Category: Current Events

Iowa Checks In

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If Donald Trump regains the White House this will still be a different country than the one I was born into.  That country ceased to exist after 2001.  That was when the people who ran this country decided that they had the cover to take over everything in our lives and leave us nothing but the bills.  And in 2009 when Obama entered the White House he stood over the corpse of our country and buried it once and for all.

So, whatever happens going forward we live in a different place.  But some of the people who made up the Old America are still kicking around.  You can tell when Donald Trump scores an enormous win in Iowa.  It took 37 minutes to declare Trump the winner.  With about 37% of the vote in he’s got 52% of the votes to something like 20% apiece for DeSantis and Haley.  People know who’s on their side.

So, you can see the demographic outline of the Old America by the places where Trump is doing well; places like Iowa and the Midwest and the South.  And so, we’ll recognize that the Old America is a layer submerged in the new.  It’s like a layer of pebbles that is all made of one mineral but then another mineral dissolved in water leaches into the stratum and forms a matrix around the pebbles and encases them in a sediment.  We’re still here but in new surroundings, a new reality.

The only question to ask then is what can be made of this new place.  Will the elites who drove this replacement manage to destroy us?  I suppose that’s what we’ll find out.  They’ve done a pretty thorough job of lousing up most of the things that still worked in this country.  They croaked about half of the small businesses around the cities during the pandemic they orchestrated.  They’ve ignited inflation and made life awful for the working class.  They’ve consigned the children of the middle-class to the under-class.  And they’ve sent most of the manufacturing jobs to Asia.  I won’t even bother with the forever wars because even the Millennials and Zoomers are hopping mad about those because they might be the ones to have to fight them.  So, all of this is waiting in the wings to see who gets the White House in November.

And to keep us amused until then we get to watch the spectacle of the Republican donors and the RNC spending tens of millions of dollars to try to convince voters that Nikki Haley is one of them.  Not since Hillary Clinton started speaking in tongues and tried to convince black voters that she was just a poor old cotton-picker from Arkansas have we witnessed phonier “aw-shucks, we’re just folks” play acting. Well, I know Nikki said that Hillary was her inspiration and template.  I think she’s reached her goal.  All she lacks is the cackle.

So, let’s see how these primaries go.  New Hampshire is probably going to be Haley’s high-water mark.  All the Dems will voter for her since there isn’t going to be a Democrat primary to speak of.  It’ll be fun to listen to the various talking heads try to parse this thing and give Nikki all the hopeful coverage they can until Trump reaches the finish line on Super Tuesday, March 5th.  That’s seven weeks.  Forty-nine days of listening to halfwits explaining how Nikki Haley would bury Joe Biden but Donald Trump doesn’t stand a chance.  I’m sure MSNBC, CNN and PBS will have graphs and power point presentations and even holograms to prove all this.

I hope there is plenty of entertainment value to all this.  I could use a laugh.  In fact, Old America could use a laugh.  We haven’t had one in years.

G-Block Superactinide Bling

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Since Valentine’s Day is coming up I told Camera Girl to be on the lookout for any man jewelry she could get for me made of unbihexium

Unbihexium is a hypothetical stable super heavy element with an atomic number of 126.  Now granted it’s never been detected anywhere either naturally or at CERN but a good wife should always use her shopping acumen to assist all of her husband’s purchasing goals.  So I’ve told her to be on the lookout for a star sapphire mounted in a pinky ring of unbihexium.  And I told her it wouldn’t hurt if there was a spiral galaxy at the center of the star.  Hey we all can dream right?

Unbihexium is supposed to exist at the magic number for stable super heavy elements.  Apparently some astrophysicists are theorizing that the existence of very heavy elements in second generation stars points to the existence of super heavy elements being produced in some kind of ultra-ultra super duper supernova events that would be needed to produce these elements.

I know, I know I should be talking about Iowa or Joe Biden but as you know I’m trying to put off suicide for the foreseeable future.  So, unbihexium!

 

 

Strapping In for a Long Political Season

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I was watching some footage of the pro-Palestinian rioters scaling the outer fence at the White House and thinking, “Is there a chance they might get Joe?”  But, no.  It was all Kabuki theater, of course.  Some people are screaming,” Hey, how come they didn’t arrest them like they did the January 6th protesters?”  But you don’t arrest your friends when they’re playacting.  You know, making believe that they expect the White House to throw the Israelis under the bus.  Ask the former president of Harvard how that worked out for her.  No this is a fig leaf to try and minimize the electoral penalty they expect to pay in Michigan from the Arab voters there.  Well, someone did the math and decided this was the better play.

