Jun 23 2018
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Adrastos, Comedy, Diary, Film, Fog Of History, Food and Drink, Gret Stet Politics, Law/Justice, Music, Odds & Sods, Television, Twitter

Saturday Odds & Sods: The Day I Get Home

Fantastic Landscape (Volcano Erupting) by David Alfaro Siquerios.

Our visit to Virginia was a quickie. One of the highlights came on the return trip when we met longtime First Draft readers Lex and Carroll Alexander for lunch. We rendezvoused at Stamey’s in Greensboro, NC and ate the food of their people: barbecue. The meal included perhaps the best peach cobbler I’ve ever had. A good time was had by all but I’m afraid Carroll and I did most of the talking. She has family roots in the Gret Stet of Louisiana and I was eager to untangle them. Nosy might be a better word, but it’s always fun to learn someone has Momus/Comus/Proteus old line krewe types in the family. You never know what happens when you give someone’s family tree a shake. All sorts of oddities are likely to fall out.

On a weird note, I got into a twitter slagging match last week with a Gret Stet legislator’s wife. My crime was criticizing her hubby’s voting record. She was not amused and he contacted me by DM. “Perfection” is a terrible burden and they don’t carry it well. #sarcasm. I wound up inviting them to a “block party” so the fight would end. I’m not sure why they think fighting with citizens is a good move but they do.  I’m not the first person to have this experience and won’t be the last. Weird, weird, weird.

This week’s theme song wedged itself in my head on our trip home. The title is a minor misnomer  as we got home last Sunday. The very Beatlesque The Day I Get Home was written by Difford and Tilbrook for 1991’s Play album. We have two versions for your listening pleasure: the original studio recording and a swell live performance.

Now that we’ve trekked home, it’s time to jump to the break without crash landing. Knock on wood or some such superstitious shit.

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Jun 22 2018
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Adrastos, Catblogging, Music

Friday Catblogging: Tongue In The Mail

I actually got this picture of Paul Drake via text from our catsitter, Christy of Petit Pet Care fame:

The post title refers to the opening line of a classic Crowded House song, which became the name of the Crowded House fan email list in which I was an active participant when it was active. Here’s the tune:

 

Jun 21 2018
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Michael F

What Makes Miller Tick

mcallen-facility_Miller_2

Sorry to play the same song over and over, but I think it’s worth repeating. There are times to debate issues. This isn’t one. There’s no arguing. Team Trump and the GOP base (or maybe I should say Team Trump IS the GOP base); anyway, it’s a political movement based on cruelty and hatred, pure and simple.

It’s not like this is new. They’ve been around for a while…I’m sure you could go back further, but certainly since Goldwater…Nixon carried them, as did Reagan and Bush Junior…though…I’d thought of these folks as George W. Bush voters. I didn’t realize they likely view Bush as “ok, but a little nuanced and sophisticated.” Trump, for all his ugliness, speaks their language.

Which leaves us at a crossroads. I still think a majority of people in this country reject Trumpism. They did in 2016. Let’s not forget he won on a technicality/thanks to weird rules. So, in the upcoming mid-terms, we need to express this rejection in the strongest possible way. Vote them out.

Or deal with the consequences of living in a country that embraces casual cruelty as public policy. Guess we’ll see what happens.

Jun 21 2018
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Adrastos, Books, Pulp Fiction Thursday

Pulp Fiction Thursday: The Chessmen Of Mars

I was a devoted reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books as a tadpole. The Chessmen of Mars was one of my favorites. I somehow doubt if those books inspired Trumpy’s space proposal. Reading is too hard.

There are many editions of The Chessmen of Mars. I like these two early paperback editions that I found on the interweb.

