California Fire and Life

(apologies to Don Winslow)

Over the past twenty years or so, California's fire season has expanded from a late-summer nuisance to a nine-month volley of increasingly more catastrophic firestorms. Typically it rains enough between late November and mid-March to keep fire threats down, but our fire season now occupies nearly the entire period of time in between.

Last year saw parts of Santa Rosa, by far the largest city between the San Francisco-Sacramento I-80 corridor and the Oregon border, burned right to the ground. Hundreds of homes and buildings destroyed, thousands of people displaced. The fires disrupted the real estate market for a year, in about a hundred-mile radius, because of the sudden scarcities in an already scarce inventory.

This year has been non-stop all over the state, but especially burdensome in the relatively sparse population areas of Northern California, the region commonly known these days as the State of Jefferson. The Carr Fire engulfed the Redding area for weeks, causing destruction that will take years to recover from. And now the rather poorly-named Camp Fire (named because it originated near Camp Creek Road, not because it was a campfire that got away from the campers) has claimed the entire town of Paradise, and is heading down Highway 99 toward Oroville. Somehow Chico has been spared. Fire crews from all over the country have pitched to help, and the fire is finally getting contained. It's supposed to rain this coming week, which should help finish off the damned thing.

The King In Yellow

I barely regard him -- it -- as human anymore, using words like "monster" and "thing" to describe the creature that continues to defile the White House and corrode what's left of this country, day by rotting day. And at first there may have been a vein of schtick, trash talk, the proverbial smackdown, but that part rang hollow, that there might be any semblance of even grim humor to those specifically chosen words.

Because humans, even assholes, have common threads that identify them as such. We've gone over this many times before, but it can't be repeated enough:  humans have things and people that they like and appreciate for their own merits. Music, books, art, friends, family, pets, games, teevee shows, whatever. Something. Unconditional love.

Normal human beings enjoy these pleasant little features of life because collectively those little features are what make life worth living. It's hard to know what to make of someone who has never -- and that may very well be literally true, like never -- had an appreciative or complimentary thing to say about anybody or anything, except in the context of how its quality was a reflection of themselves.

Like, as a hypothetical, someone asking such a person how they felt about, I dunno, the Beatles' music, and the response being something like, Oh, Paul McCartney stayed at one of my hotels once. Big spender, Great guy. What's your favorite movie? You know, Madonna dropped $500k at the craps table at the Taj Mahal once when she was in town doing some post on Shanghai Surprise. How does anyone listen to that pathetic, weird old man for any length of time and not hear the festering insanity? How did such a person get into a position to gut the country so critically in just a couple of years?

We can all take a deep collective breath that the midterm election results at least show that we don't have to pull the plug on the old bird just yet. It's still on life support, but it's still life, and maybe even having a chance to breathe on its own a bit and start to recuperate.

But it will take more work, and lots of it. Because the results also showed that there are more horrible people than you'd hoped. I said after the 2016 election that those results raised the question of whether the country we thought we'd become with a black president had changed somehow, or maybe that election just revealed and confirmed what we really still had been the whole time -- a seething, teeming, bitter, vituperative mess.

There are a lot of assholes out there, and the thing has unleashed their energy; pure spite and id and moiling fury. Bad people can have good qualities, but if they're supporting something that inspires pipe bombers and synagogue spree-killers and yahoo border militias because they think it pwns libtards for them, well, they're still bad people in the end. Hitler loved his dog, yada yada.

The most dangerous thing about them is, if you really listen to them (not a suggestion, by the way) you find pretty quickly that since they neither know nor care what they're yammering about, there is nothing that will make them happy. Nothing. You could give them ten million dollars and they'd just waste it; you could kick out all the Meskins and they'd bitch that strawberries are now too expensive. You could shout Merry Christmas at them year-round and they'd wonder what happened to Blessed Memorial Day.

Nothing will make them happy because they don't want to be happy. The fight is all they have, because the fight is all it has. It campaigned on the notion that Obummer had turned Jebus' Nayshun into a flaming hellscape, and that worked on the addled and the butt-hurt. Complaining is all it's capable of, and so that's all they know anymore. More and more it is observed that the behavior is cult-like, and that's not an exaggeration -- nor, to them, is it a flaw. It's a feature.

