Crazy times carnival

 Who is "mind-numbingly reckless and irresponsible" and jeopardizes "the entire mission of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office"?  Hint:  It isn't Black Lives Matter.  Or Joe Biden.  Or even George Soros.

According to Sheriff Paul Penzone it's Cyber Ninjas, the ad hoc "company" hired by Arizona Republicans to shake & bake all the county's ballots from 2020, a majority of which were cast for Biden and are therefore illegitimate.  They want router numbers which would give them access to confidential voter information (including medical and tax records) and would jeopardize law enforcement officers, according to Penzone.  Frustrated in their search for bamboo fibers in the paper which would somehow prove the ballots originated in China, they now want to knock on voters' doors and demand to see their papers or something.  

After three weeks of this farce State Senator Paul Boyer, who voted for it, has changed his mind.  "Looking back, I didn't think it would be this ridiculous.  It's embarrassing to be a state senator at this point."  And it could stretch into the summer unless the Biden Justice Department shuts it down first.  At least the Crazy Times Carnival across the street has concluded and moved on, leaving reporters searching for a less obvious metaphor.

All Republican-controlled states are desperate to keep voters from voting and have introduced or passed more than 361 bills as of March 24.  Arizona is just more proactive than most, with a proposed law which would allow the legislature to change the election result even after it is certified by the governor.  In other words, legislators could do, by a simple vote, exactly what Cyber Ninjas are struggling comically to do now.  Before 1913 this is how US Senators were chosen.  I wonder if Arizona voters will still be allowed to do that.

That was the Seventeenth Amendment.  Republican panic, however, can be dated to 1947, when they introduced the Twenty-second, limiting presidents to two terms.  That's because Franklin Roosevelt scared them shitless; they couldn't beat him even when he was dying.  Term limits are implicit in a democratic system, but term limits imposed by law are inherently undemocratic.  Of course, so is the absurd electoral college system, which has foisted loser Republicans on the country three times (1876, 2000, 2016).  

Trump is a cartoon villain who will be remembered for motivating a record eighty-one million Americans to navigate the already restrictive voting laws in order to expel him from office, in the middle of a pandemic he did nothing to combat.  Trump is a chancre on the country's genitals.  One day he'll be gone but that won't mean the spirochetes are not flooding the national bloodstream.   If you don't like that, here's another way to look at it:  there is a leech that lives in the rectum of a hippo, feeds on its blood and finds a mate there.  No other spot will do.  Let's just say the Republicans need a new symbol to replace the elephant.  Once nominally a Democrat, Trump found a home  --  but the hippo was always a hippo.  It's a good match.  

All right, no more hippo leeches.  Let the fun times roll!

According to a new book by Carol Leonnig, the Trump crew had a colorful relationship with the Secret Service.  Not only were agents forced to seek alternative toilet facilities near Casa Kushner but Trump criticized their appearance as if they were some actress who had rejected him.  "I want these fat guys off my detail," the morbidly obese Stable Genius whined.  "How are they going to protect me or my family if they can't run down the street?"  He also considered some of them too short, probably the female ones.  Not everyone in The Family agreed, apparently, because Tiffany spent "an unusual amount of time alone" with her minder, while Vanessa, then Mrs. Junior, was openly dating an agent before dumping Junior in March 2018.  (Imagine, a man who didn't need coke to perform!)  Despite their failure to come up to his Leibstandarte standards, Trump was happy to demand another six months of free protection for his darlings.  Not you, Vanessa.

It's a new day and Bob Baffert has a new excuse:  Medina Spirit was being treated for dermatitis and the antifungal ointment could have caused the positive drug test.   Tomorrow we hear about those Rothschild space lasers that Margie Two-names warned about.  This would be easier if we could ask the horse.

The Rightzis who adopted the Royals as their personal cause after Meghan Markle told Oprah they're a smidge racist are excited.  The queen opened Parliament dressed like a normal person without that five-pound crown on her head because she's 95 and a widow and she has no more royal fucks to give.  Or perhaps she was signaling her distaste for the laundry list handed her by the Johnson government which includes, among other things, a new provision for voter IDs.  You know, to stop all the "fraud," apparently a huge problem for rightwing governments everywhere.  The usual suspects over here all want to know if the "Queen of England" is a racist (which is not what Markle said) because she wants voter IDs (which may or may not be true).  All we know for certain is that known racist Boris Johnson and his crew want them.  

Despite the pandemic and the years-long drought, California is rolling in it.  The accountants predict a $75.7 billion budget surplus this year.  Unable to spend it fast enough on Medicaid, education, the homeless and everything else Republicans hate, Governor Gavin Newsom is contemplating payments of $500 - $600 to residents.   No doubt he'll be accused of trying to bribe voters, but the recall effort was probably doomed even before Caitlyn Jenner became its silly public face.

NASA's got a brand new probe headed for the asteroid Bennu on a two-year mission to dig up some 'roid and return it to earth.  I'm fine with this, I just object to the probe's name, OSIRIS REx (and it took some contortions to arrive at that acronym).  One's Egyptian and the other's Latin, OK?  It just annoys me.  

The Independent has curated "Eighteen of the most bizarre things Trump has already posted" on his blog.  Read it, don't read it, whatever.  My favorite:  "Happy Easter to ALL, including the Radical Left CRAZIES who rigged our Presidential Election, and want to destroy our Country!"  Christ is risen.  (But does he promote Ivermectin as a covid treatment?  It's for worming horses, so yeah, probably.)

If Prince Charles was smiling under his mask at the SOoP today, it may have been because Helmut Jahn has died at 81.  Here are a few of the upsetting structures designed by "the Flash Gordon of architecture."

Worth a flight to O'Hare?