Telling

GOP voters are begging the people they voted into office not to fuck 'em over by repealing ACA, and those representatives are high-fiving each other for moving to repeal it anyway.

What does that tell us about the GOP?

What does it tell us about ourselves?

What does it say about how fucked up it has to get before we figure out that it's fucked up?

Trump's The Chump

Donald Trump projects his own shit onto everyone else.  I realize that's not exactly news, but that is actually the point - that he just keeps hammering on it until you throw up your hands and give in.

Blue Gal and driftglass call it a Denial Of Service Attack. 
Bob and Chez call it the Tennis Ball Machine. 
Olbermann calls it Chaff.

And I can tell you, I'm struggling not to blow it all off and walk away.  For the 69 days since the election, this whole thing has felt the way I image it feels to be stuck in a war zone.

Unfortunately, I think it might just get worse after Friday.

There's no indication this guy will feel constrained in any way on anything at any time.

Here's a quick scorecard from Dana Milbank at WaPo - talking about why The Peddler-in-Chief don't get no respect:

To Trump’s many self-assigned superlatives, he can now add another: the sorest winner. With charity for none and with malice toward all but his supporters, he has in the past two months set a new standard for gracelessness in victory.

When a well-heeled practitioner of Both-Siderism like Dana Milbank puts up a column that never once says, "...but the Democrats...", maybe there's been a bit of a shift.  I won't hold my breath, but wouldn't that be nice?

Anyway, Trump likes to throw shit, and the method to this madness is to keep us from seeing the shenanigans he's really up to because we're trying to deal with all the flying shit.

Apply that to Washington, and you've got a US Congress using Trump's shit-flinging as cover for their skullduggery too.

And of course, when they think he's no longer useful, they can impeach Trump, selling that little project to us like they're a bunch of fucking heroes righting a terrible wrong and bringing the country together and blah blah blah.

With a few minor tweaks, it fits too perfectly with the usual GOP formula:

1) Fuck it up.

2) Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up".

3) Propose your "solution".

And won't that be a kick in the head? We'll be rid of Trump, and it'll only cost us our Healthcare Coverage, Social Security, Medicare and a whole package of rollbacks of basic protections on Civil Rights, Environment, Consumer Finance, etc -  plus we get President Mike Pence in the bargain. Lucky us.

Grease up and bend over, America - nobody goes unfucked.

Today's Tweet

PEOTUS is a seriously-deranged bag of poorly-executed low-end dildos.

Another horrible night porch drinking & grilling in #fifthdistrict Thanks @repjohnlewis @ajc #defendthe5th #Riseup #swatl #atl #atlanta pic.twitter.com/GE0kGRwJMt

— Dantes Rameau (@DantesRameau) January 15, 2017

Jay Smooth

Today's Today

Things were pretty lousy way back then.

So much better now.

no justice - no peace

Know Justice - Know Peace

Today's Pix

Today's Jiggery Pokery

Start Making Sense

They count on us being dumb enough to believe the crap story about a phony conspiracy like PizzaGate, so we won't be smart enough to believe the true story about the real conspiracy of Putin & his partly-trained orangutan.

Yes, It's Really Happening

Today's Tweet

Rubber, meet Road
Road, this is Rubber

My dad starts chemo Monday. Here's just ONE prescription he needs. It's really very simple: without Obamacare, within 8 months he'd be dead. pic.twitter.com/VpW3zgPYli

— Megh Wright (@megh_wright) January 14, 2017

It Won't Be OK

Widewalls - Protest Art 

What is the scope and impact of protest art? As Adorno famously wrote, ‘all art is an uncommitted crime’, meaning that art challenges the status quo by its very nature. Thus it can be argued that all art is political in the sense that it takes place in a public space and engages with an already existing ideology and dominant discourse. Yet, art can often become dangerously and explicitly political and serve as a powerful weapon. Throughout the history of social movements and social revolt, art has always reacted against oppression, violence, injustice and inequalities. Addressing socio-political issues and challenging the traditional boundaries and hierarchies imposed by those in power, art can open up the space for the marginalized to be seen and heard and contribute to the social change by producing knowledge and solidarity or simply raising awareness. In this way, the personal life and work of the artist transcends the individual and speak meaningfully to a larger audience bringing together the political and human functions of art.

NYT:

...Nadya Tolokonnikova of the Russian punk band and activist art collective Pussy Riot. The group’s 2012 guerrilla performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, which viciously mocked Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, resulted in a two-year prison sentence for Ms. Tolokonnikova and another of its members.

--and--

Leading up to Ms. Tolokonnikova’s trial, Russian news reports carried suggestions that she and her bandmates were pawns of Hillary Clinton’s State Department or witches working with a global satanic conspiracy — perhaps linked to the one that was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, as lawyers for one of their offended accusers put it. This is what we now call “fake news.”