Troll Flag

The conventional wisdom holds that the midterm election is a referendum on that fucking thing currently defiling the White House. This is only partially true -- it is a referendum on us, and what kind of country we intend to be. Do enough of us want to move forward into what will most assuredly be a transitional decade on many fronts (political, economic, environmental, cultural), or are we going to continue slouching back to the 1930s?

This must be what life is like in a particle accelerator -- countless atoms propelled at impossible velocities into observed collisions. Each week moves faster than the last, with more and more and more crazy things. It tells you what kind of week it's been when the Saudis' admission -- after weeks of denial and almost defiant dog-ate-our-homework excuses -- that they planned the murder of a dissident journalist and carried it out in their Turkish consulate, that such a thing doesn't even register in the top three things of the past seven days.

The attempted pipe bombings and now yesterday's massacre at a synagogue serve to bring us all into sharp relief. We already know what sort of diseased soul he is; what will now be revealed is what sort of people we are collectively. Either we are fine with insane losers being egged on by the chief executive at hate rally after hate rally, or we've had enough. Either we're okay with one of our "allies" holding a journalist to a table and dismembering him alive, or we're not.

Either we see the connection or we choose not to, between said chief executive spending years going town to town, city to city, night after night, openly calling for the imprisonment without charges of his political opponents, and having audiences of angry losers chanting along. They can try to bullshit onlooker with the bullshit evasion of It's just a joke!, but it is clearly not a joke, and when unbalanced loners and losers take that shit both literally and seriously, either you address your role in that situation, or you're fine with it all.

Make no mistake -- they are fine with it. All of it.

Partners In Crime

The Middle East is unraveling very quickly, and with momentum. The murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, committed by a Saudi hit squad sent by their thug king, is the latest and so far largest domino to fall. (Never mind, of course, that the Saudis have been mercilessly driving Yemen back into the Stone Age for several years now, aided and abetted by the current and previous US governments.

If the Obama Administration was somewhat slow and heedless in its (non-)responses to authoritarians taking over in Egypt, Israel, and Turkey, as well as the existing problems in Iran and Syria, the current gang has been even worse. They have made it very clear that their idea of foreign policy is merely a tollbooth, one which bails out the first failson-in-law from his various real estate snafus.

Naturally, the despotisms of the world prefer raw transactional politics, which is why these creeps get along so well with each other. And in fact, the current regime's enabling behavior, as an aversion to Obama's measured responses and precautions, has kept the region more volatile than it would otherwise have been. They are sleeping with a monster, and they are fine with it, because he's a rich monster who's happy to pay up.

Turkey is playing its own game here -- all of the information about Khashoggi's presumed fate, and the evidence for it, has been filtered out from Ankara. They have on-and-off relationships with the Saudis and the Israelis, and meddling in Syria from Russia and the US have only exacerbated the dynamic in the region. The one good outcome is that ISIS seems to have been mostly eliminated, though of course there's always another such group lurking under the next rock.

But with this greedy, doddering old fool driving things forward into a nasty election, this Saudi problem could get pretty ugly. Already the Saudi stock market is taking a hit, expecting sanctions, and they dump too much money into the US real estate market for it not to be noticeable if they decide to pull out or sell off their sovereign fund investments, or just slow down oil production for the winter to drive up gas prices.

Seriously, Fuck Kanye West

So did I tell ya or did I tell ya? The guy has, like, zero fucking redeemable characteristics. He's a perfect acolyte for this anal fissure of an administration -- not one-tenth as smart as he thinks he is, proudly ignorant, completely incoherent when he thinks he's trying to actually make a fucking point. He has nothing useful to say about anything or anybody. Just like his fat, elderly, doddering daddy figure.

Few things are more pathetic than watching a grown-ass forty-year-old man spew his little-lost-girl daddy issues; even Clownstick looked uncomfortable after a while. I think if there hadn't been a crowd there, Kanye probably would have tried to suck his dick.

