Manly Men

Sarah nails it starting at about 12:15

Nicolle Brings It

• In 2016, Obama ran a clean and fair election, and Trump won
• In 2024, Biden ran a clean and fair election, and Trump won
• But in 2020, Trump fucked it up so bad, Trump lost
• Now it's like we should not think he's going to fuck it all up again

There's no rhyme or reason to anything - just like The Daddy State needs it.

Remember this:

Daddy State Awareness

• The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
• The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
• Lying about everything creates chaos, which helps condition us to stop thinking, and look to them for "guidance".
• Once we're totally dependent on them, we'll accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to destroy our ability

to experience reality directly,

so they can dictate reality to us

The Bulwark Comes To Colorado

Kyle Clark is a really good analyst, and that may be what makes him a really good old-school-type journalist.

"...because Jared Polis is the smartest guy Jared Polis has ever met."

Finding A Way

Reading - on the nail head.

If you read well, you can do anything. If you don't, everything is harder, and some things are completely out of your reach - you're done before you get started.

I'd give anything to have had my deficit properly diagnosed by 3rd or 4th grade.

Compensating for your difficulty - and having to defend yourself against "He's a bright kid, but he doesn't apply himself ... he's not living up to his potential" - that shit's exhausting.

Patterns Of Criminality

Trump pardoned almost 1600 J6 rioter-assholes. Dozens of them have since been arrested and charged with new crimes:

• child sexual assault
• production of child pornography
• possession of child pornography
• rape
• conspiracy to commit murder of FBI agents
• kidnapping
• sexual assault
• aggravated robbery
• reckless homicide
• driving under the influence causing death
• illegal possession of firearms
• domestic violence by strangulation
• burglary
• vandalism
• grand theft
• stalking
• violation of protective orders
• threatening public officials
• drug trafficking

January 6

was not

a day of love

Democracy Is

It's been going around for some time now, that it's not Red vs Blue, or Conservative vs Progressive, or even Good vs Evil (although we've seen a lot of that too)

And there's certainly a Class vs Class element to it - a big one actually.

But what it's come down to is liberal vs ill-liberal. Do we want our version of democracy to work for us, or do we want a version that just requires us to obey - and work for - the government?

I have one basic bone to pick with Mr Frum - he left out the yang:

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals - and you know it."

--Agent K, Men In Black

And that's the eternal paradox - the necessary rights of the individual, and the necessary commitment to a collective society every individual depends on.

Today's Bulwark

"We have deeply unserious leadership in a deadly serious moment."

And The Good News Is ...

... two days ago, when some of the Jan6 mob gathered again on the National Mall to celebrate having tried to totally fuck our democracy five years ago, they were outnumbered by the cops and counter-protesters.

We have to deal with asshole ICE "agents" (eg) who get caught up in their own daddy issues - or whatever drives their pathetic existence - but we should also keep in mind just how small the various factions are that make up the gang they think is huge and powerful and  impossible to resist.

What's really at work is the large network of shit-slingers and bots that blast the nonsense that fuel these idiots' fantasies of dominance and conquest.

We should continue to believe them when they tell us what raving assholes they are, but we also have to see them for the scared little men we know them to be when they're out in the open, and exposed to the disinfectant properties of either literal or figurative sunshine.

when you turn on the kitchen light

you'll see the cockroaches scuttle back

to their safe space under the dishwasher

Bulwark

Bulwark Takes

You know you're in a really bad place when the most important profit center driving your business - and your business decisions - is the guy monitoring Trump's social media feeds.

Closer And Closer

It's not a terribly smart thing to hold your breath on this shit.

• Trump is pressuring Boebert and Mace hard to get their names off the discharge petition
• Even if the vote is called, there's bound to be delays - debate, conference meetings, etc
• If the thing passes, there's no guarantee Johnson will act quickly to deliver the demand to Bondi
• Bondi almost absolutely fight it and stall and do whatever Trump instructs her to do
• This is Trump, so he'll take it to court and we'll spend a year waiting - unless enough Republicans get antsy enough about the re-election chances if it drags out and remains an issue during the mid-term campaigns

So yes, it's pretty damned close to being the smoking gun, but since there's no honor in MAGA, the GOP, or the White House - we can't reasonably expect any of them to act honorably.

A New Golden Age

We are now fully arrived at the 21st Century Golden Age Of Quackery.

Spaghetti

Dear President Putin

Uh-Oh

It's not definitive, but there's an awful lot of smoke here.

And what's up with Tulsi Gabbard doing a full blown press conference today?

And isn't it a little interesting that everybody (me too, BTW) gets very circumspect and cautious when information pops up that might actually be the smoking gun?

Suddenly we all get real careful to say things like "allegedly" and "it appears to be".

More Slotkin Please

Elissa Slotkin may be a bit more military/CIA than I'm willing to snuggle up to. But she hits it on the head and gets directly to that point.

1. I may work with somebody I wouldn't piss on if he was on fire, but the job is to get shit done, and you don't get shit done when all you do is sit around and bitch at each other.
2. Sometimes, defense helps you not lose, but it's offense that wins it for you.
3. Harris in particular, and too many Dems in general, went into 2024 with an Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once "plan", and when you try to win everywhere, you almost never win anywhere.

Communication is 10% words, 20% tone and inflection, and 70% body language. So stop smiling all the fuckin' time.

That's my main problem with the way too many Democrats present themselves - particularly guys like Michael Bennett and Tim Kane and until recently, Mark Warner. I think they're good and decent people, but when one of them puts that stupid little smile on his face as he lambastes some Republican jackass who applauds the anti-abortion laws that are obviously and proveably killing women, all I want to do is slap that smile around to the other side of his fuckin' head.

Get mad

Look mad

Stay mad

And stomp those jagoff MAGA Nazis

until there's nothing left

but a greasy spot on the rug.

Anyway - Elissa Slotkin is talkin' sense.

Two Weeks

We're closing in on being able to establish a new system for measuring political timelines.

• 1 Friedman Unit = 6 months
• 1 Scaramucci = 11 days
• 1 Trumplefuck = 2 weeks

This is a lot of 2-weekses

The Florida Finagle

I don't like thinking I'm adding to the problem of the Fire Hose Of Shit, but when practically every day gives us another major grift, I don't know how I can just brush it off, and let it become part of a very ugly process of normalizing official corruption.

So - sorry - here's today's shit.

Press Poodles Clutching Pearls

The US Constitution works on the honor system.

Trump is exactly the guy Madison and Hamilton worried out - the unscrupulous jerk who would use the founding documents as a guide to subvert them, and to warp government structure to serve his own ends - to make his own law.

A slug like Trump lives in SmarmSpace© (where loopholes are found, or manufactured).

He simply doesn't care about honor, or the rule of law, or right-n-wrong.

Unfortunately, there are about 275 people in Congress who are willing to go along with all this shit - because they're either cowardly phonies, or active participants in the project to tear down our traditions of democratic self-governance in order to replace it with a corporate-style plutocracy.

It's not a bad thing for media to keep these things in public view, but instead of the usual 10 minutes of exasperation, we need an acknowledgement of the fact that these assholes are actively working to kill democracy, and we need to know how we go about beating them - including civil disobedience.

The Two Fatal Flaws

Two things always eventually become obvious, and take the Daddy State regime down.

1. Incompetence
2. Corruption