Congress

Eat and drink, be of good cheer, for Christmas comes but once a year Not for me, no sir. If as I expect, in another 11 days, I’m able to turn on MSNBC and see helicopter of that little white haired weasel, wearing his stupid Truman Capote little round glasses, and shuffling slump shouldered through the gates of a federal prison, I am gonna be one jig danging Irishman, I’ll tell you that much for free! Christmas in July! And if Roger Stone isn’t sweating like a meat loaf in a 375 oven right now, then Stone is even dumber than I give him credit for. And personally, I score igneous rocks higher on the IQ scale. When you look at the current landscape of Trumpmenistan right now, time is not on Roger Stone’s side, and it’s passing on Mercury style winged feet. I’ve said it before, the easiest mark in the world is a con man, and every con man’s best mark is himself. His rock solid belief in his own superior intelligence makes him ripe pickings, especially when he cons himself into taking one risk too many. Trump has spent his entire 5 years in politics since Access Hollywood throwing one shiny object after another in the air, to distract people while he struggled to get dressed in the morning. And now, it’s happening to him, and that is about to bite Roger Stone in the ass. What does Trump have on his mind right now? Well, not only isn’t the economy roaring back, his own GOP Governors are being forced to roll back their economic reopening steps in the wake of coronavirus spikes. And the other day, on a flyby, I heard an economist on FUX News drawing the distinction between an economy with 15 million newly minted unemployed, and the totally discordant stock market. When your own ministry of Propaganda starts churching up the masses, you’re in trouble. Trump trails Biden outside the margin of error in every battleground state, and even states like Texas, Iowa, and Georgia are suddenly in play. And there’s this nagging problem about giving Putin free rein to turn US forces in Afghanistan into ducks in a bathtub. Trump doesn’t have time for shit like Roger Stone, and Stone has to know that. After all, even in more pastoral, sedate times, Trump let Paul Manafort shuffle off to the federal pen, gout and all, without a backward glance. And Manafort did more for Trump than Stone ever did, especially since I consider it inconceivable that Manafort got millions in loans from that Chicago bank, without some little envelope of baksheesh sliding under the Oval Office door. That’s just how Trump operates. And Stone has to be careful too. After all, Trump’s hair trigger temper and short fuse are world renowned, especially when he’s distracted. If Stone and his lawyers spend too much time whining and begging His Lowness to take action, they may get their wish, and one day Tubby the Ewok shows up in court arguing for a longer sentence for Stone as an enemy of the people. So, I’m in countdown mode. And for the next 11 days, just so long as The Duke of Distraction has all of these gnats and mosquitoes buzzing around his ears, he has no time for a pissant like Stone. But even if he does end up having to report to the Crossbar Hilton, it’s not all bad news. Maybe he […]

More than 90 progressive advocacy groups are calling on Congress to repeal a decades-old Pentagon program that facilitates the transfer of surplus military equipment to local police departments, a demand that gained steam in...

