Impotently fulminating about absolutely everything since 2006.
Postings whenever I happen to get around to them. Ditto comment moderation.
You got a problem with that?
Can you spot the Adderall symptoms? Or is he just addled?
The wannabe emperor Donald Trump says he’s suspicious — of Joe Biden, that is.
According to The Washington Examiner, a newspaper that’s often just a gnat’s hair to the right of Attila The Hun, “the president expressed suspicion at what he said was a sudden, marked improvement in Biden's debate performance during the Democratic primary season and suggested that he believes the improvement was the result of drugs. The president offered no evidence to support his speculation.”
However, evidence or no, Trump is now demanding that Biden take a drug test before their first debate.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Trump began babbling similarly addled horse manure about Hillary Clinton back when he was running against her, The New York Times reminds us.
Poor Trump! He has no program, except to take care of Donald Trump. In order to hold on to the presidency that he botched so badly, he’s making the same promises he made during the first election — wall, Mexico, tax cuts, no preexisting conditions (although we already enjoy that benefit and he tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy President Obama's no-prexisting-conditions rule during his first term), and so-yawn and so-fart.
So, of course he wants the distraction of a drug test. Our pathetic excuse for a president long ago ran out of rabbits to pull out of his hat. Or from under his orange makeup and his elaborate comb over.
But I have a better idea. Joe Biden ought to call upon Trump to release his tax returns for the past ten years prior to the debate.
You say, “But of course Trump will refuse?” Exactly, and that’s a point that Biden should poke Trump in the eye with eight or ten times during the first debate. (For safety’s sake, Biden should also take a drug test that day and have the results handy, to poke in Trump’s other eye.)
Meanwhile, Donald, keep taking your Adderall, because you need that drug for your attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. You know, the mental condition with symptoms like getting easily distracted, and not being able to read a two page intelligence report from beginning to end and comprehend what it said.
Just beware of its side affects, like nervousness, difficulty sleeping instead of sitting on your bed all night and tweeting, as well as impotence, and hair loss.
In a dark corner of the Internet netherworld, the sex-for-sale listings, offers of sexual favors for pay are peppered with code words. Some of them are puzzling — unless you're a member of the cognoscenti. I once asked someone conversant in these matters what some of the codes meant. "For example, what's GFE?" I asked. "That's girlfriend experience," my informant replied. "It means she'll kiss, and she'll probably give you oral sex." "And what's PSE?" I continued "That's Porn Star Experience." "What's a Porn Star Experience?" "That's exactly the same as a Girl Friend Experience, only with a lot more noise and screaming." That said, I give you Kimberly Guilfoyle, screaming into a microphone in a nearly empty room. Pay particular attention to her orgasmic closing sentence.
In June of 1942, eight German saboteurs entered the United States, four on Long Island, New York, the other four in Florida.
Their mission was sabotage. Their targets were some of the crown jewels of America’s industrial might: major hydroelectric plants, important aluminum factories, critical railroad tracks, bridges and canals–and the water supply system of New York City.
Fortunately, their scheme was uncovered in time. None of the planned acts of sabotage were ever committed. Two of the saboteurs who cooperated with the United States got prison sentences. The other six were executed.
As I write this, we have Louis DeJoy, Donald Trump’s new Postmaster General, testifying before a U.S. Senate Panel, about his deliberate sabotage of the U.S. Postal System.
He claims that destroying sorting machines is a “cost cutting measure.” He has yet to satisfactorily explain how destroying sorting machines cuts costs.
He is, of course, lying through his teeth.
He has in effect said that he has carted away mailboxes, and destroyed sorting machines to make the USPS “more efficient.”
More efficient at what? If the USPS can’t efficiently sort and distribute the mail, if the machines that do that work are carried out of postal facilities and junked, if it becomes difficult even to find a mail box conveniently, there will be only one efficiency. That will be DeJoy's efficiency at clogging the mail, and in so doing, sabotaging both the American economy and election results come November.
We have a 68-year-old precedent for dealing with saboteurs like DeJoy. We ought to be talking more about it.
Okay, all you folks can natter on about the Democratic Convention. Or about whether Donald Trump will either hotwire the Presidential election and drive off with it, or launch a coup d’état if he loses fair and square. Not me.
I want to repeat some comments I made a while ago about Lindsey Graham’s crybaby act. And the rule concerning Donald Trump’s penis. And Trump’s most paranoid ambassadorial appointee. If you have a sense of déja vu, it may be because I've covered all this before. But after you've had a butter pecan ice cream cone, there's nothing like another butter pecan ice cream cone.
All set?
