Category Archives: current events

Nepo baby Trump attacks Diversity, Equity and Inclusion hiring by Black president of conservative Virginia university; kills eleven “suspects” on boat in international waters

George Mason University, the home of the Antonin Scalia School of Law, for fuck’s sake, home base for the Heritage Foundation, with professorial chairs endowed by Charles Koch and friends. Black president, Dr. Gregory Washington, is being pressured by Trump’s minions to apologize for comments he made about the importance of diversity hiring in 2020 and 2021. You see, the Civil Rights Act was racist, according to the persecuted U.S. president (and his boiling “brain”, Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller), presumably because it failed to recognize that only rich white men can be true victims of vicious, systemic racism. You can’t make this shit up, as one of Trump’s supremely flexible appointees stated in chastising the school president in a recent official statement:

The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, upped the pressure in a statement last month, saying Dr. Washington “waged a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful D.E.I. policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race,” the statement said, adding, “You can’t make this up.”

Read all about it.

Unfortunately, you can’t make this up. However, everywhere you look our low IQ, increasingly demented mad leader is making himself less and less useful to the billionaire tech fascists who put him into power. How do you like this headline?

First another reminder: there is absolutely no connection, beyond years of purely superficial, 100% transactional friendship between Donald Trump and convicted procurer of underaged “prostitutes” Jeffery “Hoax!” Epstein. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Suspected drug smugglers, you get that? I think you’re a drug smuggler, you make me suspicious, I’m a very stable genius, I can kill you and everybody around you, who I also suspect is a drug smuggler. I’m Duterte! [1] I will kill you! This is a turn on Alan Dershowitz’s incoherent defense of the big guy at one of his impeachments (subsequently written into US law by the Koch Six): if the president truly believes he has a good reason to violate the law, he can’t be punished for that.

Note the NY Times characteristic Nazi-tolerant delicacy in framing this obscenity — the issue in their subhead is not, God forbid, that this is clearly the alarming claim of a dangerously unhinged, murderous, dictatorial psychopath. The last guy who did it is in front of the International Criminal Court. We, at the Grey Lady, note that it appears to be problematic to treat criminals (who have been convicted after a trial) as enemy combatants, although, admittedly, the power the Orange polyp claims is to treat suspected criminals (no trial, nothing but my suspicion and your death!) as wartime combatants — and summarily kill them, as he did to eleven people on a boat the other day.

We are living in the shit, boys and girls, and the NY Times is innocently helping. For every important article highlighting grotesque fascistic excess by this desperate regime, we get several mealy mouthed headlines like this, to keep things fair. To not piss off an obviously insane, revenge-twisted maniac to take some kind of profit crushing retaliatory action, one supposes.

[1] Mr Rodrigo Roa Duterte, born on 28 March 1945 and a national of the Republic of the Philippines. President of the Philippines, Mayor of Davao City, and allegedly the founder and head of the Davao Death Squad (‘DDS’), at the time of the relevant conduct.

Arrest warrant issued on 7 March 2025

Allegedly responsible for the crime against humanity of murder, committed on the territory of the Republic of the Philippines between 1 November 2011 and 16 March 2019 in the context of the ‘war on drugs’ campaign. . . On 12 March 2025, Mr Duterte was surrendered to the International Criminal Court after being arrested by the authorities of the Republic of the Philippines in accordance with the warrant of arrest.

link to indictment

Literal Nazi fucks

Who but a Nazi pulls this kind of brutal, illegal shit at 1 a.m. of a holiday weekend? This is from Labor Day:

The rush to deport children in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, in apparent violation of the law, looked a great deal like the administration’s removal of undocumented immigrants from Venezuela to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. At the time, President Donald J. Trump denied that he had signed the order invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act the administration used to justify the rendition of the men to El Salvador. “Other people handled it,” he said, even though his signature is on the document that appears in the Federal Register.

source

I pose the question again: who but a Nazi targets the children of “others” for illegal deportation, at 1 a.m., to a country they, or their parents, fled for fear of persecution?

