From Los Angeles … Short today, got a plane to catch.

IT’S POLITICAL: The fight to succeed Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House is shaping up. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise from Louisiana and Ohio’s Jim Jordan both declared themselves candidates for speaker yesterday.

  Scalise, 57, was the Congressman shot and seriously wounded by a gunman during a Washington baseball practice in June of 2017. In recent months he’s been treated for blood cancer but says he’s able to serve as speaker.

  Despite having been shot, Scalise is opposed to gun control. He said on NBC’s Meet the Press, “Don’t try to put new laws in place that don’t fix these problems. They only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to own a gun.”

  Jordan, 59, is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and was the first-ever chairman of the extremely conservative House Freedom Caucus. He has been the driver of investigating whether President Biden had improper ties to the foreign business deals of his son, Hunter.

  Both are deeply conservative, but Scalise is the mild mannered one and Jordan is the angry firebrand of the two. He refused to cooperate with the House January 6^th investigating committee.

ORANGE ALERT: Donald Trump’s presidential campaign announced that it raised $45.5 million from July through September, triple that of his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.  The numbers cannot be independently verified until later this month, but a good part of it is reported to have rolled in after the release of Trump’s mugshot following his indictment and arrest in Georgia.

NO ACCIDENT: The indictment of New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez has shed light on a 2018 fatal accident involving the woman who’s now his wife and some potentially shady dealings that followed, The NY Times reports.

  Nadine Arslanian was driving her black Mercedes through the night in suburban New Jersey when she hit and killed a man crossing the street. She was not charged and not even tested for drugs or alcohol.

  The Times reports that the now Mrs. Menendez was so eager to get a new car that the senator was willing to attempt suppressing the unrelated criminal prosecution of a New Jersey businessman in exchange for a $60,000 Mercedes convertible. The mention of the accident lines up with the Mercedes listed in the Menendez indictment as one of the payoffs he’s accused of taking.

THE SPIN RACK: President Biden canceled another $9 billion in student debt just as repayments started up again after a three-year hiatus. This affects 125,000 people who qualify under existing programs, including teachers, firefighters, people on permanent disability. This comes after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s plan to forgive $400 billion in student debt. — The three Writers Guild of America staff writers for The Drew Barrymore Show refused to come back at the end of the strike. The reason has not been announced, but Barrymore angered the writers with an announcement that she was going to bring the show back to production before the WGA strike ended. She backed off, but the damage was done. — Actress Julia Ormond, who starred in Legends of the Fall, has sued former producer Harvey Weinstein, Disney, and Miramax charging that Weinstein sexually assaulted her in 1995 in New York. She tells a now familiar tale about Weinstein’s, who’s serving 23 years in prison for rape. The 58-year-old Ormond says her career never recovered after the incident. — The US says it gave Ukraine thousands of brand new guns and more than a million rounds of ammunition seized from Iran. — The City of Lights has become the City of Bites. Less than a year before millions of people are expected to descend on Paris for the Olympics, the city is suffering an invasion of bedbugs. 

BELOW THE FOLD: While Congress devolved into leaderless chaos this week, the quiet news from Washington is that President Biden’s dog Commander has been removed from the White House. Commander has bitten secret Service agents as many as 11 times. Biden’s previous dog, Major, also was removed after becoming a biter.

  Evidently the agents willing to take a bullet for the President draw the line at dog bites.