Before vs After

45* had another public "meltdown" on DumFux News yesterday. I put the word 'meltdown' in quotes because I think at this point we have to consider the probability that 'meltdown' is this clown's default mode.

About 40 seconds in

Starting about 4 minutes in - with 25 minutes to go

The really intriguing part was that 45* ranted and raved for almost 30 minutes about things the DumFux News audience never hears on WingNut Media.

So the gang at Good Morning Couch Tumors, realizing they had no chance to get him on topic, were left scrambling to get 45* off their air, so they could go to a nice long commercial break in order to figure out how to spin it back to the shit they're always pimping.

But apparently they couldn't do it, because they spent the rest of the show alternating between pretending nobody had heard what they had just heard, and changing what 45* had actually said.

The Best God Is No God

Real tired of spending money time or effort on anything having to do with anybody's brand of religion - especially when it's government employees wrangling over who gets to mumble entreaties to non-existent deities on my fucking dime.

The Hill:

House Chaplain Patrick Conroy’s sudden resignation has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill, with sources in both parties saying he was pushed out by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

Conroy’s own resignation announcement stated that it was done at Ryan’s request.

“As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives,” the April 15 letter to Ryan, obtained by The Hill, states.

Through his office, Conroy, who has served as chaplain since 2011, declined to comment on Thursday. His resignation is effective May 24.
- and -

A second Democratic aide said Conroy’s ouster was “largely driven by a speech on the tax bill that the Speaker didn't like.” But the source also offered a second reason.

“Some of the more conservative evangelical Republicans didn't like that the Father had invited a Muslim person to give the opening prayer,” the source said.
Having an official chaplain of any stripe working for any branch of my government is an offense to the US Constitution. Fire 'em all.

1. Leave your imaginary friends in the cloak room. 
2. Put your asses in those chairs.
3. And get some fuckin' work done.

Primped And Ready

Michael Cohen says he took out an equity loan on his house to get the $130K for Stormy Daniels.

Michael Cohen (and his father-in-law) loaned $26M to a guy in Vegas, who wants to transition from the taxi business to the marijuana business.

The Hill:

President Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen and Cohen's father-in-law reportedly loaned at least $26 million in recent years to a taxi mogul who is shifting his business to selling legal marijuana, The Associated Press reports.

The AP obtained documents showing that Cohen and his father-in-law have loaned millions to Semyon “Sam” Shtayner, a longtime Nevada business associate of Cohen's father-in-law who is transitioning from the business of owning taxi medallions to a business built around selling marijuana edibles.

CNBC:

The Shtayners, like Cohen's father-in-law, are immigrants from Ukraine.

Cohen owns 32 taxicab medallions in New York.

His father-in-law, Shusterman, was charged with two other men in 1993with conspiring to defraud the IRS in connection with his own New York taxi business. He pleaded guilty to a related charge that same year, and was placed on probation for two years.
There may be a reasonable-sounding explanation - even for this one - but it just keeps getting harder to reconcile all the weird and sketchy shit that goes on in and around Cult45.

The Commish

WaPo:

There is, of course, no official manual on how to use an official government position to get officers to tear up a ticket, but for any enterprising self-help author looking to write one, a dash-cam video featuring a purple-vest-wearing, recently resigned Caren Z. Turner might prove insightful.

During an Easter weekend traffic stop that involved her daughter, Turner flashed her gold “Port Authority of New York and New Jersey” badge and demanded that the law officers call her by her title: “Don’t call me ‘Miss.’ It’s ‘Commissioner.’ ”

She said, early and often, that she is a friend of the Tenafly, N.J., mayor and also happens to be a personal acquaintance of the police chief. She may have even been invited to attend the officers’ police academy graduation, she told them.

She made sure the officers knew they were dealing with the cream of Tenafly society, not riffraff. She is an attorney, she told them. Her daughter, she said, is a student at Yale, and the younger woman’s friends attend MIT — and the officers were ruining what had been a nice Easter weekend hike.

And when all that failed, she cursed at the officers and told them to shut up.
(actually, she told 'em to "shut the fuck up", but WaPo is still trying to get us to think the world of politics is somehow marked by decorum, and inhabited by well-mannered people)

But anyway:

We can't know exactly what was going on inside her head of course, but this looks an awful lot like Privilege Working Overtime.