Jun 20 2018
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Adrastos, Bigotry, Fog Of History, Fog Of Scandal, Hurricane Katrina & Federal Flood, Immigration, Immoral Values, Political Crack, Race, The Darnold

Kirstjen’s Katrina Connection

It had to happen. Some pundits are calling the caged children scandal “Trump’s Katrina.” First, former Failing NYT editor Jill Abramson in the former Manchester Guardian followed by New Yorker editor David Remnick. To be fair, Remnick acknowledges a crucial difference:

Some pundits have suggested that what is happening now in Texas will be “Trump’s Katrina.” But, without excusing the racism and the indifference shown by the authorities in that horrific episode, it ought to be pointed out that at least the federal government did not order the flooding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. What is happening now is purely gratuitous, a deliberate act of cruelty intended as leverage to build a “beautiful wall.” And it is a wall intended not only to block Mexicans and Central Americans from making their way into the United States but to divide the United States itself, in order to retain power.

Bush’s Katrina moment was based on incompetence and casual racism whereas the separated family scandal (I’m trying out different rubrics) is deliberate and based on incompetence as well as malicious racism. Shorter Adrastos: the shitheads want to keep out people from shithole countries. Team Trump *wanted* the outrage thinking it would gin up the baser elements of their base. This is what happens when Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller and the Insult Comedian are driving the train. Hopefully, it will cause a wreck in November.

There’s a more interesting direct link to Katrina involving the very white lady at DHS:

Nielsen moved over to the White House as special assistant to the president and senior director for prevention, preparedness and response. She had that job in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. Nielsen’s job didn’t involve coordinating storm response—she served more as an information conduit to the White House—but the George W. Bush administration’s botched response to Katrina reflected poorly on all involved.

A bipartisan report (pdf) prepared by the House of Representatives after Katrina specifically cites Nielsen for not recognizing the storm’s potential for destruction, although her office had received warnings. The Washington Post reported that “Nielsen was one of a handful of White House officials warned of the so-called ‘New Orleans scenario’: a hurricane rated Category 3 or higher hitting the city and bursting its aging levees.” Even after in the storm’s aftermath, with hundreds of people awaiting rescue, Nielsen’s office had trouble getting the attention of Bush, who went to California to give a speech. “It does not appear the president received adequate advice and counsel from a senior disaster professional,” according to the House report.

Nielsen is yet another example of upward mobility based on failure. She helped screw the Katrina pooch and ended up Homeland Security secretary.

I rarely watch Trump administration press briefings but I saw Nielsen the other day. It’s bad enough when the Press Secretary pleads ignorance, it’s infinitely worse when the person in charge of things does so. Nielsen made like Huck’s horrible spawn and said she hadn’t seen the images from South Texas or heard the heartbreaking recording of the weeping six-year-old Salvadoran girl. She told the assembled press corps that she’d look into it and get back to them. She’s done neither. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a shitty role model, y’all.

Harry Truman famously had a sign on his desk saying “the buck stops here.” Team Trump is intent on passing the buck. Bigly. So much so that Dahlia Lithwick compiled a list of Trumper excuses, evasions, and downright lies in defense of this disgusting policy. Their spin doctors are so dizzy that *they* need a doctor. It’s a pity Ronnie Jackson is no longer there to minister to their needs.

Speaking of pointing the finger of blame, I recently read Bob Mann’s fabulous biography of Gret Stet Senator Russell Long. The events involving the very white lady at DHS put me in mind of Long’s legendary aphorism:

To say these are trying times is a grotesque understatement. We have a president* who tweets out shit like this:

Applying the word “infest” to human beings is straight out of the Goebbels playbook. The fucking moron president* may not know the history behind this but Stephen Miller does. Making matters even more grotesque is the fact that Miller is Jewish. Oy, just oy.

Back to the very white lady at DHS. I’d like to praise the folks who heckled her out of a Mexican restaurant in Washington City. And they say that irony is dead. Nielsen puts the tacky in taco.

I was tempted to call this post Kirstjen’s Katrina Konnection but decided that was a bit heavy-handed. I’m as fond of alliteration as anyone but it’s what the Ku Kluxers do, so include me out.

