Today's GIF

Bubble porn

A Little Nature Porn

Pretty kitty

Rottweiler, Inc

Repubs keep indicating (ie: insisting) that their basic function is to protect 45*. So I think it's time to start referring to the GOP as The Republican Guard.

Why the increased attacks on @FBI’s McCabe? Looks like someone has figured out he corroborates Comey against Trump. This is targeted. As were @POTUS’s Comey tweets. As is anti-Mueller campaign.https://t.co/1Up5OUZeXw

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) December 23, 2017

 

Today's Buzz

Pointing up some shitty shit that's been flying under the radar.

Some Christmas Toons

The HR Director would like to remind you that the guiding principle for appropriate behavior at the office Christmas is pretty simple: 

Try not to do what you did last year.

Today's GIF

There's a metaphor here somewhere

Today's Tweet

Kinda proud of myself on this one

As the GOP becomes more insistent on being 45*'s personal protectors, shouldn't we start calling them The Republican Guard?#MuellerInvestigation #TrumpRussia

— Mike Roberts (@eVilleMike) December 22, 2017

 

Sam Bee

In a never-ending quest for the un-crazy, Samantha Bee 12-20-17:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Near the end of Part 3, Sam - as usual - is the one who asks the real question of people who keep peddling the bullshit about how this whole Cult45 is going to end up being good for us:

(paraphrasing) With everything we've lost already and everything we're going to lose, is all this really worth it?

Confirming Evidence

45* and the GOP lie. A lot. I keep thinking, eventually that's not going to come as any kind of news to anybody. And as soon as I think that, I remember the rubes will never hear anything but what The Ministry of Dis-Infotainment tells them.

WaPo:

• “The entire purpose of this is to lower middle class taxes.” — House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)
• “Primarily, and priority number one, is middle-class Americans.” — White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders
• “The theme behind this bill is to get middle-class tax relief for most people in the middle class.” — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Fox News on Tuesday

President Trump was so excited about passing his first major piece of legislation Wednesday that he blurted out that the Republican Party had misrepresented the entire bill, handing Democrats some potentially troublesome talking points for the 2018 midterm elections.

Speaking at the White House just before the House prepared to sign off on the tax-cuts bill one last time, Trump reveled extensively in his win before turning things over to Vice President Pence to heap praise upon him continuously for a few minutes. It was a thoroughly unique spectacle, even as victory dances and Trump Cabinet meetings go.

But along the way, Trump basically admitted that the GOP's talking points on the bill weren't exactly honest in two major ways.

While talking about the corporate tax rate being cut from 35 percent to 21 percent, Trump said, “That's probably the biggest factor in our plan.”

President Trump says GOP tax plan will lower tax on businesses: “That’s probably the biggest factor in this plan.” pic.twitter.com/ntTtnnD55b

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) December 20, 2017

Oops

This one's worth tracking:
"these companies...will start pouring into the country..." (jobs jobs jobs - and raises for everybody - yeehaw)

Trump's second admission was about the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate being repealed in the bill. Apparently eager to argue that this constituted his having cut taxes and slain Obamacare in one fell swoop (after Congress came up short on Obamacare this year), he argued that repealing the individual mandate was basically the same as repealing Obamacare.
So we have enormous corporate powers being given more money to spend on Coin-Operated Politicians, who are increasingly obliged to strip out protections of the law in order to accommodate the avarice of the American Aristocracy - at the expense of everyone else.

(And BTW - wanna talk about what happens with expanded Corporate Power, together with no ACA, together with HR 1313, proposed in March 2017, that says companies can require DNA - and health info on all family members - from all of it's employees? Wait til you see what that one costs ya.)

In the First World of Industrialized Nations:
Every country except the US has some form of Single Payer
Every country except the US has a sizable Labor Faction in government
Every country except the US has Anti-Climate Change policies in place
Every country except the US has sensible Gun Safety laws
And on and on and on

American Exceptionalism just ain't what it used to be.

Today's Tweet

Waiting for the Dems to figure out how they turn this around so they can blame themselves.