A regime that renders people they deem alien enemies, of their children, in the dark of night, to places like war-torn South Sudan and a torture prison in El Salvador, is not a democracy governed by laws. It is a totalitarian regime driven by a lust for unchecked power. These insane, enraged, cruelty-addicted fuckers are Dick “Darkside” Cheney on steroids. Adolf Eichmann (and his ilk) got nothing on rabid “MAGA” loyalists Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and their foul-smelling Nazi ilk.

Of course, nobody ever accused Eichmann of protecting pedophile sex traffickers and their clients.

Nice if-pology idiotically framed as an apology from judge scolded by Gorsuch and Kavanaugh about their new rule on binding precedent

This is one of the scariest distortions I’ve read in the New York Times recently. The article focuses on the conditional apology given by a Reagan appointed federal judge after he was scolded by two bullies on the 6-3 Leonard Leo majority Supreme Court for not following “binding precedent” — an unsigned summary order, with no legal reasoning they released on an emergency basis to serve President Project 2025.  Their ruling on massive cuts to the The Department of Education, they scolded, obviously applied to cutting NIH grants to study cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV and similar deadly plagues. This was a bit of unprecedented bullying by these radical right ideologues.   The Grey Lady styled it as the federal judge (who ruled correctly) messing up and legitimately being required to apologize.

Let us also note that an emergency application from Special Counsel Jack Smith languished for seven months before the 6-3 far right majority granted candidate Trump unprecedented blanket immunity for any crimes committed by a US president as part of his “core duties” (try to imagine the hypothetical where a president would have to commit a crime to do his job, the six provided none).   Their delayed ruling effectively ended the prosecutions of Trump for violating the Espionage Act (by taking classified documents to his home when he was out of office), obstructing justice (having his lawyers lie by claiming he’d returned everything), and trying to overturn the results of an election he was well aware he lost. 

In glaring contrast, every one of Trump’s emergency applications, complaining he’s not being allowed to commit random illegal acts, is immediately heard and almost invariably decided by the far right six in the hardened sociopath’s favor. As was his emergency application after he was busted by federal judges for illegally firing tens of thousands of civil servants without cause and violating other laws.

Here is the Gray Lady’s idiotic headline about the Supreme Court extending its power in a hideously fascistic manner (while neutering lower federal courts):

Judge Apologizes to Conservative Justices in Case Over N.I.H. Cuts

Judge Young said on Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.

“Before we do anything, I really feel it’s incumbent upon me to — on the record here — to apologize to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they think that anything this court has done has been done in defiance of a precedential action of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Judge Young, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

“I can do nothing more than to say as honestly as I can: I certainly did not so intend, and that is foreign in every respect to the nature of how I have conducted myself as a judicial officer,” he added.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with White House in nearly every case it has considered.

Source

Wrong headline.  Wrong framing.  Here’s a better headline, off the top of my head:

Respected federal judge bullied by Trump appointees for not recognizing their unsigned, three page “emergency” shadow docket ruling as binding precedent.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with the New York Times sometimes, they only intermittently serve the interests of democracy in their reporting.

For one thing, the federal judge’s apology was conditional — if I offended you, I’m sorry. This is known as an if-pology. The New York Times apparently doesn’t make this distinction. The judge defended his actions while “apologizing”– how was he expected to know an unsigned three page emergency ruling was now binding federal precedent according to two members of the highly partisan Supreme Court majority? How indeed? He had to be told by two of the six doctrinaire jurists who made their way up the far right judicial pipeline by proving their brazenness and fidelity to the dogma of their extremist judicial fraternity.

Read the rest of the article, it doesn’t spell things out with the greatest of clarity, but it eventually manages to make clear how offended the judge who apologized was to be singled out this way for an ass whupping by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch (two prep school bullies whose powerful mothers both assured them they were destined to sit on the Supreme Court). Another triumph of incoherence by Project 2025’s architects, with a snazzy assist from the journal of record.

Supreme Court precedents are binding rulings that all federal courts must follow. They are traditionally based on articulated legal reasoning, analyzing and evaluating the arguments of both sides in light of past Supreme Court decisions directly impacting the issue in question. Supreme Court holdings are based on centuries of case law, legislative history, the text of the Constitution, the merits of both sides of the constitutional argument presented.