These are people, I swear, when they put one foot forward, they have absolutely NO idea of what to do with the other foot   Tom Jimson   Drowned Hopes Welcome back. I swear, some nights the fun just never ends! As many of you already know, earlier this week the European Union announced that they are reopening their countries for travel from other countries, having successfully knocked down, and at least for the present, the coronavirus. But there’s a catch there. Having taken care of their own business, the EU is in no hurry to reintroduce the virus to their countries. And therefore, the United States is on an embargo list for travel to the EU. In other words, we ain’t traveling to the other side of the pond anytime soon. Let’s pause for just a moment for a brief review of recent global history. In late February heading into early March, the coronavirus was rampaging over the glove. At about the same time that most European countries were affecting draconian measures to try to stall the damage of the virus, many American states were instituting their own lockdown provisions to fight the virus. When I say many American states, feel free to read progressive Democratic Governors who trusted science. At that point, statistically, pretty much everybody was on a level playing field. Flash forward 4 months. The countries of the European Union, whose countries acted swiftly with a unified government response, have largely got the virus under control. Meanwhile, the United States is now the leading health crisis for the entire globe. What in the hell happened to have the European countries flattening their rate of infection, while the United States sets a new record every damn day? There are a couple of reasons for this. The European countries spoke with a centralized, unified response, putting their entire nations under the same, unified restrictions. The Trump administration refused to even consider the virus a national emergency, leaving 50 separate state Governors to deal with the problem through a hodge-podge of restrictions and regulations. And the European governments quite properly diagnosed the virus as a healthcare emergency, while Trump read it as a political issue with economic ramifications. This was a tragic miscalculation. But the worst miscalculation was Trump mandating that states reopen as quickly as possible, in order to juice up the economy, his only platform to run on. There was an ingrained fallacy in this. Following the initial collapse of the stock market as the companies tried to come to grips with the new world order, it turned out that the companies that occupy the Dow Jones 500 were well enough protected to rebound fairly quickly. While tens of millions of Americans filed for unemployment, the Dow made up almost half of its initial losses within a few weeks. But here’s the McGuffin. In a few days, the European Union will reopen for business. And the United States isn’t invited to the party! Most Asian countries have also flattened out their curves, and they’re ready to both travel, and receive travelers to get back to business as usual. The United States as  quickly as possible. And because they took the time and trouble to get their curve under control, they will be welcome visitors in EU. The EU reject list is actually rather ratified, but still includes countries like Russia, […]

You know, whenever I look at the latest outrage of El Pendejo Presidente or his administration, my mind immediately goes back to one of my favorite movies, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. In that movie, any time Indiana Jones did something daring or stupid that placed them in danger, his father always exclaimed the same three words, This is intolerable! Which are exactly the same three words I bellow every time I see the latest Trump administration outrage. But earlier today, I took a break from my laser focused disgust at the latest outrage of Glorious Bleater, namely that active duty troops under his ultimate command were not worth protecting from having bounties placed on their heads by some halfwit, former KGB cocksucker. Instead, I took a step back, and looked at the devastated landscape of the last four years under Der Gropinfuror, in a more dispassionate way than I have in quite a while, and in doing so, I came to a personally stunning conclusion. The entire last four years of this country’s history has been completely and entirely illegitimate. There is no other way to look at it. Trump failed to win the popular vote, and he couldn’t even fall back on the time honored American tradition of having the fucking supreme Court hand the election to him. Instead, Trump fell back on micro targeted messaging and disinformation war but Vlad the Imp to propel him to the White House. From the moment Trump befouled the Lincoln bible with his hand, his presidency was illegitimate. But don’t get cocky, we’re just getting started. We are also honored to have a completely Illegitimate Senate Majority Leader. And he was that way when he was the Senate Minority Leader as well. Every time I look at Mitch McConnell, I can’t help seeing Gollum, the pathetic creature from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so obsessed with the power