General Housekeeping

From what I've seen of Twitter over the years, most of it still seems like the truck-stop shithouse wall of the internets, and I have neither the time nor interest to start up a page for any reason.

That said, especially as the Putingate story gathers momentum -- and despite Clownstick's dismal attempt at distraction, it's gaining steam daily -- several Twitter accounts have become regular reading for me, and so there's a new category below the blogroll. It would be something if these treasonous, thieving scumbags ended up getting brought low by a bunch of keyboard warriors, but obviously far stranger things have happened in recent months. I heartily recommend all of them, and will add to the list as more come up on the radar.

Everybody's Fuck 'em for the Weekend

I refuse to apologize for being petty enough to say, "Fuck this dunce." Because seriously, fuck her and everyone like her in the neck. Guess what, dummy, elections have consequences, especially when you're in a vulnerable demographic, one that's been targeted even. Now you know. Jesus H. Christ, what's wrong with these people?

I know we're supposed to support the high-minded ideal of not only letting but encouraging everyone to vote, but this is a perfectly good case study in why it might be best practice to dissuade the maroons and halfwits from engaging in the process. Stay home and fornicate and deep-fry Twinkies or whatever. Let the fucking adults handle the serious stuff.

I'm not going to apologize. This makes me happy, brings me joy. I love watching people get what they voted for. I don't give even half of a fuck whether or not they ever let her husband back into the US again at any point in time. I don't care if her kids can only travel to Mexico if they ever wish to see their father again. This is what you wanted, this is what you get.

You voted for this, you fucking dummy. Own it.

War-ons and Wargasms

So Clownstick spends $90M last night lobbing five dozen Tomahawks into a pre-cleared Syrian airfield with no follow-up plan or policy, literally the lamest and most obvious sort of fo-po theater, and the dipshits at CNN fall for it right away. Someone should tell Chris Cillizza and Fareed Zakaria that the wingers who want to hear empty, mewling genuflections are already watching Fixed Noise for that shit.

No, Clownstick did not "become president" last night, anymore than he did a month ago when he used a KIA Navy SEAL as a prop in a (gasp!) teleprompter speech. He will never become president, not in any meaningful way, because it's never going to be in his skill set. He's going to fuck something up in the next three or four days, because he can't help himself, and this dopey, useless distraction will be forgotten.

When news broke of the sarin attack the other day, two questions immediately popped to mind, neither of which has been adequately answered, near as I can tell:

1. Wasn't the key to Obama supposedly abrogating his "red line" stance on Syria the promise from Putin that Syria's chemical weapons would essentially be taken away from them -- in which case, how did they get them back?
2. What strategic purpose for Assad would be served by using chemical weapons? After all, he's been dropping barrel bombs -- which cause plenty of damage and carnage -- for years, and no one's said shit. He could wipe out a hundred people easy with one or two of those. So what's in it for him to use the chemical weapons that were supposedly taken from him in the first place?

Assad's an amoral monster just like his old man, but he's neither insane nor stupid. The dynamics of the Syrian civil war are beyond the grasp of most Americans because the corporate media sucks balls and is comprised of a bunch of armchair Hemingway types whose dicks get as hard as a full-blown jingo's at the sight of a few lobbed missiles.

But the nutshell version is this:  the Assad family and their regime are mostly Alawites (Shi'a), ruling an overwhelmingly Sunni populace with generations of brutality and coercion. Push comes to shove and the regime topples, Assad and his family might get out, hand over a suitcase of cash to Putin and spend the rest of their days at a dacha outside Sochi. But the sultan's dogs would meet a fate not unlike that of many in neighboring Iraq after we kicked over their applecart, revanchist death squads roaming Baghdad with cordless power drills to run through the faces of their victims.

Of course, the missile strikes don't affect the equation or outcome in the slightest, because there will be no follow-through, because Clownstick is a dipshit and an oaf, and thinks strategically like old people fuck. He has no second move. He seriously thinks that the missile launch serves multiple purposes, and will signal the Chinese and North Koreans (and who knows, probably the Iranians while we're at it) that He Means Business. I'm sure Xi Jinping is trembling in his boots.

Xi is headed to a state dinner at the fucking Maga-Lardo country club, with its iceberg wedges and lobster mac-and-cheese and rich-asshole lemon parties, for one thing only -- a price. Xi will tell Clownstick what his foreign policy expectations are from us, and will make Clownstick an offer, and they'll haggle over the final amount, and Clownstick's little crime family will line their pockets once more (just like they are by holding official events at his business). That's all that is; Xi couldn't care less about the "show of strength" in impotently throwing money into a military runway that's already been repaired and is operational again, less than thirty-six hours later.

Xi is not going to get rolled or bullied on North Korea. Even a retard fake negotiator like Clownstick has to realize that the Chinese are in a position of strength here and we are not. There are no manufacturing jobs being repatriated from China, nor is there going to be a tariff slapped on Chinese imports. Everyone seems to get this but the master negotiator. There is no way to do those things without damaging the American economy, bigly. That's not politics, that's math.

Clownstick is such a joker and a loser that even his closet-case alt-right cargo cult is all butt-hurt on this one, insisting that the "globalists" headed by Clownstick's J-O-O son-in-law and daughter pushed him into this move on (heh-indeedy) humanitarian grounds. Setting aside Clownstick's Being There garden jabber about the "beautiful babies" being killed by the chemical weapons, it again occurs to one that more of those babies will be killed by the next round of barrel bombs, and again no one will say or do jack shit.

Observers are overthinking this whole thing. The alt-right cuck-tards are postulating a neolibcon takeover of their movement, pushing out Foster Brooks Steve Bannon in the purge. Even more stupidly, the putatively librul corporate mediots are proposing an even more ridonkulous theory -- that the missile strike is the opening gambit of some sort of grand strategy or (for fuck's sake) doctrine.

You wanna know what the fucking Clownstick Doctrine is? Here it is -- and listen close, 'cause it's a wild one:  make money bigly. I mean, there's some of the usual narcissistic self-aggrandizement baked into everything he does or attempts to do, because that sort of shit is to him what breathing and taking a dump is to us mere mortals. When he talks about being the smartest and bestest at every damned thing, remember that he's talking to himself, not to us.

But it shouldn't even need to be said that there's nothing at all beyond that, certainly not a strategy. Good grief, when it comes to strategery, compared to Clownstick, even Fredo W. Arbusto is fucking Garry Kasparov. Clownstick doesn't do strategy; he'd probably lose two out of three to a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken at the county fair. It's all id and impulse, there's no other gear with this guy. There is no strategic interest for the United States in Syria right now, other than containing ISIS and al Qaeda and the rest of that lot. But the continuation of those groups has as much to do with the Gulf states paying them protection money, and Turkey controlling all the water for the region, as it does with the atrocities of the Assad regime.

On the other hand, I tend to believe Clownstick also had sincere motives in lobbing the missiles for those beautiful babies. That is clearly how his mind works -- he's an addled, sundowning old man who gets every drop of his "information" and "knowledge" from the teevee. So he saw that shit on the teevee and had to Do Something. Coupled with his idée fixe that nothing says "diplomacy" like a big swinging dick (even when all can see that it's just a shriveled orange worm), he timed it against the Chinese state visit for maximum effect. But there's no doubt he seriously thinks that his show of force got ol' Assad all a-skeert and what-not. Sure. Problem solved. No more bombed babies.

Imagine your foreign policy and geopolitical strategy run by Mark Burnett. That's what you've got here, with less polish and suspense. He's gonna fuck this up just like he's fucked up everything else he's touched in his too-long life. It is the universe's weird, ironic sense of humor that his skeevy avarice and utter incompetence at the simplest of things will end up being the main things that keep us out of a nuclear war or an even greater depression than Shrub got us into a decade ago. Maybe.

He Went to Jared

On a day where Syria gassed dozens of civilians and North Korea launched another missile, let's all pause for a second and recall that El Caudillo Fuckface Von Clownstick has delegated pretty much every major job to his son-in-law, whose sole qualification is that he inherited his business after Chris Christie put his dad in prison.

Here's what is almost certainly an incomplete list:

• Kushner is in Iraq right now "consulting" with generals on how best to retake Mosul and defeat ISIS (recalling that Clownstick had a secret 30-day plan for that).
• Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
• Diplomatic negotiations with China this weekend, in which the Chinese have made it quite plain that they are simply finding out what the asking price is.
• Diplomacy with Mexico. Apparently we don't have a State Department anymore, just Tex Drillerson working on Exxon's next deal with the Russians, and Jared handling everything else.
• Reforming the Veterans Administration's health care system.
• Reforming the criminal justice system.
• Bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. Hey asshole, try starting with the "signature lines" pimped by your wife and your father-in-law.
• Addressing the US' opioid epidemic. Good luck with that. Here's an idea:  shut down the doctors handing this shit out like candy. That's one way to meet the lobbyists from Big Pharma and shake their tree.
• Heading the so-called Office of American Innovation, the stated goal of which is to reform and streamline government operations.

