Blatant Republican corruption, the rodent that ate the Internet, Tom Friedman gets tangled in his plot line, and nude cycling in the time of the plague

 

Je m'appelle Big Trouble

How corrupt is Republican politics? Well, let’s just say that how far you get in Congress all depends on what you pay. Or what you can get others to pay on your behalf. The following is  verbatim from Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, a proudly corrupt Trumpista from Florida:

“Donations to the party do not officially determine which committees you’ll sit on or how prestigious your spot will be, but unofficially money sure seems to make a difference. I won’t pretend I walked away from the game. On the contrary, I was playing to win, and I did. I was eager to meet with Leader McCarthy in hopes of getting a spot on the Armed Services Committee, which is very important to decisions that affect the lives of many military personnel and veterans in Florida’s First District. I expected that when I did meet with him, I’d have to explain the potential impact on my constituents, my relevant experience with military issues, and the ways in which I was (or was not) in sync with the rest of the party on military and foreign policy issues,” Gaetz writes of an exchange he had with McCarthy as a freshman congressman. “To my shock, he looked me straight in the eye and said it would be helpful if in the next ten days I could direct $75,000 ‘across the street,’ which meant into the coffers of the National Republican Congressional Committee. I frankly told my supporters back home about how things apparently work in D.C., and they agreed I should try rolling the dice. I quickly ponied up $150,000, twice the ask, and ended up not only on Armed Services but the Judiciary Committee as well.” 

And if all that sounds either unbearably depressing or so infuriating you fear your head may explode, let me soothe your nerves with a mischievous rodent.

 

“Je m’appelle Coypu and what I do is chew.” A coypu is a rather large, impossibly cute rodent that looks like a cross between a beaver and Punxsutawney Phil, the woodchuck who brings you six more weeks of winter if he sees his shadow on Groundhog Day. A coypu recently had some uncounted number of citoyens tearing their hair out in and around Marsan in southwestern France.

 

They lost their e-mail. They lost their Google. They lost their entire Internet. Complaints from disgruntled customers of Orange, which is sort of the French G-mail, were flooding the switchboards. 

 

Connexion France, my go-to source for silly stuff about France reports:

Telephone engineers turned detective to track down the culprit who cut the internet to several communes in southwest France for several days last week.

[snip]

 

Two days searching along a remote and hard-to-access 14km stretch of cable, uncovered the scene of the 'crime' - and revealed that service had been cut in nine communes around the small town of Nogaro by a coypu chewing through underground cables.

The article goes on to say that the coypu is native to South America, but was, umm, “introduced” to France. Evidently, it not only chews up the Internet, but also “Its tunnelling can cause riverbanks to collapse.”

Coypus are now classified as pests.

 

Ya think?

 

How’s that again, Tom Friedman

of the NY Times? Oh, nevermind!

 

Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist who for a very long time promoted his book “The World is Flat” by using that phrase in column after self-serving column, has now taken to explaining the results of Jared Kushner’s “peace initiative” in what Friedman calls “a soap opera analogy.”

It is as if Jared Kushner was a lawyer who set out to arrange a divorce between a couple, “Mrs. Israel” and “Mr. Palestine.” In the process, though, Mr. Kushner discovered that Mrs. Israel and Mr. Palestine were so incompatible that they couldn’t even sit in a room together, let alone agree on his plan for separation. 

But along the way, Mr. Kushner discovered something intriguing: Mrs. Israel was having an affair with Mr. Emirates, who was fleeing an abusive relationship with Ms. Iran. 

So, Mr. Kushner stopped trying to arrange a divorce between Mr. Palestine and Mrs. Israel and seized instead on the mutual interest of Mrs. Israel and Mr. Emirates to marry — not to mention the self-interest of President Trump to serve as the “justice of the peace” who would officiate on the White House lawn in the midst of a presidential campaign  

Cut to commercial. 

I’ve got a better cut. Cut out reading Tom Friedman.

 

Virus shmirus! I’m wearing a mask, right?

 

What, you weren’t in Rennes, France, last weekend? Too bad! You missed “the first cycling and nudist gathering in France.” 

 

This raised some concerns, because of the very recent growth of Covid-19 cases in town. So the city center was off-limits to the cyclists, there in the nude “to raise awareness for the vulnerability of cyclists in urban areas, and also to promote naturism.”

