Raging Bro

Well, there's your country in a nutshell, folks:  Christine Blasey Ford was poised and calm and credible, and Rapebro McGambledrunk was shouty and angry and weepy, acting like nothing more than a classic alcoholic wife beater. There should be no more doubt that, even if he didn't assault Ford, McGambledrunk is pure fucking scum, and shouldn't even be in a federal circuit court, much less the Supreme Court. He clearly doesn't have the temperament -- nor, it would seem, the temperance. His "testimony" was sneering, entitled rage from a whiny, spoiled asshole, whose personal hypocrisies and moral compromises make him the perfect selection for the Human Centipede Administration. He almost certainly perjured himself even more at points in his testimony today.

And in the end, it doesn't even matter. They're going to confirm him, just as an act of defiance. Fuck you if you don't like it.

But let's spread the hate around to all the places where it truly belongs, not only the vulgar hackery of Chuck Grasshole and Huckleberry Closetcase, but all the other little Eichmanns who fill their roles reliably. We can and should demonize the old white patriarchy that continues to run their tyranny of the minority roughshod over process and principle alike.

And there are plenty of females who also deserve to shunned and scorned -- not just Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, but Rachel Mitchell, who took the job as beard for these fuckers. The sixty-five women who signed a support letter for McGambledrunk -- who gives a fuck that many of them supposedly have "taken it back"? The careerists who wrote dopey op-ed pieces about what a great carpool dad he is. Even the girls he coached, who allowed themselves to be used as props, and their parents. This shit was disgusting, unprecedented.

And it was all because the Republicons knew about McGambledrunk's issues, they knew all along. They were prepared at every step of the way with these cheap stunts. They know what he is, and they want him despite of it, or as we've already established, because of it.

So while women (and men) certainly should repudiate the asshole men running the ongoing subjugation and ridicule of vulnerable women, what should be the appropriate response to the Aunt Lydia types that actively support that regime?

Make no mistake, McGambledrunk will be confirmed, not only by a straight party-line vote, but it wouldn't be surprising at all to see Manchin and Donnelly and Heitkamp throw in as well. Because hey, it's politics, and whaddaya gonna do about it, sport? It's hilarious how so many common-taters are piously insisting that a vote certainly cannot be held now, because....well, tons of perfectly good reasons, really. Like that's going to stop them. The whole reason they doubled down on this loathsome turd is to show everyone they could, to rub your face in it and make you eat that turd. You think they give two fucks about street protests and angry phone calls?

Well, what are you going to do? Vote? Great. Make sure you haven't been "accidentally" purged from the registry, or that your precinct hasn't been closed or moved without notice. And then, even if you do vote, look at all the pigfuckers who are just fine with all this, who like that McGambledrunk "fought back," and exult in the lib-pwning he'll do for decades to come.

It's going to get worse before it gets better. Count on it. The bottom line is that the entire Republicon party needs to be ended, the earth salted and the ashes scattered. These people are fucking monsters.

Droit du Failson

While the corporate mediots continue chasing their collective tails over how mean Chuck Grasshole and Borrin Snatch are to wimmins, it might be a good time to review the essential truth that there's more to hate about Brett Kavanaugh than just his attempted rapes at prep school. The guy's just a complete sack of shit, from gin blossoms to hemorrhoids. He's a creep and a prick who has never been held accountable for anything in his life, because he has money, and money elevates you into the special caste.

David Rothkopf provides a solid reminder that Kavanaugh is basically everything real 'murkins claim to hate -- a spoiled frat-boy asshole who has simply been allowed to fail upward in life, over and over again, until the stench of his kind finally just wafts to the top. See Fredo Arbusto, and the jism-stained tangelo currently defiling the office. We talk a good game about these motherfuckers, and rarely follow through. This country is run through and through by mediocre dickheads of louche morality, failsons who would be unemployable anywhere outside of daddy's friends' companies.

There are so many reasons to disqualify Kavanaugh, beyond whatever he did or didn't do to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. He's already been caught perjuring himself under oath, both during the current confirmation hearing and in past ones. His financial record is janky at best, but very possibly compromised. He managed to pay off a quarter-million dollars in debt, while sending his kids to their elite prep schools, while living in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. Sure would be something if Mother Jones didn't have to do all the heavy lifting on that, of maybe some of the corporate media failsons could be convinced to do their fucking jobs once in a while and check this out, instead of junketing down to Miami on the corporate dime and giving a platform to a bunch of Republican donors chomping at the bit to throw another woman under the bus.

Remember ladies, we can't do it without your help.

While we're at it, I feel compelled to throw in my two cents on this "all teenaged boys do this" bullshit. Let me be clear on this, without sounding humblebraggy: I did okay with girls in high school, went to plenty of parties, got my mack-daddy game figured out, and then toured with rock bands for the next ten years. So it's a pretty safe bet that I've been with a lot more women than a greasy tool like Rapebro McGambledrunk, like an order of magnitude more. Every woman Kavanaugh has ever gotten close to with his cheese-dick frat-boy "no means yes and yes means anal" idiocy knew his family had money. Some of us had to earn it, son.

But the point is, at no time would I or any of my friends have considered holding a girl or woman down and putting a hand over her mouth to silence her. It pisses me off to hear such behavior characterized as "normal" or "we all do this." I fucking resent these cunts (and it's been mostly women who've been floating that lie) saying such a thing. Maybe they live in a world where sex is aggression and domination and nothing more. I don't know and I don't care. But it's vile and toxic to just categorically assert that "all guys do this." We don't. Again, corporate mediots, stop giving liars a national platform to LIE.

