The big stall

 

I'm truly sorry to make you look at that, but underpaid people in Mar a Lago have to see it every day.  

Here's another picture, equally hard to see but for different reasons.

That's some of the evidence the FBI found on its August 8 visit to Florida's most famous crime scene, arranged on the floor to show the SECRET and TOP SECRET markings clearly visible to anyone with Trump's rudimentary reading skills.  This is stuff they found in desk drawers and other random places and suddenly I'm not so sure he was looking for buyers in China or Iran.  If you think you've stolen the crown jewels you put them in the safe surely?  But they were found in some room with ugly carpet next to a box of framed Time magazine covers.  They were released because Trump, desperate to run out the clock, demanded a "special master" to examine docs that even Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, has to read in a guarded room.  That was obviously not going to happen, but the Justice Department had to answer the motion anyway, which they did in a lengthy filing which included these lovely snapshots.  Even Judge Aileen Cannon will have a hard time finding evidence of attorney-client privilege here.   She should brace for a stream of Ministry of Truth Social invective.  After all, Trump appointed her, she's supposed to be loyal to him.  Now he'll have to mock her accent like Jeff Sessions, or body-shame her like Bill Barr.

To cut to the last page, because I'm so tired of this, the Jenius Plan seems to be for Trump or at least DeSantis to get elected president in 2024 so one of them can pardon him and end this.  At the very least a semi-fascist-controlled Congress next year will downplay all the espionage and treason and devote every daylight hour to screaming about Hunter Biden's laptop.  There's not much riding on this except a future of totalitarian rule or the limited democracy envisioned by the guys in the powdered wigs.  

And there's so much else going on!  This is the most epochal August since 1974.  The French, who allegedly all go on vacation this month, will be back tomorrow asking "Qu'est que ce?"  

Mikhail Gorbachev died.  It's generally agreed that he was loved abroad and loathed at home, a bit like Tsar Alexander II, who ended serfdom and was assassinated.  Putin is still mulling whether he can spare a few soldiers to march in a state funeral.  Based on the Ukrainian offensive in Kherson, maybe not.  In order to kill more civilians with fewer losses, Russia has bought a load of drones from Iran, but either they're faulty or the Russians are too drunk to operate them correctly.

Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, is 82 percent Black but that probably has nothing to do with the fact that it is one hundred percent without water.  The O.B. Curtis water plant was limping along before it was overwhelmed by heavy rains last week and now nobody can even flush a toilet.  Today the National Guard began distributing bottled water but ran out.  The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency -- that's right, MEMA -- is supposedly sending water trucks.  Nobody knows when the plant will be repaired.  The mayor of Jackson somehow failed to get an invitation to the governor's news conference because his name is Lumumba and he is a Democrat, but Joe Biden has declared a state of emergency anyway.  Does this sort of thing happen in First World countries?

A second grader at Cochise Elementary School in Bowie, Arizona, is charged with bringing two guns and ammunition to school.  He's seven.  I guess even Arizona draws the line there.

On Fox Business Sean Duffy was seriously offended by Biden's "semi-fascist" remark about Trump's followers.  Hurt, even.  Trump would never do such a thing.  "He went after people individually but he never went after a whole group of people," he asserted, which will be news to The Mexicans, The Muslims, The Fake News Media, people who live in "crime ridden hellholes" like Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago, the citizens of "shithole countries" and anyone who criticized him ("woke left liberals").  But generally, a uniter.  A healer.  Whatever.

Texas has a new law that requires public schools to display donated signs that say IN GOD WE TRUST and, as with forced-birth law, recognizes no exceptions.  But if you donate one in Rainbow font or in Arabic they will hand it back to you and probably call the police.  I wonder if signs in Spanish are acceptable.  

Talking up his Safer America plan, Joe Biden called for increased funding of police, especially for training.  By way of illustration, twenty-year-old Donovan Lewis was shot in his bed by Columbus, Ohio, police serving a warrant.  He had a vape pen on the bedside table.  There is remarkably clear body-cam footage.  Meanwhile, Childersburg, Alabama, police arrested Pastor Michael Jennings in the act of watering his neighbor's flowers.  It's going to take a lot of training.

Women, especially young women, are registering to vote in numbers not seen since, well, 1920.  What could be driving that?

Chaya Raichik has slithered out of her hole again.  You may remember her for unleashing violent threats at Boston Children's Hospital with an unhinged lie about gender-affirming surgery on young girls.  Now she's smearing Karla Hernandez, candidate for lieutenant governor of Florida.  Hernandez was president of the teachers union to which phys ed teacher Wendell Nibbs belonged.  Nibbs pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of nine girls in 2020, and therefore ipso facto res ipso loquitur hic haec hoc, Hernandez is a pedophile or at least a "protector" of pedophiles.  I am so glad I don't live in Raichik's head.  Or in Florida, where Ron DeSantis was happy to echo the lie.

Psychology Today has a thoughtful article called "What Is a Narcissistic Collapse?" by Elinor Greenberg.  It may contain clues to what Trump's future holds.