Congress

(coup — a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.) After Rachel talked me down a bit…noting that drumpf’s Declaration of Emergency is not only subject to review by the courts but by Congress also (The House can vote a bill contesting it and the bill would go to the Senate where Yurtle cannot table it but must bring it to a vote)… I decided to put together this diary illustrating how the crazy right is on message today raising a hue and cry calling sober deliberations on evoking the 25th Amendment to a coup —  which they ain’t . No gentlecretins, this was not a coup. This was a coup:

So, this was an interesting segment on the RMS last night. In it Rachel shows that a handful of GOP Senators are on record (Rubio, Cornyn, Ron Johnson, Susan Collins) are on record opposing Trump’s impulse (plan is too kind a word) to declare a National Emergency in order to build his wall on the southern border: Earlier this month in The Washington Post Greg Sargent pointed out the same thing…. “Senate Republicans appear to be in a panic about President Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency to realize his unquenchable fantasy of a big, beautiful wall on the southern border. Republicans are reportedly worried that such a move could divide them, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has delivered that warning to Trump in private conversations. Republicans have good reason to be deeply nervous. Here’s why: According to one of the country’s leading experts on national emergencies, it appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can trigger a process that could require the GOP-controlled Senate to hold a vote on such a declaration by Trump — which would put Senate Republicans in a horrible political position. Trump reiterated his threat to declare a national emergency in an interview with CBS News that aired over the weekend. “I don’t take anything off the table,” Trump said, adding in a typically mangled construction that he still retains the “alternative” of “national emergency.” But Pelosi has recourse against such a declaration — and if she exercises it, Senate Republicans may have to vote on where they stand on it.” Of course it is possible, probably likely, that The Senate, fearing the GOP base, will not pass such a measure. But Pelosi needs to force the vote. Because, once drumpf gets a taste for his newly acquired national emergency superpowers there is no telling what bat guano crazy measures he will grab by the…well, you know… to shut down democracy and oversight of his many crimes. That is a sure as the sun rising tomorrow. When it happens we need to have the dictatorship approving, drumpf enabling GOP votes on the record. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… To receive articles of mine not published elsewhere become a patron on Patreon. Please follow me on Twitter @durrati

Anybody who has ever thrown a birthday party for a kid knows that there are two basic forms of entertainment. There are clowns, and then there are magicians. Donald Trump is a true cross over, a magician clown. He lumbers around the yard with his big flopping feet, knocking over the folding table with the cake on it, while he makes a cute little bunny out of a long pink balloon, which somehow or other ends up with a hard on on it. Donald Trump has been pretty transparent since day one in regards to his response to problems with his Presidency or his administration. That’s Trump the magician. Throw a handful of sparkling pixie dust into the air to attract attention, while your other hand puts the rabbit into the hat. But because Trump is a clown, he throws the damn pixie dust directly over the hat. Every time. Never has Trump needed a major distraction more than right now. His approval numbers are in the toilet, and there’s a hand on the pull chain. People are finally seeing the bait-and-switch in his tax cut dodge with lower IRS refunds, and he’s taking friendly fire from the right wing media over the wall. Oh yeah, and Robert Mueller is making his Cornholeone family look more like the “Kid Sally” Palumbo family in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. There is one whopping distraction required here. For a while there, sane minds worried that he would actively try to engineer a war with North Korea if he were backed far enough into a corner, the ultimate distraction. But no, as long as in Dung Pil keeps sending His Lowness 3’x4’ Valentines cards hand delivered by an envoy, they’re golden. Then people worried that he would manufacture an incident to enable him to go big into Syria. But Vlad the Imp shook a finger and made tsk-tsk-tsk noises, so that is now one of the few options in Trumpmenistan that is actually “off of the table.” Which leaves us with Iran. Trump has been laying the groundwork for a pissing contest with Iran for quite a while now. All the way back when he was a candidate, he slammed the Iran nuclear deal, but that was back when Trump honestly thought that whatever he said wouldn’t matter in the long run. It was just his way of raining on Baravk Obama’s parade for being able to craft a goddamn deal that actually worked. Once he got elected, common sense and realpolitik never entered into the equation, he had a reputation of “excellence in ignorance” to live up to. He wiped his ass with the Iran nuclear deal and threw it into the toilet, and then he unilaterally restored sanctions on Iran, doing everything in his power to poke the tiger with a stick, just to prove that his obstinance was as overpowering as his stupidity. For quite a while, none of this mattered as much, for one simple reason. That’s because “Mad Dog” Jim Mattis had the keys to Donald Trump’s cage. Trump could howl at the moon all he wanted, but it was ultimately Mattis who would decide whether or not to let slip the dogs of war. But now Mattis is gone, and The $1 Store Caligula has a chickenhawk piece of shit like John […]

