I don’t know what list I’m on that resulted in Erika Kirk sending me junk mail, but imagine my words when I saw this envelop in my mailbox:
Yes—the level of narcissism to just have your name as the
complete return address is stunning.
The pitch was what you’d expect:
(The “personal reply” I was to send was framed in $25
increments.) As was my response: “Oh, hon—no.”
Ripped it all up and tossed it in the recycling bin.
©2026 Bas Bleu
This is the week the world discovered the real reason that Li’l Donnie Two Scoops is saber-rattling about needing Greenland for US national security: he’s miffed that he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize last year, so he no longer cares about peace.
That’s exactly what he told Norway’s prime minister, Jonas
Gahr Støre, in a text message:
So—any upheaval that transpires as a result of the United
States either attacking the territory of one of our allies, breaking up our
longest and most honored military alliance, imposing snit-related tariffs on
other alliances who back Greenland’s sovereignty or (probably) him stubbing his
toe getting out of the shower is all on Norway.
Here's Ann Telnaes' take on this:
Honest to God—SCOTUS and the Republican pimples in Congress
are going down in history as the most reprehensible cowards the American
republic ever produced.
©2026 Bas Bleu
For those of us who thought last week’s speech at the UN General Assembly was the dernier cri of batshit lunacy, Tuesday at Quantico showed us that we have far to go before we hit bottom. First SECDEF Hogsbreath (“I’m not a cabinet officer but I play one on right-wing TV”) lectured 800 generals, admirals and senior NCOs on manliness, White supremacy and grooming for an hour. He was followed by Cadet Bonespurs (the guy who evaded the Vietnam-era draft five times and who comes from a long line of military service dodgers) delivering 70 minutes of spittle-flecked invective against Democrats, democracy and constitutional rights, and instructed military leaders to ignore international law, the Posse Comitatus Act and common decency.
He also whined about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize
(which—he claimed—he doesn’t want for himself, but for the country) and was this
close to begging the audience to applaud, cheer and laugh.
It was, at once, cringeworthy and terrifying. In the most
disordered way conceivable, he was publicly telling the leaders that he
expected them to go anywhere he tells them, and kill anyone he tells them,
including Americans here in America. Every uniform in that room was filled with
a person who’s served more than 20 years in the military, and is quite familiar
with both the Constitutional limitations on use of the armed forces and with
the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Most of them take those things seriously
and they know that issuing and following illegal orders are crimes.
(Remember—there are whackjobs in uniform. E.g., Mike
Flynn. But I think they’re in the minority.)
When Whiskey Pete finished—on what he obviously felt was a
high note—there was deadly silence for a few beats; then the assembly was
called to attention to mask the lack of positive response. When the Kleptocrat
finished, there was tepid applause for a few beats; then a Souza march was
blared to drown that out.
It was a shameful performance by both of them, at the cost
of millions of dollars to bring the audience to Quantico. But they’re all about
the performance and not the substance, so they’re taking it as a win.
Meanwhile, our government shut down as of 0001 Wednesday
and the administration is violating the Hatch Act all over the place as
official communications channels blame the Democrats. (Republicans control the
House, the Senate and the Presidency. They put forward a budget that slashes
social support and demolishes ACA subsidies, which doubles or triples what
people have to pay in healthcare premiums—and that’s what Democrats wanted as
the price of passing the bill.)
Klepto has also announced that—due to the shutdown—he’s
going to dismantle “Democrat” agencies. They’re also withholding all manner of
funds to states that have Democratic governors.
So—given all this, today’s earworm is Spike Jones’ immortal “Der Fuehrer’s Face”. We're getting there.
©2025 Bas Bleu
You know, Tuesday’s performance in the White House on the terrors of Tylenol would have been enough for most insane asylums, but then we had Wednesday’s speech at the United Nations. That sucker wasn’t just unhinged; it had never in its existence been close to a hinge.
And then we got Republican conspiracy theories about a “broken
escalator” (safety mechanism most likely tripped by one of the Kleptocrat’s videographers)
and “broken teleprompter” (all teleprompters used by Cadet Bonespurs wherever
he is are operated by White House staff)—they’re calling for “investigations”
into “treason” and for the US to “bomb or gas” the UN for making him look like
a clown.
