Sssssss

That loud hissing sound we hear is either the air going out of the Daddy State balloon - finally - or it's the growing problem of snakes in the snake pit, as they escalate their attacks on each other.

And now that I stop and think about it for moment, those two things always go together.

Ronnie Reagan would not approve on either count.

WaPo:

Republican senators clashed with one another and confronted Vice President Pence inside a private luncheon on Thursday, as anger hit a boiling point over the longest government shutdown in history.

“This is your fault,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at one point, according to two Republicans who attended the lunch and witnessed the exchange.

“Are you suggesting I’m enjoying this?” McConnell snapped back, according to the people who attended the lunch.

Johnson spokesman Ben Voelkel confirmed the confrontation. He said Johnson was expressing frustration with the day’s proceedings — votes on dueling plans to reopen the government, both of which failed to advance.

The people who attended the lunch spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a closed-door session. Aides to McConnell, citing regular policy on GOP lunches, declined to comment on the gathering.

- and -

The outbursts highlighted the toll the shutdown has taken on Republican lawmakers, who are dealing with growing concerns from constituents and blame from Democrats, all while facing pressure from conservatives to stand with Trump in his demand for money to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

- and -

“Nobody was blaming the president,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), speaking about the lunch to reporters afterward. “But there was a lot of frustration expressed about the situation we find ourselves in.”

Repubs are staring their political doom in the face and they can't bring themselves to admit that they - along with the incredibly shitty hurtful policies they've been pimping - comprise their main problem.

They can't figure out how to unhitch themselves from a very unpopular president without going against a constituency they believe is vital to their staying in power. But if they continue pandering to a shrinking group of zealous gullible rubes, they're on their way out anyway.

Most of us can see that 45* has not remade the GOP in his image so much as he is a near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for 30 or 40 years. Congress Critters are finally beginning to acknowledge that, as it becomes clearer to more and more people just how venal and cynically ambitious these clowns are.

And guys like Wilbur Ross and Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett (et al) aren't helping.

BTW, that stoopid idea about hostages borrowing money to "tide them over"?  C'mon - you're going to fuck with these people - threatening their livelihoods and their credit ratings and their plans for the future - and then you're going to charge them interest when you're basically loaning them their own fucking money?

Seriously - what the fuck is wrong with you assholes that you'd be looking to profit from this mess?

Walkin' And Talkin'

If you talk like a crook and you walk like a crook, and in practically every other way you act like a crook - then you're prob'ly a fuckin' crook.

WaPo:

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, was arrested by the FBI on Friday after being indicted in the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Stone was charged with seven counts, including one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements and one count of witness tampering, according to Mueller’s office.

With Stone’s indictment, Mueller has struck deep inside Trump’s inner circle, charging a long-standing friend of the president and one of the first people to promote Trump for the White House.

Stone, 66, who has been friends with Trump for three decades, served briefly as a formal adviser to his presidential campaign in 2015 and then remained in contact with him and top advisers through the election.

The GOP operative has been a key focus of the special counsel for months as Mueller has investigated whether anyone in Trump’s orbit conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Read the indictment
I suppose the dangling of pardons will likely come back into play now - preceded of course by more of the usual flip-floppy double-speak:

• Yes, Roger's a friend
• No, I never really knew him
• Yes, he was an integral part of the operation
• No, he did a few things for us around the edges
• blah blah fuckin' blah

And Stone will most likely stay in the mode he helped establish for GOP Rat-Fuckery:

Today's Beau

Justin King - aka: Beau Of The Fifth Column

We Live For Recognition

The reason we're addicted to social media is that we're addicted to every little squirt of dopamine our brains give us when we get even the tiniest bit of approval - every Like or Retweet or Share or whatever.

Even when it's a negative reaction - we gotta have that daily fix. 

What makes it one of the greatest ironies ever is that the web has given us a feeling of power because of its promise of anonymity, but that same anonymity - the fear of being ignored and forgotten and discarded - that's what drives us to call attention to ourselves.

"...where your glory and your doom are bound up together..."

Plus - if you think nobody knows who you are, or where you are, or what you're doing, then you're completely daft, and you're the perfect pigeon when the cynical manipulators need to move political opinion in one direction or another.

For a good look at a fairly representative part of the problem, and how the rat-fuckers exploit these vulnerabilities, find "Brexit: The Uncivil War" (BBC and HBO).

And oh yeah - our "president" is "president" because in a bizarre and perverse way, he is, in fact "one of us".

Taking Solace Where I Find It

George Will has no room to criticize anyone for hypocrisy, or for the voluntary blindness that's become the hallmark of the GOP Establishment. ie: "Holy fuck - the Republican Party seems to be filled with Republicans".

