"I Love the Poorly-Educated!" We're Seeing Why

 

     I blame the lack of emphasis on education.

     I know it's not exactly insightful or original to say that a poor public educational system gives us people like Donald Trump and other right wing assclowns in our government. But with minimal effort, one can draw a direct line between public education and the quality of our elected officials.

     My family and I moved to East Meadow on Long Island exactly 50 years ago today. It was the day before my 16th birthday and, while I wasn't aware of it at the time, by 1975, the school or the district stopped teaching things like Civics, Logic, History, Critical Thinking Skills and several other disciplines that were standard in high schools back when my parents were young. What little we got in the way of History and Civics we had to learn through the various curricula of Social Studies teachers because, by then, everything having to do with Civics, American history, etc was folded into what used to be known as Social Studies.

     I was lucky in that I had a very good Social Studies teacher in senior year named Edwin Lemkin, a former Navy chief who really knew his stuff (I wrote a post about him many years ago on this blog). While he didn't run a Civics class but a catch-all Social Studies class, in those nine short months he was our 8th period Social Studies teacher, he gave us a pretty good basic grounding of how government worked. Through him, we learned that Congress has the power of the purse strings, checks and balances, etc.

     But not all students were as lucky as we in Mr. Lemkin's class. There was a gradual erosion of the quality of the education that kids were getting both in my time and after.

     Fast forward about 25 years later. I may have told this story before but, still, I'll tell it again. My then girlfriend and I were at a parent teacher's conference in the local high school. We had two boys in that school so we had a lot of teachers to talk to that night. During the down time in the hallways, I noticed several students were fanning out and talking to the parents waiting to talk to teachers. It quickly became obvious that the students were doing a project for their Social Studies class.

     Their teacher sent them out to ask parents what were the five rights given to American citizens in the First Amendment. Granted, I didn't hear all the answers but of the ones I had, not one parent could answer that question  At most they could identify two or three rights. The full answer, of course, was freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to petition and the freedom of religion.

     And that parent teacher conference was a real wake up call for me and showed me how pitifully ignorant my generation was about basic Constitutional law. It was one of the experiences that led me to become a political blogger a few years later.

     Compare the typical curriculum in the public school system to what it was like in the 19th century. Children, say, in the PS school system in 1800s New York City were grounded in ancient Greek, Latin, sophisticated mathematics, history, rhetoric and critical thinking skills. Today's students, and especially their hapless parents, would have no chance of passing such a curriculum.

     And Republicans have been gunning for the Department of Education since Carter created it in the 70s. Because Republicans love the idea of ignorant, low information voters who will believe anything they're told by a guy in a suit and a perfect set of teeth. It doesn't matter to these right wing nut jobs that the Department of Education funds only 8% of the public school system and that the other 92% is funded at the municipal and state level. This is why they want to replace public schools with charter schools that have a political or religious axe to grind. Indoctrination, in other words.

     Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud when he said in 2016, "I love the poorly-educated!" Trump may be incipiently demented but he still knows his victim profile like any good con artist. He knows the idiots who vote for him are rubes and marks and has no qualms about turning on them the minute he gets their votes.

     When you keep the people ignorant and poorly-educated, you get low information voters. And when you have a nation of poorly-educated voters, you get crooks, liars and thieves in government.

     God knows throughout American history, we'd elected mendacious scumbags into our government but they were still men who knew how to do the job. Senators and congressmen sounded like senators and congressmen. Now, we have abject morons like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and, until recently, Matt Gaetz and George Santos, and Tommy Tuberville and Rand Paul in the US Senate.

     Ans you have lack of education to thank for these idiots getting elected to the government and other idiots getting appointed to high positions. Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison must be spinning in their graves fast enough to power the western hemisphere.

A Sad Day For America, Indeed

 

     Trump was very sad and pathetic during allocution right before his "sentencing". Allocution is when a criminal defendant gets to address the judge just prior to sentencing. It's the defendant's final chance to throw themselves on the mercy of the court and often, a judge will hand down a lesser sentence than they'd originally intended if the defendant shows any convincing remorse or contrition.

     Naturally, Donald Trump showed none of that because Donald Trump is genetically incapable of accepting blame for anything even when convicted by a jury of his peers.

     Last night, in a rare lack of support for Trump, the right wing-leaning Supreme Court refused to let Trump wait for his sentencing until after the inauguration in 10 days. In the 5-4 ruling, the SCOTUS said that Trump must face the music just like anyone else. Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett sided with Kagan, Jackson and Sotomayor.

     Everyone knew Trump wouldn't get any jail time. Judge Juan Merchan even said so. When you're allowed to show up virtually via Zoom, it's pretty much guaranteed you're not going to be taken into custody.

     People expected there would be verbal pyrotechnics on Trump's part during the allocution phase. This joke of a sentencing essentially means the very narrow gag order on Trump has been lifted since the trial's over. During the trial last year, Trump basically threatened everyone but the courthouse's janitor, including Merchan, his daughter, his clerk, the District Attorney, everyone. Then he whined when he got a very narrow gag order slapped on him.

     So what happened this morning?

     Well, rather than verbal pyrotechnics, Trump was reduced to whining to Merchan about the unfairness of it all. In fact this is what he said:

     "This has been a very terrible experience. It was done to damage my reputation so I would lose the election. I am totally innocent. I did nothing wrong."

