Chop Shop

Just what you needed -- another checkdown on the plight of the Stockholm Syndrome corporate mediots. The self-referential version of a Cletus safari, the corporate media's other wonderful contribution to the "discussion."

Look, you morons, it's pretty simple:  if you stop showing up to these useless "yellicopter" stunts, he'll stop doing them. What the reporters, as individuals, and their employers are really afraid of is that if they act on their "principles" and don't show up, everyone else will still show up.

These things add no value to the average American citizen's ability to discern the nuances of policy emanating from this human centipede of an administration, like a stream of wet Family Guy farts following a feast of chili made with roadkill and Old Milwaukee. Like much of what the ragebait media does now, it is worse than useless, it has been outright harmful.

When you look at the valuable examples of media work, for example David Fahrenthold or Natasha Bertrand, you instantly see the enormous qualitative difference between what those two (and a few others like them) are doing, and the useless (funny how much that word crops up, but it's the right word) sound-bite coverage. The latter of the two merely serves as a convenient channel of lies and propaganda, presented as "oh, look at what this doddering rage-monkey said today," as if it was any different than what he said last week or last year.

But functionally it falls under the rubric of the old saw that the lies runs halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. And frankly, he's doing this worthless custom a favor -- White House press conferences have never not been little more than routine agitprop events. Trump and the mutants who work for him cannot help but let you in on the joke.

They hold anyone who questions or doubts them in very deep and cynical -- but completely sincere -- contempt, and this holds exponentially greater for the tedious scriveners who wait on the lawn to have lies screamed at them incoherently. And they make no attempt to hide it. The next step will be to limit Trump's press availability to "executive time" -- that is, he will only allow them to ask questions of them while he's growling out a huge, smelly Filet-O-Fish dump.

I don't feel sorry for them or their viewers and readers. Platitudes and bromides are useful in this context:  People will treat you how you let them treat you. When you expect little out of life and out of yourself, that's generally what you'll get. The only things Trump loves in life are money and the empty adulation of dipshits. And so on. Go back and read some Mencken, and be refreshed by what today turns out to be his rather sunny optimism.

Grampa Walnuts is dumber than a bag of snot, but he knows that the housebroken media monkeys will show up and dance to his tune, every fucking time. It's all they know how to do. It might be time for them to think about what their job really entails. Maybe this isn't what they aspired to do. God, you hope for their sake that they didn't intend to do that for a living, to serve as a collective rage-tampon for a demented criminal's daily rantings.

Not that investigating and uncovering the various nefarious activities of these scumbags is likely to change anything; America is nothing if not a deeply cynical nation, betrayed and bored to death by the mutual ankle-biting of the "elites" that the rabble somehow keep getting tricked into voting for. But what they're doing now comes with an ironclad no-bullshit 1000% absolute guar-on-tee that it will accomplish absolutely nothing. Might push a few more magazines or cheeseburgers or pharmaceuticals, but that's it. There is no scoop to be had in these things. It's a bad cat's litter box.

Trump's right -- it is fake news, in the sense that it's a contrived, cynical event, broadcasting things he says that he, they, and we all know to be untrue. There's nothing real or useful about any of it, and if the reporters had any goddamned self-respect, they'd just walk away and do some real digging. They'd rather stand there for hours in bad weather like a bunch of assholes, waiting for nothing, knowing full well that this evil old bastard is a sadist at heart, that their discomfort gives him a tiny chub.

Tune them out, turn the channel, boycott their sponsors. Withhold your business from all of them, as much as possible. That is the only thing that's going to change this sorry paradigm. Shut them down.

Going Down with the Ship

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has been fired. Here is his resignation letter. It is pretty much what you would expect, boilerplate from an old hand whose first duties are to the false gods of protocol and decorum. He does ultimately mention that his orders from Trump to reinstate convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher go against the oath Spencer took to defend and uphold the Constitution. (The same oath that Trump and Gallagher took, by the way.)

One sentence about halfway down stands out for me:  The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. This is untrue. Every country we have ever fought against had codified laws. What happens with dictators and despots and tyrants is that they bring in lackeys and minions to administer the law. They use henchmen to cow the channels of communication to the public, in order to poison the well from which the populace collectively drinks. And on and on. We all know how the fascist model works.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. The difference is that the despot simply declares that the law means what we say it means, much like a pelf-grubbing evangelist declaring their interpretation of the bible to be the only true reading. He appoints ministers to oversee the law to his preference; he installs judges who have pre-declared their fealty to him. He stacks the deck, and defies anyone to do anything about it.

A good con man understands his marks, knows what they think they need, knows how to diagnose their problems and sell them the snake oil to cure it. He also knows how to spot key players and use them, making them complicit in his crimes. These are Trump's skills, his only ones aside from losing other people's money and never being held accountable.

He knows that his base hate libtards far more than they give a shit about the well-being of the country. He knows that Republican politicians are hopelessly greedy and in thrall to the tax-free evangelical nutjobs. He knows that the pols that aren't on someone's payroll are constrained by "norms" and "rules" and that sort of worthless honor-code bullshit. He knows that military chiefs are bound by codes of duty and honor as well, and are also political players once they reach the ranks of general or admiral (even before then, really).

He knows that Rupert Murdoch's propaganda organs will say and do whatever he wants them to and keep the ignorant rabble in line, because Murdoch is a greedy scumbag who doesn't care about anything but hoarding precious money. He knows that he has an advantage over his opponents, because they insist on playing by the rules, while he is unconstrained by such nonsense.

These things are all assets to the con man. By making them all complicit, they can't turn against him without taking some heat themselves. Perhaps they tell themselves that concepts such as "nation" and "country" are mere abstractions, and therefore betraying is not real, like cheating on your spouse or something. The old saying about how it takes one to lie and one to believe it also holds true.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. Laws and norms and rules only matter when everyone agrees to abide by them, and when there are consequences for violating them.

No one should be surprised by any of this. Trump has been open and consistent in this area, as with all of the other areas where people (mostly idiot reporters and panel-show dickheads) profess to be "shocked" or "concerned" or some such.

But right from the start, on the subject of war, the draft-dodger has been on point from the start:  fuck their heathen religion, plunder their oil as the spoils of war. War crime? You and what army is gonna enforce that?

So of course he pardons a shameless murderer like Eddie Gallagher, whose own platoon, every one of them, turned him in for his crimes. When Trump claims to know more about ISIS than the generals, or have some special insight on warfare that apparently escapes lifetime military professionals, he's shitting on their service and commitment.

He's talked shit about wounded and tortured combat veterans, as well as Gold Star families who have lost their loved ones in combat. Nobody in his family has ever or will ever serve in the military, because that would require real sacrifice and some level of selflessness, two concepts that are utterly alien to him and his scummy, chiseling family.

Not to mention the other two enormous implications of dumping Spencer: the first is obviously that this sends yet another message to the nations we occupy now and in the future that we can do whatever the fuck we want to them, without repercussion; potentially even worse is that the military justice system and the operational chain of command has been openly subverted, sending a message to any miscreants in the service that all they need to do to get out their jam is to get to Pete Hegseth or whichever Foxtard can get on the morning show and make his case for Grampa Walnuts.

Old jokes about "military justice" oxymorons aside, there is a system in place, and if its functions are subverted by a senile autocrat, with no pushback or accountability, what's to stop him from unilaterally thwarting a directive from a federal court or the Supreme Court? Pointing at law books and reciting statutes doesn't work if no one is going to enforce them.

For the thousandth time, you are dealing with someone who has done wrong all his life, and never really faced any consequences for any of it. Someone else always pays his bills. He sure as fuck doesn't pay them, and no one ever makes him. Why should this be any different? All his life, the people who are in positions to tell him no refuse to do that simple thing.

So when military personnel claim to support him, you have to think about what they're really supporting. Same as the women who support him, even though he's an enthusiastic sexual assaulter and serial pervert. They know who and what he really is. People need to get honest with themselves, and stop warbling about how these rubes have been bamboozled by Russian trolls and memes on Fakebook. They know what they're doing. They know what they're supporting. They're good with it. They want more of it.

Dunning-Krugerocracy

Lol, turns out Adam Neumann is somehow a much bigger dirtbag than had previously been known. Can't wait for the next big thinkpiece on how billionaires make the world such a great fucking place. I sincerely hope he reaps everything he's sown, but I also know that shitheads like that almost never do.