The professional observers who are trying to make this a mental illness issue need to reconsider. He may be mentally ill, but that's not the problem here. Kanye West's problem is exactly the same as Fuckface Von Clownstick's problem:  he's an ignorant, jabbering fool who has nobody in his life to tell him no or set him straight on anything, so he's now far beyond the point where he would listen anyway.

You really can't tell people like that anything, all you can do is cut them out of your lives, and hope they finally see the pattern for themselves. Or not. If they can't get it together, you're better off without them anyway.

But this is how West has always been, always. Clownstick fans and self-styled conservatards think they're being clever by appropriating West as one of their own, like they've liberated him from the Dummycrat plantation. Well, they can fucking have him, and the wife-beater Jim Brown, and the murderous thief Don King, and the rest of the criminal types they think show the party as being more inclusive. Hell, dig up Ike Fucking Turner while you're at it.

The funniest part of it is that this serves as a perfect example of what I was just talking about in the previous post less than a week ago -- they can't tell musicians and athaletes to shut up and sing or dribble or dance, when they take a stance against their senile god-emperor, but soon as one starts singing his praises, they all reach for the hymnal and join in.

Shut Up and Sing

Onoez! Taylor Swift has broken the hearts and dreams of white-power cellar-dwellers by coming out in support of Phil Bredesen in the TN Senate election. In the slightly more "mainstream" conservatard disinfo universe, no doubt the Fixed Noise baboons are already verbally burning Swift in effigy.

This is a weird but entirely predictable phenomenon for them. I never hear of liberal (or "liberal") commentators or bloggers touting the endorsement of this or that celebrity. I mean, it's nice that, for example, Willie Nelson has endorsed Beto O'Rourke all summer, but it doesn't affect my opinion of Willie or Beto at all. I'd support a slab of river rock, if it was running against that dipshit Ted Cruz.

So the way your garden variety conservaturd will characterize this is some too-clever-by-half variation on Laura Ingraham's "shut up and sing" catchphrase. Of course, they don't say that to Kanye West anymore, now do they? Hell, some of us are old enough to recall how they all flipped when West was embarrassingly rude to Swift, crashing her award thingy like an asshole. Or when West claimed that George W. Bush didn't care about black people. (Not true, of course -- Bush didn't and doesn't care about poor people.)

But these days, as far as they're concerned, Kenny West is woke like a Tim Allen joke, y'all, wearing his MAGAt cap on that librul Saturdee Night DEAD fake-comedy program, hurrr, amirite. He showed them assholes whut's whut, I tell you whut. They try to make it sound like people in the entertainment industry are unqualified to reach an opinion on something (as if Ingraham or Hannity or Tomi Lahren or Greg Gutfeld are qualified to do anything that doesn't involve fellating raw power on a nightly basis), until they have an opinion they like.

Like all reactionaries, their real motto is ipse dixit. Because I say so.

It's even funnier when random morons post such memes on their social mediot pages. Some Fuckface in Pig's Taint, Alabama gets all het up about a celebrity or athlete trying to ram their opinion down 'murka's throat. But they're jes' a dumb celebrity! Har har! Entertain me! Dance, monkey, dance! Right, and who are you, and who am I, and who is that panel of privileged assholes on my basic cable feed? If it's your right to be an obnoxious dickhead on your friends' Facebook feeds, why is it such a problem when LeBron James or Tom Arnold speaks their mind?

We all know the old "opinions are like assholes" song:  Everyone's got one, and they all stink. Taylor Swift is not unqualified to voice her opinion because of her line of work -- if anything, the fact that she has to tour and travel constantly probably gives her a broader perspective and range of experience. I might even say the same thing about a garbage human being like Kanye West, if not for the fact that everything about him is a publicity stunt, and it's impossible to detect anything resembling sincerity from him. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a year or two passed and he and that hobbit he's married to publicly change their minds about their elderly oompa-loompa friend.

And they would still be insufferable assholes. When they give away 95% of their ill-gotten pelf and go help some isolated African village, without a camera crew in tow, then we can be impressed.

