Welcome Back to Pottersville: November 2020

Monday, November 30, 2020

Gotham City Digest

(Just think- If all the dead people he killed at those rallies actually did vote, he might've pulled it out.)

Vanderbilt University's Sarah Fuller became the first female to play a game on a Division 1 college football team. You go, girl! Good on you.

If this bombshell WaPo article doesn't prove Trump's full on bonkers, nothing will.

87 more votes for Biden, at a cost of $34,000 each. I've heard of buying votes but this is ridiculous.

"Dead people were seeing ballots. But even worse, dead people were applying to get a ballot. They were making applications to get ballots. Many. And we’re not talking about 10 people, we’re talking — there are a lot of dead people that so-called voted this election.”

Well, it's not our fault if you didn't court the zombie demographic.

Even Fox hammered Trump over his conspiracy theories on Fox Sunday morning.

More eliminationist rhetoric from little boys playing at being Nazis. "We will eliminate you"? Bring it on, sonny.

"Unfortunately, Biden is living up to every stereotype of the quisling Democrat and taking this advice seriously. Reports suggest that in the interest of national 'unity,' Biden is discouraging the idea of prosecuting Trump." - Amanda Marcotte

With few exceptions, there are nothing BUT quisling Democrats and Biden is the very avatar of that tautology.

Criminal returns to scene of crime.

Oh, this is rich, Cornyn calling Biden on his Cabinet picks working for the corporate sector. Trump's entire Cabinet and so-called administration was rotten with corporate billionaires. I'll bet Cornyn had to look up the word "transparency" in the dictionary.

Giuliani's daughter, a liberal Democrats, offered up some self-improvement tips for her completely insane father.

The two boys who were killed at that mall shooting on Black Friday in Sacramento were brothers.

The mall reopened for business at 10 AM the next day as if nothing happened.

Just in case 2020 hasn't given you enough weirdness...

Where was George Zimmerman when they needed him?

Historian Steve Inskeep thinks that Trump won't be remembered by history. I disagree. He may wind up on a Trivial Pursuit card.

Meme intermission.

He's right- The GOP is the same posse of jack-booted, pro-corporate goons they were 20 and I'd say even 50 years ago.

The Federalist was always a right wing rag. But since when did they become a third rate Breitbart?

“The good news is that we’ve done a good job — and we’re not done, as you know — filling the vacancies that there are on the appellate courts to minimize the opportunity for more liberals on it,” Another Republican scumbag.

“How am I doing by the way, Brian, are we going to win it? ... ‘Cuz if we’re not, I'll tell you what, I'm going to take my endorsement away from him if I don’t." Trump to Kemp.

In other words, "Give me what I want or I'll take my ball and leave."

I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that Giuliani and Sidney Powell actually used to be US Attorneys.

“Georgia law prohibits the governor from interfering in elections.” Except that's exactly what Kemp did when he stole the election from Stacey Abrams two years ago as Secretary of State.

And this is what happens when you get into bed with scumbags like Trump.

Of course he's echoing Hitler. Who else would he echo?

Well, well, look who just lost the sympathy of the National Review.

I hope I live long enough to see an op-ed in Vanity Fair by Stephen and Katie Miller's 20 year-old daughter entitled, "THE DAY I FOUND OUT MY PARENTS WERE JEWISH TRUSTEES FOR A NAZI PRESIDENT."

Sure you are. Because you're famous for your long history of selfless acts and never thinking about yourself. What Twitler's saying here is, "I'm pretending I'm fighting for the 74,000,000 who voted for me and against the 80,000,000+ who voted against me, especially the blacks." So much for being the president for all the people.

I don't suppose Rudy getting barred from testifying in Michigan was really because he paints reproductions of the Last Supper with his own fecal matter, does it?

Why don't we tar and feather criminals, any more?

"...or else we'll take our ball with us and go eat worms!"

"Why are Republicans willing to sell their souls for a big lie"? That's because even if Republican scum had souls (and they don't, obviously), they could be bought and sold for a song and a dance.

They can gawk at him all they want. This right wing scumbag just got reelected to another six year term. Moscow Mitch doesn't give a flying fuck what anyone thinks of him now.

