What Did I Have to Be Thankful For?

     Thanksgiving was days ago and, to me, it was like any other day. Same with every other holiday. Barb and I used to cook holiday dinners on Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Now that she's dead, every holiday has been drained of its joy and significance.

      But even if she were still alive, hale and healthy and we were living happily together in our old home, it'd still be difficult to see for what we should all be grateful even if I squinted. Being a liberal, I don't wait for things to personally affect me before I start complaining. My heart went out to those who were in danger of losing their SNAP benefits early this month (even though I was affected)  just as my heart goes out to those 20,000,000 who will see their health care premiums get bloated by 200% or 300% because of the rapacious greed of so-called health providers and the Republicans who are in lockstep with them.

     It's difficult to see what there is to be thankful for when our federal judiciary is, at best, semi-functional and is rotten from the top. That would be the same Supreme Court that essentially ruled Trump can do whatever he wants as long as they're "official acts" (while denying Biden his EO modestly forgiving student loan debt).

     It's difficult to see how Trump is making America great again by insulting our allies in the Oval Office while kissing the asses of murderous dictators in that same Oval Office.

     It's difficult to see to what good end it is to have our government fan out across America like something out of an Orwell fever dream and arrest brown people for absolutely nothing and decimating communities.

     And it's difficult to see what there is to be thankful for when this is all being done at the behest of a doddering old pedophile who, even as he's filing lawsuits to prevent people from getting adequate food assistance while he's making literally billions from cryptocurrency schemes and building a $350,000,000 ballroom paid for by the oligarchs in whose service he is.

     While I will never believe for a minute this aging psychopath was legitimately elected in 2016 or last year, I have long since given up on trying to understand the 77,000,000 morons who, just four years after the worst, most ruinous administration ever, decided, "Yes, we want more four more years of this shit."

     This is a bum who said on the campaign trail, "I am your retribution" and called brown people "animals" and "vermin". He openly promised to fire federal employees left and right in the name of rooting out and eradicating "waste, fraud and abuse". Then we heard about his jet-setting FBI Director taking a $60,000,000 jet to see his squeeze sing the national anthem right before a wrestling match and giving her an FBI SWAT team as a security detail. We heard about his DHS secretary living a bloated lifestyle and coercing the Coast Guard to buy her two jets worth a total of $172,000,000.

     Trump is impoverishing America in countless ways but expects us to be thankful for his ballroom that will cost more money than the defense budgets of most countries.

      That's why I bark out a bitter laugh when I read stories virtually every day about MAGA voters, MAGA districts and MAGA states when they whine, "We didn't vote for this!"

     Oh, yes you did, you dumb cunts. As if past isn't prologue. Again, you voted for a disinterested sociopath who let hundreds of thousands of Americans die during the worst pandemic in a century and somehow, against all odds, made his first administration look like FDR's by conspicuous relief.

     Again, he's impoverishing you, denying disaster aid even to red states, is bitterly fighting to prevent you from getting food assistance, refuses to extend ACA subsidies to keep your health insurance premiums from going through the roof and is crippling the government to the point where's barely functioning. Oh. but he'll send you a $2000 check that never seems to come, a payout that will cost the government $600,000,000,000 dollars, add six trillion more to the debt and which even his own administration is saying would be a horrible idea.

     How is none of this blatantly obvious even to the morons on Earth Two?

     So, please, spare me your bleats about how this wasn't what you voted for. He promised to be a dictator on Day One. It's been 344 days and there's no end in sight. His top goons are living the fucking life of Riley while he's costing us millions every week so he can play golf and you're cutting coupons and counting pennies in a vain attempt to counter the raging inflation that's making it impossible for you to feed yourself and your families.

     Spare me. I don't want to hear it.

Trump Has Blood on His Tiny Hands

     Rahmanullah Lakanwal got into his car in Bellingham, Washington and drove 3000 miles to Washington, DC to kill National Guardsmen.

     God knows what was going through his mind or what he thought he was going to accomplish. We have no idea what his motives were but that really isn't important. He opened fire on two West Virginia Guardsmen near I Street and wound up killing Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom of the 863rd Military Police Company. 24 year-old Andrew Wolfe is still fighting for his life.

     The DOJ has upgraded its charges against Lakanwal and charging him with first degree murder. But considering Jeanine Pirro is in charge, with her track record, don't be surprised if Lakanwal winds up getting acquitted, receiving a key to the city and getting a huge civil judgment.

      Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, Trump decided to send 500 more Guardsmen to Washington, even though the double shooting was by an Afghan national out of Bellingham, Washington and wasn't home-grown. Such a tactic is stupid and eerily mirrors the "sunk-cost fallacy" that made the 21 year-long war in Afghanistan such a losing, hopeless quagmire.

     If Trump had never sent those Guardsmen to Washington, that girl would still be alive. Wolfe wouldn't be fighting for his life. And our nation's capital wouldn't be an armed encampment. Sending more Guard troops to Washington is akin to pouring gasoline on a fire in the hopes it will extinguish it. Their very presence in DC simply invites conflict.

     Lakanwal worked with the CIA in Afghanistan and was, ironically a policeman in his native country. After the August 2021 exodus of US forces, Lakanwal came to the United States seeking asylum and was finally granted it by, wait for it, the Trump administration. That same administration, when warned about the danger to Guardsmen deployed to DC, simply blew it off. 