Devil's Triangle, Slight Return: The People's Court

Now that the vile deed is done and written in blood, here's a few follow-up points from yesterday:

• In the initial review of how each branch of gubmint has broken down, I meant to point out that in the case of the executive branch, this has obviously been going on for some time. The "unitary executive" trend gained steam after 9/11 of course, but Obama did nothing to stem or abate that trend. (Nor without any clear direction or guarantee of lasting effect, should he have.) It was always a bargain with the devil, in the possibility that sooner or later this increasingly unchallenged power would fall into the hands of an evil person, or an idiot -- or, as it turned out, both.
• The final vote to confirm was 50-48, with Steve Daines absent, Lisa Murkowski voting "present" rather than "no," and Joe Manchin defecting to the "yes" crowd, ostensibly to protect his re-election odds. I find that logic baffling; does anyone on either side of the fence seriously think that a Clownstick cultist is going to vote for Manchin because he voted to confirm Kavanaugh? If Manchin votes with his party, the count is 49-49, and Murkowski is forced to make a choice, as is Daines. That's what hardball politics is supposed to be about. Imagine if, say, that fuckhead Flake could have somehow been brought around. Suddenly Manchin's the deciding vote. Instead the guy fucking punts. Real party solidarity there, asshole. Maybe his Pharma Sis daughter has another price increase on the Epi-Pen coming up.
  
  For the next few weeks, liberals will be lecturing each other about "purity votes" and that sort of nonsense. Personally, I think Manchin's a fucking squirrel turd, and he is entirely welcome to go fuck himself repeatedly until you can drive a Buick straight up his gaping asshole. He deserves whatever rage and scorn actual liberals and Democrats can muster to heap upon him. He did something he didn't have to do, for no good strategic or tactical reason, at a time when all Democrats really need to stand and fight.
  
  All that said, he needs to be voted back in right now (though, you know, try not to be too surprised if the blue tsunami doesn't turn out quite as advertised, and he jumps parties), and then primaried hard the next time around. But it shouldn't be hard to understand the way people are reacting to this, the feeling that there's no point in voting Democrat if the fucker votes Republican. Heidi Heitkamp understood that there's no point in genuflecting to monsters, and so she voted her principle. It will probably cost her seat, but at least she's going down swinging. People are pissed, and they should be. For fuck's sake it hasn't even been a day and these tiresome lectures come out. Let people have a few minutes to fucking vent, before they vote the way you think they should vote. But in the end, come back around and show up, now and every time going forward. Use your anger, rather than the other way around. Don't forget, but don't self-destruct. Use it the way they use it:  to keep warm. Wolverines!
• More than anything, you can pretty much bet the bank that more will come about Kavanaugh in the weeks and months to come. This guy is fucking dirt, pure and simple, both as a human being and as a practitioner of the legal profession, much less a Supreme Court justice. The most critical lesson to be learned with Kavanaugh is that process should not be rushed, especially if the nominee turns out to be janky as fuck. It's fascinating how every dipshit peckerwood suddenly became a fucking SCOTUS scholar overnight, even though they couldn't name two other justices if you held a gun to their heads.
• Bottom line, here is the deal on this asshole:  Kavanaugh was selected by an executive who lost the popular vote, and confirmed by a collection of senators who represent a minority of the population, and was opposed by a majority of the citizens in every poll. Hang tight onto that, and don't let go. Use that anger constructively. Never vote Republicon again, for anything or anyone, no matter what. Start strategically weeding out fake Democrats like Joe Manchin, one by one by one. It can be done, but it takes work, attention, effort, commitment.
• If I have to read one more thing about how Chris Coons and Jeff Flake are such wonderful friends and colleagues who rely on each others' advice, I'm going to fucking puke. Earth to Chris Coons: your good pal made a spectacle of himself and his vaunted principles, and then turned right around and did what he was always going to do, what Susan Collins was always going to do. Quit letting yourself be fooled by these cock-smokers. There is nothing good about them. You're a sap to think otherwise.

There can be no excuses in a month. Either you're tired of all the winning, or you love it. Either you want a voice in your government and your collective fates, or you're good with all this. There's no middle ground. If everyone who was just too lazy or apathetic to vote last time around showed up -- hell, if half of 'em showed up -- you would have your tsunami, bigly. There are more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is show up.