Obviously, it's not that the above items don't need to be addressed; in fact, it's the opposite. These are all serious problems that require attention from people with knowledge and expertise. Kushner has no experience or ability with any of these issues, and is at best a dilettante. But the angry cheeto is fat, stupid, and lazy, and therefore has to farm out all of the job duties for which his dipshit fan base anointed him.

Of course, this is just a way to stay hands-on to monetize these areas where possible for the family rackets. China will literally hand over duffel bags stuffed with cash if it reduces American strategic presence in the Pacific theatre, if we leave them alone on Taiwan, Tibet, the South China Sea, Africa, and everywhere else China is expanding their trade empire. The criminal justice and prison systems are well on their way to privatization anyway, it's just a matter of working with the "right" companies to secure and expand, especially if they're publicly traded. Ditto the VA system.

These are just market opportunities. Hell, it wouldn't be a surprise in the least if the Israel-Palestine thing got monetized as well, perhaps with Kushner buying a company that manufactures modular homes, and Netanyahu's government purchasing them to help settlers push Palestinians off their land.

Certainly we have seen our share of shameless politicians and administrations in this country, but never a group so eager to openly emulate the tactics of authoritarian strongmen, from Putin to Erdogan to Hugo Chavez. They're not even bothering to conceal it. Way to go, Drumpfkins. Enjoy watching these dirtbags snuffle boatloads of cash from the trough, while you die all the same in your broke-down home in your broke-ass town.

Truth Hurts

It took the DNC long enough to select their chairman post-election, but if this is any indication of how Tom Perez will roll, I like it:

“Women marched all over the world and said: Donald Trump, you don’t stand for our values!” Perez said. “That’s what they said. Donald Trump, you didn’t win this election!” If anyone didn’t want to hear this, Perez had an answer: “I don’t care, because they don’t give a s--- about people.”

Hours later, the conservative Daily Caller posted clips of Perez’s remarks for a story that was shared on Facebook more than 18,000 times. Ronna Romney McDaniel, the new chair of the Republican National Committee, demanded an apology for the “dangerous” remarks, snarking that Perez “needs a lesson on how the electoral college works.”

Not sure what the electoral college has to do with Republicans not giving a shit about people, but whatever the case, Ronna Romney McDaniel is entirely welcome to get bent, and then go have a talk with the head of her own party about how he talks about his opponents. Maybe she'll find herself on his 3:00 AM drunk-tweet shit-list. Sad!

Anything that gets these pearl-clutching humps rattled is a step in the right direction. No offense to the late Alan Colmes, but the fact is that part of the reason people have trouble identifying with Democrats and liberals is because of the perception of bloodless, dispassionate, milquetoast commenters thinking that their repository of "facts" and "ideas" will win the day. It's a nice thought but I think we've all figured out the hard way that it just ain't true. You want to motivate people and galvanize a movement, you gotta give 'em a little pepper. Facts have more impact when conveyed with passion and conviction.

That's the real beauty of all this -- the Dems don't even need to stretch or invent anything. They're up against incompetent bozos who would seriously find a way to fuck up a lemonade stand. Great businessman? Ask the working-class dogs he screwed over as part of his revenue bankruptcy model. Great negotiator? The House voted more than fifty times to repeal Obamacare, yet when they finally got the chance to push their own plan, they dumped it right out of the gate. This guy's nothing more than every cheese-dick sales-douche you learned to avoid long ago. If you bought a used car from him, you'd regret it before you got out of the lot.

Bill Clinton, of all people, put it most succinctly: People would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right. That's really all there is to it, and it doesn't necessarily mean the mindless strutting of the Drumpfelthinskin bowel movement. The one thing about Clownstick that merits some respect -- even if he takes it to the most petty, vindictive extreme -- is that he doesn't take shit from anyone. He dishes it out with a backhoe, and won't take back so much as a dirt clod. And it's worked quite well for him.

We may not like it, we may wish that the formation and implementation of public policy colored within established lines, but those days have been over for some time, and you either adapt with the mammals, or get wiped out with the dinosaurs. Every time Tom Perez tells these assholes to go fuck themselves, and their talking heads and media monkeys sputter and fume about it, an angel gets its wings. They can take their fake facts and slanderous bullshit, and go fuck off and die in a fire already.

Novo Zek

You know, fuck Mike Flynn. I'm not going to waste any time on this hypocritical, Russian-owned douchebag, except to say that it is my advance Christmas wish that Adam Schiff nails Flynn's worthless hide to the wall. Among other things, Flynn famously claimed that if he "had done one-tenth of what she did" he'd be in jail today. Well, you did at least that much, you traitorous cocksucker. See you in Leavenworth.

The Fuck 'em Never Stops

If there's anything more useless than a focus group of Drumpfkins helping their cult leader slow-walk his empty promises, it's a pwoggie trying to lib-shame people who also have a legitimate right to be angry about things. Look, now is the time for these incoherent motherfuckers to learn that elections have consequences, and that the revered country Drumpfkin is going to bear the brunt of it.

And while Markos Moulitsas and rich Frank Rich might be down-punching a bit in their rhetoric, after nearly two years of vile, ugly spewing not just from the wampeter but from the cult followers themselves, it would take someone with superhuman forbearance to let it all slide. Guess we're going to get caught in an ongoing cycle of recriminatory fuck yous, because some of us are not in a mood to make nice with people who refuse to listen to rational argument anyway.

We're tired of being told we're not real Americans, simply because we have better things to do than pick on gays and immigrants. We're tired of their "Fuck Your Feelings" and "She's a Cunt" tee shirts. We're tired of their stupid chants and stupider rants. Tired of the chest-puffing fatties who think they're bad-asses, just a Moon Pie away from keeling over. Tired of the morons who think that voting for a certified con man whose goal is to wreck the world counts for something good. Tired of the mindless excuses and endlessly shifting goalposts. Tired of the mediot smart set pontificating that We Must Reach Out To Them, while never so much as implying that maybe it's a two-way street.

All Your Base Are Belong to Lulz

The big debate amongst Dems, libs, pwoggies and such like, is how hard the Democratic Party should "reach out" to the white working class (aka WWC, which fittingly sounds like a discount pro-wrestling organization) voter, who obviously went deep into the Clownstick pocket. It's a dilemma whether to "write them off" or "bring them aboard" with the proviso that tolerance is a requirement; in other words, for most it is not really an option to dismiss issues revolving around LGBTQ rights or Muslim bans or what have you.

It's a fair discussion to have, and in fact such dialogues should be had by all factions of all parties on basically a continuous basis. Ideally, that's how you arrive at improvement.

But I wouldn't expend to much energy in trying to win the deplorables over. Take a look at the folks who attended the pro-Clownstick "rally" (there were apparently somewhere between ten and fifty people there, so....) in Jefferson City, MiseryMissouri. Tell me which ones you think are remotely open to being swayed. They were playing The Ballad of the Green Berets while they waddled around the plaza, for fuck's sake.

I mean, think about it. These are obviously people who eke their way through life on a pittance, and here they are voluntarily showing their heartfelt support for a spoiled hectomillionaire who's in hock to the Russian mob and using the office as a profit center for his deals with the Chinese, who wouldn't piss on their heads if they were on fire. Clownstick doesn't give two shits about them, or anyone else besides himself. If they've paid any attention at all to his life history before the scampaign infomercial-rally bullshit, they know this already, whether they admit it or not.

This doesn't mean completely write them off, but it also doesn't mean the Dems should expend too much effort chasing after them. The phrase "come correct" comes to mind, that if Dems approach these folks with respect and understanding, they might get an audience. But it might also be political version of Winter's Bone, where people are the way they are, because that's how they've always been, and they're not interested in learning or changing much of anything.

Despite the innate skepticism many on the left have about the "economic anxiety" bloc, many of the Clownstickers are economically anxious, and in any case, what they really want is to see and hear that more attention is being paid to those issues than to transgendered bathroom use or whatever social justice cause is making the rounds.