Many, many years ago, all the way back on November 10th, 2016 ore so, Mitch McConnell was one chipper turtle, he was living high on the hog. That’s because the hog had just gotten elected President, but hadn’t actually taken the oath of office yet, so he wasn’t actively screwing things up. McConnell looked at the Senate map for 2018, liked his jowly chops, and predicted that the GOP would pick up 6-8 seats in the Senate, cementing their majority, and possibly giving them a filibuster proof majority. And then the unthinkable happened. Trump was sworn in and started “governing.” The massive Women’s March, multiple failed attempts to ban Muslims cuz, like, Muslims, multiple failed attempts to repeal Obamacare, rationalizing a racist murder in Charlottesville, and a thriving investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. Flash forward 18 months, and McConnell is sending up warning flares that the GOP could actually lose the Senate in 2018. In the end, McConnell ended graphically demonstrating the old adage, “When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME.” McConnell fell far short of his boast, picking up only two seats, partially because of the embarrassment of losing two incumbent seats, and failing to dislodge two vulnerable Democratic incumbents in states that Trump went all in on, West Virginia and Montana, This in what should have been a tsunami map for the GOP in any normal year, with any normal President. And now, here we are, looking at 2020. The cycle has come full circle, and it is the Democrats who have a Senate map that should be very favorable to their chances to at least chip into McConnell’s majority, if not flip it completely. But in looking back, i find that there were two indicators that didn’t seem to get much attention at the time, that could provide a useful tool to see how each side thinks the wind may be blowing going into the 2020 election. The first weather cock is retirements. In 2016 retirements were the first WHOP-WHOP-WHOP that signaled that the wheels were about to come flying off of the GOP bus, especially in the House. And in the Senate, Flake’s departure from the scene helped to pave the way for Kyrsten Sinema to flip that seat, and a rousing Democratic challenge for Corker’s newly vacant seat in Tennessee meant that the GOP had to send cash propping up a less than inspiring Marsha Blackburn that could have been spent better in other attempts to flip seats, instead of retaining what should have been a “safe” GOP seat. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee has already announced that he is calling it quits, and this is a problem for the GOP. The problem is that in losing Alexander, the GOP loses the incumbent edge in that seat, Alexander’s name recognition, state wide familiarity, and donor and fund raising base. A replacement candidate is going to require coddling and support that Alexander would not need, and as Blackburn proved, red state seats are not necessarily safe with sub par candidates. If there are more “moderate” Senate retirements, this could stretch the GOP again, especially if Trump becomes even more unpopular. The second lesson from 2016 to keep an eye on is recruitment. And this will play heavily on both sides. One of the reasons for McConnell’s optimism […]

The Hollywood Reporter “Fox News has rejected a national advertising buy for a 30-second spot that warns viewers about the potential dangers of American fascism after an ad sales representative said network leadership deemed it inappropriate, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The spot was to double as a promotion of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary short A Night at the Garden, which recounts a 1939 Nazi rally in New York City, and a warning — “It Can Happen Here” — to Sean Hannity’s largely conservative viewers about the potential dangers of President Donald Trump’s brand of populism. An ad was bought to air locally during Monday night’s edition of Hannity’s primetime show through a regional advertising buy on Charter Communications’ Spectrum service in Los Angeles, but was precluded by breaking news — coverage of President Trump’s rally in Texas. The film’s distributor, Field of Vision, then decided to purchase a national spot on Hannity’s show, but was rebuffed by the network, which controls national advertising. A Fox News national ad sales representative told the distributor’s media-buying agency on Wednesday that CEO Suzanne Scott (“our CEO”) said the ad was “not appropriate for our air,” according to email correspondence viewed by THR.” Here’s the spot: Yeah, Fox News can’t promote an Oscar nominated documentary that might cut into the ad time for  Hannity’s regular rotation of carnival barker yelps about the magic of boner pills, wrinkle creams and sleep inducing pillows. Because – if Fox viewers ever get their minds right they might be able to look at themselves in the mirror and sleep at night, cutting into Fox’s advertising revenue. Can’t have that. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… To receive articles of mine not published elsewhere become a patron on Patreon. Please follow me on Twitter @durrati

