January 10, 2021

So far I count 5 Senate GOP votes for conviction

Romney, Murkowski, Sasse, Toomey (maybe?), Collins (finally!)

Barring Trump turning into Yosemite Sam ("Yose-mite" as he would say) & running out to the front lawn with six-guns a-blazing, where do you think the additional 12 GOP votes needed to convict might come from?

Could there be a bandwagon effect, Mitch be damned?

January 6, 2021

Does anyone know if someone's been dispatched to

wake up Rip Van Carson @ HUD & Rip Van Ross @ Commerce & tell them they'll be out of a job in 2 weeks?

Given their lethargy (Carson) & advanced age (Ross), I can't imagine that either will be shocked, & of course neither will have to worry about updating their resume or collecting unemployment.

Still, gently rousing them from their 4-year hibernation would be the decent thing to do before the movers arrive.

December 29, 2020

Vatican priest who appeared in Religulous dies

NPR remembers the Rev. Reginald Foster — perhaps the world's foremost Latin scholar. He was the official translator for four popes and inspired Roman tour guides for Latin enthusiasts worldwide.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/28/950886281/reginald-foster-worlds-renowned-latinist-dies-at-81

Here's the clip from Religulous. Quite a character!

December 21, 2020

Inadvertent or deliberate humor?

Moscow (CNN) - A Russian agent sent to tail opposition leader Alexey Navalny has revealed how he was poisoned in August -- with the lethal nerve agent Novichok planted in his underpants.

The stunning disclosure from an agent who belonged to an elite toxins team in Russia's FSB security service came in a lengthy phone call following the unmasking of the unit by CNN and the online investigative outfit Bellingcat last week.

In what he was told was a debriefing [italics mine], Konstantin Kudryavtsev also talked about others involved in the poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk, and how he was sent to clean things up.

December 12, 2020

Trump has gone from disparaging windmills as nothing but bird-killers

to tilting at them in his quixotic, traitorous, bird-brained, cuckoo coup attempt. Like all his other endeavors, it was a miserable failure.

To revise slightly Orwell's first line in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "It will be a bright cold day in January and the clocks will be striking twelve."* This time, however, the clocks will be marking not the continuation of a decades-long dictatorship, but the end of a four-year attempt to create one.

*Original line: "It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."

November 16, 2020

Disgraced

For all his lies & failures of omission & commission (too many to recount; not the purpose of this post), George W. Bush handled the transition to the Obama administration in the same smooth, time-honored manner as his father (who had been defeated) & all his predecessors (as far as I'm aware). To be sure, W. presided over a failed presidency (and how!), but he doesn't deserve to be called a disgraced former president.

Trump, by acting exactly in defeat as most (all?) DUers & others predicted -- & we're still in the early stages, oy -- has earned himself the adjective forever applied to so many politicians who resigned for criminal or ethical breaches: Disgraced.

If Anthony Weiner, e.g., will always be known as "disgraced ex-congressman Anthony Weiner," Donald Trump should suffer the same fate.

Will it happen? Not in the current boiling cauldron, but farther along, I believe history will regard 45 as "disgraced."

November 9, 2020

Considering his seething rage that's unlikely to subside for a looong time,

I don't think Trump's going to pardon anyone (besides himself, which will fail) before leaving office, whenever that might occur between now & Jan. 20. Not even the 2 Thanksgiving turkeys.

November 7, 2020

I doubt that Joe Biden will become the 46th POTUS

That's because Trump will resign, making Pence #46.

Any thoughts on when the Great Abdication might occur? My guess is as soon as he's get his legal team assembled to do battle in Manhattan & other state venues.

October 6, 2020

"Bless us, O Lord Donald J(aysus) Trump"

Kayleigh is a Jesus Camp alumnus if ever there was one.

July 9, 2020

Judging from the surge in Covid cases after many states reopened prematurely,

imagine what the numbers would look like had we not gone into lockdown, flawed as it was, a couple months ago.

Had Murka remained open for business as usual in April & May, we'd be at multiples of the current number of daily cases & deaths.

Has even one of the troglodytes, Neanderthals, imbeciles, incompetents, mental defectives, low-IQ morans, greedy bastards, "freedom" lovers & sociopaths in DC, the media or the general pop. who vehemently opposed the lockdown come forward publicly & admitted they were wrong, BIG TIME?

Of course not. Silly question.

What Democrats, liberals, progressives, moderates, The Lincoln Project, Never-Trumpers, Rational Republicans (is that an oxymoron?) & anyone else acquainted with reality need to do is remind voters very loudly & constantly that Trump & his nest of vipers opposed the lockdown with every fiber of their miserable, twisted souls & that it was the governors & mayors -- Dems aggressively & 'Pubs reluctantly -- who brought things to a halt, saving tens of thousands of lives & preventing hundreds of thousands of cases of a sometimes deadly & often-disabling disease.

And also remind voters that it was overwhelmingly the Rethug governors who reopened prematurely, imperiling the lives of their constituents & of us all.