"(T)he Biden administration shuffles onto the scene already a revenant; it can only offer a revivified formula of the same neoliberal strategy which has already exhausted itself in earlier decades... which was more about the exorcism of Trump than about the ascension of Biden — is likely to dissipate rather quickly under the grind of the neoliberal machine. While Trump himself will eventually depart from the White House, the electoral core he has carved out for himself will remain very much in place." -Salon

In other words, Biden's much more in jeopardy of losing his base than Trump, who runs a bona fide death cult. Biden WILL alienate those Democratic voters who were scared or deluded enough to vote for him (I didn't) or against Trump. But he WILL alienate his base and lose voters just as Obama had between 2008 and 2012. Joe Biden is no real Democrat and Harris even less so. And the last thing this country needs is more tired neoliberalism that's cynically dressed up as actual liberalism and viewed as such only in comparison to Trump's failed 4th Reich.

Right wingers invented cancel culture back in the late 17th century during the Salem Witch Trials. So it's hilarious that trump and his dittoheads have been screaming about it in their jeremiads against liberals. And finally...

And speaking of cancel culture, can someone please explain to me why this asshole hasn't lost his tax-exempt status for engaging in political activities?

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Gotham City Digest

(Scouting out a new venue for the presidential library?)

Now I understand how Donald Trump got a reputation for being such a financial genius- By paying $3,000,000 to lose ground to Biden in Wisconsin.

If this doesn't show how utterly cold-blooded executives are, nothing will.

"In a 2017 presentation...McKinsey laid out several options to shore up sales. One was to give Purdue’s distributors a rebate for every OxyContin overdose attributable to pills they sold. The presentation estimated how many customers of companies including CVS and Anthem might overdose. It projected that in 2019, for example, 2,484 CVS customers would either have an overdose or develop an opioid use disorder. A rebate of $14,810 per ‘event’ meant that Purdue would pay CVS $36.8 million that year.”

Headline: "Trump had Marine One fly him directly from his golf course to his vacation at Camp David." Yes, you read that right. He had Marine One fly him from Sterling, VA to Camp David when he could've just as easily had driven in his limo for less money.

This list is a bit outdated (last June 12th) but still worth a looksee if you're looking for new mystery and thriller fiction.

Yeah, he's doing that already. Republicans have been a seditious 5th Column for decades.

Melania may write her memoirs. Here's a sneak peak:

"Our first night in White House, husband could not 'get it up' as you Americans say.

'It's your fault!' Donald say, 'I take no responsibility at all! I can't close the deal because of you!'

'I don't care. Do u?' I ask.

After Becoming, Melania's alternate title is, Weird Scene Inside Gold Digger's Mind.

This is an interesting idea. The thing is, the KKK Act has been on the books since 1871 and if it actually had any teeth to it, we could've used it yet haven't. Right wingers have been trying to disenfranchise black voters since they were enfranchised by the 15th Amendment that was ratified the year before in 1870.

You're too late, asshole. Trump already enlisted all the "odd people" in his army.

I agree with Rep. Cohen. We should deny Trump PDBs after he's kicked out, especially as he's so strapped for cash. I can perfectly imagine Trump spilling national security secrets for money.

Trump's history with white supremacists, in one supercut.

“Fascist wannabes won’t muzzle my free speech or stop me trying to defend our republic. Those supporting this pathetic resolution are complicit in Trump’s attempt to become a dictator.” -Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ).

In other words, right wingers only care about THEIR free speech. Everyone else must toe the Republican line or else.

This may seem like a superficial article but it really isn't, it's quite funny and informative.

There are two groups of incompetents every election year: The pollsters before an election and the journalists telling us where the pollsters went wrong after the election. It's not "the Trump factor" or Democrats harping on health care. Health care, in fact, is the #1 concern for voters across party lines. It was too many Blue Dogs railing against "socialized medicine" and M4A. And health care touches on both the economy and pandemic. They're all inextricably entwined and it's absolutely impossible to separate them. (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

Sorry, 'Rona Ronna: This is the only flipped seat that matters.

Typical Republican scumbag tribalism. They only care about protecting themselves.