     Military commanders knew very well what the risks were but Pam Bondi's Justice Department dismissed the concerns as purely "speculative". Well, a girl barely two years out of high school is about to be put into her grave. It's looking a lot less fucking speculative now.

     Again, I don't know what Lakanwal's motives were and I don't care. And I don't want to hear about his mental health issues. He planned this and successfully drove 3000 miles from Washington state to Washington DC to murder people. As opposed as I am to the death penalty, I hope for once Pirro succeeds and gets this piece of shit the death penalty. But Trump's administration gave this psychopath the asylum he sought, he put the National Gard at risk just by deploying them and he dismissed the risks they'd face. And now he's ordering 500 more Guardsmen into a city he doesn't like. Let's not forget that. Ever.

The Real Meaning of Thanksgiving

     "The Mayor, who is a low IQ person... the mayor is incompetent and the governor is a big fat slob. So Governor Pritzker, if you're listening, let's get your act together. Invite us in. I had a little bit of a Pritzker joke, I was going to talk about Pritzker and size, but when I talk about Pritzker, I get angry because he's not letting us do the job.

     So I'm not going to tell my Pritzker joke. They have a very cute, little joke you know, some speech writer wrote some joke about his weight. But I would never want to talk about his weight. I don't talk about people being fat. I refuse to talk about the fact that he's a fat slob, I don't mention it."

     Then the pardoned turkeys were secretly decapitated and their bleeding carcasses flown to Mar a Lago.

Quiet, Piggy

 

     These days, I'm thinking more and more about Hitler's famous tantrum in the bunker after finding out that Gen. Steiner didn't follow his orders and attack the Soviets as they encircled Berlin. Steiner, one of Hitler's most capable generals, disobeyed his order, not for ideological reasons but purely pragmatic ones. Confined to the bunker, Hitler was out of touch with the reality of the situation aboveground.

     Steiner, being on the ground, knew better than to attack a force with superior manpower, weapons and ammunition. He was forced to cobble together whatever males he could find from the ruins of Berlin. By late April 1945, Steiner realized he'd be sending old men and boys into a meat grinder and he was enough of a military commander to not send them out on a suicide mission in the twilight of a lost war.

     On discovering this, Hitler flew into a rage and looked at Steiner's refusal to send poorly-trained troops into a sure death trap. Hitler, refusing to see the reality of the situation, looked at Seiner's refusal as a personal betrayal.

     There isn't a helluva lot of daylight between Trump and the man whose speeches he slept next to. Both represent a mindset that's poorly-informed and out of touch with basic reality. And Trump's rages are starting to get attention even from those of us who've grown accustomed to them over the years. Just recently, he snapped at a Bloomberg reporter asking about the Epstein files by saying, "Quiet. Quiet, piggy."

     But then there's his new jihad, one against Sen. Mark Kelly, my senior senator here in Arizona. Since getting elected to the upper chamber, Kelly has been a bland, anodyne centrist lawmaker, certainly no liberal. But he brought with him the prestige and gravitas of being a former astronaut, combat pilot and a retired Navy captain with a quarter century of service.

     Kelly appeared in a video with five other Democratic lawmakers imploring service members to not obey illegal orders from Trump. They had reminded them that the UCMJ doesn't merely suggest but obligates those in the military. The video's main failing was that it didn't specify what those unlawful orders were but one can take more than a wild guess. 

     One could start with Trump's  illegal order to send 700 Marines into Los Angeles in violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus law. One could further point to the military being ordered to fire on fishing boats off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia that have resulted in at least 73 deaths.

     When the video came out, Nazi pipsqueak Stephen Miller whined about it on Fox. The next day, Trump raged on Truth Social that the six lawmakers were guilty of sedition and shared a post that they ought to be hanged. Then he set his sights on Mark Kelly.

     Trump's reaction was similar to Hitler's after the Generals Plot on July 20, 1944 when a bomb went off under a table at the Wolf's Lair. Hitler purged the Wehrmacht and had 200 executed. Another 20,000 went to the concentration camps.

     Blindly lashing out and meting out punishment is part and parcel to dictators. They tend to look at the military as theirs to do with as they please regardless of laws or constitutions. And Trump's own blind rage at Mark Kelly is rather surprising, not to mention alarming. Later, he tried to walk back his threats by saying he was “not threatening death, but I think they’re in serious trouble.”

     Pete Hogsbreath, the War Czar, announced a "uniform inspection" of Kelly to make sure he earned the medals he had, an investigation into his conduct and even floated the idea of recalling him to active duty to be courtmartialed.

     All things you see in totalitarian dictatorships.

     One could make a case that Trump's escalating rages are perfectly symptomatic of dementia, something I've experienced firsthand, but that's not what's important. What is important is that this lunatic needs to be removed from office as soon as humanly possible. It's really that simple.

Illegitimate

      If Donald Trump has any one superpower aside from snaking out of comeuppance and getting idiots to hand him vast sums of money, it's in finding and getting to work for him the worst lawyers in America. Sidney Powell. Todd Blanche. Emil Bove, Alina Habba. Mayor Rudy. That's just a partial list of the attorneys who had gone to war for Trump and failed.

