Should The New York Crank seek the Democratic nomination for President? This is an extremely serious question (almost).

Thanks to free clipart like this example from Clipart-Library.com

anybody can make a poster and run for President. And  it looks as if

quite nearly everybody does.

I mean, why the hell not?

As of this posting, there are already 29 declared Democratic candidates for President. That rises to 30 if you count not-quite-announced probable candidate Joe Biden. It rises to 31 if you count not-yet-decided Stacey Abrams and to 32 if you count not-yet-decided Bill deBlasio, the less-than-wonderfully-competent mayor of New York.

A million gurgling bile ducts'

worth of incompetence

Given that incompetence seems to be a prerequisite for the job of head of state these days, I will bet up to two cents…no, make that three cents…no, make that a nickel…. that deBlasio will sooner or later declare himself a candidate. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So back to the incompetence thing.

Exhibit A, of course, is the creepy clown, (or should that be kreepy klown?) currently occupying the White House. Collusion or no collusion, it’s a wonder the guy can tie his own shoelaces without inadvertently hanging himself. 

The little staff

that wouldn't

Until recently, it would appear that all kinds of horrors were not visited on the people of the United States, and possibly of the world, simply because Trump's underlings ignored his orders. This was exacerbated by the fact that Trump either forgot he had issued the orders, or didn’t know what to do when people disobeyed him.

It would appear that after two years, Trump figured this out, fired most of the Defiant Ones, and is slowly replacing them with Yes men (there seems to be a shortage of Yes women) whose slavish devotion to His Klownship for all I know might lead us either eventually or very quickly to a major depression. Or runaway inflation. Or a nuclear war with North Korea. Or us unilaterally nuking…I dunno, maybe France or England.

We don't need comic opera.

We have Donald Trump.

The thing about Donald Trump is that he’s on trend. Incompetence at the top of national governments used to be confined to nations about which composers of limited talent wrote operettas back in the 1920s. As one parody of these operettas, written by a nearly-forgotten humorist named Newman Levy, described the quintessential  situation:

The scene: a public square in Ruritania  

Fair Ruritania, land of gay romance

Where the people have a strange and curious mania 

For gathering in the public square to dance.

Derision of the gods

You don't have to limit the current examples of Ruritanian comic opera to Brexit. (You didn't think I'd leave out Brexit, did you?) For another contemporary recreation of Ruritanian incompetence, I herewith submit to you Ukraine. 

There, a comedian with zero political experience, who stars in a TV sitcom about a shlub with no political experience who is accidently elected President of Ukraine, was in fact elected President of Ukraine. A perfect example of life imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, in a zen-like wheel of repetitive insanity. 

We don’t need versified parodies of operettas. The gods are already mocking us.

The new Ukranian President Zelenskiy almost makes Trump look good. He has no political experience, and makes promises that call for explanations, without offering any explanations. In other words, he's just like Trump, only funnier. Zelenskiy has promised to fight governmental corruption without explaining how he’ll do it. Ditto his promise to end the conflict with Russia in Eastern Ukraine. 

(Maybe he’ll do both by simply surrendering the nation to Russia. That would serve the citizens of Ukraine right for thinking they’re in on the joke.)

Should deBlasio's campaign slogan

be "You could do worse?"

Now we come to wavering U.S. Presidential candidate Bill deBlasio, who presently happens to be mayor of New York, the city where I live. DeBlasio's strongest claim to the Presidency, so far as I can determine, is that he is not really the worst mayor New York has ever had. He is merely incompetent. Not to mention tone deaf.

For an example of his tone deafness I give you his stubborn insistence on going to the gym each morning. No, there’s nothing wrong with going to the gym. It’s how and where he goes to the gym.

The mayor lives in an official residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He works in City Hall, in lower Manhattan. Between those two points there are, last I counted, three Ys (the closest to him only a few blocks from his residence) and more private health clubs that I can count. So where does he go?

To his favorite YMCA in Brooklyn, a round trip drive of — I’m estimating here — twelve miles. But deBlasio doesn’t take the subway, the way the late Mayor Abe Beame often did. Instead, he gets into a gas-guzzling SUV, followed by a a security detail in two other gas-guzzling SUVs, and burns carbon all the way to Brooklyn and back.