     Merchan then gave him a "sentence" of “unconditional discharge,” which just means that he's now officially a convicted felon in the eyes of New York State and anyone who cares to pick up a newspaper or click on a link.

     Of course, Trump, who loathes the very concept of accountability, will appeal the ruling but it doesn't matter. He's always going to be known as the first person to take the oath of the presidency as a convicted felon.

     But the “unconditional discharge” is basically a black stain on his reputation, such as it is, nothing more. It's not a suspended sentence, it's not supervised release or parole, not even a slap on a wrist. He wasn't told to stand in a corner and to think about what he did. He wasn't made to go to the neighbor's house and apologize for putting a baseball through their bay window.

     Nothing.

     Of course, his mouthpiece, Todd Blanche, who never met an ambulance he couldn't catch, whined to the judge, "It’s a very sad day. It’s a sad day for President Trump and his family and his friends, but it’s also, in counsel’s view, a sad day for this country.”

     Yes, Todd. It's a very sad day for America when a one man crime wave can finally get convicted eight years after the fact on 34 counts by a jury of his peers and still get "elected" then sworn in as president without even seeing the inside of a courtroom during the so-called sentencing phase, so he can then pardon potentially many hundreds of other convicted criminals.

     It's a very sad day, indeed.

The (Mentally) Sick Man of North America

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

The madman was very angry on Tuesday.

    There he stood behind an old Trump-Vance podium (I guess the Office of the President-elect placards haven't arrived from DC) rambling about all sorts of the usual weird shit flowing out of his circus clown car of a brain, only more of it. There are only two genders. Windmills make whales crazy. Yawn.

    Trump's insane press conference at his tacky Mar a Lago country club (the place where fake gold moulding goes to die) showcased his toxic, inexhaustible wellspring of anger and wingnuttery. The anger is inexplicable. Ever since Trump "won" two months ago (with lots of help from Elon Musk, who'd originally wanted to hitch his Space X rocket to Ron DeSantis), he and his supporters have been ejaculating rage and bile all over the American landscape. It's a curious, unjustified admixture of anger, arrogance and grievance.

   They've gotten everything they ever wanted and more. World leaders, political figures and the reliably worthless mainstream media are all giving Trump and his billionaire minions obeyance in advance. Nations abroad are adjusting their economic and military postures to adjust to Trump's incoming Fourth Reich.

    Let's take his strange obsession with the Panama Canal:

    “I’m not going to commit to that. It might be that you’ll have to do something," Trump said. “The Panama Canal is vital to our country.”

      Perhaps one reason for Trump's mad-on regarding the Panama Canal has to do with the fact that it was just one tentacle in his decades-long global criminal enterprise. Back in November 2017, Newsweek wrote an article about Trump's Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower. It was infamous for drug and human trafficking not to mention money laundering of Russian mob money. One of the paragraphs in the article said,

     "One of the men involved in the scheme was David Eduardo Helmut Murcia Guzmán, who a U.S. court subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison for laundering millions of dollars. Another was Alexandre Henrique Ventura Nogueira, who sold units at the Trump Ocean Club and later admitted that some of the people he did business with were members of the Russian mafia."

 

    Like Nancy Pelosi said to Trump in the Cabinet Room during his first "presidency", "With you, all roads lead to Putin."

     The Panamanian gravy train stopped (and Newsweek inexplicably didn't mention this) when new owners came in and kicked out Trump, his criminal buddies (throwing some of them in jail) and wasted no time in taking his name off the hotel. Keep in mind that for decades Panama had enjoyed a dubious reputation for being a stereotypical banana republic but Trump's criminal syndicate was so over the top it disgusted even Panama.

 Trump's Nuuk-ular Option

 

Another baffling obsession of Trump's is acquiring Greenland. While Trump was holding court in his gaudy mansion in Palm Beach, he'd dispatched his namesake to Nuuk, Greenland's capital. Donnie Jr was accompanied by Charlie Kirk, the ultimate Trump hangeron. Donnie was gone less than 24 hours later, which makes one wonder why he took Trump Force One to the world's largest island, in the first place.

    Years ago, when Trump first floated the idea of acquiring Greenland and making it a state or US territory, he did it so to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland. Greenland and Denmark, of course, had no more interest in Puerto Rico than Trump was in helping them with federal aid after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria.

     I stand on pretty firm ground when I say that in New York City in the 70s, there was a virulent prejudice against Puerto Rico and its residents. It didn't matter to people like Trump that Puerto Rico was then as well as now a US territory and that all its residents were US citizens. Trump was very much a product of post-war Queens and the other four boroughs and his festering hatred for all things Puerto Rican was very much a part of his upbringing.

     When Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, it killed well over 3000 people, 2975 of whom were in Puerto Rico. The 911-class death toll had absolutely no effect on Trump the sociopath and he reluctantly gave Puerto Rico the federal aid they desperately needed. Trump's rationale (and one is or should be amazed that this came from a guy who would be indicted and convicted on 34 counts of fraud and ran a criminal operation in Panama that had netted him $75,000,000) was that Puerto Rico was corrupt and that they'd waste the federal aid.

    To those who know anything about Trump's unbroken history of racism, it was obvious that he wanted to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland so he could make America white again. Maybe he learned on Wikipedia that Greenland was owned by Denmark, a Scandinavian nation, and that he could trade brown people for proper white Nordic types.