Finally, it may be a struggle in 2018 but I *still* try to be a glass half full person. That’s why Todd Rundgren gets the last word:

Jun 20 2018
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Adrastos, Album Cover Art, Music

Album Cover Art Wednesday: Bootzilla

I’m about to break a rule and perhaps even set a new precedent for this feature. Bootzilla was the first single from Bootsy Collins and the Rubber Band’s 1978 debut album  Bootsy? Player of the Year. The album cover is somewhat pedestrian but the single cover is Bootsylicious, which is why I’m featuring it.

The album cover is the featured image of the video below. Cool shades, meh album cover. Get ready for the tale of “the world’s only rhinestone rock star doll.”

Jun 19 2018
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Athenae, Do Something

Cages

They’re trying to make us fight about the place we keep the children we steal from their parents, the children we lock up:

And it’s too easy to reach for the Ursula K. LeGuin, today:

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting.

They’re trying to make the fight about the cages. It isn’t the cages that make a prison.

Anything can be a prison. Anything can be a cage. It doesn’t need concrete and barbed wire, gun towers and checkpoints. Is that what you think a prison is? A quiet street in a city neighborhood can be Pelican Bay. A luxury condo in a skyscraper. A well-kept house in the suburbs.

You don’t need a cage to make a prison.

You just need a guard.

And oh, does this administration have guards. Say what you like about deportations under previous presidents, say that they, too, were callous or cruel types of separation. Fair. They were not capricious, and they were not done to teach someone who isn’t listening a lesson he or she can’t hear. They weren’t done to shove the law in anyone’s face, to score points in Florida or Ohio or some other racism-blasted swing state full of resentful, angry white people; to make the talk radio listeners cheer.

This administration knew its people and their uses. They elected this president. They chanted “lugenpresse” and “fake news” at reporters. They put them in cages, too, and spit at them and yelled and threatened. They beat protesters and chanted “lock her up.” They longed to inflict human misery, gleefully, on anyone they were told had taken from them, on anyone they were told would take from them. And this administration saw that and said that it was good. It said yes. It said more.

These people have made prisons for decades. Prisons of war, drawing borders and bombing inside them, and out, to make a point with their voters. Prisons of poverty, making food and health care conditional on where you lived and worked. Prisons of redlined racist ghettos, where police patrol one side of the street, pull you over if you cross. Sundown towns and poll taxes and schools segregated in all but name, whites-only fountains and colored sections on the bus. These people know how to make prisons. They know how to do it without building walls.

So don’t come at us now and talk about how the cages aren’t cages and cages aren’t a prison. Anything can be a prison if there are people there who keep you in. Who keep you quiet. Who keep you awake or asleep or fed or starved depending on how you behave and how they prefer it. They can bang on the doors every fifteen minutes, and it doesn’t matter if the doors are chain link or solid steel or polished thick American oak.

If they can lock them, and let you out only when they say, you’re in prison.

Call it a partition instead of a cage, if it makes you feel better. It doesn’t matter.

Not to the children inside, or the guard standing at his post, keeping them there.

A.

Jun 18 2018
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Adrastos, Bigotry, Diary, Fog Of History, Immigration, Law/Justice, Political Crack, Race, The Darnold

Hostages To Misfortune

Every time we think Trumpism cannot get worse, they exceed our already low expectations. The family separation policy makes sucking up to dictators and fighting with allies look positively tame. Angela Merkel is a tough woman who can take care of herself. Children torn from their parents cannot. Let the children go, Mr. Trump.

Team Trump’s chaotic messaging has made matters even worse. The very white lady at Homeland Security cannot keep her story straight, Jeff Bo is quoting the Bible, and the president* started blaming Democrats the minute the story blew up in the administration’s face. Democrats are supposed to repeal a non-existent law so the kids can go free and/or be deported. It’s the clusterfuck of clusterfucks. That’s why I call him the Kaiser of Chaos.

What’s really going on is a hostage crisis. Team Trump are the kidnappers. They’re making unreasonable demands: FUND THE WALL or else. The hostages are children torn from their parents and placed in cages, cells whatever you want to call them. What’s important is that this outrage stop. Pronto.

