A lovely own goal

The man with a reputation as Dumbest Man on the Internet, Jim Hoft, has a blog called Gateway Pundit.

The Gateway Pundit blog has press credentials at the White House, and Hoft might have a rival: his “journalist” representative is Lucian Wintrich. Wintrich posted this:

They break into our country, steal resources, then do shit like this. And libs still wonder why we are pushing for immigration controls…

You know, those brown people he’s berating look like Indians to me…native Americans. Making that caption incredibly ironic.

The Unraveling continues

Reince Priebus has been fired. How do I know? Trump announced his replacement in a tweet, of course.

Isn’t this administration professional?

In other fun news, Anthony Scaramucci’s wife, Deidre Ball, has filed for divorce, citing his excessive ambition and connection to Donald Trump.

It’s like everything The Donald touches turns to ashes and slime. Or is it just that ashes and slime are attracted to The Donald?

I still detest him, but McCain did one good thing

The latest iteration of the health care repeal bill was presented to the senate in the dead of night, while most of us were sleeping, and put to a vote. Three Republicans — Murkowski, Collins, and McCain — voted with the Democrats to kill it. The maverick was mavericky one more time.

But still…there were 49 Republicans, and Mike Pence waiting in the wings, willing to wreck the hobbling compromise that they call Obamacare. Remember that. All those other Republican senators who have been occasionally willing to complain about the fool running the country caved and were willing to go along with this abomination: Ryan and Graham voted for it. And remember most of all that McConnell is the arch-villain who has been orchestrating it.

Remember all of them. And remind everyone else when the next election rolls around.

Voted most likely to be a recurring character on SNL

The Mooch.

“They’ll all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “ ‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ” (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.)

It’s nonstop hilarity!

Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” (Bannon declined to comment.)

Bannon hasn’t been making as much of a spectacle of himself lately — I now realize it’s because he’s working through an intense list of flexibility exercises.

Whoever wrote this should become deceased

From the warrant the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension filed to investigate the murder of Justine Damond:

Upon police arrival, a female ‘slaps’ the back of the patrol squad. After that, it is unknown to BCA agents what exactly happened, but the female became deceased in the alley.

female became deceased is the kind of bureaucratese that warrants further investigation, and at the very least, criminal charges ought to be filed against the police culture that permits such offenses against humanity.

John McCain’s last chance for honor

He’s screwed it up so many times before. He likes to pretend he’s a “maverick”, but somehow he’s always supported the conservative status quo, and has always betrayed any sense of principle. This is the man who took on Sarah Palin as his running mate in a failed attempt at the presidency. He is just generally a screw-up.

And now he’s mortally ill with cancer. Heroically, he’s flying back to Washington DC to cast a vote on a health care bill that no one has seen, that no one will be allowed to see, that given Mitch McConnell’s history of promoting selfish, evil tax-cuts-for-the-rich bills under the guise of “health care” is certainly pure poison.

We don’t know how McCain is going to vote.

He’s voting with zero information, so he ought to reject it out of hand, as all the senators should. There’s a principle at stake here, but given what I’ve seen of McCain, I think that means he’ll run away from responsibility, vote yes, and then allow the sycophants to tell him how brave he was to leave his cancer treatments to vote to deny millions of people cancer treatments.

He’s got one chance to go out on a high note. It won’t change his legacy, but he’ll exhibit one tiny scrap of conscience.

I expect he’ll fuck it up. He’s John McCain.

Never trust a boy scout

It’s a corrupt organization. They don’t allow atheists to participate (my boys were briefly in the scouts, but they couldn’t say anything about their beliefs, and had to do all the religious oaths; Margaret Downey has been fighting this for years), and they only allowed gay and transgender boys in recently, while still prohibiting gay scout leaders. It’s a conservative organization that typically works to instill regressive values — with a few exceptions — and so we shouldn’t be surprised that the boys clapped and cheered, while their leaders capered and grinned, at Trump’s speech to a boy scout jamboree.

That speech is something else. It’s pure madness. It’s the kind of speech a Caligula would give: self-serving, obsessive, focused on slights to his majesty, derisive of the previous administration. He wants to encourage loyalty, but he still can’t resist the temptation to encourage them to boo the previous president and his opposition in the last election. He is still going over and over the size of the crowd over and over, the legitimacy of his election, and “fake news”. And he ends by telling them they’ll be allowed to say “Merry Christmas” again, as if this has ever been prohibited. There was no good message in it, unless you count that bizarre anecdote about a rich man losing his ‘momentum’ a moral message. It’s a speech that tells us much about Donald Trump, none of it good.

But he still has the devout support of the Christian Evangelical community!

Jebus. Read George W. Bush’s speech to the boy scouts in 2005, and compare. W was a disgrace as a president, and yet look how far we’ve fallen with Trump.