Showing posts with label Congress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Congress. Show all posts

Friday, November 15, 2019

Dude's a #£¢§´#% miracle of modern medicine

I think our present state of affairs in these United (for now) States may lie somewhere between laughing to keep from crying . . . and dying laughing. That last thing isn't meant to be figurative.

God help us all, because we certainly haven't been able to help ourselves.

Friday, October 25, 2019

Tuesday, October 01, 2019

Didn't we all see this coming?


The most staggeringly unfit man ever to be president of the United States looks for all the world like he's trying to start the civil war he's been tweeting about this week.

I'm starting to think he might succeed. If you don't think that's enough of a possibility to be much afraid right now, you either are in denial or haven't been paying attention.

God help us.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

President Donald J. (for Jim Jones ) Trump


This is what the president of the United States posted on Twitter about two hours ago as I write this, after a day that saw compelling evidence surface that he engaged in a Mafia-style shakedown of a foreign leader to obtain dirt on Joe Biden.
It came a day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened an impeachment inquiry against him over that same incident, which prompted a reportedly damning intelligence whistleblower report that one congresswoman termed "jaw dropping" when asked to characterize its contents.

"I describe it as explosive and jaw-dropping," Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said Wednesday night on CNN's Don Lemon Tonight. "I could not believe what I was reading."

ON A NIGHT such as this, I couldn't believe what I was seeing on the president's Twitter feed. Given what we've already seen from the tweeter-in-chief on his Internet Id-fest, that's saying something.

It's clear that we have come to such ruin in America that we no longer have a president, but a cult leader instead. And like Jim Jones, I fear the only way we'll remove him from the White House (God forbid) is feet first -- rather like the way Jim Jones left Jonestown in 1978.

No doubt, the crazy will be turned up to 11 in Trumptown as the end -- one way or another -- draws near.
That leads us to another horrifying thought, one we dare not admit but which surely haunts us nevertheless: How many Americans will this particular cult leader take with him down that highway to hell.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Dude sounds like he's on pot


National politics is so dysfunctional, disheartening and -- frankly -- bat-shit crazy that I largely have lost the will to comment on such a shitshow.

Sen. John Kennedy
Which brings me to Louisiana's junior U.S. senator, John Kennedy. And the matter of shit.

There is much that could be said about Kennedy. Most would fall under the category of dysfunctional, disheartening and -- frankly -- bat-shit crazy.

But I will say this: I am a Southerner and there is no way in hell I would vote for any Southern politician who can't keep his metaphors straight.

"Urinate or get off the pot?"  Really? Really?

REALLY???

I am old enough to have used the proverbial pot, which my Louisiana family referred to a a "slop jar." And I well know the choice that we all face in life: Shit or get off the pot.

And Kennedy's mangling of a damned fine metaphor is just too damned much to take. Get it straight, podna, or shut the f*** up.

That is all.

Friday, March 22, 2019

Calling Jake and Elwood: The Iowa Nazi edition

Truth in politics?
Rep. Steve King, National Socialist-Iowa, is at it again. No doubt, our national appetite for wallowing in political pig poop is fathomless.

The Washington Post is there with a shovel, as usual.

"We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybody’s looking around saying, ‘Who’s going to help me? Who’s going to help me?’” King said, recounting what he said officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, had told him about the relief effort, in which he said he had participated. Yet, he was also one of 11 members of Congress to oppose a bill providing federal aid to Katrina victims in 2005.

In his home state, he said, residents looked after one another without government handouts. Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has declared a disaster in more than half of Iowa’s 99 counties because of severe flooding and is seeking a federal declaration that would free up funds from Washington.

“We go to a place like Iowa, and we go see, knock on the door at, say, I make up a name, John’s place, and say, ‘John, you got water in your basement, we can write you a check, we can help you,'" King said. “And John will say, ‘Well, wait a minute, let me get my boots. It’s Joe that needs help. Let’s go down to his place and help him.’”
THE NORMAL human response -- or what one would hope is the normal human response -- to the question "Who's going to help me?" is "I am."

King seems to admit as much by lauding Iowans' willingness to help their neighbors without hesitation. So, I suppose the only thing he finds offensive is that people would ask for help -- particularly from, one supposes, the federal government. Particularly the majority-black population of New Orleans.

Something tells me the right dishonorable white nationalist from Kiron will not be pressing FEMA to withhold aid from those of his constituents affected by flooding on grounds of "We can take care of this shit ourselves." This leaves us with the explanation that's left for what King said Thursday.