Cogestion pricing? That's

for the little people.

Then, because traffic gridlock is so bad in New York, deBlasio slams the city with a congestion pricing tax that has upped my taxi fare whenever I need a taxi to go to the doctor, or when I’m horribly late to someone’s home. 

DeBlasio's traffic congestion tax adds to the impossibility for most New Yorkers of owning any kind of a car, for any reason, in Manhattan. Make an exception here for the super-rich, who deBlasio aids and abets while opposing them.

And then he positions himself as an environmentalist.

Why won’t he walk to a neighborhood gym? He evidently loves his Brooklyn Y more than he loves any thing else. Which means, if he becomes President, that Air Force One will be flying him to New York each morning, where a Presidential motorcade will meet him on a daily basis and take him to his Brooklyn Y and then back to the airport again. Terrorist crisis? Let it wait. President deBlasio is on his treadmill to oblivion.

Did I mention that in New York the subways are a mess, public housing is falling apart, potholes are a plague, infrastructure is rusting, affordable housing is vanishing, triple-digit million dollar skyscraper condos are sprouting like weeds, and most of the city’s once great schools continue to be mediocre at best?

One reason for all that? Fourteen of the city’s agencies, offices and corporations lack a permanent head. The mayor simply hasn’t gotten around to doing that part of his job. It’s more Trump-like than Trump.

Will they love him in November

like they do in Nevada?

Meanwhile, incompetent deBlasio busily buzzes off to faraway places in Iowa and Nevada, testing the waters for enthusiasm about his candidacy for President.

All this is right on trend. Tone deaf incompetence is creeping toward universality. Have I mentioned Venezuela? Do I need to?

So that’s why I’m considering running for President. If elected, I promise to sleep in, wake up in foul moods, throw temper tantrums wherever and whenever possible, secure world peace including between Israel and Palestine, eliminate nuclear weapons, tax the rich until they bleed from their eyeballs, fix the environment, lower temperatures two degrees Celsius, get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, provide Medicare for all (but only for the people who want it), and force every child of a celebrity millionaire to take the college entrance exams under the trained and watchful eyes of murderous thugs armed with AR-15s. 

Vote for me.

Donald Trump wants to send oodles of immigrants to sanctuary cities. Thanks to municipal rights of eminent domain, here are a few places where we can house them.

New York City has been welcoming immigrants since a local band of Indians sold some immigrating Dutchmen Manhattan Island, reputedly for twenty-four bucks worth of items like mirrors and axes. 

A sudden influx of immigrants is nothing new to us. You can quibble with the figures I suppose, but for openers, this from Google is an eye opener: 

"It is estimated that as many as 4.5 million Irish arrived in America between 1820 and 1930. Between 1820 and  1860, the Irish constituted over one third of all immigrants to the United States. In the 1840s, they comprised nearly half of all immigrants to this nation."

As for Mr. Trump's own ethnic group (on his father's side) there are nearly 50 million German-American descendants of immigrants, and most of them originally landed in New York. We're accustomed here to taking in immigrants in large numbers, even if some of them are disreputable, women-trafficking brothel keepers, like Trump's grandfather. (Just sayin'.)

 If the Trumpster sends a huge crowd of immigrants here, I would suggest that our mayor declare a state of emergency. (I hear you've heard of those, Mr. Trump.) 

Then, citing the emergency created byTrump, our mayor could exercise the city's right of eminent domain to take over the several Trump hotels and the Trump Tower, evict the present occupants, subdivide the vast interior spaces into small but livable apartments, and welcome the immigrants in.

I imagine there might be some back-and-forth in the courts over compensation. Fortunately, it has been alleged that that Mr. Trump has valued his properties in more than one way — a high valuation when he's talking about how rich he is, or when he's borrowing money using the buildings as collateral, but a low valuation when he's getting taxed on his properties.

The city (and other cities with Trump properties) could cite Trump's own low valuations in paying compensation.

Year later, when the immigration crisis is solved, the city could sell the buildings for a higher price than it paid, since the buildings will be much improved by getting Trump and his people out of there. This is a phenomenon not overlooked by New Yorkers who lived in a couple of buildings with Trump's name on it and improved their property by taking Trump's name off.