Cry, baby, cry,
Put your finger in your eye
Then run and tell your mommy
That it surely wasn’t I
I’m looking at you, Lindsey Graham. And why are you giving me that pouty frown? Did you honestly think I wasn’t going to set up a listening post on the Internet to find out what Republicans are saying to each other when they don’t think Democrats are listening?
I voted in a poll you put out there. I gave you one of my pseudonymous e-mail addresses. And ever since then, you have been bombarding me with fund raising appeals.
What does that Senatorial crybaby, who feigned maximum testosterone-fed outrage when the House was impeaching Trump, have to whine about? Well, for starters “13.9 MILLION DOLLARS!!!” That’s how Lindsey wrote it — all caps, with three — count ‘em, three! — exclamation points. And then he went on:
...That's how much my Democrat opponent raised in the second quarter of 2020, bringingthe grand total raised to nearly $29 million to fund his massive negative ad campaign against me. The Radical Left will say, do, or spend whatever it takes to defeat me. Now more than ever, I need to know if you're still standing by my side. Please consider making a campaign contribution to Team Graham below!
Well, what did you expect, m’am? I mean Senator Graham. That’s what political opponents do. They raise money to defeat the people they oppose. And when you are one of the key Senators who blocked the removal of Herr Donald after the House impeached him, people who see him speeding this country head-on toward a dictatorship are going to contribute to your opponents to stop it.
So I won’t be contributing $5, $25, $50, $75 on and on up to $2,800, $5,600, or “other” to “benefit Team Graham.” Nor will I “make this a monthly recurring donation.” Nor will I contribute to an “August End of Month Money Bomb.” Whatever I give, I give to the Dems. To defeat whiney Trump enablers like you.
Put that in your self-righteous pipe and blubber into it.
You don’t need analyzing
It is not so surprising
A rubdown with a rubber glove…
Hey it’s one thing to rape a thirteen-year-old girl, even under the benevolent auspices of Jeffrey Epstein. It’s quite another to insist you have to sexually abuse her with a germ-free barrier between her disgusting pre-adolescent hand and the rapist’s beloved and beautiful sex organ.
According to the testimony by a woman named Katie Johnson, that was what she faced with Donald Trump some years ago. He may, according to her testimony, be a rapist. But that doesn’t mean he’ll let horrible disgusting pre-adolescent germs touch his most precious bodily part.
But she is now no longer thirteen years old and at long last she’s talking. Her story, in her own words, was released on You Tube last month. I should warn you, it’s as long as it is scandalous, with several revealing glimpses into what she says are Trump’s sex fantasies, their relationship to his need for power, and the psychodramas he staged around those needs. My advice to you: Before you click on it, run to the kitchen and make a big bowl of popcorn. You’re gonna need it.
The bulletproof ambassador
Iceland is a pretty peaceful country. Actually, the most peaceful nation in the world according to the Global Peace Index, followed by New Zealand, Austria, Portugal and Denmark. But that hasn’t stopped Jeffrey Ross Gunter, Trump’s political appointment to Ambassador in Iceland, from declaring that he needs to carry a gun for his own protection there.
He has also requested a “stab proof vest” (you can’t make this stuff up), and door-to-door armored car service to take him on his errands around Iceland. Oh, and did I mention that he also asked to work from home? Home is in California, where the ambassador’s previous occupations were dermatology and contributing generously to he Trump Campaign..
Trump can sure pick ‘em. But I have a theory about Gunter’s alleged paranoia. He’s terrified his own embassy staff is going to kill him.
According to the Iceland Review, Paranoid Jeff ‘s “Deeply Offensive Behavior also included this:
Ambassador Gunter has had seven Deputy Chiefs of Mission since his arrival in May 2019—one of whom prepared for over a year for the position and spent a considerable amount of time studying Icelandic only to be blocked because the Ambassador “didn’t like the look of him.” Ambassador Gunter also refused to return to Iceland after attending a conference in the US in February, took a personal leave of absence right in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and reportedly wanted to conduct his job remotely from California.
And you wonder why Europe’s image of the United States has been downgraded from the number one world leader to that of a bunch of shmucks led by the world’s biggest shmuck in the White House?
Caveats: Some nightmares may not be ephemeral. Your fright may vary. If uncertain whether your nightmares are real, stop dreaming and see seek psychiatric counseling immediately. Let your doctor know if you have been to a country where certain fungus infections can be treated without inflicting bankruptcy on the patient.