At the Movies

Scorsese is one of my favorite directors, although not infallible -- I thought Casino was about an hour too long and a pale follow-up to Goodfellas, couldn't make it through Age of Innocence, and oddly just never got around to seeing The Last Temptation of Christ.

But there was also one other Scorsese movie I had never seen, indeed wasn't really aware of, that apparently is seen as an overlooked classic by those in the know.

After Hours (1985)

(It's a 35-year-old movie, so of course there are spoilers.)

The premise actually sounds kinda promising, in a lighthearted '80s screwball comedy way:  office nebbish (Griffin Dunne) meets cute with a girl (Rosanna Arquette), gets invited to her place, and adventures ensue when he tries to return home. The cast looks promising. Teri Garr! John Heard! Cheech & Chong! Catherine O'Hara! Late '80s/early '90s babe Linda Fiorentino! Even Bronson Pinchot makes a brief appearance.

And it does start off promisingly, with Dunne as a bored office drone who catches Arquette's attention in a coffee shop while he's reading Tropic of Cancer. She gives him her number, he calls her later that night and she invites him over....at 11:30pm. Okay then.

Obviously, the plot of just about every screwball comedy turns on misunderstandings, implausibilities, and coincidences. Usually some combination of one or two larger ones, and maybe two or three smaller ones. Something to drive things along, and the audience just goes with it mostly because there's no movie without it.

But that's all this movie is, is a string of increasingly dumb implausibilities and coincidences. Dunne heads over in a taxi traveling at roughly Mach 1, and decides for some reason to take a $20 bill -- his only money, important plot point here you guys! -- and stick it in an ashtray, with the door window behind his head wide open, in order to suck the bill out of the high-speed taxi. Nutty, right?

Dunne arrives and goes up to the loft, looking for Arquette, instead finds Fiorentino, the goofy "sculptress" roommate hacking out her papier-mâché objets d'fart. Even though Dunne just told Arquette on the phone that he would be there in forty-five minutes, she decided to bail down to the midnight pharmacy, as one does, thus leaving Fiorentino the golden opportunity to come on to Dunne before falling asleep on him.

Arquette returns, decides to take a shower before beginning their "date" (by now it must be around 1:00am or so), which is weird and disastrous, with Arquette talking about being raped for six hours by an ex-boyfriend (again, as one does -- did I mention that these two just met a couple hours prior?). Dunne wisely ditches her and leaves, only to begin his series of wacky misadventures.

And it just gets worse, and stupider. Rather than pick through every thread of the narrative, I'll just drop a few of the remaining low points:

• Dunne finds his way back to Arquette's building only to find out she killed herself. Talk about a bad first date!


• After failing to jump a subway turnstile, Dunne then finds himself at a bar. The bartender offers to give Dunne a couple bucks (uh-huh) so he can catch the subway back home, but goshdarnit, the bar's cash register -- you know, where currency is stored for exchange with paying customers, like in a business -- suddenly won't open, and the only key is -- get this -- back at the bartender's apartment. Probably stashed way up the tight asshole of an erratic pet chimp, or an impenetrable safe with a combination that requires knowing pi to the thirty-second place.


• As assurance that he totally won't burglarize the bartender's apartment, Dunne leaves his own house keys as collateral. Again:  two in the morning in New York City, these people have never fucking met before, they're exchanging house keys so that one of them can spot the other one two dollars. Jesus Christ.


• Just as Dunne is about to leave the bar, Mister Bartender gets a call that his old girlfriend has just killed herself. In order to make sure Dunne and the audience know that it's the same weird broad, Bartender yells her name about a dozen times, Stella! style, while pounding the bar. Of all the bars in the naked city, right? There's a lottery-ticket coinkydink for ya right there, podna.


• Instead of just saying, you know, I can walk a hundred blocks back to my place after all, I don't really need the two dollars that badly, and getting his keys back, Dunne heads for Bartender's apartment all the same. There's wacky comedic misunderstandings, and there's borderline retardation.


• Did I mention that there's been a string of burglaries in the area lately? Reader, there has, and Mister Bartender's up-all-night neighbors are totally watching everyone like hawks, and see Dunne going in and out of the apartment. Keep that one in your back pocket for later. Foreshadowing!


• Let's see, what else? Dunne comes back to the bar only to find the distraught bartender has left for a few minutes (at 3:00am or so by now), so he hangs out with the oddball waitress (Garr) at her place across the street. Then he heads over to the punk club where Fiorentino and her S&M boyfriend are hanging, which makes you wonder who called Mister Bartender so quickly. He hooks up with yet another weirdo (O'Hara), who drives an ice cream truck and decides he's the burglar, which results in a vigilante mob chasing Dunne through the streets of NYC at four in the fucking morning, raiding businesses and apartments to search for him. Probably because the entire NYPD was taken up with getting Suicide Arquette down to the morgue. Who fucking knows?

Oh yeah, Dean Wormer's wife is in this thing too. What an incoherent mess it is. Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have had a field day with this pile of crap. It's tonally all over the place, every character is a complete idiot or an insufferable goofball, and none of it makes any sense. Who writes this shit?

I'm telling you right now that the only thing keeping people from rating this turd lower than Battlefield Earth is that it has Marty Scorsese's name on it. But because it's him, it's a "hidden gem" or whatever. Bullshit. It gargles rhino balls. I was thinking maybe he had some alimony to pay down or something, but apparently he took this project on after Last Temptation got cancelled, and he was pissed and frustrated and needed something to do. It had a budget of $4M and made $10M, so that's something I guess.

Fuck this movie. I want my two hours back. The only thing that didn't suck is that Linda Fiorentino has decent tits, but she only shows them for a few seconds early on, and for no fucking reason.

Grade:  F- (yeah, I know there's no such thing as F+ or F-)

P.S. I'm still looking forward to seeing The Irishman.

Teflon Don

I couldn't have picked a better couple days to stay home sick from work, than yesterday and today, with the impeachment hearings going on in the background. Hoarse Whisperer has been doing a great play-by-play job throughout, so check it out if you're interested in more granular detail, and throw him a few shekels for his effort.

European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland is currently testifying, and as many live observers are noting, his demeanor is that of a man who is at peace with what he needs to do. He saw how lifelong ratfucker Roger Stone's time finally ran out last week. Stone is looking at fifty (50!) years in Club Fed, a life sentence. Paul Manafort is doing his stretch right now, and will be in his late seventies -- and broke like a muthafuckin' joke) by the time he's released.

Rudy Giuliani is in the midst of a very slow-motion process of being thrown under the proverbial bus. At 75 years of age and currently going through an expensive and messy divorce from Wife #3, Fruity Gee is surely aware that his best days are now and forever truly behind him. Even if he finds a way to weasel out of major trouble, he knows that he will only be accepted by people that he knows are scumbags. That's all he has left. That "America's Mayor" shit is long gone.

So Sondland sees all that and has adjusted his tack accordingly. He's just a standard doofus with way too much money who thought he'd buy his way into the in-crowd. Well, ya got in, Gordo. How's the weather?

Sondland is now dragging Giuliani and Mike Pompeo and Mick Mulvaney and Dear Leader himself into the ever-widening web of implications. Pompeo and Mulvaney have been trying to find a way to jump ship for months, and Gordo just shanked 'em both real good. They're balls-deep in this, and will be lucky if all they lose is their political careers.

I would only add a few "slightly larger picture" details that are being exposed more and more as this process works through:

• Ukraine is not a member of the European Union. So what exactly is Sondland's official role in all this? Why is he the mediator for these surreptitious transactions with a country not in his diplomatic portfolio? Not to mention the fact that Sondland is a certifiable dipshit -- he testifies that he took no notes of any of his conversations (but gee, he wishes he would have), and he literally held a discussion with POTUS out in the open at a restaurant in Ukraine, on an unsecured line, loud enough for everyone within earshot to overhear what Trump was saying. Again, if you wrote this into a spy novel or a James Bond script, you'd be laughed out of the pitch meeting. It's waaayyyyy too stupid to be remotely believable. And yet Gordo cheerfully attests to all that. Winning!
• Rudy Giuliani has no official role in the United States government at all. He is famously (infamously?) working "for free" on Trump's behalf. It should be clear by now why all that is extremely problematic. As cumbersome and tedious as the appointment-confirmation process might be -- especially to a STRAPPING MAN OF ACTION like Dear Leader -- all of this is why you have that process.
  