This is not to minimize those things at all, but it is a call to look at the aggregate numbers realistically and play the odds accordingly. And the real numbers are in motivating non-voters to get out and vote, but it wouldn't hurt to at least cast a glance in the direction of the deplorables and see if they'll at least listen for two seconds. But it's an uphill struggle convincing low-info voters. Obviously they care very little about empirical facts as much as they need to feel that you will walk your talk.

I sincerely believe that if an agenda of economic justice for all is pursued, the social justice issues will fall into place much more easily. People who have a little more discretionary income and hope for the future do not have time to fixate on who's using which bathroom. And the Democrats are in a fine position to test that theory.

This Must Be More of That Winning We've Been Hearing About

So who gets to explain to Grampa Walnuts that NATO is not his country club:

We all knew that the White House meeting between President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been awkward. But things were even more uncomfortable than we thought. Turns out Trump’s version of diplomacy with one of the country’s most important allies in Europe involves handing over a bill for billions of dollars that the White House believes it owes NATO, according to the Times of London.

One German minister did not hesitate to qualify the invoice as “outrageous,” saying the intent was clear. “The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister said.

Although no one confirmed how much the total invoice was for, a calculation by the Times suggests the total was around $312 billion for the shortfall in spending and around $62 billion in interest.

It shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it does -- while NATO has members, in the sense that it is a security alliance, there are no membership dues. The members do not pay x dollars, pounds, or euros to each other or any central administrative entity. No money exchanges hands.

Everyone knows this except the people who are "running" this country, apparently. NATO members pledge to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their respective defense budgets. That's it. Germany, in particular, has actually been discouraged somewhat from ramping up defense spending (in terms of troops and weapons), and pushed in the direction of using more diplomatic means to resolve conflicts. Anyone want to venture a guess as to why that might be?

Even so, Germany is ramping up their defense spending to meet the NATO requirement, so they are complying. Free-riding was an issue with the last administration as well, but because Chocolate Hussein Thunder is an adult, the issue was handled with more (that is to say, in contrast with these morons, any) grace and diplomacy. Since we keep thousands of troops in their country, there are trade-offs here and there, and something (accumulated over many years) that amounts to about half of our annual defense budget is one of those trade-offs. This is shameful anyway; Germany sent 5,000 troops under the NATO agreement to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11, and have lost 57 soldiers over there.

The advantages of being the big dog come with some costs, and this is simply one of those costs. Again, adults and strategic thinkers understand this. God-Emperor Man-Baby and his boozehound grand vizier don't understand anything.

So, uh, sixty-five days in and here we are -- compromised up the wazoo with the Russians, every close ally pissed off at us, no credibility with anyone, already out of juice for domestic policy. If we're lucky, these people will prove to simply be too incompetent to do too much damage, and once get an adult back in the chair, we can repair our damaged credibility with the countries who thought they were our friends. Anyone tired of all that winning yet?

This Week In Fuck 'em

It's always sad when a family gets busted up for no good reason, even worse when that family seems to be nice, hard-working, well-liked in their community. But again, it's impossible to generate any sympathy for this dingbat. He told you what he planned to do, and now he's doing it. You chose to believe that the arbitrary classifier of "bad hombres" was something that he either knew or cared about.

Same thing with this fool; in fact, Kraig Moss might be an even less sympathetic character than Helen Beristain. This guy is just too much. I don't want to minimize the tragedy of him losing his 24-year-old son to a heroin overdose, it's too awful to fathom. But Moss attended 45 rallies, heard all the lies, the chants, the nasty hateful rhetoric from the cheeto and the mob alike. He was down with Locking Her Up and Building The Wall. But now he finds himself betrayed on the issue that he cares about, and the whole deal is off.

We're all tired of these "what are they thinking" stories; this is just a different flavor, a close cousin to those tedious ass-spelunking expeditions the scriveners take out to Real 'murka to get the pulse o' the people. I have a feeling we're going to be seeing more of this particular flavor of buyers' remorse, of Leopards Eating People's Faces Party voters shocked and dismayed that their face is getting eaten by leopards.

(Which is unfair to leopards, who are as majestic and noble creatures as you are likely to find. Hyenas are a much more appropriate comparison to the "movement" Clownstick and his cult followers represent. Or dung beetles, if dung beetles could attack people.)

These stories are meant to elicit a reaction of either contempt or pity, but it's hard to feel either of those things for either of those people. Mostly it's difficult to know what the fuck to make of them.

Helen Beristain is an immigrant herself, married an illegal immigrant who had already been popped once. She understood the stakes, and yet she chose to cast her lot with the reality teevee clown known primarily for colorful, self-serving lies, dismal treatment of women, ripping off contractors and shareholders, and being cut off from borrowing from any of the commercial banks in New York, despite having his own skyscraper literally on the same street as some of them. Her dopey, mewling nonsense shows that she still hasn't learned anything from this.

Kraig Moss is a different breed of rube -- he quit his business, stopped paying his mortgage, gutted the interior of his house, and followed the Chump Train around the country with his stupid songs, like a dipshit hippie following the Grateful Dead in a haze of bong-water mist and patchouli oil. The old joke about cons is that in a short con, the mark gives the con man all the money he has in his pocket right then and there; in the long con, the mark goes home and sells all his shit and heads back to give the proceeds from that to the con man as well.

They're nothing but marks, and there will be more to come, and it's damn near impossible to give much of a shit. I'm honestly surprised they aren't previous customers of Chump University, because they're exactly the type.

Man of the People

Goddamn, he's such a fucking child:

Adults understand that while the ACA has its flaws, the intent was to establish a framework that could be tweaked by subsequent sessions of congressional representatives who took their roles seriously. Children, ideologues, and opportunistic assholes say things like Clownstick does in the above tweet. His essential position on this is "rather than work on the flaws and improve the product, let's burn this fucker down and make a new one."

Never mind that the ACA was the culmination of efforts that began in the Truman administration, never mind that their "plan" was a vicious joke, people will die because these fuckers are content to let the ACA twist in the wind and implode. This should clarify to those who might still be wondering whether they are really as horrible as they seem. They're probably worse than you think.

The Fart of the Deal

The Clowncare fiasco the last couple days should make it clear to everyone that Hair Fuhrer's reputation as a master negotiator rests entirely under that thing on his reduced scalp. As with all things these days, it is clear only to the people who already saw it long ago.

None of the things he promised for two years would be done right away has really even been started. He spent months braying about how much smarter he was than the stoopid generals, and how his secret thirty-day plan to end ISIS was a slam-dunk. Sixty-five days in and you haven't heard a fucking word about ISIS.

Health care reform is even worse -- Thursday's initial failed vote was, like everything with these dipshits, meant to be symbolic, as it was the seventh anniversary of the passage of the ACA. So beyond the failure of Master Negotiator to bring his own party to heel, the plain fact is that these assholes had seven full years to come up with an alternative to the Worst Thing Evar, and all they have is a tax cut for the wealthy barely disguised as a health care plan. Even the inbred diehard cultists aren't quite dumb enough to fall for that, if only because they'll be the first ones affected by it.

The Wides of March

Here's some advice for the counter-maga protesters:  let the maroons have their little party, while they still can. Hold your own rallies tomorrow, or next weekend, and compare attendance counts. Take photos and harass them online. Our crowd is bigger than their crowd, that sort of thing.

Better yet, show up and harass your congress-critters, let 'em know what time it is, and that you won't forget in eighteen months -- in fact, you'll organize and mobilize and be back in greater numbers at the voting booth. Trust me, they are already noticing, and they are getting worried. Keep up that momentum and diversify your protest portfolio, and watch them run. Hit 'em where it really hurts, and keep hitting.

For the life of me, I have never understood the appeal of standing around in a public place with a sign indicating my opinion, as part of a greater group of like-minded souls. It just seems so....meaningless, a theatrical act of choir-preaching. Does it convince anyone of anything, has anyone ever changed their mind on something by observing a mob in the public square agitating for something or other? I know I haven't, and I'll bet you haven't either. I don't understand the point of candlelight vigils, either, so maybe it's just me.

Shot in the Dark

Let's just say it's not unreasonable to be just cynical enough to sincerely believe that at least part of this verdict and sentence is based on a white cop shooting a black child in Loozy-anna. As with most police shootings, though, race is more of a distraction than a useful observable component of an avoidable situation.

Officer Stafford and his partner fired a total of eighteen shots into the SUV in question; Stafford fired fourteen of those himself. The mitigating factor is that all of those shots, captured on video, were fired after the SUV had given up trying to flee, and the driver (father of the child) held both hands out the window, indicating surrender.