   But the plain fact is, trading Greenland for Puerto Rico would not advance the Kingdom of Denmark's interests one bit. Plus, it's obviously been lost on Trump that nearly 90% of Greenland's population is Inuit and just 7.5 % of the population is actually Danish. Even if his insane plan to acquire Greenland sees fruition, he'd essentially be trading an island of 3.2 people of color for one of 55,000 people of color.

     When Trump had first made his intentions for Greenland known, world leaders could afford to laugh at him. But for some reason, they're not doing so now. This is what CNN had written recently: "To that end, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen signaled on Wednesday that the country wants to discuss the issue more with the incoming Trump administration. 'We are open to a dialogue with the Americans on how we can possibly cooperate even more closely than we do to ensure that the American ambitions are fulfilled,' Rasmussen told reporters."

     What's making world leaders' sphincters tighten this time around is that Trump hasn't ruled out military force to grab Greenland and the Panama Canal.

 

Oh, Canada...

In at least one aspect, Trump's bullying has already seemingly bourne fruit- The resignation of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau.

    Now, anyone who knows anything at all about Canadian politics knows that what's happening in Ottawa has nothing to do with Trump's bloviations and childish taunts from Mar a Lago. Trudeau has been battling low approval ratings and a series of defections from within his Cabinet, culminating with the resignation of Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland. Plus, it's expected that Trudeau's Liberal Party is going to get their asses handed to them in the upcoming elections in February. Of course, Trump's crowing on his dunghill on Truth Social that he was the reason why Trudeau quit.

     It doesn't matter very much to Canadian voters that their country had enjoyed peace and prosperity for much of the 11 years that Trudeau has been their Prime Minister. There's a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment that's affecting more than just the United States, If you don't believe me, look at what has happened in Argentina and Italy. Now. thanks partly to Elon Musk, there's a growing wave of support in Germany for the AfD, which is nothing less than the new Nazi Party.

   Trump's trolling of Trudeau's Canada resumed right after the election when Trump began making his threats of raising tariffs on Canada, our largest trading partner. He began by calling Trudeau "Governor Trudeau" and more than suggesting that their only way around his tariffs is to become "the 51st state", which is a bottomlessly absurd thing to even suggest (One wonders if Trump even knows Canada is part of the British Empire or cares.).

   Of course, Trudeau could've and should've clapped back by calling Trump "Russian Vice President Trump" because it would be vastly more accurate than "Governor Trudeau". 

   But the resurrection of his obsession with Greenland notwithstanding, Trump is showing alarming ambitions of imperialist expansion, ambitions that he seems willing to back up with military force. He's talking about invading northern Mexico to do battle with drug cartels and he even wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America". What's next? Is he going to order the state of New Mexico to be renamed "New America"?

    And how is MAGA going to square this tough guy posture with the guy for whom they voted, one who's bragged for years about keeping America out of wars in foreign countries? I suppose one shouldn't be surprised that once again, Trump is canoodling with hostile tinpot dictators like Putin while antagonizing our allies.

     With seemingly no guardrails in place this time around, it's impossible to see how any of this will lead to anything good come January 20th. And it will only be a matter of time before Trump gets us into a Mexican standoff. Or. should I say, an American standoff.

Meme o' the Day

And Sometimes Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

 

     If you look at the final vote tally for yesterday's Speaker vote, Mike Johnson squeaked by virtually without a single vote to spare. The final tally was 218-215. But it could've been very different.

     Because, you see, there are delegates from US territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia) and, for over a century, these delegates have been forbidden from voting for House Speaker or any legislation. Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett had a problem with that, saying,

     “And Mr. Speaker, this body and this nation has a territories and a colonies problem. What was supposed to be temporary has now effectively become permanent. We must do something about this problem so that these 4 million Americans … But I have a voice!”

      At least, she did until that moment when the asshole who was holding the gavel at that moment cut off her microphone. 

     These rules have been long-entrenched for decades, over a century, actually. And, ironically, the federal government treats US territories just as the British government had the colonies back in the 18th century. They're essentially afforded all the perks and privileges of being House members... except when it comes to voting. It's essentially taxation without representation, which was a big hairy deal to the colonists and Founding Fathers in the 18th century.

     Republicans want delegates to vote less than ever because #1, they tend to skew Democratic, like Plaskett, who was one of the nine impeachment managers for the second impeachment of the largest one man crime wave in galactic history. #2, Republicans currently have the slimmest majority in modern US history. When Trump poaches two Republicans from the House after the 20th, Johnson won't even have an actual majority. It'll get shrunk to 216-215 (218 is an actual majority in the 435 seat House).

     There are five delegates representing the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. A resident commissioner represents Puerto Rico. Plaskett's tirade on the floor of the House yesterday was doomed to failure but success wasn't the point. The point was to bring attention to this incredibly undemocratic function.and to have it entered into the Congressional Record.

     But the undemocratic nature of House Republicans doesn't stop with just delegates not being allowed to vote. At the end of the 118th Congress, Republicans rammed through a raft of new rules that they wouldn't have been able to enact in the 119th.

     House Republicans recently passed some decidedly antidemocratic rules changes. As far as rules changes go, it's a typical wishlist of self-serving Republican interests. Among them: "Eliminating the House’s Diversity and Inclusion office, authorizing subpoenas of officials connected to the investigation of the Biden family’s finances, and requiring congressional financial audits of potentially inflationary legislation."