Trump has no problem using immigrant children as hostages. There’s a long history in this country of demonizing non-white children as Rebecca Onion pointed out at Slate:

Like so many cruelties that have intensified under Trumpism, the idea that only white American children are truly “innocent” and worthy of protection isn’t his invention—it’s just subtext, made text. As historian Tera Hunter wrote in the New York Times, “child-snatching” has a long history in the United States. Black parents in slavery and Native American parents facing white colonialism had children sold, killed, or put into boarding schools and re-educated out of their culture. “Nits make lice,” Col. John Chivington is supposed to have said before the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado in 1864, when his soldiers killed a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho, women, children, and all. Part of the rationale for these atrocities was that these children are not really children, in the way white people understand it—those families were not really families, and those people were not really people.

It’s horrifying that Trump *is* capable of saying something as deplorable (there’s that word again) as “nits make lice.” In this instance, it’s probably good that his ignorance of history is as profound as his malice for everyone who does not look like him. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen such raw, naked, overt racism in the White House. It should curdle the blood of all decent Americans. It was too much for Laura Bush. Let the children go, Mr. Trump.

Adding to the horror of the situation is that the New Yorker is reporting that the government does not have a plan or protocol to reunite the families they’ve torn apart.  They think of them as pawns in this president’s* game of low brow chess with Congress. It’s because the families consist of “nits and lice” as far as the Trump regime is concerned. They do not give a damn.

I thought of Francis Bacon’s words when I sat down to write this post:

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

There’s no fortune to be made in this situation. Donald Trump’s goal is to wreak as much havoc and destruction as possible while he’s in office. They say that misery loves company and the Insult Comedian is one miserable, angry son-of-a-bitch. His election made us all hostages to misfortune.

We should resist in whatever way available and, more importantly, get out and vote this November. Only a Democratic Congress can reign in this cruel, racist, and evil government. I’m tired of being a hostage to misfortune.

The last word goes to the good people at the New York Daily News. A tabloid headline speaks louder than a thousand words;

Jun 18 2018
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Free Republic, The Darnold, Tommy T

Today on Tommy T’s Obsession with the Freeperati – short takes edition

OK – suits ON –

ISO suit

Here we go!

Trump gives Democrats a big health care opening for the midterms
Axios ^ | 6/11/18 | Drew Altman

Posted on 6/11/2018, 5:55:03 AM by DoodleDawg

Most of the discussion of the Trump administration’s decision not to defend the Affordable Care Act — and to urge the courts to throw out its protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions — has focused on what happens to the individual insurance market. But the political impact may be even greater.

Why it matters: Protections for people with pre-existing conditions are hugely popular, and the administration may have handed Democrats their strongest health care weapon yet — because now they can make the case that the administration has gone to court to take away protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

The case is also likely to drag on, so it could be the political gift that keeps on giving through 2020, even if it is eventually thrown out.

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

Attacking what is just about the only really liked feature of Obamacare could come back to bite the GOP.
1 posted on 6/11/2018, 5:55:03 AM by DoodleDawg
To: relictele
Have the Dems shown they are ready to attack any actual issue? 

This just happened Friday I believe. The Democrats haven’t finished their happy dance yet.

8 posted on 6/11/2018, 6:13:32 AM by DoodleDawg
To: DoodleDawg

 

Insurance for those with pre-existing conditions is not insurance.

It’s like buying home owners insurance AFTER your house burns down.

5 posted on 6/11/2018, 6:09:48 AM by Flavious(sic)_Maximus

No, Dumbfuckious Maximus, it’s like buying home owner’s after your house burned down in a forest fire, and you rebuilt.

To: Flavious_Maximus
Insurance for those with pre-existing conditions is not insurance. 

Argue semantics if you want but that doesn’t change the fact that this is one of the few popular features of Obamacare and the GOP is working to eliminate it without any alternative. Optics on this won’t be good.

10 posted on 6/11/2018, 6:15:29 AM by DoodleDawg
I’m sorry – you misspelled “Retards who voted for The Darnold are suddenly going to realize that they’re going to go bankrupt because of this.”
To: ConservativeMind
It is technically called a “benefit” when people are given preexisting condition coverage.  

