Not-so-secret shade

It will come as no surprise to you when I state the blindingly obvious: we are living in strange, strange times, when a former body-builder and star of The Last Action Hero can rebuke the President of the United States for lack of moral compass.

It’s truly weird, because Arnold Schwarznegger has a history of being a dick. Look—just Google it, you’ll see. Literally, if you want. He’s had documented conversations that are right up there with grab ‘em by the pussy. And his inability to keep it in his trousers is as slimy a story as you’re going to encounter.

Moreover, it’s plausible that, back when the Kleptocrat started thinking about his run, he looked at Schwarznegger’s two-term stint as Governor of California and thought, “if that German asshole—he wouldn’t have made the distinction between German and Austrian—can be governor, I can be president.”

If so, Conan the Barbarian has a lot to answer for.

Whatever. You’ve probably seen this video of Schwarnegger schooling Li’l Donnie Two-Scoops on being a Nazi-hugging loser, but it’s worth revisiting.

However, it turns out that Schwarznegger is no stranger to throwing shade on politicians, as witnessed by this veto letter he sent to the California legislature in 2009 for a bill allocating funds for redeveloping the port of San Francisco:

Unremarkable, until you look at the first letter of each line.

I bring this up because we’ve been seeing this kind of thing recently in resignation letters submitted by various people the Kleptocrat had hoped to co-opt to lend credibility to his imperium. I have two examples, post-Charlottesville, from the Arts Council, and from the Science Envoy of the State Department.

Note the first letter of each paragraph—the message goes from RESIST to IMPEACH.

Naturally, the Kleptocrat will scoff that he don’t need no stinkin’ arts advisors, and we all know what he thinks about science. He hasn’t even bothered to lie about disbanding the organizations, as he did about his two CEO advisory councils.

But it is truly a bizarro universe where the immigrant has a better grasp of both our language and governmental processes than a sitting president, and where anti-regime messages hide in plain sight. I would not be at all surprised if I started seeing Vs scrawled on walls and hearing dot-dot-dot-dash tapped on coffeehouse tables.

Writing on the wall

Let’s have a bit of history by way of intro to today’s post—going back to the golden years of another Republican administration, when thousands of men moved from town to town across the country, searching for work. This being before the days of Geico, they mostly hitched illegal rides on freight trains, congregated in camps known as Hoovervilles and performed odd jobs in exchange for food.

Kind of like the men who hang out around Home Depots looking for work as day laborers.

Anyhow, this confraternity of traveling men developed a kind of hieroglyphic shorthand scrawled on various flat surfaces to communicate with those who followed, to guide them, warn them and share general insights. Viz.:

Not sure how much it will resonate with the general readership, but this updated chart of hobo-like signs for freelance writers is spot-on.

Coffee hour in the church hall

Let’s go for a different sort of lunacy today—the Twitter kind.

I don’t even know how I came across this post on Sunday, but you know that once I saw it, I had to drill down. And the Twitters-dot-com did not disappoint.

But I believe I liked this response the best:

Cosmic convergence

Well, the sun hid behind the moon today. Several of my friends traveled to the path of totality (one to Wyoming, one to Knoxville, Tenn., and one to Columbia, S.C.). I’m looking forward to their reports,* especially whether the temperature dropped, birds stopped singing and vampires came out.

Here in the District They Call Columbia, we had only 81% coverage, and none of those things happened.

Well, except for the vampires part:

(Honestly—everyone on the planet has been told a squillion times not to look into the sun without protective glasses. This is proof positive that the Kleptocrat absolutely will not learn anything.)

What a maroon.

I went out with my ISO-certified eclipse glasses (pro tip: only wear those suckers when you’re looking up at the sun; they’re as black as the inside of a cow) around 1350 and checked periodically as the sun disappeared. It was both hot and humid, so I’d have welcomed a drop in temperature, but no luck.

Le tout Washington was out there, with glasses, pinhole cardboard and aluminium-foil-covered cereal boxes. I’m not entirely ashamed to say that the thought occurred to me that Monday, at around 1430, would have been an excellent time to knock over a liquor store, because everyone was out gawping at the sky.

Look: even without the grandeur of the totality, it was still an awesome experience, watching that sun disappear. You really can understand how primitive cultures in pre-science days and in the Republican Party could puke with terror. I didn’t get any photos that were worth sharing, but here is some stunning video, courtesy of NASA, in Idaho:

But it was on my trip home on Metro, checking my Twitter feed, that the moon’s ability to throw shade was assured:

*Knoxville: "Aside from giving birth, seeing the total eclipse was the most amazing experience of my life. Literally wept in awe." 

Peace out, my brothers and sisters.

Gratitude Monday: for the birds.

On this day of a total eclipse of the sun being visible to a swath of the country starting in Oregon and running through to South Carolina—I’m grateful that yesterday, as I went about my Sunday tasks, we had an exceptionally find day for August, and I had my patio door open so I could watch and hear a variety of birds at the feeder.

Listen, after the previous seven days, this is a huge blessing.

Planetary alignment

As we get closer to the total eclipse of the sun on Monday, things are getting increasingly weird.

As you’d expect, tbh.