As mentioned the other day, there is no need for the Goopers to stick with this flaming dumpster fire of a nomination. They can cry all they want about Dem perfidy, but they held Scalia's seat open in bad faith for 400 days, and Gorsuch sailed right into it with barely pro-forma opposition. Just like the teenaged behavior, this level of opposition does not "happen all the time." McGambledrunk is compromised and they know it, and it's why the emperor wanted him in the first place, a faithful lackey who knows who owns his ass, and will give daddy whatever he wants. He's a judicial gimp. They oughta buy him a leather mask with a zipper as a confirmation gift.

But it's clear now that the other reason they won't just cut bait on McGambledrunk and take one of the scores of knuckle-draggers down the list is pure chimp dominance. They need to show their baboon basetards that they can't be pushed around, especially by a bunch of broads like Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono. [makes "pussy-whip" wuk-ch! noise]

Next time you're hearing yet another tiresome panel discussion about McGambledrunk's harmless teenaged groping, just try this thought exercise: what if McGambledrunk had been poor and black?

China Syndrome

Steve Hilton, Fixed Noise "analyst" and former advisor to British PM David Cameron, lands some pretty solid jabs in his analysis book excerpt regarding China's ascendance as an economic and military superpower. In particular, Hilton's points about the strictures imposed upon American companies doing business in China are problematic. Gee, if only Apple could afford to produce their thousand-dollar phones in America.

But it's here where Hilton, to put it mildly, loses the thread:

[Fuckface Von Clownstick] should now reject in its entirety the failed China strategy of his globalist predecessors. This means not just continuing, through tariffs, to pressurize[sic] the Chinese regime on issues like the theft of vital technology from American companies.

He needs to go bigger, and bolder. At the UN and beyond, he should rally the whole world behind a simple but audacious goal: to topple Xi Jinping's regime by turning China into a pariah state.

Only in the Fixed Noise alternate universe does that sound like a sensible idea. These assholes have just spent the better part of two years telling everyone apart from the world's most detestable dictators to go fuck themselves. What incentive do any of our allies and trading partners have to work with him on this "audacious goal"? Clownstick approaches every negotiation -- hell, every conversation -- with this "what's in it for meeee?" attitude. Well, what the hell makes anyone think Germany and France and the rest of them won't take the same posture for such a silly, stupid proposition?

Again, Hilton's not wrong in his list of grievances about the empowered authoritarian Chinese state. But we collectively decided that cheap toys were more important than anything else -- American jobs, human rights, economic parity and stability, collective sanity, and much more. We made our decision, and now it's too late to turn back. The locus of economic power is already shifting toward the Indian Ocean. China is poised to take over as the top economy in a year or two. It's already happening, and trying to conscript the European economies, who had their fill of our nonsense when we dumped the criminally inept Fredo Arbusto regime on them, and are in no mood to give us more chances now that we topped that fuck-up royally, is a fool's mission.

Maybe the phrase "too big to fail" has some resonance for Hilton. This is absolutely the case with China, and some hare-brained, no-plan stunt at the UN won't change that. Now, a person who had some intelligence, surrounded themselves with other smart people, and planned out such a massive undertaking carefully might have a shot at turning back China's impending dominance.

But we don't have that, do we? We have a dyspeptic, tantrum-throwing reality-teevee clown whose closest economic advisors are a movie producer and a cokehead teevee econ jerkoff with a decades-long track record of failed predictions. Yeah, I'm sure the winning team of Mnuchin and Kudlow have carefully crafted an exquisite master plan to make China a "pariah state" while keeping what's left of the American economy intact.

The fact is that, despite strong employment and GDP numbers, the precariat of the Obama years is still very much in effect. Real wages are still stagnant, despite near-constant reports of unfilled jobs and desperate employers. Somehow, they're not quite desperate enough to, you know, offer more money. Hmmm.

And while the emperor might be brushing aside his cheeseburger wrappers every other night to tweetkake the proles about the "record" economic boom, there's a problem baked into that -- if we accept the premise that economic booms are cyclical, and the current boom cycle has gone on longer than any (or at least most) that preceded it, then by definition that means that statistically, we're overdue for a recession. And he's started and escalated completely unnecessary trade wars with our largest trading partners. So how does the econ wizard Steve Hilton suppose that's going to shake out?

Besides which, I don't know if Princess Snowflake still has her knock-off wares being manufactured in the Shanghai sweatshops, but if she does, there's no goddamned way Daddy Dearest is going to ruin that for her.

Moore or Less

So Fahrenheit 11/9 has dropped, and to perhaps no one surprise other than  Michael Moore's, it looks to be pretty much DOA. This essay in Variety magazine (I know, right?) is a fine rundown on the many reasons why this is so.

To those reasons it might also be added that Moore has spent the last couple years trying bridge the divide, as it were. And while it is true that working-class Clownstick supporters are much more similar to working-class Clownstick opponents than they are different, the problem is that it doesn't matter, as long as the first group spends all their time in their impermeable bubble of epistemic closure.

Moore was on Bill Maher's show the other night, plugging his film and indulging in his now-usual harangues at "elitist" libruls for not listening to real 'murkins, yada yada. Coupled with all the very good reasons for Moore's decline listed in the Variety article, this is a major reason as well. It's bad enough we have to be constantly lectured by lying sellouts and brain-dead truck-stop denizens in Fuckknuckle, Alabama. Now we're supposed to listen to Moore's happy horseshit about how it's all libruls' fault because they didn't watch enough Duck Dynasty or whatever synapse-melting pod-people "reality" bullshit they're clamoring for this month.