Devil's Triangle

It's probably wishful thinking to assume that most -- or even many -- 'murkins have any real knowledge of the three branches of gubmint, and/or the principle of checks and balances. Maybe a plurality recall some of the broad strokes:  executive, legislative, judicial; these branches are designed to serve as checks on one another; now let us all pray and remember the sacred day that Jebus brought the Holy Constitution down from Mount Bullshit to bestow upon the Founding Fathers, who while infallible were in the end mere mortals.

With the tedious, rote theater of investing Rapebro McGambledrunk with a lifetime sinecure, in reward for his lifetime service as a company butt-boy, it should be clear by now that all three of those sacred branches have pretty much rotted off the proverbial tree. The executive branch is the playpen of a dipshit madman and anyone willing to suck up to him. The legislative branch is comprised of craven idiots who give the executive whatever it wants, provided the tax cuts and knuckle-dragger judges keep coming through. And now the judicial branch, long dying on the vine, is done.

Maine's good Senator, Angus King, sums up the objection to Kavanaugh thoroughly. Forget getting caught up in the endless he-said-she-said of Dr. Ford's accusation -- Kavanaugh's judicial record is problematic, as is his bullshit explanation of his massive credit card debt. And we all saw his temperament. This turd doesn't even deserve the job he already has. But they're going to promote him all the same. And there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it. Vote, sure, and protest and boycott and all that. Don't take any shit from these fucking mutants. But be realistic about the prospects, and manage expectations.

This has been going on for some time, since the Saint Reagan years at least. But Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010 served as the one-two punch to ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the rest of the political system. Kavanaugh's ascent, with all his spite and vengeance and his career of naked political opportunism, may very well be the end of SCOTUS as a legitimate institution.

So now there are no checks or balances on anything -- these branches now serve either to logroll each others' ideas in the service of the vile billionaires who put all of them in office, or to sit inert while the majority burns. This is untenable; by 2040 it is estimated that seventy percent of the US population will live in just fifteen states -- which of course means that the remaining thirty percent will have a 70-seat supermajority representing them.

On the one hand, we seem to have turned into a nation of drama queens, spurring each other on with ever more furious bouts of performative outrage over this or that hot-button issue of the day. On the other hand, it really doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that this election is essentially a make-or-break for the United States to continue on as a more or less functional entity, and that even if the Democrats take back the House and the Senate, which is highly unlikely, it will still take a rout in 2020 to start moving things back toward an even keel.

It should be clear by now that things will never get better until the Republicon Party is completely crushed, burned to the ground, the ashes scattered and the earth salted. All of them, including and perhaps especially the supposed "moderates" (Flake, Collins, Sasse, etc.), have cynically placed party over country and principle, every goddamned time. There should be no place for such people in a decent society, but we stopped being a decent society some time ago.

Balance is important in life, and so it should be in politics that you should have functioning, principled liberal and conservative parties in order to balance out certain tendencies in each. Obviously, we no longer have anything like that, there is no functional conservative party in this country anymore, just a virulently reactionary party and a technocratic centrist party trying vainly to keep in the game. But all the scumbag billionaires who own and operate the political system in this country bankroll just one party, the nutbag insane one.

The usual peanut gallery types are going to insist that the Democrats overplayed their hand on Dr. Ford's accusation and testimony. But that was the hand that was dealt -- all the other concerns about Kavanaugh, jurisprudential and financial, were brushed aside like pesky mosquitoes. This really was the only play to slow the process down at all. So what if it mobilized the basetards? Don't worry, there would have been some bullshit issue cranked out about this time to get them worked up regardless. If it wasn't this, it'd be football players again, some stupid shit. You never have to look far or try hard to find something to rile up morons.

And the thing is, Handmaid's Tale rhetoric aside, the Supreme Court is about to be catastrophic for a lot of things -- voting rights, worker's rights, privacy rights, the rights of individuals against corporations or the state. Hell, they'll push the Gamble decision on through, and then the emperor can pardon all his cronies. Won't that be fun? That's the most galling thing of all, out of all of this -- these whiny motherfuckers are never held fucking accountable for anything. Ever. Prove me wrong.

The Democrats need to start understanding the game as it is currently being played, and stop with the empty worship of "decorum" and "process" and "comity" and the like. These people are not your friends or colleagues anymore. They are your enemies. Trust me, you are certainly their enemies, and they are treating you accordingly. They will bury you with your dignity.