If you’d like a for example, here’s an advert (probably from Craigslist) for a, well, take a look:

The woman who posted it on Twitter was wondering whether she should toss her, erm, hat into the ring:

But it turns that she doesn’t meet the cats requirement, which appears to be a deal-breaker.

But here’s what I was wondering on my Metro ride home: what, exactly, is the feline involvement meant to be in this act of cosmic whatever? Is this something PETA should be aware of? And how does the nitrous oxide figure into it?

Well, I wonder, but I’m not going to inquire. Not sure I want to see the response.

...may the good Lord deliver us

The Washington Post occasionally annotates stuff going on, largely to do with the Kleptocrat, because someone needs to do a blow-by-blow breakdown of his monstrous porkies. And they did so on Tuesday, parsing li’l Donnie Two-Scoops’s train wreck at the Towering Dumpster Fire on Monday.

You owe it to yourself to read it, with the annotations, and the comments on the annotations. I do not know the person with the handle BarbWire, but I would be proud to buy him/her a beverage of his/her choice, anytime, anywhere.

Another interesting thing about said train wreck was this shot of Klepto's current chief of staff John F. Kelly and a couple of aides watching his performance.

Remember that Kelly is a career Marine, and consider what it takes for a retired USMC general to slump like that. Also, the two men at the right appear to be calling upon the Almighty to deliver them from this abomination.

But further to my point yesterday about him being a foot-stamping hissy-throwing pouty-face loser—here’s his response to CEOs bailing out of his advisory council on CEO stuff:

Yes, he’s taking his tiny balls and going home..

(This is a turnaround from his response 24 hours earlier, when they first started streaming out:)

And actually, apparently the Kleptocrat just said he's closing down his CEO clubs. But in fact the remaining CEOs notified him that they were disbanding, so he's taking credit for it.

25^th Amendment, folks. Time for the 25^th.

We are so screwed

Right—back to Nazis, again.

Because when the Kleptocrat’s grudging reading of a statement Monday condemning the racist neo-Nazis’ violence in Charlottesville over the weekend did not bring the adulation he thought he was due, he first tweeted his pique:

Then he let his inner foot-stamping adolescent out by flouncing out this stream of absolute false-equivalence lunacy yesterday.

And you know what? I can’t even. It’s not just the complete cognitive dissonance in his imaginary both-sides-were-equally-at-fault, or the obvious anger that being president isn’t as much fun as he thought it was going to be. This sad, ridiculous, pouty, racist loser has access to the finest nuclear arsenal ever amassed, and he’s entirely capable of ordering a strike on Pyongyang, Caracas or the Washington Post just because it occurs to him that he can and we can’t.

There is not one single redeeming quality in his entire makeup.

Gawd.

Call Terminix, or Webster

Today I am sick of Nazis, white supremacists and their ilk, inside the White House and all over the country, so I’m taking a little break, via this play on words and software development:

Gratitude Monday: FTS

Here are a few thoughts about the events in Charlottesville over the weekend:

White supremacist neo-Nazi thugs showed up in military-manqué cammos, with their tiki torches and assault weapons, industrial-strength CS gas and riot shields, to proclaim their outrage at the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park. 

(The angry white racist to the right, Peter Cvjetanovic, 20, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, has since told media repeatedly that he's not an angry, shouting white racist, but a white supremacist who "as a white nationalist, [he cares] about all people."

Underlying their outrage is the Make-America-White-Again Weltanschauung that life is a pie, and that any part of that pie that goes to someone else means less for themselves.

They waved Confederate and Nazi flags proudly, apparently unaware of the irony that the last flags raised by both Confederates and Nazis were white, and represented unconditional surrender.

Anti-racist protestors showed up carrying hand-made signs.

So, when violence broke out, including the ramming of chanting, sign-carrying anti-fascist marchers by a car, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring many others…

…what would a reasonable observer conclude about where responsibility lies? On “many sides”?

(At the time of writing, there are three dead: Heyer, killed by the car driven by James Alex Fields, Jr., and two Virginia State Troopers, whose helicopter crashed into trees near the city  on Saturday afternoon.)

Also: if a few hundred non-white people showed up—just showed up, not carrying weapons of any kind—in any city in the nation, what are the odds that police forces from multiple jurisdictions would have been deployed to arrest them at the slightest misstep (“Littering, Joe—they’re tossing their gum wrappers in our streets! Round ‘em up.”), probably before they’d got a couple of hundred yards?

Assuming they were even granted a parade permit.

So, why were Charlottesville (and Albemarle County) cops so notable by their absence? Starting with the tiki-torchlight parade-and-rally Friday night, and into the appalling events of Saturday—what, exactly, were they doing?

(Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has since defended the [non-]actions of the police by saying they were outgunned by the Nazis. Which is a load of crap. Outgunned, assuredly, but why? You knew these thugs were coming, and you knew they would be armed to the teeth. Have you never heard of preparing? Badly done, Virginia. Badly done.)

Well, it’s Gratitude Monday. They say that the very act of trying to find something to be thankful for (even if you fail) is a key to happiness. So here’s what I’m grateful for:

Those fat, pathetic, losers with compensation issues in their paramilitary dress-up clothes limited their willie-waving to spraying CS gas, beating people with poles and killing only one person (may her memory be a blessing); at least they did not start firing their weapons into the crowds.

This time.