Morality police and other disasters

I don't know what all of this means, so I'll just put it down.

When I saw that the Bishp of London is a woman, I thought the Church of England has made remarkable progress since it refused even to ordain women.  Not in every category, though.  Rev. Mpho Tutu-van Furth of Shropshire, the daughter of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has been forbidden to conduct the funeral service of her godfather Martin Kenyon in church because she is married to a woman.  The funeral had to be held in a marquee, like an episode of Bake-off.  And her marriage is supposed to be celibate.  This church is tied in more knots than Houdini.

When I think of Melania Trump I think of "fucking Christmas."  Doesn't everyone?  They wanted her to skip her Botox to approve the decorations other people would put up at the White House -- four times!  So I was not even a little surprised to read that she's marketing a line of ornaments for $35 to $45 with "a part" of the proceeds going to some scholarship scam.  Oh, you need a link to her website?  That's too bad.

J.R. Majewski probably loves Trump more than Melania does.  He once painted a mural of the Orange One on his lawn.  So when the Ohio Ninth was redrawn to favor Republicans he duly sought the endorsement of King MAGA and began lying about his military record.  His claim of service in the Air Force in Afghanistan collapsed when some liberal media hack revealed that he spent most of his hitch in Japan, apart from six months loading cargo in Qatar.  Also he supports/does not support QAnon.  And he took part in the coup attempt but did not break the law.  And a few other lies.  He sounds perfect.

Abbott and DeSantis may well owe Trump an apology.  It looks like abusing immigrants was his idea, with bells on.  According to Miles Taylor (New York Times readers will remember him as "Anonymous"), Trump "wanted us to identify the murderers, the rapists and the criminals and, in particular, make sure we did not incarcerate them, and we put them in those cities" -- the cities to which migrants are now being flown and bused.  The assumption that murderers and rapists walked from Honduras to the southern border in significant numbers is of course pure Trump.  

The name of Mohamed Bouazizi is not well enough known.  He was the shopkeeper whose self-immolation touched off the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2010 and led to the ouster of President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.  Will Mahsa Amini turn out to be the Bouazizi of Iran?  The country is racked with rioting since Amini's death at the hands of the morality police, who didn't like the way she wore her hijab.  It doesn't help that the economy is causing widespread pain, or that the Kurds (Amini was one) are tired of their treatment.  

Next week Japan will finally hold a state funeral for Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in July.  Japan is nominally a democracy but most people have little faith in the system, dominated as it is by the enormous American military presence -- now in its sixty-seventh year -- and one-party rule, or as they call it in Washington, "stability."  Connections between Abe's Liberal Democratic Party and the Unification Church have also angered many Japanese, including the man in his seventies who immolated himself to protest the state funeral, which will cost $12 million.  

Say this for John Gibbs, Trump's candidate for Michigan Third -- he's not climbing on the misogyny bandwagon.  Gibbs has hated women since college (Stanford), when he started the Society for the Critique of Feminism.  He knows women can't reason, are too emotional, and the Bible is pretty clear about their place in the food chain.  Also, the Founding Fathers didn't think women should vote and Gibbs is an Originalist.  (They would have counted him as three-fifths of a man and denied him all rights but let that go.)  I'd call him an incel, but he's clearly a babe-magnet.

 And his opponent is a woman, which makes it perfect.

Do you want to know what the FBI was really looking for when they invaded Mar a Lago and made a mess on the perfect carpet?  Hillary's emails.  That's what Trump told SpongeSean Squareface last night when people could hear him.  Even Hannity was confused.  He stayed that way when King MAGA asserted that he could de-classify documents "by thinking about it."  None of it makes sense but it fended off questions about Letitia James, which would have evinced something racist and misogynist and also would not have made sense.

Inspired by Neuter Gingrich's "Contract with America" the House Republican leadership devised a "Commitment to America" which promises to raise prescription drug prices, pave the way for cuts in Medicare and Social Security and for all I know bring back the military draft.  We'll never know what other intensely unpopular things they have in store because it vanished from Kevin McCarthy's website like a fart in a hurricane.  A work in progress, no doubt.  Henry Connelly, Speaker Pelosi's communications director, managed to save a few pieces.

"I know this sounds idiotic, but I'm from New Jersey.  I feel like an idiot, it sounds idiotic and it is."  Thus Hitler impersonator Timothy Hale-Cusanelli to the jury that convicted him of obstruction of Congress (he claims he had no idea Congress was even in session on January 6, 2021).  It looks like Hale-Cusanelli's last public performance was at the Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, as Judge Trevor McFadden gave him four years -- enough time to learn German and read Mein Kampf in the original, and may god have mercy on his soul.

Leonard Glenn Francis, a/k/a "Fat Leonard" has been recaptured in the Caracas airport.  While thousands of people fled Venezuela, he headed for it.  Sneaky, but not sneaky enough.

I'm watching people get mauled and arrested by men in riot gear and I do not know if it's Iran, Russia or someplace else.  I need my glasses.

Judge Aileen Cannon has been on the federal bench for about two hours but she's already been overturned bigly.  A three-judge panel of the 11th circuit Court of Appeals says she had no grounds for allowing Trump his special master and that the Justice Department can proceed in the Case of the Purloined Intelligence Secrets.  The ruling was unanimous even though two of the three judges are Trump appointees.  I imagine the Mar a Lago staff are unsurpassed at cleaning up ketchup stains by now.

A student at the University of Utah who was really pumped about the game against San Diego State wrote on Yik Yak, "If we don't win today I'm detonating the nuclear reactor on campus."  She was arrested and charged with making terroristic threats.  I can hear you asking, "What the hell is Yik Yak?"  I can't help with that but Utah won 35-7.  Be cool, the police have no sense of humor.