So, tomorrow is the Iowa Caucus.  Trump will win it by twenty or more percent.  If Haley comes in second then maybe DeSantis may drop out.  I’m not sure if Ramaswamy stays in.  Maybe he wants to do New Hampshire too.  I really don’t know how all this works for him.  I think with all the Democrat and Independent crossover, Haley has a shot at winning in New Hampshire.  But New Hampshire is now just North Massachusetts.  Of course, they don’t want Trump.  Every time the idiot governor Sununu shows up on MSNBC, he yammers on about how independent their voters are.  What a load of crap.  Anywhere else in the country a New England “Republican” is a radical progressive.

But if Haley manages to squeak out a victory in New Hampshire the press will trumpet how this means she’s got a shot at the nomination.  Now that’s a crock.  I don’t even think she has a chance of winning in her home state of South Carolina.  But we’ll be hearing that drivel all the way up to February 24th when the primary occurs.  Then mercifully, the wind will collapse out of their sails and the next sideshow will be the court trials to try and put Trump in jail.  And on and on until the conventions and then the election.

Well, I really don’t have the interest to follow all of the minutia.  I’ll just look at the headlines and look for some talking head to say something really stupid that I can mock.  And there’s no end to those.  I can’t make up my mind which are more pathetic the idiots on CNN and MSNBC or the fakes at Fox News.  They’re both contemptible but somehow the fake conservatives are more contemptible.  The pundits on the Left are so obviously cretinous numbskulls that you almost feel sorry for them; being paraded in front of cameras and allowed to prove themselves morons.  Someone like Joy Reid isn’t playing with a full deck.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/01/13/joy_reid_black_folks_see_those_palestinians_and_they_see_themselves.html

She’s annoying for sure but no one is thinking, “Hey, that Joy Reid really has a point there.”  Well, no one with an IQ over 65.  So, it’s not very important to try and discredit her jabbering.

But the Fox News people are of at least functional human intelligence and yet they lie and deceive their viewers by carrying water for the likes of Joe Biden.  More and more the likes of Bret Baier strike me as the worst problem in news.  He’s the voice of the Republican establishment and the worst offender when it comes to trying to sell people on Nikki Haley as some kind of conservative.  So, Brett and his clones will probably provide the best fodder for my mockery.  I’m sure if I search round in his history, I’ll find his elevator speech for why Republicans should embrace pediatric transgender affirmation surgery.  But somehow he hasn’t volunteered to try it out himself.

As I said at New Year’s Day, I intend to try to avoid beating the same dead horses I’ve been pummeling for the last few years.  It’s not very amusing anymore but when there is something amusing or enlightening that I can think of I’ll pass it along.  Well, let’s see what shows up in Iowa.

Trixie, We Hardly Knew Ye

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Joyce Randolph, best known as Trixie Norton, the wife of Ralph Kramden’s best friend Ed Norton of the tv show “The Honeymooners” is dead at 99.

Trixie was typically straight man to either Alice Kramden or her husband Ed wasn’t a commanding acting presence on the show but she was a familiar part of many of the set-up husband/wife battle scenes.  Farewell oh, last link to the Honeymooners, a venerable part of  tv history.

Fabulous 2024

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JB – Welcome back to the PBS News Hour.  I’m your host Jiff Benetton and I’m here with New York Times columnist David Brooks-Brothers and Washington Post editor Jonathan Capon and we’re here to talk about the Biden reelection campaign strategy.  Tell me David, what do you think should be the Biden campaign’s highest priority right now.

DBB – Well Jiff, If I’m being honest, I think they should try to limit the number of new shooting wars to one per week.  Not that shooting wars are wrong or anything but it’s kind of a tradition to try and explain why we’re blowing up foreigners in some sort of detail.  I mean, it’s hard enough to explain who the Houthis are and why they’re not called Yemenis and where Yemen is on the map.  A recent survey revealed that 73% of Americans polled, identified the Houthis as inhabitants of the ice planet Hoth in Star Wars Episode 5; whereas in reality the desert home of the Houthis is more akin to Tatooine the home of the Tusken Raiders in Episode 4, or as I like to call it “the real Star Wars.”.

