One Down, Many More To Go

Fuck the Koch brothers, right in their evil hearts. The family fortune was literally started with their dad digging oil wells for Stalin, then building an oil refinery for Hitler. It's gone steadily downhill since then.

David and Charles Koch epitomize the Scrooge McDuck scumbag who hoards pelf for its own sake, occasionally doling out a crumb here or there to the "right" type of philanthropic endeavor, but never anywhere near the ballpark of what it would be if they just paid their goddamned taxes.

It would be nice to think that that sort of person is actually somewhat miserable, that having to spend all one's time plotting and scheming in order to hoard and accumulate endlessly would eventually create a mental feedback loop where that's pretty much all you can do anymore, just in terms of having an existence, rather than a life that you take joy in. Maybe not. Maybe people like that are just hardwired to endlessly compete with one another, to play dress-up and go to the big parties and schmooze and pretend they don't all hate each other.

Check out the intricate mechanisms of the political system right here and now -- there are enormous, deliberately set fires engulfing hundreds of thousands of acres in the Amazon rain forest at the current moment. It is an ecosystem within itself, and a cornerstone of the world's ecosystem. Destroying enough of the rain forest would drastically accelerate an already looming climate change situation.

This has been going on for years, of course, mostly to clear land for cattle ranchers, but since the election of the current Trump clone there, the process has been intensified. Since Preznit Genius Q. Dealmaker has decreed that trade wars are good and easy to win, China in response has cut off all American agricultural products for import, especially soybeans, which as you might imagine, China consumes a great volume of.

Guess which country China just signed a huge soybean deal with?

All of these features are natural results of the system the Koch brothers have quite literally purchased with their ill-gotten pelf -- not just lower tax rates, but the steady elimination of even basic environmental protections, and installing climate-change-denying clowns in important government offices. This is what they wanted, and we've let them do it, at the very least by having enough chumps fall for their self-serving propaganda.

It's a small consolation that, for all his filthy money, David Koch is every bit as dead as the homeless heroin addict in the next drawer at the morgue, and from the look of things a hell of a lot more reviled. It's a reminder, though, that the homeless guy deserves better, but hopefully it's also a reminder to the surviving Koch brother that no matter how many crumbs he disperses to the art museum or the philharmonic or whatever rich-asshole hobby, what he'll be remembered for is ruining the planet.

Oh, the rented dogsbodies at Reason and AEI and all that will slap together some insincere encomia, but Charles will know. He'll know that the family name has passed on to utterly useless progeny -- fat, soft, spoiled jerkoffs who will be used as catamites and barbecue in the eventual climate change holocaust. He'll be every bit as dead as the poorest dirt farmer he poisoned or exploded, and most people will spit as they say his name.

There's your legacy, Chuck. That's your mark on the world, after all that. Nobody in your life ever really loved you, without due compensation. Know that above all else. Enjoy what's left of your time, with your empire of dirt.

Murder on the MCC Express

Everyone had a motive for wanting Jeffrey Epstein dead -- Trump, the Clintons, Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, Leslie Wexner, and many more. It reads like a list of Lizard People Who Really Run The World from one of David Icke's books.

I recently read James Patterson's Filthy Rich, a profile of Epstein's life and crimes that, while not exactly investigative or revelatory, at least effectively curates all things Epstein into one concise volume. To be sure, Epstein's crimes against teenaged girls are disgusting and unforgivable. But many facets of the story are interesting, in particular two recurring factors:

1. Epstein ingratiated himself with the movers and/or shakers of the 'murkin cultural elite by engaging in their favorite contact sport -- philanthropy. By donating (or promising to) large amounts of money to relatively liberal and progressive causes, and convening scientists and politicians and such, Epstein managed to create a nice little club of high-profile defenders for when his behavior was finally uncovered. Consequently, he got a sweetheart deal from Alex Acosta, who frankly comes across in Patterson's book as a career tool who got steamrolled by people much further up the ladder. In other words, Acosta didn't necessarily desire a cushy deal for Epstein so much as he was instructed to give him one. All of this stems from Epstein's ability to cultivate -- and perhaps compromise -- a roster of Very Important People.


2. Although Epstein was typically referred to as a "hedge-fund manager," the fact is that there appears to have been no real hedge fund per se. Epstein's first (and possibly only) wealth-management client was Wexner, who oddly disclosed just a couple days ago that Epstein had swindled him out of $46 million, yet Wexner for some reason had never previously decided to, you know, contact the authorities, or even the SEC. Regardless, Epstein's actual asset wealth seems to be a small fraction (like maybe ten percent) of his previously claimed net worth. Sound like anyone else we know?