These emergency “shadow docket” rulings, sometimes only a paragraph, answer only the narrow burning question placed in front of the court for immediate, emergency decision.  The Supreme Court, in the past, has rarely ruled this way, except on the eve of an execution, for example.  It is now routine for Trump to run to his appointees for these “shadow docket” rulings which are made without briefing or argument, citing no cases, no precedent, no legal analysis.  His record is something like 16-0 in these unsigned majority  orders.

To force federal judges to consider these abbreviated, unsigned emergency rulings “binding precedent” is an abomination on the Constitution, the specialty of this particular group of six transactional corporate assholes in robes. Shame on the Grey Lady for helping to obscure how radical and dangerous this latest overreach by these judicial arsonists is.

How Nazis always do it

When it comes to manipulating public opinion, particularly regarding an embarrassment to the party in power, lead with an aggressive, lying attack directly contradicting the actual truth.

The Environmental Protection Agency [1], a thoughtful, forward-looking Nixon creation hated by Project 2025 and Leonard Leo’s Supreme Court, had its legs cut off by the 6-3 majority.  They ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to mandate carbon emissions from existing power plants. The 2022 decision also opened the door for a future Unitary Executive to have the final word over government scientists on most things formerly protected by the EPA.    Not enough for Project 2025, the arms and head had to be cut off too. 

So President Project 2025 obliged.

The Trump administration fired at least seven employees for signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for undermining “the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The firings are, Amudalat Ajasa of the Washington Post noted, “an escalation of the administration’s effort to clamp down on dissent within the federal bureaucracy.”

Source

Here’s Trump appointee-speak (note the consistent sprachregelung, with piquant, aromatic notes of the boss’s seat) for what the EPA, and the entire federal government, which has the final say in every state, now stands for (and it’s not the so-called environment, woke mind virus infested cucks!)

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career officials using their agency position and title to unlawfully undermine, sabotage, and undercut the will of the American public that was clearly expressed at the ballot box last November,” an EPA spokesperson said.

But [Heather adds], increasingly, it seems obvious that the administration is claiming a mandate for policies that voters did not intend to endorse.

Like Dr. Brainworm’s clueless concepts of a plan to make random little kids in airports not strike him as so mitochondrially defective.

Fuck those fucking putos.

They only get away with this incoherent, immoral, indecent, crude, lying lawlessness if good people stop fighting them at every turn. It is on us all, to pace ourselves and do whatever is in our power to do, Remember to stay encouraged by the uniformly high level of reckless idiocy and constant failure displayed by these mirthless assclowns [2] as they carry out their boss’s wildly unpopular cruelties. Do not accept deliberate incoherence as the final word.

[1]

The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. Wikipedia

[2] They might actually be asshats:

In the word’s official entry in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, lexicographers theorized that it could be a play on the phrase to “have one’s head up one’s ass,” an insult which, if pictured literally, would indeed result in the person’s ass serving as a sort of hat. However, the author concluded, “a more precise history will depend on the location of further attestations.” source

~88 deaths AN HOUR from “DOGE” (Project 2025) cuts is not news

With an insane and increasingly demented Unitary Executive empowered by a far-right Supreme Court to commit as many crimes as he likes as part of this “core duties”, it’s no surprise he’s been able to destroy as much as he has in seven short months (while personally making literally billions since taking over as US CEO). His goal is clearly American Carnage, creating the violent, bloody battleground for his childish dream of world domination. This dystopian dream requires off the charts desperation among average Americans, violence, mayhem and unpunished murder. His more immediate dream, adding to his personal fortune, has been advanced by about $3,000,000,000 since he gilded the Oval Office.

He’s surrounded by supremely ambitious, unprincipled loyalists, backed by a dozen powerful “Libertarian” think tanks and judicial pipelines (all owned by the same handful of billionaires), who fund nefarious projects and get deadly legislation passed, policies designed to maximize fear, instability and mass desperation, to bring about the social disintegration needed for violence and dictatorship.

Who, but a Nazi, is focused on “mass deportation”, particularly of law abiding residents who pose no threat to anyone? American carnage, now! It’s their only hope for permanent minority rule.

With so much disgusting offal hitting the fan every hour of every day, orchestrated by rabid chaos agents frantically working for a visibly declining old maniac, it’s hard to focus on any one aspect of it for more than a moment. That is by design. It enables all kinds of abuses, humming along in the background. For starters, get rid of FEMA, Emergency Management after killer storms is just more woke mind virus. Same goes for the CDC, woke mind virus stubbornly insisting on vaccines for pandemics!