Either you believe politics and policy are serious subjects for serious people, or you don't. Insisting that people who take those things seriously should take all their cues from idiots who are just glomming onto a name they recognize and coupling it with their bottomless spite -- well, I don't need to hear anymore of that shit. I've had entirely enough of pointless lectures from people who tell me they're on my side. Fuck you. Go make a fucking film for them, see if any of them will reach out to us. I promise you it'll be an even bigger waste of time and pixels.

Boycott Them All

In its own shitty way, CNN is just as useless and destructive to the desiccated corpse of American politics as the Fixed Noise Entertainment Option is (click photo to enlarge).

These "news" orgs need to get right with Jebus and either clean house, or fold up shop. Not that that'll ever happen, since they're definitely fulfilling their true purpose -- to give each other panel discussion points and sell cheeseburgers and pharmaceuticals to the rubes.

It does no good to remind of the right thing to do. The only thing they understand is taking a shot to the wallet. This is hackery at its worst. I don't give a fuck how "principled" Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper are supposed to be, they're taking the checks, they're part of the problem.

Sometimes the "fake news" epithet is well-deserved. Fuck 'em all, put every goddamned one of them out of business. They're how we got in this jam in the first place. It's time these assholes had to go earn an honest living.

25th Amendment Remedies

This interview public relations hack job has to be read to be disbelieved. I have no idea who the two clowns are that participated in the dual fellation of Parsnut Mario Kart, but they need to shred and burn whatever journo creds they have, because those are fraudulent documents.

It's impossible to narrow it down to just one or two things. Here's a cursory list:

• He basically admits that he declassified the Carter Page docs because Dobbs, Hannity, and Pirro told him he should.
• He admits that he did not review the documents before declassifying them. He did it because "many people" asked him to.
• He keeps referring to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page as "lovers," which considering his own personal history is weird and creepy and hypocritical in its implicit moralizing. Maybe he thinks it'll keep his weird, creepy, hypocritically moralizing evangelical basetards in the game. He's probably right.
• He asserts that the FBI paid George Papadopoulos "from $500,000 to $2 million" for something or other, but never gets around to saying what.
• He thinks he should have fired Comey when he won the primaries. You know, five months before the fucking election.
• He continues to push the notion that Mueller is after his fat hide over some bullshit dispute of country club dues, something vague along that line. He's never quite clear about that, or about anything else. Oh, Mueller "wanted to be head of the FBI." Which he already had been, for over ten years. Fucking simpleton.
• He throws Jeff Sessions under the bus yet again. At this point, the KKKeebler Elf must be nothing but tire tracks and diesel exhaust, held together by spite and cracker crumbs. Sessions has even less self-respect than Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. Where does he find all these cucks anyway, do they rent their asses out at his club? I bet he has Roger Stone take them out for a test drive -- he's a power bottom if ever there was one.

Not only does he posit that the Democrats started the "Russia hoax" as an excuse for losing the election, seven months before the election, he lamely tries to cover that idiot logic by saying that was when people started thinking he had a chance to win. Right up to the very day of the election itself, I never saw a single reputable poll that gave him more than a fifteen percent chance. Even the normally reliable betting markets had Clinton at 85-90% chance of winning.

The idea that the Democrats -- who again were too inept to figure out how to beat a cartoon character with a well-documented history of bankruptcy, incompetence, and corruption -- were able to engineer months in advance this baroque hoax, with assistance from lifelong Republicans at every level, is so preposterous, only he and his ass-kissers on state teevee could possibly find a thread of logic in it.

Then an extended coda, riffing on the usual "I'm the greatest ever and no one has done more than me" jabber, but it reads and seems more jabbery than usual. It's hard to tell if it's because he knows the vise is closing on his droopy old-man balls, or because his narcissism prevents him from understanding why everyone doesn't think he's perfect all the time about everything. Probably a combination of both.

But these journos, inept as they are, deserve some credit, since their tedious knob job basically just let him keep going, and it's almost certain that a couple of the things he says, pertaining to Comey and perhaps Mueller and Sessions as well, could end up being self-incriminating. Just pick a random paragraph and read it aloud, and you ask yourself if that's someone who should be in any position of responsibility, much less in the White House.

It's almost tempting to leave him there to do more damage, since the people who vote for him don't even agree with him or the party on policy, but are merely voting out of spite to make the libtard snowflakes cry. They're about to get a further taste of tariff backlash magic, and their squeals of pain are surprisingly musical.
 

Balls to the Wall, Slight Return: An Obvious Theory

There is another highly likely reason they don't want to cut bait on Kavanaugh, and it's basically the same reason he was nominated in the first place:  because he's compromised. They obviously knew it; they had that stupid letter ready the very second Christine Blasey Ford's accusation got out.

Look at all the major players Clownstick has had working with and for him over the years, starting with Roy Cohn back in the day. Think what you know about (for just one example) Rudy Giuliani and his utter lack of character, and now try to imagine (without making yourself sick) all the things you don't know about him.

I don't mean weird sex shit, either; Ghouliani is an arm-twister, born and bred. Five of his uncles were supposedly made guys. He was a popular mayor in NYC well before 9/11, because of the feeling that he got shit done, and could and would (and did) do pretty much anything to make sure things got done.

Ghouliani's just one sordid example. Michael Cohen fancies himself a Ray Donovan-style fixer, and you should have no doubt that if someone were to grab a shovel and dig in the right spots, they'd find worse things than what you know. Kushner is balls-deep in debt to the Saudis and Qataris and the Chinese. Scratch just about any name in Clownstick's inner circle and you will find grime under your fingernail. Obviously, that's no accident. This is the problem with prizing loyalty over ability.

These are the kinds of people Clownstick has always liked to surround himself with, because they're compromised, because no one with any ethics will touch them and so they're grateful, they owe him and will be intensely loyal because there's nowhere else for them to go.