And the kicker? In the public statement she released to The Englewood Daily Voice, she shifts the blame, suggesting it's the cops who need to "...review best practices with respect to tone and de-escalation, so that incidents like this do not recur."

Fake lord, have mercy.
hat tip = FB pal Vicki W-E

Today's Pix

Some of these pix may be NSFW

About That Macron Dude

Mr Macron:

Emmanuel Marcon just delivered the State of the Union Trump should have. Watch. pic.twitter.com/gfP9Tsso9t

— Millennial Politics (@MillenPolitics) April 26, 2018

 

I have to push back on one tiny point - we're not killing the planet.

What we're doing is making it far more probable that the planet will end up killing us.

It's not all that complicated.

Today's Tweet

We should all be so weird

I just saw the phrase
“Naziphobic Bigot” used in a non ironic fashion and now I want to punch a nazi.
Then again, I always want to punch a nazi.
I’m weird that way.

— Dave The Great and Powerful (@_Mr_Merrick) April 24, 2018

 

It's All For Show

45* sweats bullets thinking his presidency isn't legit - to the point where he's willing to spin complete bullshit like "massive voter fraud", and "we oughta have a nice parade to show everybody how much the military loves me".

And of course, Bobby Three Sticks gives him nightmares even when he's not officially asleep (we may see him walking around with his eyes open, but that don't mean he's actually awake, y'know?)

That moment when your wife resists holding your hand... PRICELESS. 🤣🤣 @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/hDpPddTv5C

— BetsyBits (@BetsyBits) April 24, 2018

 

Melania's been kinda FLOTUS-ey lately, and it makes me wonder what that's costing him. 

Remember, this is a guy who's had to pay practically every woman in his life to do the things he wants them to do.

Did they negotiate a price list?

Per Appearance, solo....................................$ 50,000

Per Appearance, w/ POTUS.........................$100,000

w/ Hat, add....................................................$    2,500

w/ Physical Contact, add...............................$250,000

After Business Hours (eg: State Dinners).....call for quote

It's almost literally nothing but a show. And I know we've been saying that for years, but there're people in this country who tell us they believe this shit's real. Or that they think this shit's OK because what we really need is somebody who'll get in there and just disrupt the fuck out of it - and besides, if it makes some Librul mad enough to cry, then it's Mission Accomplished.

Today's Tweet

Swamp Thang

After Ben Carson became HUD Secretary, Sean HANNITY got $5 MILLION worth of new HUD guaranteed loans to purchase discounted and foreclosed properties. This is the same POS who rants about too many "government hand-outs"! But some of his supporters say that he earned
this $$😮 pic.twitter.com/HxKOZ3zi98

— NOTPC (@amazinmikey) April 24, 2018

 

Catching Up With Ourselves

One of the main reasons people stay split once they're split is that once trust is broken, it can be damned near impossible to repair.

And it doesn't work quite the way we think.

There's the whole Cheater / Abuser thing, and this is going to sound backwards, but here's the deal: If I believe you've done me a great wrong, it becomes very difficult for you to trust me - because in the back of your mind, you'll always worry that I'm just biding my time waiting for the perfect opportunity to exact my vengeance.

Even if I continually express my forgiveness, and you've shone me a sincere effort to atone, that doubt is always there.

Extrapolate that out and apply it broadly across a society, spanning a generation or two - or 20 - or 500.

Now add in the advantages that certain cynical manipulators can cash in on by pimping that mistrust and we've got "intractable problems" caused by "irreconcilable differences".

So just keep that in mind for a bit.

Niraj Chokshi, NYT:

Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” Hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send Mr. Trump, and a message, to Washington.

Or so that narrative goes.

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

The study is not the first to cast doubt on the prevailing economic anxiety theory. Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.

In her study, Dr. Mutz sought to answer two questions: Is there evidence to support the economic anxiety argument, and did the fear of losing social dominance drive some voters to Mr. Trump? To find answers, she analyzed survey data from a nationally representative group of about 1,200 voters polled in 2012 and 2016.

- and -

“The shift toward an antitrade stance was a particularly effective strategy for capitalizing on a public experiencing status threat due to race as well as globalization,” Dr. Mutz wrote in the study.