of his precious that he had lost any mortal feelings or soul that he may have had. Sound about right? Remember this. On inauguration night of 2009, it was McConnell who sat in a restaurant room with his closes cronies, and plotted to make Barack Obama a one term President. He clearly violated his oath of office that night by placing his own personal and party interests above those of the country. His chosen method, total obstruction, McConnell reached the zenith of illegitimacy when he spent almost an entire calendar year refusing to even consider a completely legitimate nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States. Which means of course, that we now have a totally illegitimate Supreme Court, and on two counts. The minute Judge Neil Gorsuch accepted his nomination to the Supreme Court, he became illegitimate, and by extension, the court itself. There had been plenty of time for the nomination process for Judge Merrick Garland to run its course, except for the obstruction of Bitch Mcconnell, a clear violation of the traditional Senate role of advise and consent. Even worse was the forced ramming through of a clearly unqualified , possibly on criminal ground, of the nomination of “Brewski” Brett Kavanaugh. The refusal to allow a full investigation of the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh alone disqualified him from being confirmed. In any other administration, even if the nominee had refused to step down, the President would have pulled his name. But not […]

After more than 3 1/2 painfully long years, it is finally time for the GOP to make the ultimate decision. What do you do, shit, or get off of the pot? And I’m not talking about the GOP House, those idiots don’t know whether to shit, go blind, or wind their watch. I’m talking about the GOP Senate, and yes, even Vice President Mike Pence. The ship is 100 yards from the rocks, full speed ahead, and the GOP has about ten seconds left to jump off and save themselves. Will they take it? Look, I’m sick of dicking around being politically correct, so I’m going to come right out and say it. Trump is toast, he’s dead in the water. And I don’t want to hear any of that hand wringing Remember 2016 bullshit either. A fluke is a fluke, but a dead fluke will sink like any other fish. Trump has lost independents, he has lost college educated white women, he’s losing college educated white men, and seniors are saying goom-bye as fast as we can toddle away. James Carville encapsulated it perfectly on Friday night when he said that a national change election is like tossing a pebble in a pond concentric rings. If you’re up by 3-5 points nationally, and especially in the states, then you’re highly likely to flip the swing states that you lost the last time. If you’re up by anything like 6-8 points, then you have just put into play the states you lost by less than that the last time around. And if, like Biden, you’re up by double digits, then you are entering wish list territory, flipping states like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. And that’s where the Democrats are right now! And it’s about to get even worse, and the GOP knows it. Two of their most durable constituencies have been military personnel and veterans. And properly fact checked and reported, this latest scandal about Trump being aware that Vlad the Imp had put a bounty on American soldiers heads, and actually paid off on them, will rip a 6′ hole in Trump’s hull, beneath the waterline. And it’s already being properly vetted and presented. Forget just the New York Times. There are now multiple news organizations out there that are confirming the NYT’s original reporting. And now there is multiple reporting that former NSA John Bolton told other advisers at the time that he had verbally briefed Trump on the issue all the way back in 2019! Little wonder that golden nugget didn’t survive the White House review for classified information and appear in Bolton’s rag book. The backlash has been swift and brutal. Not surprisingly The Lincoln Project came out with a scathing ad accusing Trump of standing with Putin’s soldiers instead of out own. But the veteran’s activist group, but the vets has just come out with an ad that doesn’t pull punches, and actually calls Trump a traitor; Watch and….   The GOP in general, and the GOP Senate in particular, is in extremis here. For 3 1/2 long years they have carried Trump’s water for him, and always to the detriment of the rest of the country. And when they didn’t overtly support him, they tacitly approved his nonsense by remaining silent, refusing any criticism. And at this watershed moment, each and every one of them in complicit in his treachery. And will pay his price. Ever […]