Donald Trump’s team, by arbitrarily shuttering USAID, the agency of American soft power in the poorer parts of the world, is quietly committing mass murder. More than 60,000 people, most of them children, die every MONTH since team Trump nullified Congress’s appropriation of funds to USAID. This horrific fact is no longer reported, it’s among so many other senseless acts of willful idiocy performed daily by the president’s competitive sycophants. Countless child deaths, at the stroke of an insane unelected bureaucrat’s pen, the stuff of nightmares.

Doing a search just now I learned that the last media mentions of this ongoing international slaughter by an American president were in June or early July when the number killed, mostly children, was reported as over 300,000 dead so far. Understood, when an insanely cruel man leads a heartless movement bent on permanent enforcement of their privilege, many ongoing atrocities will simply have to get overlooked.

It is like the National Rifle Association’s lobbyists prevailing for decades on the issue that it is unfair to include suicide by gun (more than 50% of all American death from gunshot) in the annual tally of American gun homicides. Dead bodies are considered, by a certain economic philosophy, to be externalities, unfortunate, perhaps, but part of the cost of doing business, and always subject to negotiation. So, according to the NRA, gunshot being the number one cause of death for children below the age of 18 in American is bad enough without by conflating it with tens of thousands of annual voluntary self-killings that don’t hurt anyone else.

When the Supreme Court condemned girls just old enough to menstruate to bear to term and give birth to their rapists’ babies, if their state legislature so ordered, I thought the outrage of that barbarously medieval ruling would shock people awake and cause a tidal wave at the polls that could not be countered by fraud. Take in the full horror of it: the girl is eleven, she has a period, she gets raped by a pedophile. JESUS SAYS SHE MUST CARRY THE SACRED FETUS TO TERM, say the majority of “Red” states newly empowered to enforce radical Christian views. No matter if you and your daughter are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans, you must obey what five rich, unappealable, “justices” say Jesus Christ commands under the US Constitution. I don’t know why that MAGA crime against girls and women wasn’t the single most decisive issue of the 2024 election. I pictured the ad with the blurred face of the ten year-old who was forced to flee her state to terminate a pregnancy initiated by a rapist of children. I saw this irrefutable ad in my mind, MAGA is the party of forced pregnancy and birth for child rape victims, but don’t recall ever seeing it anywhere else.

After one of the world’s richest psychopaths generously donated $250,000,000 to convicted felon Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and Trump was elected, Elon Musk received full access to the personal data of all Americans and the files and personnel of every agency that was investigating him. Musk also had carte blanche to defund and close down any agency that particularly offended him. USAID [1] was one of these agencies. At the time Musk and his bogus “DOGE” operation cut USAID funding by 83% and slashed its staff, it was estimated that as a result of services and medications not delivered and food rotting in warehouses, 103 people AN HOUR were dying worldwide. A virtual 9/11 death toll (2,977) every day — 2,472 dead EVERY DAY because Elon Musk’s teenaged hackers followed Mr. Neurodivergent’s orders to take down this massive source of “waste, fraud and abuse.”

USAID expenditures amounted to less than 1% of the US budget, and the agency saved millions of vulnerable lives annually. However, USAID was apparently investigating Musk’s selective use of Starlink in various war zones and “DOGE” had a mandate from Trump and the Heritage Foundation to radically slash the federal budget by any means necessary (with full, unchallengeable presidential pardons at the ready for anyone caught “over-reaching”).

Since the closure of USAID (after “DOGE” canceled the agency, Marco “MAGA” Rubio ordered USAID’s website removed from the internet) hundreds of thousands, mostly children, have died worldwide, particularly in war zones where the US has long provided life saving humanitarian aid.