You think anyone wanted Huckabilly Sanders or Kellyanne Conway for anything before they hitched their wagons to that loser, much less now? Come on. Baghdad Barb would be hustling the mail-order swag for her dirtbag old man, and Conway was lamely shilling for Ted Cruz, talking days of shit about Clownstick, before she saw which way the wind was blowing.

So Kavanaugh makes perfect sense in that regard -- if he squeaks through, he'll owe Clownstick more than ever; if not, the next contestant will have to find ways to distance himself from the emperor's fat shadow. Awk-ward!

Balls to the Wall

Brett Kavanaugh attempted-rape accuser Christine Belsey Ford has asked for an FBI investigation into her claims before she testifies. Unfortunately, but all too predictably, this will not go her way -- the bureau will not investigate unless directed to do so, which obviously won't happen, and if Dr. Belsey Ford doesn't show up next Monday, Chuck Grasshole and the rest of the He-Man-Woman-Haters Club will just say, "Hey, we offered."

There is so much bad faith baked into this whole process it's sickening, just layers upon layers of naked cynicism. Should Ford have come forth at some earlier stage in Kavanaugh's ascent up the judicial ladder? Absolutely. Do we perhaps understand why women might be reluctant to come forward with these sorts of accusations? If we don't, we should by now.

For all the hacks doubting her account, one thing should still be clear:  liars don't typically ask the FBI to investigate their claims. Maybe it turns out to be bullshit, but no one knows yet, it deserves to be checked out thoroughly, and ferchrissake, you'd get dumped from an interview with Target or Walmart for this sort of thing.

Which makes sense, since the asshole-in-chief wouldn't last a day at a real job, at a company owned by anyone else. He wouldn't last a month even at the managerial or executive level of one of those companies, much less as floor staff. Those folks actually have to show up and work hard and behave themselves.

Perhaps most frustrating is that it's come to this point in the first place. Kavanaugh should have been disqualified or at postponed already regardless:  he has very likely perjured himself in this and past confirmation hearings; he seems unable to give clear answers regarding his opinions on important privacy rulings such as Roe and Griswold; he has yet to explain how someone with his means spends a quarter-million dollars on baseball tickets, and then pays down the credit card debt with a suspicious quickness.

Then there's the matter of only ten percent of his documentation being released for senatorial review. It is somewhat difficult to fulfill an "advise and consent" role for this lifetime appointment when you're only being given a fragment of the record to review, and over 100k pages are being deliberately withheld from review, on orders of a lawyer who represents Kavanaugh, Don McGahn, and George W. Bush's administration. Small world.

Obviously, this is no longer about Kavanaugh specifically, or even filling a SCOTUS seat generally. (And let's not forget Anthony Kennedy's role in all this. May he rot in hell.) This is about power, and the naked exercise thereof. This is about Republicans scrambling to fill the seat before the midterms, because they know or at least believe strongly that they're going to take a hit in about six weeks. This is about Not Backing Down.

Face it, they obviously have a list of knuckle-draggers if this one doesn't work out. There is no reason not to cut bait on Kavanaugh and move on to the next one, no reason to die on that particular hill. Except they clearly feel that this is their last best chance, that shit's coming down soon, and they now don't have enough time to try to ram through another mossback.

The Democrats do not have to pitch their tent on this single issue, as awful as it is. As noted, there are several salient issues regarding Kavanaugh, any of which should be at least enough to hit the "pause" button and get more information. Hell, there would still be time to confirm him before election day, if it came to that.

Even if this had been a last-minute stalling tactic, so what? The Goopers are trying to push this guy through without a proper review for purely political reasons. Their hypocrisy re Merrick Garland is wide open, and defying you to call them on it. The other valid questions about Kavanaugh have been summarily brushed aside, questions that they would have spent weeks grilling an Obummer-appointed candidate on. And we all know it. Why is only one side allowed to play cutthroat rules? This is the game you wanted, assholes. Well, you got it.

But their real strike date for this is the end of next week. Because some of these shitbirds -- lookin' at you, "Ted" Cruz -- need to get back home and campaign in October, to try and keep their seats.

The fact that they've managed to keep Clownstick from twit-bashing Ford, and that the senators invited her to testify, clearly indicate that they're worried at least a bit. There's just the slightest stutter-step in their rush to ram Kavanaugh into his seat (giggity). This is a weakness that must be exploited as much as possible.

There has been some talk of future Dem court-packing, and that doesn't sound too thrilling either. Given how ludicrously compromised this process has become, it might be better to approach it from another angle, and set limits, albeit long ones -- say twenty to twenty-five years. This removes the "lifetime appointment" gambit that has become a cynical football, and it also reduces the chance of a judge going senile on the bench, having their clerks do all the work. No one should be working past the age of eighty or eighty-five, including Supreme Court judges and members of Congress. And no one needs to hold the same powerful position for more than a generation.

The trick is where to start, to cast some semi-random future date, say 2025 or 2030, after which appointments would be for the aforementioned 20-25 year term. But it's something to consider, and might even alleviate what has become a hopelessly cynical and debauched process.

This Week in the Neverending Saga of Fuck 'em

Oh, you mean Parsnut Coal Mine don't really care 'bout coal miners? Knock me over with a fucking feather. As this human centipede of an administration keeps morphing into a total laughingstock rather than their intended object of fear and awe, the brightest light is that his most rabid supporters are getting exactly what they voted for -- good and hard, as always.

Lazy Bitch Ragin'

While the week culminated in Paulie the Wig flipping over on Fat Donny Dollhands, the latter spent the previous four days driving home every point every critic had ever made about him, oblivious as always.

