Shits happen

“Tell Bezos to add Mickey D’s kiosks to these crunchy-granola stores of his.”

Jaysis, the Foods Hole was nuts this morning.

I couldn’t tell whether the ravening hordes were preparing to:

(a) Mark the final Thanksgiving before fascism;

(b) Celebrate the impending arrival of fascism, or;

(c) Stock up on four years’ worth of grub that has gotten at least a casual look-see from Big Gummint before all the food inspectors get laid off/processed into Soylent Green@ brand “liverwurst.”

Balloons and gasbags

Trumpkin.

The Not-So-Great Pumpkin is floating into The Duck! City this fine brisk fall morning, a fat orange gasbag too late for the International Balloon Fiesta.

But just in time for Halloween. Boogity boogity boogity.

Nobody knows just why he’s visiting. ’Burque, BernCo and New Mexico in general tilt reliably blue, last I heard. Oh, we have our cultists like everybody else, flying their flags upside down, hanging banners, erecting statues and the like.

Freedom of religion, etc. Their god is not dead. He just smells like it.

Maybe the last time he drifted through he found a Mickey D’s that suited his peculiar tastes. Maybe they let him work the fries station. I have my fingers crossed that he’ll need a job soon. No, not that one. Having Max Factor one stroke away from the Resolute desk is the scariest thing I can think of this Halloween.

We’re skipping the rally, same as we did back in 2016. If we crave some bad noise we can always tune in to the dulcet tones of dime-store street racers Steve McQueening it up and down Tramway.

And if you crave some bad noise, why, you can tune in to this week’s special Halloween episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.

• Technical notes: I’m liking this setup — Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, a soupçon of Auphonic to sand off the rough edges, and a street organ and balloon burners from Freesound. The amateur racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.

You deserve a brick today

We’re all bozos on this bus. Some of us more than others.

Ronald McDonald’s criminal brother Donald doesn’t exactly inspire me to hit the drive-thru.

Not in the traditional sense, anyway.

I wonder if the folks who actually do a job of work at this location — which was closed to the public for this campaign stunt — got paid for the day.

The union that represents food service workers called this dime-store clown show “a slap in the face to the men and women who work those jobs in real life and make a poverty wage of $7.25 an hour in Pennsylvania.”

What do you suppose would’ve happened if this Mickey D’s had been closed to the public if Fatso just happened to drop by for his usual — two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish burgers, and a large chocolate milkshake? He’d have probably told his SS detail to send the grunts to Gitmo and burn the joint to the ground.

But not before he got what he came for.

Your Daily Don: Follow the leader

“Paul Krugman? How many divisions has he got?” (h/t Winston Churchill, “The Gathering Storm.”)

Almost all economists agree that taxes on imports are, in fact, passed on to consumers. Why? Because that’s what the evidence says, and it’s very hard to come up with an alternative story.

On the other hand, Trump loyalists — which these days means almost the entire Republican Party — insist as a group that foreigners, not American consumers, pay taxes on imports. Why? Because Donald Trump says so. — Paul Krugman, “Trumpism, Stalinism and the Tariff Debate.”

Your Daily Don: It’s always showtime

It isn’t golf, but you can still score a hole in one.

The New York Times has a piece headlined “The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump,'” which I decline to read or link to, because I suspect Mother Times doesn’t take credit for her own heavy lifting on that project (see “But her emails!”, etc.).

If you have a greater interest in the Who Gives a Shit? File than I do, you’ll have to do some hunting to find the thing, because the NYT yanked it off the top of the homepage and buried it on page three of a search under his name after the carny barker found himself in the shooting gallery again.

Now, I am not in favor of summary execution of those who commit golf, not even TFG. Some unbalanced types insist on playing with their little white balls in public, and for most an extended period of confinement in a psych ward or correctional facility should restore them to a semblance of mental health, or at least keep them off the lawn in what should be public parks, available to all free of charge.

Anyway, for the Clown Prince of Mar-a-Lardo it’s not even about “playing” golf, which is just something else he lies about and cheats at. It’s another day at the office, a fundraising opportunity.

As Billy Penn once said, “The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune.”

And thus the Clown Prince finds himself as a supporting character in a new reality series, “Duck & Cover,” in which a conga line of heavily armed loons has a go at a maniac masquerading as a presidential candidate on the campaign trail.

Bit of a comedown, from star to second banana. Oh, well, it’s a living. Awaiting a blast of fortune indeed.