Thursday, January 31, 2019

Ukraine West

As soon as Maduro cracks we will begin to see little green men hither and yon in Venezuela.

And donnie will huff, and he will puff, and then his pants will fall down.

The Epitome Of Delusional Egotism

That’s what I would have to call it.

If Howard Shultz actually declares that he is running for president in the face of the chagrin, dismay and derisive laughter that has accompanied his 60 Minutes appearance, a new level of self important out of touchedness will have been established.

Even his non partisan and ostensibly non political book tour looks to be becoming a disaster.

And Starbucks has sent out a directive that its employees declare that they really have never heard of Schultz and that, in any event, even if such a person exists, he has nothing to do with Starbucks.

Unless something changes he may replace donnie as lead victim of late night television opening monologues.

That is probably not a likely path to the Presidency.

Weird Other Side Of An Unacceptable Occurrence

I cut the cable several years ago.

Recently I have signed up for a rudimentary streaming facility.

I thought that I would get back to being a heavy watcher of video entertainment again.

I haven’t.

The extended cut cable situation allowed me to permanently break the addiction.

So I don’t know anything about the current hot shows and their attendant hot personalities.

So all I can do is use generic terms for what I am about to say, because I don’t know the names of anybody who is in the vast hoard of shows that I don’t watch.

************************************************************************

This is about the young actor who was attacked a couple of nights ago in Chicago.

As Al Sharpton has said about the incident, it is heinous, horrible and unacceptable in America.

He said something like that.

And I agree Reverend Al with vigor.

But what I find  worthy of noting, and having so noted, asking the question, what kind of creature – there were two of them apparently – would lurk out on the waterfront in massively sub-zero weather at 02H30 with a rope and a container of some kind of fluid?

What made them think that there was going to be a gay black actor out walking around at that time of day, down by the lake, in those kind of inclement conditions?

Conjuring the conversation that would have been the underpinning of laying that plan creates, in my mind at least, a dialogue which could spawn some new sort – I guess the word is genre - of horror/psycho/homo-phobia drama.

It could, if written down, become the treatment for a really twisted Hollywood project.

Maybe it could be the path back for Harvey.

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Today…

I woke up earlier than usual – about 06H33.

I laid there for a minute or two trying to convince my body that it needed to go back into the dream state from which I had suddenly emerged.

In that dream state I had been moving off of the roof of a very bricky and ornate several story – old – building onto some kind of ledge that I knew, in my dream, would allow me to work my way back to the ground.

I worked my way for a way along, I guess it was, a ledge, and was at that point in the company of another person.

I knew who it was.

It was Pat, a good friend from high school.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

I reached out to try to grab something that would allow me to get from the untenable position I was in – roof dreams always have me in precariously untenable positions – and allow me to get onto whatever it was that Pat was on that looked more likely to be a way to get off the building.

What happened was that something broke loose and Pat fell away out of sight.

Even in the dream state I had a sense of horror.

But I looked down expecting to see a horror.

I woke up instead.

I have various versions of this dream all the time.

The have never before had Pat in them.

I also have a dream where I’m in some kind of weird mall – it could be in the middle ages – dream in which I am trying to get back to get back to some restaurant in the mall to have a meal, but can’t get there because, even though I think I know where I am, I really don’t know where I am; or maybe where I am keeps changing out from under me.

I also have those flying dreams.

Mine almost always start on the lawn in front of my grandparents’ place in Lake Forest Park – Seattle – which is a sloping lawn above a rather large pool (oddly, we called it “the big pool”) and I just hurl myself out and up and swoop down to the big pool and off into the adjacent woods and …

Those flying dreams are great.

But I almost never have them anymore.

And I have a lot of other sorts of dreams, but I won’t mention them now – maybe later.

Anyway, after doing that full body stretch that I do which always signifies to me that I am really going to get up and not keep trying to drop back into that dream state, I called my son.

On the phone.

Really good news.

His company has laid him off.

But he has been expecting it and has been looking forward to replacing his middle management career in a major corporation with a job in the plumbing department at Office depot.

He has been looking forward to that for some time.

Now he has got half of his wish.

