Thursday chemtrails
Welcome to another edition of Cleaning the Crap Off My Desk.
To paraphrase Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein, "A Constitutional crisis is an ugly thing...and I think it's time we had one." The anonymous resister who wrote the infamous Times op-ed says he and his co-conspirators considered triggering the Twenty-fifth Amendment but didn't want to set off a political earthquake. That's the whole point of the democratic system they claim to be preserving -- it has a process. Twenty-five is the process. Stealing papers off the president's* desk while he's in the bathroom (twenty Diet Cokes a day!) is not a Constitutional remedy, it's a Saturday Night Live sketch. And now he knows what you're doing.
It's a day that ends in "y" and that means it's time for Calling the Cops on Black People. We go to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, where eighteen-year-old Akil Carter was removed from a car and briefly handcuffed until one of the two (white) women in the car identified him to police as her grandson. As a point of interest, two black people assumed he was robbing the women and called the po-po. So that's different.
Ted Cruz was giving a campaign speech somewhere in Texas, and when he mentioned his opponent, Robert "Beto" O'Rourke, someone yelled, "Send him back to Ireland!" Cruz, who was born in Canada and whose father was born in Cuba, paused and acknowledged the witticism with what he considers a laugh. Savoring the irony, Ted? Can irony live in the Texas climate?
Trump now claims he considered making Robert Mueller director of the FBI but decided against it because Mueller is the BFF of James Comey. (Not true, according to those who know them.) Of course, that wasn't enough for He Who Doesn't Know When To Shut Up, who continued, "I could show you one hundred pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other." No such pictures exist, but the glimpse into Trump's psychological state these days is...chilling? Hilarious? Let's go with creepy.
Roy Moore -- "Uncle Roy" in the nightmares of too many Alabama women -- is suing Sacha Baron Cohen, Showtime and its parent company CBS for $95 million, claiming defamation, fraud and "emotional distress." Baron Cohen, whose modus operandi is all too familiar by now, pretended to be an Israeli government official with an award for Moore and then deployed a "pedophile detector" which beeped when in his proximity. I don't find Baron Cohen funny (he has hoaxed many others including Howard Dean), but the best way to promote his career is hopeless lawsuits like this one. Moore was crying poverty not long ago despite a generous pension from the state of Alabama, and soliciting contributions to cover his legal expenses. This is making my "desperation detector" beep.
Marco Rubio and Alex Jones got into a slap-fight in a hallway at the Capitol yesterday. Don't know what that's all about but, you know, "Go it, Alex! Go it, Marco!"
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee may not be able to prevent Koathanger Kavanaugh (no, but I wish I had) from becoming a stain on the Supreme Court, but they're having a swell time trying. Yesterday Kamala Harris (and to a lesser extent Pat Leahy) questioned him like a particularly shifty defendant on Law & Order: Your Vanishing Rights, and today Cory Booker released two documents His Honor had already lied about (and which the Republicans had classified) and triple-dog dared John Cornyn to kick him out of the Senate or take away his bathroom key or whatever their weird-ass Rules require.
My favorite tidbit from Bob Woodward's book (so far): Trump apparently ordered "the military" to kill every important member of the Syrian government, but the order was quietly countermanded by James Mattis. I'd say Bashir al-Assad owes him a beer.
If you've been calling the New York Times with a question about today's crossword and couldn't get through, it might be because Sarah Sanders posted their number and invited her Twitter followers to call and demand the identity of the "gutless coward" who wrote yesterday's op-ed. I immediately thought the same thing -- wait, Sanders has Twitter followers? Since she employed the phrase "failing New York Times," she may not be the actual author of this tweet. It's what we old English majors learned to call a kenning -- a ready-made phrase from the time of oral epic poetry, something a bard could employ to save time and effort, like Homer's "wine-dark sea" and the Beowulf author calling the ocean a "whale-road." And who relies on kennings like "failing New York Times" and "Crooked Hillary" and "Little Rocket Man" (until Kim Jong-un made the list of Most Favored Tyrants)? Not Sanders, who has a lot of faults but never proclaimed herself "the Hemingway of 140 characters."
I knew that English degree would come in useful one day. This is the day.