Already Epstein's demise is the greatest conspiracy theory since the JFK assassination or 9/11, and it's likely many people will never "know" whether he was murdered or if he really committed suicide. That is to say, they'll never be satisfied with the official explanations. Nor should they be -- virtually no one in this mess has functioned as an honest broker, and they're not going to start now.

There are conflicting accounts of Epstein's previous suicide attempt on July 23rd; for one, Epstein himself apparently asserted that he did not try to kill himself, but was in fact attacked by another prisoner, a former cop doing life for murdering four drug dealers. That's why he wasn't on suicide watch.

More to the point, let's use a little common sense here. Most of us accept as fact by now that Epstein appears to have engineered a large, complex extortion scheme, in which he would entice wealthy partygoers into compromising positions with his teenage harem, and then use the videos and photos to blackmail them. Seems strange that he has that kind of leverage over such people, and opts out without even using his volume of material.

Maybe he knew his goose was cooked, and there was no way out this time. But you'd think that a creep like Epstein would have had no reservations about taking down with him whoever else he could, before checking out. Otherwise, what's the point of accumulating all that dirt on influential people?

In the end, it doesn't really matter if Epstein killed himself or was helped along. The main thing to remember is that no one will be held accountable for anything. Oh sure, the SDNY has the files and data and all the dirt from raiding Epstein's mansion. So what? Bill Barr -- whose father gave a grossly underqualified Epstein his first real job, teaching physics and calculus at The Dalton School, even though Epstein had never finished his college degree -- will clean up that mess, just like he's cleaned up all the others.

Maybe Barr will find a convenient liberal type -- Epstein was, after all a liberal and cultivated more high-profile friends from that side of the aisle -- to throw in as a scapegoat. But he'll squash the rest. Whatever Trump's involvement with this creep, he'll get away scot-free, just like he always has and will for all of his shit. Everyone who thought Saint Mueller would save the day should see things for what they are by now -- the whole point of being wealthy and powerful is to insulate yourself from all consequences and accountability.

Clarity

If you find yourself in opposition to the ridonkulously regressive anti-choice bills being shoveled forth throughout Real 'murka, you owe them a huge thanks:  they are clarifying things wonderfully, removing any possible doubts from the well, the establishment Republicons won't let the extra-chromosome crowd kill Roe hack argument. They will. They are. Wishful interpretations of their supposed intentions aren't going to help anyone.

This should not be framed as the typical "pro-life/pro-choice" dilemma. The argument is simple:  either you think women and teenaged girls should be thrown in prison for decades at a time for making their own health care decisions, or you don't. Some inbred, doddering creep who has no clue how women's bodies work, or how basic reproduction and gestation take place, decided that miscarriages should be investigated and treated as homicides. Either you trust those imbeciles, or you don't. There is no longer any middle ground to pretend to defend.

It's interesting how none of these bills address the male's role at all in any of these pregnancies or precious heartbeats. It's even more interesting how so many of the bills have been "crafted" by individuals with literally no idea how women's bodies work, or how medical science works, or how pregnancies work. You can't re-implant an ectopic pregnancy. Women do not know they're pregnant the instant after the male ejaculates in them, nor can they test at that point. And so on. These people aren't just fanatics, they appear to be borderline retarded as well.

And while it's true that this all predates Trump by decades, this is still his baby (so to speak). He's the one who put a couple of middle-aged conservative Roman Catholics on the Supreme Court to decide Roe's eventual fate, when it makes it back there for the overturn in a year or so. He's the one who's been prancing around the country with his fanciful stories about newborns being "executed" because they had the bad luck to be born to murderous parents with serial-killer doctors working out of butcher-shop hospitals. He's stoked the nonsense with pure lies, and these bills are the natural results.

So everyone who is horrified by this, but just couldn't get "enthused" enough to vote for Butter Emails, you own this. It's yours. You did this with your purity-pony bullshit, or because you're too lazy to vote in the midterms, or for state legislature candidates, allowing them to be gummed up with these batshit god-bothering squids. How do you like it?