Which really demeans this guy because he has demonstrated
for decades that he’s fully capable of self-beclowning.
So today’s earworm is from the Everly Brothers. Substitute “Putin” for “Cathy”, and you’ve got it.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Well, alrighty then—Cadet Bonespurs
proposed Tuesday that the United States take “a long-term ownership position”
of Gaza by sending US troops to clear out all the Palestinian residents of the
region (sending them to as-yet to-be-named countries permanently) and following
them with US companies (mostly ones with his name on them or in which he has a
financial stake) to develop all that beautiful beachfront property.
I have thoughts.
That he did this by way of welcoming
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is just cherce. I mean—don’t get me
wrong, Bibi would love nothing better than to hand off the ethnic cleansing of
Gaza to someone else; it saves him money and maybe gets about 2.2% of the
world’s opprobrium off his back. But I’m not really sure how happy he’d be to
have an outpost of the United States in his backyard, looking over his shoulder
and making strong suggestions on how he should run his little satrapy.
The notion that Gaza’s neighbors Egypt and
Jordan should take on 2.1 million displaced Palestinians because the Kleptocrat
is waving his willie is also interesting. There are literally generations of
Palestinians who’ve never been allowed out of the Jordanian refugee camps to
which they fled in 1948 because they’re considered alien and troublesome. Both
Jordan and Egypt have been quite clear over the decades that they do not
welcome Palestinians. At all. I do not know how much money we’d have to throw
at them to get them to appear to change their minds about this, but I don’t
think we have enough.
In fact, I’d be interested in Bonespurs’
brain burps on where he expects to find the “good, fresh, beautiful piece of
land” for the displaced millions. Rwanda, perhaps? Madagascar, maybe? Possibly
he’ll annex all of Cuba and move them there. As for finding the “some people to
put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and
enjoyable”…yeah, okay: I can see Peter Thiel, Eric Prince and some others
sniffing out some very profitable contracts coming down the pike. After they’ve
finished building out and managing the concentration
camp in Guantánamo Bay (you know that’s going
to be a for-profit prison, right?).
Dunno yet how the apocalypse-loving
evangelicals are reacting to this. On the one hand, Bonespurs is talking about
turning the conflict that’s meant to usher in the End Times into luxury resorts
and high-end time shares (neither of which they can afford, unless they're "pastors" of megachurches). That’s not Written in the Book, I don’t think. On the
other, Mini Moses Johnson and his co-religionists have had some kind of chip
implanted in the space where normal people would have a cerebellum, which
prevents them from saying anything critical about their God-sent messiah. So
it’s a paradox.
Evidently all the talk on the campaign trail about keeping US troops out of foreign wars was just so much bullshit. Go figure.
And all you American supporters of
Palestine, who didn’t think Kamala Harris would do enough to help your brothers
and sisters, so you voted R, or third party or not at all: welcome to find out.
I hope you’re happy with your choice.
The rest of you: don't let this shite distract you from the 24x7 fuckery going on in federal agencies by the World's Richest Ketamine Freak and his muskrats. He's playing kid in a ketamine shop with our data from Treasury, and is moving on to "fix" the aviation system. Nothing scary about that, eh?
Well, anyhow—it’s Friday, so in honor of
all that new beachfront development, let’s have something truly classy for the
first president to use the bully pulpit to hawk his cheap-ass schlock merch.
Has to be Frankie and Annette singing “Beach Blanket Bingo”.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Great. The Kleptocrat has announced plans to build a “migrant operations center” at Guantánamo Bay, “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States, and to address attendant immigration enforcement needs identified by the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.”
I have thoughts.
He's building a concentration camp to hold
up to 30,000 people his goons identify as “criminal aliens”, in the most hidden
and inaccessible place the US controls. The current facility at Gitmo maxes out
at 800, and there are currently about 100 prisoners—uh, “detainees”, whatever—there.
Imagine what it will take to expand that to 30,000. Either he’s thinking of
letting the construction contract to his buddies, or he’s expecting to use
slave labor to get the job done. ¿Por qué no los dos?