Just sayin'.

Holy cosmic guacamole! It’s the end of the world! No, the end of the galaxy! No, the end of the universe! No, the end of Donald Trump!

No, it won't look like this. You should be so lucky.

Fortunately for everyone involved, it’s all probably going to take a while. That black hole that scientists found, or announced that they found earlier this week, is 55 million light years away from earth. So we don’t have to sweat it. 

At least not for a few days. 

But maybe by next month.

Here’s my thinking on that.

A black hole, in case you’ve been hibernating so deep in a black hole of your own that you’ve missed the news, is a kind of gravitational vacuum cleaner in space. It’s so powerful that it permanently sucks up everything that comes near it, compressing the mass of the stuff it swallows, then adding the new mass to the old mass.

Quantum physics for dummies

Now, gravity equals mass times momentum. So, even if things keep going along at the same rate of speed, the more mass the black hole gobbles up, the more its gravitational power grows. 

Anything that falls into a black hole never gets out again. It just gets squished into a mushed-together clump of gravitational whatever-the-hell it is. Its gravitational pull is so powerful that even light can’t get out of it.

I confess that all this is kind of, oh let’s say several thousand light years above my pay grade. So let's just consider everything that's said here an interpretive extrapolation. Or a speculative construction. Or a conflative reduction, whatever the hell that means. 

Even so, it seems to me that like the ramjet whose behavior can be described as, “the faster it goes, the faster it goes,” the rule of thumb on black holes ought to be, “the more it eats, the more it eats.”

It’s not just an insatiable appetite. It’s an appetite that gets increased by eating. Which means that in time, it will eat its entire galaxy. Which will make it even hungrier — okay, more gravitational, if you insist. Which means it will start eating other galaxies. Which will make it even hungrier. Until it finally eats our own galaxy. Although I understand our own galaxy has its own black hole to worry about.

Salt the margarita glasses now, Mabel

‘cos we’re all just cosmic guacamole

Shorter version? You, and I, and whatever political philosophy we rode in on are doomed to get squished into an extremely dense, and probably highly unappetizing form of cosmic guacamole.

There’s no escape. Not even for those well-heeled Silicon Valley dudes who bought up property in New Zealand to stay safe when “It” happens. Because “It” is global this time. In fact, it might be universal.

Even the Silicon Valley guys who took the trouble and the mega millions to build a rocket ship outta here won’t escape. (Got that, Mr. Space X?) Because the black hole gravity is so powerful, nothing’s getting outta here. And even if they got out, where would they go? The moon, and Mars, and the planet Venus, and the planet Saturn, and the former planet Pluto, and Jupiter are all getting squished into the same bowl, or hole, or guacamole. Ditto the Milky Way.

That’s the bad news. 

The good news is, so is Trump.

What will Trump do?

Not that I expect The Trumpster to take it lying down. First of all, he's probably familiar with the concept of black holes. Why do I think that? Because his attorney general is making one in which to insert any meaningful findings of the Muller investigation. But I digress.

If Black Hole Panic begins to spread during the next election campaign, you can count on Trump to do two things. Well, come to think of it, three things:

1. Find a way to blame it on Hillary and Obama.

2. Promise us that he alone can fix it.

3. Demand immediate appropriations to build a wall around the Milky Way to keep the black hole out. (And that will, of course, work no better than a wall on our southern border will keep out immigrants. There’s no stopping a massive mass, whether it’s a mass of matter or a huddled mass of immigrants yearning to breathe free.)

Meanwhile, expect all the usual suspects to have a field day with this.

Look out for “They”

The conspiracy theorists are going to point out that “They’re not telling us,” how fast the black hole is growing, or how long it’ll be before it swallows up the earth.

The “They” who aren’t telling us are, of course, are The Deep State. Or Democrats. Or “The Muslims.” Or “The Jews.” Or Socialists. Or Barack and Hillary. Or paid professional Crisis Actors from the Stanislavsky School of Method Crisis Acting, reconstituted as an evil cabal of conspiring astrophysicists. Or whatever They is at the top of the secret conspiracy list this week. 

