“We need to get to work for the American people. We need to get a Speaker as soon as possible. So instead of doing that I’m going to force vote after vote on my doomed wank-fest of a candidacy until whatever remains of the Marginally Sane Wing of the Republican Party hires undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns to yank my head off and place it in a glass jar to be displayed at the House Rostrum as a warning to other self-serving sociopathic bomb-throwing nihilists who couldn’t pass a bill if it were taped to a football but nonetheless might seek the gavel.”
I’m starting to think Thor couldn’t pick up this hammer.
Mad Blog Media 
Back in January, McCarthy traded his soul for votes so he could become Speaker. Gym Jordan has no soul, so he has nothing with which to trade.
Devil’s all like: “Sorry, chum, no trade-in value there. I could maybe tow it away, for a small consideration. …”
Now that’s a proper rant! Classic!
Chesebro bro just flipped. C’mon rudy, you can do one backflip.
Rudy the Mook is on the grill for sure. Will he come off rare, well done, or extra crispy?
I can’t see him finking. The whole steely-eyed DA, America’s Mayor bushwa is too much a part of his tanktown carny act. I could see him taking another way out, though. You will recall Frankie Five Angels from “The Godfather Part II.”
Of course, as drunk as he seems to be all the damn time, I suppose it would be possible for The Mook to “stumble in front of a speeding delivery truck.”
“What could I tell you?” says the driver, Ezmo the Driver. “The sun was in my eyes.”
Hey, it works for just about everyone who runs over a cyclist.
Nah, rudy ain’t got the grit to take an extra warm bath. Now, the delivery truck trick would work. I hope donny daintydick doesn’t think of it; I would rather see them both in jail. Rudy in Rikers would make a good movie. I’d pay a dollar to see that.
I wonder if Giuliani will try a Vinny the Chin act. Heck, Rudy the RedNose Drunkard is increasingly incoherent anyway.
Hey, by the way, have you tried that new trail on the west side yet?
https://www.abqjournal.com/clickable/albuquerque-petroglyph-biking-trail/article_49a166f0-7021-11ee-b533-5b1d578d92ca.html#tncms-source=home-featured-7-block
Naw, that’s a long way to pedal to ride four miles of pavement. Thirty-mile round trip from El Rancho Pendejo and a shit-ton of vertical. I got all the pavement I need right here.
Are you recovering from your bout with The Bug?
And boom! Just like that, Gym-bo is out on his ear. Next!
Gee, trumpers can’t govern.
Goes without saying that the House is adjourned until Monday, when Pee-wee McHenry (R-Playhouse) will evict a few more Democrats from their offices.
So, it looks like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight is back at the Okie Dokie Corral looking for another horse to flog.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/jim-jordan-fails-third-vote-house-speaker-losing-gop-support-rcna121394
And Matt Gaetz* is trying to get everyone’s attention again, weeping crocodile tears for the Coach. “Lookit me, lookit me,” etc.
We really shouldn’t laugh. This isn’t at all funny. Except that it is. Any middle-school drama class could put on a better show than this. With a smaller budget and fewer tantrums, too.
*Could the young Jack Nicholson play Gaetz better than Gaetz does? You bet your ass.
Well, charlie mccarthy said it during a interview with the press, “nobody like mat gaetz.” For once, he is right.
All anyone needs to know about the Gaetz/Jordan friendship is, the guy who pays for sex with 18 year olds thinks the guy who covers up sexual assault is okie dokie.
For reals. That Gaetz dude in particular is straight out of Pervert Central Casting. I wouldn’t leave him alone with a Chihuahua, much less a child.
What? There’s clear cut information out there that Matt Gaetz is one of the illegitimate children left behind by Jim Jordan?