     Now add Lindsey Halligan to the list. 

     Halligan's indictments against James Comey and Letitia James were thrown out today by Judge Cameron McGowan Currie on the grounds that Halligan was appointed illegally by Trump in a clear violation of the Constitution's Appointments Clause. Halligan, who'd replaced Erik Siebert as the acting US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, was never confirmed by the US Senate. In fact, she never even got a hearing.

     It's an eerie near-reprise of the ruling by Judge Aileen Cannon who had similarly thrown out the documents case against Trump in Fort Pierce, Florida on the grounds that Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed (He wasn't).

     The case against Comey was endangered because the Trump administration waited until literally the last day to beat the five year statute of limitations. The DOJ told Siebert to hastily arrange a grand jury to indict him. Siebert balked as he thought at least some of the charges wouldn't stick. In true form, they forced Siebert out and installed Lindsey Halligan to assemble the grand jury and, with suspicious rapidity, they got an indictment literally hours later, just barely beating the deadline.

     But it wasn't the fact that Trump shoehorned Halligan into the role with the grace of a stubborn toddler trying to force a square peg into a round hole. It was Halligan's incompetence and ignorance over what a US Attorney is supposed to do.

     Judge Currie made note of this inexperience in the opening paragraph of her ruling, which stated, "On September 25, 2025, Lindsey Halligan, a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience, appeared before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia. Having been appointed Interim U.S. Attorney by the Attorney General just days before, Ms. Halligan secured a two-count indictment charging former FBI Director James B. Comey, Jr. with making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding."

      In a way, one has to almost feel sorry for Halligan for being thrust in this position until one realizes that no one forced her to take the job. In some respects, she's typical of the female attorneys hired by Trump- Failed beauty pageant contestant, and wholly unsuited to lead federal prosecutions. She was, until going to work for the administration this January, an insurance lawyer who also represented a modeling agency and, again, had zero prosecutorial experience. In other words, she'd barely seen the inside of a courtroom.

     According to Judge Currie, it’s now up to the local district judges to name an acting US Attorney for that district (if any of this rings a bell, speak up now or forever hold your peace.) 

     But it wasn't just the fact that she was unlawfully stuffed into Siebert's chair or that she was comically unqualified to be a US Attorney. In going after Letitia James and especially James Comey, she displayed a level of incompetence that had to be seen to be believed. She didn't give the grand jury the full list of charges and, when she tried to undo that fuckup, she went back not to the full grand jury but the foreperson and one other juror so the rest of the 16 member grand jury was left in the dark about the charges.

     In a mad attempt to further unfuck this, Pam Bondi, after Judge Currie's ruling, tried to retroactively give the indictment her seal of approval. But Bondi wasn't the one who brought the charges. She's not even a US Attorney. It won't change the judge's ruling and now people are grumbling that both Bondi and Halligan should be disbarred. As it is, any other case brought by Halligan will now have to be automatically dismissed because Judge Currie exposed her illegitimacy.

     Now, are the cases against Comey and James over? Not so fast. Judge Currie dismissed the cases without prejudice, meaning the government can still bring forth the charges at a later date with a legitimate US Attorney. The DOJ could also appeal the ruling and, knowing Trump, he's already scheming to get the Supreme Court involved, his usual tactic when he doesn't get his way in the lower courts.

     But what about the long-since elapsed statute of limitations? The government can still use that because they'd secured the indictment just hours before it expired. In other words, the statute of limitations will still be grandfathered as far as Comey's concerned.

Nonexistent Terrorist Organization No Longer Exists

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari) 

I suppose it really was written on the walls all this time, even if, to the oblivious, it was in invisible ink.

     The nonexistent DOGE, the terrorist organization that, yes, terrorized millions of federal employees for months, the fake government agency that even Trump's Congress refused to recognize or fund, has been very quietly disbanded. 

     All this time, it was destined to be a footnote, a fast-fading speck of fly shit on the national historical record. "Created" by Trump via Executive Order and headed by a self-interested sociopath named Elon Musk, DOGE was notorious for bringing in juvenile delinquents, literally teenagers, to run roughshod over government agencies and even some that weren't, flying the pious banner of ridding the government of "waste, fraud,and abuse".

     In the first few months of Trump's second criminal junta, DOGE enjoyed access to once-secure government buildings, servers, websites and databases that, before January 20th, would've been considered unthinkable. What few offices and buildings had resisted were eventually brushed aside by FBI, Capitol Police and even the US Marshal's Service despite the fact they had no legal standing.

     It was the very delineation of Idiocracy- The US government taken over by barely-functional morons. The MSM kept referring to them as an actual government agency. By CPAC 2025, the Nazi rally led by homosexual rapist Matt Sclapp, Musk took the stage with Argentina's version of Generalissimo Franco and, in a nightmarish visual, waved a chainsaw like an autistic Leatherface. It was like a synthesis of corporate branding with the Night of Long Knives with a healthy dose of human horror dropped in.

     The real reason behind DOGE was clear- Musk used his illegitimate and fictional authority to fire exactly those Inspectors General who were investigating companies that Musk owned. The deregulation involved precisely those that would've put restrictions on, again, his companies. Meanwhile, the tens of millions in government contracts to Musk's companies kept rolling in.

     The two trillion in savings that Musk and Trump breezily promised on the campaign trail? It amounted to about $200 billion, if that. Fired workers had to be rehired back when they realized, oops, those people are necessary. Now, with DOGE sent off to the farm, never to come back, the hiring freeze has now been lifted. Our personal information had long since been harvested with no oversight and now God knows where it is or who has it. The damage wrought by DOGE has barely begun to manifest.

     And the interesting thing is that DOGE was disbanded with eight months left on its illegitimate "mandate". According to Trump's EO, DOGE was supposed to be around until July 2026, or a year and a half after it was hastily slapped together. They were supposed to be around for a year and a half. They didn't last half that long.

 

Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me, St. Elmo? 

Just yesterday morning, Politico ran a piece about former DOGE "staffers" who are now pissing their board shorts over the possibility of prosecution for the crimes they knew all along they were committing. The piece starts with DOGE staffers packing up their stuff on June 5. They'd been living on the 6th floor of GSA headquarters for the past four months. Some of them had even moved their families in with them like vagabonds taking advantage of some obscure squatters law.

    Them moving out with their DOGE tails between their legs that day was no coincidence. That was the day Donald Trump gave Musk his walking papers and told him he was done (Remember the black eye and the gold key?). Whether through some animal, preternatural awareness or Musk telling everyone to get out of the pool, DOGE delinquents scuttled out of the government as if they were never there.

    That was also the day Musk essentially told them he was abandoning them. Or maybe he didn't get that far. But, either way, from that day on, Musk's childrens' crusade was exposed politically, financially and legally. The kids got caught raiding the liquor cabinet when Mom and Dad came home. No more money. No more free lodging. No more authority. No more screaming at actual government employees and demanding they work around the clock for 36 hour shifts.

     No more cover.

     So, what about that "waste, fraud and abuse"? Well, the next thing we heard was that Kristi "Border Barbie" Noem was spending $220,000,000 in taxpayer money on an ad campaign in which much of that money was going to an outfit associated with her, through a company formed in Delaware just days before the contracts were handed out.

     Kristi Noem, meet $220,000,000. $220,000,000, meet the inside of Kristi Noem's pocket.

    That would be the same Kristi Noem who got the Coast Guard (which is part of Homeland Security, not the DoD), to buy her two luxury jets worth at least $172,000,000. So, because Trump saw fit to put Kristi Noem on the wingnut welfare rolls, the American taxpayer is on the hook for $400,000,000, with nothing but a few glitzy ads and illegal detentions and deportations to show for it.

      And, while we're talking about government parasites and jets, let's not forget professional sugar daddy and parttime FBI Director, Kash Patel's jaunts on a $60,000,000 government jet so he can spend quality time with a wannabe country and western singer who's literally young enough to be his daughter. He also provides her with her own FBI SWAT team. That alone qualifies as waste, fraud and abuse. Don't forget the final chapter of Orwell's Animal Farm, in which the characters became guilty of the things they'd decried in their predecessors, in which the humans and pigs became indistinguishable.

Good Tmes at Gotham City

 

We Are All Josef K

     "They tell me you are wicked and I believe them..." Carl Sandburg, Chicago

     "Agent 1: I can tell you right now how it’s going to go. We’re going to try to get out, they’re going to block our vehicles, we’re going to tell them to move, they don’t, we gas. Agent 2: We’re definitely gassing them when we leave. Just start throwing shit." 

     Federal Judge Sara Ellis has just written an extraordinary 233 page opinion regarding the crackdown on Chicago. Her massive ruling "backing the now-stayed preliminary injunction she issued limiting federal tactics in response to anti-ICE protests in Illinois," to quote Josh Gerstein.

     Even as I write this, ICE is now quietly slinking out of Chicago (and Portland) after inflicting untold misery and anxiety on the people of both cities. In her ruling, Judge Ellis mentioned incidents such as the indiscriminate and unnecessary use of tear gas on peaceful protesters to one agent captured on his own body cam using ChatGPT to write his own report.

ICE agents just snatched a Journalist & were Speeding away when they hit a woman’s vehicle that was going to work & doing nothing wrong! They almost left the scene after slamming into her,but then snatched her out of her car at gunpoint and took her with them! pic.twitter.com/JQ0sK5htnH

— Suzie rizzio (@Suzierizzo1) October 11, 2025

      In the weeks since ICE stormed into Chicago, we've seen countless atrocities being committed against the people of the Second City. In the video above, one of the most egregious abused of power I've seen out of Chicago or anywhere else, ICE agents, if that's what they are, snatch and arrest a journalist off the street. Right after starting their getaway, they hit a car. They stop then proceed as if attempting to drive away from the scene of the accident they caused, then stop again. They barge out of their van, violently pull the victim from her car, bind her hands then kidnap her as if she was the criminal.

     Judge Ellis began her ruling with a poetic reference to Carl Sandburg:

"While living in the Ravenswood neighborhood, Carl Sandburg wrote a love letter to hiscity, Chicago. In the poemSandburg noted both the complexity and beauty of a city known for its vitality, pride, strength, courage, tenacity, and joy. This case ultimately turns on whether the Chicagoland area, and Chicago specifically, is the City of Big Shoulders or  Chipocalypse Now. The Chicagoland this Court sees from Aurora to Cicero, from Chicago to Waukegan, and all points in between is a vibrant place, brimming with life and hope, constantly rebuilding itself to create a more just society, striving to move forward from its complicated history of segregation, police brutality, and gun violence, and expressing the joy of community in block parties, street festivals, and Sunday jazz shows on the lawn of a high school. Neighbors from every community show up for each other whether by filling little free libraries in parkways,offering free meals to those facing cuts in food benefits, guarding intersections to help trick-or-treaters safely cross the street, standing on the sidewalk to document law enforcement activities and protest against immigration enforcement activities they believe to be unjust, or simply praying the Rosary to provide comfort and bear witness to those detained at the Broadview detention facility who are facing fear and uncertainty."

     I'm sure Judge Ellis was referring to the shocking video of a priest at the Broadview facility in which a priest was holding his rosary beads and saying a prayer when an ICE goon shot him in the face with a pepper ball, then arrested him.

     I'm sure she was also referring to a Halloween parade of little trick or treaters who were terrified when ICE swarmed the area.

     During the government's brief brutal occupation of Chicago, there was hardly a day that went by when Twitter, Facebook and Bluesky weren't filled with fresh videos and images of masked goons pulling people out of their cars, jobs, homes or simply off the street regardless of immigration or legal status. Hardly a day went by when we hadn't heard accounts of innocent people victimized then arrested, detained and locked in a cell without food, water, medicine our access to a lawyer or even told what charges, if any, they were facing.

     It's literally like something out of Kafka. These days, we are all Josef K.

     And Judge Ellis is now fully aware of the sheer scale and scope of the endless lies that were being fed to her curt by DHS. One of DHS' top goons, Greg Bovino, someone Himmler would've loved, was called out by Judge Ellis for being evasive and giving "cure answers" in her court. In a perfect microcosm of the entire Trump administration, DHS has been unmasked as being cruel, sloppy and stupid. In their frantic, brainless attempts to get Stephen Miller to stop shrieking at them, they're madly trying to reach his insane goal of arresting and deporting 3000 people a day.

      On the campaign trail last ear, Trump promised to deport 1,000,000 a year assuring s they would be only the worst of the worst. But there simply anywhere near that many criminal immigrants to satisfy that quote for even a year much less four. So they're arresting people based on the color of their skin, racial profiling not even on steroids but on Captain America's super solder serum. They're manufacturing criminal backgrounds and cases that don't exist. Ask Kilmar Abrego Garcia, if you don't believe me.

The Appearance of MTG's Evolution

     Marjorie Taylor-Greene might as well represent Tybee Island, one of Georgia's barrier islands. It would be perfectly representative of Greene's increasing isolation from Republican politics.

     Green is an unfortunate byproduct of the vitriolic divisiveness that's become an accepted feature in American political discourse. She started as a gadfly stalking David Hogg through the streets of Washington, DC, then shouting through the mail slot of the congressional office of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

     Then she decided to run for Congress out of Georgia's 14th district and she hasn't had to look back. In fact, lately, she's been looking forward, eager to shake the dust of Rome, Georgia off the soles of her gym sneakers. Since her first election, she's evolved from being a stalker to a presidential bleacher bum, making a spectacle of herself at President Joe Biden's States of the Union.

     But Biden's no longer in office and even she knows that schtick is getting old fast. After nearly five years in Congress, Greene is looking for greener pastures. She's got just enough political savvy to know that even the single issue sons of the soil in GA-14 aren't going to put up with her bomb-throwing antics in the House forever. She's in the process of reinventing herself.

     Outwardly, it appears to be sincere, at least in the costs she's had to pay for bucking the MAGA base. She's long since been kicked out of the House Freedom caucus, which historically is a roll call of the worst of the worst that the GOP can offer. She engaged in a feud with Lauren Boebert that's only lately simmered down.

     And, most notably, there's her ongoing war with Donald Trump.

     Trump obviously never respected Greene (most likely because she's long since aged out). In true Trump fashion, he used Greene for his own ends, to help him advance his fascist agenda. Pointedly, he never gave her a job in his administration after his second theft of the presidency.

     Greene is a savvy political animal with more than nominal gifts in using social media but her one big weakness is in choosing allies. Her cynical alliance with former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a case in point. After going on a nation-wide fundraising tour with Matt Gaetz, she parted ways with him when Gaetz declared jihad on McCarthy, depriving Greene a powerful ally in the House.

     Then the House Freedom Caucus booted her out.

     So Greene set her sights down the road and reassessed her future. She openly mused about challenging Senator Jon Ossoff or maybe running for governor of Georgia. Generalissimo Trump couldn't have that. He wanted Greene exactly where she was. He couldn't have one of his loyal foot soldiers nursing aspirations of being an officer in her own right.

     He essentially told her he wouldn't support her in either race and that he wanted her to represent GA-14 forever. Putting her in her place didn't sit very well with Greene so she began opposing Trump's policies one by one.

     There was the plight of Gazans. Advocating for the 77,000 in her district who were about to lose their SNAP benefits. Then, of course, there was the release of the Epstein files. Greene was only one of four Republicans who'd signed the discharge petition paving the way for the 427-1 House vote that sent the bill to the Senate.

     Now, let's be clear about one thing- Just because Greene is suddenly making sense and finding herself on the right side of issues doesn't mean she's miraculously found her inner sane person. She texted Trump to release the flight logs of the Lolita Express so he could go after Democrats like Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and Reid Hoffman.

     Trump flew into a rage because he knew his name is all over those flight logs and, typically, he began calling Greene names and calling her things like a "ranting lunatic".

     When Adelita Grijalva was about to get sworn in, a clearly rattled Trump summoned Green and Boebert into the Situation Room and tried to pressure both women to take their names off the discharge petition and failed with both women. The guy who piously swears by "transparency" was making a desperate, last-ditch effort to keep those files from being released. 

     Again, in her crude, limited, Appalachian way, Greene is savvy enough to read the tea leaves. She knows how to make sense when it suits her. She knows that each day Trump slouches and slumbers his way through the White House brings him a day closer to irrelevance. In short, the 51 year-old Greene quickly realized she has a much longer and more viable political future than the nearly 80 year-old Trump.

     Greene separating herself from Trump and his legacy is based on nothing more than resentment over how Trump has treated her. He basically told her, "You will never get my endorsement for the Senate or the governorship of Georgia and that I want you to stay right where you are."

     Of course, Trump had no right saying that to her and she knows it. Marjorie Taylor-Greene has every right to run for whatever office she pleases. But let's not be fooled by Greene's sudden ascent into the land that makes sense. Say what you want about Greene but she doesn't like being told what she can or can't do and that has to get some grudging respect even among her fiercest detractors.

     But Greene is not going to turn into any liberal superhero anytime soon or ever. She's a die-hard MAGAt through and through, even after the movement had abandoned her. Right now, Greene is a latter-day version of the Scandinavian outcast pushed off on an ice floe. Look what they did to Liz Cheney. Green shouldn't be surprised it's happened to her, too.

And now, a word from the Fuhrer Bunker

 

     I'd like to take a break from the Epstein documents release to call attention to screeching little Nazi Stephen Miller, the dead-eyed, self-styled Gauleiter of the Southern border. 

     Miller apparently had a problem with two senators and a handful of congresspeople who posted a video on Senator Elissa Slotkin's Twitter account calling for military service members to disobey unlawful orders. Slotkin was joined by Sen. Mark Kelly and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio, and Chrissy Houlahan.

     In the minute and a half-long video, the lawmakers reminded those in the military that they have not only a constitutional right but a responsibility and an obligation to disobey an unlawful order even if it comes from the Commander in Chief.

     Well, in true fascist fashion, Miller ran to the nearest right wing outlet to scream about this mild opposition to Trump's plainly illegal orders. Here's what Miller said (translated from the original German):

     "It is insurrection, plainly, directly, without question. The CIA, the clandestine service, which isn't even legally authorized to operate in the United States, should engage in, again, acts of rebellion and insurrection. These lawmakers should honestly resign in disgrace and never return to public office again for even daring to think, let alone to say these words and to say them proudly."

     Then, for good measure, he added,

     "We have seen the Democratic Party nurse the flames of violence and insurrection against the federal government for the last 10 months. When you see this continuous campaign of violence against ICE officers and Border Patrol agents. This is a dangerous moment. You have a political party, an organization, the Democrat Party (sic), and their message is that any action, no matter how unlawful, no matter how dangerous, no matter how much it threatens this constitutional order, is justified if it keeps Democrat (sic) policies in effect at any cost." 

 

     Miller, who, according to this left wing blogger, is even punier and more craven than he appears on TV, also has a permanently arrested sense of irony. He's screeching about "insurrection" on Fox while remaining blithely ignorant and outright dismissive of the actual insurrection started by his boss on January 6, 2021 that resulted in the deaths of nine people.

     He's also plainly no lawyer, even going so far as the claim the CIA has no jurisdiction to operate within the United States. And he thinks that by yelling at the top of his lungs on Fox that these six lawmakers should resign that he'll make it so.

     I've said it before that if Miller was born 100 years ago, he would've made the perfect sondercommando, the Jewish slave labor used to dispose of the bodies in the death camps. Or, if he'd succeeded in avoiding deportation, he would've signed up for the SS and lied about his Jewish heritage. Honestly, every time I see Miller, I remark to myself how out of place that sneering little cunt looks in a tie and suit and can more readily imagine him wearing a black SS uniform.

     But far from those six Democratic lawmakers declaring an insurrection on the US (again, like his boss did on January 6), Miller is declaring war on them and on the entire Democratic party. Because, remember, in every totalitarian state, other political parties are outlawed because tyrants and their enablers are cowards at heart and get the dry heaves at the thought of opposition at any level.

427-1

 

     This is the lone Nay vote. Clay Higgins of Louisiana's 3rd District.

     He just shot himself in the foot with a Javelin. 

     The 427-1 vote tally, of course, was to the bill that demands the DOJ release the Epstein files in full. Republicans fought bitterly against the discharge petition. Only four Republicans (Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert) signed the petition. Mike Johnson refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, who won her special election in AZ-7 last September 23rd, desperately trying to kick the can down the road as far as he could. Then when he had to finally swear her in, she immediately added her name to the petition as promised, setting the process in motion.

     Once the discharge petition went into effect, Mike Johnson was powerless to stop it and all he could do was schedule the vote. And once the discharge petition went through, the other Republicans who refused to sign it knew the jig was up and that there was no future in protecting the pedophile in the White House.

     Every Republican voted to compel the Justice Department to release the full Epstein files. Except for Clay Higgins.

     Now it goes to the Senate and the near unanimous House vote puts pressure on John Thune to hold a vote in the higher chamber. I expect there to be a near unanimous vote in there. Then it goes to Trump's desk.

     Trump did a head fake and demanded Republicans vote to release the Epstein files. When asked about the turnaround, Abigail Jackson actually said, “President Trump has been consistently calling for transparency related to the Epstein files for years – by releasing tens of thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request”.

     Somehow, she managed to keep a straight face.

     Of course, once Grijalva added her name to the discharge petition and gave it the crucial 218th name, the first thing Trump did was summon Boebert to the White House Situation Room to try to get her to remove her name from it. And, for months, despite his campaign promises, Trump has resorted to every dirty trick in the book to keep those files from coming out.

      This is how he pretended to call for the release of the Epstein files (emphasis mine):

     "Some 'members' of the Republican Party are being 'used,' and we can’t let that happen. Let’s start talking about the Republican Party’s Record Setting Achievements, and not fall into the Epstein 'TRAP,' which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE! All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT."

     That little caveat, "whatever they are entitled to", is the reason why the full files will not come out.

     It's common practice for the Department of Justice to not release files, even those compelled by Congress, if they pertain to ongoing investigations or prosecutions. Trump has raised the question several times that if the Epstein files were damaging to him, then why didn't the Biden administration release them?

     The short answer is it couldn't.

     So now it's chaos in Pam Bondi's DOJ  with the 427-1 vote They're not waiting for the Senate to do the inevitable. They're going crazy right about now cherry-picking Trump's name out of the files, including the incriminating photos and videos of Trump doing God knows what. They're already busy redacting Trump's name and that of every Republican out of those files so that all we'll get is a sanitized version, one that comports with Ghislaine Maxwell's claim that Trump never did anything wrong.

     Here's the thing- While they were stupid enough to vote for Trump, some of them three times, they won't be mollified with it. They'll know something's up. And they won't be happy.

Moving the Goalposts

 

     Two days ago Megyn Kelly hit a new low.

    The Dollar Store Laura Ingraham actually said that an unnamed source informed her that Jeffrey Epstein wasn't a pedophile, an ignorant opinion that she leaned into. On her show, she said,

     "Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile. This is this person's view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. I realize this is disgusting."

     What's disgusting is that Kelly actually seems to be believe this or is pretending to. One thinks of other media figures in the past who were sacked from their networks for saying less provocative things, such as Phil Donahue and CBS legend Dan Rather. Kelly herself was fired by NBC for defending blackface.

     But Kelly runs her own podcast and for now, she gets to call the shots, at least until she gets deplatformed. And she should.

     Saying Jeffrey Epstein wasn't a pedophile is like saying the earth isn't round or that water isn't wet. It's beyond debate. At least 27 women have came forward claiming that Epstein sexually abused them and had trafficked them. That was why he was originally arrested in 2007 in Florida and again 12 years later when he came back from France. His right hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, is currently serving a 20 year stretch for sex trafficking.

     And even an idiot like Megyn Kelly must know at least the basics of the age of consent in the United States. In Florida, for instance, where Epstein was first arrested, it's 18. So to claim 15 is acceptable and perfectly legal is fallacious.

     Kelly herself is the mother of a 14 year-old daughter. It would be amusing to ask her if she'd accept that her daughter next year started sleeping with a man in his 50s or 60s. Would she be OK with it, then?

     She'd remember the actual age of consent pretty damned quick.

     But it's obvious why Kelly is doing this. She's not doing this to defend Epstein. She's doing it to pre-emptively protect Trump so she can say, "So what if the president had sex with a 15 year-old girl when he was in his 50s or 60s?" when the Epstein files in toto finally come out.

     Elsewhere on her podcast, Kelly said that she hadn't heard of anyone accusing Epstein having sex with anyone under the age of 15. I would refer her to Katie Johnson, who filed two lawsuits against Trump and said in her testimony that Trump and Epstein had both raped her when she was 13. She'd also said that Trump forced her and a 12 year-old girl named "Maria" to perform fellatio on Trump in Epstein's Manhattan townhouse.

     So maybe Kelly should talk to Katie Johnson or at least to read the transcript of her 2016 testimony.

     Moving the goalposts is a tried-and-true tactic of Republicans. Kelly may pretend not to know what the age of consent is but she certainly knows about guilt by association. She knows Trump and Epstein back in the day were the Frick and Frack of the pedophile community.

     It's one thing to defend Trump. Koolaid swillers like Megyn Kelly do that every day. But to posthumously try to rehabilitate a scumbag like Epstein to that end is beyond credulity.

     It's also another tried-and-true right wing tactic to advance a ridiculous opinion and then to claim it was fed to them by an unnamed source. "Don't shoot the messenger. That's what she said!" But something else that Kelly never realized is that, if this source actually exists, claiming that she "was there for a lot of this" automatically undermines her credibility.

     Because I'd like to think most of us know that witnessing a crime and not reporting it immediately makes one an accessory after the fact.

     Yes, this should have been career-ending and Megyn Kelly should have been deplatformed by the end of that same day. But we all know the rules are different for right wingers. Dan Rather lost his job at CBS over a font on George W. Bush's military record. Phil Donahue lost his job for criticizing the Iraq War, something we now know was illegal. But, hey, when Megyn Kelly says it's perfectly acceptable for late middle age men to have sex with girls who should be in 9th grade, it''s just another day in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

     It's always risky to take a criminal like Jeffrey Epstein at his word. However, most of us let our guard down during private communications. There's less of an incentive to lie if we assume they won't be read for public consumption, if there aren't reputations to protect.

     Having said that, it would also be reckless and wouldn't necessarily serve the interests of truth to dismiss out of hand the tranche of documents handed to the House Oversight Committee by Epstein's estate. These consist of tens of thousands of emails written by Epstein to people like Ghislaine Maxwell and Trump biographer Michael Wolff.

     The emails indisputably seem to have been targeted for dissemination to the House committee and many of them are insulting, defamatory and condemnatory of Trump (which leads one to wonder why he'd spent Thanksgiving with Trump at Mar a Lago in 2017).

     Indeed, reading just a few of these emails, one gets the sense that it would be more difficult to explain why Epstein would lie about Trump than it would be to explain why he'd tell the truth about him. We don't know what precipitated the split between the two longtime friends. The accepted theory is that it was over a real estate deal in Palm Beach when both men bid on a property. But that's not what's important.

     What is important is how thoroughly Epstein seems to have turned on Trump. It was an animus that bordered on the outright venomous. In some emails, Epstein wrote that Trump didn't seem to have a decent particle in him,that he was "unbelievably evil" and even called him "borderline insane".

     Most chillingly, Epstein said, "I'm the one that can take him down."

     Plainly, Epstein had plans for Trump and he was ready to make his move. So perhaps it's no coincidence that Epstein was arrested moments after landing after a trip to France.two and a half years into Trump's first term. And perhaps it's no coincidence that Epstein was a suicided a month later.

     As I've said several times before, it's one thing to have a few dots to connect. It's another thing entirely when there are so many dots that they form a picture, like the pixels on a TV screen. And everything we already know about Trump and Epstein (and one gets the sense the worst for Trump is yet to come) show an eventually bitter relationship.

     The animus was mutual. In countless desperate attempts to separate himself from Epstein, Trump has called him a creep and other names. He said he booted him out of Mar a Lago and revoked his membership, despite Epstein saying he was never a member. 

     Trump, ironically, is now trying to deflect attention from himself by mentioning Bill Clinton and others. Here's the problem- Epstein wrote in one of those emails, in all capital letters, that Bill Clinton was never at Epstein's island.

     In other words, everything Trump has been claiming is being disputed by the Epstein emails.

     Now, does Epstein's turnaround on Trump retroactively make him a hero or a decent person? Of course not. Epstein was a well-scrubbed scumbag who victimized countless underage girls for his sexual gratification and ruined their lives. At least one of them has committed suicide over it. One girl, named "Maria" by Katie Johnson, permanently disappeared.

     All it proves is that Epstein had an axe to grind and, just as many a true word is spoken in jest, many of them are also spoken in bitterness.

     And, unremarked by everyone is the sheer level of Trump's panic and at how willing he is to burn bridges to protect himself. The most notable split has been with Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

 

     Greene is one of only four Republicans who'd put their names to the discharge petition intended to release the Epstein files in full. Greene, to put it mildly, has been supportive of Trump and she's debased herself to no end in her service to him. Yet lately, Greene has been siding with Democrats about a whole host of issues, including the plight of those in Gaza, SNAP benefits being suspended and, of course, the release of the Epstein files.

 

     For now, she's a useful idiot but we need as much help as we can to get justice for those girls. And Trump has been spitting venom at Greene over a text message she recently sent him that drove him over the edge. As a result, Trump called a "ranting lunatic", probably the only honest thing he's ever said recently, and pulled his endorsement for her.

     Let's get one thing straight- Greene is no more a secret hero than Epstein. Having drunk the Koolaid countless times, Greene's predicate for demanding the release of the files is taking down the Clintons and other Democrats. She literally cannot fathom why Trump is going after her. And, like a diehard MAGAt, it's honestly never occurred to her that she could be protecting a pedophile, that maybe Trump doesn't want the Lolita Express's flight logs released because he knows his name is all over them.

      Trump also wants to take down the Clintons but not at the expense of his own reputation. That's why he's fighting so hard and viciously to keep the Epstein files from being released. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, is confident the vote on the Epstein files' release will sail through the House and that many Republicans will vote with the Democrats. And even a famously thin-skinned asshole like Trump knows he can't go after all of them.

     Jeffrey Epstein said he was the only one who could take down Trump. It looks as if he might posthumously get his wish.