He's been a de facto cheerleader for the GOP's fuckery for 35 years - always looking the other way as they pulled the most heinous shit on people, telling us the results of the election proved the party was representing the will of the people and blah blah blah. 

But anyway - now he's considered an Elder of the Beltway Tribe, and so of course, we have to listen when he croaks out something that sounds vaguely cogent.

File this under - "When You've Lost George Will..." which has grown into a gargantuan folder, and still somehow, George's "conservatives" continue their dickishness apace.

(ed note: try to ignore the very old and very stale "windsock" analogy - George himself is old and stale, so - yeah)

From WaPo:

Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party today.

When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge. In the past three years, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion.

In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.

- and -

On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from “I don’t know” whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and divert into wall-building funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, to “Time for President . . . to use emergency powers to build Wall.” The next day, he scrambled up the escalation ladder by using capitalization: “Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.” Two days later, he scampered down a few rungs, calling for his hero to accept a short-term funding measure to open the government while wall negotiations continue. Stay tuned for more acrobatics.

But stay focused on this: Anyone — in Graham-speak, ANYONE — who at any time favors declaring an emergency, or who does not denounce the mere suggestion thereof, thereby abandons constitutional government. Yes, such a declaration would be technically legal. Congress has put on every president’s desk this (to adopt Justice Robert Jackson’s language in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision affirming the constitutionality of interning of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent) “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Or an implausible one. However, an anti-constitutional principle would be affirmed. The principle: Any president can declare an emergency and “repurpose” funds whenever any of his policy preferences that he deems unusually important are actively denied or just ignored by the legislative branch.

Why do they come to Congress, these people such as Graham? These people who, affirmatively or by their complicity of silence, trifle with our constitutional architecture, and exhort the president to eclipse the legislative branch, to which they have no loyalty comparable to their party allegiance?

Seven times, Graham has taken the oath of congressional office, “solemnly” swearing to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it, “without any mental reservation.” Graham, who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.

One important point that Mr Will doesn't include in this little sermon is that once Cult45 is out of office, guys just like George Will are going to assure us that either it never even happened, or it was some really strange anomaly. 

Yeah, you bet - an anomaly that keeps happening in much the same way over and over again.

Mr Will wrote this same column about Bush43, and then carried a lot of water for the people who needed us to forget about that particular chapter of GOP fuckery, having done almost exactly the same after Reagan's fuckery.

At least this time, he touches on the problem - that Lindsey Graham is a symptom of the disease - but he fails to point it up properly.

The failure is all about refusing to deal honestly with that problem. And even more to the point - the failure lies in promoting the kind of memory loss that pimps Deliberate Ignorance on the part of Team Rube so they'll keep voting against their own best interests.

45* and Lindsey Graham and Steve King and Devin Nunes and and and - those guys have not remade the party in some weirdly warped image of themselves. They are the near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for the last 40 years, at the behest of the guys with all the money, and the power to buy these Coin-Operated Politicians.

Happy Birthday

Django Reinhardt

Jean Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953) stage name Django Reinhardt, was a Belgian-born Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer, regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. He was the first jazz talent to emerge from Europe and remains the most significant.

Just Missed

A sinkhole opened up on Tuesday afternoon in the road a block away from White House grounds in Washington.

DC police said in a tweet that 17th Street NW between C and E streets NW was closed in both directions because of the sinkhole.

A sinkhole formed last summer on the north White House lawn near the entrance to the James Brady Press Briefing Room. The hole was cordoned off, excavated and repaired over the course of roughly a week last May.

God was unavailable for comment, but through a spokes-angel, heaven released this brief message, quoting the deity: "Shit - I guess my targeting system's all fucked up again".

Today's Tweet

Startin' to get it now?

There's no apparent connection between the Cov Cath presence on the mall last Saturday, and there's probably not much we can hook into NBC's decision to interview the privileged little prick who's the face of the problem, but when that little prick and his gang are invited to a White House where the General Counsel just happens to be a Cov Cath graduate, there's a little too much coincidence on that one.

Oh, hey, look! WH counsel is a CovCath grad. NO WONDER media was so anxious to whitewash the little shits’ behavior. https://t.co/SxYLGW7sli

— Karoli (@Karoli) January 23, 2019

Today's GIF

Cult45 needs desperately to convince us that their "president" is powerful and potent and manly. 

There's no way to get this clown on horseback with his shirt off. And he's way too much of a pussy to go anywhere near a tiger.

So when they create memes for posting on social media, they just PhotoShop the image to make him appear thinner, and to make his fingers look longer.

And ain't that pretty much the whole story on this dickhead?

Your tax dollars hard at work - gaslighting the fuck outa ya.

hat tip = Gizmodo

Today's Pix

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