1. Rumors of murder circulate, saying that the kids who were taken off the streets of Portland and pushed into unmarked vans by unmarked government agents in military garb are dead. According to the rumors, the kids were forced to board military transport aircraft and then dropped into the Pacific Ocean, on orders of the Trump administration. The rumors are vigorously denied by the White House until one of the missing demonstrators, a former college swimming champ, shows up in Maui claiming the bubble wrap he was wearing under his clothing during the protest to cushion the impact of rubber bullets and police batons served as the equivalent of water wings. He states that they kept him afloat while he backstroked to the island. The next day, Tucker Carlson makes an impassioned plea to outlaw bubble wrap, calling it “the secret weapon of the radical left and the Antifa movement,” but adding, “On the other hand I have to hand it to that kid. He sure can swim!” Inexplicably, Carlson disappears the next day.
2. Putin and Trump in the buff: Donald Trump is in his bedroom at his Bedminster, NJ golf club, exchanging nude selfies with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Suddenly, 50 tons of ammonium nitrate that were carelessly stored in the club’s kitchen, for a future golf green fertilization project, get ignited when a newly-minted junior assistant chef’s shashlik on a flaming sword flames out of control and sets fire to one of the bags in which the ammonium nitrate is stored. The explosion causes Trump to levitate out of bed and then fall back down on it from the ceiling, breaking six ribs. Trump responds by blaming Hillary Clinton and issuing an executive order locking down “any place where Democrats congregate.” Nancy Pelosi gets arrested by the new Super-Triple-Secret National Police Force. Three days later she is found floating in a lake, alive, thanks to having been wrapped in bubble wrap by obliging Customs and Border Patrol cops wearing army camo.
3. Blue collar Liberty. While Jerry Fallwell Jr. is on a leave of absence from Liberty University for an unspecified length of time, following the scandalous release of a photograph of himself and a young women, both with their pants halfway down aboard a yacht, the University decides to give higher education “to people who otherwise wouldn’t have any” and offers majors in non-traditional university subjects such as carpentry; heating, ventilating and air conditioning; plumbing; and welding. Oh wait.
4. Mount Trumpmore. Donald Trump tries to get his likeness carved on Mount Rushmore next to those of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Oh wait.
5. Elections “unnecessary.” One week before the 2020 Presidential elections, Donald Trump cancels elections “to control the Chinese virus” and declares himself “President For Life By Popular Acclaim.” The U.S. Supreme Court, in a six-to-three decision, upholds Trump’s coup. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, states, “Forcing people to vote when it would be unhealthy to do so, whether after standing in a line at a crowded polling place, or by handling paper mail-in-ballots that have been touched by God-knows-who is prima facie unconstitutional. Therefore, we must reluctantly agree that an election at this time, or possibly at any time, should be set aside."
This is one pissed-off nation. And as in all things, it’s the people at the top who set the mood.
So yes, Trump again. The Huffington Post recently made note, among other Trumpian horrors, of the complaint that Twitter’s trending topics are “ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair." He mentioned the unfairness on Twitter, which of course, drove his trend numbers up even higher.
So disgusting to watch Twitter’s so-called “Trending”, where sooo many trends are about me, and never a good one. They look for anything they can find, make it as bad as possible, and blow it up, trying to make it trend. Really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!
Of course, this would have nothing to do with the fact that if you spend your presidency posting on Twitter (when you’re not playing golf or acting like a shmuck and sending disguised thugs out to beat up peaceful protesters in the streets of Portland) you become a pretty hot topic.
All the same, it’s hard to tell what’s “illegal” about Trump’s trending. The press could ask, but when Trump knows the answer will make him look bad, he simply walks out of the press conference. Which, of course, leads to more tweets. Which ups his trend still more. On to another topic.
Values? We don’t need
no stinking values!
Yes, yes, I know it feels like 100 years ago, but it was only last week that, in response to leadership from the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, major advertisers boycotted Facebook over hate speech, various divisive lies, and trollery that Marc Zuckerberg and his gang have been tolerating. How could anybody who loves money more than humanity blame Facebook? Hatred attracts eyeballs, and eyeballs attract advertisers, and advertisers shell out money to advertise.
The boycott kind of fizzled, because it turns out that big national advertisers are only a drop in Zuckerberg’s bucket. He said his strength was coming from small local advertisers, although I suspect big political organizations on both sides of the aisles are willing to overlook the hate speech in their search for an advertising audience.
The most ancient rule of beastly behavior is, if you’re in it up to your neck, have the intelligence to keep your mouth shut. But not Carolyn Everson, Zuckerberg's VP of global business solutions, whatever the hell that title means.
“The truth is we are not trying to be neutral in the sense that we have no values,” she told an interviewer for Advertising Age. “We have actually very clear values, we have values around voice, around safety, authenticity, privacy, dignity. We have values, but depending which side of the aisle you’re on, depending on a decision we make, you might think we’re one way or the other, but there is no advantage to us to be taking sides.”