This choice is not accidental. Guantánamo
is the 21st Century analogue of Poland, which was where the Nazis
located their six Todeslager—the killing centers of Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek,
Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Oh, yeah—they built “concentration
camps” in Germany and occupied western countries, but for the real work of genocide,
they put the facilities far from the Vaterland, so Germans wouldn’t
smell the smoke coming from the crematories.
Even people in South Dakota and Wyoming might
object to that sort of thing, job prospects in prison management notwithstanding.
Not in theory, you understand; just NIMBY.
To put the scale of this “detention center”
into perspective: 30,000 is roughly the population of Rahway, N.J.; Gloucester,
Mass., Winter Park, Fla.; Juneau, Alaska; Bangor, Maine; Laramie, Wyo.; or East
Palo Alto, Calif. It’s the undergraduate student body of the University of
Southern California, Clemson University, the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst or the University of Iowa. Pulling something like that
out of the Kleptocrat’s ass because it’s the best way to hide crimes against
humanity—well, what could possibly go wrong with that process?
We started down this path of lawlessness
in the pursuit of geopolitics when George W. Bush announced the Great War on
Terror and repurposed the naval station to imprison men scooped up in raids all
over the Middle East and West Asia—often just on the say-so of others who had
scores to settle. (Much the way people ended up in Dachau or Sachsenhausen on
being denounced by their neighbors.) And then held them in prison without trial
for years. Our hands are not clean. But man—we’re just diving face first into
the abattoir with this insanity.
Since the White House has declared that
shoplifting $100 in merchandise constitutes major crime if you aren’t White (basically),
this means that people with anything less than a US passport in documentation
can be swept up and jailed without due process, because migration. (It
was the first bill he signed in office, the so-called Lakan Riley Act.) And
those people could end up in Guantánamo. Because once he’s built the facility,
he has to justify it by filling it.
Well, but it’s Friday, innit? So our
earworm for today is “Guantanamera”, a folk song based on a poem by 19th-Century
Cuban poet, nationalist and philosopher José Martí. The poem is about a girl
from Guantánamo, but she’s a proxy for his love of Cuba. He would be appalled
by these plans.
Let’s hear Cuban artist Celia Cruz singing it.
©2025 Bas Bleu
So, this happened yesterday:
Only (and I know you're be amazed by this):
And these replies were pure gold:
God, but we are well and truly fucked.
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes has resigned from The Washington Post. She left last week after her editor killed this cartoon she proposed:
The image shows Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of
Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder, CEO of Blue Origin and WaPo owner) and Sam
Altman (CEO of OpenAI) offering bags of money to the Kleptocrat (who may be a
statue, elevated on a plinth—this is actually a sketch she submitted, not a
finished cartoon). Additionally, LA Times CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong is offering a lipstick and Mickey
Mouse is prostrated at the base of the plinth.
You may
recall that Bezos and Soon-Shiong nixed their respective newspapers’ intent to
endorse Kamala Harris in the presidential election. All of the corporations
have recently donated in the seven figures to the Kleptocrat’s “inauguration”;
they have clearly decided to obey in advance. It’s particularly outrageous that
two of the formerly best newspapers in the country are among the Quislings, but
that’s what happens when billionaires buy media companies as side hustles and
make editorial decisions based on what’s best for their bread-and-butter
revenues.
Telnaes explained her reasons for leaving WaPo on her Open Windows blog. She invited other cartoonists to riff on her rejected theme, and the early responses are pretty good. You should also take a look at her post on why political cartoonists are a critical part of a free press, which is vital for democracy. She wrote this in 2019; it's only become more frightening in the intervening years.
As she
says, they’re the canaries in the coal mine of a democratic society. And the
canaries are coughing.
©2025 Bas Bleu
At time of writing, we’re still a couple of hours from the presidential debate. Which means we’ve had about ten days of Republicans laying the groundwork for a catastrophic failure by their twice-impeached, adjudicated rapist and fraudster, cognitively impaired, convicted felon candidate. They’ve been doing that by confidently proclaiming that Biden will be jacked up on everything from vitamin supplements through crack, washed down by Mountain Dew.