Oh so now they want to take away a “benefit” that people really like? Just gets better and better.

13 posted on 6/11/2018, 6:16:27 AM by DoodleDawg
OtherwiseOK
One of DoodleDawg’s detractors takes a swipe at him:
To: ConservativeMind
You keep sounding like someone who is happy transgender reassignment surgery being force-covered. After all, tons of people are very, very happy with it.  

And you sound like someone who doesn’t care if the Democrats take the House and/or the Senate in November.

65 posted on 6/11/2018, 9:32:49 AM by DoodleDawg
More (and shorter) short takes after the you-know-what…

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Jun 17 2018
1 Comment
Athenae, Catblogging

Sunday Catblogging: Tube Kitten Edition

Slade:

Like a seal sunning himself on the beach.

A.

Jun 17 2018
2 Comments
Athenae, Big Damn Heroes, Do Something

WHAT ARE THE DEMOCRATS DOING?!!?

I’ve been seeing variations on this theme all week, like the party that isn’t in power right now should somehow magically gain power and stop family separation.

Well, they’re sitting in. They’re marching. They’re giving speeches. They’re fighting with the only fight they have. If you want them to be able to mount real opposition, we need more of them. 

Could one of them filibuster? Sure. Stand on the floor all night telling refugee stories. Could one of them start a hunger strike, mount civil disobedience over and above what’s going on already, could they find a creative way to shut shit down? Sure.

And then, as ever in the past two years, it’ll be over, the TV hairdos will either ignore it or call it a stunt and have 12 Republicans on a panel to talk about how protest is stupid, and nothing will change because THERE AREN’T ENOUGH DEMOCRATS IN OFFICE.

I know you’re sick of hearing me say nothing matters except November, but nothing matters. Except November.

Democrats can’t mount any meaningful opposition because there are six assholes who always give us a hard time. They’re from conservative states, they’re always endangered, etc, etc, they’re weak and scared and it’s infuriating.

What gives those six or so assholes who always give us a hard time their power is that they are necessary to overcome Republican regressiveness and opposition. Put 60 Dems in the Senate and 350 in the House and that handful of dickheads from red states don’t matter anymore.

They can’t hold their critical votes over people’s heads if their votes aren’t critical anymore. And if we have enough Democrats that their voices don’t matter, then we have enough to stop things like this. Things like Trump and his enablers. Things like Pence.

November, bitches. Write and call and yell and make it unpleasant for Republicans to exist in public while this is going on, and then, in November, fucking kick their fucking asses as hard as you possibly can.

In the meantime, if you want to do something, this is a great organization that needs help.

A.

Jun 15 2018
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Adrastos, Diary, Music, Odds & Sods

Saturday Odds & Sods: Life On The Road

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper.

Dr. A and I are on the road today after a whirlwind trip to Virginia for our nephew Ryan’s high school graduation. His graduation ceremony was a bit *too* exciting as there was a threatening phone call that led to the hall being cleared. It turned out to be a crank call, but in 2018 one has to take these things seriously. So much for my plan to embarrass the nephew. So it goes.

This post is a place holder but I do have a theme song: Life On The Road from the 1977 Kinks album, Sleepwalker. It’s the opening track of that record and it rocks like crazy:

The closing track of the album has the word life in the title as well. It’s the story of a guy who tries to commit suicide on an impulse but decides to live instead. A subject that’s both timely and timeless.

How about one more Kinks tune for the road.

That’s it for this week’s weak edition of Saturday Odds & Sods. I wrote this before hitting the road so I’m using a two-year old picture of the nephews doing what they call the Twin Towers. Kids today.

Jun 15 2018
2 Comments
Adrastos, Political Crack, Stupid Republican Tricks, The Darnold

Quote Of The Day: Dictator Wannabe Edition

The Insult Comedian went on his favorite teevee show this morning. He had a lot to say even though little of it made sense. We’re used to nonsense from this president*. It’s one reason he wears an asterisk. Anyhoo, here’s the quote heard round the world:

“He’s the head of the country, and I mean he’s the strong head. He speaks and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.”