  Instead, you have a doddering freelancer, working on the direct behalf of another doddering freelancer, rather than that of, you know, the fucking United States of America. So it's not just that POTUS is explicitly using tools of bribery and extortion on a foreign leader to extract concessions that benefit him personally, it's that his pro bono henchman is subverting national security and foreign policy to work his own side-hustle with whichever Ukrainian oligarch-owned gas company wants to come around and do business.
• This is a case study in how the ongoing undermining of the foreign service corps will have national security repercussions for decades. These shitheads chased out all the competent non-partisan personnel, whose expertise is quiet but essential to day-to-day operations and actionable intel, and replaced them with dipshit lackeys, whose only role is to receive and deliver thick envelopes. The lackeys will be gone at some point in the near- to short-term. It will be very difficult, and take years, to round up a new cadre of professionals, and get them trained and deployed. In the meantime, we will have no operational presence to speak of, in many volatile regions. Feel safer now?
• You hate to use tired clichés such as "scratches the surface" or "tip of the iceberg" with this. It will become clearer when (if) the tax returns are made public. Ukraine is just a small example of how American foreign policy has been monetized -- not for the country's benefit, but for Trump and his family. The Saudis are happy to to just funnel money through the failson-in-law, and get whatever they want -- including American military personnel, who now are apparently mercenaries working for a medieval shithole. Turkey certainly gave him some consideration, in return for his abject betrayal of the Kurds, who fought side-by-side with Americans, and are now being mercilessly slaughtered as you read this. The other side of that coin is the shakedown protection racket, which we just tried on the South Koreans yesterday, walking out of "negotiations" per Genius Q. Dealmaker's super-great how-to manual on MAKING THAT DEAL. Instead of having their protection fees quadrupled overnight, the South Koreans opted instead to sign a security agreement -- wait for it -- with China. And so the Asian century continues apace, without us.
  
  But the point is, Ukraine is just one part of the elephant here -- the trunk, the tail, an ear, whatever. There's a lot more to be uncovered, and the inquiry is probably going to have to be limited in time and scope, for various political considerations. I dunno, if only someone had proposed that this process be started MONTHS EARLIER.

Anyway, the real problem here is that the Republican party politicians, and their disgusting, increasingly anti-American base, won't budge for any of this. Again, you could have indisputably real video of Trump literally robbing a bank and shooting everyone in it -- guards, tellers, customers, his fellow robbers -- and they'd find an excuse for it.

All of the above is a problem for the nation, just as a going concern. But the stubborn obstructionism of Republican politicians, too terrified or stupid to simply observe what's in front of them and do what they know is the right thing, that is a clear and imminent danger. And you're never going to undo the brainwashing of the Fox cult, even if you found a way to pull the plug on the network tomorrow. That damage is done.

No More Billionaires

Like any good lawyer or journalist, Martin Longman asks a question he already knows the answer to. The wealthy like Trump just fine, even as they pretend to distance themselves from his vulgar boorishness. But the end result for them is just the same as with Willard Romney or any other bog-standard Republicon:  lower taxes (with the goal of none, at least for them); fewer regulations (ditto); the ability to repatriate overseas profits without (you may detect a pattern here) having to pay taxes on said profits.

Over the years, I've read and studied and listened to more than my share of wealthy, successful people -- not just their carefully scripted public statements and ghost-written manifestos, but the rare moments of candor, as well as their unvarnished backstories. There are some common themes with them, and you don't have to slog through Napoleon Hill's stuff to see those themes.

One of them is a sense of self-regard, the self-reinforcing tautology of I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because I'm rich, a sentiment entirely devoid of context, obviously. Smart about what? If you've become successful at something, it's a given that you probably know much more than most people about that particular area where you found success. But you may be completely ignorant about a host of other subjects.

The real key to knowledge is not setting out on some foolish quest to "learn" or "know" everything about every subject. It really boils down to being able to prioritize the knowledge that you can apply to your life and business, being aware of the areas of knowledge that you're not strong in, and knowing which resources (human or Google or Wikipedia or whatever) to refer to when you need to access those weaker areas.

This seems obvious, but consider it in context with the sort of wealthy saps who infest the gubmint routinely. What does Donald Trump know about any subject beyond the immediate grasp of his own stubby fingers? He has never shown any interest or knowledge about anything beyond where he can grease the palms of the local aldermen and get another shitbag hotel built.

But the self-reinforcing tautology leads him to think that because he slapped his name on a hotel in Istanbul, he knows everything he needs to know about Turkey's history and geopolitical importance to us and to Russia -- things which even a moron would recognize to be at cross purposes at best, but which Trump, seeing only through his prism of solipsism, understands only in terms of transactions and opportunities that benefit him and his useless progeny.

The other salient factors to success are consistency and ruthlessness, which you can see across the spectrum, from dipshit trust-fund assholes like Trump to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Or even that WeWork huckster that just cashed out while shitcanning 2,000 employees -- he had a non-existent product with a bullshit revenue model, but in true Silicon Valley fashion, the whole point of WeWork was simply to get either to the IPO or the buyout. And he got there, by being consistent to the fiction, and by being willing to screw over thousands of people who were working for his success and counting on him to deliver for all of them.

I don't know whether Adam Neumann is "intelligent" or not, in the conventional sense. I do know that, like Trump, his actions serve as a fine example of demonstrating the clear difference between intelligence and mere cunning. Remember "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli, who just got denied parole? Yeah, him too, another good example of that difference.

Probably the single largest factor in wealthy people demonstrating some sort of real intelligence is whether the wealth was inherited, built on, or earned outright. Warren Buffett is a good example of this -- while he is clearly not an idiot, his real genius seems to be having a guy like Charlie Munger, who knows how to measure profitable outcomes and capitalize on them, as his silent partner.

A good example of wealth that was "built on" is Koch Industries. Now, Fred Koch was a monstrous human being -- made his nut literally working for Stalin and Hitler, and founded the John Birch Society -- but he achieved some measure of actual success. His sons, who also are scumbags, took over the company and turned it into one of the largest privately-held corporations on the planet. But there was some combination of those three factors -- intelligence, consistency, ruthlessness -- that made the difference, and catapulted the company into the coveted position of being able to skull-fuck the American political system for the past forty years.

Of course, as has historically been the case, the next generation of Kochsuckers is, well, not so adept at the finer arts of bidness acumen. A morally just society would tax a useless doofus like Wyatt Koch at roughly ninety-nine percent, thereby forcing him to earn his keep in some discernible way. He seems to seriously think that "designing" fat-guy shirts adorned with little bags of money counts for something. I would have more respect for him if I had never heard his name, if he had simply bought a two-hundred-foot superyacht and stocked it with unlimited Ketel One and wagyu beef and Russian hookers, and never set foot on land again. That's pretty much what I would have done.

Anyway. So of course the moneybags set loves them some Trump. They just try to keep it on the downlow, because a lot of them still fund and attend rich-guy hobbies like the symphony, or they clink appletinis at the Hamptons houses in the summer. It's all this Great Gatsby shit about putting on a mask for appearances, and eventually forgetting how to take it off.

It would be nice to think that there will eventually be some sort of reckoning, but of course there won't be. In a modern society where all the wealthy people also own all the modes of communication and disinformation, there can't be. The only reason they caught up with Epstein is because he crossed the wrong people, and it was they who caught up with him, not some oppressed peon. In the meantime, the hoarders will simply dump money on whatever scumbag lets them hoard more, and maybe they'll throw a crumb here and there, disguised as philanthropy.

To Serve and Protect

Part #675,976 of "Gee, I Wonder Why Black People Don't Trust Cops," the latest entry in an endless series. Look, there's no question about what the problem is here, and the thing is that both sides of the equation know it.

Cops understand it just as well as civilians do:  while there are jerkoffs and authoritarians and outright racists in every profession, law enforcement is the only profession where such people are given a deadly weapon and the right to use it, and then are institutionally coddled when they indulge in illegal and immoral behavior. Just like politicians, cops routinely get away with behavior that would get you fired from stocking shelves at the Wal-Mart.

The thing to keep in mind is that the leadership levels of the law enforcement profession consider all that a feature, not a bug. It's the domestic equivalent of bombing a wedding or shooting a civilian in a combat zone, and shrugging your shoulders and saying well, whaddaya gonna do? as if there is simply nothing that can ever be done about such incidents, so why even bother trying.