     But the one rule change that got everyone's attention was the one that made it much harder to oust the House Speaker. What the new rule stipulates is nothing short of one party rule: Whereas before, with Matt Gaetz's insistence two years ago, when it only took one member of Congress to challenge the Speaker's authority and force a snap vote to elect a new Speaker (it used to be four prior to that), the new rules state that only members of the majority party can introduce a challenge and that it has to have eight co-sponsors.

     That's about as undemocratic as you can possibly get. If the Democrats were in charge and their Rules Committee had enacted the same rules changes, Republicans would be screaming their pointy heads off. Don't be fooled by the fact that Johnson got reelected Speaker yesterday on just the second ballot (compare that to the 15 ballots needed to elect Kevin McCarthy two years ago by, again, the slimmest of margins). This is nakedly a circling of the wagons to protect Mike Johnson because they know he's the weakest Speaker in modern history with the very weakest of mandates.

     Also, let's not forget how many Republican defections there were during the 118th Congress. By April last year alone, the GOP lost a whopping 23 members of its own caucus through early retirement, getting expelled from Congress, retiring from public office or running for the US Senate.

     Even considering the normal ebb and flow of politics, that's a lot of defections between just January 3rd and April 22nd of a single Congress. Does anyone really think there won't be any defections in the GOP ranks during this Congress? Look what had already happened between the end of the 118th Congress and the beginning of the 119th:

     81 year-old Virginia Foxx fell down the steps of the Capitol just yesterday and nearly broke her nose. Another 81 year-old Republican, Kay Granger, suddenly turned up in a nursing home being treated for dementia. (The odd thing about that was that no one was asking any questions about her whereabouts considering she hadn't cast a vote in the House since July 24th last year.). In fact, this is what MSN wrote: "According to the Daily Mail, reports stated that Granger had been placed in the facility after being found wandering and confused in her district."

     Two words come to mind: Term and limits.

     Plus, one other reason why there were so many Republican defections in the 118th Congress was a morbidly high attrition rate. Many Republicans left Congress because they were simply disgusted with the "governance" of their party and its inability to get anything done, starting with an omnibus spending bill. I don't see that trend magically reversing just because Johnson literally doesn't have a vote to spare. I mean, you don't have to be a university-trained mathematician to crunch the numbers and see that it's literally almost to the point where all it would take to flip the House is for one Republican to turn coat and switch parties.

     And, let's face it, the only reason that the assclowns of the GOP have had the majority is because of stupid Republican voters and gerrymandering.

     But knowing how virtually nonexistent their mandate is, Republicans moved the goalposts yet again to benefit themselves and their party. They know how weak Johnson is. They know there are at least 10 Republicans who will move to oust him the very next time he reaches across the aisle to pass a stopgap spending bill with Democrats (the next deadline is March 14, so beware the Ides of March). And they simply don't want a repeat of the debacle of when Gaetz and seven of his cohorts ousted McCarthy. And they even shamelessly boxed out Democrats as if they didn't exist just to protect Johnson, which is to say to protect Trump.

     Until delegates are allowed to vote, the election of the Speaker will always be one of the most undemocratic functions in our government. But it's hardly the only example of Republican contempt for democracy.

Rest in Peace, President Carter

     I still vividly recall the day I sat for my ASVAB in Flushing, Queens. It was Wednesday, November 3rd, the day after Election Day 1976. The whole world was talking about the improbable election of a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, former Governor Jimmy Carter. He'd defeated Gerald Ford, the only man who became the vice president then president without getting elected. I sat for my ASVAB, and aced it, and by September the following year I enlisted in the Air Force and I proudly called President Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, my Commander in Chief.

     As a 17 year-old kid on that cold day, I could feel the excitement and the hope in the country. I was just a couple of months shy of legally being able to vote for the first time but, as Gerald Ford had famously begun a State of the Union Address, our long national nightmare was finally over.

   Watergate was still a fresh, raw memory for all of us and, during that 1976 general election, the partisan makeup in Congress didn't change significantly. Jimmy Carter won the electoral college by a full 57 votes and the Democrats retained control of Congress. Carter had a solid mandate, far more of a mandate than the one crowed about by the clown about to take over in a few weeks.

     Even though President Carter died at the age of 100 just yesterday, it's easy to see Carter taking his place among other consequential one term presidents such as John Adams and Abraham Lincoln. And for a one term president, Carter was remarkably transformative. His administration created the Departments of Education and Energy. 

     Did you know that the president had a yacht? Yes, a yacht. Jimmy Carter got rid of it, selling it for $286,000. With unemployment at 8% and inflation at 14% (a wonderful gift from the Nixon/Ford administrations), Carter quickly saw there was no way we could justify its operating budget.

    Carter also brought about the Camp David Accords, a 14 month-long effort that brought peace between Egypt and Israel. Carter was perhaps more dedicated to lasting peace than any US president in modern history, if not all history. He never sent a soldier into battle.

     Carter was taken down through the duplicitous machinations of an evil piece of shit like Ronald Reagan. Like Nixon 12 years earlier, Reagan's campaign secretly and illegally made a back room deal with the Iranians whereby he sold them weapons then laundered the money from the proceeds for the Contras. And all the Iranians had to do was hold on to the American hostages until the minute, literally the minute, Reagan took the oath of office.

     It took the Iran Contra scandal literally six years to catch up to Reagan and by the time he testified before Congress regarding his role in the scandal, he was so incipiently demented that he literally couldn't recall any of the briefings he got on the subject.