Pussy Riot became an international symbol of Mr. Putin’s crackdown on free speech; of how his regime uses falsehood and deflection to sow confusion and undermine critics.

Now that the political-media environment that we smugly thought to be “over there” seems to be arriving over here, Ms. Tolokonnikova has a message: “It’s important not to say to yourself, ‘Oh, it’s O.K.,’” she told me. “It’s important to remember that, for example, in Russia, for the first year of when Vladimir Putin came to power, everybody was thinking that it will be O.K.”

 

resist

Today's Tweet

If you're curious re the pro-Putin motives of the Greenwald alt-left, this summary might help:
1) Tear down system
2) ???
3) Progressivism!

— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) January 14, 2017

I don't like even my own tendency sometimes to do the Both Sides thing, but the reactions coming from folks like Greenwald look a lot like a leftie version of the Tea Party.  

Purity warriors are a big part of the problem.  Whether it's RINOs or DINOs, it doesn't make sense for anybody to get their panties in a bunch over it, because it just turns the whole thing into a race for the logical extreme, and the logical extreme is where everything goes to fail.

Today's Meme

Lewis voiced the opinion that Trump's election to POTUS is illegitimate - an opinion I imagine is shared by about 100 million Americans and a coupla billion people around the world.

Trump hit back with his usual Tu Quoque crap - where, instead of dealing with the criticism and defending against the charges, he tries to deflect by pointing at problems in Mr Lewis's district.

And of course it worked - because of course it always fucking works - as the Press Poodles dutifully ran off to chase the tennis ball to check on how things are in Georgia's 5th District instead of staying with the story and asking Trump about what Lewis actually said, and seeing it as another reason to pursue the slightly more important story:

Whether or not the fucking President Of The Fucking United Fucking States is a FUCKING. RUSSIAN. DUPE.

Stop falling for that shit. Know your Logical Fallacies and watch what the fuck you're doing.

Today's Podcast

@proleftpodcast

The Professional Left

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We Were Warned

"When we were kids, we were all afraid of the dark. And when we grew up we weren't afraid anymore, but it's funny how a big lie can make us all kids again."

On Psycopathocracy & Geejy Birds

From Juan Cole:

We are now on the brink of a new form of government, undreamed of by Aristotle, who spoke of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. We are headed to a psychopathocracy, which has something in common with the degraded form of classical regime types that Aristotle warned against (he thought monarchy can deteriorate into despotism, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into demagoguery). Psychopathocracy is the rule of persons who lack a basic ability to empathize with others, to feel their pain or to feel guilty about harming them.

Psychopathocracy is different from mere bad policy. We can all disagree about the direction of government or particular initiatives. Often people backing a policy that harms others do not understand the harm, or think it is averting a greater harm. It isn’t true that all high politicians are psychopaths who don’t care about injury being done to people. And high politicians have put in programs like social security that have lifted millions of elders out of poverty over decades. They did it because they cared about people.

--and--

CEOs of corporations and successful politicians are also disproportionately likely to be psychopaths. Robert Hare developed a 20-point checklist for the condition, which, however, does not exactly overlap with the definition in DSM-V, the description of mental conditions put out by the American Psychiatric Association. Hare did some of his research in prisons and so his checklist is skewed a bit for criminal activity.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to recognize that Donald J. Trump and several nominees to his incoming administration exhibit obvious signs of psychopathy. Having psychopaths in the White House is not unprecedented. It seems pretty obvious that Dick Nixon, a pathological liar who actually derailed the 1968 peace negotiations with Vietnam to keep his rival Hubert Humphrey from looking good to the voters, had this condition. Untold American soldiers and Vietnamese peasants died so Nixon could be president.

So it's not really a new thing at all.  I guess it just seems new because we don't see it so blatantly exhibited very often.

The two big questions remain tho - how do we explain our apparent willingness to accept this shit?  

And knowing that forms of government take on an aspect of self-perpetuation, what has to happen to get us back to where we think we need to be?

Cuz this looks a lot like the end of one Geejy Bird, and (maybe) the beginning of the next.

Every government is a geejy bird.

The geejy bird is a strange creature; it flies only once in its lifetime, but that flight is a spectacle to behold. The geejy bird appears suddenly, standing on a limb, young, elegant, proud and respectable.  Surveying the horizon, it spreads its majestic wings and swoops upward in a wide graceful curve, with magnificent wing flappings and loud glory whoops.  When it reaches maximum altitude, it begins its elegant descent, an ever narrowing spiral.  It makes smaller and smaller circles in the sky until, suddenly and mysteriously, it vanishes through its own asshole.