And why aren’t They telling us? So that we won’t panic  and riot and destroy property, of course. Because property values are property values, even when your 500-acre weekend ranch and your $50 million yacht are both ninety seconds short of getting squinched down to the size of Donald Trump’s you-know-what. 

Or They’re not telling us so that They can institute Sharia Law. Or so that They can get all the jellybeans before the Apocalpse. Or, most likely of all, because They have just enough space ships to take Them off the planet and onto a secret and not commonly-known planet outside the gravitational field, while everybody else gets compressed denser than a lead brick.

Then there will be the deniers who, just for openers, will deny the Great Gravitational Squish to Come, because the Bible doesn’t say it’s going to happen that way. 

Or because they have a team of learned scientists with bought-and-paid-for degrees from the Betsy DeVos For-Profit College of Advanced Knowledge, and both those guys say it’s not going to happen.

Or because at least fifteen people woke up this morning and called in to work to say they felt light-headed, which means they can’t possibly be getting heavier.

But junk robocalls

must and will continue!

One thing’s for certain. Until the phone system goes down the black hole for all eternity, the junk phone callers will still be at it. 

While I was writing this, I got two — yes two junk calls! — from the scam artists in India who call to tell you they’re very, very official, and they need to fix the viruses in your computer. I asked my first caller if he was from the U.S. Government. He didn't deny it.

Maybe he'll call Donald Trump's cell phone next. Tell him to hurry. I'm suddenly feeling very heavy.

How to blow the next presidential election and hand it over to Trump — 3 surefire techniques for Democrats who want to lose

The Kindlifresser, a statue in Bern, Switzerland

of a monster that eats little children. Democrats

are eating their own candidates — and their

chances for electoral success.

1. Keep on calling it Socialism. This one’s for you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And you too, Bernie Sanders. And even you, Elizabeth Warren. I love most of the things you favor. Government-sponsored health care. Guaranteed incomes for all. Some long overdue redistribution of wealth. Publicly paid-for college education. Paid parental leave. Just one little catch.

The best way to get none of those things is to call them “Socialism.” 

“Socialism” is the Freddy Krueger of American politics to a wide swath of Americans. They want all the things you want them to have. But they don’t want Socialism, or at least they think they don't. You say Socialism, they see Venezuela. Yes yes, I know. That’s not true about your own base. But we’re talking about getting a majority of votes from as many of the 50 states as possible.

You’re really talking about Scandinavian-style Socialism in free and democratic nations like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Germany — the kind of countries from which Donald Trump says he wants to see more immigration to the United States. (Fat chance! Happy people don’t pick up and change countries.)

But accurately referring to the part of the world where the S-word brings happiness and stability might help progressive Democrats win. So don’t call it “Socialism.” Call it “Scandinavian benefits.” Or even better, “Aryan benefits.” Now let’s see The Trumpster lace into your program. What’s he gonna do — declare himself anti-Aryan and shoot his entire base in the head? 

Or call it Northern European benefits, if you want to tone it down. Just don’t call it Soc…Soc…Soc…you know.

2. Kill the candidacy of any male Democrat who gets accused of anything by a woman. Yeah, I know that touching a woman’s shoulder or smelling her hair seems kind of creepy these days. But it used to not be. The culture has changed. Fast. The notions of what are acceptable social behaviors always change and evolve. Give your fellow Democrats a chance to catch up.

Compared  to corruption, self-dealing, hypocrisy, unrestrained greed, habitual lying, "grabbing' 'em by the pussy," and, who knows, maybe even treason, smelling somebody’s hair is a hell of a flimsy reason to disqualify a candidate for office, even with our changed norms. We've already pretty much disqualified two strong vote-getters, Joe Biden and Al Franken, imprisoning them in the forever penalty box. They're finished. Done. Kaput. For what?

It’s getting to the point where, if I were a Republican strategist, I would wait until the Democrats nominate someone and then hire a few nobodies to claim the candidate breathed on them. Or kissed them on the cheek. Or called them "darlin'." What if the candidate is a woman? 