Farewell, Individual Mandate.
Created by a GOP think tank.
Implemented by a GOP governor.
But then the black POTUS adopted it & it had to go.
So now uninsured sick ppl can show up at ERs
& local taxpayers foot the bill.
Congrats, MAGA folk - you finally got Socialized health care

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) December 20, 2017

 

Still Ain't No Wave

We've got an awful lot of fretting and hand-wringing going on - with good reason, me thinks.

But we've finally got a lot more people paying a lot more attention now, which is the only thing that makes a democracy work, which should be obvious, which apparently isn't obvious because we've been having these elections where 60-70% of us seem to take it all for granted, refusing to do the one goddamned thing we all have to do if we expect our little experiment in self-government to keep going.

We can't sit on our asses letting everybody else do the work. Shitty things happen when we get comfortable having other people make our decisions for us.

Slate:

Democrats have lost their one-vote lead in a state election that will determine control over the Virginia House of Delegates. The race is now a tie, and the State Board of Elections will determine a winner by drawing lots. If Democrat Shelly Simonds wins, Democrats will break the GOP’s 20-year chokehold on power in the House. If Republican David Yancey wins, the GOP will retain unified control of the state legislature.

-and-

If Simonds loses, incoming Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam will have to govern with both houses of the assembly controlled by slim Republican majorities. This divided government will not reflect the will of the voters. In November, Democratic candidates won the state’s total House vote by nine points. Thanks to gerrymandering, their ability to break Republicans’ grasp on the House has come down to pure chance. In a democracy, the outcome of a wave election should not depend upon names drawn from a fishbowl.

So we get to sweat this one out, waiting for the fates to settle it for us - partly because too many of us rationalized our way into thinking one vote doesn't matter.

Decisions get made by the people who show up.

So show up or shut up. Especially now. Don't start thinking we can fix it all with one or two elections. We have a very long way to go because we've just now started to fight back.

Happy Solstice

And the light is reborn as we start another lap.

Without deviance from normality, there can be no progress.

--Frank Zappa

Today's Pix

Today's Blather

At first blush, we see 45* as having no real concept of putting thought to words, but what he's doing (trying to do) is basic spin.

He's a bad rookie salesman's idea of a Sales Pro. Just like he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy. Just like he's a shmendrik's idea of a mentsh.

So when he's asked about the Mueller investigation, and he says this:

"What we have found, and what they have found, after looking at this, really, scam, is they found tremendous — whatever you want to call it, you’re going to have to make up your own determination — but they’ve found tremendous things on the other side."

That's 45*'s attempt at a turnaround - taking a negative and rephrasing it as a positive.

He gets tangle up on some of simplest things. Here's 50 or 60 seconds of near-gibberish as he tries to answer a fairly simple question on TaxScam'17®:

"I think it's very important for the country to get a vote next week, not because we lost a seat, which we would've gotten a seat, a lot of Republicans feel differently they're very happy with the way it turned out, but I would've, as the leader of the party I would have liked to have had the seat, I wanna endorse the people that are running, but I will tell you that it's to me it's very very, just important to get this vote. Not because of that, but because of the, and I don't know what the vote will be, I don't what exactly the final, we have a margin now of two, plus our great vice president, so um, so I really think we're going to get a vote, but I will say it, we have to get more senators and congressmen that are Republicans elected in '18, and then you'll see a lot more of what we're doing right now."

He was asked how Roy Moore's loss to Doug Jones might affect his legislative agenda. All he had to say was, "We still have Big Luther, so we have the votes - or it looks like we do. We have a majority in congress, which is what every president wants of course - and we'll do even better when we get more Republicans in office in 2018."

The guy doesn't know jack shit. He doesn't have the intellectual horse power to organize his thoughts, and he doesn't have the mental discipline to keep even simple sales techniques straight - like the rule of 3s.

I'm the leader of the GOP
We're moving our agenda forward
Which gives us the momentum to get more Repubs in office by this time next year

Instead, he goes on a 175-word-safari to nowhere. Which points up why I know this clown to be a bad sales guy (aside from not knowing his fucking business).

Bad salesmen talk themselves out of the sale because they don't know their fundamentals, which always leads to not knowing when to shut the fuck up.

SLAPP Happy

Sec'y Reich explains:

It should be pretty clear now why the Repubs are trying so hard to fill the Federal Bench with mouth-breathers who'll go along with whatever horse shit comes down from Corporate HQ.