Home Depot doesn’t know about his availability yet, so they haven't hired him yet.

But I’m pretty sure they will.

They’re not idiots.

Just a corporation.

However …

I was really happy for him.

But what I really wanted to tell everyone about was what happened next.

I was expecting Glenn from Appliance Repair somewhere around 08H30.

Glenn is one of those magic people that can fix anything.

Today he was coming to rebuild my Sub Zero wine cooler.

That was going to take six hours and most of the floor space of my office where the wine cooler resides.

So I wanted to get down to my office – it’s in the daylight basement – and get my morning computer work done ASAP.

So I invoked a word document.

I was in the office.

In the basement.

Where the wine cooler is.

Glenn wasn’t there yet.

I got in return for that invocation a dialogue box informing me that Microsoft Office Had Encountered Some Kind Of Catastrophic Error and that I was probably out of luck.

The short story is that, after four hours of various forms of thrashing, I got Office to work again.

The longer story, but deferred to some other time, is that I will someday tall y’all the rest of this really boring story.

But this is all for now.

Monday, January 28, 2019

The Significance Of The Wall Street Journal

“Less than 50/50” old dumb donnie said in an interview yesterday or the day before.

That statement reeks of incompetence.

It’s easy, though to miss the brilliance of his subtlety.

He made those remarks to the WALL Street Journal.

What a genius.

Friday, January 25, 2019

There Is A National Emergency

But Article XXV can solve it.

Did you hear that unhinged hulk who continues to masquerade as president in his mid morning core dump?

A Pesky Little Problem

Section Seven of Article One of the Constitution of the United States says “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other bills”.

donnie doesn’t seem to know this.

Nancy does know this.

They both have taken an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States.

Nancy is defending it.

donnie is in violation of it.

The Government shutdown is the the reckless tactic invoked by donnie to try to implement his strategy of abrogating the Constitution.

That is not defending it.

I leave the description of what it is to anyone who reads these thoughts.

Monday, January 21, 2019

Still Interfering 

Has anyone noticed that the Women’s March has been attacked by the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/Puty Putin apparatus?  

Friday, January 18, 2019

Washington And The Council - Again

I thought that I had awakened and that I was watching Fox News.

As odd as that should have appeared to me, I accepted it as the facts of the matter.

I never watch Fox News.

I try to avoid all near occasions of heart attack.

Fox News is a major source of those type of occasions.

So I guess I should not have been surprised at what happened next.

I had not awakened on the couch watching Fox News.

I was back in the room of the Council of the Leaders.

The President – remember that is what the Council has dubbed Washington – was still staring at me.

Staring at me with those ice blue eyes that demanded fealty.

He had just said:

“Shape up Citizen; the one of whom you are thinking will not prevail; we did not freeze our asses off that winter; and risk everything we had – all of us – to have donnie win out; we are going to bring that to a halt now; and you are going to be at the forefront of bringing it to an end; and my country, my America, will be greater and stronger when the slime has been purged”.

I thought that I had awakened on the couch.

Watching Fox News.

Apparently not.

On my left was a surprise.

There in the meeting room fixed by the steely blue stare of the first President of the United States of America was another apparently human manifestation.

It was donnie the dildo.

The President fixed him with a glare that – if donnie hadn’t already been  toxic ray immune, due to that orange shit he slathers on – would have fried a normal human.

But donnie isn’t normal.

Nor is he human.

He is just a vagrant waft of protoplasm that unfortunately fell upon America.

“So, you vagrant waft of protoplasm” The President was quite direct, I thought; “that unfortunately fell upon America, you have sullied everything that we the founders risked all and everything for; you are a grifter and a buffoon; I have appointed Harry to fix what you have put at risk; he has pulled our chestnuts out of the fire before, and I believe that  Franklin will support me in this “ The President looked down the table and a man in a wheel chair put both thumbs in the air; “and I believe he can do it again. You, sir, disgust me”.

I woke up again, on the couch, watching Rachel Maddow.

I really do have strange dreams.

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Nancy And donnie Part One

Dear donnie:

We have been without 25% of our government for several weeks now.