And until you find ways to weed out and discourage that mindset, it will never, ever change.

Let's Get Physical

So Preznit Fat Albert hey-hey-heyyyyed his way over to Walter Reed yesterday to begin "phase one" of what is apparently a multi-phase routine physical (uh, as such things tend to be?).

To be fair though, it probably will take multiple visits to remove the heads of Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Matt Gaetz from Fatboy's capacious cloaca. Plus his intravenous mayonnaise feedings may have to be reduced to once a week.

When that fucker finally kicks off, all his homiez will upend forty-dogs of KFC gravy on the sidewalk. I usually don't indulge in gratuitous fat-shaming, but for that worthless asshole, we'll make an exception. Every time you see him in a polo shirt, his gut and his ass look like three hundred pounds of chewed bubble gum.

Born Every Minute

I don't know how the estimable Daniel Dale keeps doing what he's doing, frankly. He must have a masochistic streak a mile wide. The entire thread is interesting enough, if depressing in its tedious repetition of the rank stupidity that has been mainlined into the body politic.

What sticks out is the tweet in the link above where John Fuckface Kennedy, the You Ass Sinadur outta Loozyanna, who is a millionaire lawyer educated at Vanderbilt and Oxford, and has never gotten so much as a callous or a splinter on his hands in his life, goes on a ludicrous tirade about "goat's-milk lattes" and "avocado toast" and such like. Hoo-ee! Boah howdeh theah, thissa pow'ful sweddy wuhk up'a heah dem lites! Lahk ta cuttin' a big ol' hawg in the ass!

I think it would be a fine thing if these good folks showed us coastal elites a thing or two about avocado toast and all that, and went ahead and elected livestock molester Eddie Rispone by a landslide. And when he jams a fat pool cue straight up their collective ass, we'll still be out here eating avocado toast. (For the record, I have never had avocado toast. Once in a great while I'll have a couple bites of guacamole with chips and salsa.) Boy, you really showed us! I bet you're too much of a liberal pussy to jump off that oil refinery tower!

It's impossible to feel any sympathy or even empathy for these chumps, who sit there and fall for this discount Huey Long shit, this rich asshole engaging once again in po'face minstrelsy, shucking and jiving like (as one of the commenters in the link above brilliantly put it) he's spent his adult life selling onions out of the trunk of his car.

Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the country, with sky-high rates of cancer and pollution, dismal quality of life, and on and on. They are perpetually competing with their neighbors in Mississippi and Alabama to see who can scrape the bottom of the barrel the most. You want hucksters like Kennedy and Rispone to keep you on your back, have at it, hoss. Wouldn't dream of talking you out of it.

Same thing with that worthless evilangelical grifter Paula White, a character straight out of The Righteous Gemstones who now helps Trump in his mission to further degrade the office and the nation. I mean, I wish she'd get taxed at a 95% rate, and she should be kept at least five hundred miles from any person of political influence, but as far as the rubes she rooks with her cartoonish "prosperity gospel" grift? They're sheep waiting to be sheared; if White wasn't doing it there's dozens of others waiting for the opportunity.

Fakebook Is Not Your Friend

Zuckerberg Inc. is planning to lease about 1.3 million square feet of space at Hudson Yards, the project that once had Dear Leader's name attached to it, and now is being helmed by Stephen Ross, owner of a lot of other properties, including the Miami Dolphins, Soulcycle, the Drone Racing League (it's real, and actually fun to watch) -- and is one of Dear Leader's biggest fundraisers.

I don't know what it is that compels these people, who can do literally anything they want in life, to decide to be terrible humans, to become the minions and handmaidens of people who are even more terrible. Life is too short to keep asking why. All any of us can do is shun them as completely as possible. It should be clear by now that they did exactly that to all of us a long, long time ago.

The Show Must Go On

Maybe Bill Taylor should have used jazz hands as he described in detail his utter dismay at the clear pattern of corruption around him. Maybe George Kent should have cried like a punk and screamed about how much he liked beer, made a scene like a day-drunk housewife.

What can our elected officials do to bring more "pizzazz" to these solemn proceedings, so that the horserace media dipshits who get paid way too much to cover these things, and the addled geriatrics that believe them, can walk away entertained by the fact that the executive branch is clearly engaged in an ongoing conspiracy of bribery and extortion?

I mean, it's certainly a service to the nation that Reuters was available to faithfully transcribe the deep musings of Fredo Number Two. The NBC guy, Jonathan Allen, is just as bad, with his avatar of two baseball players. Talk about a meaningless event that is painfully boring to sit through. I double-dog dare anyone out there to watch an entire baseball game, commercial breaks and all, without changing the channel once.

These people are disgusting, sure, but the fact that they remain gainfully employed means that there must be some role in a putatively free market for their trenchant theater critiques. So rather than be repulsed as usual with these sorts of individuals, and wondering aloud why they don't just go find a more exciting line of work if trying to save the goddamned country just isn't interesting enough, let's stipulate that there are two possibilities with these "people think these hearings are boring" analyses:

1. They're wrong.
2. They're right.

Obviously to a certain extent, both possibilities have at least some truth to them. There are 325 million or so people in this country, and some of them are assholes or morons or simply too caught up in whatever distraction-of-the-day has captured their attention, to pay heed to what's going on.

So what I really mean here is that if a sufficient number of people out there are actually interested in the proceedings, and what these witnesses -- serious career people who have decades of civil service and (in many cases) military experience, who have served under chief executives of both parties with the same degree of dedication -- have revealed so far, and will continue to do so.

The public hearings just started a day ago; the meter takes time to move. And a responsible media, focused on reporting the facts and providing a narrative context, instead of lamely trying to guess the engagement of people they don't know and haven't talked to directly, can affect that meter.

And it already has moved since the initial inquiry began, which would tend to lean more in the favor of Possibility #1. That means that the theater critics, instead of trying to provide reality-teevee snark and pigskin-prognosticator bullshit, need to either report the facts or just go find another job better suited to their skill set, bearing in mind that Eric Trump appears to have hands, so he probably doesn't need these fools to jerk him off.

Possibility #2 is much scarier, because if there really is a critical mass of people who just don't give a shit about the open malfeasance of these fuckers, then it's only going to get worse, the country really is done for, and we'll deserve it.

But we're not there yet, so it's good to see people telling the theater critics to fuck off and find honest work.

Two-Ply Journamalism

I'm not bothering to link to the fucking NY Times anymore; its mendacious toadying is a net detriment to the well-being of this society, even once you factor in the occasional "good" article you might get out of them. This Twitter thread describing the latest slop-ed piece is more than adequate in chronicling the bad-faith argumentation that comes out of them anymore.

It takes some real balls to lambaste climatologists, who have been presenting empirical data for decades regarding the dangers of climate change. This is the American political system in a nutshell:  absolve the rented politicians, and the reality-teevee-addled dupes who keep voting for them, by scapegoating the one group of people who actually showed up and did their fucking jobs. Both-siderism is the crushed fentanyl of gatekeeper journalists, who peddle their agenda behind bullshit "op-ed" pieces and anonymously-sourced bits of hackcess journalism. They have ruined this country just as surely as that turd Mark Burnett has.

That's how you end up with a chief executive who literally admitted just a few days ago to running a fraudulent charity that stole money from veterans, and everyone's already forgotten about it by Veterans' Day, of all things. A competent media ecosystem would ask him and his minions about that non-stop for a month, but they've already given up on it. They don't even try. Instead we get puff-piece profiles of billionaires' concerns about actually having to pay their fucking taxes, or provide a decent standard of living for the peons who shovel their shit every day.

Jamie Dimon should have been guillotined in the middle of Wall Street a decade ago, as a warning to the rest of that vile breed. Hope that clears things up.

I am also tired of hearing calls for "unity" from Democratic candidates. Each and every one of us has stark choices to confront for ourselves, and what we might consider our values. Either we are okay with a demented slapdick who lies about everything having all this responsibility, or we are not. Either we are okay with the very real, impending problem of climate change and its many dispersed effects, or we aren't. Either we're okay with working Americans dying from hoarding their insulin because of profiteering, or we're not. Either we're okay with children fleeing unthinkable levels of poverty and violence being torn from their parents and thrown into cages, being victimized by older children while their mothers are drinking from toilets, and ultimately being trafficked to American families looking for a cheap kid to adopt, or we find that sort of thing, you know, fucking abhorrent.