Based on the evidence and testimony, it sounds like the correct decision was made, but again, it's not difficult to believe that it wouldn't have even gotten this far if the cops had been white, and especially if the victim(s) had been black.

Forget all that for the moment. Compare and contrast the above case with this recent decision regarding another police shooting. If this doesn't infuriate and concern you, you aren't paying attention:

Andrew Scott and his girlfriend were playing video games in their Florida apartment late at night when they heard a loud banging at the front door. Scott, who was understandably disturbed, retrieved the handgun that he lawfully owned, then opened the door with the gun pointed safely down. Outside, he saw a shadowy figure holding a pistol. He began to retreat inside and close the door when the figure fired six shots without warning, three of which hit Scott, killing him. Scott hadn’t fired a single bullet or even lifted his firearm.

The figure outside was Deputy Richard Sylvester. He failed to identify himself as a law enforcement officer at any point. He had no warrant and no reason to suspect that Scott or his girlfriend had committed a crime. He did not attempt to engage with Scott at all after he opened the door; he simply shot him dead. And on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit held that Scott’s parents and girlfriend cannot sue Sylvester because the officer’s conduct was not “clearly” illegal.

This is more than simply "bad" or "sad" or "wrong." This decision is monstrous, and extraordinarily dangerous. The practical ramifications of this ruling make it almost literally impossible for a person to defend themselves in their own home.

A few more details about the case in question, since the Slate article focuses on the legal consequences:

• It wasn't just "late at night," it was 1:30 AM.
• Scott was completely innocent; the Lake County police had fucked up and gone to the wrong apartment, pursuing a suspect who had fled on a motorcycle.
• At no point did Richard Sylvester identify himself as law enforcement; in fact, it was the policy of the Lake County Sheriff's Department to not identify themselves, which seems bizarre, stupid, reckless, unnecessarily dangerous for cops and civilians alike. But, y'know, Florida.

So, to recap:  Andrew Scott is sitting at home, minding his own business, when someone starts banging on his door at one-thirty in the morning, without identifying themselves. Scott legally keeps a gun for self-defense, and reasonably assumes that something is wrong. He opens the door -- his door, to his domicile -- and sees some asshole lurking in the shadows, still not identifying himself as A FUCKING COP. Scott goes to close the door, still only holding his gun at his side, not having lifted it or pointed it at anyone, and is blown away in a hail of bullets.

Richard Sylvester and the Lake County Sheriff's Department, through poor policy and sheer incompetence, murdered Andrew Scott, pure and simple. The citizens of Lake County are less safe by having these uniformed mutants on the street. Sylvester should not be in the law enforcement profession, based on lack of qualification, and if he had any sense of honor, he would end himself for what he did to an innocent man in his own fucking house. I hope it haunts him to his final breath, never giving him a moment of peace.

That and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee, but it won't bring any justice for the murder of Andrew Scott, or the ongoing evisceration of our most basic rights to be safe in our homes -- not only from criminals, but from idiot fuck-up cops who think they have more rights than the people they're supposed to be protecting and serving. Maybe they do have more rights; if that's the case, then simply say so out loud, and we can all have that collective discussion.

But at the very least, maybe someone from the "justice" system or the sheriff's department should explain to the kids in the cheap seats what exactly Andrew Scott should have done, when a stranger beats the shit out his door in the middle of the night and refuses to identify themselves. Seriously, what the hell are you supposed to do in such circumstances? Scott literally would have been better off by shooting Sylvester right away, and trying his luck by claiming that he saw a gun and Sylvester didn't identify himself. He'd still probably have been murdered, though.

Maybe Scott should have kept a video camera handy to record the proceedings, but even then he probably would have faced prison time and had to defend himself over that. They have rigged the system in their favor, everywhere you turn. The rule is maximum accountability for the peons, no accountability at all if you carry a badge. Or not; it's surprising some criminal or gang hasn't made some sort of enterprise out of shaking down unsuspecting mooks under feigned authority.

Again, this guy was at home, minding his own business, when these inept cops showed up and gunned him down for no goddamned reason at all. It's bad enough that they did it in the first place; it should be completely unacceptable that they get away with it.

This is precisely how police states come into existence, when citizens stop questioning the insane, awful events occurring right in front of their noses, under the color of authority. They try to tell themselves that the person who got shot had it coming for whatever reason, even as they quietly keep the truth to themselves, thankful only that it wasn't their turn.

Yet.

Nothing Beside Remains

Another day, another laundry list of transcribed LIES. As always, the whole mess richly deserves the FJM treatment, but to what end? More such lists erupt every week or so, or whenever some mewling scrivener feels it's their journamalistic duty to gain access to someone who has no intention of giving them a straight answer. So what's the fucking point?

Bonus points, though, for these gems:

1. Literally referring to the National Enquirer as "the newspaper." Jesus H. Christ, he really is the angry drunk sitcom dad of our collective cultural subconscious.
2. Seriously seems to believe that when he repeats unvetted bullshit that he heard on Fixed Noise or wherever, that when said bullshit is exposed it's not on him at all, but on the idiot who first pulled it out of their ass. Which begs the question:  if that's your standard for epistemic accountability, why not just recite claims from various late-night infomercials, or the scrawled claims on truck-stop bathroom stalls?
3. "I'm the president, and you're not." Not for much longer, motherfucker.

The whole thing is just a pathetic pile of nonsense. The man can barely put together two sentence fragments in a row without a running start. These pieces do at least demonstrate quite clearly what clusterfuck of a human being he is, that his head is full of snakes and mirrors and sulfurous smoke.

He thinks that because he drew crowds in safe states that "the country believes [him]". Fine, asshole. Come to a state where people actually live and see how that works out for you. He won't because he's a chickenshit, like his sucker-punching cult followers.

Betting Pool

So the betting markets fucked up royally in predicting the election outcome, obviously, but so did the "professional" pollsters. With that caveat in mind, and acknowledging that we are barely sixty days into this amateur clusterfuck of an administration, it bears mentioning that there are at least existing bets one can place that these motherless fucks will be down the road before the end of the first term, and even by the end of this year.

It's a hair too soon to be overly optimistic, but something is brewing and gathering momentum. Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and now Devin Nunes all appear to be up to their asses in alligators over the pattern of collusion between the Clownstick campaign and Russian intel. The only one of these assholes that's even a bit hard is maybe Flynn, and that's only because whatever his faults, he's still a general.

The rest of them? Pfft. Manafort just wants to go back to his dismal existence of serving as a bagman and PR flack for murderers and tyrants. Stone is a perv who literally likes to watch other guys fuck his wife; even more damning, he's a lifelong professional ratfucker. Page appears to be a broker between the Clownstick regime and the Russian oligarchs, and Nunes simply backed the wrong horse because he has way more ambition than brains or ethics.

The Marching Morons

I don't read much on Twitter, maybe check in on Richard Nixon and Nihilist Arby's once or twice a week, but this thread neatly encapsulates why we are where we are, how we ended up with a cartoon character in charge. They're not outnumbering us yet, not overall, but they are outnumbering us in many regions, and the ratio seems to be accelerating. Turns out that Idiocracy was not only a documentary, but it was wildly optimistic about the timeline. It won't take five hundred years at this rate, more like fifty.

I don't want Democrats to devise strategies to win over the dumb cow described in the tweet-thread -- I want them to discourage her from voting at all, not to mention breeding, driving, or pretty much anything else. We have to collectively decide we have had enough of stupid people, and start disempowering them as much as possible.

In my imaginary benevolent despotism, I would happily give her a decent guaranteed minimum income to not vote and not pollute the gene pool. There are too many of these mutants making decisions for all of us with their bizarre flat-earth epistemology, and the sooner we figure out a way for them to fuck off and die already, the better off the entire planet will be.

Is that "intolerant" and "elitist"? Perhaps it is technically, but we have to draw our lines somewhere, and I humbly submit for the record that an adult who is too stupid to recognize an elephant because it has red dirt on it is stupid about everything else. Seriously, I don't know how these fools remember to breathe. Bottom line is, you can't fix stupid, so we need to find a way to keep it out of the fucking voting booth.

Strategery

Let's think about just a few of the high spots in diplomacy and foreign policy that Wile E. Coyote Fuckface Von Clownstick, Supergenius, is responsible for in just eight weeks:

• Conducted sensitive national security discussions regarding North Korea missile launches in the dining area of his country club, allowing members to take photos and listen in;
• Scolded the Australian Prime Minister;
• Threatened Mexico with a military invasion to take care of the "bad hombres";
• Accused the British of bugging his Manhattan lair;
• Made implicit threats to China over territorial waters, as well as their handling of the NK situation.