If the Democrats aren't doing every little thing to be obstructive, finding every obscure codicil and procedural maneuver available to slow this bullshit train down, then they fail, and the noble experiment in self-governance is done. You can tack on all the ponderous, empty, self-serving flatulence from the putrid likes of Jeff Fucking Flake, they add zero value except to Flake's future career as a scumbag lobbyist. It's fight or die, fuck or walk, shit or get the fuck off the pot and go home for good.

There are days when I hatch a speculative novel in my brain, about the current "cold civil war" going hot, or at least warming up. There is that aforementioned performative outrage, your dipshit Facebook friend who communicates largely in misspelled memes that really should all just read DURRRR FUCK OBUMMER DURRR N HITLERY 2 LOCK HER UP!!!. That shit is annoying but harmless; your FB friend is never going to actually prise his fat ass out of his couch and do anything. Hell, he may even forget to vote, so besotted with the innate greatness of Hair Fuhrer, he'll just assume a 100-0 landslide.

But the people getting arrested at the protests, the people harassing senators in the Capitol building, that shit is real, and those people are frustrated, and it wouldn't take much to see one or a few of them deciding that it's better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees, especially when they've just been flat-out lied to and shit on, their trauma mocked and ridiculed. That's not an endorsement, just an observation that it wouldn't be all that surprising sometimes.

And this is definitely one of those times. People are on edge, not just feeling but knowing, having their faces rubbed in it, that their government doesn't give two shits about them, that the national motto isn't In God We Trust, it's Fuck You, What Are You Gonna Do About It? That it's really just a bunch of elderly white men, and their female enablers, and the obscenely wealthy scumbags who rent them.

Unless you're in the donor/owner class, writing checks for these animals, you don't matter. Your sexual assault story doesn't matter, your family's hardship doesn't matter, your shitty job doesn't matter, the polluted water table that gave your kid terminal cancer doesn't fucking matter to them. At all.

Seriously. Flake's the perfect fucking example of that -- certainly his entire miserable career, but this past week has been an absolutely perfect snapshot of what he is, versus what he thinks he stands for. A week ago today, he nearly broke his arm patting himself on the back for his high-minded insistence that the FBI "investigate" the allegations Dr. Ford made in her testimony. Instantly, the scope and timeframe of the "investigation" was so tightly circumscribed that you wonder why they bothered with it at all, since it fooled absolutely no one, and therefore didn't even provide rhetorical "well, we checked it out" bullshit cover. It was nothing, worse than nothing.

And during that week, the Yale Law School, the American Bar Association, and several other organizations made their opposition to Kavanaugh known. Hell, the FBI didn't even interview Kavanaugh and Ford, the two main interlocutors, not to mention the many other people who came forward and wanted to talk to the FBI as well. The fix was in, and all could see. And Flake ended up exactly where we all knew he'd end up before he pulled his sanctimonious Lucy-with-the-football shit. Fuck him, and fuck Susan Collins and especially fuck Joe Manchin. These people are all vile, every bit as vile as the unrepentant knuckle-draggers like McConnell and Cornyn. I hope that when their respective times come, they all go out flat broke and universally despised.

So we have to vote, and we have to decide whether we want to take what's left of the country back, or let the rubes and the Jebus nazis have it all make the rest of us eat shit for the rest of our lives. It's going to take work, far beyond just the endless churn of the electoral-industrial complex. That's really what it comes down to. I can't even imagine what goes on in the head of someone who's "undecided" or who doesn't care enough to vote. If the shit comes down, I sincerely hope it gets snapped off in their asses worst of all.

Five Queasy Pieces

The following lengthy articles have all come out in the past week, have gotten a great deal of attention, and if you haven't read them all, you really should.