Seriously, what kind of dipshit gives fist-pumps and thumbs-ups at a 9/11 memorial on 9/11? I'm surprised he didn't high-five one of the grieving family members. Maybe he didn't want to get his tiny, tiny hands outsized.

Then the multiple tweets contesting the Hurricane Maria body count in Puerto Rico. Even some of the cultists have to see by now the pathologies in play with him. It takes some doing to find two national tragedies that each took about three thousand American lives, and fuck them up on consecutive days. He made them both about himself, albeit in different ways. But that's his thing -- he doesn't know or understand the simple concept of other people and their needs and wants. For him, literally everything is about him.

And that's coming through more and more, evident to all. The requisite clips from the last few hate rallies show a rather....tempered enthusiasm, let's say. Oh sure, you read the local bumwipe and they'll profile the requisite "Ah niver voted bee-four he came along, and he's uh-may-zin!" losers in the crowd, waiting outside for hours because they have no lives. But that's a handful of hardcore suckers out in the middle of nowhere. Let him go anywhere an appreciable quantity of people live, see what happens.

He knows it, and they know it, and their peckerwood logic won't change any of that.

Manafort's flip seems to have quieted his tiny Twitter thumbs somewhat, though he bizarrely dug up this old gem last night, reminding everyone of something that happened ten years ago that no one gave a shit about, while simultaneously not getting just how much he's gotten away with the past few years -- hell, his entire life.

But you know he's run out of material when, in the wake of his campaign manager signing a cooperative plea agreement, he's reduced to whining about Obama's ancient "57 states" gaffe. Even Kellyanne's better half had to jump in on that one. Real tight ship these assholes run.

Bottom line:  as each week makes the previous one pale in comparison, and we know the coming week is going to be crazy, one fact remains consistent -- the guy is awful, just pure unadulterated scum. He genuinely doesn't see other people as separate entities apart from him, with their own interests. He doesn't understand or care about other people's pain. I've read about serial killers with more empathy for their victims.

The economy is doing relatively well -- for now, anyway, until the tariffs and trade wars kick in. The economy is a lagging indicator, and it takes time for these things to percolate. But the cold fact is that even with a strong economy and no major military conflicts dominating the news, two out of three Americans fucking hate him. It didn't necessarily have to be that way, but he can't have it any other way. He has to be the obstinate, bratty four-year-old losing his shit in the cereal aisle, every time.

The midterms will clarify the situation. Either we have a republic, or we have a banana republic. It's fuck-or-walk time, folks. Make sure you haven't been purged from the voter rolls, and then make sure to vote. I have little faith in the Dems even with a landslide victory, but even their gutless, squirrelly ineptitude is better than the lagoon of pig shit we have right now.

Manafort Paul Seizin's; Or, The Lyin' In Winter

Good news is scarce enough to practically be in witness protection, so the news that Paulie the Wig is finally turning state's is surely a welcome development. With or without that fucking turd Kavanaugh skating through his not-even-pro-forma bullshit confirmation, Fuckface Von Clownstick's goose appears to be cooking nicely.

It's getting buried in the disaster-porn hurricane coverage that our shithead corporate media live and breathe for, but the biggest clue that Manafort has something huge to trade is that the cooperative plea deal required him to surrender $46 million in personal assets. In principle, I've never been a huge fan of civil asset forfeiture, as its application in various states and municipalities has generally ended in people getting shaken down by an authoritarian extortion racket, instead of being left the fuck alone.

But in the case of Manafort, we'll make a small exception -- this asshole has spent his adult life as a PR tool for some of the most evil dictators of the late 20th century. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. He's a procurer, a pimp, a professional prevaricator. He's a money launderer, a tax dodger, a peddler of influence and a distributor of thick envelopes. People like Manafort are the grease in the world's brutal wheels, and it would serve him right to spend the rest of his life rotting in prison, thinking about how many people had to die for his fucking ostrich jackets.

Beyond all that though, it again helps to focus on the massive amount of the forfeiture, which apparently didn't take long to push Paulie on. Seems like just a week or two ago Manafort was counting on his good buddy Fat Donny Tangelo to pardon him and absolve his many sins. One assumes that Mueller showed Paulie just enough of his cards to let him know that Paulie's ace in the hole was no match for Bobby's (at least) three kings.

Maybe it's a full house, maybe it's a four of a kind. Whatever it is, it was enough to convince Paulie to roll on his only hope for a walk, and at the cost of pretty much everything he had. So it's big. And we're about to find out what it is. And we've earned it. I hate these fucking people so much, Trump and all his enablers.

I've talked a lot of trash in here over the years, and smacked some richly deserving muthafuckaz. But Trump (and again, a very rare lapse into the actual name of the thing, because mockery and ridicule are central to sapping its illusory power) is one of the few people for whom my hate is genuine and deep and eternal. I hate everything about him, and always have. I sincerely wish and hope and pray that he is pursued and inundated by every misfortune life has to offer.

We'll get into it in a bit more detail in the next post, but to be more specific, it goes beyond his tedious stupidity and willful ignorance. He's complete scum as a human being, and he's shown it over and over again; even under the most tragic of circumstances, disasters that should evoke empathy from the hardest of hearts, he is only worried about himself. Watching that over and over again for the last thirty years or so has been appalling and tiresome. And still he refuses to go the fuck away.

In the end, though, it's the completely unearned sense of entitlement he's always had. I don't just mean the smarmy expectation that whatever fortune and privilege he has is his divine right, I mean the in-your-face-and-up-your-ass conviction that he should be allowed to play by an entirely different set of rules than everyone else, simply because he's so fucking awesome and incredible and special. It's been his defining characteristic the entire time, since he started humping 'murka's leg in the 1980s with his ridiculous thoughts and tacky personal life.