That’s right, I’m throwing a retirement party, and it’s gonna be one helluva bash, I can tell you that. There’s gonna be unlimited beer and munchies (as long as you bring that shit yourselves), and the awesome “DJ Drums is spinning it for free, since he’s flush with kaboodle coming off of that Trump inauguration gig. Y’all can quit fist bumping and chest thumping now, I’m not the one who’s retiring. As long as I can continue to read the characters on the keyboard, you’re stuck with this tripe on pretty much a daily basis. Besides, I already retired once, four years ago, and I understand that some of my former coworkers are still on probation from that last bash.The guest of honor at this soiree is a long time trope, and all purpose pain in my ass, and once he leaves, I’m giving standing “shoot on sight”orders to security if he ever comes back to one of my diaries. The golden moldy that I’m finally shoving out the gate to pasture, never to rear his ugly head again is the age old slogan, “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” I have hated that insipid line ever since the first time somebody put it in a comment, and rubbed my nose in it like a puppy with a fresh pile on the living room carpet. Enough with that shit already! It’s long past time to drop a rose on the lid, and fill in the hole. It’s sorry, it’s tired, it’s old, and unlike a Twinkie, it actually has a shelf life, and that shelf life expired quite a while ago. Like me, it just doesn’t work anymore, for the simple reason that there is no longer a viable Republican party! That slogan harks back to a day long ago, when there was a “traditional” Republican party, and that party was based on certain basic principles. Were they sick, evil, twisted, fucked up principles? Yep, but they were principles, so they went with what they had. The whole meaning of the phrase was that while their voters may have had problems, sometimes serious problems, with an individual candidate, when it came down to crunch time, they all sucked it up and rallied around the party. But that isn’t the case anymore, and hasn’t been for almost a decade. The cheap, easy way out is to blame Trump, and he deserves his fair share of the blame. By the time that Trump stumbled through all of that smoke on the stage of the Republican National Convention, looking like a trailer of the movie version of the book “The Fat Vampire,” he had already split the party in two. back during the 2016 primaries, Trump channeled his inner David Pecker, and threatened the political equivalent of publishing dick pics of Reince Priebus by threatening to take his supporters and go hold his own election if Priebus didn’t turn the RNC over to him. We all saw how that turned out, the ENC ended up paying freakin’ Jared Kushner’s legal bills for a while. When Trump split the party, there was no longer one coherent message for everybody to rally around, and enough traditional Republicans rebelled that Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million. Damn! That’s one raggedy ass line they got there. But the real nexus of the split occurred 6 years earlier. […]

Apparently it’s all over but the shouting. Fittingly enough, the final capitulation came not from The Pampers President himself, but instead from Ditch Mitch “No show votes” McConnell, who stated that the Senate would move quickly to vote on the compromise border security bill, and to say “Gee whiz, I shore hope the Purzident signs the gosh darn thing!” or something like that. I for one am not going to take a dance a victory Irish jig on Trump’s humiliating wall grave. Hell, I’m not that mature. Instead, I’m planning on chugging a 12 pack of Bud Light to generate the maximum piss volume. But as I watched all of these GOP losers in shiny suits walking around with Basset Hound looks on their faces, a realization hit me. This whole political Waterloo over his stupid vanity border wall is worse than they realize. The Three Horsemen of the Shitpocalypse, Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter seem clueless, although two of them are already cutting their losses. The Oxycontin Kid is already saying that the fact that the alleged author of The Art Of The Squeal managed to negotiate himself from $25 billion from the Democrats in return for permanence in DACA to a measly $1.375 billion for new fencing is an “embarrassment” for the President, but sticks the GOP congress with the tab, for not fighting harder. And Flat Top is sputtering and blustering about how any Republican that dares to vote for this “garbage compromise bill” is going to have to explain his capitulation to their constituents. Only Coultergeist continues to do her best banshee impersonation, moaning hollowly about how the President “talks a good game, but doesn’t have the guts to fight for the wall.” Oh yeah, and she’ll get his little dog, too! All of these slobs, from McConnell to Hannity, from Meadows to Coulter, are so busy crying in their beer about their humiliating defeat about the damn wall, that they’re failing to see that there is a bigger picture involved here, and that the wall is just one piece of a larger mosaic. It just happens to be the piece that holds the rest of the mural together. You should all know my favorite Catholic ditty by now, “In order to keep your faith intact, ensure it stays unsullied by fact.” Trump the con man is himself nothing more or less than an elaborate con. He is an illusion, a cheap trick, except that this time, when the magician pulls his hand out of the hat, there isn’t going to be a rabbit in it. Trump’s entire “mystique” was built on one central conceit, that he was a winner! The brash, loud mouth, finger pointing mogul whose favorite pastime was snarling “You’re FIRED!” to cringing underlings, although the real Donald Trump couldn’t fire up a Weber grill. The owner of a multi billion dollar real estate empire, who proudly proclaimed himself the “king of debt,” knowing full well that his audience and supporters were too dim to realize that what that really meant was that it was all somebody elses money! Trump wasn’t alone in perpetuating this scam on the dim and inattentive. Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, Ingraham, they all played Trump up like he was the greatest boon to man since the discovery of the polio vaccine. They touted his business acumen, […]