He’s also a dictator, you nitwit. Trumpy is just a wannabe although he’s transformed the Republican party into a personality cult centered on him. The stupid bastard isn’t even a longtime Republican. It’s something of a cautionary tale that Democrats should pay heed to as well. Turning your party over to an independent is madness even if that person isn’t as bad as the Kaiser of Chaos. Nobody is as bad as Trump.

I’m old enough to remember when GOPers were anti-communist and anti-Russian. Under Trump they pander to Putin and the bloodthirsty Kim regime. Kim is an old school commie and Putin is a KGB irredentist seeking revenge for the Soviet Union’s “humiliation” at the end of the Cold War. John Foster Dulles and Ronald Reagan are spinning in their graves. Hell, my head is spinning like a top.

I believe in talking to everyone BUT not in taking one’s talking points from a dimunitive dictator with a bad haircut. Next thing we know Trumpy will start wearing a jump suit in honor of his little buddy, the artist formerly known as Little Rocket Man. A too long red tie will look weird with a jump suit but Trump has the right stuff to make it work. Did I say right stuff? I meant weird stuff.

Trumpy has, of course, said other stupid shit this week but I have a summer cold and I don’t want my head to explode. It’s time for another aspirin.

 

Jun 15 2018
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Adrastos, Catblogging

Friday Catblogging: Basket Case

Paul Drake is a large cat who is an expert at squeezing into small spaces.

 

Jun 14 2018
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Michael F

Ave Geezer

ancient_coin_trump_450

GOP paterfamilias Don Donald might be a cult leader…but the GOP faithful are the cult itself, and they’ve been bending their knees to his brand of vicious bigotry and authoritarianism for some time.

Charles Pierce:

I don’t mean to keep beating this tin drum as loudly as I have been, but I think it’s important to keep reminding people that the current president* is an aberrational modern Republican only in the crudeness of a) his rhetoric and, b) the way he wields his power. (Also, he’s something of a nut, which, in my experience, transcends politics anyway.) For example, as was pointed earlier on Wednesday, Tuesday night’s Republican primary results in various states pretty much preclude any serious attempt by Republican office holders to throw a spanner into the crazy that is dominating our politics at the moment. This morning, on MSNBC, this is what Joe Scarborough had to say on the subject.

“It has devolved into a cult. Primary voters in the Republican Party have devolved into a Trumpist cult.”

That’s a word that’s getting tossed around a lot these days. Retiring Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, opined that his party is in the thrall of “cult-like behavior,” while longtime Republican activist and cable TV megastar Rick Wilson says that the word cult “isn’t strong enough” to describe what’s going on. This makes Corker the moderate, I guess.

Now, to be clear, I don’t disagree with any of this. We are seeing politics on one side of the aisle turning into a cult, but, alas, that cult is modern Republicanism. Trumpism is merely one breakaway sect of it, and, truth be told, it hasn’t broken away all that far. After all, Corey Stewart got nominated for the U.S. Senate from Virginia not because of his loyalty to the president*, but as an adherent to a far older cult with which the GOP was quite content to be a part of over the previous four decades: the cult of the Confederate States of America.

Another example: as the results were rolling in Tuesday night, Congressman Steve King, the Republican crackpot who represents the Fourth Congressional District of Iowa, took it upon himself to retweet a famous British neo-Nazi named Mark Collett.

I will give Trump, well, small credit (small credit like his small fingers?). In the, thank heavens, absence of any major crisis (knock on wood) he’s managed to make the run up to the mid-terms mainly about himself. And at this point, even the most scathing of Mueller reports wouldn’t change the true believers’ minds. If anything, they’d view it at Trump’s passion/martyrdom … making him the first martyr ever who’s tastes run to dictator chic.

And…I dunno: given how thoroughly fucked Trump’s reaction will likely be in the event of a disaster of some kind…like with what happened…and what is still happening…in Puerto Rico…

If noting else, we’ll find out what sort of country we’re living in…for now.