To paraphrase Kenneth Mars in Young Frankenstein, "A Constitutional crisis is an ugly thing...and I think it's time we had one." The anonymous resister who wrote the infamous Times op-ed says he and his co-conspirators considered triggering the Twenty-fifth Amendment but didn't want to set off a political earthquake. That's the whole point of the democratic system they claim to be preserving -- it has a process. Twenty-five is the process. Stealing papers off the president's* desk while he's in the bathroom (twenty Diet Cokes a day!) is not a Constitutional remedy, it's a Saturday Night Live sketch. And now he knows what you're doing.
It's a day that ends in "y" and that means it's time for Calling the Cops on Black People. We go to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, where eighteen-year-old Akil Carter was removed from a car and briefly handcuffed until one of the two (white) women in the car identified him to police as her grandson. As a point of interest, two black people assumed he was robbing the women and called the po-po. So that's different.
Ted Cruz was giving a campaign speech somewhere in Texas, and when he mentioned his opponent, Robert "Beto" O'Rourke, someone yelled, "Send him back to Ireland!" Cruz, who was born in Canada and whose father was born in Cuba, paused and acknowledged the witticism with what he considers a laugh. Savoring the irony, Ted? Can irony live in the Texas climate?
Trump now claims he considered making Robert Mueller director of the FBI but decided against it because Mueller is the BFF of James Comey. (Not true, according to those who know them.) Of course, that wasn't enough for He Who Doesn't Know When To Shut Up, who continued, "I could show you one hundred pictures of him and Comey hugging and kissing each other." No such pictures exist, but the glimpse into Trump's psychological state these days is...chilling? Hilarious? Let's go with creepy.
Roy Moore -- "Uncle Roy" in the nightmares of too many Alabama women -- is suing Sacha Baron Cohen, Showtime and its parent company CBS for $95 million, claiming defamation, fraud and "emotional distress." Baron Cohen, whose modus operandi is all too familiar by now, pretended to be an Israeli government official with an award for Moore and then deployed a "pedophile detector" which beeped when in his proximity. I don't find Baron Cohen funny (he has hoaxed many others including Howard Dean), but the best way to promote his career is hopeless lawsuits like this one. Moore was crying poverty not long ago despite a generous pension from the state of Alabama, and soliciting contributions to cover his legal expenses. This is making my "desperation detector" beep.
Marco Rubio and Alex Jones got into a slap-fight in a hallway at the Capitol yesterday. Don't know what that's all about but, you know, "Go it, Alex! Go it, Marco!"
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee may not be able to prevent Koathanger Kavanaugh (no, but I wish I had) from becoming a stain on the Supreme Court, but they're having a swell time trying. Yesterday Kamala Harris (and to a lesser extent Pat Leahy) questioned him like a particularly shifty defendant on Law & Order: Your Vanishing Rights, and today Cory Booker released two documents His Honor had already lied about (and which the Republicans had classified) and triple-dog dared John Cornyn to kick him out of the Senate or take away his bathroom key or whatever their weird-ass Rules require.
My favorite tidbit from Bob Woodward's book (so far): Trump apparently ordered "the military" to kill every important member of the Syrian government, but the order was quietly countermanded by James Mattis. I'd say Bashir al-Assad owes him a beer.
If you've been calling the New York Times with a question about today's crossword and couldn't get through, it might be because Sarah Sanders posted their number and invited her Twitter followers to call and demand the identity of the "gutless coward" who wrote yesterday's op-ed. I immediately thought the same thing -- wait, Sanders has Twitter followers? Since she employed the phrase "failing New York Times," she may not be the actual author of this tweet. It's what we old English majors learned to call a kenning -- a ready-made phrase from the time of oral epic poetry, something a bard could employ to save time and effort, like Homer's "wine-dark sea" and the Beowulf author calling the ocean a "whale-road." And who relies on kennings like "failing New York Times" and "Crooked Hillary" and "Little Rocket Man" (until Kim Jong-un made the list of Most Favored Tyrants)? Not Sanders, who has a lot of faults but never proclaimed herself "the Hemingway of 140 characters."
I knew that English degree would come in useful one day. This is the day.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 2:24 PM
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