Eternal Sadness In The Making

A scene from the @NRA annual meeting in Dallas. 5,790 American children receive medical treatment each year for a gun-related injury; 21% of those injuries are unintentional. About 1,300 children die annually from a gun-related injury in the US. #NRAAM pic.twitter.com/6ONVhlJytG

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) May 6, 2018

• 100,000 gun casualties every year in USAmerica Inc.
• 5,790 kids are shot every year - 1,300 dead kids. 

The young woman is Kendall Jones - who found infamy by killing African wildlife, and pimping the case for "Hunting is all about conservation". Some people wear their ugly on the inside.

The Mostest

The other day, WaPo reported that 45* has told 3,000 lies since Jan 2017.

3,000 straight-up, flat-out, confirmable lies.

Three-fucking-thousand.

Starting with this one:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

On Kanye

It's always about a lot more than is obvious at first blush - and I'm not minimizing - I don't think it's unreasonable to include "Privilege Envy" in the description.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic:

Kanye West, a god in this time, awakened, recently, from a long public slumber to embrace Donald Trump. He hailed Trump, as a “brother,” a fellow bearer of “dragon energy,” and impugned those who objected as suppressors of “unpopular questions,” “thought police” whose tactics were “based on fear.” It was Trump, West argued, not Obama, who gave him hope that a black boy from the South Side of Chicago could be president. “Remember like when I said I was gonna run for president?,” said Kanye in interview with the radio host Charlamagne Tha God. “I had people close to me, friends of mine, making jokes, making memes, talking shit, now it’s like oh, that was proven that that could have happened.”

There is an undeniable logic here. Like Trump, West is a persistent bearer of slights large and small—but mostly small. (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Barack Obama, and Nike all came in for a harangue.) Like Trump, West is a narcissist, “the greatest artist of all time,” he claimed, helming what would soon be “the biggest apparel company in human history.” And, like Trump, West is shockingly ignorant. Chicago was “the murder capital of the world,” West asserted, when in fact Chicago is not even the murder capital of America. West’s ignorance is not merely deep but also dangerous. For if Chicago truly is “the murder capital of the world,” then perhaps it is in need of the federal occupation threatened by Trump.

It is so hard to honestly discuss the menace without forgetting. It is hard because what happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers—unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee. Here is a country which specializes in defining its own deviancy down so that the criminal, the immoral, and the absurd become the baseline, so that even now, amidst the long tragedy and this lately disaster, the guardians of truth rally to the liar’s flag.

- and -

What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that “we.” In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.


For my own bad self, I'll try to remember that whatever else Kanye thinks himself to be, he is first a foremost a Kardashian.

Today's Tweet

If they let us all vote, they lose.

Final note: Trump had a meeting with DHS Nielsen and all last week to discuss the status of our elections. We heard nothing. Which likely means it was an update to insure the midterms would not be fair.

— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) May 7, 2018

Today's Pix

Click a pic

Today's Tweet

Jill Wine Banks - happy warrior.

#JillsPins today at 2 CT and 7 CT. When pigs fly, 45 and Guiliani will tell the truth. pic.twitter.com/xdvTgtqQNp

— Jill Wine-Banks (@JillWineBanks) May 4, 2018

Today's Eternal Sadness

CrimeSider

GRAND FORKS, N.D. -- Court records indicate a woman who, along with her three children, died of gunshot wounds at her home in North Dakota may have been struggling with financial problems. Police discovered Astra Volk, 35, and her children, 14-year-old Tyler Talmage, 10-year-old Aidan Talmage and 6-year-old Arianna Talmage at their home in Grand Forks after a school requested a welfare check Thursday morning.

Police have not officially classified the killings as murder-suicide, but said they are not looking for any suspects and that they found a gun in the house with the bodies.

Grand Forks County court documents show a collection agency won three civil judgments totaling about $3,750 against an Astra F. Volk in the last six months of 2017 for unpaid medical bills.

You own this, GOP. This is all yours. It's what you wanted because it's what you voted for.

GOP policies are bad for us. They get people killed.

Out In The Open

Observation: Cult45 is almost eager to manifest "Consciousness Of Guilt".

But they always do these things right in front of us - hiding in plain sight - to help us maintain our illusion of "Well, they don't seem to have anything to hide - I guess it's OK".

Pretty much every time you turn around, somebody's saying 

• Trump shouldn't talk to Mueller for fear of perjuring himself
• Trump should just pardon himself and then fire the whole DoJ
• Trump has to do something to keep Flynn from flipping - to keep Manafort from flipping - to keep Cohen from flipping.

Every one of these items can easily be taken to indicate how thoroughly fucking guilty 45* knows he is.

John Bowden, The Hill:

President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani told Fox News on Saturday that he believes special counsel Robert Mueller has targeted former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort because Mueller thinks Manafort will be easier to flip against the president.

In an interview with Fox News's Jeanine Pirro, Giuliani speculated that New York's attorney general had passed off the investigation into bank fraud charges against Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to Mueller while continuing to investigate Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman.

"And of course [New York] developed that whole Cohen investigation and gave it away. Why did they give away Cohen, and not Manafort? Maybe they think Manafort's somebody they can flip faster," Giuliani said.

The spin of course is, "gubmint's out ta git me", which plays inordinately well with about 20 million rubes.

Way back in the 90s, I recall Mr Starr doing almost exactly what the Repubs are bitching about. (yes, I know it gets old playing "where was your outrage when blah blah blah - and no, that's not what I'm doing)

Repubs knew Bill Clinton would eventually step on his dick, so they needed an excuse to establish the Special Prosecutor (Whitewater), and then they just had to find an excuse on occasion to keep it going until Clinton did, in fact, step on his dick.

They tried the same with Hillary-n-Benghazi, and Hillary's Emails - failing until Comey came to rescue and stepped on his dick as an act of public sacrifice(?), but that takes it into a slightly different rant.

So anyway, a variation on Daddy State Rule #1 applies here.

1. Every accusation is a confession

hat tips = tengrain (mockpaperscissors.com) and @TeaPainUSA

Coffee Cast

A new one for me.  Pretty "hard left" (not that there's anything wrong with it).

This episode features Blue Gal and driftglass. Mighty fine.

Today's Burning Questions

Overheard on Twitter:

Why would a billionaire need his lawyer to front him $130K to keep the coochie quiet?

And why would a billionaire need an installment plan to pay his lawyer back?

WaPo looks into 45*'s "wealth":

In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”

Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

It shows that Trump had access to far more cash than previously known, despite his string of commercial bankruptcies and the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry.

- and -

Trump’s lavish spending came at a time when his business was leaning largely on one major financial institution for its new loans — Deutsche Bank, which provided $295 million in financing for big projects in Miami and Washington.

- and -

“He always used other people’s money. That’s for sure. Not cash,” said Barbara Res, who was a top executive for Trump throughout the 1980s and continued to work for him for most of the 1990s. “He always got somebody to put up funds for him. To put up the money. And he’d put up the brilliance.”

There's always the possibility that we're falling into the Argument From Ignorance fallacy - that it's all perfectly legit, and we just haven't come up with a good explanation yet.

There's also the possibility that a squadron of alien space monkeys will come flying out of my ass tomorrow morning at precisely 7:15.

There is nothing "perfectly legit" about Donald Trump.