You really can’t make this shit up, folks, because
Republicans do that for you.
Anyway, I thought that I should adhere to this theme and give
you something from the better-living-through-chemistry years. So, here’s
Jefferson Airplane and “White Rabbit”.
(Just so you know—I spent the afternoon rolling down memory
lane on this one, because the choices, man—the choices…)
©2024 Bas Bleu
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee just showed us the truth of the adage “Elect clowns; expect a circus.” Because Wednesday’s hearing about alleged impeachable offenses by President Joe Biden was pretty much Republicans beclowning themselves, with some able assists from the Democrats.
So we’re having the iconic “Entrance of the Gladiators”, composed by Czech Julius Fučík, performed here by The Hill Crew. I heard it all day Wednesday.
I made a Costco run yesterday—I was getting low on Greek yoghurt and down to eight pounds of butter, so it was time. I was gone about an hour (I do not dawdle in a shopping situation), and when I returned home, this is what the home page of The Washington Post looked like:
A few Thoughts:
The Kleptocrat will obviously appeal the D.C. Circuit Court
panel’s (unanimous) decision. (The judges did not buy his lawyer’s argument
that the Founding Fathers intended that a president have the freedom to order members
of the military to assassinate a political opponent without worrying about
criminal prosecution.) That will be two rounds of court appearances—before the
full Circuit Court and then SCOTUS—and will no doubt effectively delay the
federal prosecution for his attempts to obstruct Congress until after November’s
election.
So it’s a win for him.
But I bet the ketchup is flying at Mar-a-Lago.
Also—I have no doubt that he’s added the names of the panel who
ruled against him to his “retribution” list. That story is all about how the
guy who once held the most powerful office in the world is waving his willie in
the direction of anyone who hasn’t shown him sufficient adulation and obeisance.
(In the end, no one will be kept off that list, because there’s never enough.)
But he’s actually gearing up to use the power of that office to stomp every person
on that list in the most humiliating way possible.
And there are millions of dumbasses who are happy to vote him
into office for that purpose.
Third—“trust issues” in the GOP? Whatever next?
Okay, I had been unaware of this, but some Republicans in the Florida legislature actually think that Florida taxpayers ought to be funding the Kleptocrat’s fight against multiple indictments.
Because evidently a self-proclaimed billionaire, who’s reaping a
crop he’s been sowing for (in some cases) decades, deserves all the help the
citizens of the Sunshine State can hawk up. To the tune of $5M. (TBF, $5M is
barely the retainer for one of Cadet Bonespurs’ lawyers, former Florida Solicitor
General Chris Kise, currently beclowning himself in the civil fraud trial in
Manhattan, so it’s kind of a sop in the global scheme of TFG’s legal schemes.)
That’s pretty whack, I have to say.
But wait, as they say on TV—there’s more.
Because one day after Ron Never-Back-Down DeSantis backed down
and closed up his presidential run shop, and endorsed Bonespurs, he
apparently found a non-human vertebra and tweeted that he’d veto any such bill that came
across his desk.
Yeah, the guy who blew $1.5M of Florida taxpayers’ money to illegally
entice migrants in Texas to get on planes and be flown to Martha’s Vineyard to
stick it to the libs has decided that paying the legal fees of a private
citizen is not, in fact, an appropriate expenditure.
Well, we’ll see how long it takes for him to cave on this, too.
Welp, it’s been a bit of a week for Cadet
Bonespurs and his minions.
The Orange One himself was given an extremely
limited gag order by US District Judge Tanya Chutken in his federal election
coup trial because all his willy-waving and whining has a real potential to
intimidate witnesses and poison the jury pool.
He immediately whined about how he was told he
couldn’t talk about anything and it’s election interference and not
fair.
He also got reprimanded by Justice Arthur
Engoran in the New York civil fraud case in Manhattan, because he was causing a
disturbance while a witness was testifying (against him). I knew he couldn’t go
for hours without making a scene.