My 8th grader is reading Animal Farm this month. Being a Cold War baby, back at our Day, we read it with a 100% focus on just how fucked up Russia was. But looking back at it, through the lens of what we have just gone through, That shit could happen anywhere, anytime, communist, socialist, capitalist, democratic monarchy, representative democracy, etc…
We have 65,000 thousand years of humanoid history that tells us there’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator,
And that any amount of power concentrated in one person’s hands is bad bad news. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wish there was an Odin-like puppet-master who could step in, raise both arms, and proclaim, I gave you a chance to sort this out amongst yourselves, but given your current level of apathy, ignorance, and incompetence, I declare the House to be a failed experiment. Here’s your banana box, pick up your things and don’t let the door on the way out.
Speaking of a related Orwell novel.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/21/1207763489/julia-is-a-retelling-of-george-orwells-1985-through-a-different-perspective
Although I’m not in the 8th grade, I believe adding Animal Farm to my list of books to read is in order. Nope, I never read it. But my carefree youth was full of a lot of Classics not read. I suspect that is the reason that in my later years, allowing myself more time to read, I am just now learning to think.
I could not have cared less about what my English teachers called “the classics” in eighth grade. I was into comic books, James Bond, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and tons of science fiction. Also, history, especially of military aviation (WWI and WWII). I think I read “Mein Kampf” and “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” then, too.
Basically, I would read just about anything, unless a teacher told me to read it. As a consequence I was late to the literature party.
Still can’t read “Ulysses” or anything by Faulkner, though.
You read Shirer? My 4th grade teacher confiscated it after I snagged it from the public library bookmobile that visited our school, and she told my mom I was demented reading that shit. So my mom took me to the public library and I signed it out there.
Meanwhile, the school monitored what I signed out of the school library. I think that is when I became an ACLU member.
You read”The Rise and Fall…” in the 8th grade? Kudos, it would have taken me the entire school year to get through.
The family legend is that my parents taught me how to read at an insanely early age, using the phonetic system. And thus at age 3, when I was reading Time magazine aloud to them, I pronounced “Egypt” as “Iggy-pit.”
I have been hiding from people, in books, ever since.
Yep. I was fascinated by World War II, probably since the old man had done his bit in it, as had my friends’ dads. We were stationed at Randolph AFB at the time, attending school on base, and I don’t ever recall any authority figure telling me I couldn’t read whatever I wanted to.
I was and remain a fiend for reading. My parents gave me that and the schools never took it away.
When I was with the local United Way, we used the early childhood education expression that “Up until third grade, kids are learning to read. After that, they’re reading to learn”.
Getting started on the right track is hugely important. It’s much harder to get on it if you don’t get a good start.
JD, did you know Colleen Sandrin-Drake when you were at the United Way? Would’ve been a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, which is to say the late Seventies. She and I ran around together at the University of Northern Colorado.
Quite a few members of our little gang made names for themselves. I myself was given a few, but they can’t be printed in a family blog like this one.
“Animal Farm” is a keeper. I think I first read it in high school, but I was pretty heavily into science fiction then. Might be I didn’t get to it until later.
And yeah, that shit could happen anywhere, even here. As long as it didn’t interrupt televised “sports,” “reality” TV, or Amazon Prime Day.
Mendo, hey? Well done indeed. I never could find work in California — not until I took a job at The New Mexican in Santa Fe, after which the Ventura Star-Free Press called to say they would be delighted to have me on their copy desk.
“Sorry, lads, gotta dance with the one what brung me in off the unemployment, which was fixin’ to run out. Maybe next time?”
Turned out there was never a next time. That was my last newspaper gig, all praise to Cthulhu, may Its tentacles grow ever longer. Next up: Thirty years of cycling urinalism.
You may know another old Gazette bro of mine. Mike Geniella was the Ukiah bureau chief for The Press Democrat after he left the G in the 1980s, and I think he still continues to crank out bits and pieces of journalism from Hopland these days. Coursey, natch, became mayor of Santa Rosa and then a county supervisor, which was exactly the path I had foreseen for him, except not.
Got your 20 in, have you? Herself and I just marked 34 years of holy macaroni, which is a testament to the charity of women if ever there was one. We’re fresh out of dogs and down to one cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who turns 18 this year. No beaches here in Albuquerque. Plenty sand, but we’re light on water.