     Carter had every right to be bitter about getting mugged by Reagan and his pack of right wing thugs. Making the Iranians artificially hang onto the hostages longer made Carter look bad. Reagan never should've been allowed to take the oath of the presidency considering the dirty deal he had made with Tehran. He should've spent the rest of his life in prison for his act of treachery, he and his entire criminal cohort.

     But Carter moved on. He founded the Carter Center in 1982 and launched what became the longest post presidency in American history, one marked by unending acts of humanitarianism. He founded Habitat for Humanity, which has created countless homes for the underserved in this country, and there are literally thousands of pictures of President Carter with a hammer in his hands. While other presidents of both parties spend their post public life making tons of money, Jimmy Carter wasn't interested in any of that. President Carter was the very delineation of a Christian man living the best Christian life possible.

     And, it could be said, his crowning achievement post-presidency, was in winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 (And, unlike Obama after him, Carter actually earned it). 

     And, in death, Carter is being reviled by the right wing, with justly obscure right wing pundits still calling him the most terrible president ever without even a hint of irony considering the fool who's about to occupy Carter's old seat.

    But I'm pretty confident that posterity will name President Jimmy Carter as one of the better presidents of the 20th century if not for all time, a man who was so good at the presidency, it took several criminal acts to dislodge him from the White House.

Guess What, MAGAts?

     The billionaire class looks down their porcine snouts at you.

     As Mark Twain once famously observed, it's a lot easier to fool the people than it is to convince them they've been fooled. That aspect of human nature hasn't changed one bit and never will.

     It blew up just a couple of days ago when Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the elitist tech bros that had abruptly subsumed Trump's campaign and transition team with frightening rapidity, put this screed on Twitter:

 

 

     Now, I don't know what decade Vivek lives in but the TV shows he referenced were canceled like decades ago. It all goes to show how, like a typical billionaire scumbag, he's completely out of touch with any and every aspect of mainstream American life.

     But much more important than what Vivek thinks we watch on TV, is his idea that we should avail ourselves of the H-1B visa status. H-1B, of course, is the work visa generally given to people born outside the US so they can enjoy jobs in high tech. It's more often than not given to white collar workers like software engineers. But it doesn't matter if Ramaswamy is right or not.

     What he basically did was spit in the face of white American workers in general and, of course, since they're the ones most quickly triggered, white right wing workers in the MAGA movement. In other words, as Axios pointed out, the same white right wing workers who proved to be the backbone of the MAGA movement (and 2024 is no exception).

     It's borderline comical that Ramaswamy would resort to stereotypes and long-canceled TV shows to piss on the red hats of the people that "elected" Trump. The red hat crowd, obviously, voted for Trump by and large because they were taken in hook line and sinker by his bullshit promises to bring back American jobs (despite the fact he didn't the last time. In fact, Trump was the only "president" in modern US history to preside over a net job loss).

     Another major reason they went for Trump was because they were also taken in by his promises of America First deporting even legal US citizens.

     But, typical of the out of control arrogance of the 1%, Ramaswamy basically said the quiet part out loud and told Trump's base what he thought of it and without seemingly any provocation. And it wasn't just him. It was also his fellow billionaire DOGE running buddy, a clown who wasn't even born in this country and even worked here illegally. This came out just last night:

     Responding to failed right wing cartoonist Scott Adams, this is what Musk said:

     "And those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem."

     In other words, "We got your votes now shut up or get out or we'll forcibly remove you."

     Typical elitist, 1% arrogance. Just like Trump himself, who did zero for the average American worker.

     Now, it's impossible for me to feel any sorrow for anyone in the MAGA movement, a class of disaffected morons who benefited from the strongest economy in recent history, some of the lowest inflation and a country in which the outgoing administration, in just four short years, created 16,000,000 jobs. MAGA is a movement that is so stupid and willfully ignorant that they were convinced that this economy that's the envy of the world was a left wing, Socialist hellscape that they brought back a clown who actually lost 2.670 million of their jobs and required Joe Biden to rebuild our shambles of an economy.

     There's no room for sympathy there.

     But billionaire scumbags like Ramaswamy and Musk, two sociopaths who would gladly take away what little they have just because the cruelty is the point and then spit in their faces while doing so... That's cold.

     Like the meme goes, in buying Twitter, Musk thought he was bringing back 1930s Germany and instead be brought back 1780s France. So, if you have any discretionary income after Trump starts another needless trade war that will wind up costing you $10 or more for a loaf of bread, start investing in companies that make guillotines. Then book your PPV slots.

Please Help Ace

 

     This is Ace. 

     Ace is a sweet little dog who now lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts with his mistress, Tianna Sawers. But when I still lived in Hudson, I got to know Tianna and her pup, Ace. She used to work at a local gas station on Tower Street and, for a time, simultaneously at the little Dunkin' Donuts at the other end of the building.

     Because she and Ace were so close, she'd often bring him into the building with her and set up his little dog bed behind the counter so people could see and interact with him. Tianna, Ace and I got so close, in fact, that we swapped numbers and when she was in town working, she'd text me to let Barb and I know. So we'd get in the car and make a special trip where people would make a big deal over him. Back then, he was a hurricane of activity. He loved people and just couldn't get enough of them. I'd frequently bring over boxes of Milk Bones for Ace and, if Tianna didn't watch him, he'd go through the whole box in one sitting.