Make the claim anyway. Accuse her of being a closeted lesbian predator. Or of coming on to male high school campaign volunteers. Trust me, I’m not giving the Republicans any ideas. They probably began inserting these ideas into ring binders for distribution among the party weeks ago. But if we keep going the way we’re going, the Republicans won’t need to sic fake accusers on our candidates. We’ll have killed off all our own candidates for them.

The only way to prevent this is to draw a red line. Credible claims of rape, undue and repeated pressure to engage in unwanted sexual activities, or pederasty? Sure, if those are credible, throw the creep out. In fact, call the cops out. But as for the rest of these piddling grievances, drop it, willyuh? We’ve got an election to win. And a vulture named Trump to send home to his Fifth Avenue aerie where he can feed on his own golden bile. Or orange bile on his golden toilet. Or whatever.

3. Play stupid manipulative games with your own voters.  Normally I don’t contribute to political candidates. Oh shut up, I know I should, too. I just don’t. Except once, recently, when a Democrat I admire sent me an e-mail asking for “Just $5” for some urgent thing or other. Hey, for five bucks, why not? I filled out the online form. I charged it to a credit card. I clicked on the “contribute” button. I started to feel good about what I'd done. I began thinking that this was so painless, I could do it more often. Until…

….maybe three minutes later. I got another e-mail, from the campaign committee of the same politician. Y’know, they told me, it costs money to process all these contributions. Would I please send another three dollars “processing fee?” 

Say what? They killed any hope I'd ever contribute another nickel not only for their own candidate, but for any candidate from my party who might ever ask me for money again. If you wanted eight bucks, you scuzzball, why didn’t you just ask for eight bucks instead of jerking me around? You've not only fouled your own nest, you've fouled every Democrat's nest. At least for me.

Positive afterthought: Remember the Hillary Clinton - Donald Trump debate, where the Trumpster wandered away from his own podium and stood way, way too close behind Hillary while she was answering a question? If Hillary had wheeled around, snarled, “Back off, Buster! and then kicked Trump in the nuts, right there on TV, she would today be President of the United States. 

I hope all the nice women who feel the sudden urge to go whine to the news media that a politician made them “feel uncomfortable” will remember this. If somebody’s making you feel uncomfortable, and that’s pretty much the extent of it, tell him firmly and loudly to buzz off — and forget about crying about it to the news media. 

Utah Senator Mike Lee’s heroic plan to destroy humanity, the epidemic of Republican logorrhea, and how we know that at least 20 percent of Georgia’s Trump voters are going to spend eternity in hell.

Slightly dimwitted Republican Senator Mike Lee. (Photo
courtesy of slightly dimwitted Republican Senator Mike Lee.)

Quick, who talks too much, blurts out whatever’s on his mind, and spouts crackpot ideas sometimes worthy of a world-class lunatic, the rest of the time worthy of a confirmed nincompoop?

If you said, “Donald Trump,” well, of course. 

But who else?

Well, if the headline and photograph made you think it must be Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, you’re certainly right, of course. 

But who else?

Probably every Republican on the planet, that’s who. 

The Republics are coming down

with virulent logorrhea again

There seems to be an outbreak, no, an epidemic of mindless Republican logorrhea. More and more Republicans, from Donald Trump, to Mike Lee, to some obscure Georgia preacher who seems to think he has his own personal direct line to the Almighty are are spewing it. They’re seizing microphones and delivering rambling addresses full of crackpot notions and self-satisfied conceits.

Let’s deal with Mike Lee first. In what appears, from a video, to be an address to a considerably-less-than-packed Senate chamber, Lee recently delivered a smirking oration punctuated by what appeared to be illustrations swiped from some George Lucas storyboard that accidentally got left  behind in a Hollywood conference room. 

While rambling on in a thirteen minutes-long monologue that clearly demonstrated he has no future as a standup comedian, Lee said:

“The green new deal is not the solution to climate change. It’s not even part of the solution. In fact, it’s part of the problem.”

And then, a few seconds later he added: 

“You know where the solution can be found, Mr. President? In churches, in wedding chapels, in maternity awards across the country and around the world. Mr. President, this is the real solution to climate change. Babies. Climate change is an engineer problem. Not social engineering, but the real kind. It’s a challenge of creativity, ingenuity and most of all technological innovation. And problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws. They’re solved by more humans. More people mean bigger markets for more innovation.”