I have no intention of "coming together" with people in the first half of those descriptors. We all have relatives, friends, coworkers in our lives on that end of the discussion, and we've all made our personal calibrations as to how to deal (or not) with that. But that is a different matter than whether the candidate we end up being allowed to select to lead the country for the next four years has pre-emptively decided on a fool's errand of comity and appeasement with the "fuck your feelings" crowd..

This is a practical matter as well as a moral one. Unless Buttigieg and Biden are making cynical political calculations in preaching their unity gospel, they should head to the nearest neurologist and get checked for dementia, because they clearly have lost all short- and long-term memory.

In 2009, Barack Obama won the most electoral votes since Saint Reagan in 1984, and had both houses of Congress, including a supermajority in the Senate. It took the Republicons, years before Trump would waddle into view, about a month after Obama's inauguration to flat-out declare fuck what the clear majority voted for, we're going to obstruct this president at every opportunity, and create more opportunities to do so. And thanks to their little helper monkeys in the corporate gatekeeper media, that's exactly what they proceeded to do for the next eight years.

But Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are apparently convinced that, between being nice guys themselves and Republicons secretly wanting to do the "right" thing, they can breach this gap. They are fucking high if they really believe that nonsense. Every day in every way, the GOP has told us, over and over and fucking over again, what they are really all about. Power and money, and the various uses thereof. Republican members of Congress refuse to confront Trump over his corruption not because they fear him, but because he's doing exactly all the things they want done.

This is not an aberration. This is the culmination of the party's efforts for the past five decades, explicitly so. They do not deny or try to hide any of this at all.

It's enormously difficult to figure out how Democrats and media monkeys could possibly be this stupid, to not see what has been in front of all of us all along. I assume it's the old Upton Sinclair line about people not understanding something because their paycheck depends on it.

Again, the Republicons make no effort to hide any of it. And they make no bones about what they're willing to do when they lose. Matt Bevin still hasn't conceded his loss in Kentucky. Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature have been openly joking for weeks about how they're just waiting for the Democrats to leave the legislative chamber so they can push a bunch of stuff through (which they did on September 11th, while Dem legislators were at a fucking 9/11 memorial).

Here in California, there is a petition drive to recall Gavin Newsom from the governor's seat. We all laughed at that shit back in 2003, and look how that worked out. It takes a shamefully low number of signatures to get an initiative on the ballot in this state, considering the huge population. There is nothing so low that these fuckers will not stoop to, and it precedes Trump by a longshot. He's just made it easier for them to mainstream it.

Because that's the other thing Democratic politicians need to get past -- this idiotic Anne Frank teleology that people are basically good. Some are, some aren't, and the ones that aren't don't worry about playing by the rules, and are more than willing to rent themselves out to the highest bidder. This idea that indecent people are suddenly going to grow a conscience, like a vestigial tail or something, is just so far beyond stupid, I'm not sure there's a word for it in the English language.

So I don't know what the fuck Diamond Joe and Mayor Pete are thinking when they spout nonsense like we need to get back to working together or whatever pablum they cynically think will win over some imaginary sliver of "swing" voters, who are clearly the dumbest motherfuckers alive.

Refer to the very brief list of terrible things above, and try to imagine the sort of halfwit who thinks there's some sort of middle ground to be had on those things. What if we kept those refugee kids in cages, but didn't let them get raped and didn't illegally give them to strangers? Like that maybe, is that what passes for compromise and unity? Could it possibly be more productive to motivate non-voters to vote, instead of debasing yourselves in a futile gesture to nasty morons?

Bringing it all back to climate change, and what we can hope to do about it politically, this ongoing political and media dynamic is simply not conducive to getting anything constructive done in that (or any other) area. And it has nothing to do with how scientists have presented their findings, or the many legitimate reasons why they tended not to be sufficiently "alarmist" about the situation. Even their moderate, empirically-backed and peer-reviewed claims were immediately shut down or ignored by the fossil fuel companies and the politicians they own.

(And by the way, I have already given you the template of actions that, collectively taken, would have real impact on climate change and the companies causing it:  eat less meat; drive smaller and smarter; have fewer children; consume less; buy local food as much as possible. Just about anyone can make most or all of these changes, and would in fact save money in doing so. But like vaccinations, it requires a critical mass of people to do it, or it won't work. And right now, even the majority of people who are aware of climate change seem to require government action to get anything done. And that's simply not correct. The challenge is in overcoming the average person's base Homer Simpson instinct of wanting someone else to do everything for them.)

And the fact of the matter is that, no matter how much it would cost to invest in mitigating or preventing further damage from issues related to climate change, it will cost more to do nothing. More lives. More money. That's just a fact, and you don't need to spend years comparing a bunch of permafrost core samples to know that, to observe all the symptoms going on and understand the connection.

So what, pray tell, would have gone differently if enough climatologists had gone up to DC and sat before this or that House subcommittee and testified under oath that yeaaahhhhh, about that global warming, if anything we're understating the case, it's really bad and we're really fucked and it's gonna all happen sooner than we think? Mister Slop-Ed can't rightly say, you know, because he was talking straight out of his asshole in the first place.

But he was allowed to talk out of his asshole in the New York Times. And that's the fucking problem.

Respect, Part 3: Keeping the Peace

Some folks are annoyed that this man was arrested for eating a sandwich on the BART platform. They should just be glad he wasn't slammed face-down to the concrete, handcuffed, and "accidentally" shot in the back.

Numbers Game

Steve over at No More Mister Nice Blog has an interesting take on the numbers Trump's so-called campaign manager and number cruncher, Brad Parscale, keeps conjuring in the face of actual results.

Part of the magic and wonder of our bounteous perpetual campaign industry is the constant barrage of numbers generated by pollsters and consultants, some internal to the candidates and campaigns, some of them independent observers such as corporate news organizations. All of them should be taken with huge rocks of salt, not only because the participants frequently have vested interests in the outcomes, but because the outcomes themselves are so fluid and active, especially a full year out from the elections, months before the primaries and the holidays and the 4Q numbers and all that.

But in the Peter Drucker sense of "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," the numbers should provide guidelines and benchmarks for the politicians and their campaign staff to make adjustments.

There's something odd about the way Trump's "administration" and the 2020 "campaign" tend to generate, observe, and manage their numbers in general.

One example is the unemployment rate, typically the U6 numbers, which Trump whined about during the 2016 campaign, calling them fake. And of course, the second he gets in, they're his numbers, and they're improving slowly but steadily, so suddenly they're "real."

Nothing has changed, obviously, in how the numbers are derived; they are no more "real" or "fake" than they were when they were Obama's numbers. But the point is that Dear Leader is not interested in the real-world economic conditions that determines how those numbers are arrived at. He just knows he likes them.

Another consistent example is the internal poll numbers, the ones Trump regularly tweets about how 94% or 95% of "Republicans" approve of his great and unmatched wisdom. That number does not even closely jibe with the actual numbers, which are still at comically high Saddam Hussein levels, but have slipped recently, from 88% to mid-70s in the recent polls I've seen.

Now, we can cynically assume that many administrations of either party might choose to make the highest available numbers public for prole consumption, while still knowing what the "real" numbers are. But there's no indication that there's any such separation; in fact, all the reports are that the terrified WH minions frantically bring Dear Leader sheaves of carefully massaged numbers in order to placate him. It's very much a bunker mentality where numbers are used to tell you what you need them to tell you, rather than to see them for the empirical data that they are.

In other words, it seems like neither Trump nor Parscale is able or willing any longer to discern how to use their data properly, in order to fine-tune their approach and viability. The good news with that is that by the time they do believe what's in front of their eyes and make necessary corrections, it may be too late to avert a blowout. The bad news is that if anyone has proven time and again that they can fuck up a sure thing by going into a prevent defense, it's the Democratic Party.

Respect, Slight Return

Pretty sure Huckleberry meant to say "mouthful." In a business immersed in rank hypocrisy, this gutless clown takes the cake and fucks it like it's his very first time. What a worthless pile of shit he is. Do the right thing already, South Carolina, and flush your traitorous turd.

OK Bloomer

The plutocrats have worked very hard for decades: gobbling up rivals to stave off the threat of actual competition; buying media outlets to push their free (for them) market freebooting ethos; renting politicians to faithfully carry their water. And it has paid off handsomely for them -- they own pretty much everything, and thanks to an abundance of loopholes and relatively low taxation, they have more than enough to buy everything else.