No one knows where geejy birds go - probably back where they came from.  Unfortunately, when they go, they take us along.  We are all subjects of one geejy bird or another; we are born and live and die during one of these mad flights.  To be born early is, at least, exciting; the air sparkles with hopes and dreams, and there are worthwhile things to be done.  To board the flight in the soaring stage is next best; there is a fresh wind and a feel of strong wings and a dizzying view of the world.

But what about those of us who are born near the end of the flight?  We can't jump off; the fall would be fatal.  In vain we scream, "Turn around, great geejy bird! Turn back in thy flight!"  Too late.  There is nothing to do but make the best of it.  We snap to attention, salute, and begin to sing our stirring anthem.  "God Bless Our Geejy Bird!"  Together we enter the turd tunnel to oblivion.

The Rape of the A*P*E* (page 174) --Allan Sherman

This is Now

Obama's first presser in 2008:

See if you can pick out any small details that're different when President Water Sports tried it for the first time:

He starts - starts - with the lie that he's always done the press conference thing. Then jumps straight in with the self-agrandizing crapola of taking credit for things he's had nothing to do with. And ends by telling us the file folders on the tables contained info about his vast empire of companies - when they were actually empty. They're props. That whole bit was nothing but Show Biz.

WaPo breaks it down.

A coupla big points that stand out for me: First is that there's going to be a major purge of the Executive Branch. That's already started. At the very least, the gathering of names in certain departments with regards to certain activities is a great way to exert a little intimidation, and to tamp down on the trouble-makers who don't quite understand that  speaking truth to power is a subversive attitude that'll get your ass fired.

And second, this guy expects everything to happen in secrecy.

Because The Daddy State works best under the cover of darkness.

But the really big one is the merging of Trump and The People's Business. The plan for separating Trump from the Trump Organization sounds about right until you get to the Magic Loophole, which is that he'll be "donating" his hotel profits to the US Treasury, which begins the process of conflation, which twists the whole thing into a grotesque perversion - "What's good for Trump is good for America", because Trump is America.

Maybe it's gonna be OK, and maybe he's not the slimy fuckwad he's been trying so hard to tell us he is (while we've been trying just as hard not to believe it), but he has always been Mr Loophole - he delivers on his promises when he can't stop you from forcing him to deliver on his promises.

TrumpUSAmerica, Inc.

Today's Typical Trump

From NPR:

In late October, just weeks ahead of the election, President-elect Donald Trump made a quick detour to Washington for the official opening of his new five-star hotel, just a few blocks from the White House.

During a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Trump told the crowd that the two-year, roughly $200 million renovation project at the historic Old Post Office Building was done ahead of schedule and under budget, thanks to what he called an incredible team of people — "including hundreds of construction workers, electricians, maintenance workers and so many others who helped make this project a reality. They're really the important ones."

Now some of those companies would like final payment for their work. Documents obtained by NPR show three Washington-area companies have filed liens against Trump International Hotel totaling more than $5 million.

--and--

Sterling, Va-based A&D Construction filed a lien in November saying it was owed $79,700. The firm's lawyer, Richard Sissman, says A&D is a small, Hispanic-owned company that was subcontracting on the Trump hotel project.

"The nature of the work was ... trim and casework and architectural millwork, wall base, crown molding; this is all fine carpentry," he says.

Sissman says A&D's lien is relatively small compared to the other two, but it's a lot of money to his client.

"On these big jobs these should be paid. It's ridiculous that a small-time operator has to beg for its money," he says. "It's put him in a very bad situation right now."

This has been Trump's whole history - Over-Promise and Under-Deliver.

Trump is the embodiment of the same old Autocratic Hyper-Predatory Capitalism that the founders risked everything fighting to get rid of (it's just been updated to fit our "modern" version of a very old paradigm), ie: "I don't owe you according to our contract - I only owe you what my lawyers can't prevent your lawyers from forcing me to pay you."

Guess what happens as of January 20th, when Trump thinks he owns it all, and that he can do whatever he wants to do because he's convinced there's nobody left who can force him to do what's right, and nobody to force him not to do what's wrong.

In the end, the only thing that really stands against the impulse to do shitty things to people is a man's sense of honor - and there is no honor in that man.

Say What?

"Conservatives" are adamant about telling celebrities to stay outa politics after trying to name everything in sight for a B-Movie Actor over the last 30 years because they think he was the greatest POTUS ever.

And now they've spent 2 days going out of their way obsessively trying to convince us they don't care what Hollywood thinks about the Game Show Host who'll be inaugurated a week from this Friday.

It's almost like, fuck that death-of-democracy thing - we might stand a chance to get some of that back if we start caring about the death of irony.
...or shame
...or honor

Today's Tweet

Ever notice how #maga trolls who call others 'cuck' are the ones who voted to let Putin come screw America while they watch from the corner?

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) January 10, 2017