That Brain is a real pain in the ass. He’s always sniffing around, like a dog.   Escape From New York I chose that quote for a very specific reason, In Escape From New York, the character Brain is a third rate crook with some science knowledge, who keeps trying to leverage that scant knowledge for a position of power. But the hardened cons of The Duke of New York treated him for what he really was, a loser. With The Brain, John Carpenter came up with the perfect capsule characterization of Roger Stone. As a lifelong political junkie, I have occasionally rubbed rhetorical shoulders with Roger Stone. Stone has spent his entire adult life selling himself as a master political dirty trickster. There’s just one small problem with that persona. In order to be proficient as a political dirty trickster, you have to live and operate in the shadows. Your reputation grows and spreads through innuendo and word of mouth. But Roger Stone craved the spotlight, and the public connection to power. As a result, he took credit for everything, some shit he did, and some he didn’t. In other words, he was unreliable and attracted too much attention. This is important because Donald Trump thinks that he is the Duke of New York, and he has always thought of Roger Stone as his Brain. If there’s one thing a bullshit artist can spot a mile away, it’s another bullshit artist. Trump has known Stone for decades, and knew all about him. Stone was a kind of court jester, someone to be winked and smirked at behind his back. And now Roger Stone is in deep shit. Roger Stone was scheduled to report to federal prison to begin serving his sentence no later than June 30th. His defense team filed a motion with Judge Amy Berman Jackson, asking to delay his report date until September. Rather, or should I say, not so surprisingly, the Barr DOJ had no problem with that delay. But Judge Jackson did. She demanded a legally defensible reason for their agreement from the DOJ, which they provided at the last moment. Judge Jackson, whom I believe has had quite enough of one Roger Stone, rejected the DOJ’s position, and ordered Stone to report to prison by June 14th. All of which led Rachel Maddow to speculate that Roger Stone might be the recipient of a pardon from El Pendejo Presidente some time between now and July 14th. I love Rachel Maddow to death, but this time I disagree with her analysis. And for a very good reason. Because Donald Trump thinks that Roger Stone is a clown, and has no more loyalty to him than he would for a falafel, especially when he is under such intense scrutiny for the corrupt operation of his DOJ right now. But at the same time, Trump feels a little sentimental twinge for Stone, so, unfortunately for Stone, Trump already shot his wad. Remember this. Even before Tubby the Ewok went batshit crazy over Michael Flynn, making a national media splash, he stuck his fat, furry fingers directly into the Stone case. Realizing that it would be more difficult for the DOJ to try to drop charges against someone who was actually convicted of multiple charges, instead of having pled guilty, Barr went right in and rewrote the sentencing guidelines that the career prosecutors in charge of […]

He’s a fucking moron   Rex Tillerson Whether you watch current events and figures to report on them to others, as I do, or just watch them yourself just to stay better informed, if you look around closely enough, you’re quite likely to see stupid hanging around in one form or another. But I learned long ago that you have to be careful with stupid, because it can be tricky. Too many times, a politician or public figure will say something blindingly stupid, but only as a distraction while something wicked devious is going on in the background. In covering Trump’s presidential campaign, I was under no illusions. After all, how seriously can you take somebody who comes right out and says that Mexicans are murderers, rapists, and drug barons, insults women, the largest voting block in the country without shame, and asks African Americans, What the hell do you have to lose? This was obviously a stupid campaign, being run by a stupid and self centered man, with no further research necessary. But when Trump was actually elected, I immediately became more cautious. After all, Trump wasn’t the first moron to assume residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In 2000, George W Bush was nobody’s idea of an astro-physicist. But once John Roberts disgraced his robe and gave the presidency to Bush, the GOP establishment quickly moved to bracket Bush with traditional insiders like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and Scooter Libby. The RNC made every effort to insulate the world from the more obvious acts of stupidity of which Bush Lite was capable. And it largely worked. And so, when the Trump administration started doing startlingly stupid things, I was wary. Whenever the fledgling Trump administration would do something blindingly stupid, I would say to myself, Surely nobody is this fucking stupid on the surface, there must be another miscalculation was that I failed to realize that His Lowness had so corrupted the RNC and the party that there was nobody left to insulate the world from his native stupidity! more devious plan at work here, and off I’d go, spending hours looking for some way that something that obviously stupid could make sense on a deeper, more Machiavellian level. But time and again I came away empty handed, until I was finally forced to realize that yes, They. Really. Were.That. Fucking. Stupid! There was no devious subterfuge involved. Which makes things so much easier on all of the rest of us. When we see an act of blazing stupidity on the part of the Trump