 

Faceless naturism, as it turns out, because the riders were required to wear face masks, whatever other parts of them were uncovered. 

 

Meanwhile, the number of cyclists in the city has increased by “around 15 – 20% according to Connexion, France.

Miscellany from all over (guaranteed almost Trump-free — at least until close to the end)

The cause of la grande explosion in France. Yicch! (Photo swiped from Wikipedia.)

There’s just so much Donald Trump I can stand before I stick my fingers in my ears, close my eyes, and run screaming from the room.

So today, a few random departures from the subject. Consider these the equivalent of sitting at the computer watching cute cat videos while a forest fire rages outside your window. (If you’re in California or Oregon there probably is one, come to think of it.) You want to get in a couple of smiles before the Internet goes down and the house burns to the ground. So there’s the following.

There once was an old man who zapped a fly

I wouldn’t know why he zapped that fly… 

In France, an 82-year-old pensioner blew up his house while trying to kill a fly. The old guy was sitting down to dinner. The fly was buzzing his….I dunno what he was eating, and it really doesn’t matter. But since this happened in the Dordogne, let’s just suppose it was a plate with some of the local cheeses, like a nice, soft Margotin, and a semi-soft mild Trappe d'Echourgnac. Mmm! No wonder the fly wouldn’t leave!

At any rate, La Technologie’s ubiquitous fingers have reached all the way to the Dordogne village of Parcoul-Chaud, where the irritated old guy reached for his fly swatter — an electronic fly swatter. 

“Unfortunately,” reports ConnexionFrance.com “there was a gas canister leaking in his home and this reacted with the device, causing an explosion that destroyed the kitchen and a part of the roof. 

“The man sustained only minor injuries.” 

I could not find any reports on the condition of the fly.

To pimp out a course, pump up the pomp

More than fifty years ago, the great advertising genius David Ogilvy advised his then-young copywriters, me among them, that if they wanted to write ads that sell, they should avoid using pompous language and onerous jargon.

Tell that to the folks who run “Brand United University,” which, as you might have guessed even as you read its name, is not a university at all. It’s an activity of a marketing and advertising trade magazine called Brand United. You’d think that after the debacle that was “Trump University,” people would stop adding the descriptor University to the names of things that aren’t universities. (In this case it’s a two-hour “webinar.”) But no.

Not satisfied with the grandiosity of equating a two hour course on the Internet about print ad marketing techniques with an institution of higher learning, the people behind all this added the following descriptor, which I think is supposed to impress you:

Print marketing offers a blend of many offline marketing touchpoints in the customer journey that multiplies marketing performance when incorporated into a comprehensive optichannel strategy.

Got that? Me neither. But I think it means something like, “There are lots of things you can do with different kinds of print advertising at different times to sell stuff.”

That I get. But it doesn’t sound nearly as important. Or perhaps as self-important. 

Somebody please drop these clowns in the dumpster with full military honors while the band plays Pomp and Circumstance.

It all depends on what you squat

Back to France, where there was a retiree in a “care home.” (Is that something like a nursing home? I dunno.) Anyway, the retiree discovered that squatters had invaded and taken over a property he owned. 

A report, again in ConnexionFrance.com, my go-to source for all things that are both French and frivolous, tells me:

[The squatters] claimed, wrongly, that because it was an empty second home they had the right to take it on to house homeless people. 

In cases of squatters moving into a main home, the owners can have them evicted by police at any time if they can prove the occupiers broke in to the property and are thus using it as a residence illegally. 

But owners must go through the legal channels and not try to evict the squatters themselves – they risk a €30,000 fine and up to three years in jail if they do so. 

In the case of second homes, the law is stricter.Police can arrest squatters within 48 hours of them occupying the property if they have caused serious damage during or after the break-in. 

After this initial 48-hour period, the legal owners must obtain an eviction order from a court before bailiffs can move in. The process can take weeks. 

And if the application is ruled on during France’s winter truce – the period between November 1 and March 31 when evictions are banned – a judge may rule that the squatters cannot be evicted until the spring.”

And that was where a gear tooth snapped, a cog slipped, and my blogging machinery started spitting out Donald Trump again.

I mean, speaking of squatters, what are we to do if he loses the election but refuses to leave the White House?