Trump's transition was just the harbinger of things to come: Indiscriminate firings (Chris Christie lasted as transition leader for a day and a half), contempt for any information given to them by the outgoing administration, empty transition offices, unattended meetings and backstabbing. Biden's thus far is a model of efficiency. Nice, smooth and boring. Which is the way it's largely supposed to be.

This is perhaps the greatest hypocrisy out of many in Trump's "presidency": Ragging on Obama every time he picked up a golf club yet golfing over 400 times in less than four years. In Trump's world view, the only two times a black man ought to be on a golf course is as a caddie or a groundskeeper. And finally...

Sean Hannity, on the side of sanity? Say it ain't so!

Friday, November 27, 2020

Hold Me Closer, Tiny Desk Man

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

So there he sat: Like a petulant, rambunctious boy very poorly-raised, excommunicated to the kiddie table by the exasperated adults trying to have a peaceful Thanksgiving dinner, a regular-sized presidential seal comically affixed to the desk as if to remind us who still more or less works in the Oval Office but only managing to make the desk seems even smaller. Behind that greatly diminished table, the Resolute Desk's Mini Me, making it look even more risibly miniature, sat a bloated tyrant in an equally tiny chair.

It brought to mind the time over two years ago when Trump was in a first grade classroom, sitting at another tiny table, in another tiny chair and colored the American flag wrong. He hasn't gotten any better informed since then. Yesterday's shit show marked the first time Trump had deigned to talk to the press since the election. Yesterday's shit show also reminded us why.

Specifically, it was Reuters' Jeff Mason who brought out the worst in Trump by simply asking him if he was ready to finally concede the election. The election proved in spades that Donald Trump became what he loathes and fears the most- A loser. The legitimate mainstream media asking him if he'd concede to Joe Biden reminded him of what he truly was and always will be.

Then the guy who spent the better part of a year calling Obama a Muslim terrorist and a native Kenyan snapped, “Don’t talk to me that way. You’re just a lightweight... I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way.” As CNN's Jake Tapper drily noted, "Jeff will still be working at the White House after January 20, 2021."

So, take heart, mainstream media, the beatings, the domestic violence, the verbal abuse, the abuser living between silence and rage will soon come to an end. In less than two months, the restraining order that 80,000,000+ voters demanded and got will take effect. Then you can rebuild your lives and careers by embarking on a relationship with the nice, kindly old man who'd been dealing with the political press since he was in his late 20s.

Like a typical right winger, Trump is hostile toward the media. But he differs from most other right wingers in that that loathing is occasionally offset with a need, a hunger for publicity that only the mainstream media can offer. Oh, he may pretend he loves Newsmax and OANN now because they're a reliable echo chamber for his conspiracy theories and lies. But those channels are the modern day equivalent of UHF TV, cable access Fox wannabes. It's not the same and he knows it.

This Isn't the Story You Should Be Writing

So, virtually every time Trump has dealt with the press since 2015, he's had on his jiggling, powdered puss this look of baffled fury that reporters would ask him tough questions on occasion, his Mussolini jaw provocatively jutting forward, his vagina-shaped mouth molded into a sneer, ready to lash out at anything that he perceived as a liberal Gotcha moment.

Trump honestly thought the political press would be unconditionally fawning of him, dutifully taking stenography. But those were the society, gossip and celebrity glitz journalists from leading newspapers and the "slicks" he was expecting and, Chanel Rion of OANN aside, that is not what he got. It wasn't until Vladimir Putin installed him in the White House that Trump was ever seriously (if only occasionally) challenged by the press. And he can't understand why they're doing so.

This is a guy who thought of every high-stakes negotiation as a "deal" whether it be a Middle East peace plan with Palestine and Israel, a trade agreement with China or haggling with Congress. He honestly thought the presidency would be all glitter and artifice, as if he was walking around like in the good old days between (and sometimes during) marriages with a young lovely on each arm, opening a soon-to-be-failed Vegas or Atlantic City casino.

He can't understand how he lost the election, how over 80,000,000 voters lost the plot. This isn't how the story is supposed to end. Someone or something, some right wing deus et machina, was supposed to bail him out of his latest incompetence whether it be Russian banks or mobsters, Deutsche Bank's money spigots, Daddy's fortune or the small donations from millions of marks who fell and continue to fall hook, line and sinker for his every lie.