I don't have to play by your mortal rules. Turns out you do, fucker. You're not nearly as special as you think you are. You're about to get hosed, bigly, and your close minions Paulie the Wig and Mikey the Weasel are providing the ammo. I've waited for this for so long, I don't know if I can afford enough popcorn. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

Maine Event

Here's a thought for the folks contributing to and running the Go Fund Me account set up to challenge useless ectoplasm Susan Collins if she fails to vote correctly on prep-school rapist Brett Kavanaugh for his pre-ordained SCOTUS seat:  don't bother making the challenge to Collins conditional on just that one vote. Fucking go all in against her. Put that money into getting a senator that will actually represent the interests of average Mainers(?).

Collins is horrible, a weaselly hack whose cultivation of bullshit "moderate" and "independent" descriptors is as craven as Saint McCain's "maverick" appellation. The day Susan Collins shows any real independence from bog-standard swamp rats like Bitch McConnell or Huckleberry Closetcase is a day you should go out and buy a fucking lottery ticket.

So just lean into it and make it official, turn it into a PAC to fund whichever Democrat takes Collins on for 2020. Because she needs to go regardless. Maybe she can replace that shitbird Paul LePage as governor, but there's no shame in just raising as much dough as possible and getting opportunistic hacks like Collins and Murkowski and the rest of the faux-pendents the fuck out of there.

How to Get Away with Murder

There are many ways, of course, if you are imaginative enough. But one surefire, can't-miss, no-fail way to get away with stone cold murder:  be a white cop killing a black man. Never fails.

Hopefully no one is fooled by the Dallas prosecutor charging Amber Guyger with manslaughter, because it's a "safer" conviction than a murder charge. It doesn't matter what Guyger is charged with. Mark my words, call your bookie, and bet your entire paycheck, because it's as much of a slam-dunk as saying the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning -- Guyger will walk, and she probably won't even be fired from her fucking job. She might resign on her own, if a big enough stink is raised. But they won't fire her. They've already invested fully into cover-up-and-muddy-the-water mode.

It would be amusing to watch the repeated attempts to get her story straight, if we weren't talking about an innocent man MURDERED in his own fucking house for no goddamned reason, and a bunch of people who entrusted and empowered to SERVE AND PROTECT the public are collectively using every cheap tactic available to avoid accountability.

Whatever bullshit story they finally land on and decide to roll with, chances are it was something stupid, like Guyger being drunk or high. Either that or she had some unknown (so far) beef with Botham Jean. Probably some combination of the two, but whatever the case, this was no accident. It was either gross negligence and dereliction, or outright intent.

Law enforcement and criminal justice professionals, whether they're cops or prosecutors, will all tell you that innocent people have nothing to hide, that people who instinctively clam up and grab a lawyer are almost guaranteed to be guilty of something. Of course, the rules change when it's one of their own, but we all know the truth.

Everyone knows the fix is in and the game is rigged. Everyone knows that cops can do whatever the fuck they please, when it comes to black men. Ask Patrick Dorismond, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, and on and on. For every Michael Slager who gets held accountable, there's a dozen or a score or a hundred who don't. And I promise you, Guyger won't, even though her crime is even more egregious situationally than just about any police shooting.

I mean, how fucking dumb do you have to be to buy the notion that a police officer, a member of a profession that is trained rigorously to observe, did not know her own apartment -- especially since her apartment was not only on another floor, but had additional locks on the entry door because of her occupation. And Botham Jean had a huge red welcome mat outside his entry door. Either Guyger is a laughably bad cop who never should have been on the job in the first place, or she's lying because she knows she fucked up.

But not really. I hope I'm wrong, but I know what country this is. All it takes is one "cops is never wrong" doofus on the jury to jack the verdict, and Guyger walks. Don't think that she and her friends on the blue wall don't know that. This thing will get tossed, and even if Jean's family pursues a lawsuit (and hopefully they do, hopefully they sue Guyger and the police department into absolute penury for their shameful incompetence and reprehensible misconduct throughout), and even if they win a judgment, the amount will be lessened simply by virtue of the fact that a criminal outcome couldn't be attained.

Hell, the aforementioned Slager got a mistrial at first, and the only reason it came back around and he got convicted and sentenced is because he had a long history of that shit -- oh, and his murder of Walter Scott was caught on video. But even with video of Slager shooting Scott five times in the back and planting the gun on him, it took two years and two trials to hold his worthless ass accountable. All anyone has on Guyger is her idiotic fairy tale and a few neighbors who overheard things, some of which may conflict and thus cancel each other out. Then all you're left with is a vulnerable young white woman fending off a menacing black man.

Everyone's up in arms, and rightly so, about the public release of a search warrant of Jean's apartment that turned up a small quantity of pot. What they don't tell you is they were probably looking just as hard for a photo of Jean in a hoodie and baggy pants, maybe throwing gang signs with his hands, that sort of shit. These people are completely without scruple, gearing up to smear and blame a man their employee murdered. Amber Guyger straight-up MURDERED Botham Jean, and she and the Dallas PD are getting away with it, and that's all there is to this.

Even on the million-to-one chance that this was some weird "honest accident," which is already impossible given how Guyger's story has changed from whether the door was locked or ajar, so what? What do you think would happen if you somehow got disoriented and knocked on your neighbor's door, thinking it was your own house, and you pulled your weapon and shot your neighbor when he opened the door, thinking he was burglarizing your house? Seriously? But a police officer makes that sort of fatal "mistake" and they're for some reason given the benefit of the doubt, even thought the standard should be higher.