Then his personal pick for new Speaker of the
House, Gym Jordan, face planted in two rounds of voting—even after his allies
(in the sense than members of the gang are allies of the capo) literally sent
threats to Republicans who weren’t in lock-step. Oh—in the first round, Jordan
got 200 votes; it was 199 in the second. That’s not a good direction. (In
addition to being an enabler of sexual abuse, Jordan’s only claim to fame is
never having proposed legislation that even made it to the House floor in all
his 17 years as a Representative. Oh, and he was down with the overturning of
the 2020 presidential election, even when insurrectionists were literally in
the Capitol looking for colleagues of his to hang. He’s a burn-it-down bully
who only gets elected because his district is gerrymandered in the shape of a
ruptured duck. You can see why the Kleptocrat likes him.)
As of yesterday afternoon, Jordan had backed
down from his “I’ll do whatever it takes to get this job”; he instead was
mulling making the Speaker-pro-tempore some kind of shadow Speaker, presumably
in the expectation that he can pull the strings on the marionette. (Although he
might have to duke it out with Kevin McCarthy for that honor. The interim
Speaker is Patrick McHenry, who holds the position solely because he was first
on a secret list McCarthy made when he finally got elected after 15 ballots in
January. Also, McHenry’s only act as “speaker” was to turf out Nancy Pelosi
(minority leader) and Steny Hoyer (minority whip) from their offices, because
McCarthy ordered it in an entirely unsurprising act of petty vengeance.)
Let me just say that
“temporary-speaker-because-we-can’t-elect-a-real-one isn’t a thing, but with
this band of loonies, anything could happen. Jordan may try again.
Oh, and then in the Fulton County, Georgia,
RICO case against Bonespurs and 18 co-conspirators, the Kraken lawyer, Sidney
Powell, has taken a plea deal and presumably will flip on the ex-president and
everyone else. TBH, she is truly such a nutjob that it’s not clear to me how
seriously she could be taken as a witness (and remember—she is a licensed
lawyer), but 16 of her fellow indictees (the bail bondsman already flipped) may
worry about not what she might say but about what documentation she might have,
and therefore they could be putting out feelers to DA Fani T. Willis about what
kind of deal they might get if they, too, turn on the Kleptocrat.
Remember—the early flippers get the best deals.
Well, anyway—in honor of all this anti-winning, today’s earworm is Rod Stewart’s “I’m a Loser”. Think about Jordan and his idol as you crank up the volume and revel in all the grossness of the lyrics.
Fun fact: I went to a Rod Stewart concert in
the 90s with a friend. We got to talking about how when you have sex with
someone, you’re really having sex with all the people they’ve ever stupped. We felt
really concerned for Rachel Hunter.
Given the utterly pathetic performance by everyone in the Republican party—from their inability to get to a nominee for Speaker even in a secret vote, to the superseding indictment of George Santos on 23 federal felony counts, to Ron DeSantis’ loser campaign, to the incessant whining by Cadet Bonespurs in and out of the courts—I think today’s earworm just has to be Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me.”
Crank up the volume.
Lawd-a-mercy, after declaring definitively last Tuesday that, having been ousted as Speaker of the House (a historic first), he would not run again for the job…yesterday Kevin McCarthy announced a few times that he’s available for his old job, if his (Republican) colleagues want to put him back in it.
It’s absolutely true what they say: you can’t
believe a single thing Kev says.
I don’t know how this would work, or how he
imagines it would work. If you recall, back in January (having already moved
his crap into the Speaker’s office the weekend before Congress was in session),
McCarthy suffered through 15 ballot (another first!), successively giving up
more and more power to the RWNJ caucus run by Matt “Rapey McForehead” Gaetz
before he finally achieved the apotheosis of his ambitions. That was with
McCarthy actively campaigning, actively begging for votes, actively
surrendering swathes of the speakership just to hold the gavel.
He lasted 23.7 Scaramuccis.
How does he imagine it would go with two rabid
cons (Gym Jordan and Steve Scalise) already in contention and not one voice
saying, “Hey—what about Kevin?” Is he hoping they’ll cancel each other out and
an exhausted Republican caucus will turn to him to save the day? Is he thinking
they might actually kill each other and he’ll be there to pick up the pieces?