Steve King is a racist piece of that in which we've been wallowing since 2016.

Monday, June 04, 2018

It's dangerous to have courage in an age of cowards

Click to enlarge
 
Trumpism is an apocalypse, an unveiling and a revelation in the original Greek sense of the word.

What previously was hidden from many now is visible to all -- and the choice we face as Americans is crystal clear.

"Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?"

One of the vanishingly few pluses to this apocalypse is the revelation of true backbone, conviction and integrity among some Republicans and conservatives who previously were just seen as partisan warriors in the right-wing tribe. Michael Gerson is among this number.
 

'When the king is a liar, truth becomes treason.'
HE'S BEEN anti-Trump from the start, has been clear about why he's opposed Donald Trump and has, on principled grounds, cast himself out of his tribe because his tribe has shown itself to be massively intellectually and morally corrupt. And in this age where tribalism is all -- and you don't have to look far to see this; you're on social media, after all -- it is no small thing to stand alone, reviled to some extent by all sides.

If this all goes even more sideways than it already has, folks like Gerson will be among the first to be rounded up and thrown into the gulag. Remember that as you read this.

Thursday, May 31, 2018

No, there is no bottom for right-wingers to hit


Let's just call this staggeringly odious and misleading Internet ad what it is.

It's the right-wing crazy machine's "Where the white women at!?" moment. There's no other explanation for using that artwork of Barack Obama, and using it in the manner of Cleavon Little meets Snidely Whiplash.

Particularly when Obama hasn't been president for a year and a half now.


Boris Badenov . . . president's FSB handler
It's something worthy of Boris Badenov . . .  or a Washington dark-money advocacy group with ties to the Koch brothers.

The spectacle of Republicans resorting to Obama-baiting -- still -- to thwart an effort to continue regulating a utility like, well, a utility just beggars belief. Or it would have beggared belief a decade ago. You know, before the Great "The President's a What???" Freakout.

And now that Donald Trump is president, I'll believe anything. Except, of course, a single word that comes out of his mouth.

IN AN AMERICA lost somewhere on the wrong side of a pee-colored looking glass, the old Jim Crow political tactic of n***** baiting has become the postmodern coin of the realm for Republicans. That's fair enough. After all, they've been looking more like Klansmen every God-forsaken day in this deviant and dysfunctional Age of Trump.

Thus, we have the right resorting to this "Where the white women at!?" demonizing of a man who's no longer running things -- all in the name of letting Corporate America screw consumers and potential economic rivals as much as possible.

No doubt, this is another GOP "freedom" moment.


And, as Janis Joplin told us all 47 years ago, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Meme-ing down your leg with holy water


Today's prayers, thanks to yesterday's inaction.

















* a sampling



What good is it, my brothers and sisters,
if someone says he has faith but does not have works?
Can that faith save him?
If a brother or sister has nothing to wear
and has no food for the day,
and one of you says to them,
"Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,"
but you do not give them the necessities of the body,
what good is it?
So also faith of itself,
if it does not have works, is dead.

Indeed someone might say,
"You have faith and I have works."
Demonstrate your faith to me without works,
and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.
You believe that God is one.
You do well.
Even the demons believe that and tremble.
Do you want proof, you ignoramus,
that faith without works is useless?
Was not Abraham our father justified by works
when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?
You see that faith was active along with his works,
and faith was completed by the works.
Thus the Scripture was fulfilled that says,
Abraham believed God,
and it was credited to him as righteousness,
and he was called the friend of God.
See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.
For just as a body without a spirit is dead,
so also faith without works is dead.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Diary of a mad white president . . . or just another day in hell


Donald Trump is the devil. And the devil is lord in America.

Since its founding, the United States has been a country with a guardian angel sitting on one broad shoulder and a demon on the other. Sometimes, we listen to the angel.

Other times, we invade Mexico because we can . . . and to grab some land. We go to war in defense of slavery. We pal around with Mr. Jim Crow. We decide 58,000 dead American soldiers is an acceptable price for not losing face in Vietnam. The list goes on.

Tiny hands and all
Now, one could be excused for believing that Americans have decided to skip the middleman altogether and just install the devil as president. Donald Trump, to be fair, is not the devil. But he is a devil. The difference is only a matter of lowerarchy.

The devil presides over his people from an oval office in which there are no corners to hide. Like the real deal below, he wouldn't think of harming a hair on our chinny-chin-chin -- directly. That, he convinces us to do ourselves, to ourselves.