As you know the House has passed multiple bills, all previously passed by a republican House, that would fund the government and let federal workers go back to work.

Unfortunately Mitchell hasn’t let us pass those bills off to the Senate.

The Constitution seems to say that the Senate’s job is to act on bills passed by the House.

But Mitchell apparently knows better.

I know that you are holding 800,000 Americans hostage by not paying them (I guess your vast experience in bilking contractors and employees in private business is being applied to our government) so that you can make the House pass a money bill to build your wall.

I need to point out that, since the House totally disagrees with spending that amount of money on a stupid wall, if I were to support your demand to spend money – spending money being the province of the House, not the Executive – I would be violating my oath to defend the Constitution.

As are you, by the way, by demanding that the House do what you want, not what the House wants.

But this hostage crisis has gone way too far.

So here is the deal.

I am going to pretend that I am not violating my oath.

And, I will introduce a bill to be fast tracked for 6 billion (I know you are really sloppy on your cost estimates as your various bankruptcies have documented, so we are topping up on the amount) to build your stupid wall.

That 6 billion also includes the airline bill for my recent trip that you said I should fly on the economy rather than using military aircraft.

All they could give us – to have the appropriate security – was first class, dedicated aircraft, so it was pretty expensive, but what the hey, right?

The only stipulation is that you have to act as general contractor.

That way we can all see how genuinely incompetent you are.

Or not.

That’s a joke.

We will come after you, though.

Forcing the House of Representatives of the United States of America to pass a money bill so that millions of Americans can be relieved of the pain of your government shutdown is, among other things a violation of your oath of office.

We will impeach you and we will win in the Senate.

Or Mitchell will be next.

Refusing to hear bills passed by the House looks a lot like a violation of his oath.

But then, on the slime scale, he may even be slimier than you.

And that’s really slimy.

By the time they get around to me we will have a Democratic President and Congress – Senate also, so …

Happy Valentines.

Love

Nancy

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

A Fairly Funny Joke

Can you spell conspiracy?

No, I'm a republican.

(That's a joke going around).

The Cost Of Having A Pretend President

I thought donnie said they were defeated. 

terror attack in syria 011619 00000

terror attack in syria 011619 00001

terror attack in syria 011619 00002

Can you spell disarray?

From The (Prospering) New York Times 011619

new york times 011619 00000

Back when donnie was a delusionally successful gambling industry magnate he used to wait until his workers had finished their work before he stiffed them.

Now that he is a delusionally successful pretend president he has the perfect deal: he can stiff his workers at the outset; he doesn’t need to wait.

He has recently been heard mumbling as he wanders a nearly vacant white house in his bathrobe “gotta get those slaves back in the traces”.

My spell checker said that “delusionally” isn’t a word.

I like it; it should be.

A word.

Monday, January 14, 2019

Has The Worm Turned?

Starting this weekend I have had a sense that the news coverage of donnie and his treasonous activities have begun to be taken seriously.

I was moved to that feeling by that waft of communication that one feels from time to time, as we all did, for example, when Tricky Dicky said “I am not a crook”.

He isn’t denying “collusion” anymore.

Now he is denying that he worked for the Russians.

And says he’s insulted that the American people could think that he would work for such low wages.

Things are looking up for the Republic.

Saturday, January 12, 2019

I Get To Talk To President Washington Again

Jacques the Mouse came and got me last time.

I was in Paris.

Jacques prefers Paris to other places, as do I, but he, unlike me, is not confined to space and time and airline and Metro schedules.

This time I was back again in boring, vastly over-rated Seattle.

The big deal in Seattle today was that they had finally closed a viaduct that was designed to kill people.

It only needed to have a good sized earthquake to fulfill its mission.

We had one in 2001 – an earthquake - that nearly did fulfill its mission, and the city fathers and mothers have ever since been arguing about whether its mission was really death and destruction or being the backbone of a system designed not to let anyone get in or out of Seattle between the hours of 03H55 and 00H15 daily.

Somehow – I have never understood what it was that caused this – some faction voted in a tunnel to replace the viaduct so we could have underground gridlock between the hours of 03H55 and 00H15 daily; it was deemed more desirable to have gridlock underground where no one could see it, and where, when the earthquake comes nobody will get crushed in a collapsing viaduct, that viaduct having been, starting today, removed.