Someone got the ending wrong. And it wasn't him. It was democracy.

(Oh, let's call it what it really is in his fun house mirror of a mind: Demockracy in which we are a nation not of laws but one incipiently senile old man who plainly looked at the White House as just another one of his Russian-funded properties and the presidency a birthright that should be granted to him through sheer, selfish force of will even after 80,000,000 of us or about seven New York Cities, wrested it out of his tiny hands.)

He was supposed to live a charmed life and allowed to leave the White House only when he was damned good and ready. And to be replaced by the guy he got impeached over trying to kneecap with Ukraine's help is replacing him? The guy he called "Sleepy Joe" and accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs (We all know by now Adderall isn't one of them.)?

He is simply mentally incapable of processing that and admitting that is precisely what happened. But what did we reasonably expect from a man who thought you could break up hurricanes by nuking them, that we could safely cure coronavirus by injecting disinfectants into our bodies and that windmills cause brain cancer?

Gotham City Digest

(Because they shipped the Resolute desk to Delaware.)

Remember a liberal blogger from about 10-15 years ago named emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler)? This is what she caught over a year and a half ago.

Once a crook, always a crook.

Once a crook, always a crook, redux. Now you know why Perdue wanted to be on the banking committee.

That's what you get when you give vast sums of money to other right wingers. I don't feel one bit sorry for this asshole.

Turkey thinks a week is four days long.

Dear god, deliver us from these gene pool polluters.

At last- The REAL reason Trump fired Sidney Powell. She was trying to muscle in on his grift.

“O’Brien’s Vietnamese hosts regarded their guest and his entourage as human petri dishes and restricted the delegation to a single floor of the luxurious Metropole hotel in Hanoi. Room service meals were left outside the U.S. guests’ doors, and Vietnamese officials in head-to-toe protective gear administered virus tests.”

Vietnam has recorded just 1400 cases of coronavirus all year and they'd like to keep it that way.

I guess the Kraken is functionally illiterate.

Your Brads o' the day.

Read the ticker under the chyron.

Someone purchased the domain for Trump's library. The results are hilarious.

And some comedians bought this domain, to show the world what a loser Trump is.

Meme intermission.

Yes, Georgia just thought of a new poll tax- If you don't have a car registered in the state, you can't register to vote. Naturally, this targets with "surgical precision" inner city minorities and students, i.e. Democrats, i.e. people least likely to own cars.

Your co-Brad o' the day.

This crackpot's literally getting crazier by the day.

Trump is trying to Baghdad Bob his way through this loss but it's not working.

How the hell did we ever get out of the 20th century and into the 21st when we never completely left the 19th century?

Looks as if Lt. Gov. Guns -n- God is at it, again.

"I am not a psychopath!" yells Newsmax psychopath who wasn't called a psychopath but should be.

And, like a miracle, on January 20th he'll be gone.

Trump forced to sit at the kiddie table on Thanksgiving.

That's what you get when you give vast sums of money to other right wingers. I don't feel one bit sorry for this asshole. Whether it's We Build the Wall, Trump's "legal defense fund" or this. All. Republicans. Are. Crooks.

“This mask phobia Idahoans are suffering must be the result of some mass hysteria experienced during childhood, perhaps triggered by a frightening Halloween prank. Similar to the fear of clowns some people have.”

"Please stop filming me and exposing me as a Nazi asshole."

"Some articles noted that Keegan was a survivor of the Almeda fire, and a GoFundMe page raising money for their losses notes that Keegan and his young son were living at the hotel while they tried to recover from the fire that destroyed thousands of structures in the Ashland area."

Keegan was the racist asshole who murdered the black kid for loud music but HE'S the victim in all this, don't you know.

Oh, those liberal activist judges!

Well, since the fake hearing in Pennsylvania was such a rousing success, why not do it again in Arizona?

Maybe this asshole in Utah should stay in his lane and stop trying to throw preemptive doubt as to the validity of the Georgia Senate runoff races. Even his own local paper isn't buying it. And finally...

You can always count on Americans to risk their lives so they can get an extra 15% off on a Magic Bullet.