Our devil in Washington is not the persecutor we're all looking for -- or at least the one the alleged Christians among his minionish base have been expecting forever. Ol' Devil Trump is the subverter we never saw coming.


Check that. Trump is the subverter we damn well saw coming, but kept trying to pass off as something else entirely.

In our nation's capital and in Anytown, the subverter-in-chief bids his victims forward one by one to tell each how he must offer up his immortal soul this day. One of today's dead men walking was retired Gen. John F. Kelly, White House chief of staff and Gold Star father.


"General," sayeth our demonic majesty, "you gotta get me out of this." "This," as we all now know, is the matter of what the president said to the young widow of Army Sgt. La David T. Johnson. Johnson was one of four soldiers killed in an ambush while serving as advisers to troops fighting Islamic extremists in Niger.

Kelly's mission, should he choose to accept it -- and he did -- would be to somehow normalize the grossly ham-handed, insensitive thing Trump said to Myeshia Johnson about her KIA husband, whose name he couldn't be bothered to utter. Probably because he couldn't remember it.

Trump's idea of comforting the stricken is to tell an Army widow that her husband “knew what he signed up for . . . but when it happens it hurts anyway.”

Kelly's idea of selling that to the American people as perfectly normal is "Why, that's exactly what my buddy said to me when my boy got killed in Afghanistan!"


That's a paraphrase boiled down by me. Here is what he actually told the assembled White House press corps. In this extract, Kelly starts out by explaining Trump had a question for him:
And he said to me, what do I say?

I said to him, sir, there's nothing you can do to lighten the burden on these families. But let me tell you what I tell them. Let me tell you what my best friend, Joe Dunford, told me, because he was my casualty officer. He said, Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were, because we're at war.

And when he died — and the four cases we're talking about Niger, in my son's case, in Afghanistan — when he died, he was surrounded by the best men on this earth, his friends.

That's what the president tried to say to four families the other day.

I was stunned when I came to work yesterday morning and brokenhearted at what I saw a member of Congress doing, a member of Congress who listened in on a phone call from the president of the United States to a young wife, and in his way tried to express that opinion that he's a brave man, a fallen hero.

He knew what he was getting himself into, because he enlisted. There's no reason to enlist. He enlisted. And he was where he wanted to be, exactly where he wanted to be, with exactly the people he wanted to be with when his life was taken.

That was the message. That was the message that was transmitted.

It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation, absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That's obviously not the case anymore, as we see from recent cases. Life, the dignity of life was sacred. That's gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.

I just thought the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that that might be sacred.

And when I listened to this woman and what she was saying and what she was doing on TV, the only thing I could do to collect my thoughts was to go and walk among the finest men and women on this earth. And you can always find them, because they're in Arlington National Cemetery.
I DO NOT doubt that Kelly, the career military man, found comfort in his friend's words. I also do not doubt that Kelly's preferred script for these difficult conversations is entirely too complicated to be followed by "a fucking moron" with an emotional quotient measured in negative numbers.

So . . . here we are. Trump botched a script most people -- because common sense, sensitivity and basic human compassion -- would not follow when attempting to console a young war widow with two young children and a third on the way. Trump's words not only were heard by Mrs. Johnson, but by everyone in the funeral-home limousine as family and friends traveled to the airport to receive the body of Sgt. Johnson.

One of the family friends happened to be a member of Congress. Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) had known the Johnson family for years. She also had been a mentor to Sgt. Johnson and his two brothers. She was his father's school principal years before.

And she was outraged by what she heard on speakerphone.

Too bad for her. The only unforgivable sin in the Church of Satan -- Trumpistan is to shine light on the sins of our father below.


When one disses the devil, the sulfurous one has any number of acolytes who will try to snuff out the light as they snuff out their own self-respect. In the case of Wilson, the Church of Satan lowerarchy -- at least in my viewing of what it's trying to pull off here -- went full-bore for racist stereotyping with no hesitation at all.  Let's review:
It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation, absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That's obviously not the case anymore, as we see from recent cases. Life, the dignity of life was sacred. That's gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.

I just thought the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that that might be sacred. 


IT TAKES little effort to read between those lines. After all, the Trumpian base isn't that bright, and its attention span isn't that long. That said, the multitude of Trump's minions are outdistancing the there-are-none-so-blind White House press (who maybe need to get out more) on this one.