And All Your Money Won't Another Minute Buy

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same. .... What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. -- George Orwell, 1984, Part II, Chapter 9

In the midst of the constant info-tsunami, you may have heard that noted hairpiece enthusiast Sheldon Adelson is in grave health. Considering Adelson is eighty-five years old, has looked much older for many years, and is in fact pure scum, it would be understandable if you shrugged your shoulders at such news, and went off to go read your horoscope or fix a nice cocktail.

Nonetheless, let's all spare a thought and/or prayer for ol' Shelly, something in the neighborhood of I hope it fuckin' hurts, reeeeeal bad.

If Howard Zinn proved anything, it's that most of history really just consists of wealth and power subjugating everyone else by whatever means available at the given time. Torture, murder, rape, slavery back in the day, compelled by violence and force; usury, debt peonage, and wage slavery nowadays wrought by sophisticated systems of disinformation and culture-war stoking.

Where these modes of subjugation once were in the service of religious and territorial expansionism, now it's just for the money. Imagine:  people who already have more wealth than they could spend in ten or twenty lifetimes, pitting the country against itself for another fucking tax break. A few more million dollars, which for them is a fraction of a percent, but for everyone else is more money than they'll see in their entire lives.

At least the religious fanatics believed in something, even if it was all bullshit. People like Sheldon Adelson believe only in what they already have way more than enough of.

Let's do the quick back-of-the-envelope calcs here:  if you had a billion dollars, you could spend $100,000 every single day for over twenty-seven years. And that's if you're giving it all away and buying toys and shit with no further value -- no real estate, no businesses, no stocks or investments or anything with a yield or resale value whatsoever.

The average American family takes close to two years to earn $100,000 gross, before all the expenses of daily life are deducted. I have a pretty good imagination, and I like toys, and I have no clue how I would go about wasting $100k every day for nearly three decades. You can indulge in hookers and blow for only so long -- believe me, I tried back in the Eighties and Nineties.

But seriously, we're not just talking about a lot of money, we're talking about a staggering amount of money, at the cusp of what most people can conceive. The vast majority of Americans still think conceptually of a "millionaire" as someone who is doing quite well -- little or no debt; chooses houses and vehicles instead of just getting what you can afford; two or more vacations per year, domestically or abroad; will be able to retire well before you hit the age of sixty. So now picture all that a thousand times over.

Sheldon Adelson is reckoned to be worth about thirty-six billion dollars.

And of course you have your other greedy elders who take an active role in undermining this country with their shenanigans in its electoral process:  Rupert Murdoch (turns eighty-eight next week), and Charles (eighty-three) and David (seventy-eight) Koch. Like Adelson, they count their billions in the teens. They could each live another ten, twenty -- another hundred -- years and still not be anywhere close to running out of precious, precious money. They could send hundreds of kids to college every year and not even feel it.

But it's not enough. It's never enough. I seriously think that the thing with people like them is that once you reach a point where you don't really need money anymore, because you have so much of it, you just use it to keep score, to compete with others in your social strata. It's all just a game for them.

Yes, they've done some philanthropy -- the Kochs have donated to rich-guy activities like symphonies and ballets, and Adelson donated $25 million to build a children's hospital. He also spent $100 million trying to get Newt Fucking Gingrich elected president, and another $100 million in the 2018 midterm electoral cycle. I'm sure he's got another $100M cocked and loaded for next year, to keep that jabbering scumbag in place. Probably already good to go, in case he kicks off.

Isn't that nice to know? When you flip on your teevee now, and are subjected to the daily ravings of a slobbering grifter, day after day after fucking day, it's all because a handful of elderly billionaires decided that the best way to lower their tax bills even further was to use their propaganda organs to pit working-class Americans against each other. Be sure to thank them.

Somewhere in hell, Jay Gould is smiling knowingly.

Keep America Hate; Or, Character Is Density

By now, we've all seen the photos and videos of this disgusting bullshit, and there's not a whole lot to add. Res ipsa loquitur, as the kids are wont to say in the 'hood.

On the one hand, maybe it's harsh to pick on children; on the other hand, these "children" are awful. No one put a gun to their heads to force those fucking lids on them. Would you care to meet their parents? There's no guessing as to how this happens. It would be a failure of imagination -- and, therefore, given the perilous state of what passes for our free and independent media ecosystem, entirely predictable -- to pass this off as yet another example of racism.

Certainly racism is a driving element, but it's really a matter of asserting upper-middle-class white privilege, on a second-class group. The only way it could be any better if is these losers try to excuse their behavior by saying that they thought Nathan Phillips was Mexican, and hence wanted to build a wall to keep him out, per Dear Leader's impassioned plaints. Build that wall! Lock her up! Derp derp derp! Dee- fence! Unh-unh! Dee-fence!