Some of them will try to purchase public goodwill as well, by using crumbs from their tax savings to fund this or that charitable cause. Their "philanthropy" is really just their way of (to them) ensuring that their tax dollars get spent on exactly what they want, nothing more. (To his credit, Bloomberg's philanthropy is real, unlike Trump's, and it takes place in this country, unlike some others. Not that digging wells in Rwanda isn't important and valuable, but there are a lot of places in the US that give the Third World a run for their horrifically inflated money.)

If only we peons had the same privilege, right? I would much rather my tax dollars stayed in my own state to help out with its many issues and challenges, rather than being sent to some southern taker state that shits on my ilk with every foul breath, but eagerly cashes my fucking checks. Or being forced to subsidize the burgeoning evilangelist grifters who have taken over the White House like a swarm of cockroaches. But that's part of the deal -- everyone is paying for someone or something they personally disapprove of.

So Liz Warren has a plan for everything, and one of those plans is to institute a wealth tax (2% over $50M; 3% over $1B) to pay for something resembling a civilized health care system, like every other modern nation has. Since our media ecosystem is entirely bought and paid for by our insect corporate overlords, and exists primarily to reassure them of their innate rightness about everything, we have seen a barrage of nonsense spewing from everyone with a ten-or higher-digit net worth, fuming that they might end up with only eighty billion dollars instead of eighty-four billion dollars or whatever their fucking problem is.

(Obviously, we know what their problem is:  the two simple words in the English language they refuse to understand are no and enough. And frankly, why shouldn't that be the case? If you or I were constantly surrounded by yes-people, sucked-up to and feted and cosseted by the influencers and tastemakers and power-brokers, we'd be in that epistemic bubble as well. I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because I'm rich. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.)

Whatever else he may be, Bloomberg is not an idiot, nor is he particularly evil. Hell, if he somehow became the Democratic nominee and went up against that fucking thing, I'd vote for Bloomie in a heartbeat. Not even a close call. Same with Tom Steyer.

But this is clearly nothing but an ego trip for these guys, rich-dude wish-fulfillment. Bloomberg and Steyer are intelligent guys; they know full well that if they wanted to do the most good with the most impact for the greatest number of American citizens of all socioeconomic strata, the most effective way for them to do that through the political system would be to find the ten most vulnerable Republicon senators up for re-election next year, and give each of their Democratic challengers $25M.

It doesn't matter if Warren or Biden or Bloomberg gets that shitbirds out of the White House, if Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey are still pushing ass out of their respective seats. Every single candidate has to know this, whether they admit it or not.

Bloomberg is simply jumping in to take the side of the Monopoly dude with the monocle and the waxed mustache, the misunderstood failsons who inherited every dime and still think they're Hank Rearden. Again, if these guys really wanted to "solve problems" they have the means to do so. No doubt the Wal-Mart heirs are watching closely, to see if one of their spoiled grandchildren might need to "help" by running for governor or senator from Arkansas.

Respect

I don't mean any disrespect, but Loozyanna Senator John F. (for Fuckface) Kennedy has never not sounded like a drawling, three-sheets-to-the-wind rapist of random livestock.

Really, I'll try very hard to care as I watch his fuckhole of a state go under the waves in the very near future. You get what you vote for, folks.

I Can't Believe It's Not Butthole

Okay, I guess I have to admit it out loud for all to hear -- if you're not watching Tucker Carlson's show, you are missing out on some trenchant political analysis from some of the world's finest thinkers, the most accomplished people in the public policy sphere. I mean, Jesus Christ, was Meat Loaf busy or something? The unbuttoned shirt is a nice touch for a sixty-year-old man.

Let's face it, Fixed Noise reached Peak Moron years ago, but it's like the various hosts have some kind of weird bet with one another to see who can scrape the bottom of the barrel more and still keep a straight face. Half of Carlson's viewers are likely to reflexively scream at the teevee for Fabio to go back to where he came from if he doesn't like it here. Keep up the great work, Tucker!

Mister Popularity

Last night, Andy Beshear proved it could be done, and defeated Kentucky's second-most despised politician home. (Well, Matt Bevin is going to kick and scream and contest the results, but he's going to lose, and he knows it.) And Beshear accomplished this just a day after cult leader and tonsorial adventurer Genius Q. Dealmaker wheedled a spare gathering of toothless diaper-fillers about his need for Bevin to remain in office.

You can't let that happen to me!

Obviously, it's way too early for Democrats, liberals, and people who are just sick of Fuckface Von Clownstick and everything he represents, to pitch a huge tent just yet. Bevin lost by about five thousand votes, and every other state race there went to the Republicon candidate by a wide margin. So this had as much to do with Bevin's existing unpopularity as it has to do with Clownstick's steadily increasing unpopularity, which by definition is creeping in his own backyard. Still, a win is a win, and there were plenty of other nice wins in tough states last night.

So here's the real point here -- Kentucky's most-despised politician, one Addison "Yertle" McConnell, who is the closest thing this country has to a full-on traitor, and long the most-loathed US senator, has a challenger, Amy McGrath. Help her do to Addison what Andy Beshear just did to Matt Bevin -- send his worthless ass home. It can be done, despite what the pollsters and the common taters and the useless teevee prognosticators tell you.

The link once again:

Donate to Amy McGrath

You Will Know Them By Their Fruits

It's good to see this story being covered in the midst of the never-ending shitstorm -- your tax dollars, friends 'n' neighbors, paying this fucking fraud to pose as a "spiritual advisor" to an avowed moral leper who's fucked around on every woman he's ever known, and has never earned a straight dollar. That second one would be precisely what she has in common with him.

[Fuckface]'s personal spiritual adviser, Paula White, launched a prayer effort alongside other evangelical Christian leaders on Tuesday, offering a prayer condemning the president's opponents, accusing them of being aligned with evil spirits and using sorcery.

Bitch, if we could use sorcery, he'd have never gotten anywhere near the White House in the first place. But it would explain why she looks like she does her own plastic surgery with a blowtorch and a spackling knife. As the poet Rodney Dangerfield once noted, the last time I saw a mouth like that, it had a hook in it. Doesn't matter what this hideous cow looks like though, the ugly goes clear to the bone on that one.

White is one of those "prosperity gospel" assholes, and while I would normally adhere to my principled stance of it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money, the presence of these filthy animals at the highest levels of government, like flies drawn to shit, is profoundly disturbing. Where is Jesus with the whip when you could really use him?

When and if we get out from under this diseased chancre of an administration, the first thing we need to do is make scumbag grifters and hucksters like Paula White PAY THEIR FUCKING TAXES. And anyone calling themselves a "Christian" and seeing White as anything other than loathsome needs to read their bible again.

Poll Smokers

Ignore all polls -- yesterday, today, last week, next week, next month, a week before the election. I don't mean you need to remain ignorant of the polls, but seriously, what sort of person lets a poll result affect their vote or any part of their decision-making process? A dipshit, that's who. You already know that, though, you don't need some internet wiseass to point that simple fact out to you.

Much like reality teevee, the constant churn of meaningless data is a very real and metastasizing cancer on this country. It has poisoned the impressionable brains of simpletons, people who shouldn't be allowed out of the house with money or without a helmet.

Unlike every other modern representative government on this groaning, beaten planet of ours, the US is blessed with a perpetual campaign machine. It's another in a long list of uniquely American rackets that turn out to be lucrative, because we are largely a country of willing dupes.

So, for example, the health care system is a collusive racket between the insurance companies, HMOs, and big pharma. The university system is a collusive racket between the schools and Wall Street. Both are designed to do exactly the same thing -- hoover ungodly amounts of usury out of the pockets of a captive market.

Now, the perpetual campaign racket is similar in that it is basically underwritten by most of the above entities, since they all buy ad time on the corporate media propaganda outlets. But instead of sucking money directly out of your pocket, they grab your eyes and brains with piles of the worst sorts of tea-leaf-reading bullshit and pseudo-analytical nonsense.

Why are white men without college degrees twenty-five percent likelier to vote for Trump than any other demographic? they ask. I dunno, because they're idiots? Who knows? Who cares? I don't give two shits who my next-door neighbor or my relatives or some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner is going to vote for -- at all. I mean, I care in the sense that I hope they don't make the stupid choice, but whatever their choice turns out to be, it doesn't affect my choice in the slightest.