Briefly, the White House is sending the nearly unmistakable message that Frederica Wilson is just another crazy, angry black woman who's simply out to stir up shit and lay waste to every social norm precious to proper white Americans.

We're to see the congresswoman as some sort of malevolent Madea, out to throw a potful of hot grits in the face of the Great White Dope Hope, then cold-cock him with the empty pot. Right before she tears up Arlington National Cemetery via unlawful use of a front-end loader.


That's the message our government wants to send to alt-white America, which is the only one that matters to the devil.

Not so long ago, which seems like a lifetime ago, presidents didn't talk like this. Presidents didn't send staffers out to pull stunts like this. Richard Nixon, for God's sake, would not have been so brazen or so emotionally stunted -- and that's saying something.


 That's obviously not the case anymore, as we see from recent cases.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

'Muslim!' is the new 'Squirrel!'


Dear Rep. Bacon:


Meanwhile, as the Trump Administration prepares to deport Iraqi Christians back to almost certain death in a country they've not seen in decades . . . crickets from Republicans seeking to distract attention from our very own "What fresh hell?" regime.

For God's sake, man! Every damn time an alert sounds on my laptop or iPhone, I wonder what fresh hell is breaking loose now from Mad King Donald or our dysfunctional, pathological government. Every damn time. It's usually a doozy, and it's usually happening SEVERAL TIMES A DAY.

Yet you're outraged about what the g**damned Palestinian Authority is doing as you don Ray Charles sunglasses and stick your fingers in your ears and hum the "Star-Spangled Banner" while contractors measure the Oval Office for padded rubber wallpaper? Really?

How damned stupid do you think we are? (Obviously, stupid enough to have elected Donald Trump and yourself.)

Yeah, I am just so zip-a-dee-doo-dah, orgasmically THRILLED that you intend to kick some Palestinian Authority ass as you inexplicably exhibit ZERO concern that your own House leadership is considering Flat Eartherism so it could have a shot at sailing the ship of state off the g**damned edge.

And I can't even begin to express how grateful this woebegone nation is that you're devoting precious minutes and hours to some *obviously* existentially important Palestinian baiting while North Korea fires off ICBM after ICBM, and President Donald J. Trump may be the most unequipped person on planet Earth to deal with a REAL Korean crisis, as opposed to your ordinary, everyday Korean crises.

Good grief, don't you people even LISTEN to yourselves anymore? Is it possible that y'all are really that non-self aware?

Nah, can't be. I think you're just that flippin' cynical.

God help us, because we sure as hell aren't capable of helping ourselves anymore.

Sincerely yours,

Hoping We Don't Get Nuked Before
I Can Vote for Your Opponent

Friday, May 05, 2017

At least quit telling us it's raining


Rep. Don Bacon
Congressman, Nebraska 2nd District
Reichstag
Washington, Greater Trumpian Reich

Dear Rep. Bacon:

Your vote is as despicable as your claims are Orwellian. In addition, voting on a measure such as this without a Congressional Budget Office analysis and score is absolutely irresponsible and reckless.

In other words, since you seem incapable of *not* pissing down our legs, at least quit telling us it's raining policy blessings from heaven.

Sincerely,

A Voter Who's More
Sentient Than You Think

Monday, March 20, 2017

There was this today


We cannot make any judgments on whether or not the campaign of the man elected president of the United States of America was in cahoots with a hostile government to rig the election in Donald Trump's favor. We just don't have all the facts yet.

We don't know for sure whether there indeed is a fire or where it is, exactly. We do know there's a hell of a lot of smoke, and it's blowing in from that direction.


And we also know this: That we're even suspecting what we suspect means the republic is in mortal danger. That Trump is governing how he has thus far -- via a weird mix of basic incompetence, a fundamental skepticism of the American narrative and a vindictiveness toward his political enemies, the poor, the Other and even some of his own supporters -- only adds to our peril.

Can the United States survive this? No one knows, not really. We have no experience in this; the closest analogy would be an investigation into Leonid Brezhnev ordering the KGB to break into the Watergate on behalf of Richard Nixon . . . who was allegedly in on the plot.

Facing South. Courthouse, Denison, Iowa.
This crisis comes to a nation as divided as it's been since the South seceded in defense of slavery. The Union was preserved at the cost of the Civil War and nearly 700,000 corpses. Robert E. Lee couldn't even have dreamed of the kind of weaponry your average, solitary American gun nut possesses today.