What those values specifically are is another question, perhaps for another day. And yes, when there’s money to be made there’s “no advantage” to taking sides on racism, fascism, misinformation, perhaps even lynching or a coup d’état. Not when a buck is a buck, right Zuck? Okay, one more topic.
Consumers lose confidence.
The unconscionable nerve of them!
Late last month, Bloomberg news reported that “U.S. consumer confidence declined in July by more than forecast as Americans became rattled by the recent increase in Covid-19 cases and its impact on the economy and the job market.”
Since then, the Republicans and the Trump Administration have rolled up their sleeves and done whatever they could to drive consumer confidence even lower. As of this writing, they’ve let the $600 weekly supplement to unemployed Americans expire. They’ve taken off from Washington, ignoring a House bill, pushed through by Democrats, that would have restored some stability to the lives of unemployed Americans.
Liveable income? Protection against eviction and homelessness? Control of the Corona Virus? They’re not only on the chopping block, they’re also getting scooped up and tossed into the paper shredder. But don’t worry, the Republicans fully intend to protect Fortune 500 companies against lawsuits from employees and their families if the employees are forced to work in unhealthy conditions and then contract or die from Covid-19.
Of course corporations will be protected. As Mitt Romney so ably described the concept four years ago, "Corporations are People." So there! Carry that comforting thought through the day with you. Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog
With Donald Trump in charge, what are we to make of America’s destiny?
Our lives have become a nightmare of outrages and horrors, each playing a game of Can You Top This with the previous outrage or horror.
Autocratic merchandise from the
not-so-little shop of horrors
Our psychopath-in-chief threatens to postpone the next presidential election.
He sends armed thugs in insignia-less military camo fatigues to beat up, gas, and shoot with “less lethal” munitions people who peacefully protest against police brutality.
He alienates our longstanding friends abroad and sucks up to tyrants.
He spills a can of intelligence beans to Vladmir Putin, rendering other nations’ impression of our espionage apparatus so untrustworthy that I suspect the rest of the democratic world will not only refuse to share intelligence with us, but won’t even give us the time of day.
He ignores a pandemic, turning it into an American plague (over 150,000 dead so far and counting) while the rest of the world tamps down the viral spread in their own nations.
And I’m only skimming the surface. Under Trump America has become bereft of sympathetic allies and hence militarily weaker. We have become a cesspool of viral disease. We now teeter on the edge of becoming an economic basket case as well.
If some enemy agent had sneaked into America and done all this to us, we’d undoubtedly arrest, charge, try, and then execute him. We executed Osama Bin Laden even without benefit of a trial.
But because Trump is President of the United States, our only hope is to vote him out of office — and even that prospect is pockmarked with horrifying possibilities that range from ballot tampering by agents of the White House to an armed coup d’état.
Does Trump remind you of
anyone else you’ve heard about?
I’ve been trying to think who else in history — past the obvious usual suspects like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini —Trump reminds me of. Vlad Dracul, the 15th Century Transylvanian Prince A.K.A Vlad the Impaler sprang to mind.
Like Trump, Vlad Dracul was a psychopath who liked to portray himself as a tough guy. His favorite form of execution — of foreign intruders and also of his own subjects that he didn’t like — was to impale them, threading them alive onto sharpened poles as if they were shish kebab, and leaving them mounted by the public roadsides for the horrific edification of Vlad’s other subjects.
Did he feel any pity for his victims, writhing in pain on poles until they died? Hardly. Vlad, like Donald Trump, had all the human empathy of a pit viper. He was said to have enjoyed his lunch while watching the impalement of his own living subjects. (See the woodcut at the top of this post.)
Needless to say, Vlad not only failed to charm the people he ruled, but also made himself one of the most despised men in history. It is said that the folk legend of Dracula the vampire evolved out of his memory. That memory nourished folktales of a bloodsucking bat who drains his victims dry, a veritable incarnation of Satanic evil, from which Bram Stoker fashioned his retelling of the vampire legend.
The undead presidency
of Donald Trump
Since Donald Trump is not likely to step down willingly, his presidency threatens to have the semi-immortal characteristics of Dracula. Even when his presidency is dead, it will be undead. It will abhor the sunlight, but stay up until the wee hours tweeting bat screeches that tell us he’s coming for our throats.
I am speaking in wildly hyperbolic metaphor, of course, but in the end, it may be necessary to drive a silver stake through his heart and bury him at a crossroads. Ditto, his entire cavern full of bloodsucking eutherians, from William Barr, to Mike Pompeo, to Jared Kushner, to enablers like Mitch McConnell.
The good news is, this would have the potential to create one of the first great infrastructure programs to revive our failing economy. Call it the Crossroads Repair and Highway Reinforcement act of 2021.