Christ. What a bunch of morons -- but worse than that, what a bunch of truly useless humans. The world would not miss them, had they never come along, really. Gunny from Full Metal Jacket had it right -- the best part of these doughy losers ran down the back of their mommas' legs, ending up as brown stains on mattresses all over the greater Cincinnati area.

At the Movies: Worthless Asshole Edition

In case you were wondering:  the only way I'll ever watch a Dinesh D'Souza movie is if it involves him putting a Mossberg in his diseased piehole and splattering his brain-pan across the nearest wall. In a world of useless, vile cocksuckers, D'Souza stands out -- or slouches out, anyway. Not only is he the true essence of scum, in the usual moral and conventional sense, but he's completely useless as a human being.

Even Roger Stone has held a job at some point, and had to add value to whatever sleazy concern he grifted from at the moment. But D'Souza is one of those true dirtbags who moralizes and preens to no end, while he cheats on his wife and fucks married women, outs gay college students, compares liberals to nazis, participates in election fraud, but never actually does anything useful.

This is another thing that has always annoyed me about Barack Obama:  the man was simply incapable of hating effectively, in the true strategic sense. Forget the paranoia about Nixon's "enemies list" or what-have-you -- if Obama had really made a point of dropping the fucking hammer on people who were asking for it (Joe Lieberman; Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson; D'Souza) he might have engendered some real fear and respect from Mitch the Bitch and his gang of traitors, and gotten more accomplished, instead of having his name and legacy erased in a year by a jism-crusted baboon smearing shit on the walls.

By letting those losers off the hook rather than making well-deserved examples of them, Obama showed himself as a light touch. And that's how you end up with an industry-written health-care reform bill that's mostly a legislative zombie these days, a stolen SCOTUS seat, and on and on. D'Souza should have had to push ass out of some New England hellhole like Walpole, where he would have been traded weekly around the cell block for commissary items. I'm not kidding or exaggerating at all, D'Souza's track record is something that any decent person would be deeply ashamed of. He's a fucking piece of shit.

Instead, he gets a high-profile pardon from Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, which has the triple effect of making a political point to the scum getting ready to roll on Orange Julius, trolling the libtards, and ushering the gutter worm back onto the conservatard radar, where he can once again collect wingnut welfare checks for his hacky little snuff films. I do hope Obama is enjoying his paragliding weekends with Richard Branson. When we needed someone to really fight, and drop ankle-biting turds like D'Isgrace D'Souza down a fucking hole once and for all, we got a patient, calm explanation in cool, professorial tones about why the fight was just and worthwhile.

Never again am I falling for this shit; I want a goddamned eye-gouging street fighter, someone who head-butts the opponent right in the nose, then leans in and goes Mike Tyson on the motherfucker's ear. All you Marquess of Queensberry fools lamenting the absence of decorum can sit right the fuck down, and go back to your accounting jobs or whatever.

Decorum is dead, they wheedled it into their windowless ice cream truck and raped and killed it, and we're not interested in resurrecting it until all the Pogo the Clown types on the other side have been dealt with appropriately and with real finality. I'm dead serious; I want their kids and grandkids to be completely unemployable.

Regardless of whether Fuckface Von Clownstick is impeached or resigns or gets another term, I have zero interest in returning to the gutless incrementalism and performative normalcy of the ambitiously cowed technocrats. The contradictions have been well and truly heightened, ferchrissake. The warning should be sent out to Democrats as well as Republicans -- fight or fuck off. Start bringing a gun to the gunfight for once in your worthless lives, because the other guys certainly are, every time.

To reiterate:  fuck that asshole. Like the rest of them, D'Souza needs to be crushed, made broke and powerless and away from any platform of influence. I hope we have a new generation of Democratic politicians coming in who quit persisting in delusions about "collegiality" with these traitors and thieves, and simply set about to the hard but rewarding work of ending them, of burning their careers and livelihoods to the ground and poisoning the earth beneath.

Job Qualification

Not sure why people are up in arms over this rotten cunt; after all, it's no worse than what her boss said a few years ago, and never even considered apologizing for. It's who he is and who they are, chickenhawks using military personnel as cynical props, and the suckers buy it every fucking time.