Again, even on the miniscule chance that Amber Guyger is "innocent," even her own bullshit story proves she has no business being on any police force, or indeed in any position that requires oversight of others' lives. No matter. You just watch -- she'll walk, and the Dallas PD will just get her off the street and give her a desk job. She won't do an hour in jail. Count on it.

War Party

The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings have been every bit the monkey-fuck we all knew they would be. The nominee is a smarmy little putz who should be drummed out of public service post-haste, I don't give a shit how nice he is in the soccer-team carpool or whatever.

He's a typical little suburban asshole creep who is salivating at the chance to go after every conservatard's judicial wet dream -- no, not Roe v. Wade, but Griswold v. Connecticut, the ruling that not only tragically permitted American citizens to purchase birth control and have some say over their reproductive lives, but also put the phrase "penumbra of rights" into the judicial lexicon, as that pertains to the privacy of individuals. These creepy little Handmaid's Tale shits can't stand that they might not be able to fully control women's sex lives.

But what's worse is how cynically the Republicans have gone about this, not just bulling Kavanaugh's confirmation through before the midterms, not just releasing less than ten percent of the documents Kavanaugh has worked on, but withholding another 100,000 pages of potentially incriminating documents. Indeed, it appears that Kavanaugh has already perjured himself.

And yet the GOP will sign off on this rigged bullshit, because that is what they have been for a long time. It's just gotten progressively worse, and now here we are. It's going to cost them in the long run.

I'm fifty-one years old now. I was a pretty reliable ticket-splitter up till 2000, and even since then, I've voted for an occasional Republican at the local level. But never again, not even for dog catcher or tax collector. Fuck that corrupt husk of a party and everyone who remains within it. Kavanaugh is a fucking animal who was specifically brought in to get His Travesty's dick out the wringer with Mueller, and the process is rigged beyond belief, and even "moderate" Republicans like Collins and Murkowski are in on it. Fuck them, every last one of them. They are betraying this nation, pure and simple.

So figuring I probably have another twenty-five to thirty years of life, that works out to roughly fifteen electoral cycles I have left to vote in. And I don't give a shit if the alternative is a dirtbag of a human being, if they are running against the Republican, they get my vote. My wife, same thing. My daughter, who unfortunately is five months too young to vote this November, is looking forward to a long life of never voting Republican. Never. Not under any circumstances.

The fucking aliens could land or the Chinese invade, and we'll just have to figure out something. Because we'll never vote for those treasonous cocksuckers ever again, and I know a lot of other people who are feeling the same way. The entire party has abdicated any pretense to principle or morality, or even basic loyalty to country over party. They must be made to pay. The Republican party must be rendered moot, razed to the ground, the earth salted, and the ashes scattered to the four winds.

Which brings me to the Democrats, who to their credit have been steadfast in their angry opposition to this fucking travesty. But this has to be a permanent war stance now, because it is a war. There is no room for compromise on anything anymore. That is my expectation out of this, or I won't be voting Democratic either. I'm not having anymore of this "live to fight another day" bullshit anymore -- this is now that "another day," so it is time to fight, until you win or die.

Assuming that this dog-and-pony show goes through, and that smug little shit gets the SCOTUS seat, and the House goes Democratic in November, it needs to be a priority to impeach -- impeach Kavanaugh, that is. As noted above, he's perjured himself, possibly multiple times. He lied in the job interview. That's not even touching on the hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt Kavanaugh incurred buying tickets to fucking baseball games -- and then paid that debt down very quickly, suspiciously so. This asshole is janky to high heaven, and he's a sex freak to boot.

It's been cool watching Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and Pat Leahy and others get all up on Kavanaugh, getting loud and angry and fighting. Chuck Grassley is a fucking doddering weasel who is leading this betrayal of the country, and Leahy or Feinstein or one of the older Dem lions needs to pull him aside in the back room, away from the cameras and microphones, and look Grassley in his beady, traitorous eyes, and calmly assure him that if he insists on bulling through this travesty, that they have Kavanaugh on video perjuring himself, and that that is grounds for impeachment, and that a Dem House will absolutely go through the impeachment process, even if there aren't enough senators to convict and remove this turd.

The Senate seats up for grabs in 2020 are basically the reverse of this year -- twice as many vulnerable Republican seats as Democratic ones. Again, the Dems need to put on their war face and make sure that the Republicans -- who are not their friends, not their colleagues, not their fucking drinking buddies; they are complicit in the ongoing destruction of this nation's institutions, and are openly rigging the processes and rules, and as such, are now the enemy -- understand that no compromise or cooperation or quarter will be asked or given.

I don't know about you, but I've had quite enough of gutless incrementalism. Look around you -- this is what that has gotten us. It's time to try something else. Mencken's aphorism about hoisting the black flag and slitting throats should be the rule of thumb going forward. This can no longer stand.

Derp Throat; Or, The Best People

Interesting parlor game going about that Vichy Times op-ed, no? The smart money seems to be on it coming out of Pence's shop, but Charles Pierce floated an interesting possibility that it could be Kellyanne Conway or her husband.

Doesn't matter, of course, so long as once the person is identified, they are never hired for anything beyond burger-flipper again in their worthless lives. It's difficult to imagine the warped conceit of a person who can pretend that they are "serving the country" by sabotaging a chief executive they know to be unstable and incompetent.

Whoever the worthless cocksucker is, they seriously should be shunned by all, rendered completely unemployable forever. They are loyal only to their own gutless careerism, whatever they deluded themselves with after writing that thing. It's one of the most chickenshit things I've ever seen in my life, but it's entirely in keeping with the sort of people he would hire, and the sort of people who would be willing to work for him.