I’m not seeing it. Since his very hard-won
election, he hasn’t been able to get much of anything done in the House,
because—despite holding a numeric majority—those RWNJs don’t play well with
anyone and it’s strenglich verboten that any R work with Democrats to
actually, you know, legislate. Every bill was laden with Tea Party appeasement crap
to the point that anything that made it through the House was nixed in the
Senate.
This no-Dems-allowed thing is a policy McCarthy
is actually down with. The problem is that he doesn’t have enough Rs who are not
RWNJs to pass anything without Democratic help. But any whiff of him talking
across the aisle gets him beaten up and losing his lunch money on the way to
school.
That situation, by the way, has not changed. If
the Archangel Gabriel descended to the House floor and scattered pixie dust
upon its denizens long enough to get a majority to cast their votes for the
fro-yo mogul from Bakersfield, he’d still be faced with the Gaetz gang’s antics
and he still wouldn’t be able to govern.
But obviously, Kev just can’t stop the
yearning. He’s like the spotty dweeb in high school who nonetheless dreams of
showing up at the prom with the hot blonde cheerleader and basking in the resplendent
glory of showing everyone up.
It’s like he’s a political incel, which would
be pathetic if the consequences of his incompetence weren’t so staggering.
I think the word I'm looking for, actually, is...pathetic.
Strange week in these United States.
The best efforts of right-wing Republican nut jobs
in the House of Representatives were not enough to shut down the government,
even though they stamped their feet, held their breath and tossed their toys
out of the pram.
As a consequence, the first invertebrate to
hold the office of Speaker of the House (after 15 votes) also became the first
Speaker to be voted out of the office (after 270 days—shortest tenure since
1878).
It was rather amusing to watch Kevin McCarthy go
on CBS Face the Nation on Sunday and bald-facedly lie to Margaret Brennan to
blame Democrats for the Continuing Resolution drama; she laughed at him.
Ahead of today's vote on an effort to oust @SpeakerMcCarthy, the House Democratic Caucus watched McCarthy's interview with @margbrennan on Sunday, where he attempted to blame House Democrats for the near-government shutdown.
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) October 3, 2023
WATCH: pic.twitter.com/IwwnMYZitK
Aaaand then on Tuesday he reached out to those
same Democrats to try to save his speakership when Matt Gaetz came gunning for
him for the high crime of…working with the Democrats to get the CR passed.
People—these morons have driver’s licenses.
They’re loose on the streets.
Well, McCarthy’s out as Speaker, bow-tied twit
Patrick McHenry of North Carolina is interim Speaker. His first action
(prompted by McCarthy) was to order former (and highly-effective Speaker) Nancy
Pelosi to move out of her current office; his second was to order Steny Hoyer
(former Majority Leader) out of his office.
Never let it be said that there is any act too
petty for Republicans to perform.
Li'l Kev subsequently announced that he will never run for Speaker again. Evidently there is a limit to the amount of humiliation he'll undergo.
Having thus exhausted themselves, Republicans
ordered the House into recess until next Wednesday, notwithstanding the fact that the clock is ticking on legislation to fund the federal government beyond mid-November. Hissy fits are hard, man.
And in courtroom news, the (twice-impeached,
four-times indicted, never-won-the-popular-vote) former president, Cadet
Bonespurs, got a gag order from Justice Arthur Engoron in New York District
Court. The tipping point was a burp on the Kleptocrat’s imitation Twitter
platform attacking Engoron’s law clerk—posted while he was actually in court on
Tuesday, but you could tell he was working his way up to projectile verbal vomiting,
starting with his arrival in the Manhattan courthouse Monday morning. (One of his
whines is the fact that this is a bench trial—“there’s no jury!” Well, doofus,
that’s because one of your lawyers couldn’t be arsed to file the paperwork
requesting a jury trial. James’s team requested no jury; Orangina’s team didn’t
file, so voilà. Yet he’s still moaning about it. At any moment I expect him to
exclaim, “It’s a tapestry of justice!”) His rants have become more and more
unhinged in the past couple of weeks, and he barged into the courthouse visibly
steaming about the fraud case filed by NY Attorney General Letitia James.