Question for the class:  is there anything that would turn the cultists against their wampeter, anything at all? I really don't think there is. Any of them could say and do pretty much anything, up to and including shooting a wounded veteran in Times Square, and the morlocks would rush to trot out their usual talking points.

They don't care about anything but grifting and wrecking what's left of this country. To their credit, they don't try to hide it. The sooner the Democrats and the putatively librul media realize that and start behaving accordingly, the sooner we have an outside chance of climbing out of this pit, away from these fucking scummy people.

Access Washington

Just finished reading David Cay Johnston's The Making of [Fuckface Von Clownstick], and it's a very good (not great, but very good and quick) compilation of the countless small crimes of character His Orangeness rode into his current unearned position of power. As a career investigative reporter, Johnston for the most part wisely avoids editorializing and "analysis" and lets the ugly facts do all the talking.

There were a few specific items in the book I hadn't been aware of, but no real surprises. But there are three (actually more, but let's focus on three) major factors in Clownstick's rise to infamy that Johnston's book ably captures. Here they are in (imho) ascending order of importance:

1. During the Atlantic City casino years, the level of corruption and incompetence in New Jersey's gaming regulation boards was nothing short of criminal. Clownstick should never have been let anywhere near a casino, much less allowed to own one. Every job and investor stake lost in his failures is on the head of every corrupt gaming regulator who chose to look the other way instead of doing their fucking job.
2. In chapter after chapter, Johnston lists one failed scam after another, where Clownstick misrepresented himself and his family and his companies and his interests and stakes in any given project, from Chump "University" to Punta Bandera. In all of these, once the fish get wise and sue his ass, Clownstick ends up settling, contrary to his frequent boasts and LIES. And in all of these cases, the courts sealed the details of the settlements. Gee, it might have been nice for the public to know about these repeated incidents of fraud before the motherfucker ran for fucking political office.
3. The media sucks. Let it be shouted from the rooftops till all our eardrums bleed:  OUR MEDIA FUCKING SUCKS. More than any other entity, more than the in-the-pocket Jersey gaming commissions or the institutionally impotent court system, feckless media careerism is what propelled Clownstick into his current seat. Since the early 1980s, he has lied, bullied, cajoled, stroked, and bamboozled them collectively into giving him a platform to spout his LIES and nonsense, and then left them to lamely scramble after him and maybe (usually not) try to clean up the mess, too little too late.

To cite just one string of examples, how many times during the 2016 campaign was that asshole allowed to phone in from his gold-plated shitter to the Sunday morning follies, on all the networks, one after the other? How the fuck do you interview a presidential candidate over the phone, again and again, especially one with such a tenuous relationship with empirical reality? Yet they let him get away with it, over and over.

 

At no point did any of them say, Fuck it. We're not interviewing him unless he shows up, and then we're hammering him on at least some of the lies. Nope, they just let him call in, say what he wanted to, half-heartedly challenge him on his more egregious lies, but at no point did they stand up to him, or god forbid just refuse to have him on because of the incessant lying.

 

Have I mentioned that that cocksucker does nothing but LIE, about every goddamned thing?

And if today's collective marathon of pearl-clutching in defense of Baghdad Barb doesn't make all this clear, I don't know what will. These people are fucking terrible at their jobs. Or maybe I've just been misinformed all these years as to what their jobs actually are. Maybe they're supposed to suck up to powerful people who despise them. That certainly would explain things much better.

Look, we all get the rapidly changing institutional factors impacting their long-standing revenue model. Even the phrase "twenty-four-hour news cycle" means something completely different than it did from, say 1983 to 2015. Seriously. It used to mean that the cable news channels had so much airtime to fill, practically anything became a news story, or more likely, real news stories got beaten into the ground with incessant coverage and overly obsessive detail.

But the meaning of the phrase has changed since He Who Shall Not Be Named threw his hairpiece into the ring. Now with things happening constantly, there's not enough time to keep up with a given story and cover it with due diligence.

Here's another example:  Sean Hannity, Fox's flagship common-tater, was outed less than two weeks ago as one of three clients of Michael "Smithers" Cohen, the obsequious bratva-linked Clownstick toady, who clearly wants to spend the rest of his life polishing his idol's little cheeto. Now, it's bad enough that Cohen isn't really even a lawyer, he's a "businessman" (big finger quotes there, folks) who happens to have a law degree. He's a wannabe Ray Donovan-type "fixer" who uses said law degree to help his main client take care of things, like paying off his inconvenient hoors.