Being buried in a tunnel has been deemed to be more cosmetic.

Anyway, Jacques showed up again.

I had just finished a pretty good dinner of linguine with sautéed shallots with Pomi tomato sauce laced with Mamma Lill’s.

The last time Jacques showed up – in Paris in 2012 – I had just  finished a great dinner of saumon avec champignons sautéed in huile d’olive et calvados.

I liked that better.

But the Pomi was good too.

He came in and just said “we need to go back and see the President again”.

I like it when a relationship has matured to that level of simple directness.

He and I, apparently, have been together for several thousand years, over hundreds, at least, and thousands, probably, of adventures; but it was the 2009 – 2102 period in Paris that refreshed my memory – dimmed by time and tide – of our on going, and, in creature terms, eternal collaboration.

So I finished my glass of wine in a gulp and took his hand – we can do that after all these centuries – and went where he wanted to take me.

It was the Council of the Leaders Again.

This time though the meeting room wasn’t as described last time.

This time it had a feeling – not a look, it still had that central table and the same principal occupants of that table, as had been there the last time in 2012 when I had been there; but this time there were no walls to the room.

The lack of walls allowed one to see what “felt” (I say “felt” because it was tangible and palpable that sensation) like overwhelming sadness, grief and hopelessness; and that “feeling” was reinforced by a distant sound of moaning concurrently overlaid with groaning concurrently overlaid with various voices in various languages saying whatever it was that they were saying in staccato bursts interleaved with the other sounds.

And there were faces.

And the faces were people.

Leaders all were they.

And the leaders all were there.

Pretty much all of them.

Pharamond even.

The history of the world had apparently gathered there and then and Jacques, for some reason, had  wanted me to be there.

The head of the table was The President (that, we learned last time, was what The Council calls Washington).

He spoke.

“I don’t like speaking”.

“And I am by no means the chairman of this body”.

“But this crisis is mine”.

And then he fixed me with those General’s blue eyes and I felt myself wilt as I simultaneously felt myself enlist in his army.

“No wonder America was born” I thought as I looked back at him.

“How sad” I said to myself as he returned my gaze with his century spanning clarity “that we can’t have people like him anymore; how sad that we end up with donnie the charlatan, the grifter, the criminal; how sad; how sad”.

The President spoke.

“Shape up Citizen; the one of whom you are thinking will not prevail; we did not freeze our asses off that winter; and risk everything we had – all of us – to have donnie win out; we are going to bring that to a halt now; and you are going to be at the forefront of bringing it to an end; and my country, my America, will be greater and stronger when the slime has been purged”.

Things began to fade and I woke up from sleep on the couch watching Fox News.

I have the oddest dreams.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Making America Great Again???

But we’re going to have a beautiful wall.

And a lot of coal miners.

And beaucoup Pottersvilles.

trumpsvilles?

donniesvilles?

The Economist Cover SC 011019 00000

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

The Emergency Defined

donnie says that he will declare an emergency if he can’t make a deal with the democrats.

So, if he can make that deal, there isn’t any emergency?

And if he can’t there is an emergency?

So his lack of artfulness of the deal is the national emergency?

I would think that even the dolts that comprise “the base” would question that rationale.

But The Economist at the very beginning of the donnie disaster pointed out that there was a P.T. Barnum phenomenon in effect:  the rubes that Barnum made his fortune duping loved being duped.  Once duped, they had an on-going and heavily vested interest in not admitting having been duped.

As usual, The Economist saw it all clearly substantially in advance of actual events.

***********************************************************************

A couple of interesting things that I have heard recently:

1. A carelessly redacted Manafort document that says that Manafort, as donnie’s campaign chairman, passed detailed polling information to a Russian Intelligence Officer is clear indication of collusion.

2. I heard a former United States Attorney who was being interviewed on KUOW say that he believes that donnie jr and jared will be indicted and that at that point donnie will fire Mueller and then the shit will hit the fan.