What sorts of things are you writing? As you see, I can’t stop. It’s a sickness. The cartooning I’ve largely shelved, which surprises me, but the writing persists, like a breakfast-bar fart in a hotel elevator. I have a small, deeply disturbed audience, and that seems about right these days.
Don’t get me started on privileged old white men. I hate the fuckers and I am one.
Sounds like you found your spot. Not an easy thing to do. I’m still a transient at heart; between growing up in a military family and then bouncing around from one newspaper to another for 15 years I never really set down roots anywhere.
I’ve tended to stay longer in a given place since about 1994, though, because changing locations — when you’re two people and a couple-three critters and there’s property to sell/buy — can be such a monstrous pain in the ass.
The KGUA writing prompt was a brilliant idea. One of the reasons I’ve held onto the Mad Dog Media blog for a quarter-century is that like paying work it compels me to write — short, long, whatever. But no money changes hands, so, bonus. It’s just something I do. The readership is eclectic as hell and their comments help keep the thing alive.
Got a musician on your hands, eh? You and Tom are definitely in the right place: artists and writers and pickers, o my! My cousin Joseph Thompson is a classical guitarist up in Ashland, so music runs in our family, but it’s only about an inch deep in me. Still have my old Boosey & Hawkes flute, but it’s in poor repair, and the cat runs for a safe space when I break out a guitar.
Shannon, a.k.a. Herself, is a librarian at Sandia National Labs. Holds clearances, works in secure spaces, pulls four 10-hour days, the whole enchilada. She basically reinvented herself at an age when most people are in glide mode. She managed bookstores, toiled in outdoor-sports shops, repped an energy bar at events as an independent contractor, even worked in a bank once.
Then one day she decided to go back to school (DU) for the masters in library science. We were not living anywhere near Denver at the time, so that was … interesting. But she got the degree and her last two gigs have been strictly top shelf, so all that reinvention definitely paid off. She hasn’t had to handle returns the day after Christmas for the better part of quite some time.
In the mid-Nineties we tried country living, but it didn’t last. We were at 8,800 feet up a rocky hillside east of the Sangre de Cristos, outside Westcliffe, and it worked kinda-sorta OK until it didn’t. There was no work worth a damn for Herself, groceries were a 110-mile round trip on roads that got real evil in winter, and everything I was writing or cartooning about involved cycling — but I was basically the entire cycling community in Custer County. We’re talking your basic dry well, is what. After seven years of that we moved back to Colorado Springs so Herself could get proper work and I could poach fresh notions from group rides and shop hangouts.
I do miss the wood stove and well water, though. And the view. Straight across the Wet Mountain Valley to the Sangres.
Here in The Duck! City we’re east-siders, snugged up against the skirts of the Sandias. All the convenience of a minor-league city with singletrack just two blocks away. I know the name Leslie Elgood, but haven’t met her. If I bump into her I’ll say howdy for you.
Anyway, good to hear from you. If you ever want to holler at me without hunting a reply button on the blog, shoot an email to maddogmedia (at) gmail (dot) com. This here WordPress dawg don’t always hunt the way it oughta.
Speaking of books, any of yis ever read “Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar …” by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein?
The subhed is “Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes,” and it is a howler. It’s been the mainstay of the Reading Room for a while now, supplanting various collected editions of “Calvin and Hobbes.” It may keep you on the john longer than is good for you, so feel free to move it to another room.
Thanks for the tip. Somehow I missed them on NPR, but I won’t miss that book.
What a bunch of losers. Slow coup number two coming to a theater near you soon. Make no mistake, if he can subvert the house with a speaker of his choosing, when they reject the 2024 electoral college votes and throw the election into the house, every stinking, spineless repug will give him the oval office. It is happening right before our eyes.
Jenna Ellis just flipped. A convicted felon at age 38. Her legal career, such as it was, is over. C’mon rudy, flip for us and bring eastman with you.
That image of Gollum is ghastly each time I see it. It’s almost as bad as, gulp, rudy. “What is your name sad creature? My name is ruuudyyyy. I am seeking my precioussss. Its hair is orange and it loves meee…”