And now, in keeping with this supergenius thing, we apparently think it would be a good idea to encourage the Germans to ramp up their military budget.

First, They Came for the Snowflakes....

It's always interesting to watch assholes like Tim Allen flaunt their "conservative" quals, especially in the context of how persecuted the poor darlings are.

Why, Allen has been kept down so harshly by the lib-nazis in Big Bad Babywood, that despite having not been funny for roughly two decades, and riding his one joke into the ground back while Bill Clinton was getting his pole smoked in the Oval Office, he was given another show in which he can be a low-rent Archie Bunker. Smell the persecution, libtards!

The reason it's interesting is that, as most of us know, Tim Allen Dick did time in Club Fed after getting busted in an airport with over half a key of coke. He got his sentence reduced in exchange for ratting out a bunch of fellow dealers. He's one of those conservatives who sincerely believes that everyone who does what he did ought to get the maximum sentence, while he should be allowed to skate. Mainly he's one of those guys that feels like he should get to keep every dime he earned slaving that one grunt joke, and that commie Kenyan moooslin would just give it all to crack whores.

The Con Way

When Kellyanne Conway says, "I'm not in the job of having evidence," she is, we all should admit, one hundred percent accurate. However artless her phrasing tends to be when she gets wound up, the fact is that facts are not her job. She is not in the business of disseminating information, or providing knowledge or insight.

She is nothing more nor less than a spreader of manure, a mechanism dedicated to the unholy task of fertilizing the media landscape with gin-you-whine, honest-to-Bannon, industrial-grade bullshit. And when the media play this tedious can you believe this shit? game with their readers and viewers, they are playing the game she wants them to play. Her goal, obvious as it is unstated, is to distract, to deflect, to muddy the waters and confuse the lines of questioning.

The easy slam would be to say she's "evil" like her boss, but the reality is that there are different shades and flavors of such a thing. The error in trying to categorize Clownstick's clear authoritarian tendencies is in trying to lump him in with other infamous political animals -- Hitler, Stalin, Mobutu, etc. And to be sure, Clownstick has the ethics of a termite and the soul of a banana republic caudillo.

Delete Your Job, Too: Frank 'n' Beans

Speaking of useless journamalistic hacks who, if they hung up their knickers tomorrow and sought an honest paycheck, you wouldn't miss 'em for a New Yawk second, here's food-critic-turned-political-theater-turd-miner Frank Bruni defending Clownstick's pathetic appetites:

[Clownstick] ordered his usual slab of beef in his usual manner, “well done and with ketchup, as if the entree would be accompanied by a sippy cup,” wrote my friend Tom Sietsema, The Washington Post’s restaurant critic. That’s a great line, and just as witty was Sietsema’s call for “a moment of silence for the cow, the condiment and what most chefs would call a forced marriage.”

Forced, yes, but not necessarily unhappy, and certainly not deserving of the gasps and guffaws it drew. A former restaurant critic myself, I fielded a media request for my appraisal of [Clownstick]’s epicurean trespass. “Let he who is without a bag of microwave popcorn in his cupboard cast the first stone,” I said, or something along those lines.

It goes on like that, surrendering the usual guff about how "it pegs Trump’s critics as exactly the sneering elites he says we are" and such like. Listen close, asshole: Clownstick is a fucking elite, by his own reckoning. He lives in a marble-and-gold penthouse, with gold-plated terlets and Louis Quatorze chairs. Yes, it looks like Saddam Hussein's palace decorator had a go at it, but still.

The fact is, if Clownstick were marginally competent and/or sane, the fact that he likes his steak the same way a five-year-old does wouldn't even be fodder for snark. No one would care. But what does it tell you that it gets attention? There is something wrong with someone who takes a New York strip steak -- not the best cut but a pretty good one -- and has it cooked to a crisp, and served with ketchup? Go try that at the nearest expensive restaurant near you. If the chef doesn't come out and berate you for being a culinary retard, he probably spit on it. Not that you'd taste the difference.

Delete Your Job; Or, Just the Hacks, Ma'am

Steve has already covered this thoroughly, but it pisses me off to no end, and so I feel compelled to hurl my voice into the internets void:  I fucking despise these people down to their very molecules.

What Amber Phillips has scrawled on the virtual wall deserves to be roundly fisked, FJMed, deconstructed to a atomic level, refuted right down to Phillips' choice of verbs. But life is too short, so let's just grab a few of the high notes. Take a look at Bernie Sanders' tweetstorm this morning, whence comes Phillips' worthless analysis:



Near as I can tell, the good senator bookended three objective, empirical verities of very recent vintage with two salient, if somewhat objective, assertions. He essentially said that a leader who lies -- and this is important -- so flagrantly, and about things that are easily refuted, not only is no leader, but he undermines the credibility of the nation in the eyes of the world, and Sanders provided three fresh examples to support his argument. This is very solid work, in fewer than seven hundred characters, far fewer than the number of helpless pixels Phillips expends in her shameless hackery.

A prominent U.S. senator just described the president of the United States as a frequent and “shameless” liar, a claim that for reasons I'll explain is difficult to prove.

Yeah, except she doesn't explain it at all, except to assume that maybe Fuckface Von Clownstick legitimately does not know the facts regarding the things he asserts. In other words, despite having the facts explained to him over and over and over again by the very media outlet (among many others) for which Amber Phillips haplessly plies her trade, Clownstick may sincerely believe that millions of people voted fraudulently, that his inauguration crowd was record-setting despite all photographic evidence to the contrary, that Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii.

That's why this ultra-tense Democrat-Trump relationship is more than just he-said, she-said politics. Because Senate Democrats can require 60 votes to approve any piece of legislation, they have leverage over Trump and congressional Republicans, who have only 52 members in the Senate. Trump needs at least a handful of Democrats to help him repeal and replace Obamacare. And carry out his plan to restructure the tax code. Or pass a $1 trillion infrastructure package.

Right now, the exact opposite is happening: Democrats are blocking Trump in historic ways, like stalling committee hearings for key Cabinet posts or threatening to filibuster his Supreme Court nominee.

To read this tedious nonsense, you would never guess that we just spent the last eight years watching a Democratic president (who won by margins much larger than that of the current occupant) get kneecapped by the opposition party for no good reason at all, out of sheer obstructionism. But this asshole selects for his cabinet fellow skeevy billionaires and feckless morons who promise to destroy the agencies they have been appointed to lead. This is a strategy, albeit a demented one, employed by someone who has spent the better part of the last two years campaigning on the most toxic lies and corrosive rhetoric in modern memory. But it's the Democrats who are being meeeaan. Hey, fuck you.

Phillips lards the rest of her turd-burglary with weasel phrases such as "Democrats say," as if they were making unsubstantiated claims just to be dicks, as opposed to using facts to respond to someone who is making unsubstantiated claims just to be a dick. Repeated throughout, this serves as a cheap hack-media device to separate the writer from their intrinsic fear of "editorializing," as if this was all just a matter of partisan opinion-mongering.

The whole column is a pile of shit that should be flushed twice, but again what really takes it that extra turd-mile is this butt-nugget near the end:

It's possible Trump believes the allegations he's making, which seem to have surfaced on a conservative news site one of his top aides used to manage. Several top House Republicans haven't brushed off the wiretapping claims, with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, saying he'll look into it.

[emphasis in original]

Lots of things are possible. It's possible that I have a billion dollars in the bank and a twelve-inch cock, which I use on Salma Hayek several times a day. It's possible that the corporeal entity we know as "Donald Trump" is actually two hyperactive children piggy-backed under a trench coat, like trying to sneak into an R-rated movie in a cartoon. It's definitely possible that Amber Phillips should have reread the nonsense she was writing before she sent it in to her editor.

Because Phillips' own logic undermines her own argument. By her logic, this fucking jerkoff is either a pathological liar or the dumbest fucking guy on the planet. Because all of his lies -- and let's stop fucking around here, folks, he's lying and he knows it, he just doesn't give a shit -- have been refuted over and over again. Whether he chooses to read anything besides Breitbart, or watch anything besides Hannity or Fox and Friends, is irrelevant. You can cut a dropout oxy addict in Bumfuck, Ohio some slack for not having their facts straight; it is an existential danger and a complete abdication of responsibility to cut the guy in the Oval Office such slack. Also, Devin Nunes is a shameless douchebag who would probably chug Steve Bannon's pole on the White House lawn if told to do so. [Ed.-- But he'd wait for Jason Chaffetz to finish his turn.]