But when you have billions of dollars thrown at weaselly consultants whose sole mission is to convince you that some doofus "swing voters" should be courted like a busload of horny supermodels, you have your racket. And it's every bit as pernicious a racket as the health care or college rackets, maybe more so in some ways.

The real job of this dipshit consultant with their focus-group polling, appearing on a panel with other useless assholes on Jake Tapper's show or whatever, their real job is to convince you that any bold ideas that might upset the billionaires who own everything is Bad, and makes Candidate X "unelectable." This is explicitly designed to force Candidate X to "moderate" their tone, coin some "conciliatory" phrases in order to reassure our benevolent plutocrats that All Is Well, why, we would never so much as dare to dream of anything beyond a life of pointless make-work, eternal usury, and endless advertisements.

So the real "problem" with Elizabeth Warren proposing a plan to move to a "Medicare for All" type of system, is certainly not that it might displace some number of paper pushers and bill collectors whose jobs would be made redundant, nor even really that a "wealth tax" would be instituted to pay for it. The problem the billionaires have with it is that they are unclear on where their revenue stream  is in the proposed new system. How can we monetize it? How can we financialize it? Where is the magic pond in this plan, the one where I get to wet my beak for eternity?

As I keep preaching, their equity is an amalgam of other peoples' debt, just as your personal debt could be pieced out as other peoples' equity. They have a clear vested interest in keeping as many people as possible broke, stupid, and on the debt hook for the rest of their goddamned lives. An important part of gulling people into voting against themselves over and over again is to make them feel like they have at least a small stake in life, something worth not losing or risking, and then destabilizing them with barrages of data -- some true, some false, none of it matters -- in order to induce a state of fear.

Fear of losing your job or your house because the company you work for pulls up stakes overnight and moves operations to China. Fear of losing your crappy health insurance, because if you or your wife or one of your kids gets cancer or hit by a bus or whatever, you're fucked. Hell, even if you do still have your insurance, you're probably fucked. But at least there might be some lube involved.

(Of course, the hospital will charge the insurance company a thousand bucks for the one-ounce tube of lube, which the insurance company will then deny and send you the full bill on the EOB, against your five-thousand-dollar deductible. But I digress.)

And so the pelf-grubbers and the usurers and the spreadsheet-diddlers who produce and create nothing, but own everything, are welcomed on to the corporate media which is institutionally aligned with them, to lecture the peons about the "moral hazards" of not gouging every possible cent out of working people, for a product which typically does not recoup its cost in the first place, never mind the next decade or so of vig added on.

And then they'll turn around and have that nazi Spencer on, or the liar Kellyanne. The mission is not to inform, but to deform -- to irretrievably mutate the terms of discussion, so that a truly honest debate can never be had. It takes some serious balls for these fucking hacks to grind on Liz Warren's proposal -- which is all it is, we're not even into the primaries yet -- and not provide a side-by-side comparison with that flag-humping Caddyshack reject, who has done nothing, has proposed nothing, to resolve or even address what most people across the political spectrum agree is a serious problem.

It's a game, and we need to stop playing it. People like Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd really ought to be ashamed of themselves. What they do is not journalism, it's (as Frank Zappa once memorably put it) the entertainment branch of industry. It's PR for the Koch brothers and for Exxon, and whoever else is paying the bills.

The perpetually changing polls in the perpetual campaign are critical pieces in keeping the average rube unsettled and destabilized. They're designed to give the just-over-half-bright viewer a few simple talking points they can memorize the next time they have a run-in with their smarty-pants co-worker at the water cooler.

They can prattle about the two million clerical and admin jobs that might be lost in the M4A transition, which would take years to implement in the first place, without considering that part of the problem is that at least some of the money that comes out of your paycheck to pay for your shitty insurance pays for those jobs, and that maybe creating a real marketing efficiency would not only save you money on your insurance premiums, but give those workers an opportunity for something better than churning out EOB forms.

They can recite Leon Cooperman's bullshit about the moral hazards of student-loan forgiveness, without thinking about the fact that Cooperman owns a stake in Navient, so yeah, students' debt is his equity, where have you heard that one before? I think we're at the point where you could start a super PAC called "Chickens for Colonel Sanders," and no one would see the irony in it. We're post-Onion now. And it's because mediots with no sense anymore of what is actually newsworthy decided to give infinite air-time to people with no scruples or principles whatsoever.

So I don't care what the polls say, even when I agree with them. And I don't care what any media monkey says, even if I nod along with them. I have already made my resolution, and it's best phrased in A.R. Moxon's tweet at right:

I used that exact argument with a Trump-supporting friend a few months ago. I reminded him that I was very much a ticket-splitter for a long time, but as the Republicans have increasingly soiled their brand with hucksters and scumbags like Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, et al, I've written them off forever.

I figure I've got another seven or eight presidential election cycles left, and I don't care how bad the Democratic candidate is, I will never vote for a Republican again, not even for so much as fucking dog-catcher. My wife will never vote for a Republican. My daughter just turned eighteen, and is very much looking forward to casting her "fuck you" drop in the ocean against Trump and his scummy ilk next year, and for the next sixty or seventy years. And we already stopped buying from companies that support Trump or Fox, watching shows made in Georgia, all of it. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle, but I am fucking done with all of these people, and refuse to give them anything -- time, money, attention.

Just as I know more than my share of Trump supporters, I also know a good number of people who, like myself, did vote Republican sometimes, but now regard them with a snarl usually reserved for child molesters and red-light runners. Trump is not the cause of all this, but the natural outcome of their efforts for my entire lifetime. It's not just him, it's always been them. They're fucking scum, top to bottom, whether they vocally support Trump or not. Silence is complicity.

And I will make sure that if a pollster calls me, they know that, that it's not just "no" to Trump, but "never again" to the Republicons. They're a party of Fredo Corleones, completely dead to me. I think maybe Matt Bevin just found that out the hard way as well, and Trump may finally start figuring out that despite what the paid prognosticators and his bullshit in-house surveys tell him, people don't like that motherfucker, because he's an awful excuse for a human being, and a goddamned embarrassment to a majority of Americans.

Fuck the pollsters, and the mediots who put them on the air. Let's get this party started!

Interesting Reads

Let's take a look at some cool stuff from other people:

The Root's Michael Harriot does some great extended Twitter threads on little-known (but interesting and important) stories from Black American history. This is a great baseball narrative.

A.R. Moxon has some terrific insights on the subtle but important differences between leadership and governance. Someone at the DNC should take note of this. Getting elected means nothing without vision and commitment. Just ask Obama, whose legacy at this rate will be almost completely obliterated by next year's election anyway.

Op-ed piece in The Atlantic (yes, I know, still light-years better than the goddamned Times) about how far we have fallen, and keep falling. But did we really fall that far after all? Was it all just a crazy dream, how great and awesome we thought we had always been?

Buzzfeed sued for and acquired the "secret" memos from the Mueller investigation. As you might guess, it raises more questions than it answers, chief among them being, "So why again hasn't Bill Barr been impeached yet?" and "Why didn't Mueller fight harder and more publicly to preserve all the hard work he and his team did before Barr killed it and stuck it on a shelf?".

Another case of a Trump-sucking oligarch reaping the benefits. Boycott Quicken Loans. Boycott the Cleveland Cavaliers. Boycott anything and everything owned by Dan Gilbert.

Crush 'em, Slight Return: Snowflake Season

The real legacy of this gaping cloaca of an administration will be the judges they have stuffed into our increasingly problematic judicial system, at all levels. This is simply unacceptable, though; how many of these fucking whiners must we be saddled with, these coddled rich white men who turn on the waterworks like some day-drinking housewife, every time their precious privilege is challenged in the slightest?

Having been in scores of interview and hiring panels over the past decade, let me put on the trusty HR hat for a second. Let's stipulate that, regardless of your spot along the political spectrum, we should all be able to agree with the simple principle that these little dog-and-pony "confirmation" hearings are essentially the functional equivalent of a job interview. Yes? Good.

So, whether for a privately held company, a publicly traded corporation, or a public-sector department or agency, there is no fucking way I would ever give a job to someone who cried (or yelled and talked about his drinking, as Boof O'Kavanaugh did at his hearing) during the job interview.