I searched for an update about the USAID cuts and there is no news more recent than June or early July, it’s simply not a story anymore, with the high-powered firehouse spraying fecal “content” 24/7 as advocated by Sloppy Steve Bannon. Though, by sheer chance, Project 2025 made another move today to claw back the rest of the shuttered agency’s funds, through an untested legal theory called presidential “pocket recission”, taking back money already appropriated by Trump’s majority Congress. By chance this was reported in the NY Times, in the hours since I started writing this post earlier today:

The request largely targets accounts funding the United States’ contributions to the United Nations and economic development and aid programs run by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has already largely been dismantled by the Trump administration.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the proposal on Friday, saying that none of the targeted programs “are in America’s interest, which is why the president is taking decisive action to put America and Americans first.”

The single biggest clawback would be a $445 million cut to U.S. funding of peacekeeping operations abroad, including through the United Nations. The request also proposes a $132 million rescission of the $340 million approved by Congress for the Democracy Fund at the State Department. The White House’s proposed budget released earlier this year suggested eliminating that program entirely.

source

Millions die in distant lands every day, nature and humans are cruel, what are you going to do? It’s like raped girls, bad things happen to good people, like the kids murdered the other day while praying, though their souls got thoughts and prayers from MAGA.

The estimate of hourly deaths as a result of the Musk/Trump/Project 2025 USAID cuts is currently 88 dead per hour. You can see the breakdown of how these deaths are happening and how many of the dead are children, dying easily preventable deaths. Should we be relieved that only 2,112 people are dying every day, down more than 300 a day from the earliest projections? Or is outrage more appropriate when rich, corrupt psychopaths, at the behest of our nation’s greediest billionaires, cut off a program, fully funded by our Congress, that saved tens of millions of lives over the last two decades? The good news is that the wealthiest 1% got even wealthier, so, even if just under a million have to die unnecessarily in 2025, it wasn’t a total loss.

Adolf Eichmann was tried, convicted and executed for his role in the mass murder of millions of Jews and others he’d had shipped to death camps. He insisted that he’d never killed anyone, Jew or any other person, and no evidence was ever produced to show he had. He claimed he’d only done his job, as was his lawful duty under the laws of Nazi Germany and the oath of personal loyalty he’d taken to Adolf Hitler. Contrary to the myth that Eichmann was the architect of the Final Solution, he was not the mastermind of anything, except the logistics of moving large numbers of doomed people to their places of execution. He was very good at delivering these condemned souls to their final nightmare deaths. Eichmann was a bragging, self-aggrandizing bureaucrat of limited imagination who worked tirelessly to please his bosses and make himself look good by “getting results”. Much like the highly competitive crew of grossly unqualified sycophants who pretend to love the taste of the big orange guy’s lowest sphincter.

The same addled sycophants are frantically busy protecting the boss and a group of powerful white male pedophiles who were supplied with teenaged girls by longtime close Trump buddy Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein very likely blackmailed them after secretly videotaping their statutory rapes of minors. The criminally unaccountable Talented Mr. Epstein, a billionaire with no obvious source of his billions, of course blackmailed the wealthy, powerful white men who came to “party” with him. Why WOULDN’T he? He even got a secret non-prosecution deal from Trump’s future Secretary of Labor, since disgraced, Alex Acosta. Click the hideous clause below to read the whole seven page 2007 “sweetheart” deal the late Mr. Epstein, with tactical support from Mr. Dershowitz, negotiated for himself for the “crime” of … uh… hiring a few underaged hookers.

The legal notice to victims required by law before settling such cases… uh… you know what? Screw the “victims”?!! Who has suffered more than that powerful friend of many of the world’s most powerful white men, Jeffrey Epstein? Only one name comes to mind.

[1] The United States Agency for International Development was the agency within the United States federal government primarily responsible for foreign aid. Established in 1961 during the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy, USAID was designed to counter the Soviet Union through the use of soft power across the world. Wikipedia

A very, very, VERY stable genius

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on:

“A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they’re saying you’re trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

source

This, from the Grey Lady, five months before the stable genius became the 47th president of the United States of American Carnage:

He is easily distracted. He halted in the middle of another extended monologue when he noticed a buzzing insect. “Oh, there’s a fly,” he said. “Oh. I wonder where the fly came from. See? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here. You’re changing rapidly. But we can’t take it any longer.”

But like some people approaching the end of their eighth decade, he is not open to correction. “Trump is never wrong,” he said recently in Wisconsin. “I am never, ever wrong.”