By the way, on that same KUOW noontime news show I heard something several months ago that might fit into the emerging donnie and the Russians mosaic: It turns out that the much maligned Steele Dossier wasn’t commissioned by Hillary Clinton as donnie and the republicans keep saying but was a by-product of an investigation into Russian money laundering and related chicanery related to a FIFA scandal.  The fact that it morphed into stuff about donnie is sort of interesting.

I guess we may begin to hear more about urination and collusion (collusion is the street term for conspiracy; urination is the clinical term for pissing).

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Who Is To Blame?

donnie said he would take responsibility for the current government shut down before he started it.

As usual he was lying.

Now he says it’s the Democrats’ fault.

Any way anybody who knows anything could look at the situation results in a simple conclusion.

donnie threw a tantrum and said unless the opposition party voted the way he told them to vote he would shut down the government.

Politics aside, the Constitution makes that sort of presidential dictate a really bad idea.

So the Democrats have not voted the way donnie has ordered them to vote.

Because – through no fault of theirs – they don’t agree with what donnie is telling them to do.

Democracy was designed as an alternative to another form of government: dictatorship.

The Democrats have, however, passed several bills that would terminate some or all of the government shutdown.

The Constitution says that those bills should go to the Senate for adjudication and vote.

Ol’ Mitch apparently hasn’t read that part of the Constitution.

He says that he doesn’t want the Senate to vote on those bills.

So donnie’s shutdown continues.

It is clear that the democrats are to blame for something.

They are guilty of being unwilling to ignore the voters who have put them in place and instead take orders from donnie.

Other than that structural guilt, donnie and the lackey republicans own this one.

Unfortunately there is more.

Tonight donnie is going to lie to the Nation on the networks at prime time.

He is going to trump up some hallucinated national emergency – the only place that emergency exists is in the echo chamber between donnie and fox news.

There are a lot of people at our southern border requesting asylum – they show up at official entry points, so they don’t need a wall to fend them off – and there are international and US laws that give those people the right to do that.

That is a completely transparent and totally legal form of immigration.

The illegal kind of entry to the United States from Mexico is at historically low levels.

The “4000 terrorists” that donnie and his staff of hired liars are talking about (3755 I have heard is the exact number) are people who have been stopped at airports somewhere else in the world, not at some culvert on the US/Mexican border.

But donnie will no doubt truck that lie out tonight.

The only “National Emergency” is the continuance in office of a pretend, irrational and incompetent president.

Monday, January 7, 2019

The Economy: Looking Forward

I heard an economic expert review the state of the economy on NPR this weekend.

She said all the standard stuff:  low unemployment, erratic stock market, great jobs report (the previous day), one month’s report of wage increase vis inflation, trade war, government shut down, erratic president.

But on balance – more standard stuff – she said the economy was strong and looked to continue to be.

Then she said something that caught my attention (I am editorializing here with the words in the quotation marks; I was driving my car at the time and I couldn’t write down what she was saying, and my car stereo doesn’t have a recording option; but this is pretty close).

“Of course those statistics are all backward looking statistics; they describe how things have been, not where they are going.  Forward looking statistics tell where the economy might be going.  Two key ones are business investment and growth of the labor force.  American business is keeping and has been keeping for years all their cash, not investing it; the birth rate doesn’t support a growing labor force; immigration is usually the solution to that problem, and we all know where that is going. So the forward looking statistics forecast a less optimistic future for the US economy”.

Saturday, January 5, 2019

Albatross Or Monkey?

I just heard a news item. 

The US State Department said concerning the recent murder by the Crown Prince of a Washington Post journalist: “they need to get the albatross off their back”. 

Actually the “albatross” - in this case the murder - but literarily a general metaphor, is always around the neck. 

What’s on their back is a monkey - that’s always what’s on one’s back; in this case the “monkey” may be a medieval version of their religion. 

Thursday, January 3, 2019

From The Hill

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has declared any legislation passed by the House to fully reopen federal agencies will be a non-starter in the Senate but he may have trouble keeping all his troops in line.

McConnell has tried to keep his conference out of the fray altogether by insisting any government funding deal depends on negotiations between President Trump and Democratic leaders.”