I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore   Helen Reddy   I am woman Just a quick reminder, I have absolutely no idea of who is going to win the Democratic primaries for President, and neither do you. I don’t even have a “favorite” yet, and won’t for some little while to come, I want to see and hear them perform in some of the upcoming debates before I start to even think about locking in on any one potential front runner. I will say this though, I think that anybody who automatically relegates Amy Klobuchar to the second tier due to her national name recognition is making a mistake. But there is already a dynamic starting to take shape, even in this early stage of the primaries that is fascinating, and it has nothing to do with how the Democratic hopefuls are relating to each other. Exactly the opposite in fact. Donald J Trump, Pestquire seems to have a bit of a woman problem. For a bull stud that is reputedly more desirable than Valentino himself, Trump seems to have run into an inordinately high number of outlier women who just didn’t find him all that desirable when he put his filthy paws all over them. And they didn’t mind saying so in public either. Man, talk about a hit to the good old Casanova meter! As if having all of those loud mouthed crybabies on his ass wasn’t enough, Trump now finds himself faced with a strong, independent woman who is as infallible to his male dominance as water is to oil. Nancy Pelosi is tossing him around over her head like pizza dough, while he spins helplessly, and flattens out a bit more with every rotation. His complete inability to deal with her is apparent from the fact that the worst Twitter epithet he can think of for this hated rival is “Nancy.” What’s the matter tough guy, cat got your tongue? Personally, I am thrilled to see at this early stage, that there are more women than men running for President on the Democratic side. It is a testament to the diversity of the Democratic party, especially considering that the women are eminently qualified for consideration. On the Republican side, not only do you not have any women running for President, you don’t even have any men running for the job, just the whiny and petulant man child. And this infusion of intelligent, qualified, assertive women on the Democratic side is going to give Trump a whole lot of agita right out of the gate, for the simple reason that he just can’t keep his big, fat, New York nose out of anything! It was stated on MSNBC today that women running for President have an inherent problem, polling shows that men will vote for someone that they don’t personally like if they agree with their positions, but if they don’t “like” a female candidate, their positions are unimportant, the man won’t vote for them. We’re already seeing this with Amy Klobuchar, with this nonsensical controversy over how tough of a boss she is on her staff. Nobody makes such a claim against a male candidate, unless sexual harassment is involved. Men are “driven,” women are just “nags.” And now we’re hearing that Klobuchar is too “nice” to run, […]

just remember one thing, the higher the road, the steeper the drop off at the edge of the shoulder. Everybody agrees, believing in God is a perfectly acceptable personal choice, but when do evangelicals become an insufferable pain in the ass? When they pull that “holier than thou” crap. Mike Pence is a perfect example, walking around so arrogant, so damn smug, that you’d swear that he has a sliver of the true cross encased in plastic hanging from a chain around his neck. I learned a hard lesson a few years ago, and being a rock headed Irishman, of course I had to learn it the hard way. It was the spring of 2016, and party primaries were kicking into gear all over the place. While you all know that I mainly worked the GOP primary side of the street, specifically the Presidential primary, I took keyboard in hand and did a candidate diary for the opponent of Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I don’t live in Florida, I live in Nevada. And I wasn’t a Bernie supporter either, but I was highly pissed that Wasserman Schultz had tried to put her finger on the scales for Hillary. I received several comments in the diary from Florida residents, politely, but firmly advising me to let actual constituents decide the issue, and keep my damn nose out of it. I haven’t done a primary candidate diary since. This is the problem that the national Democrats, especially the Presidential candidates are facing, and the tightrope that they have to walk in dealing with the Ralph Northam controversy in Virginia. The Democrats decided quite a while ago on a “zero tolerance” policy in dealing with Trump, a decision in which I totally agree. If you’re gonna talk-the-talk in regards to Trump’s misbehavior, you have to walk-the-walk with members of your own party, or risk being hypocrites. But remember, just because I believe in God doesn’t give me the right to dunk your head in a bucket of water to baptize and save your soul. National Security expert and MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance summed the situation up rather bluntly on Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday night, when he said, “I wish all of those people out there that are expressing ;black outrage; all of the time would try checking with actual black people once in a while.” His point was that, while the rest of America, including large swaths of white America, was baying for Northam’s political blood, a poll showed that a clear majority of African Americans in Virginia wanted Northam to remain as Governor.And when you come right down to it, shouldn’t the black constituents of Virginia be the ones who ultimately get to decide just how offended they are with Northam’s behavior, and what to do about him? The Democrats have already made their decision about “zero tolerance,” and I agree with it. Now the next step has to be deciding how to implement it. For a national office, the parameters are different. The Democrats were able to call the Republicans late-to-the-party on Steve King because they took swift action on members like John Conyers, Anthony Weiner, and Al Franken. And in the House and Senate, they can take steps like removal from committee assignments to make their […]

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