Ryan Lizza's Esquire profile of the Iowa farm owned and operated by Devin Nunes' parents makes for a decent story, if not quite as potentially explosive, given these hopelessly cynical times, as Lizza might believe. While the weaselly shenanigans of the Nunes family makes for fine reading, what's even more interesting is how the residents in that county, mostly farmers whose workforces are mostly undocumented immigrants, square the circle in their own heads about voting for a paranoid bigot who wants to build a useless wall. Then again, these are the same people who will tell you what hardworking self-made bootstrappers they are, as they take the gubmint subsidy check, not to mention the bailout money Preznit Mario Kart had to dole out to cover for his tariff screw-up. They can fool themselves all they want with their creative compartmentalization, but they're not fooling anyone else.

Excerpt from Michael Lewis' upcoming book, The Fifth Risk, provides excruciating confirmation that the idiots running the country are even more inept and incompetent than anyone had assumed. Everything's a full-on goat rodeo with these dipshits. They could fuck up a two-car funeral. The one thing you can give them some credit for so far is that they have managed not to lawn-dart the solid (if unspectacular) economy Obummer left for them. So far.

I already linked to the NY Times' epic exposé on the ongoing fraud and tax evasion that serve as cornerstones of the Clownstick family fortune for generations, but it really deserves a fresh link and a careful read. Old Man Fred Clownstick was one shady motherfucker, and he greased every Democrat palm within reach to make sure no one got too close to ask about his shell corps and bullshit trust funds. There are really two (at least) major takeaways from this article, which is undoubtedly the best thing this gaping asshole of a newspaper has done in several years:  1) Since the Seventies, the New York media had been all too willing to serve as PR dupes for this monster. It's a goddamned shame they didn't shut him down with real reporting like this a long time ago, before the joke got out of hand.;  2) He really is a wretched businessman. It's not schtick. His dad gave him over $400 million, and he swindled the IRS out of another half-billion, and he still became so cash poor that he had to become a money-laundering butt-boy for the Russian mob. Sad!

Dan Alexander at Forbes magazine has already done several fine investigative pieces on the chicanery of the Clownstick grifting enterprise. This long read makes the feel-good argument that the enterprise has actually been losing money for years now, and the shitbag's ascent into office has actually accelerated that problem. Good. May every goddamned one of them be made utterly destitute, and the name be forever stained, so that future generations feel compelled to change it. Fuck every last one of them.

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic has also been doing fine work for some time during these crazy years, and his latest effectively limns the random, gleeful cruelty that ultimately serves as the defining characteristic not only of the Human Centipede Administration, but of its most vocal supporters. As we always point out, when we hate on politicians, we also recognize that more often than not, they are accurate reflections of the constituents who sent them there. So it goes with the hate-rally crowds. We can try to explain some of it away with pained jeremiads about "epistemic closure" and such like, but in the end it all comes down to the cold fact that they're fucking assholes, proudly so. A decent society would have marginalized these dumpster-diving mutants long ago, or at least done the humane thing and bribed them to sterilize themselves. Going forward, the least the rest of us can do is assure that they reap everything they've sown.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Heading into the homestretch before the midterms, Orange Foolius has been barnstorming the rubes hard, three rallies in the past 96 hours:

WesBanco Arena, Wheeling WV -- capacity 5,600
Freedom Hall Civic Center, Johnson City TN -- capacity 8,500
Landers Center, Southaven MS -- capacity 10,045

Let's mention a couple things that might sound grudgingly complimentary, but really aren't.

• New schtick has been added, in his quest to shoehorn Rapebro McGambledrunk onto what's left of the Supreme Court for the next generation or so. Key to this is his mocking attempt to undermine Christine Blasey Ford's account of McGambledrunk's alleged sexual assault. So if you're a woman who's tired of being condescended to in that fashion, or just a sentient human being, rather than an angry hillbilly gastropod, he's giving you your motivation. Right?
• He's flat-out telling them that the election is a referendum on him, that however they vote, they're voting for him. Again, very true. Considering how rarely he manages to utter anything at all that is true or accurate, it's unclear whether this assertion is intentional on his part. But it's true all the same.

Just a month and some change, and we will see which direction we're going to head from here. Vote with ballots and wallets, and get ready to smack these mutants back down.

This Would Have Been Helpful At Least Three Years Ago

In which the FTFNYT finally decides to do their jobs. Nonetheless, a very good read that might even result in some criminal charges [lol]. Now we just wait for the inevitable Maga Haberman tweet about how secondhand anonymous sources inform her of the emperor's current agita. Really, that should just be the default response to every single thing that every remaining supporter jabbers about:  He said he would release his tax returns.