(Engoron ruled last week that James has proved the fraud; this trial is to
determine the amount of damages Bonespurs and his business entities have to
cough up.)
Tuesday afternoon, Engoron met in private with
TFG, his lawyers and the prosecutors. Evidently the post had been brought to
his attention and he bitch-slapped Bonespurs thoroughly, demanding that it be
deleted. It was, but he’d already used it for fundraising appeals; the goobers
do like that kind of thing. The deal currently seems to be that none of the
parties—looking at you, short-fingered vulgarian—may make public
statements about any member of the court staff; violations will bring
consequences. (Not sure what those might be, though.)
(Also on Tuesday, Forbes dropped the Kleptocrat from their 400 richest people list. That's gotta bite his gold-plated ego.)
TBH, I’m surprised we haven’t had more
outbursts from the head of the Republican party. Having to sit for hours in a
room where you’re not allowed to speak and aren’t even the focus of attention
has to be agony for a malignant narcissist. Then there are the physical issues—the
girdle and adult diaper can’t be comfortable at all. Must be a little tricky
changing the latter in a public toilet, too.
Also, TBH—I’m surprised that Bonespurs hasn’t
violated the gag order. I didn’t think he’d make it out of the courthouse
without spewing something sanctionable. But evidently he’s planning on
testifying at some point in this trial, so I’m pretty sure he’ll make it over
the line.
At time of writing, TFG has packed it in, courtwise, and is headed to Florida. He has, after all, been unable to golf for three days; understandable.
And it is no wonder that the world is watching this
and slowly backing away.
I saw this SUV on the regular in the parking lot outside my physical therapy facility.
I found it fascinating as a variant on the *RUMP
2024/Confederate flag/Fuck Joe Biden display. Perhaps more restrained, but
still deep into dipshittery.
But that’s America for you.
In honor of the utter clown show that is the Republican majority in the House of Representatives—the ones who are about to shut down the federal government to own the libs—I had to go with “Send in the Clowns” for our earworm today.
There is not one of them who can hawk up an
actual reason for careening toward the shutdown at the end of the week, not in
all the soundbites they’ve been spewing over the airwaves this week.
Speaker-after-15-votes Kevin McCarthy won’t
work with Democrats to come up with a funding bill because if he does, the
RWNJs in the inaptly-named “Freedom Caucus” will remove him as Speaker, which
is the only thing in life he cares about. Freedom Caukers really seem to have
no concern about the hundreds of thousands of federal workers (much less the
contractors) who’ll have to down tools and go unpaid until such time as they
pull their fingers out and do their damned jobs. (Elected officials do get
their paychecks during a shutdown, although I think their staff do not. I’d get
my own coffee for a while, if I were one of these buffoons.) They just want to
ensure that Dems don’t get any say in the legislation.
Meanwhile, people in banana republics and Eastern
European oligarchies are laughing hysterically at this farce, and our allies
are whispering among themselves that “that boy ain’t right,” and wondering
if maybe a cow sat on the entire US legislative branch.
So, here’s Barbra Streisand singing “Send in the Clowns”, from A Little Night Music.
The utterly unique Randy Rainbow released this a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. So I’m sharing it with you, so it’ll worm your ear, too.
Oh, my, my, my—Kevin McCarthy’s apotheosis of ambition (the entire reason for his pathetic political career) in being nominated as Speaker of the House of Representatives finally came yesterday. And he’s gone down in history as the first wannabe speaker in a century to fail to be elected on the first ballot.
And the second.
And the third.
He evidently moved into the speaker’s office over the weekend in
anticipation of his achievement, but all the groveling he did to the RWNJs of
the party did not work. I expect he spent the night trying to find Republican
asses to kiss to turn his humiliation around—although a humiliation like this
just doesn’t go away. It’s in the history books.
Imagine having to suck up to Paul Gosar and Matt Gaetz just so
you don’t have to move your crap out of Pelosi’s office.
Nancy, BTW, probably had a nice glass of red and settled in to
watch the spit turn.
I mean—look at this face:
As one Twitterite said, yesterday was the worst day McCarthy ever had
at the Capitol and two years ago he was almost murdered there.