administration, we no longer have to run around looking for some deeper context, it’s just the fact that the administration is blindingly stupid. But the really funny part, the part that has me in involuntary giggles as I write this, is that when you’re that fucking stupid as a matter of course, it can backfire on you and have unintended consequences. The firing of SDNY US Attorney Geoffrey Berman may well be a prime example. According to recent reporting on MSNBC from Justice correspondent Pete Williams, there may be nothing nefarious at all about the firing. According to Williams, the chair of the SEC, a Trump political appointee, apparently with some clout, advised Trump that he wanted to blow the SEC pop stand, and thought he might like to the the US Attorney for the SDNY instead. Trump took another […]

Stupid is as stupid does   Mama Gump Lord, I am weary. These walking ass gaskets have been at this for 3 1/2 years now, and Tubby the Ewok has been the Attorney General for two of those. How can a bunch of cheap thugs in shiny suits still be so abysmally incompetent at hiding even the most obvious beginnings of their attempted criminal enterprises. I guess His Lowness couldn’t find a handy cabinet level Inspector General to shitcan in a Friday News Dump, so had to settle for a US Attorney instead. But once again arrogance and plain stupidity managed to trump even a modicum of common sense. Here’s the quick down and dirty. At about 9:30 EDT last night, Bill Barr released a press dump stating that the US Attorney of the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, had stepped down from his post. Barr went through the usual nose flute nonsense of thanking Berman for his service, and wishing him well in his future endeavors. The problem seems to be that nobody bothered to tell Geoff Berman that he was stepping down. Within the hour, Berman took the highly unusual step of releasing a statement of his own, making clear that he was highly pissed off to learn of his termination from a news report, sound familiar James Comey?, and that he wasn’t going anywhere. He made it crystal clear that there were several sensitive investigations that the SDNY was in critical parts of, and he had no intention of abandoning them. Gee, ya think? He can’t mean that petty shit like possible money laundering by the Trump organization, other possible malfeasance by the same group, and a criminal investigation into Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Ghouliani? Any kid fresh out of law school, and awaiting his bar results could sail through that stuff. While announcing Berman’s replacement, Barr confounded common sense by announcing that he was appointing the US Attorney for New Jersey to oversee the office for a period of six months. Howcomewhaforwhy? That job should fall to the Assistant US Attorney for the SDNY. Maybe because the Jersey US Attorney is a Trump and Barr flunky, who is already involved in the Trump witch hunt into the origins of the Mueller investigation? Once again, Barr has tried to use a nutcracker in a situation where a sledge hammer would have done fine. All Barr had to do was to come out and say that Berman had lost the confidence of the President, and was being replaced. Instead he tried to use intimidation to keep Berman quiet, and to submit meekly to the powers that be, which obviously Berman had no intention of doing. Apparently neither Barr nor Trump remembers the name Preet Bahrara. But at least I get the logic for that one. If Trump and Barr are able to get Berman to step down voluntarily, albeit it under pressure, then it makes it easier for them to make all kinds of claims of executive privilege to try to prevent Berman from testifying to congress if called. After all, they already fired James Comey by media, and dumped Michael Cohen into the shark tank with steaks tied to him, and they saw how well that turned out. Why risk firing Berman, and have his outrage drive him directly into the witness chair at a House committee hearing. […]

Well, tonight’s the big night, and ya know what? Fuck ’em. Every last man jackin’ one of ’em. And the horse they rode in on. If these empty headed Trumplets are willing to sit and stand in the rain for 3-4 days to watch a pumpkin in an Armani suit waddle out and scream up their nose for two hours, they deserve what they get. Likewise, if they know better, and are selfish and self indulgent enough to walk into that arena just to piss off us libtards, enjoy your respirator vacations y’all. No skin off of my nose. But that’s not to say that I’m devoid of empathy. Far from it, I’m actually full to the gunwales with empathy. But that empathy is reserved for everybody who is unfortunate to know, live with, or work with these EEG flatliners, or anybody unfortunate enough to bump up against them in the coming days. Because at 9:30 or 10 o’clock tonight, when those doors open up, and all of those sated Trimbies come shambling out of that arena, it stops being purely a Tulsa problem. MSNBC has had reporters on the ground since Tuesday, handed the unfortunate task of actually putting these denuded souls on national television. And what they found should make everybody less than thrilled. Those people standing