Who can issue a legal eviction notice? Must the process move through the Federal courts, with Bill Barr again acting as Trump’s personal attorney at taxpayer expense (because of course if Trump refuses to move out of the White House, why should Barr move out of the Department of Justice?) 

Will a Court of Appeals rule that Trump cannot be evicted until Spring? Will the White House eventually be referred to as “The Executive Squat?” If Trump finally does leave, will he begin referring to himself as "homeless?"

Stay tuned.

Heading for a violent street demonstration? Don’t leave home without your bag of soup. Here’s a surefire recipe for The Crank’s Not-Quite-Beef-Bourguignon Soup + Yummy Stew dinner.

A soldier gravely wounded by cream of asparagus soup 

during WWI gets treated by medics.

By now probably everybody is aware of this, because Donald Trump has told us about it. Large groups of Antifa troublemakers, clad completely in black uniforms so that nobody will notice them, at least not in the dark shadows, are boarding airplanes and heading for big cities to burn them down and riot.

Not only that, but they’re hurling soup! The bastards! So you know what comes next. Pretty soon  Homeland Security agents will be searching your baggage at the airport not for weapons, not for explosives, but for soup cans. Or maybe, as Trump tells us, even bags of soup.

Fortunately, you can make your own soup, without ever coming near a can. Here’s a recipe for my very own Not-Quite-Beef-Bourguignon Soup. And as an added bonus, a useful and very tasty byproduct of this weapon of street warfare is my cranky Not-Quite-Beef-Bourguignon beef stew for six.

What you’ll need to perpetrate

Beef Bourguignon-based violence:

1 teabag (any flavor tea)

1 nail file

1 12-to-25-inch length of unwaxed, unflavored dental floss

1 heavy steel-headed hammer with at least one flat side on its head

1 small plastic bag

1 large covered pot or Dutch Oven

Thyme

Parsley flakes

Bay leaves

2-4 tablespoons of olive oil

2 large white onions

1 bag (roughly the size of the two onions or slightly larger) of peeled baby carrots

1 ½ to 2 lbs. of beef chuck, stewing beef or brisket, cut into roughly 1-inch squares

8 ounces or so of tomato basil sauce

2 cloves of garlic

6 beef bullion cubes

3 cups of water

2/3rds bottle of red table wine, preferably Burgundy

Instructions

1.  Using the nail file, very, very carefully pry open the staple that holds the tea bag closed. Discard the staple before the cat or some human idiot accidently swallows it. Also discard the tea leaves. All you want is the bag.

2. Very gently, being careful not to tear the bag, fill it with ¼ teaspoonful of thyme, ¼ teaspoonful of parsley flakes and two  bay leaves. If the bay leaves are too big to fit, it’s okay to break them into smaller pieces. 

3. Tie the tea bag tightly closed with the dental floss and set aside.

4. Slice the garlic cloves and set the slices aside.

5. Slice onions into quarters or eighths and set aside.

6. Put the  bullion cubes into the plastic bag. Seal the bag. Then whack the cubes with the hammer until they’re pulverized into small pieces or into a powder. If it’ll make you feel better, you can imagine you’re whacking Boogaloo Boyz heads. You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking in this country. Not yet, anyway.

7. Put the olive oil at the bottom of the pot, set pot on a medium flame, and brown the beef on all sides. Remove the browned beef from the pot and discard the olive oil and the fat rendered from the beef.

8. Add to the pot: The water. The wine. The pulverized bullion cubes. The sliced garlic cloves. The tomato basil sauce. The browned beef. The onions. The baby carrots. Finally, add the spice-filled tea bag, but leave a good length of dental floss hanging outside the pot. 

9. Cover the pot and bring  to a boil over a high flame, then lower the flame and allow the contents of the pot to simmer for 90 minutes, stirring occasionally. After the first 40 minutes, yank out the teabag (that’s why you left the string hanging over the side) and discard before the beef bougignon gets too spicy or bitter.

This makes a Not-Quite-Beef-Bourguignon stew that serves four to six violent Antifa revolutionaries, with approximately a pint of soup left over.  (When it’s served on the meat it’s sauce. When it’s served separately, it’s soup.) 

Serve the stew over flat noodles or boiled potatoes with a little bit of sauce. You can freeze the remaining soup into bricks and bring them to your next demonstration. Or just leave them unfrozen to fling at Q-Anons and Boogaloo Boyz and see if they’ll start licking each others' faces.