Now, Hannity has been extremely vocal in his defense of Smithers Cohen and Fuckface Von Clownstick, never once disclosing that he, Hannity, was another client of Cohen. When it finally did come out -- thanks to actual investigative reporting by The Guardian, a British media outlet -- Hannity lamely averred that he was an opinion and entertainment guy, not a serious journalist. NBC fired Brian Williams for far less (although Williams is back in a late-might slot at MSNBC these days, but still), but Fox took it all in stride and said they were fine with Hannity's excuse. Within twenty-four hours of the disclosure, Hannity was joking about it on-air with Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.

Since then -- again, bearing in mind that the initial revelation about Hannity was less than two weeks ago -- we have also found out that Hannity is a slumlord, using his ill-gotten pelf to buy up distressed properties with HUD-backed loans, and promptly jacking up the rent, because he's a fucking scumbag. Oh, and no one is surprised that Hannity has free-spending HUD director Ben Carson on with some regularity. It's all just a big coincidence. This sort of thing, this blatant collusion between a key anchorperson and the people he reports on and talks with, would have been unacceptable, even at Fox, just a few years ago.

Not to mention Clownstick's bizarre call-in rant to Fox & Fiends last Thursday, which now (please please) might be a monthly standing appointment. Fox is now officially a propaganda organ for these fuckers, and they aren't bothering to conceal it one bit.

Do gutless media twats like Chris Cillizza pontificate on those sorts of inconvenient truths? Why no, they prefer to grumble about the incivility of comedians calling out lazy media tools for their feckless, dickless careerism. Fucking lazy hypocrites, all of them. They are in the wrong line of work. They really are hurting America.

There are no consequences or accountability for bad behavior anymore. And that's what Johnston's book is really about, in the end -- this steaming orange turd is in charge because at every step of the way, when the courts, the media, the fucking gaming commissions had a chance to hold this fucking piece of shit accountable for the things he'd done, they pushed it off. They let it go; they let him go.

Fuckface Von Clownstick's entire existence -- indeed, his sole actual skill -- has been an extended exercise in getting other people to pay for his high-on-the-hog lifestyle. And he's been enabled the entire time by access journalism, from Page Six to the Today show, these careerist hacks who are more concerned with getting eyeballs and filling airtime than in calling an asshole what he is.

In a rational world, we'd drop him and his vile minions off on a remote island with all the Beltway hacks, let them deal with each other, and never hear from any of them again. They made him, they should be the ones to have to live with him.

Runnin' With the Devil

So this is fun. Mo Brooks is a slimy sack of crap; it is truly a shame he didn't take a header down those marble steps and land on his face. These people would literally rather vote for a creep who sexually assaulted teenagers when he was in his thirties, and was literally banned from a mall, than for someone who sent murderous domestic terrorists to prison.

Alabama can get its collective back up and whinge about "Yankees" tellin' 'em whut ta do, but the fact is that this is a test for that state. They need to step up and decide what they're about. It's too late for Roy Moore (and the mediots need to stop referring to him as "judge" -- he's been forcibly removed from that position twice) to be removed from the ballot, so the choice is between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. Period.

So no nudging, Alabama, but what are you about as a state? Forget all the "dummycrats is sociamalists" mumbo-jumbo excuses -- you either support a skeevy pederast, or you don't. Either you stick with the Cletus the cousin-fucker stereotypes or you reject them. You're either the state of Bob Ewell or of Atticus Finch. You cannot have it both ways anymore.

Same goes for the Republican Party, which is still fundraising and canvassing for Moore, despite their public plaints; same goes for the GOP voters. Sometimes a moment comes along where you have to decide how you want to define your team, and this is one of those times.

The Goopers are really stuck on this one, and they know it. There are a couple of longshot scenarios to consider here, but they're not completely out of the realm of possibility:

1. Jeff Flake's seat in AZ is up for grabs, as is Bob Corker's in TN, and "Everybody Hates" Ted Cruz has to run for his seat next year as well. Things are not rolling the Goopers' way lately, and these are all gettable for the Dems.
2. Moore loses or is pre-emptively disqualified per the actions of the leaders of his own party, and he rallies the same breed of deplorable who are chomping at the bit to kill and/or die in the service of Fuckface Von Clownstick. A schism is created in the Republican party, and a breakaway "populist" party takes on the "establishment" party. Popcorn companies do record business, and the Dems sweep the midterms hard. Clownstick goes into full Downfall bunker mode, watching his idiot MAGA fantasy go up like a tire fire.