You might expect more out of a corporate media entity than a cheap reiteration of George Costanza rationales. You would be wrong to have that expectation.

Word of advice to the "legit" media -- the only thing required for you to do your job is that you call people and things what they objectively are. Stop using weasel words and pretzel logic and idiotic false equivalences, especially in what is essentially an opinion column.

The Continuing Adventures of Fuck 'em

As Charles Pierce and John Cole ably point out, it's impossible for any sentient being to have sympathy for what's going to happen -- what is happening, in the case of the WV coal miners -- to the Clownstickers. They elected to burn the house down, and they're in the weediest parts of the house, the parts that will incinerate hottest and first.

The coal communities are a particularly stark case study in this phenomenon. Those jobs really aren't coming back, and everyone seems to know it except them. Imagine a scenario a hundred years ago, where a town built around the buggy whip factory wanted to shut down the auto industry so's they could keep on making those buggy whips.

This is what's happening now, except much worse. Clownstick and his buddies tricked these rubes. The regulations will get lifted, and the streams and water tables and caves (West Virginia has the finest cave system in the country) and towns will get coal ash and chemicals dumped into them. The mines will be more dangerous, less accountable for, say, a collapse. And no coal jobs added, because again, no coal jobs needed.

Welp, that's what you get in Kin-tucky for voting for Bitch McConnell over and over again, for voting for a meathead governor whose mission is to fuck you out of your health care. Same as WV, these folks are in dire need of help and seem to not want it -- or worse, insist on voting for people who will take what little they have and gut them in the process. It will happen in other states, just give it time.

These highwaymen told them exactly what the deal was, what they intended to do. The good voters of the Real 'murka states voted for them by a landslide. So a landslide is what they get, perhaps literally, once the regulations are removed. Hope they enjoy digging themselves out.

Ozymandias

If there was one useful feature of Duh Big Speech last night, it's that it sorted out the actual journamalists from the useless theater critics. Hacks from Chris Cillizza to Van Jones fell all over themselves praising Clownstick's uncharacteristically sober teleprompter reading. All of it bore the same damning whiff of faint praise, of a bar lowered well below sea level. Grampa Walnuts didn't make a boom-boom in his Depends this time! Yaaayyyy!

And of course, Clownstick garnered the most praise for what may be one of the most transparently cynical (even for these stupid pageant events) ploys in some time -- the eulogizing of Navy SEAL Senior Officer William "Ryan" Owens, who was killed in the recent Yemen raid.

Bringing up Officer Owens in and of itself is fine and good; obviously such things are a staple of these events. But there are a lot of issues boiling right under the surface of Clownstick's bluster about the yuge success of the mission that killed Officer Owens. It was reported just a few days ago that Owens' father refused to meet with Clownstick, and is calling for a full investigation. Questions about the raid being botched have been raised, as has been the possibility that Owens met with a fate not unlike that of Pat Tillman.

Whatever the case, no reportable intel has been gleaned from the mission (contra Clownstick's claim in the speech); the success of the mission is highly debatable (especially in the cold calculations of whether the loss of a SEAL Officer, which represents millions of dollars invested in training, offsets the gain of killing a dozen al-Qaeda scrubs that probably could have been nailed with a drone strike); and in fact Clownstick had spent the first part of the week trying the push the buck over to the generals, Obama, whoever, anything to distract from the fact that he, Clownstick, approved the mission while having dinner with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, and later that night resumed his favorite hobby of troll-tweeting the failing New York Times.

Is Our Children Learning?

What Jim said. Forget trying to win over the deplorables -- whether or not they get the Clownstick driven up their collective asses and snapped off, they never learn. They would rather watch it all burn down for everyone, just to savor the libtard tears.

So the real question is for the libs, the progs, the fems, the dems, the bros and the hoes -- do you now see why midterm elections count, and are you going to fucking show up next year? Have you had enough of all the winning yet, after less than six weeks of said winning? Because the percentage of eligible voters who didn't even bother to show up in 2016 was greater than the percentage of voters who went for any particular candidate. That's good news, in that it means that there are more people who simply need to be motivated, rather than converted.

And never, ever believe a fucking poll again, at least not to the extent that you take a slam-dunk for granted. If people got off their fucking asses and took care of business, just took an afternoon and made sure they were registered, and maybe even registered to vote by mail so they don't get stuck in a three-hour line, you would never see the likes of Clownstick again. Hell, they might have to almost start taking us seriously.

I mean, I'm as cynical as all hell about the voting process, and the measurable utility of its usual Tweedledumb-and-Tweedledumber type of choices and outcomes. But this guy is a fucking nightmare, and it was entirely preventable. Anyone who attended one of the protests or marches, and did not vote for HRC, owns it just as surely as if they'd cast their lot with the angry cheeto. So grow the fuck up and get your shit together already.

Pressing Matters

Between yesterday's snubbing of the "fake news" entities who have the nerve to quote Mister Man verbatim, and today's pre-emptive backing out of the nerd prom (which no one was going to attend anyway), hopefully it's clear by now to the mainstream media monkeys what they need to do.

If anything, these corrupt motherfuckers are doing the media dorks a favor by clarifying things for them. The mission should be clearer than ever now -- investigate and publish everything. Grab a shovel and pick a direction. They are arrogant, stupid, and corrupt. This is a very potent combination, one that is rich with possibilities.

There is no journalism to be had at the press briefings anyway, they are merely propaganda meetings. The sooner these hapless scriveners realize that they either hang together or hang separately, the better off they'll all be.

Boycott

I wouldn't read too much into the "efforts" of three miserable cunts with too much money and not enough brains or ethics. They seem to be proud that they can blow a thousand bucks a month or so on clothes and shit they already have enough of, while a helluva lot of hard-working people out there barely make their fucking rent.

But a lot of them will also grab their wallets when they can, and make their preferences clear as well. One thing should be clear to these morons -- none of these stores stopped carrying Ivanka's overpriced shit because they don't like her daddy, they're stopping because her shit doesn't sell as well. If it was selling, they'd be carrying, and as a consumer and a true-blue capitalist, I would expect nothing less.

The common thread with all of these crybabies is that they are completely blind to their hero's yuge and voluminous flaws; he spent eighteen months barnstorming the country, talking shit about everyone, lying about everything, going out of his way to be an asshole, and these fucking dingbats simply can't imagine why half the country opposes him outright.

Well, I hope I speak for at least some of my ilk when I say fuck them all. They are a collective disgrace, and whether they realize it or not, they hate their country and everything it stands for. They support a lying traitor who sold out to the Russians.

In the Post article, all three women are awful, to be sure, but Mary Carson seems the worst by a fair piece. I want to make it clear that I am gratified to know that she is physically debilitated. May her stocks go in the tank, and her life be long and poor and full of cat food. Same with the rest of them.

Provocateur

It's been an interesting week for poor Milo, no? Having not been familiar with him except by name, until his appearance last week on Bill Maher's show, I didn't really know what to expect. By the end of the segment, I guess it was mildly surprising how utterly fact-free and hacky the guy really is. I thought there'd be at least some nugget of principle, some vague core conviction of contrarianism or something.

But he's nothing but a confection of queer-lib schtick and bratty hair-pulling third-grader. He's basically a gay British Bart Simpson, minus the charm. Even Rush Limbaugh is entertaining on rare occasions. The idea that someone like Milo has any impact on the political world should give one an idea of how far gone we are. This is just "think of the stupidest thing you can, make something out of it, and do it in character."

Ami Imaginaire

Clownstick's attempts to Li'l Tommy Friedman his way through a transparent anec-LIE are barely worth observing, except insofar as it reveals much about him, upon a bare second of reflection.

Clownstick has no "friends" as such, since everything is transactional with him. There are people who he needs something from, and people who need something from him, who may be able to return a favor in the future. These two groups are by no means mutually exclusive, but neither are they "friends" in the sense that anyone is confiding in each other, exchanging any sentiment beyond surface pleasantries, etc.

That Clownstick continues to pick at Paris and use it as an example of terrorism gone viral reveals more than just his lack of knowledge about numbers and statistics, as it applies to stochastic terrorism. Clownstick portrays himself as a bon vivant who jet-sets hither and yon, meeting with people around the world, making Big Moves and plotting Big Deals.

Startin' Up a Rumor

It occurs to me that since SCROTUS (So-Called Ruler of the United States) spends so much of his time snipe-hunting the media by lobbing completely baseless, easily refuted lies, and then not bothering to respond when the media actually do their job and refute said LIES, that maybe the best response is to fight fire with fire. That is, create some true-sounding memes and disseminate them, poison the well, as it were, see what sticks.

