Wednesday Stuff

Farron Cousins lets us know here that Dementia J. Trump recently screeched that criticizing him is a national security threat...I don’t have a clue as to what triggered that last, lonely, flickering synapse in Cantaloupe Capone’s pudding brain that would make him attack the New York Times, but as Cousins says, it doesn’t take much for those red hat life forms to resort to violence in response, in particular against the media (and I’d forgotten about Obama standing up to Billo The Clown, who was every bit as rude and obnoxious in that interview as you would expect; this interminable year has made me forget what it’s like to have a functioning adult in the White House)...



...and Erielle Reshef of MS NOW speaks with Cameron Hume, former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, about the fact that Our Demented Orange Meat Sack recently ordered 30 U.S. diplomats home for some reason... Hume notes that the huge number of diplomats affected is unusual, as well as the fact that there was no turnover on 1/20, when there should have been turnover (I mean, yeah, the ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the prez, if you will, but given that we’re talking about #47, how much do you want to bet that these people were canned just because Our Tangerine Toddler heard they were part of the Biden admin and that was it?)...



...and in case anybody thought that this madness was somehow not noticed...well, you don’t have to worry about that, because it definitely IS getting noticed...Mike Figueredo of The Humanist Report informs us that PO’ed Americans are demanding revenge on #47 for his crimes...yeah, I think a lot of these memes are performative, but I agree with Figueredo that they indicate that something (whatever it is) is indeed going on...I honestly didn’t know that the anger had spread to grandmoms giving it back to performative wingnut(ette) Kaitlin Bennett, but there you are...and I WISH TO GOD that Democrats, as a party, truly understood the rage out there and the need to address it, but I’m not hopeful of that...”you can’t have a country where elites can violate the law with impunity” indeed (NSFW/H)...



...and we recently lost a true progressive champion, and that would be Howie Klein, who made his mark in the music biz and then turned to politics, creating a legacy of tireless work on behalf of candidates who truly sought to do the people’s business...way back in the “golden days of blogging,” I would leave comments at Klein’s great site Down With Tyranny and he responded in kind here, which definitely was appreciated...this post at Crooks and Liars in response to the Trump/Biden debate last year was typically spot-on (“Thinking Alfred is too old to care for the batcave is no reason to hire the Joker to replace him” indeed)...RIP...



...and just as I did on Monday, I’d like to pay tribute to three more figures in music who left us during the prior year; first is John Lodge of The Moody Blues...



...next is Mark Volman of The Turtles...



...and last is Mick Ralphs of Mott The Hoople and Bad Company...



...and as is my custom, I want to take a minute or two and thank everyone who has spent any time at this site over the prior year. I said this time a year ago that this year was going to be bad with our clueless ruling regime of grifters, lowlifes and bottom-feeders (probably didn’t take much brain power to come up with that given the evidence), but one thing I didn’t note (because I couldn’t have known) is the extent of the push-back to the ruinous excesses of Don The Con and his playmates. We definitely can take solace from our courts telling Cheetoh Hitler that they’re not going to go along with our descent into something approximating a corporate dictatorship, and that also goes for the “No Kings” rallies, everyday people fighting back against the ICE goons, voices of protest emerging forcefully and effectively against Trumpism in general, et cetera.

I’d like to step back and go “meta” a bit here. I’m in the middle of my 21st year of doing this mess, believe it or not, and as I’ve said before, this is definitely a day-to-day, seat-of-the-pants operation. In case it isn’t apparent already, I’d like to give you a bit of insight into how the “sausage gets made,” you might say. When I started this, seemingly forever ago, I would often get pretty verbose and include as many links as possible within posts (I don’t know if the abbreviation TL,DR sprung up as a result of my stuff or not, but I’m sure I contributed to it). For reasons that are too involved and boring to explain, this morphed from acting as a PR forum for Democrats in general, to something confronting wingnut BS primarily, to something else where I tried to include discussions of how politics in general and particular legislation affected people’s lives, reinforced by videos from creators I respect, along with news reports that I thought should be promoted somehow. And oh yeah, that also includes paying attention to right-wing idiocy to a certain degree. I definitely try to balance all of this in a way that I think is interesting and worthy of people’s time. I mean, if you’re looking for the very latest on the apparent infighting between Ben Shapiro/Tim Pool/The Swanson TV Dinner Heir, you probably need to go somewhere else (I mean, I MIGHT touch on that, but probably not). Likewise, I try to balance the madness from Our Treasonous Orange Pustule and his minions and not obsess over every single revolting development. Basically, if I have a choice between including a video of #47 going nuts on Truth Septic with 150 posts versus another fine clip from More Perfect Union about how the insane tariffs from our *preznit are destroying a rural farming community, I’m definitely going to include the latter (as far as I’m concerned, if the majority of our corporate media did reports with the quality of the More Perfect Union segments, there might not be a need for this blog to even exist at all).

Additionally, I’d like to say something about a particularly important story and why you likely aren’t going to find much about that here, and that has to do with the utterly awful case of Jeffrey Epstein. Like many of you I’m sure, I’m thoroughly appalled by the destruction this has wrought on the lives of so many women (including, tragically, Virginia Giuffre, who took her own life...her case is still under investigation, it should be noted). The reason I haven’t said much about this is because a lot of the coverage (as far as I’m concerned) is this ridiculous corporate media “fan dance” concerning whether or not Mango Mussolini will ever release unredacted files indicating that he’s truly guilty as sin (which will NEVER happen, people), and I absolutely DO NOT want to feed into that. Yes, I know that the Tangerine Toddler said that he would release the files when he was running last year...but he said A LOT OF THINGS when he was running last year that haven’t come to pass, and likely never will. If anyone out there truly thought that you-know-who would come clean on this in particular, then I think you’re as dumb as a bag of rocks. There are a lot of stories out there where #47 is deliberately “flooding the zone” with BS in the media to force out coverage he doesn’t like, and this is just another example. Another is our runup to a military conflict somewhere, likely in Venezuela, which is a whole other horror show. As far as I’m concerned, he’ll ramp this up more and more as the economic news gets worse (the AI bubble shows signs of bursting, high net worth people stop spending, another pandemic looms, etc.), and please believe me when I tell you that I want to be wrong.

Our salvation in all of this lies in depending on each other, folks. As I alluded to earlier, we have the courts, particularly heroic individuals in the media, and our ongoing protests and acts of resistance. And oh yeah, the midterm elections are coming, so we can get back at the “party of Lincoln” with our ballots also (and I honestly don’t know if the Dems, as a national party, understand the scope of what’s at stake, but they damn well better – if we need to get after them also, we should do so with all speed).

So in consideration of all of this, I’d like to present once more my Patti Smith clip that I almost always include at year end; let it serve as an inspiration for continued resistance in our ongoing struggle (and best wishes to one and all for a much better 2026).