Obviously, in a much broader sense, this latest episode, as well as the Bob Woodward quotes that flooded the zone on Tuesday, show conclusively the monumental ineptitude that has always been the trademark of this preposterous grifter. The person who wrote that thing could literally be any of about a hundred or two hundred people. Huckabilly Sanders and Stephen Miller seem to be about the only two people you could rule out.

The White House is a snake pit, the administration is little more than an ongoing human centipede. It could be just about anybody. That tells you everything you need to know about the "best people" he selects. He selects people like himself:  dumb, narcissistic, marginally competent at best, willing to lie instrumentally, loyal to nothing and nobody.

This summer has been hilarious and highly entertaining, even as it's gotten weirder than any of us could have imagined. As I've mentioned before, I stopped being worried months ago, when it became clear that they are all even more incompetent than anyone could have supposed. These people could fuck up a shit sandwich.. The walls are closing in, and they are all turning on each other, and now this stupid, self-serving op-ed is going to set off an internal administrative massacre (sadly not a real massacre).

They are all just fucking awful, every last one of them. If they had any goddamned self-respect, they would commit ritual seppuku in the Rose Garden, for a live news feed. As it is, their professional lives will be ruined, so there is some karma. Stock up on some popcorn and hope that the tsunami comes through, because that will be the final nail in this shitshow.

In the meantime, this is a real body blow, and it is important for the cultists to see that rather than the libtard pwnage they thought they had, they really just have universal ridicule and revulsion. No one's scared of Fat Manbaby, sorry. We're all just tired of the four-year-old throwing an endless temper tantrum in the cereal aisle, but also waiting for that magic moment when either mom flips out and whips his ass finally, or he pulls off his pants and starts smearing his shit everywhere.

But yeah, that whole "piss off the libs" thing has passed, just to the point of strengthening the resolve to vote an end to this nonsense, once and for all. Hope it was worth it, assholes.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Rimrock Auto Arena in Billings, Montana, capacity 12,000. Depending on whom you prefer to believe, either there were about 10,000 of the usual cult losers wound up to rock-concert excitement, or an indeterminate number of bozos who received his requisite Putin praise with lukewarm enthusiasm.

And so it goes. It seems like the Deadline link provides a truer picture of the scene, a jabbering dunce decompensating before our eyes, but the Great Falls Tribune blowjob provides a truer portrait of the cultists and how they think, how they access and process the "information" and "facts" that they use to make their fantastic decisions to support this....this goddamned thing.

Debbie Robbins, too, ignored any negative news and said people opposing the president are making fools of themselves.

Robbins, 67, voted for the first time to vote for Trump. Her registration didn’t go through so she drove 60 miles to same-day register and vote in Dillon, the county seat.

She and Mike only wish he could be in office for 20 years.

She said the limited coverage of Medicare is a major concern.

Mike Robbins said Trump has an ambitious agenda and needs support to get it accomplished.

“We know how important it is to be united,” he said.

I almost wish that turd could stick around for a while, just so these dipshits could get the full brunt of the awesome health care reform their lord and master is, um, well, I guess there's something in the works, right?

But really, this is like the ultimate Cletus safari, these morons. It's not just the complete epistemic closure, the empty recitation of alternate facts. It's the knowledge of what they're waiting around all day in line for like a bunch of saps, because their time is worth nothing, their lives have nothing going on. I can't think of any politician I would have waited six hours in the sun to see. Especially a politician that just says the same three or four things over and over and over again: wow, I'm so great, no one is greater than me; everyone who disagrees with me is a traitor and a liar; everyone is so unfair, very unfair; did I mention how fucking perfect and awesome I am?

Seriously, these are people with absolutely nothing going on. They have utterly failed at the business of life. If they weren't so despicable they'd be pitiable. They don't seem to get that they are just as ridiculous as their empty hero. As it is, the fervent hope that they get everything they voted for -- good and hard, of course -- burns as bright as ever.

Elegy for Charles Ellis Schumer (Sad Trombone Accompaniment)

In this brief post at LGM, Paul Campos captures succinctly everything currently wrong with the country's political mechanisms in general, and the Democratic Party in particular. Deconstruct the dynamic in play there:  the Senate minority leader is pointing to a routine cynical column by a center-right (or perhaps in the current parlance, "alt-center") columnist writing for the most manicured poodle in the corporate media kennel.

Even the lede in the tweet ("John McCain knew that we are better than [Clownstick].") is at least implicitly false. We have no idea what exactly McCain knew or thought along that line with any real specificity. But with his slow demise and now his passing, McCain has been appropriated by the commentariat as this hybrid of The Last Honest Man and the avatar of What We Have All Lost.

That's bullshit, and worse yet, it is clearly more about the professional scriveners and their official catechisms than about John McCain. Once again, McCain proved to be a more complex figure than can comfortably fit into their hero-worship narratives. He wasn't afraid to call out the emperor as an asshole, but aside from one notable exception, he rarely bucked with any real impact.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Almost forgot -- the useless orange tub of shit that festers in the office of the country's chief executive had another gathering of the dumpalos, this time at the Ford Center in Evansville, Indiana. The official capacity of the venue is listed at 11,000, but according to the local newspaper of record, the use of a smaller stage enabled them to squeeze in another 500 losers.

The cost to taxpayers for each of these events will probably never be itemized or even made public. No doubt the M.O. is the same as during the campaign, where he would barnstorm these shithole towns, make empty promises to reimburse for law enforcement and cleanup costs incurred, and leave the local yokels holding the proverbial bag. Serves 'em right.