around in line to bow before His Lowness weren’t just local Oklahoma residents, or even those statewide. They also interviewed people who had driven up from Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, and even Tennessee. Notice anything similar there? They’re all red states, and all struggling with the coronavirus through their own ignorance and incompetence. And when those doors open tonight, all of those self indulgent idjits are going to go back where they came from. And that’s when the shit will hit the fan. We all know the timeline by now. 8-14 days of gestation after initial infection, followed by 4-10 additional days before the symptoms get severe enough to require medical intervention. And this is one time when you’re not going to need trained investigators to track the source of the outbreak. Because if there’s one thing we know about these MAGA morons, they’re not only dirt stupid, they’re also arrogant. You can bet your ass that any one of these twits that drove for hours to get to Tulsa has spent at least the entire week prior bragging about it. And three weeks from now, when the two people standing next to Stewie on the line at the oil change shop come down with the virus, it’s not going to be hard to come up with a handy culprit. And while all attendees may have signed a questionable waiver giving Trump and his campaign a free pass for trying to kill them, nobody else did. And I’m willing to bet that there are lawyers out there who can prove a rally connection to an infection of an innocent person will be willing to sue Trump and the campaign for depraved indifference. This was a stupid idea to start with, but what did you expect. But the Trump campaign has gone to every length to make this as dangerous as possible for all involved. And sadly, the negative consequences will not be limited to the imbecile trolls who chose to put themselves into that […]

Well, well, well, what a day, huh? In a stunning 6-3 ruling the Supreme Court has ruled that Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that protects people from workplace discrimination due to sex, includes such perky considerations as gender identity and sexual orientation. This is a crushing defeat for conservative religious groups, since it now brings federal uniformity to the 29 states that had steadfastly refused to write any anti discrimination laws based on sexual preference at the state level. While the ruling itself surprised me, there was one component in the majority that stunned me. Since the ascension of “Brewski” Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, I have written frequently that he has forced conservative Chief Justice John Roberts into the personally uncomfortable tole as the 5th swing vote that retired Justice Anthony Kennedy used to hold. Since Trump so publicly bragged that Kavanaugh’s confirmation gave him a bulletproof conservative majority on his court, Roberts has had to deliberate decisions almost as much on the effect of the ruling on the legacy of his court as on the case merits. But sweet Jesus, Neil Gorsuch? Gorsuch is a solid, consistent conservative judge. Were it not for the Merrick Garland debacle, Gorsuch would have been about as non controversial conservative pick there is. And this case is a poster child for why the Federalist Society had him on their short list of nominees for Trump in the first place. Gorsuch not only joining Roberts in the majority, but actually writing the decision was a resounding slap. Which was something I’ve actually been expecting, If y’all recall correctly, when I’ve written in the past about Roberts new role as the swing vote on the court, I’ve also said that I expected in at least one case that it would be Gorsuch that would give Roberts a break and make the critical swing vote in the liberal direction. That wasn’t just a hunch or wild guess, I had a logical reason behind it. Gorsuch, as much as Roberts has been tarred by the filthy Kavanaugh brush. And even worse, as one of two nominees appointed by Trump, he is directly smeared every time that Trump prattles on about how loyal his court will be in ruling on his behalf. But here’s what I’ve always felt was the overriding factor. Now matter how you cut it, deep in his heart,m Justice Gorsuch knows that his is an illegitimate seat. That seat rightfully belongs to Judge Merrick Garland. While Gorsuch bears no personal responsibility for the situation, it is what it is. I have always had the feeling that Gorsuch has been biding his time for an opportunity to shoot Moscow Mitch McConnell a double barrel Fuck You! and this case, with its devastating consequences to the religious right was the perfect vehicle. It also allows Gorsuch to graphically demonstrate the fact that he’s not just some RWNJ stooge in a black mumu. Just a suggestion. Keep an eye on Justice Gorsuch for a while. President George H. W. Bush privately complained to friends that the worst mistake he ever made as President was to appoint Justice David Suter to the Supreme Court. This is the problem with appointing justices. Like any job applicant, a SCOTUS nominee will say whatever the boss wants to hear to get the job. But once he’s sworn in, the kid gloves come off. They can’t […]