The second one is admittedly a very long shot, because no matter what these weasels say, politics is really more about the money than the ideology, and it's hard to imagine the sort of genuinely wealthy person who wants to invest in a Howdy Doody-looking asshole like Roy Moore, with his totally-not-a-closet-case leather vest and the pew-pew pea-shooter he needs in order to feel safe buying his Starbucks. But there's always some douchebag Robert Mercer / Foster Friess type out there who didn't work hard enough for his money to have any respect for it.

Either way, what a difference a year makes, especially when your enemies are so consistently ridiculous. It is truly a joy watching these assholes screw the pooch and turn on each other. May the aneurysm fairy start making the rounds, and they all ride the escalator to hell sooner rather than later.

You'll Need More Snowflakes for That Avalanche

Any day these useless closet cases get outnumbered 2-1 is a good day. It's hard to get outraged when they are, as a heckler noted, "the Cleveland Browns of political movements." Still, one hopes at least that they finally receive an important message from the universe:  You are a bunch of fucking losers, each and every one of you. Shame on you. Go home and get some sleep, think about what you're doing with what passes for your lives.

And that's really all there is to them:  tubbies and morons who have already failed at life, bigly, and have nothing left but to occasionally take their armchair tough-guy static into the real world with some cosplay. They should go back to re-enacting WW2 and the Civil War as nazis and confederates. That's the best way for these chumps to work out their issues.

But, to return their favorite bullshit back on them, if they hate this country so much, why don't they get the fuck out already? It would be their fondest desire to start up Nazilvania or Kekistan or whatever, but good luck making a go of it when your main imports will be donuts and cheeseburgers, and the exports will be the choicest whines.

Season's Beatings

I'm gonna go ahead and get out in front of the inevitable moron war on Christmas bullshit right now, considering Snowflake decreed that we would all be saying "Merry Christmas" from now on, since the Kenyan Moooslin had forbade us under penalty of death to do so during the long cold winter of his two terms.

During the holiday season, I typically do say "Merry Christmas," but not this year, and maybe not again for quite some time. You don't tell me what to fucking say or not say, old man. Period.

Like the cynical use of the troops to push against basic First Amendment rights to openly dissent, to be a rebel or even an asshole, those lying closet-case valyews voters can kiss my entire ass, and then go eat shit and die in a fire. They are not christian in any real, honest sense of that word -- they hate poor people, want more guns, and have aligned themselves with a lifelong thief and liar, someone who bears false witness routinely, who violates at least three or four of their so-called commandments before his second brunch.

So they can take their Merry Christmas and fuck themselves in the goddamned neck with it -- I'll say it when I fucking well feel like it, and there's not a thing they or he or anyone can do about it.

Honor Among Thieves

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

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

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

The Lives of Others

The murder of Emmett Till was perhaps the most public of the countless blemishes on the American southern postwar apartheid regime. Some "good" did come from the atrocity -- for starters, Till's murder and the subsequent acquittal of his killers catalyzed the civil rights movement, and inspired To Kill a Mockingbird. It helped begin the dismantling of said apartheid regime, at least in the official sense. Southerners could drawl their "proud" plaints all they wanted, but nothing could undo the contempt they saw in the eyes of the rest of the country and the world.

The "revelation" that the woman at the center of the murder, whom Till made the fatal mistake of flirting with, was lying the whole time, should surprise no one. But in small additional twist of karmic fate, it turns out that Carolyn Bryant Donham's life was, according to writer Timothy Tyson, "ruined" as well.

I'll confess to being just small enough of a person to be gratified, heartened by that fact. Till's murder, it turns out, ruined the lives of his killers, Roy Bryant (Carolyn's husband) and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, the latter of whom was quite open about his glee in putting Till "in his place." Bryant and Milam had their shops boycotted until they had to close, and were basically run out of town, moved to Texas, their notoriety following them, and had difficulty finding gainful employment for the rest of their miserable lives. Both men died in their early sixties of cancer, hopefully in unspeakable pain.

Ordinarily I'd have wished that fate on Carolyn Bryant Donham as well, but it is just as gratifying to know that she's had to live with it all these years. It's still not enough, and one would like to see something more closely resembling actual remorse, rather than mere regret. (Incidentally, Tyson is something of a chump for waiting ten fucking years to drop this bit of information in the first place.)