Into the deep

hole we go

Uh Mike? The Green New Deal is an innovation. But more and more babies, and more babies after that, will just put further pressure on resources, consume more energy, result in further acceleration of climate change, and dig us deeper into a hole.

Now, I admit that nature has a way of compensating for excesses. An example? A forest fire will burn most of the trees. But it will also clear spaces for new trees to catch the sun and grow.

Similarly, on a planet overcrowded with imbeciles who are destroying the place, the planet will let the imbeciles have at it for a while. Sooner or later, some of those imbeciles will unleash a nuclear war. Or they’ll raise such havoc with the climate that there will be earthwide annihilations by means of famines, floods, and droughts, causing the deaths of millions, or perhaps billions, and forcing others to kill huge swaths of invading hordes — maybe with nuclear war again — to get humanity down to manageable levels.

After all, if humanity were an endangered species, with perhaps only 500 living examples, then even if they all drove gas-guzzling SUVs with no pollution controls, the consequence would be something that nature could handle. It’s only when the earth’s 7.54 billion people are burning carbon and mowing down forests all at once that we become a problem.

Give Mike Lee

a vasectomy

So it sounds to me as if at least a tiny part of the problem could be solved if we forced Mike Lee to have a vasectomy before he adds to the problem again. Speaking of which, what’s with the blonde in the lower left-hand corner of the video, who seems to be laughing at all of Lee’s lame jokes? 

I have no idea who she is, or why she’s there, or why nobody else seems to be there. But should it ever turn out that she’s having an affair with Mike, I wouldn’t be completely flabbergasted.

Meanwhile, in Georgia...

Speaking of undesirable gene pools getting perpetrated, a member of the Georgia State House of Representatives, one Trey Kelley, recently stood by while his father, Pastor Doyle Kelley, was the House’s pastor-for-a-day. It was more than just a demonstration that idiocy may be a hereditary trait.

The event also demonstrated, yet another time, that you can’t fix idiocy by handing the idiots a microphone. Toward the end of a lengthy invocation that seems to have violated the shaky line between church and state, Pastor Kelley declared:

The command is there: Do all in the name of Jesus Christ. People always ask me, ‘Why are there so many lost people in the state of Georgia?’

“The statistics came out that there’s 70 percent of the people in the state of Georgia that are lost. That are lost. Seventy percent. There are over 10 million people in the state of Georgia. That means there are 7 million people lost. 

“Now you want to hear it in Baptist terms: Seven million people that are lost are dying and on their way to Hell. That’s what that means.”

Well, Pastor, let’s do a little bit of arithmetic here. During the last Presidential election, only 49.6 percent of the voters cast their ballot for Hillary, Gary Johnson, or some obscure candidate. That’s a total of 2, 025,341 voters. Assuming every one of those voters is going to hell, that’s still far short of the 70 percent of Georgians who are hell-bound. And you know what that means?

The Georgia delegation in hell

Right, at least 20 percent of the 2,089,104 Georgians who voted for Trump — very roughly 410,000 of them. are going to hell. Along with roughly four and a half million Georgians who voted for nobody.  (On the other hand, all those folks may simply be going nowhere, same as they’ve done for their entire lives, but that’s an argument for another day.) 

Anyway,Trump-voting Georgians, I look forward to seeing you all in hell. And yes, you can remind me that Pastor Doyle Kelley told me you’d be there.

And here, if you can bear it, is the whole long, boring, discourse on hellfire and damnation in Georgia. Have a nice day.

"Bullshit receptivity" and the flat earthers — a metaphor for....? Well, you decide.

What is the following video a metaphor for?

Anti-vaccers?

People who believe 9/11 was an "inside job" — because roughly 36,000 gallons (over 107 tons) of jet fuel, delivered by a speeding jet plane that crashed through a wall and then exploded in a building all at once couldn't possibly burn hot enough to melt the steel girders supporting a World Trade Center tower and bring the building down?

Donald Trump has done nothing wrong?

We are being invaded by Mexicans? 

Hillary something something something?

Decide for yourself.

