Mutants!

 Only last week Trump discovered that his MAGAts howled their approval when he mentioned the transgendered.  Of course they did, DeSantis in particular has been grooming them for months.  Not to be eclipsed, he has added a new entry to his hate card:  mutants.

You thought I was joking?  I never joke about mutants.

Your move, Ron.  Fire up the Florida legislature and get those shape-shifters, hybrids and lizard people on a bus to Martha's Vineyard.

This puts a new complexion on the scandal at Harvard Medical School, where four people have been indicted for selling human body parts stolen from the school and from a morgue in Arkansas.  The head ghoul, Cedric Lodge, is accused of removing the parts to his home in New Hampshire and selling them online.  He also allegedly allowed Katrina Maclean to make selections for her shop, Kat's Creepy Creations in Peabody, Massachusetts, a place I will never patronize.  (There's something about tanning skin for leather.)  Lodge used to run the school's Anatomic Gifts Program but was terminated last year, so I guess it's all right to go ahead and leave them your skull.

No sooner had the world heard Trump bragging on tape about all the secret documents in his possession than the intrepid House Overlook Committee decided they'd better invent a similarly damning tape of Joe Biden getting bribed during his term as vice-president.  Like the one-eyed whistleblower (unless I'm thinking of a different put-up job), the tape is proving elusive.  Nancy Mace is certain the bribe story is real, while even Gym Jordan acknowledges, "We don't know for sure if these tapes exist."  It's not easy being a deck hand on the SS Trumptanic.

The Mean Kids Kaukus let Squeaker McCarthy open the House again and one of their first acts was an attempt to censure Adam Schiff for saying critical things about their multiply-indicted, twice-impeached leader.  It failed 225-196, with twenty Republicans joining all the Democrats to tell Anna Paulina Luna Livia Plurabelle where she could stick her resolution, and seven courageous Republicans voting "present."  If you can believe it she also proposed fining Schiff $16 million or half the cost of the Mueller investigation (remember that?).  The Squeaker threw Schiff and Eric Swalwell off the Intelligence Committee to avenge Nancy Pelosi removing Empty Greene from her committees for some violent threat or other.  This is what happens when the slow kids take over the play group.

Running a country is harder than just lopping off heads.  The sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 but now may be rebuilt to attract the tourist trade to the cash-poor nation.  As Kander and Ebb once observed, money makes the world go around.

Of course, there's self-defeating religious intolerance everywhere.  The Southern Baptist Convention, rocked by reports of clergy sexual abuse and steadily losing membership, nevertheless voted to expel two churches because their ministers are female.  One of them is the giant Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.  I guess there are going to be fewer but better Baptists, as Comrade Yakushova observed about the Moscow show trials.

 

The history of Communist regimes in the twentieth century is a story of state terror, relentless propaganda, closed borders and an environment of brutalist architecture, consumer shortages and enforced patriotism, but at least there was full employment.  The state would create some kind of job for everyone, even if it was sweeping the streets.  College graduates in China, however, are posing for pictures like the above to dramatize their anxiety about finding a job, never mind a career.  Nearly sixty percent of young Chinese now attend college but youth unemployment continues to set new records.  Meanwhile the US under the Biden administration posts steady job growth and lower inflation every month, pleasing even the stock market.  You can't help but wonder why the Chinese bother with Mao and Marx.

On Tuesday America heard of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, and yesterday he announced that he's running for the Republican presidential nomination.  Is this going to happen every time Trump gets arraigned?  Is Andre Dickens next?

We began with mutants and stolen body parts and we end with puppy love.  Rangers in Rothrock State Forest in Pennsylvania were reviewing trail cameras to see who was stealing hand sanitizer.  What they saw was Professor Themis Matsoukas of Penn State having sex with his collie.  "I do it to blow off steam," said the chemical engineering professor, who has been placed on leave.  

They are quite winsome.