Donham's lies had impact on the lives of countless others:  her initial lie got a kid murdered, beaten so hard one of his eyes popped out his head; her subsequent lie in court got Emmett Till's murderers off the hook. That willful evasion of justice triggered a massive, painful national upheaval, one which got countless other people beaten and killed. All for the institutionalized refusal to recognize that, as our esteemed founding fathers once wrote, tongues perhaps in their cheeks, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

It's amazing to think of how recent that murder was, a mere three generations ago, most of the principals now rotting in hell, but still relatively fresh in the collective psyche, which turns its soil more slowly, patiently. The people who insist that their stupid confederate flag has a "different" meaning should be forced to read the detailed account of Emmett Till's murder, and others like it that were commonplace throughout the south for a full century after the war supposedly ended. Countless other scumbags got away clean with evil deeds, just as awful as Till's murder.

The Union was way too nice to the traitorous insurrectionist slave states after the war -- every plantation owner should have been shot immediately, and the property redistributed among the people who had been forced under pain of death and torture to work it for free. It would have saved a hundred years of misery for millions of people.

I hope the last sixty years have held nothing but pain and sorrow for Carolyn Donham. I hope she has had regular nightmares featuring Emmett Till's face, pulped beyond recognition just a few weeks after his fifteenth birthday, because of her lies. I hope she lives to be 120, of sound mind, cognizant right up to her final breath of what she did, unable to escape its full weight. But as with most people who are capable of such actions in the first place, it's much more likely that she forgave herself long ago, feels that she paid the price, even though it was she all along who chose to pay it.

Asking for a Friend

So, uh, do you think Mitt Romney swallows?

Mommie Dearest

Even dirtbag serial killers have mothers that love them, one supposes, but the mother of sex-dungeon freak Todd Kohlhepp takes it to another level. Maybe she has to tell the rest of the world that her son is no monster, just so she can live with knowing that he is, and that she raised him. If we can't just have done with this piece of shit and shove him into a wood chipper, maybe we can just put him under permanent house arrest at her house, see how that works out.

All We Are Saying Is Give Beast A Chance

If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. -- George Orwell, Freedom of the Park

Brief notes and errata from the blunderground:

This country clearly deserves a leader like Drumpf -- a petulant liar who thinks his prevarications and authoritarian impulses are holy writ. And hell, after a few years of AG Jefferson, I say Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuuhhhd, perhaps they will be. Maybe Jared Kushner and Uday and Qusay, armed with information obtained with illegal surveillance and nepotistic security clearances, will sic the corrupt FBI cells on the DFHs protesting in the streets, heckling Pence at Hamilton, refusing to dress the new queen or appear for the Kennedy Center Honors.

Recall that one of Drumpf's early stump lines was, "When I'm president, we'll all say 'Merry Christmas'." To which a reasonable free citizen can only reply, Or what, motherfucker?

Drumpf'd

There is some small joy watching the idiot corporate media get suckered time and again by this incompetent con-man. After all, since they are largely incompetent as well, it just becomes a matter of being the first to make a move, and they will automatically, heedlessly follow, much the way your dog follows your hand because there might be a treat in it.

Now the media morons are all butt-hurt over this latest stunt, suddenly realizing they're Tina to Drumpf's Ike. Well, guess what, dummies:  he's been doing this to you for over a year, while the rest of us have watched and wondered, over and over again, why you can't just leave the brute. Now he's left a bruise, apparently. HE TRICKED US, YOU GUYS!

It wasn't the herding of them into pens at the rallies for the past year, like farm animals, waiting for the ancient, addled ungulates populating the building to waddle by periodically and hurl insults and spit at them, on cue from their wampeter. It wasn't the constant lying, evading, refusing to answer the simplest of questions honestly, openly defying them to simply do their jobs and empirically call him the fucking liar that he's been since the day he sprung forth from his mother's overworked asshole. No, it was the rickrolling that everyone saw coming up the road, punctuated with another pile of easily refuted, self-serving LIES.

Foundation and Empire

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Never Forget

On the 15th anniversary of the Twin Towers collapsing, it's interesting that this little nugget surfaces. What a disgusting piece of shit he is. If there was a god, the planes would have hit Gump Tower instead. If this doesn't do this worthless cocksucker in -- and don't worry, it won't; the Matt Lauers of the world will see to that -- I don't know what will. He's lucky there's no such thing as karma, or he'd be one of those melting Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Spread this one around far and wide, folks -- let's bring this fucker down, once and for all. He can take his fambly valyews lies and choke on them.

Soulless

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