Or, as newsman Dan Rather said today on Facebook:
If you are a praying person, today is a day to pray for the future of your country. I have seen a lot in my decades in the press, but I have never seen a day like this. This is a stress test for our democratic institutions and one can only hope that the system of checks and balances we hold so dear, can indeed hold.

The statements by FBI Director James Comey in testimony today about Russian interference in the 2016 election were jaw dropping. It should be also noted that both he and NSA director, Adm. Mike Rogers, categorically denied that there was any evidence to support Mr. Trump's repeated allegations that Trump Tower was wiretapped by President Obama. That we do know. But it must be noted how much we do not know. We cannot afford to back off on investigating, fully, completely, and openly, allegations that are anathema to the spirit of our republic. But we cannot also afford to jump to conclusions. We want answers. We want to know more. That is natural. But patience will be required. It is better that this plays out in a systematic way. It is for all these reasons that I think a careful bipartisan investigation is essential.
RATHER, who covered Watergate as tenaciously as anyone at the time . . . and has more than 60 years of journalism under his belt, said that as The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza was writing this in the newspaper's The Fix blog:
Given Comey's flat denial of any evidence of Trump Tower being wiretapped, there will be increased pressure on both Trump and Republican members of Congress to back off that position and apologize for it. Reps. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Will Hurd (R-Tex.) have already called on Trump to apologize to Obama. It's hard to imagine that other GOPers won't follow that lead in light of Comey's testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee on Monday.

Trump is another matter. His offhand remark at a joint news appearance Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that perhaps he and she had both been wiretapped by the Obama administration suggests he isn't planning to leave the issue alone — much less apologize for it.

And we know that for 35 to 40 percent of the public, that will be enough; they simply trust Trump more than they trust any intelligence official or media outlet.

But that's sort of beside the point. Trump is the president of the United States. There is now ample evidence that a very serious accusation he made about a former president is simply not true. Standing by it now is simply irresponsible.
TO ME, the most frightening thing is that 35- to 40 percent of the public thing. Those folks, at this point, are either delusional, white supremacist dead-enders or stone-cold fascists -- even if they're too self-unaware to recognize that fact.

Trust me on this; I'm in my 50s, and I'm from the South. Back in the day, probably half of the biggest flag wavers in Dixie would pick Brand B in a blind taste test where Brand A was the United States of America and Brand B was Nazi Germany.

Whether Trump stays or goes, we're going to have to deal with that 35- to 40 percent of Americans who are every bit as un-American and subversive as unreconstructed white Southerners were in the 1950s and '60s.


It will get ugly, and our country may not survive it. Assuming it survives Trump.

I'm with Dan Rather. Today is a fine day to pray for the future of America.

Thursday, March 09, 2017

'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves'


Sixty-three years ago tonight, Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly went to war in defense of an idea. That idea is the United States of America.
 

That defense on CBS Television's news program See It Now necessarily meant declaring war on one of our occasional demagogues who rise to the level of existential threat. In 1954, that demagogue was Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R, Wisconsin). His particular -ism, involving a witch hunt that exploited people's intense fear of communism early on in the Cold War, came to bear his name -- McCarthyism.

McCarthyism looked to be a war on communist subversion by any means necessary. What McCarthyism actually was was an assault against our American foundational idea.


We always seem to forget that America is not a nation -- it is a country and an idea. A country organized around an idea.

NATURALLY, we never exactly (or even roughly) live up to the idea -- the ideal -- but the point is that we keep aiming for it. In that respect, it's like Christianity. Yes, you're a sinner, but you repent and keep trying to do better.

The times when this country truly is in peril is when we lose the narrative. With McCarthyism, we twisted the narrative and used that idea against itself, as a justification for cynical subversion. The Reds weren't the only subversives in this national morality play. Who knew?

Now we struggle for control of the narrative of another American morality play. McCarthyism has become Trumpism, after our latest existential threat, President Donald J. Trump.


And I wonder whether this time we've thrown away the script -- the founding ideal -- altogether.

As Ed Murrow said, our defense is not of one party or another, but instead it is of the truth. I think we have a steeper hill to climb than that of 1954. In 1954, Americans had many questions, but No. 1 on the list didn't seem to be Pontius Pilate's -- "What is truth?"

I'LL CLOSE with Murrow's final words on that historic telecast. They're better than any I'll ever write. Apply to our present national emergency as needed.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully. Cassius was right. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

Good night, and good luck.