

  Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running the first time, said in a statement that the leaks of her video were “an illegal invasion of my privacy designed to humiliate me and my family.” It would appear that she had already abandoned her privacy.

  The Washington Post and Associated Press reported that the live streams had been recorded from a pornographic site and archived on another site. 

 The 40-year-old Gibson, who appears on her campaign website in hospital scrubs as well as at home with her husband and two young children, is running for the House of Delegates in one of the races that will determine control of the General Assembly.  Gibson condemned the release of the video “the worst gutter politics.” 

THE OBIT PAGE: Ian Wilmut, the British scientist who led the mammal cloning project that produced Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first ever cloned mammal, has died at 79. Dolly was a worldwide sensation. Until then, scientists thought cloning a mammal was impossible.

THE SPIN RACK: Five former Memphis police officers involved in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols have been indicted by a federal grand jury. They’ve also been charged with murder in state court. — Police now say that a Pennsylvania homeowner fired his pistol at escaped murderer Danelo Cavalcante as he stole a rifle from the man’s garage. They say they don’t know whether Cavalcante was hit, but he got away with a .22 rifle that has a scope on it. He’s been on the run nearly two weeks. Cavalcante’s mother told The NY Times that despite her son having murdered two people, she believes her he “did not pose a threat to anyone” and is just fighting to survive a difficult life. — Quarterback Aaron Rodgers ripped his Achilles tendon on only the fourth play of stewarding the New York Jets Monday night, ending his season and possibly his career at age 40. The Jets took Rodgers from Green Bay and agreed to pay him $75 million to help steer them to a long-denied championship season. He still gets paid, $9,375,000 for each of his four snaps.

BELOW THE FOLD: The National Book Awards has dropped actress and television host Drew Barrymore as their host this year because Barrymore returned her TV show to air while her writers are on strike with the rest of the Writers Guild of America writers. Organizers of the book awards noted that, after all, their event is about honoring writers.

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