See you at the revolution. Or as Julia Child used to say, Bon Apétit! And be sure to wear your black uniform.

Donald Trump has successfully built a wall. But not the one he promised. His wall imprisons us, like the Berlin Wall that imprisoned East Berliners under Communism.

One of the last foreign places on Earth where Americans can vacation 

is beautiful downtown Minsk. Don't forget to bring your galoshes.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, decrying the Berlin Wall. The news was full of images of that forbidding gray concrete block barrier, separating East from West Berlin, keeping the East Berliners from escaping to freedom. 

East Germany needed to imprison its people. It needed the workers, who were forced to live under grim, police state conditions.

Fatal escape attempts

From time to time, East Berliners would make an escape attempt. It seemed more often than not, they were machine-gunned to death while trying to climb over the top.

That is the kind of wall Donald Trump has built. A wall that imprisons us. He didn’t intend to build it. His intention, a formidably incompetent one, was to keep the economy going while a pandemic was taking hold. He hoped Covid-19 would “miraculously go away” before it loused up the prosperity, launched by Barack Obama, that Trump was now crediting solely to himself.

But like a spark, leading to a fuse, leading to an incendiary device, leading to a dry forest, Trump’s virus sparked, smoldered, and then exploded — all while he was denying it was a serious matter, and while nearly all of the rest of the world tamped its own fires down.

A medieval horror of a plague

—sixty-two 9/11s and counting

So now, while life in most of Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and South America moves steadily back toward normal, the United States has a pandemic of medieval proportions, eclipsed only by The Black Death of 1346 to 1353. Or to look at it another way, the roughly 185,000 Americans who’ve died of Trump’s virus so far is the equivalent of nearly sixty-two 9/11 events. We quite justifiably  went crazy after one 9/11. I can’t understand the relative calm after another sixty-two.

But here’s the thing. Other nations have noticed. And they’ve decided not to let Americans in to spread our pestilence to their own people. These days, you can’t casually get on a plane and go to France. You can’t go to Germany. You can’t go to Italy. You can’t go to Scotland. You can’t go to Belgium. You can’t go to Holland. You can’t go to Spain. You can’t go to Portugal. You can’t…but I’m sure you’ve got the idea by now. We’re pretty much trapped in our own country, as trapped as if there were literally a high wall around it.

Yes, there are exceptions. A handful of tiny Caribbean island nations, like Anguilla and Bermuda and Barbados, whose entire economies are based on U.S. tourism dollars, will risk their lives to let us in. Although even in some of those, you may have to present  the results of a recent virus test, or quarantine for two weeks, before they welcome you. 

And there are still other cheerful place you can visit. For example, there’s Ukraine. And Belarus, where you can soon experience walking through the winter slush of beautiful downtown Minsk’s brutalist architecture. Or Zimbabwe.

But hey, East Germans were free to visit Russia and Poland.

The American Iron Curtain

Trump promised a physical wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Instead, we have a currently-impenetrable iron curtain between ourselves and Canada, ourselves and most of Europe, ourselves and most of Asia, ourselves and most of South America.

Did you vote for Trump because he promised to build a wall? 

Be careful what you wish for. Or vote for.

Trump demands Biden take a drug test. Here’s a better idea:

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.

Trump girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle gives the Republican convention a "Porn Star Experience," SCREAMING HER HEAD OFF!!!!

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.

Six of the last eight men who tried to sabotage American infrastructure died in the electric chair. So what should be the fate of Louis DeJoy?

Saboteur DeJoy

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.

Lindsey Graham whines. Plus: “No one touches Mr. Trump’s penis without a glove.” Plus: Trump’s paranoid ambassador to Iceland just can’t hold on to the help.

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, bringing the 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. 

More about Paranoid Jeff in this CBS report.

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?

Five fresh nightmares dreamed here during the Trump Presidency

If this is how you feel things are looking, 

maybe it's because that's how they're looking.

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."

Everybody’s got it in for somebody. Trump says Twitter’s got it in for Trump. Facebook’s got it in for ethics. Consumers have it in for the economy. And I’m keeping my back against the wall.

It’s getting brutal out there.

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.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

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!

6:41 PM · Jul 27, 2020

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