 

Jun 14 2018
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Adrastos, Books, Pulp Fiction Thursday

Pulp Fiction Thursday: The Judas Cat

I’m not sure which of the covers below is from the first paperback edition. I have a guess, it’s the one with the old man and the cat. What’s a vintage pulp fiction cover without either a femme fatale or damsel in distress?

Jun 13 2018
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Adrastos, Elections, Fog Of History, Political Crack, The Darnold

Chiming In

I’m on the road and should zip my lip but I’m not very good at being silent when there’s this much news. I guess you’ve noticed that already. I prefer writing on the mighty Wurlitzer that is my desktop keyboard but a laptop will just have to do. I’m not, however, a fan of track pads. I find them user hostile and unatracktive…

The G-7 summit was a Trumped up fiasco. Remember when even jerky American presidents made nice with our allies?  How is it possible to fight with Canada, which currently has one of the most amiable leaders in the world, Justin Trudeau. Trudeau has followed his father’s playbook in dealing with Donald Trump. Trudeau the elder disliked Nixon but forged a decent working relationship with him. When he learned that Tricky had called him an asshole on the White House tapes, Pierre Trudeau had an elegant response: “I’ve been called worse by better people.”

Everyone is better than the Insult Comedian.

The Dictator-Dotard summit was a farce. Trump left it spouting North Korean propaganda. If they allowed dancing in the streets in Pyongyang, they’d be doing it as I write this. If this is winning, I’d rather lose.

The good thing about being on the road is that I’ve missed all of Trumpy’s teevee bragfests. I like how my friend Laura described his appearance: “Even sitting down for an interview, 45 is gross. Looks like he is working hard to have a bowel movement.”

Hey, at least he gives a shit…

In election news, Never Trump Republicans are doing a rotten job of “taking back” their party. Exhibit A: Mark Sanford. Exhibit B: Corey Stewart. Virginia Democrats are thrilled that Lost Causer Corey will be Tim Kaine’s opponent this fall. It’s yet another sign that the GOP is well and truly Trumpified.

That’s it for me. I have a high school graduation to attend. I’m glad that relatives don’t have to wear caps and gowns. It’s not a good look for anyone, especially a grown man with a size 8 head.

That is all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jun 13 2018
4 Comments
Adrastos, Album Cover Art, Music

Album Cover Art Wednesday: The Resurrection Of Pigboy Crabshaw

The Resurrection Of Pigboy Crabshaw is one of the best album titles ever. Pigboy Crabshaw was the nickname/alter ego of Elvin Bishop. Why anyone would want to be called Pigboy is beyond me, but I’m not from rural America like Elvin. I’m a confirmed city slicker.

In addition to the cool art design by William S Harvey, this is a helluva album musically. The Butterfield Blues Band moved from a guitar based blues ensemble to a horn heavy R&B combo after the departure of Michael Bloomfield to form Electric Flag. A very young David Sanborn plays alto sax on the album.

Here’s the whole damn album via the YouTube,

Jun 12 2018
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Athenae, Catblogging

Tuesday Catblogging

The cats continue to just be the best, even if they destroy shit (Ada and my wineglasses) and refuse the expensive food we buy them in favor of trash-ass Fancy Feast (Slade). They play with each other pretty aggressively, not so much that I have to break it up, but Ada will sit underneath Slade and bat at and chew his tail until he’s forced to discipline her, and he’ll lie in wait and jump her as she wanders by.

Then ten seconds later I find them like this. Silly kiddens.

A.

Jun 12 2018
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Keep Bashing Craigslist, It’s Sure to Work Any Day Now

Just stop it:

So Craig Newmark gave a squillion dollars to CUNY’s J-school, which is more than any wealthy media organizations have ever done, and the Internet is full of Very Serious Journalists dunking on him like “thanks for destroying the industry and then giving us peanuts, asshole.”

IT IS 2018. It is the year of our lord 2018 and Craigslist went online in 1995 and in 23 years the only solution to online advertising that newspaper geniuses have come up with is bitching even LOUDER about it.

2003 called. It wants its blame game back, and also possibly those cropped cardigans because that was a nice look on long-waisted girls.

A.

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