In fact, I would advocate more strenuously against it, the closer the position was to my team -- in other words, if it was a unit my team had to work with, and that unit's manager wanted the person for some reason, I'd do everything I could to talk them out of it. If it was for my unit and my superior wanted the person, I'd seriously threaten to walk. I don't work with emotionally volatile drama queens. There are far too many qualified people out there seeking the same jobs. Good grief, that shouldn't even need to be said, but there you have it. This is how far we have fallen.

This is the key quote from the article people should think seriously about:

Why does the Trump administration believe that someone who has done nothing but push fringe legal notions into the mainstream is fit to serve on a federal appellate bench? It’s a puzzler.

It's not a puzzler at all, and Dahlia Lithwick surely knows this, and she knows the reason why they're trying to push Crybaby McGee onto the federal bench for the rest of his sorry life. Obviously, Trump wouldn't know this fucking simp from Judge Judy or Judge Reinhold if you put them all in a lineup. The Federalist Society sends a list, Trump might ask how old they are, because he at least wants to make sure his fuckery carries on long after he's holed up in his Caudillo Suite at the Mag-a-Lardo, smearing chocolate cake and poop on the walls until you can no longer tell which is which.

But he goes from the list, and one thing you can be sure he agrees fully with the Federalist Society on is how far can we push it? Like every bratty four-year-old knows, the only way to find out where the limits are is to test them constantly, see how far you can push Mommy, when she's in a good mood, when she's in a bad mood, when she hasn't had any for a few weeks.

It was the same with Kavanaugh, and it worked perfectly for them. Even setting aside the sexual assault allegations, Kavanaugh's appointment was rammed through with an unprecedented lack of scrutiny -- barely ten percent of his judicial record was able to be reviewed, and he never explained how his substantial mortgage and credit-card debts just happened to be quickly paid off all at once, less than a year before his appointment, on a combined salary that, while significant by the standards of most Americans, was barely average for the DC area, and certainly not enough to knock down a quarter-million in Nats tickets.

But they got away with it, and that's all that matters, that's the only lesson they learn for the next time. And so now they have someone who will probably sit on the bench for another forty years, reliably siding with the looters and the polluters and the anti-abortion fanatics and the privatized carceral state.

They've already dumped a couple hundred of these fucking dirtbags into the system over the last few years, after preventing the black guy from doing it. That's why your vote and your dollars and your unwavering attention matter. It's a lot to keep track of, but either you care about the country your kids and grandkids inherit, or you just really need to jerk off and catch the new adventures of The Masked Singer. It's up to all of us -- and it will take all of us, and a little luck -- to say no, and mean it with every action.

Don't be distracted by their "cancel culture" con either, or their mindless "social justice warrior" carping. It's a lie. There is nothing "woke" about insisting that everyone should be equal under the law, about having a sense of real justice that holds everyone accountable, not just the poor and unprivileged and unlucky. There is nothing untoward about holding people responsible for the things they say and do, just like you would be at your job. Don't fall for their bullshit.

And definitely don't fall for that asshole's crocodile tears. He's just another reminder that lifetime appointments for judges at any level shouldn't be a thing in the first place.

Crush 'em

Another day, another tough guy leaving a threatening voicemail for a congress-critter who has the gall to disagree with Dear Leader. These losers really are a dime a dozen.

When all is said and done, if we really want to save what's left of the republic -- and hey, maybe we don't want to save it; there's a perfectly reasonable argument to be made that it's run its course, and is now just an empty husk for the plutocrats to take turns using like a blow-up doll -- but if we do think there's still something worth preserving and restoring to goodness if not greatness, then fucking well commit to it.

Obviously that means voting, despite how futile and pointless it seems anymore. Even so, game theory teaches that however dismal the odds, they're still slightly better if everyone votes than if they don't vote. And the good thing is that the more people that show up, the better those odds will get.

Unfortunately, you only get to do that every couple years at best, not counting special elections. What do you do in the meantime? Plenty -- for starters, make sure you can vote. Double-check with your local elections office to be sure. See if you can register to vote by mail, which you can do early, and is immune from the usual election-day shenanigans you read about taking place all across the angry-cracker states. No compromised voting machines to change your vote or "lose" a power cable or any of that bullshit that people do.

THEY CHEAT BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEY CAN'T WIN FAIR AND SQUARE.

Keep that in mind at all times, and use it as a weapon. Think about the thought processes involved in them not only cheating on the day of, but planning and strategizing how to cheat in advance, starting with #MoscowMitch (Putin's Bitch) preventing all election security legislation that has been drafted by the House, to come to a Senate floor vote. Many states use electronic machines whose software was created in -- wait for it -- Serbia. Yeah, no way the Russians could possibly hack our elections at all.

But simple math, and the results of the 2016 election, tell you that as awful as the cultists are (and no, it's not snark when I say repeatedly that I sincerely wish on them all the very worst things life has to offer), there are more people who see Dear Leader for what he is, and despise him for it, than there are of these simpering morons who would gladly let him fuck their wives and take a dump on their dinner tables. That's why they have to cheat -- there are more of us than there are of them, and they know it, pure and simple.

So use that day-to-day. Maybe I'll have to repeat this on a daily basis until I pull the plug on this popsicle stand in a year or so, but if enough of us boycott the companies that support the shows that put the liars and the propagandists on, they'll have to notice. Their money people will panic. The companies will pull ad space. I check into random Fox News shows every month or so, and they're running out of advertisers. It's all catheter companies who have nowhere else to go, or pharma companies that can absorb the hit.

But most of it's just in-house promo at this point, which means Fox is having to subsidize itself. That's not a sustainable business model, not even for an evil Australian bastard whose sole goal in life was to ruin the world. And you accomplished it, Rupert. Now kindly go off to your celestial reward.

As for the rest of it, the pro-wrestling spectacle that dominates the airwaves? Tune it out, turn it off, leave it. Don't listen, don't engage, don't respond. It seems like most of us have already gotten to that point, where we don't even bother to respond to that idiot relative or friend that we all have, that insists on sending whatever crap appeared on their front porch that morning. We don't even give them the satisfaction of a "bullshit" in response.

The goal at this point should be simply not to just elect any Democrat, but whichever Democrat understands the most that we can no longer return to some imaginary era of bipartisan comity. People like Joe Biden want to pretend that if we can just get rid of Trump, then we can go back to "getting things done," whatever the fuck that means. To which I would just reply, for starters:  Merrick Garland. Bokay?

Trump is not the cause of what ails us these days, but the natural culmination of thirty or forty years of Republicon propaganda and gaslighting, bankrolled by a handful of psychotic billionaires who should be rendered destitute at the earliest possible opportunity. And the party is all in on him at this point, and why shouldn't they be? He's given them everything they wanted, and told everyone to go fuck themselves in the process. He's perfect for them, and them for him. When he's gone, they'll just return to being obstructionist doorstops and discount fabulists. It's as if Diamond Joe has forgotten what Obama's entire second term was like.

So we all need to get on the same page and stay there. These people must be crushed, completely removed from power, and ended as a viable political entity. Period. You end the party, and you end the cult. Don't bother arguing with them or protesting. Explain only with your wallets and ballots, at every possible opportunity, and they will have to listen to you, I promise. It's not politics, it's math.

Trade Wars Are Good, and Easy to Win

So much goddamned winning:

U.S. farm bankruptcies in September surged 24% to the highest since 2011 amid strains from President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and a year of wild weather.

Growers are also becoming increasingly dependent on trade aid and other federal programs for income, figures showed in a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest general farm organization.

There are two main facts these folks should have learned over the last few years, if they inexplicably hadn't known by third grade:  1) stoves are hot; and 2) Donald Trump is a lying dipshit right to his rotten core. Anyone want to take odds on whether they'll vote for him again next year?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- if there's one thing to be thankful for, it's that at least Trump's "policies" have almost exclusively harmed the people who voted for him and still support him. The "coastal elite" states are not being "punished" at all.

(Increased wildfire frequency and intensity in California is excluded from this because that's an effect that's been building for the last thirty years, not the last three. In other words, Trump could have left us in the Paris accords and we'd still be having these wildfire issues.)

It's about time for another Cletus safari from the Times, isn't it? We learn so, so much from them checking back in with the same bitter clingers and Republicon operatives they talked to last year and the year before. Maybe most of them have learned their lesson by now, but you wouldn't put any real money on that. If that doesn't reinforce the principle that people really do get the government they deserve, I don't know what would.