     It was a highlight of mine and Barbara's day when we got to see Ace and I'm sure the same applied to everyone else who worked there or walked in to see Ace holding court. 

     Since I left Massachusetts last March, we've all been on the downswing. Ace's health took a turn for the worse. Tianna lost her job through no fault of her own, then she lost her apartment in Clinton when the old owner sold and the new scumbag who took over decided to evict everyone wholesale (sound familiar?) And, as she's still out of job, she can no longer afford his vet bills. His kidney functions are bottoming out and he needs medical intervention soon.

     Tianna and I spoke for the first time in years on Christmas and it broke my heart to hear her describe Ace's low energy. He now sounds so little like the energetic dog who charmed everyone he met. And, considering how much Barbara loved him, I can't think of Ace without thinking of her.

 

     This morning, she texted me to let me know that she'd finally set up a Gofundme for Ace's veterinary bills. I've pinned it to my Facebook wall and will put up the link to my other social media accounts. I refuse to believe that Ace has hit the end of the road and that there's noting that can be done about it. It's just a matter of money and a little bit of money can make a huge difference in the life of this sweet little dog who just needs a break.

Right about now

 

     

     ...Barbara and I would've been just sitting down to dinner. I would've just taken my kids back to their mom's side of the family after having them over so I could give them their presents. We then would've collaborated on dinner. I would've made the pork loin with cherry preserves at 350 for 45 mins and mashed potatoes, Old School, as well as the veggies. She would've made her cheesey potato casserole as well as the two boxes of stuffing and the pork gravy. Then, she would've opened the bottle of Riesling I always got because she was my wine girl.

      Last night, we would've taken turns in the bedroom wrapping gifts and stuffing stockings. Popeye would've been in and out, consumed with curiosity over what Mommy and Daddy were hiding from him. All the ornaments may or may not have stayed on the tree.

 

      We would've opened our presents early in the morning right after starting the coffee. And between the presents themselves and the stocking stuffers, there were always dozens of things to open up. Popeye would've been tuckered out from his annual catnip overdose.

      Then, after dinner, we'd wrap up the leftovers and looking forward to another four days or so of Xmas leftovers. We always look at each other afterwards and say, "Well, honey, we survived another Christmas."

      We'd go to bed whenever, usually with a new book we given each other that morning. It was a routine we'd immediately fallen into since our first Christmas together in 2009 and, over the next 13 Christmases after that, it changed little (except for the time her family literally tried to kidnap her and keep her forever despite her saying she wanted to go back home with me. They kept her for five weeks during that visit, dooming me to spend Xmas and New Years that year alone with the cat).

      It was through some dubious "good fortune" or some Greater Being's beneficence that I was able to survive both of them. And I wanted to share this old part of my life because now privacy doesn't matter so much any more. Up until poor Barbara began her final decline and had to go away, I'd kept my content here confined almost exclusively to the political and literary. But veterans of my blog may remember these pictures I'd put up a decade ago today. I wanted to once more share this window into my old life because it was one of the dearest and most coveted times of the best decade I'm ever going to live.

Merry Christmas From the Czech Republic!

(By Cyril Blubberpuss, Conservative-American)

Merry Christmas and bah humbug, as one of my literary heroes was famous for saying. Well, as you can probably guess, my kid brother Cecil and I are still stuck in the Czech Republic or the former Yugoslavia. The word we're getting from back home are that things are still a little too hot and that now would not be a good time to come back. 

     Actually, I'm getting all this from my baby girl, Bertha. When I called home yesterday, it was difficult hearing what she was saying. Melissa Etheridge was blasting in the background and I could hear deep-voiced women moaning loudly. I deduced it was Sappho Security, the outfit Bertha hired to protect her in our absence. At least their loud moans and groans assured me they were working very hard and that she'd be in their strong, capable hands.

     Cecil and I are making the best of it during the silly season, although the mayor gently broke the news to me that Cecil was barred from entering the village for the duration of our stay on account of him continually breaking into the changing room of the local boy's choir. I tried to tell the mayor that it wasn't Cecil's fault that he always had a fascination with boy's religious costumes as well as junior high wrestling outfits. But all Hizzoner could do was helplessly stretch out his hands and show me his brilliant smile with nearly half a dozen teeth.

     In the village we live in, and I still can't pronounce the name of the damned place since it's made up entirely of consonants and diacritical marks, they're renowned throughout the Czech Republic as being the nation's capital of goat cheese, which, considering goat cheese is their number one export, is quite a distinction. In fact, Trader Joe's is their number one customer and, were it not for them, their top exports would be sexually trafficked women and extras for John Wick movies.

   The natives here have an odd way of celebrating Christmas. Apparently on Christmas Eve, it's customary for them to fondle the genitals of male reindeer. Or, at least that was what we were led to believe by the locals who I've never seen do that. In fact, they were laughing and pointing at us while Cecil I pleasured their ruminants earlier tonight.

     But as strange and different as village life in the Czech Republic is compared to Manhattan, there are still some similarities, enough so that Cecil and I don't feel entirely like fish out of water. What originally looked like villagers with pitchforks and torches, like something out of an old Universal Frankenstein movie, turned out to be local carolers.

    And, perhaps out of appreciation for my brother and I revitalizing the local economy during the holiday season (We've already bought enough goat cheese to restock Trader Joe's), they decided to make the abandoned sex doll factory where Cecil and I are currently staying the first stop on their caroling tour. 