I have nothing to say again today, but here's a cat

 I haven't died. I haven't gone away. (Well, actually I did go to San Diego for five days, visiting The Crank's cranky brother and the Crank's cranky brother's cranky cat, but now I'm back in New York. But even after a five-day change of scenery I still have nothing important to say. I'm just writing this because I don't want everybody to think I died.)

Tell you what: people go to blogs just to look at cats, so I'll show you my cranky brother's cranky cat. Here's a photograph I took in San Diego with my cell phone. Are you happy now?

However, I'm still feeling brain dead. Keep on returning to this space anyway. I'll snap out of it eventually. And then I might have something to say that you wouldn't want to miss. Or maybe you would want to miss it, but I'll say it anyway — whenever I get around to saying whatever it is I'll eventually say, if you follow me.

The rusty Crank turns slowly and  the handle makes a creaking noise, but it still turns. Or at least it does when I'm up to turning it.

Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank

Cows, Gas, and Trump — a nearly free-associative ramble. Or amble. Or emotional purge. Or something.

Yes, I'm getting into this. So kill me.

Irritability has been my default position for more decades than most of you who are reading this have lived, kiddies. All the same, I must say that I’m feeling more irked than usual these days. 

My teeth are gnashing. My head is about to explode. I’m ready to throw a chair through a window — preferably somebody else’s window. 

A case in point has been prompted by just one stinking issue of the New York Times — today’s issue. I'm talking about hamburgers.

I mean, trust defensive Republican strategists to take a more-or-less mild suggestion and blow it into a near-nuclear meltdown. In the past few days the hysterical right, from the Trumpster to Sebastian Gorka, have been raging that Democrats want to take away….No, not your guns. Not your so-called religious freedom to insult and exclude from public accommodation anybody you personally don’t like. Not even your God-given right to enjoy the next fatal and fiery NASCAR collision.

The Republicans are ramping up the hysterical notion that Democrats want to take away your hamburgers.

What sparked all this is a goal, propounded by Democratic Representative Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, and Democratic Senator Edward Markey, calling for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas omissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”

Get that? "working collaboratively"  “as much as” “technologically” “feasible.” Hardly a demand to call out the dreaded, armed, and infamously murderous Hamburger Swat Squad.

I keep looking for buzzwords like “confiscate” and “hamburgers” in the OAC-Markey manifesto. Or even for a mention of sirloin, T-bones, filet mignons, flap steaks, well-marbled chunks of stewable chuck, or grandma’s pot roast. I find nada. Not even the forced purchase of Hamburger Helper.

What AOC and Markey are really  talking about, it would appear, is better agricultural management, and by implication, the problem of farting cows. It seems that cows emit a fairly significant dose of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere every time they fart or belch.

I’ll hazard a speculation that one possible solution might be to trap a good portion of those gasses and convert them into fuel which we could use in lieu of fracked “natural gas” to heat our homes and cook our, uh, hamburgers.

Overlooked in this brouhaha is the fact that we humans also emit our fair share of methane by farting and belching, and there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are cows.

Population reduction might make a considerable contribution to a less overheated planet, not only by eventually eliminating billions of daily farts and belches, but also because the fewer people we'll have, the less fuel we'll need, and the few farting cows to feed us.  Moreover, we’d better do something about population before Mother Nature does it for us. As somebody — I forget who — once remarked, “Nature is a hanging judge.”

But how can we begin?

I modestly propose that we start to ameliorate this situation by converting the biggest gas bags in government into hamburger, thus, uh, killing two birds with one stone. 

“Trumpburgers,” assuming they were the actual thing, might be the first product  in America with the Trump name on it that is both honest  and socially useful. Ditto all the other Republican gas bags (and a few iffy Democrats whose names I shall not mention here to avoid a digression into intramural outrage.)

This could turn into a game — not that I’m suggesting we have to play it — in which we nominate various Republicans, neo-Fascists, and other ethics-free legislators to be converted into various dishes, for the sake of diminishing gas emissions in the halls of Congress.

Oh what the hell, as long as I’m on the subject, I might suggest that Mitch McConnell could be converted into Mock Turtle Soup. 

Just sayin’.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog