Today's Tweet

But can they stick the landing?

Hey Polar Vortex, you may freeze my @JusticeForGirl pants but you’ll never kill their style #FrozenJustice #SisterhoodOfTheFrozenPants #PolarVortex #MNnice #BoldNorth #Negative50 #WinterFun #PerfectLanding pic.twitter.com/7s9Lro7Lpx

— Danika Brinda (@DanikaBrinda) January 31, 2019

Brrr

WaPo:

Even Hell, Mich., froze over: The community outside of Ann Arbor was expected to see temperatures drop to minus-26 overnight into Thursday. The nearby University of Michigan took the rare step of canceling classes through Thursday.

But, according to DumFux News, we can't stop using fossil fuel now, even though the use of fossil fuel has fucked it all up for us, because fossil fuel is the only thing we have that's really reliable - and let's be sure to conveniently ignore the fact that the fossil fuel industry's efforts to make their fuel the only one we can rely on is what got us into this fuckin' mess in the first fuckin' place.

The only real defense against Winter Storm Jayden is fossil fuels—the source of the vast majority of electricity that Americans will need to stay warm. Pie-in-the-sky talk about renewable energy won’t warm hearths and hearts during this storm, because the sun isn’t shining all the time and the wind capacity simply isn’t there.

Sorry not sorry but - goddammit, I hate these assholes.

Overheard on the intertoobz yesterday:

"I think I just keyed that guy's car with my nipples."

Safety Tip

Please make an extra effort to control your rage over the next few days, because it's inevitable that you'll hear some typically stoopid jokes about "Global Warming" from some typically stoopid Red Hat Rubes.

Just try to remember: busting your knuckles on that idiot's head hurts a lot more when it's really cold like this.

Stay calm and keep shoveling

Overheard

45* tweeted only once yesterday, and 30 million rubes assumed it was because he was wrapped in a Muslim prayer rug, bound with duct tape, in the trunk of a super car blazing through the southwestern desert at 300 miles an hour.

I only wish it was possible for us to think any of that was beyond what the rubes are willing to believe.

Today's Quote

If service is beneath you, then leadership is beyond you.

-- anonymous

Randy Rainbow

Not his best, but even then, pretty durn good.

Cell Block Tango:

Dear "Conservatives"

I can't take you at your word because the things you say make it impossible for me to  discern a consistently coherent worldview on your part.

Alt-Right Playbook:

She's Got Points

Kamala Harris, announcing her candidacy for POTUS.

Hometown crowd, but that's a right big bunch of folks.

I'd normally ignore this because I tend not to get going with anybody who comes out almost 2 years ahead of the election. So that loses her a coupla points.

But she hit on most of the points she needed to hit for me.

I want her to get better at bringing the thunder. Presentation is important in public speaking, and as superficial as it seems, if you can't get a neutral crowd whipped up a little, then you might as well be lecturing a bunch of drowsy pre-schoolers right after lunch.

Chris Cillizza recaps it:

1. "We were raised in a community where we were taught to see a world, beyond just ourselves. To be conscious and compassionate about the struggles of all people."

2. "My whole life, I've only had one client: the people."

3. "Fighting for the people meant fighting on behalf of survivors of sexual assault -- a fight not just against predators but a fight against silence and stigma."

4. "I'll tell you, sitting across the table from the big banks, I witnessed the arrogance of power. Wealthy bankers accusing innocent homeowners of fault, as if Wall Street's mess was of the people's making."

5. "On the subject of transnational gangs, let's be perfectly clear: The President's medieval vanity project is not going to stop them."

6. "To be sure we've won and we've lost, but we've never stopped fighting."

7. "We are here knowing that we are at an inflection point in the history of our world. We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation."

8. "America, we are better than this."

9. "When we have leaders who lie and bully and attack a free press and undermine our democratic institutions, that's not our America."

10. "People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other. But that is not our story."

11. "When we lift up the women of our country, we lift up the children of our country. We lift up the families of our country. And the whole of society benefits."

12. "Let's speak the truth that too many unarmed black men and women are killed in America. Too many black and brown Americans are locked up. From mass incarceration to cash bail to policing, our criminal justice system needs drastic repair. Let's speak that truth."

13. "We have foreign powers infecting the White House like malware."

14. "In the face of powerful forces trying to sow hate and division among us, the truth is that as Americans we have much more in common than what separates us."

15. "When women fought for suffrage, those in power said they were dividing the sexes and disturbing the peace."

16. "When abolitionists spoke out and civil rights workers marched, their oppressors said they were dividing the races and violating the word of God."

17. "I stand before you today, clear-eyed about the fight ahead and what has to be done -- with faith in God, with fidelity to country and with the fighting spirit I got from my mother."

18. "An America where our daughters, where our sisters, where our mothers and grandmothers are respected where they live and where they work."

19. "I will tell you this: I am not perfect. Lord knows, I am not perfect. But I will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect. I will lead with integrity. And I will speak the truth."

20. "As Robert Kennedy many years ago said, 'Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.' "

21. "These are not ordinary times. And this will not be an ordinary election."

For me, every candidate needs to demonstrate they understand that there has to be more than just an implied question for everyone who wants to continue with policies that make it better for a few while fucking it all up for the rest of us - I want them to issue a direct challenge to the Daddy State:

Why does it seem like you refuse to hear it when the entire world is crying?

Today's Pix

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This Mote Of Dust

...suspended in a sunbeam.

In what sounds like a real prayer, Carl Sagan, reading Carl Sagan:

Pushback

Wanting everyone to have food, water, shelter, education, and an equal shot at living out their lives at some fair level of dignity doesn't make you a snowflakey socialist libtard - it makes you a decent compassionate human being.

And according to the preamble of the US Constitution, it makes you the real American.

So maybe it's not unreasonable to think it means that being a dickish libertarian MAGA-rube might actually be against the law.

A Poem

May we raise children
who love the unloved things -
the dandelion, the worms and spiderlings.
Children who sense the rose needs the thorn
and run into rainswept days
the same way they turn towards the sun

And when they're grown
and someone has to speak for those
who have no voice
may they draw upon that wilder bond,
those days of tending tender things,
and be the ones.
-- Nicolette Sowder

Today's Tweet

Sea legs.

bird balance pic.twitter.com/OLFUlWI6pe

— CAWWW (@pissed_eagle) January 28, 2019

Weekend Update (NSFW)

Colin Jost & Michael Che:

Per The Washington Examiner:

Stone went on to work for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole. But while serving on Dole’s campaign in 1996, he was hit with a controversy of his own. The National Enquirer revealed that Stone and his second wife Nydia, a former model, had placed ads for group sex partners in swingers magazines and online. Stone also frequented Capitol Couples, a former swingers club in D.C., according to the Enquirer and other publications.

“Hot former model seeks exceptional, in shape muscular … studs for threesomes with herself and body builder husband,” read one ad, which including topless photos of Stone and his wife. Another ad specified: “No smokers or fats please."

Stone initially denied the Enquirer story, claiming the ads were fabricated by political enemies, but he was forced to resign from the Dole campaign due to the controversy. He later acknowledged that the ads were indeed his.

Today's Fun Fact

A dog gets a lot more useful information by briefly sniffing a pile of shit than any rube has ever gotten from years of watching DumFux News.

Today's Tweet

Cadence - it gives your audience a better chance to keep up, and makes it more likely they'll remember what you say. Fake lord knows the rubes need all the help they can get.

When you notice that Mike Pence always. talks. like. this. 🔊 pic.twitter.com/K610milDKD

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) January 25, 2019

Overheard

Here's your SOTU for 2019:

The country is stuck in a shitfest hosted by a traitorous fuckin' moron, abetted by a gaggle of billionaire tycoon butlers and 30 million inbred rubes.

There - that should hold ya. Can we go for pizza now?

hat tip = @RogueSNRadvisor, et al

Today's Tweet

Buh-bye.

"Roger Stone" Thoughts and Prayers

My thoughts are that he is a Traitor
I pray that he never sees the light of day again.

— 🌴 Jeff 🌴 (@JeffHendrix88) January 25, 2019

Sssssss

That loud hissing sound we hear is either the air going out of the Daddy State balloon - finally - or it's the growing problem of snakes in the snake pit, as they escalate their attacks on each other.

And now that I stop and think about it for moment, those two things always go together.

Ronnie Reagan would not approve on either count.

WaPo:

Republican senators clashed with one another and confronted Vice President Pence inside a private luncheon on Thursday, as anger hit a boiling point over the longest government shutdown in history.

“This is your fault,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at one point, according to two Republicans who attended the lunch and witnessed the exchange.

“Are you suggesting I’m enjoying this?” McConnell snapped back, according to the people who attended the lunch.

Johnson spokesman Ben Voelkel confirmed the confrontation. He said Johnson was expressing frustration with the day’s proceedings — votes on dueling plans to reopen the government, both of which failed to advance.

The people who attended the lunch spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a closed-door session. Aides to McConnell, citing regular policy on GOP lunches, declined to comment on the gathering.

- and -

The outbursts highlighted the toll the shutdown has taken on Republican lawmakers, who are dealing with growing concerns from constituents and blame from Democrats, all while facing pressure from conservatives to stand with Trump in his demand for money to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

- and -

“Nobody was blaming the president,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), speaking about the lunch to reporters afterward. “But there was a lot of frustration expressed about the situation we find ourselves in.”

Repubs are staring their political doom in the face and they can't bring themselves to admit that they - along with the incredibly shitty hurtful policies they've been pimping - comprise their main problem.

They can't figure out how to unhitch themselves from a very unpopular president without going against a constituency they believe is vital to their staying in power. But if they continue pandering to a shrinking group of zealous gullible rubes, they're on their way out anyway.

Most of us can see that 45* has not remade the GOP in his image so much as he is a near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for 30 or 40 years. Congress Critters are finally beginning to acknowledge that, as it becomes clearer to more and more people just how venal and cynically ambitious these clowns are.

And guys like Wilbur Ross and Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett (et al) aren't helping.

BTW, that stoopid idea about hostages borrowing money to "tide them over"?  C'mon - you're going to fuck with these people - threatening their livelihoods and their credit ratings and their plans for the future - and then you're going to charge them interest when you're basically loaning them their own fucking money?

Seriously - what the fuck is wrong with you assholes that you'd be looking to profit from this mess?

Walkin' And Talkin'

If you talk like a crook and you walk like a crook, and in practically every other way you act like a crook - then you're prob'ly a fuckin' crook.

WaPo:

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, was arrested by the FBI on Friday after being indicted in the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Stone was charged with seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements and one count of witness tampering, according to Mueller’s office.

With Stone’s indictment, Mueller has struck deep inside Trump’s inner circle, charging a long-standing friend of the president and one of the first people to promote Trump for the White House.

Stone, 66, who has been friends with Trump for three decades, served briefly as a formal adviser to his presidential campaign in 2015 and then remained in contact with him and top advisers through the election.

The GOP operative has been a key focus of the special counsel for months as Mueller has investigated whether anyone in Trump’s orbit conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Read the indictment
I suppose the dangling of pardons will likely come back into play now - preceded of course by more of the usual flip-floppy double-speak:

• Yes, Roger's a friend
• No, I never really knew him
• Yes, he was an integral part of the operation
• No, he did a few things for us around the edges
• blah blah fuckin' blah

And Stone will most likely stay in the mode he helped establish for GOP Rat-Fuckery:

Today's Beau

Justin King - aka: Beau Of The Fifth Column

We Live For Recognition

The reason we're addicted to social media is that we're addicted to every little squirt of dopamine our brains give us when we get even the tiniest bit of approval - every Like or Retweet or Share or whatever.

Even when it's a negative reaction - we gotta have that daily fix. 

What makes it one of the greatest ironies ever is that the web has given us a feeling of power because of its promise of anonymity, but that same anonymity - the fear of being ignored and forgotten and discarded - that's what drives us to call attention to ourselves.

"...where your glory and your doom are bound up together..."

Plus - if you think nobody knows who you are, or where you are, or what you're doing, then you're completely daft, and you're the perfect pigeon when the cynical manipulators need to move political opinion in one direction or another.

For a good look at a fairly representative part of the problem, and how the rat-fuckers exploit these vulnerabilities, find "Brexit: The Uncivil War" (BBC and HBO).

And oh yeah - our "president" is "president" because in a bizarre and perverse way, he is, in fact "one of us".

Taking Solace Where I Find It

George Will has no room to criticize anyone for hypocrisy, or for the voluntary blindness that's become the hallmark of the GOP Establishment. ie: "Holy fuck - the Republican Party seems to be filled with Republicans".

He's been a de facto cheerleader for the GOP's fuckery for 35 years - always looking the other way as they pulled the most heinous shit on people, telling us the results of the election proved the party was representing the will of the people and blah blah blah. 

But anyway - now he's considered an Elder of the Beltway Tribe, and so of course, we have to listen when he croaks out something that sounds vaguely cogent.

File this under - "When You've Lost George Will..." which has grown into a gargantuan folder, and still somehow, George's "conservatives" continue their dickishness apace.

(ed note: try to ignore the very old and very stale "windsock" analogy - George himself is old and stale, so - yeah)

From WaPo:

Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party today.

When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge. In the past three years, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion.

In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.

- and -

On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from “I don’t know” whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and divert into wall-building funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, to “Time for President . . . to use emergency powers to build Wall.” The next day, he scrambled up the escalation ladder by using capitalization: “Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.” Two days later, he scampered down a few rungs, calling for his hero to accept a short-term funding measure to open the government while wall negotiations continue. Stay tuned for more acrobatics.

But stay focused on this: Anyone — in Graham-speak, ANYONE — who at any time favors declaring an emergency, or who does not denounce the mere suggestion thereof, thereby abandons constitutional government. Yes, such a declaration would be technically legal. Congress has put on every president’s desk this (to adopt Justice Robert Jackson’s language in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision affirming the constitutionality of interning of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent) “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Or an implausible one. However, an anti-constitutional principle would be affirmed. The principle: Any president can declare an emergency and “repurpose” funds whenever any of his policy preferences that he deems unusually important are actively denied or just ignored by the legislative branch.

Why do they come to Congress, these people such as Graham? These people who, affirmatively or by their complicity of silence, trifle with our constitutional architecture, and exhort the president to eclipse the legislative branch, to which they have no loyalty comparable to their party allegiance?

Seven times, Graham has taken the oath of congressional office, “solemnly” swearing to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it, “without any mental reservation.” Graham, who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.

One important point that Mr Will doesn't include in this little sermon is that once Cult45 is out of office, guys just like George Will are going to assure us that either it never even happened, or it was some really strange anomaly. 

Yeah, you bet - an anomaly that keeps happening in much the same way over and over again.

Mr Will wrote this same column about Bush43, and then carried a lot of water for the people who needed us to forget about that particular chapter of GOP fuckery, having done almost exactly the same after Reagan's fuckery.

At least this time, he touches on the problem - that Lindsey Graham is a symptom of the disease - but he fails to point it up properly.

The failure is all about refusing to deal honestly with that problem. And even more to the point - the failure lies in promoting the kind of memory loss that pimps Deliberate Ignorance on the part of Team Rube so they'll keep voting against their own best interests.

45* and Lindsey Graham and Steve King and Devin Nunes and and and - those guys have not remade the party in some weirdly warped image of themselves. They are the near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for the last 40 years, at the behest of the guys with all the money, and the power to buy these Coin-Operated Politicians.

Happy Birthday

Django Reinhardt

Jean Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953) stage name Django Reinhardt, was a Belgian-born Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer, regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. He was the first jazz talent to emerge from Europe and remains the most significant.

Just Missed

A sinkhole opened up on Tuesday afternoon in the road a block away from White House grounds in Washington.

DC police said in a tweet that 17th Street NW between C and E streets NW was closed in both directions because of the sinkhole.

A sinkhole formed last summer on the north White House lawn near the entrance to the James Brady Press Briefing Room. The hole was cordoned off, excavated and repaired over the course of roughly a week last May.

God was unavailable for comment, but through a spokes-angel, heaven released this brief message, quoting the deity: "Shit - I guess my targeting system's all fucked up again".

Today's Tweet

Startin' to get it now?

There's no apparent connection between the Cov Cath presence on the mall last Saturday, and there's probably not much we can hook into NBC's decision to interview the privileged little prick who's the face of the problem, but when that little prick and his gang are invited to a White House where the General Counsel just happens to be a Cov Cath graduate, there's a little too much coincidence on that one.

Oh, hey, look! WH counsel is a CovCath grad. NO WONDER media was so anxious to whitewash the little shits’ behavior. https://t.co/SxYLGW7sli

— Karoli (@Karoli) January 23, 2019

Today's GIF

Cult45 needs desperately to convince us that their "president" is powerful and potent and manly. 

There's no way to get this clown on horseback with his shirt off. And he's way too much of a pussy to go anywhere near a tiger.

So when they create memes for posting on social media, they just PhotoShop the image to make him appear thinner, and to make his fingers look longer.

And ain't that pretty much the whole story on this dickhead?

Your tax dollars hard at work - gaslighting the fuck outa ya.

hat tip = Gizmodo

Today's Pix

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