     Of course, they're singing them in their native language so the carols are at once unfamiliar and familiar. They know we don't belong here and that we miss New York City. But, in the spirit of Christmas, they're opening up their hearts and land to us and they're very good at making us feel welcome.

     I just wish one of the carolers wasn't that one-footed, middle aged guy with the crutch who looks an awful like Melania Trump.

I've Been Sick as a Dog

      My roommate has been battling a cold all week and, on Thursday, I finally caught it. This is the sickest I've ever been since Easter 2010, which is the last time I got sick. I spent literally all day and night on Friday in bed. I can't remember a time when I've been this sick and feeble. And I do not like that feeling. To give you an idea of how sick and weak I've been, yesterday I was heating up a cup of coffee in the microwave and I literally fainted and landed on the floor. I woke up moments later and it literally took me 10 minutes and several attempts before I could stand up. Yes, I fell and couldn't get back up. My roommate was sitting at the table about nine feet away and he never heard me fall down. The only good thing about this ordeal is that it killed my constant cravings for nicotine. The pack of cigarettes that I opened on Thursday still has seven butts in it. Hopefully, this will be the opportunity I've been looking for to quit tobacco permanently. My lungs feel better, if not the rest of my body, so that alone is a good reason to quit.

Strange Days

     I never thought I'd ever live to see the day when my government was run by a low-functioning autistic South African who would've been invented by Ian Fleming on a bad day but here we are. Thanks, #MAGA.

I Want To Live But Within Reason!

 

I'll bet you're glad I hung onto this, huh. Big Brother?" my kid brother Cecil crowed as we walked in.

     We're currently in the Czech Republic, which used to be part of Yugoslavia, and we're now domiciled in the old sex doll factory where Cecil had once housed his adult entertainment talent when he'd ran www.cecilsprays.com, the world's first adult sex chat room. For some reason, the commie feds, when they shut down his operation back in the 90s, didn't see fit to seize this property, which Cecil still owns.

    The reason for this, of course, is because of Brian Thompson's shooting in Midtown early this month. No sooner than we got back from my friend Donald Trump's resort in Mar a Lago, I was forced to leave Manhattan yet again, this time in fear for my life. And even though he's not a CEO, any more, and has nothing to fear, it can't be said my kid brother isn't a Blubberpuss through and through. He's always there for his big brother just as I was for him when the stormtroopers of the FBI broke into Cecil's loft in SoHo when he was in mid ejaculation.

     Now you'd think that with a city the size of New York City, there would be enough executive and corporate security companies to go around to protect the well-being of the 1% but there you'd be wrong. You see, Thompson was shot just before Cecil and I left Palm Beach and by the time we got back home, all the security companies had been booked up for the next five years.

     Now, every executive on Wall Street, seemingly, is being followed by at least one gorilla in an ill-fitting black suit and Ray Bans. After just one day of making frantic phone calls to security contractors, it became all too obvious that it was either hire a low rent, fly by night outfit or leave the country entirely.

    On my daughter Bertha's recommendation, I interviewed one outfit that was run entirely by butch lesbian types named Sappho Security. Their company logo looked like a woman in a toga crushing a tiny man in her right fist. Their rates were fine but they more than implied that their focus was going to be Bertha and not Cecil or me.

     The last I heard, Bertha was paying them out of her own money. When Cecil and I left the house, kd lang was blasting throughout the brownstone while huge women in black uniforms were moving in suitcases.

     So, bottom line, Cecil and I will be in the Czech Republic for the foreseeable future while I try to run my company via cell phone and the country's spotty internet service that may or may not involve diesel or rats running on hamster wheels. The mayor of the village, an old friend of Cecil's who wears a suit that looks like it was made in 1950s Ankara, Turkey, has welcomed us warmly and said he would let us stay indefinitely on condition that I marry one of his daughters, a solid Slavic girl with a very subtle goatee who would put even Bertha to shame and apparently cleans her teeth by chewing on a stick. I politely declined and almost succeeded in not throwing up in my mouth.

     But this is what we've been reduced to, when corporate executives have to go on the run like a Brooks Brothers version of The Defiant Ones. We're in the process of rehabbing the old sex doll factory but work has been slow. The people Cecil and the mayor brought in look like the kind of guys you see holding blow torches in the background of an old Nicholas Cage direct-to-DVD movie and I suspect they even have connections to Sebastien Gorka.

     One interesting thing was when we found the skeleton of a human foot and we're almost convinced it was the one sawed off by that ungrateful whelp Cecil had rescued from a hostel so he could make good his escape. One of the contractors also found graffiti on the wall that he translated to, "Cecil Blubberpuss will lose interest in you the minute you start growing facial hair," a point to which even Cecil had to concede.

     So now I'm trying to conduct business on the casket of a Kosovo war victim that I'm using as a desk. I have no idea when I'll be able to come back stateside and start working out of my own office on Wall Street again. In the meantime, my first official act is to order my employees still working from home to get back to the office or else.

     The liberal pinhead who runs this sewer of a blog calls me a hypocrite but I disagree.

     But since arriving at the Czech Republic, I feel somewhat safer, although I'm a little on edge looking through the large open concrete doorway. We seem to have attracted the liveliest interest of a one-footed middle-aged man on a crutch who's looking at us with intense loathing.

Pottersville Digest

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     This is looking more and more like the Anschluss of 1938.

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     No, scumbag, praying is not "all we can do." We can try, you know, gun control.