So here's what I have been hearing and reading in many, many places, tremendous places:  Canadian Drumpfkins were identified with a simple online recruitment survey two weeks before the election, paid $100 cash each, and bused across the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, where rather than actually voting, they sabotaged the machines, clogged lines at precincts to prolong wait times, and stood behind the count teams at recount precincts, shouting random numbers in order to throw off the vote counts. American Drumpfkins were also bribed similarly to vote-pack swing state precincts. These are facts, and any attempt to deny or obscure these facts is just FAKE NEWS.

We'll come up with one of these little nuggets o' truthiness every Saturday for the near future. If anyone's still reading, please feel free to disseminate far and wide. The truth must be set free!

The Crybaby Cult

Seriously, is this what the next four or so years is really going to be like, an endless series of fucktarded anthropological excursions into Clownstickistan to suss the sage wisdom of angry goobers. Time after time, the message is clear -- Clownstick opponents need to do all the compromising, never the whiny Clownstick enthusiast who is now additionally butt-hurt because that mean ol' Meryl Streep said some terrible things.

And for the record, all Streep said was that maybe it wasn't cool to make fun of disabled people. She never even mentioned Fuckface by name. That seems to have made her mild ministrations all that more potent to these cultists. They can't stand it, mainly because they know that Streep was right, that if they had a friend or loved one who had a severe condition, a debilitating palsy that manifested itself in painful contortions and spasms in random intervals, it would hurt them to see that condition mocked by a cynical third-rate con-man for the sake of political expediency. Just like they look the other way when their hero taunts a tortured war hero, but will insist with a straight face that they support and respect military service and personnel.

Inside Man

I'll throw out the disclaimer that I don't know enough about John Schindler to attest to his reliability, and it does not go unnoticed that his article appears in the newspaper that Clownstick's son-in-law owned up till very recently, but Schindler's Twitter feed looks like he at least knows what he's talking about. The facts are indisputable that Kremlin Mike Flynn has his dick caught in a serious wringer here, and will probably be forced from his job barely a month into it, but knowing these animals, they'll probably replace him with Alex Jones.

It should be clear by now that the real challenge of this administration is figuring out whether they are incompetent or treasonous, whether their intent is to "disrupt" (in the hacky corporate jargon sense, as if causing chaos is a necessary precursor to innovation) or to destabilize.

In the end, it shouldn't matter. These people need to go. All of them. When lifelong professionals across the sixteen intelligence agencies are uniformly convinced that the Kremlin has ears in the fucking White House Situation Room, to the extent that they will no longer speak clearly and completely around the occupant of the highest office in the land and his appointed minions, we have a problem.

Clownstick needs to figure out a way to pay his bratva debts, other than by looting the US treasury and passing intel to Putin. Maybe he can host another pageant and grab some more teenage pussy.

Even Stephens

We've already gotten to know far too much about shadow preznit Steve Bannon. But did you know there's another Stephen in Clownstick's inner circle who's just as bad? It's true!

If anything, Stephen Miller might be even worse -- where Bannon has actually held jobs that require at least some skill and talent, Miller has been a lifelong conservatard Fuckface, writing passionate missives to the local newspaper as a high school student in Santa Monica, over such critical issues as whether the pledge of allegiance is being said often enough, or if Mexican holidays are getting too much attention.

Miller went straight from Duke University to work for Michele Bachmann and new Witchfinder General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuhd, before becoming Clownstick's main speechwriter last summer. Kind of funny how many of these douchebags who want only to tear down the gubmint have spent their entire professional lives working for that gubmint, innit?

So now Miller is spearheading the current LIE spewing from Clownstick's puckered liehole, that thousands of Massachusetts voters bused into New Hampshire to illegally vote there and throw the state to Hitlery. Despite the fact that, as described in the link, it is statistically and logistically just about impossible (and the down-ticket votes make no sense for that scenario), the idea that anyone could or would engage in this sort of easily traceable shenanigans for, you know, four electoral votes isn't just ridiculous, it's retarded.

So the media outlets seem to actually be pushing back on the current round of LIES being propagated by Miller and his thieving scumbag boss. It would be a mistake, though, to simply assume that this is more of Clownstick being his usual dumbass self. All of these lies and tactics -- the inauguration crowds, the travel ban, the intimidation of federal judges for doing their jobs, the placement of a Russian mole as National Security Advisor, the insistence on voter fraud with zero evidence -- are part of a systematic, concerted effort to push boundaries, to see what they can get away with.

This is not a matter of mere difference of political opinion. These people are scum, pure and simple. Miller is part of a breed that will literally do and say and fabricate anything and everything, just so the holy few who actually own this country, who already have more money than they could ever hope to spend, can get even more. Fuck them all.

Palace Corgi

There are precious few reliable axioms in this crazy world anymore, but here is one of them you can take to the bank:  any day where limey fuckface Piers Morgan gets taken down a few notches is a good fucking day.

Morgan got nailed to the wall on Real Time last night, by Aussie comedian Jim Jefferies, of all people. As a former contestant on Clownstick's phony game show, Morgan apparently felt obliged to stick up for his buddy, defending him against Bill Maher and others on the show referring to Clownstick as "mentally ill" and "stupid" -- which, of course, he is.

Such name-calling may be somewhat subjective, but can be arrived at and demonstrated by the preponderance of evidence, that while Clownstick may have only been sliming up the White House for a few weeks now, his behavior so far is entirely in keeping with eighteen months of campaigning, as well as several years of (among other things) conspiracy mongering and flat-out LYING, well after being corrected numerous times.

The argument culminated around Clownstick's most recent stunt, in which he persists in describing the increase in violent crimes over the past two years (the highest such increase in nearly fifty years) as the highest rate in that time frame. The difference between increase and rate has been explained over and over again, and at this point, if Clownstick chooses to go on in that direction, he is either willfully LYING, or he's too stupid to know the difference between rate and increase.

Morgan chose to defend such blatant hackery, and paid the rhetorical price. He's a lapdog to power, and should be treated as such.

Back at the Funny Farm

You've probably seen this little gem making the rounds already, and it's a definite winner for this week's edition of Clownstick Voters Get It Snapped Off In Their Asses:

MERCED, Calif. — Jeff Marchini and others in the Central Valley here bet their farms on the election of Donald J. Trump. His message of reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican stronghold, one of Mr. Trump’s strongest bases of support in the state.

As for his promises about cracking down on illegal immigrants, many assumed Mr. Trump’s pledges were mostly just talk. But two weeks into his administration, Mr. Trump has signed executive orders that have upended the country’s immigration laws. Now farmers here are deeply alarmed about what the new policies could mean for their workers, most of whom are unauthorized, and the businesses that depend on them.

“Everything’s coming so quickly,” Mr. Marchini said. “We’re not loading people into buses or deporting them, that’s not happening yet.” As he looked out over a crew of workers bent over as they rifled through muddy leaves to find purple heads of radicchio, he said that as a businessman, Mr. Trump would know that farmers had invested millions of dollars into produce that is growing right now, and that not being able to pick and sell those crops would represent huge losses for the state economy. “I’m confident that he can grasp the magnitude and the anxiety of what’s happening now.”

Uh-huh. Because mere mortals couldn't possibly understand the logistical and financial requirements that farming to scale present to the farmer. What the fuck is with these people? It's bad enough that this dipshit seriously thinks that non-farmers or non-businesspeople have no concept of this, but it's even worse that he also seriously thinks that Clownstick does understand their dilemma to any significant level.

Immigration was by far Clownstick's most consistent issue. Forget that he had no real plan or solution; forget that he clearly had no fucking clue about anything, including that particular subject. He tried, in his own inimitable, incoherent way, to make it his key issue. But it came out as a rambling obsession, like all his other obsessions the rambunctions of a drunk on a barstool in every Moe's Tavern across this land of ours.

Only someone who knew nothing at all about large-scale agriculture, who had no clue about what cracking down on immigrants had done to other states in the recent past, would talk like that, would say the things He, Clownstick said over and over and over again.

Credit Where Due

It's been kind of a cottage industry in these here virtual pages over the years to talk shit about the New England Patriots and the douchebag fair-weather townies that pose as fans. And Brady, Belichick, and Bob Kraft are still and always welcome to kiss every square inch of my pasty Irish ass, just on general principle.

However, it should be duly noted that no fewer than six of Brady's teammates have already pre-emptively refused to visit the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl victory. So good on all of them, and hopefully more follow suit. And anyone who starts up the usual bullshit about "respecting the office" can go fuck themselves. Clownstick himself doesn't respect the office, and professional athletes vote and pay taxes just like the rest of us, and the same right to register their opinion that we all have.

