Today’s earworm is dedicated to the little
Muskrat incel dogies. They must really feel like masters of the universe, as
they swarm into agency after agency, dicking with code and waving “findings of
fraud”. Some of them aren’t even old enough to drink legally, but they’re
definitely drunk on power. (Although probably still wondering why the hot
chicks won’t look at them.)
Enjoy it while you can, Bund brochachos,
because your power will be short-lived, but your disgrace will live forever.
There’s precedent for this. Viz:
It's got a great beat; you can dance to it. I give it a 2.
I received this notification/bill via
snailmail on Monday.
My first inclination was to ignore it,
because one of the trendier scams these days is a smishing thing: text (often
from some foreign country’s area code) announcing that you owe a road toll and
you can pay it by clicking here.
Yeah, no.
Look, I haven’t been on a toll road for
so many years that VA EZPass deactivated my account (while still holding on to
my $25 minimum; I need to get on them about that). So I knew I hadn’t incurred
any tolls on 22 January. Besides—this was for a tunnel in…Hampton Roads? That’s 182 miles
from me.
Well, I searched for DriveERT on the web,
and there is indeed such an entity. So I rang them Tuesday morning. Waited on
hold for 30 minutes (God bless speaker phone) and got their front-line help.
Which basically consists of: we photographed
the license plate, so how do you want to pay? I kept insisting that my car has not been outside of
Fairfax and Loudoun counties for well over a year, she sighed, asked me if I
own a GMC truck (no) and transferred me to their second-line support.
It took Dee (or maybe it’s D—I’m okay with
public support people using a pseudonym, as long as I have something I can
reference when I document the interaction) about 35 seconds to see that somehow
in their process they’d transposed two of the characters in the plate they
photographed, and she transferred the toll to the owner of that vehicle.
She got a kick out of me saying that if it
turns out that my car is travelling more than I am, I’m going to be upset. “It
went to Hampton Roads and didn’t even bring me back a tee-shirt?”
Between that and getting all my 2024 tax
info to the accountant, Tuesday was a good day.
Since the days back in the last century
when my sister drove a Datsun 510 station wagon that was basically held
together by political stickers, I've been fascinated with people who use their car’s
exterior surface as a thought canvas. So when I saw this new vehicle in the ‘hood,
I naturally paused to peruse. I mean:
Taking it by quadrant, we have:
And more granularly:
(This one references Woody Guthrie’s
guitar.)
Lest anyone have doubts about the overall theme, there’s the
vanity plate:
And from branding on the side panels of
the van, I believe that it’s associated with this group, which provides street
medics to the queer communities in the East Bay of San Francisco as well as in Brooklyn.
I totally respect their courage in going
behind enemy lines into a Confederate state.
Okay, given all the DOGE and general
Republican shenanigans currently going on in the Social Security
Administration, it occurred to me that this email was a bit rich:
The winter aconite was slower than usual
to appear—in the past it’s been early to mid-February. But
it’s here now, and each year it covers a little more territory.
Also, Saturday marked the return of
Scooter, back from hibernation.
Here’s where we seem to be this week: the
Kleptocrat has extorted a good chunk of Ukraine’s national resources in return
for…no security guarantee (but maybe not actually supplying Putin with weapons
of war). Pillsbury Spock and his minions are rampaging through federal agencies
in search of mythical “fraud and abuse”. Oh—and Spock’s companies are profiting
to the tune of $2M per day, and the FAA has just announced that they’re tossing
out Verizon, which has a contract to manage their communications, and
replacing them with Starlink. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been
terminated, including the ones managing nuclear safety and ebola prevention
programs.
In military matters, Cadet Bonespurs has
fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (a four-star Air Force general,
who happens to be black) and the (female) Chief of Naval Operations, replacing
them both with white men. In the case of the chair, the replacement is a
retired three-star general. SECDEF fired a flock of senior JAG staffers and
gave his reason as (and I quote) not wanting lawyers who “exist to attempt to
be roadblocks to anything that happens in their spots.”
What, you might ask, could be construed as
“roadblocks” that might be posed by…lawyers? Could it be instances where war
crimes are being contemplated? Or violations of the Constitution? Or actions
that contravene the UCMJ? Hegseth’s saying this like it’s a bad thing.
And on the health front, Texas is
currently experiencing an outbreak of measles—a disease that was eradicated in
the last century by vaccines—and an (unvaccinated) child has died.
Well—there’s more, there’s more, but I’ve
hit my limit.
There were a few bright spots, though. GOP
congressmorons—the ones who actually faced their constituents (many are
flat-out hiding)—were besieged by Republican voters who were not having their “hey—Dear
Leader has it in hand” spin. They were heckled and booed—by White people—and
they returned to DC visibly shaken. Not enough to risk crossing either Klepto
or Elno, but enough to consider what other career choices they might make.
On Tuesday, 21 employees of the carbuncle
DOGE outfit—who were subsumed earlier this year from the US Digital Service—resigned
en masse because they refused to be part of activities that made a mockery of
their oath to protect and defend the Constitution. This is the first time, to my
knowledge, that regular worker bees have taken this step; there have been
SIS-level resignations, but for these people, quitting your job in this kind of
on-the-edge economy carries financial consequences, and God bless every one of
them for taking a stand and telling the brochachos to get stuffed.
The second ray of hope came on Monday, as
hundreds of employees of the Housing and Urban Development Department returned
(as per Klepto mandate) to their headquarters in the District, to find that
every TV monitor on every floor of the building was playing a video:
Yes, it’s an AI depiction of the
Kleptocrat sucking Elno’s toe, to the latter’s audible enjoyment, with "Long Live the Real King" overlaid. We know it’s
AI not because Klepto is sucking off Elno; obvs that’s just fact. It’s AI because
Elno has two left feet.
(Although, well—maybe he actually does?
Has anyone seen him barefoot? Can you verify?)
Anyway—if generating that video weren’t
hysterical enough, it gets better. Apparently no one could figure out how to
turn off the video, which was on loop, so someone had to go to every floor and
unplug each monitor to stop the breakfast show.
So, today’s earworm is from 1975, the
Isley Brothers singing “Fight the Power”. Because—as overwhelming as this flood
of dangerous bullshit we’ve had dumped on us since 20 January is, we are not
without power. We can show up. We can speak up. We can stand up.
No—not someone sleeping rough. (That the richest country in the world can't provide shelter for all is a different outrage.) The
bastards who installed metal dividers in the benches with the backs with the
sole purpose of preventing homeless people lying down.
This is on Fairfax County property, so
they’re responsible. But I’ve seen the same benches in the Wiehle-Reston East
Metro station, operated by WMATA.
Okay, I confess that my approach to tax
filing information is…less than optimally orderly.
Which is to say—my collection of necessary
documents is a rabbit warren of paper copies that need to be scanned and
digital things that I’ve downloaded from various sites plus email attachments.
This is admittedly stressful, and it’s completely self-inflicted.
But—given that this past December I couldn’t
even get it together for holiday presents (which I have, but I just haven’t,
you know, wrapped and given)—I’m taking the fact that my goal is to have it all
uploaded to my accountant’s (rather crappy portal) by the end of this week as
an admirable aspiration and a hella forcing function.
Also—yesterday I was rooting around in the
file box with a collection of documents and found—mirabile dictu!—the 1099 from
the Virginia Employment Commission, which means (I hope) I’ll never have to
interact with them again.