Fuck Kanye West

No story or article to link, no new point to make. Just wanted to remind everyone within virtual earshot:  Fuck Kanye West.

Career Opportunity

It's very tragic how the emperor ridiculed yet another captive press animal. The way these poor people are forcibly compelled at gunpoint to sit there and be abused by a jabbering orange idiot. Maybe someone should contact law enforcement.

Seriously, it's hard to work up any sympathy for these people anymore. Again, with this human centipede of an administration providing fodder for investigative stories every day at every conceivable turn (and plenty of areas no one had even considered previously), it beggars the imagination why anyone who considers themselves a professional journalist would just sit there for the barely pro forma ritual of lies and abuse.

The renamed NAFTA deal is entirely predictable, coming from a buffoon who seriously believed that buying up some planes from a bankrupt airline and slapping his own name on those planes constituted "starting an airline."

Every so often when I'm on the road for work, I'll pass someone from the opposite direction that looks like a cop car from a distance. Then they get up on you and you see that it is a former law enforcement vehicle, but has been repainted and had the lights removed. There is no illusion that the driver is a cop. He's just driving a car he bought at a police auction. Everything these people do is like that -- a simulacrum of Doing Something, that disappears quickly on even the slightest scrutiny.

But Cecilia Vega figured that it would somehow be helpful to the public's need for real information, for her to sit there and listen to Fatboy's PR bullshit about "his deal," which will be yuge and the best, believe me, that I can tell you. She thought that she might sneak in a question about frat-boy justice Rapebro McGambledrunk, who somehow manages to keep swirling in the bowl, because none of the Goopers has the guts to just flush that turd and grab the next mutant off the FedSoc list.

I'm not a professional journamalist, nor do I play one on the teevee, but I useta watch that Lou Grant show when I was a kid, and through osmosis I have gleaned that journos don't like when sources lie to them or mislead them. So why would anyone sit there and stenograph a known liar, no matter what his temporary rank in this grotesque pecking order that our experiment in self-governance has devolved to? Seriously, what sort of respectable work is that?

This isn't the fault of Cecilia Vega, nor Jim Acosta, nor any single journo in particular. It is the natural expectation of a news-product industry that folded its entertainment and news divisions together, that prioritized smooth-talking, attractive talking heads over actual investigative journalism. It is the fault of media consumers who decided they were okay with all that, who don't mind that most of the "news" programs they watch absorb their info from are basically commercials for pharmaceuticals and fast food, with some random decontextualized content sandwiched in between.

(Did someone say sandwich? Has Subway got a special for you! Or maybe it's Arby's, or Carl's Jr., or Quizno's. Scarf your greasy meal made from meat processed by illegal immigrants and forced prison labor, you fat fuck, then wash it down with some carbonated sodium benzoate flavored with high fructose corn syrup. Drive there alone in a 3/4-ton king cab gas guzzler, and then take your statins and blood thinners afterward. The product lifecycle is complete.)

So, you know, maybe Cecilia Vega and all her colleagues should take their professional dismay and righteous indignation, and get motivated to cover something worthwhile for a change. We don't need another transcript of another dog-and-tangelo show; we don't need another rundown of the latest set of instrumental lies. Those things are worse than useless -- they've become destructive to the well-being of the nation, because they collectively instill a sense of futility and inaction. People are clearly inured to the bullshit. Why keep shoveling it?

Maybe check in with the SDNY and see how their spelunking of the "charitable" foundation is progressing. Maybe remind people that six (6) Republicon senators visited Russia on our nation's birthday, and that some or all of them are on the Russian payroll. Maybe investigate Lindsey Graham's bankrolled high dudgeon; clearly someone has something on him, what might it be? Even if he just wants to replace Sessions as AG, what sort of corrupt asshole would want to be the chief law enforcement officer for someone who literally believes they either are the law, or live above the law?

It might be something if some of these put-off scriveners asked themselves such questions, followed up on them, talked to people, see where the trail leads. That used to be what qualified as reportage. Everything else is just public relations and consumer conversion funneling.

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!