But all of this is happening while we’re still trying to explain why the Ukraine wants the Israelis’ money and it’s leading to confusion.  People are starting to get frustrated with all the flag icons they have to list on their profile on X.  Someone attempted to post the Yemeni flag with a slash through it and accidentally identified himself with the Cricket Liberation Front and a tragedy ensued.  As a simplifying strategy, during the next White House press conference I’d have Haitian Bette Boop say that all of these places are just different parts of Ukraine.  That would be best.

JB – Jonathan, what’s your take on the reelection situation?

JC – Jiff, I have just one word for Joe; FABULOUS!!!!  What the Biden campaign needs is fierce queer energy.  Joe needs a makeover.  A beehive blue wig, three-inch scarlet fingernails, stiletto heels and a B&D leather two piece should be enough to get this campaign moving.  They should bring in RuPaul as an image consultant and maybe give the First Lady a year-long furlough to an old age home to give the president room to explore his wild side.  I feel confident with Jolene Biden on the prowl the 2024 election will be jumping.  The campaign will become one big dance party!

JB – Dave, care to comment?

DBB – Uhhhhh, yeah.  I’m a little uncertain about Joe Biden as a drag queen candidate.  I’m not a hundred percent sure that the American public is ready for that much excitement.  In fact I’m pretty sure they want less Biden on their news feed.

JB – What are you saying David?

DBB – A recent poll found that 78% of Democratic voters wanted President Biden to make up fewer lies when he spoke to the press.  52% of Democratic voters said they were more likely to vote for Biden if he just hid out and didn’t show his face to the public until after the election.  I think that Drag Queen Biden would be unlikely to enhance his poll numbers.

JC – You know David, I always thought you were an ally but you sound just like a minion of the patriarchy spewing hate and trying to harsh the buzz that we LGBTQ people feel.  You white, straight, cis-gender males are the enemy of all that is queer and beautiful.  You should be ashamed for disparaging fabulous Jolene Biden and the White House Drag Extravaganza.

DBB – Yes, Jonathan.  …  I’m very ashamed.  In fact, I’ve gotta get out of here right now. (walks off the set).

JB – Well folks, you’ve witnessed history right here.  The patriarchy is reeling out of control and crashing to the ground.  If only there were a disco ball in this studio, we could celebrate the way we should.

JC – You go girlfriend!

JB – Right back at ya.  And that’s all we have.  From everybody at PBS, well everybody except that homophobe David, have a great tomorrow and a better yesterday.

Can I Review a Movie Trailer?

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It was bound to happen eventually.  Hollywood needs to give us cautionary tales.  I watched the trailer for an upcoming movie called “Civil War.”  The scenario is a “fascist” president in his third term (probably named Donald Tromp, Ronald Trump or something else equally subtle) is fighting a war to recapture nineteen states that have seceded including the Western Alliance (or something like that) consisting of California and Texas.  As an aside, the guy playing the president sounds exactly like Mike Pence.

The heroes of the movie are three intrepid “reporters” who travel across the country and witness the horror of Middle America in all its racist something or other.  In the trailer we see white men with guns interrogating some seemingly Hispanic people and when told that they are Americans the guys with guns say, “But what kind of Americans?”  And then it looks they’re going to shoot them.  And there is lots of footage of jets and tanks attacking New York City and monuments in DC blowing up and I think it looks like the invaders breach the White House.

The Democrats are attempting to take Trump off the ballot.  What a perfect time to have a movie showing what will happen if a fascist president is allowed to run for president.

My favorite part of the trailer is near the end where the intrepid female reporter says, “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a message home saying, “Don’t do this.”  And yet, here we are.”  So even during a movie where the country is engulfed in war and the outcome should be the story we have “Karen” lecturing us about how we didn’t listen to the girl boss who knew best.

So really my only question about all this is how the hell did California and Texas form an alliance.  Are they commies or good guys?  Is it run by Gavin Newsome or Ron Paul?