Her survey also assessed “social dominance orientation,” a common psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. People who exhibited a growing belief in such group dominance were also more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected.

“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said.

The other surveys supported the cultural anxiety explanation, too.

In a neat little nutshell - White Male Christians are scared shitless that brown people and women are going to treat them the same as White Male Christians have treated everybody since they started this joint.

And Brown Women? Holy fuck, dude - you don't even wanna think about that shit.

This ain't new, BTW. And it helps point up one of uncomfortable truths about 2016 - that the bit about "Hillary was such a shitty candidate blah blah blah" is a convenient excuse for not showing up for her, and allowing the greater of the two evils to be installed as POTUS.

There is no purity in politics.

One last thought - stop thinking that Blue Tsunami is some kinda sure thing.

Get together

Get focused

Get busy

Get shit done

Progress

Maybe - we'll see if anybody picks it up and/or follows it up.

endgadget:

Early this month, Facebook announced it will change how political ads appear on the company's platforms. Anyone advertising about elections or issues would need their identity 'verified' before the messages go online, and the messages themselves would be labeled 'Political Ad' with disclosure of who paid for it. Ideally, this could make advertisements on Facebook much more transparent, though we'll start finding out as the platform began requiring US-based advertisers to get verified today. In the coming months, this will spread to ad buyers across the world.


Starting today, anyone based in the US running an electoral or issue ad will have to run through the authorization process to provide a government-issued ID and mailing address. Then Facebook confirms identity by mailing a letter with a unique access code that only the advertiser's Page admin account can use, like an old-school version of email verification. And then, of course, they'll have to disclose who paid for the ads before Facebook will put them up.

While the changes went into effect, Facebook posted a Q&A about what advertisers know about you. While the company maintains that they don't know as much about us as we feared, by default, advertisers are still targeting users based on their interests and browsing habits. At least after these changes, we know a bit more about them.

Today's WTF

Trump brushes dandruff off Macron, calls him "perfect." 😳 pic.twitter.com/27CqbhbMKt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2018

 

Yes - he just did that.

Today's Birthday

Lefty Cooper

Andrew Lewis Cooper (April 24, 1898 – June 3, 1941), nicknamed "Lefty", was an American left-handed pitcher in baseball's Negro Leagues. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. An alumnus of Paul Quinn College in Waco, Cooper played nine seasons for the Detroit Stars and ten seasons for the Kansas City Monarchs. The Texan was 6 feet 2 inches (188 cm) tall and weighed 220 pounds (100 kg; 16 st).

In defiance of a threatened five-year Negro league ban for contract jumping, Cooper joined a 1927 barnstorming team that toured Hawaii and Japan. He spent most of his later career with the Monarchs. Cooper is the Negro league record holder for career saves. In a 1937 playoff game, he pitched 17 innings. Cooper served as manager or player-manager for the Monarchs from 1937 to 1940, leading the team to the pennant three times during those four seasons.

Oy

A near-perfect example of how hard they're trying to convince us Cult45 is legit.

The effort to get us to think in terms of "the leader of the country is the country" is some seriously creepy Daddy State bullshit.

Notice also, they're trying to make it look like the Dems are being hypocritical, since they complained about Mitch McYertle's policy of blocking everything Obama wanted to do. The difference being that Obama intended (eg) to make Healthcare affordable and more accessible, while Repubs want to do just the opposite.

Both sides my ass

.@PressSec: “At some points Democrats have to decide whether they love this country more than they hate this president.” pic.twitter.com/gVQPfDSZ0B

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 23, 2018

 

It never ceases to amaze me how they tell us they're doing things so very differently, while at the same time they insist they're just doing things according to the way things are always done around here.

A reply overheard on Twitter:

Hey Sarah, I'm a Democrat.

I served in Saudi Arabia '02, Iraq '05, Afghanistan '10 and Afghanistan '12.

At no time did I ever see you over there.

I never saw a Trump either.

Trump worked with Russia to undermine our democracy.

You're cool with it. We aren't. Fuck you.

Today's Tweet

It seems The Apocalypse is closer now - and if this is any indication of its entertainment value, a fucking welcome it will be.

The opposite of jazz. pic.twitter.com/FfXuSg4XeW

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) April 24, 2018