Summertime blues. No cure.

 

CNN reports that Rudolph Giuliani came as a supplicant to Mar a Lago to ask for help in paying his legal bills.  He has put his apartment up for sale, he's facing multiple lawsuits, and even his pinkie ring has not been seen lately.  From the Don he got less encouragement than Bonasera the undertaker.  Probably should have come last November on the day of Tiffany's wedding.  I have only one wish and that's to see him among the "squeegee men" his administration once abused.  He wouldn't last a day as a tin rancher (the people who retrieve deposit containers from the trash and turn them in at supermarkets).

The New York Times obtained a memo to Ron DeSantis full of advice ahead of the first debate next week in Milwaukee.  He is instructed to attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times, state his "positive vision" 2-3 times (slitting throats, isn't it?), "hammer" Vivek Ramaswamy and defend Trump when Chris Christie attacks him.  Also, he needs to come up with a nickname for the biotech guy, like "Vivek the Fake."  MAGAts love nicknames.  It's as I suspected -- these "debates" are scripted like professional wrestling.  DeSantis is trailing Christie in New Hampshire and Ramaswamy is gaining on him everywhere.  He needs a cape and some smoke effects, not advice like "invoke a personal anecdote story."  Get emotional?  What, cry more?

This was viewed some 274,000 times on TwitterX but fewer than a hundred people entered.  A free trip to Milwaukee!  Go see a Brewers game!  Unlike DeSantis, they're in first place!  Oh please! 

When Trump is booked at the Fulton County Jail (the Rikers Island of the South) next week, he can expect no special treatment, no court officers weeping and calling him "sir."  This is the place where Lashawn Thompson died last fall in a cell filled with bedbugs, so Trump will feel at home.  The authorities have promised to photograph and fingerprint him and reveal his actual height and weight, so at least we can look forward to a reduction in the "fat pig" Christie jokes.   

On second thought, he should continue to fat-shame Christie.  It's not as if there are a lot of overweight Americans who vote.

We know Trump doesn't pay his lawyers -- he probably still owes money to Michael Cohen -- so he's sure as hell not paying for printer cartridges.  His legal team now demands more time to prepare for the DC insurrection trial (that's Judge Chutkan if you're keeping track) because they have received "roughly 11.5 million pages of evidence" in discovery and they haven't finished downloading it, much less reading it.  By way of illustration they state that it equals reading "the entirety of Tolstoy's War and Peace cover to cover, 78 times a day every day from now until jury selection."  (Yes, but how many Prousts is that?)  It may be the first use of the "there's too much evidence against our client" argument in a criminal proceeding.  Judge Chutkan will rule August 28 on Trump's demand that the trial start in 2026.  Of course, if Jack Smith had withheld even one page, they'd be demanding a Congressional investigation.

Perhaps Hunter Biden's legal team would like his trial, if any, to begin in 2028.  

With so many other racist, authoritarian, unpleasant candidates to choose from, it's hard to see why the Republican Party clings to Trump.  His latest expression of contempt is to counter-program their first debate next Wednesday by giving an interview to Tucker Carlson.  Carlson can tell Trump to his face, "I hate you passionately," but won't because he's a sniveling, two-faced coward who needs to get back on television as much as Trump needs ratings he can fling at Fox.  A party with no ideas except "Stop Woke!" and no plan for governance but "Impeach!" has to take what it can get.