It Puts the Lotion On Its Skin

You know, there's nothing stopping the lot of you from leaving the golf club basement, and going out and finding a real story. Fucking morons. Do something, anything. He's not king, he doesn't have literal physical control over you. Go find someone to hack into the IRS system and get his tax returns or something. This is just pathetic.

Honor Among Thieves

Let's accept for the sake of argument that Clownstick was "joking" about "ruining the career" of a Texas state senator who had the nerve to talk about legislating that a suspect should be convicted before his assets could be seized by the thieving, grasping paws of the jackbooted thugs trying to shake a money tree. The problem is, Clownstick doesn't even question the principle that we used to at least theoretically have, that people have a right to be tried, with evidence presented and everything, before being punished, whether monetarily or by jail time.

Guess that's just too darn inconvenient for these good Christian fokes, who apparently lay awake at night dreaming up nefarious ways to steal under the cover of "law enforcement." There are plenty of cases indicating that this is a clear incentive for many police departments, who see the convenience of obtaining assets without even having to go to the trouble of, you know, proving that any laws had been broken in the first place.

Well, you want a fucking corrupt police state, looks like you got one. Then again, this has been going on for a while, and it's not like the last guy did anything about it.

Highest Bidder

Watching internet shouty-face cupcake Tomi Lahren on Bill Maher's show last night provided a nutshell take on every one of these interchangeable fuck-dolls, incoherently spouting quarter-truths, flat-out lies, and scummy innuendo for FSM knows what unholy purpose.

Lahren is, one supposes, conventionally attractive, although one thing these women seem not to realize is that that quotient is devalued in direct proportion to the bullshit that spews forth from their carefully lacquered mouths. In other words, it doesn't matter how cute you are, nothing's uglier than a shameless, lying hack who knows they're full of shit and keeps going anyway.

Then again, no doubt the inverse is true the further along the left-right political spectrum that their intended audience lies. But hey, if they're comfortable knowing that Fixed Noise viewers old enough to be their great-grandfathers are out there sputtering puffs of powdered man-chowder into their shag rugs, whatever pays the rent.

It seems that Lahren has, it turns out, a comparatively liberal recent past (then again, when you're 24 years old, your entire past is pretty recent), and that too should be no surprise, and should even be instructive, a confirmation of what we already know -- that while politics is marketed as a "values-based" product, it is in fact strictly business.

Interview with the Vampire

So we're all having good fun with the "Bowling Green Massacre" gaffe on the part of one Kellyanne Conway, soulless political hack and serial LIAR. (I think it's important to capitalize the words associated with LYING, in order to draw attention to the useless meatbags who do that for a living. Fuck them all, right in their tiny little coal-lump hearts. Conway is a fucking LIAR, every moment that she is conscious, and probably even when she is sleeping.)

For one, I would suggest that it wasn't a "mistake" at all, but merely another brick in the wall of disinformation this regime intends to utilize to secure its tentacles in the consciousness of its morlock voting base. These retards will believe literally anything, so long as it affirms their usual nonsense, and this is the sort of thing that feeds right into their booga-booga-moooslim paranoia.

Conway can try to dodge all she wants, and pretend this was all an "honest mistake," but her own words betray the truth, when she tries to insinuate that the media conspired to leave this tragic story uncovered. To which we can only say, If only that story had actually occurred.

But fuck all that. What needs to be asked of our intrepid media fools is why Conway needs to be "invited" on at all. What does she do? She LIES, over and over again. She's a fucking LIAR, pure and simple. Honestly, what is the point of having her on these stupid shows. I've got hands, I can jerk myself off. I don't need this LYING dingbat to fucking LIE to me one more LYING time.

The corporate media will probably never thrive again, not in this environment. People are simply too niched at this point, in acquiring the (dis)information they use to "inform" their decisions and opinions. And the media, in their insane quest for what they think of as objectivity, have actually managed to do nothing but piss off people on all sides of the political spectrum, because their version of objectivity has exposed them as untrustworthy for the most part. Even when their information turns out to be verifiable and empirically correct, too often it couched in the sonorous idiocies of High Broderism, the "both sides do it" system of false equivalence that gives flat-earth opinions a seat at the debate table.

So a question for said media solons:  what, if anything, would happen if, instead of having Conway on, and "challenging" her bald-faced LIES, only to let her counter them with MORE LIES, to your faces and then afterward on her Twitter account, what if you just stopped having her on at all? What value do her LIES add, seriously? Her role is to muddy the waters, and she is very good at that, but as much as the media dorks think that they're clarifying said waters, they really aren't.

So again, really, what harm would be done if they just didn't have her on at all anymore, since she's just wasting everyone's time and harming America?

[Update 2/4/17 10:00 PST:  Never thought I'd see the day where I'd be praising CNN for growing a pair, but we are indeed in strange times now. This is what it's going to take -- overpaid meat puppets being forced to make an existential decision about who and what they really are, and whether it means anything to them. It appears that CNN is making that decision, here and now. Good for them. Hopefully the Big Three follow suit, and quickly. The only reason to have Conway on should be to force her to defend Clownstick's nightly rage-tweets, one by one, and then make fun of her pathetic attempts to cover for him after her segment is over.]

Super Bowl 51 Prediction

Atlanta Falcons (13-5) vs. New England Patriots (16-2)
Spread:  NE +3 (o/u 59.0)

This is sizing up to be a classic strength vs. strength game, pitting Atlanta's high flying video-game offense against New England's opportunistic defense, which led the league in scoring this season. However, as the Football Outsiders stat gurus point out, the Patsies' D faced the easiest schedule of opposing offenses this year, certainly nothing at the level of what Matt Ryan and Julio Jones have done to most of their opponents all season (and they have only gained momentum in their post-season games).

But as the FO guys point out, the Falcons' defense faced mostly middling offenses throughout the season as well, and put up worse numbers throughout the season. Their improvement over the last six games still leaves them behind what New England defensive coordinator Matt Patricia is doing with his squad, which is solid but has no true superstars (for example, the season sack leader is DE Trey Flowers, with just 7.0 sacks).

Nor does Tom Brady have any real weapons on offense beyond WR Julian Edelman, who leads the team by far with 1106 receiving yards and just 3 TDs, and RB LaGarrette Blount, who powered 299 carries for 1161 yards and 18 TDs. We can (and do!) hate on Tommy Tuck Rule whenever possible, but the fact is that he and Belichick do more with less, year after year. With no true number-one wideout since Randy Moss, and all-world TE Rob Gronkowski out injured (imploded vas deferens) most of the season, and being suspended the first four games, the Patsies still coasted to a 14-2 regular season record with relatively little trouble or drama.

Fuck them and their spoiled masshole fans, though, and for reasons political as well as sports-related. Brady, Belichick, and team owner Bob Kraft are all shameless butt-lickers for Clownstick, and they can all go die on a fucking island together. And not a nice resort island either, more like some deserted atomic-tested atoll out in the remote western Pacific, where they can draw lots to see who gets eaten first. Our money's on the fat old bastards Clownstick and Kraft getting spit-roasted first, pitting the ageless Brady against the wily Belichick for the final Island Long Pig Showdown.

But uh, in the meantime, Sunday's game should be a good one, and fairly close, even though the last time you had a killer offense versus a killer defense, it was the biggest SB blowout evar, literally from the first play of the game. That game featured a record-setting, knockout D rightly nicknamed the "Legion of Boom," and the architect of that defense was one Dan Quinn, currently the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons. I'm gonna call it right now that Atlanta's defense steps up and gets a few plays on Brady, and gives Ryan and Jones just enough breathing room to bring the Falcons franchise their first Super Bowl victory.

Predicted Score:  Atlanta 37, New England 34.

[Update 2/5/17 7:40 PST:  Well, hell, after making America great again in the first three quarters by rolling to a 28-3 lead, Atlanta shit the bed yuuugely, allowing the fackin' Patsies to tie it up with just eighteen seconds left in regulation, and marching right down the field in the first overtime drive in Super Bowl history, for a 34-28 victory for Team Clownstick. No, I am not consoled by the fact that I guessed New England's exact point total.

Maybe the Falcons should have campaigned in Wisconsin. I keed, I keed.

Even more fun:  apparently Clownstick left his own Super Bowl party before the Patsies mounted their comeback. Sad! Also, too, does Melania have permanent Resting Hostage Face at this point, or what?]