Honestly, I’ll bet this movie will be incredibly annoying.  All the people we are supposed to applaud will be urban dwelling, latte sipping progressives and all the people we’re meant to boo will be white red state Americans.  I assume, at the end, once Donald Trump is dragged from the White House and burned at the stake, all of the seceding states will come to their senses and unanimously re-elect Barack Obama or some other BIPoC woman as president and we’ll finally reach nirvana.

Wouldn’t it be something if we could have a civil war movie where the bad guys were the people who were trying to destroy America for real?  The Summer of George rioting wasn’t exactly a civil war but it came really close.  It was akin to the Visigoths burning and pillaging the Roman Empire.

I’d pay some money to see a civil war movie where Joe Biden declares war on Texas and then gets his head handed to him.  I mean that makes some kind of sense.  I could see Texas just plain getting fed up with an immigrant invasion and putting a stop to it even in the face of federal intervention.  I’d love to see a movie where Washington calls out troops to force Texans to allow illegal aliens in and the troops revolt and join the Texans.  Now that I’d pay to see.

I guess I should wait until April and see what the actual plot turns out to be but I’d bet small change that I’ve just more or less spelled it out.  It’s a warning against Trump as dictator for life.  Please spare me this drama.

The Scatter-Shot States of America

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The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock four hundred and three years ago we are told.  And those Puritans risked all to escape from the England of religious persecution.  Now it may be that the persecution was based on the annoyingness of the Puritans.  We won’t debate that.  Suffice it to say they wanted a place of their own where they were free; free to persecute unto death, whomever they chose, in peace.

And they succeeded fabulously.  From humble beginnings they spread across the continent and now in every jurisdiction where they were overrepresented; New England, the Middle Atlantic States, the Great Lakes Region and the Pacific Coast they torture anyone who disagrees with their whims.  And they have even set up a coalition that allows them to torture the other areas of the United States by means of federal legislation and executive branch administrative rulings.  They are indeed very organized and very effective at making other people miserable.  It is their whole reason for existence.

And yet, even now as rioting and thuggery turn the streets of once great metropolises into anarchic hellscapes, the greater part of the geographic area of the United States is still a wonderland of modern life.  For the most part we have the advantages of the electric age where appliances and machines provide us with multiples of a horsepower at our fingertips to do everything from transport us to a job located a week’s walk from our home to cutting up a fallen tree in a tiny fraction of the time it would take us with a hand saw.  We heat our homes and cool them using chemical energy derived from carbon-based fuels and we eat food that is kept sanitary by refrigeration.

Now undoubtedly things have begun to degrade.  The electric grid crashes enormously more often than it did even twenty years ago.  The powers that be want a lot of this cheap and convenient power to go away.  But even now with infrastructure degrading around us, our lives are immeasurably easier than our ancestors living a hundred and fifty years ago.  As galling as are all of the lies we are told about why our standard of living has to be lowered, it’s probably true that even after they take away fossil fuels from most of us, the United States will still be more pleasant a home than the majority of the rest of the planet.

One can only imagine what it would be like, living in the Congo or Egypt or Pakistan.  Even Mexico or Brazil would be many times less safe or comfortable.  So maybe leaving here would not make sense.  Maybe we cannot be modern day pilgrims leaving the place of bondage for a land of opportunity.  Unless we can find that promised land right here in the United States.

As much as the busybody Puritans use every power at their disposal to rule over us, maybe we can undermine their control locally and even regionally.  And with the modern abilities to network and organize people across great distances maybe we can produce coalitions of our own and pool resource and regain a large part of the control over our lives that the Puritans have taken away.

For instance, Joe Biden attempted to instate regulations to force cleaning equipment (dishwashers and clothes washers) to work with extremely low amounts of water.  This is supposedly environmentally friendly but what it does is ensure that these devices will work poorly.  And I assume that companies that do not adhere to these standards will be fined or their leadership will be liable to arrest by the environmental police of one stripe or another.  The solution to this is to have the red states provide safe havens for manufacturers who produce non-conforming equipment.  And thus, this equipment could be manufactured and sold within these states.  And similarly for other companies and products that the federal government is attacking.  A major case will be gasoline powered cars.  California has legislated a ban on new gas-cars after 2030, I think.  If Joe Biden is re-elected something similar will be attempted nationally.  That would be a perfect time for a coalition of red states to champion fossil fuel devices of all kinds and draw a distinction between free states and slave states.  Le the free states enjoy all the benefits of cheap power while the slave states try to cut their lawns with battery powered mowers and travel around in their battery powered clown cars.  That is until they stall out.