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     Whoever's behind all these drones in the NY/NJ area, five will get you ten either the Russians or the Chinese are behind it. But since there are tens of thousands of drones that are used across the US every day, I'm wondering why these have been getting so much attention over the past week.

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     So, is Musk going to illegally interfere in Canada's elections, too?

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     Oh, yeah. MUCH more prestigious than being a congressman or Attorney General.

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     Shorter Atrium: "Please don't shoot our CEO."

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     Any Greek chorus arising from this would be very entertaining to listen to.

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     He probably thought there were only 10 countries, including Russia, China, North Korea and Puerto Rico.

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     Meme intermission.

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     If only it was legal to deport Republicans...

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     Oh, yes. Comer doesn't have nearly the same gravitas as the orange buffoon who talked about Arnold Palmer's penis for 12 straight minutes.

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     The judge himself defined the digital assault as a form of rape. So fuck ABC and their belly up obsequience. They should've fought his bullshit lawsuit.

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     I hate myself for saying this but I have to agree with everything Rand Paul said in this article.

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     "An innocent man"?! Is he fucking kidding? He made a fortune denying sick people their claims. Fuck you, he was innocent. And, regarding his family? He wasn't even living with them when he was shot down like a dog in the street. Even his own wife couldn't stand living with him.

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     Uh, I thought the Trump Organization was under receivership.

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     Shorter NC GOP: "Fuck the vox populi."

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     Because appeasement worked so well for Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Wray showing his belly to Trump disgusts me. Tyrants will not and cannot be appeased. History teaches us this time and again. And finally...

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     Rick Wilson's right. Trump's legislative agenda will be a bloodbath the minute he tries to pass another ruinous round of tax cuts.

A Useful Idiot, Part 4

 

     Imagine this picture in every FBI field office and resident agency.

     Partly for research for another Scott Carson novel, partly for enjoyment, I just started reading DAMNATION ISLAND by Stacy Horn, which details the horrors of Blackwell's Island in the 19th century. The lunatic asylum in particular and Blackwell's Island as a whole was put on notice by the legendary journalist Nellie Bly in 1887.

     Bly, newly-arrived in New York City, went right to work for Joseph Pulitzer's World and one of  her first assignments was to get into Blackwell's Island (Now Roosevelt Island) in an undercover capacity. So she faked insanity, promptly got herself committed to Blackwell's Island's lunatic asylum and accumulated information about the place for 10 days. She was examined by no fewer than eight different psychiatrists and each one came up with a different diagnosis.

    

     That experience would become a bombshell of six articles that Bly would later turn into a book, Ten Days in a Madhouse. It resulted in the state legislature in Albany allocating nearly a million dollars to upgrade and modernize every lunatic asylum in New York State, starting with Blackwell's Island. Bly's undercover work still stands, in my opinion, as the single most heroic effort in the history of American journalism.

     But Bly's experience 137 years ago served to show just how easily one person could get committed to a lunatic asylum even when, based on today's thresholds, there was no reason for it.

     Nowadays, it's obvious America's once again devolved and that, far from being justly institutionalized, some of the most rabidly insane people in the country are being given positions of power in the incoming government, starting with Trump himself.

     Along with RFK Jr, one of the most clearly insane nominees to Trump's kakistocracy of a government is Kash Patel, Trump's pick to lead the FBI.

     Patel started out as an obscure staffer working for Devin Nunes, now the CEO of Truth Social. Subsequently, he served as Chief of Staff to acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, and senior advisor to the acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell. Believe it or not, he used to be a federal prosecutor (Then again, so was Giuliani).

     But Patel has no background in law enforcement nor has he run an agency as vast as the FBI. It's obvious that Trump wants to shoehorn him into the Hoover Building to "own the libs" but primarily to use him as a pimpstick to go after his perceived enemies, starting with those in the FBI. Trump may be incipiently demented but he's still with it enough to recognize a dangerous Fifth Columnist when he sees one.

     As with so many in Trump's orbit, Patel is a foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorist, the most dangerous kind- A true believer who also happens to be criminally insane. When he wasn't writing children's books about how poor Donald Trump was wronged (The first book has the fantastic opening line, "Once upon a time, in the Land of the Free, there lived a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer."), he's been railing about the "deep state", even drawing up a list of 60 people in his book, Government Gangsters, that he accused of being deep staters (Among them were Bill Barr and Robert Hur).

     He also spouts conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. In true MAGA form, he also sold supplements to counteract the beneficial effects of COVID vaccines. He also sells wine, MAGA clothes, playing cards and other crap, including his books.

     But what probably permanently put him on the map of MAGAdonia was when he went on Steve Bannon's podcast a little over a year ago and said this:

     "The one thing we will do that they will never do is we will follow the facts and the law and go to courts of law and correct these justices and lawyers who have been prosecuting these cases based on politics and actually issuing them as lawfare. We will find go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media. Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you. Whether it is criminally or civilly we'll figure that out. But, yeah, we're putting you all on notice. This is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators."

     This seems to comport very neatly with the news that Patel, if God forbid he's confirmed as FBI Director, will start rooting through files looking for the names of confidential informants.

     This shows that Patel is one of those lunatics that Trump covets, the very tip of the tip of the spear that's bound and determined to turn our government into nothing more or less than an engine of vengeance. And if the Third Reich taught us anything, it's that you cannot reasonably expect a government to remain standing for long if it's based on nothing but grievance and revenge.