Click this June 10, 2024 headline for the rest of the article about what is even more obvious a year later

Trump: OUT OF CONTROL Smithsonian ignores the good side of slavery!

Here’s the malignant Orange Polyp in his own words, from Maureen Dowd’s Trump’s Slavish Stupidity:

Trump is unmoved. He wants to live in the Whiter House. On Truth Social, he ranted: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” adding, “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.”

He said that he had “instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.”

This is from Dan Rather, in a post called Culture Crash:

The American Alliance of Museums countered. “Freedom of thought and expression are foundational American values, and museums uphold them by creating spaces where people can engage with history, science, art, and culture in ways that are honest, fact-based, and thought-provoking.”

Honest, fact-based thought is exactly what this president is trying to extinguish.

Project 2025’s pet boy, Mr. Angry Incoherence himself, unveils his new portrait, a tour de force of WTF.

The Incoherence is the point

Adam Serwer, writing about Trump in 2018, came up with an excellent explainer of Trump and MAGA (and all fascist regimes, actually) “the cruelty is the point.” It is, indeed. Public cruelty to cow people and make those who love sadism thrill to the in-your-fucking-face-asshole aspect of the cruelty is exactly the point. Think of the disgusting excesses of ICE, Trump’s masked gestapo, and how, somehow, no laws apply to them anywhere in the United States because they have jurisdiction over immigration and customs. An immigrant who shows up for his immigration hearing and gets grabbed and sent to Sudan? BINGO — cruel! Consider the recent FBI raid on John Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md. The FBI closed the street he lives on at 7 a.m., sent in a dozen vans with sirens blaring and lights flashing, not because Bolton posed any threat to anyone (though he is one of the most despicable neo-con assholes of the last 30 years) but to make a very public spectacle of humiliating this Trump critic in a naked act of revenge using the full power of the state.

So, absolutely, the politics of cruelty is an essential feature of Trumpism/fascism, got to try to keep everyone scared into compliance. What strikes me over and over in the Age of Trump is the incoherence of the relentless conman and his administration, and the MAGA insistence that incoherence, from the mouths of their leaders, is just as valid as the most well-reasoned, evidence-based arguments. Trump is the same as Hitler in this regard, or Stalin, or Putin, or any other boldly incoherence-spouting thug that has attained that level of power. Of course Ukraine started the war with Russia, it’s vicious insistence on its right to exist as an independent nation is an eternal provocation that must be redressed with overwhelming violence! What choice did Putin have?

As destructive, or more destructive, than the cruelty: The Incoherence is the Point. Destroy the possibility of truth and any dialogue not based entirely on lying, outrageous, hyper-partisan talking points. The incidence of voter fraud in all elections since 1982? Vanishingly small, statistically insignificant, something like 0.0001% of all votes cast — nonetheless, voter fraud is, according to MAGA, and amplified on ‘both sides’ corporate media (not to mention on Fair and Balanced FOX), the gravest threat to democracy our threatened nation of American carnage has ever faced. Tax money invested in renewable energy? Waste, fraud and abuse, based on a liberal hoax spread by climate alarmists, people who irrationally hate fossil fuel!

Vaccines kill, they don’t save anybody from anything. Food and medicine for starving children outside the USA, waiting in warehouses as Congress appropriated the funds for their distribution long ago? Let it rot, it’s all waste, fraud and abuse, 103 dying per hour worldwide is fine, it’s not happening here, those are shithole countries. Making voting too easy for everybody kills democracy. The party in power may do whatever it likes to retain power and disenfranchise political opponents, that is the will of the plurality that gave them their overwhelming mandate to rule. Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell totally exonerates “gentleman” Trump of allegations of sex with minors! She said so herself, in exchange for transfer to a nicer prison, fair is fair! There are countless examples of childish senselessness every day from Trump and his lackeys.

Here’s a beautiful illustration. What kind of demented idiot wears a hat, referring to himself in the third person, announcing that he was right about everything? You guessed it.

You can see the thought bubble over his sleepy looking face.