So maybe we can all become pilgrims within our Scatter-Shot States of America and attempt to wring a free and prosperous life despite the worst efforts of the Puritans to make us as miserable as themselves.  It may be our last best hope at happiness.

G and G

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So, I read today that we lost that fat tub of lard, Chris Christie.  He finally dropped out.  And probably the only reason he dropped out was to give Nikki Haley a better shot at making it close in New Hampshire.  Well, if there’s a candidate I dislike more than Chris Christie it’s Nikki Haley.  In fact, I despise Haley more than Christie by whole orders of magnitude.  Christie is just an annoying gadfly.  He’s on an anti-Trump crusade because it’s the only way he could think of to even reach the debate stage.

But Haley is an honest to goodness GOPE RINO.  She believes in endless neocon war, unlimited illegal immigration, woke evil like transgender pediatric surgery and anything else that progressive Republicans tell her she should believe in.  Listening to her explain why we need to be involved in multiple wars makes my skin crawl.

Currently the plan is for Haley to either win or come close in New Hampshire by means of unaffiliated voters switching their party affiliation to Republican and voting for her.  Then when the South Carolina primary rolls around the hope is that she will have generated enough excitement from New Hampshire to win.  And you never know.  Stranger things have happened.

So, if she manages to win one or both of those states, she hopes to stay in the race all the way to the convention.  Well, I tend to doubt she can make much of a showing.  But what she’s really hoping is to be the last man standing if Trump gets disqualified by the Republican National Committee and then be appointed the nominee.  Basically, she is JEB II.  No, I take that back, she is Mitt Romney 2.0.  One thing I am sure of.  If Haley is on the ballot, she won’t be getting my vote.  I’ll either stay home or vote for Biden as a protest vote.  I despise her even more than Biden and you know how I feel about him.

So here we have the Republican Party doing everything they can to eliminate the candidate that has been polling over 60% for months.  It’s demonstrably clear that they have no interest in adopting any of the clear policy preferences of the great majority of the Republican voters.  All they want is to force the generic GOPE candidate on their voters and if they can’t do that they’d prefer to lose.

I understand that in the short term the Republican Party is the vehicle we are forced to vote for to provide the lesser of two evils.  But a time has to come soon when a successor party must begin to form around populist candidates who won’t owe allegiance to the donors and lobbyists.

It would be an enormous thrill to have a party where everything it stood for was anathema to the Bushes, the Obamas and the Clintons.  Where Nikki Haley, Mike Pence or Chris Christie would be booed off the stage if they dared show their faces.  If I could name it maybe I’d call it the Normal People’s Party.  Or maybe we could call it the God and Guns Party.  Since these are all the things that Barack Obama hated about America.

But in the meantime, just look and listen to Nikki Haley and know exactly what the Republican Party is all about.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 10JAN2024 – The Incredible Empty Suit

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Biden is not the one running this country and the SecDef’s recent Houdini act should convince more of the public of this reality.

The implications of the Secretary of Defense ‘disappearing’ for nearly a week without (allegedly) the president knowing reveals a larger truth that the American public need to understand.

It should be pointed out that the current geopolitical situation in the world regarding global conflicts would require daily briefings between the president and his cabinet. Situational awareness and evolving conditions would prompt multiple meetings daily to stay current on these issues.

Between China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, the Houthis, North Korea-hell, even the border crisis with its contingent of military assets being deployed would tell anyone with common sense that of all people the Secretary of Defense for our nation would be joined at the hip with the American president.

With them admitting that Biden didn’t know for nearly a week where his SecDef was, or his medical status is a damning indictment on the reality that he is an empty figurehead for the country, and not the Commander in Chief.

The bigger question is, who is running our government?

Geriatric Twerking Madonna Adds Support Bar. AARP Applauds

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Words fail me.  I almost asphyxiated from laughing so hard at this clip.

This image is so grotesque that it’s beyond hilarious.  The fact that Madonna doesn’t recognize how pathetic and absurd she looks performing this aluminum foil wrapped granny-twerk should give the shivers to her younger avatars; Taylor Swift and Beyonce.  In this clip they can see their future.  Twerking to the Oldies.