***************************************************************************

Last time I looked – that was this afternoon – The Constitution says that money stuff, you know, stuff like taxing and spending is initiated by the House,voted on and passed to the Senate where the Senate agrees to and/or modifies the Bill passed from the house.

Usually both houses then need to iron out differences, each vote and pass the now mutually accepted Bill, and then send it to the President for his signature.

If he doesn’t sign and sends it back the House with objections they can deal with his objections or vote to pass it again as is; in either event they vote on it again; if two thirds vote to pass it again, it goes to the Senate where they can do the same; if they pass it by two thirds, and if it has been passed with the changes requested by the President it goes back to him for his signature; if it has been passed without his objections being addressed it becomes law without being sent for his signature.

There wasn’t anything in the Constitution that I was reading that said the President has any say in any of this, except to sign or not sign.

So why are both Houses of our Legislature screwing around with a tantrum throwing cretin who thinks it’s fun to shut down the Government?

If the Legislature wants to fund the government – and that is what the Constitution says that one of the Legislature’s purposes is -  it is their job to pass a bill that does it.

The Constitution doesn’t give the cretin any part in the process.

Except to sign a funding bill or not sign it.

If the cretin continues in his tantrum, and he won’t sign, so be it; we always have Article XXV.

I don’t know what we can do about Mitch McConnel, though.

He’s the reason both Houses are screwing around with a tantrum throwing cretin.

donnie the deal maker

He could have had 25 billion early last year.

More recently he has been demanding 5 billion.

Now he’s saying that 1.6 billion is good.

I can see why the Democrats are just waiting.

Apparently donnie wakes up in the middle of the night, hallucinates a second self, and they start bargaining.

Since – like the Trinity – these two (known around the White House as “The Duality”)  manifestations of donnie are co-equal in all powers, among them the art of the deal -  the result from each encounter drives the outcome closer to zero. 

Given the masterful deal making powers of both sides of the Duality, over time one would expect, as the Duality continues its nightly encounters, big debit sized demands.

I assume the Democrats are just waiting for the duality to get to a minus trillion.

At that point Nancy will shriek “voila” or some such expletive and announce a balanced budget.

But seriously, “The Duality”: what an Article XXV ridden image.

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

A Rabbit In The Window

A few years back in the window of a gallery on Rue Mazarine:

paris lapin dand la vitrine SC 010119 00000


From The Examiner

romney examiner 010219 00000

“Look, the political history is clear. No Republican president opposed for re-nomination has ever won re-election,” RNC committeeman Jevon O.A. Williams said in an email obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Unfortunately, loopholes in the rules governing the 2020 re-nomination campaign are enabling these so-called Republicans to flirt with the possibility of contested primaries and caucuses.”

Poor little donnie.

They are all picking on him again.

And it’s all Obama’s fault.

He has called his good friend Mitt Romney and put him up to running for president.

And what an – almost treasonous – thing to do.

Suggest that donnie is nuts and America can do better?

From an additional source, known only to me, an additional RNC email has surfaced:

“That sort of thinking MUST BE ELIMINATED AND THE PURITY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY MUST BE ESTABLISHED: THE BASE – THE RACISTS, THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS, THE SUCCESSIONISTS, THE MILITIAS, ESPECIALLY THOSE EMBEDDED IN THE ARMY AND THE MARINES, THE ANTI SEMITES, IN SHORT, ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE – WILL HAVE ITS WAY.”

Apparently he can’t think at a Twitter level of donnie-like brevity and clarity and has needed to resort to an older digital form of distribution. 

He’s got the caps, though.

From outside the inner circle of the deplorables this all looks to me to be a good thing.

Concentrating evil in one assailable package should cause, one would hope and expect, a massive abandonment of evil on the part of whatever rational group still think they are republicans.

And I can’t think of a better bearer of the banner under which they will exit than Mitt Romney.

Whether he is allowed to exercise his rights within the party, or is forced into the outer darkness, his knowledge, qualifications and decency will stand as a beacon for the lost legions desiring to fight their way out of the slime of trumpland.

Third parties never have won.

But they have elected presidents.