“He was right to take the classified documents and lie about having them, he made a shit ton of money selling them and got away with it, so no crime. He was right to foment a riot to try to stay in power, after the fake elector plot was foiled by a traitor vice president, because everybody around him was a coward and a liar who pretended the election wasn’t stolen. History proved him right, and all the so-called convicted rioters were totally vindicated of ‘wrongdoing’ with pardons on day one. Fraudulent use of charitable donations? Impossible, the money was given to him, to him! And by ‘he’, of course, I mean me. Always me, a person who is and was and will be always right, about everything, obviously!”

The Grey Lady is so well-mannered!

How much nicer is her headline and lede than something I’d write after the same events?  It is such a higher tone to resist making a reference to his famous “concept of a plan”, “alternative truth” and “fake news witch hunt!”.

or, as someone with far less class than the ever classy NY Times (me) would style it:

Incompetent dictator aspirant, following fascist playbook, relies on empty spectacle to obscure lack of governing skills and nefarious antisocial agenda.

Trump rolls out red carpet on US soil, and applauds, for spymaster, kleptocrat, political assassin, kidnapper of 20,000 Ukrainian children, orderer of mass graves for civilians, multifaceted war criminal, his idol, his Excellency, the President of Russia.

vs.

Which headline takes us closer to the challenging truth we need to grasp, before we are among the enemies being rounded up?

When a psychopath also has dementia

I’m not a psychiatrist, and American psychiatry at the moment only recognizes psychopaths who are antisocial enough to be arrested and locked up for criminal behavior (Antisocial Personality Disorder, “APD” [1] ) but the scary clown in the Oval Office fits all the criteria for what used to be called psychopathy.   All of his relationships are strictly transactional, he pursues only narrow self-interest, ignores laws and norms, is impulsive and incapable of empathy or regret.  Now, increasingly, daily, he exhibits signs of senility.   This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American, last night:

At [yesterday’s] meetings, Trump repeated Russian talking points, complained about how poorly he is treated, said he had ended six wars, insisted that voting in the U.S. is full of fraud, and suggested he would cancel the 2028 elections. By the late afternoon, the president was unable to recognize President Stubb, who was sitting directly across the table from him. “President Stubb of Finland,” Trump said. Looking around, Trump continued: “And he’s uh, he’s somebody that, where are we here? Huh? Where? Where?” Stubb said, “I’m right here.” Trump focused on him and answered: “Oh. You look better than I’ve ever seen you look.”

This evening, CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes reported that Trump paused his negotiation with European leaders to call Vladimir Putin. Her source said that European leaders were not present for the conversation. Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York Times reported that the call was forty minutes long. source

I don’t know why Trump WOULD call Putin, in the middle of a meeting with Zelensky and European leaders about ending the war Putin started, the war against civilians Putin prosecutes mercilessly, including as Zelensky was flying to war-ravaged, crime-infested, national emergency DC to meet Trump.   I don’t know why Trump WOULDN’T call Putin.   He greatly admires the Russian dictator, and Putin, master of spy craft, kleptocrat, political assassin, aggressor in an unprovoked war, kidnapper of 20,000 Ukrainian children, orderer of mass graves for executed Ukrainian civilians, multifaceted war criminal, his idol, his Excellency, the beloved perpetual President of Russia, likely has his 79 year-old protege by the balls somehow.

Could His Excellency have a copy of pertinent sections of the thousands of hours of secret video Trump’s old buddy Jeff used to take, of his powerful guests enjoying some sneaky fun with fourteen year old girls?

You never know what someone as highly moral as Jesus Christ’s personal pick to be the 45th and 47th president is capable of.  History shows pretty convincingly that nothing is beyond his impulsive imagination, since he lives in a world of his own creation where he is the incomparable superstar around which everything else in the universe worshipfully rotates.  

Hopefully his advancing dementia takes him off the fascist billionaires’ chessboard sooner rather than way too late for humanity. Let charismatic, hugely popular President JD Vance try to run the sinking ship of the United States of MAGA/Project 2025.

“He [Putin] said, ‘No country has mail-in voting—it’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’ And he said that to me. It was very interesting, because we talked about 2020. He said, ‘You won that election by so much, and that’s how he [President Biden] got it… you lost it because of mail-in voting. It was a rigged election.’”

[1] click the blurb for the rest of the article on APD

Here are the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic criteria for APD, this list make you think of anyone?

My man scores better on this than the genius score he got on the test for dementia that he’s still bragging about!