or anything much. And they don't even last year-round. And they pay even worse than you feared.

And your friendly republi-CONS with those one-liners and bumper-sticker slogans and dumbed-down conceptualizing and "USA, USA, USA" chants will have taken your health care away, too. Because tax cuts for the rich! Because lazy moochers! Because small government! Because "boot yerself up by your own bootstraps!" Because "get the guvmnt off yer back!"

I've been spreading this one around a little:

Why I'll Never Sympathize with Regretful Trump Voters - by Charlie Pierce of Esquire
(subtitle: They brought this disaster on themselves. They must own it.)
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53491/regretful-trump-voters/

Yeah, I love her, too! She's the ratings queen at MSNBC again, so I've read. And well she should be!

Rachel Maddow connects the dots like nobody else I've seen in the air in donkey's years! And I'm old. She spends a long first segment every night, following trails of bread crumbs to lead to yet another in a continuing series of startling and sometimes infuriating exposes or other breaking news.

She's the Queen of Context. And many times, that's exactly what's needed - to understand the point of the story she takes 20 minutes to complete, or the big picture she takes 20 minutes of puzzle pieces to assemble.

A LOT of these stories AREN'T simple. Kinda like life. Life is complicated. The road isn't straight. Most of the time it's got a few twists and turns in it.

"you won't be seeing Kellyanne around here no more."

If there's nothing improper or suspicious or damaging in those tax returns, why try so damn hard to keep them secret?

No kidding. I feel the same way most of the time. I feel cheated, too. I wanted those brains in the Oval Office. Brilliant and resilient. Creative and resourceful - willing to get down into the weeds on any issue to understand it fully, all the better for realistic, practical problem-solving. SHIT do we ever need that. Instead, we have a tower of orange turds in there.

I STILL can't believe that fucking pervert is in OUR White House - a puppet installed there by a hostile foreign power. Let's never forget that. I wake up every morning feeling like a hostage. Literally a stranger in a strange land.

Yep, looks and sounds like a real Mensa member to me.

Charlie Pierce in Esquire - "Why I'll Never Sympathize with Regretful Trump Voters"

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53491/regretful-trump-voters/

Holy mother of god, I'm tired of reading quotes from people who live in places where the local economy went to hell or Mexico in 1979, and who have spent the intervening years swallowing whatever Jesus Juice was offered up by theocratic bunco artists of the Christocentric Right, and gulping down great flagons of barely disguised hatemongering against the targets of the day, all the while voting against their own best interests, now claiming that empowering Donald Trump as the man who will "shake things up" on their behalf was the only choice they had left. You had plenty of choices left.

In Kansas, you could have declined to re-elect Sam Brownback, who'd already turned your state into a dismal Randian basket case. In Wisconsin, you had three chances to turn out Scott Walker, and several chances to get the state legislature out of his clammy hands. And, now that the teeth of this new administration are becoming plain to see, it's a good time to remind all of you that you didn't have to hand the entire federal government over to Republican vandalism, and the presidency over to an abject loon on whom Russia may well hold the paper.

You all had the same choices we all had. You saddled the rest of us with misrule and disaster. Own it. I empathize, but I will not sympathize.

(snip)

Feeling lost and desperate is a terrible thing. But if, out of loss and desperation, you drink 20 cold beers out of the old preparation room and smash your car into a daycare center, the judge is not going to care how lost and desperate you felt. You build your own prisons in this life. You design your own sentences.

-------

Nails it.

Always had a thing for Sir Patrick.