Category: Feddle gummint

Fiddling while Rome burns

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Nero didn’t get it either and cashed out the hard way.

OK, let’s see if I’ve got this right:

“A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.”

In response, the courtiers attending His Most Pissant Majesty, King Donald the Short-fingered, Terror of Twitter, are focused like the proverbial laser beam on whether trans folk may serve in the Empire’s armed forces.

Got it. Makes perfect sense. See, if they’re not camping in camo’ down by The Wall*, or using the wrong latrines in Afghanistan, they’ll be available to fight fire and flood elsewhere, p’raps in more fashionable neighborhoods, in order that the gentry may be both protected and entertained.

* Wall not pictured. Or even built.

Checks and imbalances

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

Speaking as an angry white man, all these angry white men are starting to piss me off.

That eternal sense of entitlement was on full peacock display in yesterday’s Cirque du SoWhat? over whether the mendacious and elusive Bart O’Kavanaugh can stand erect long enough to make it to the Supreme Court.

The well of privilege seems bottomless from the top, and these angry white men will continue to draw from it until the bucket finally comes up filled with their obituaries.

Then, I suppose, their angry white sons will inherit the family business.

That business is bankrupt, but failure is for lesser men, and women. The angry white man picks himself up using our bootstraps and plows forward, like the dolt who, when told that he’s penniless, broke, flat busted, says, “That can’t be true. I still have checks in my checkbook.”

Actually, it’s our checkbook. And one of these days the angry white man’s mouth is going to use it to write a check his ass can’t cash.

But I don’t think we’re there yet.

The angry white man still has that big orange credit card we gave him back in 2016. And he’s gonna use that to buy shit the country doesn’t need and can’t afford until we take it away from him.

Remember your Martin Luther King: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

 

Just. One. Senator.

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
One senator could make a difference? What a Capitol idea.

That’s all it would take, given the present composition of the Senate, for that august body to do its fucking job for a change.

As James Fallows notes:

Every one of them swore an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, not simply their own careerist comfort. And not a one of them, yet, has been willing to risk comfort, career, or fund-raising to defend the constitutional check-and-balance prerogatives of their legislative branch. …

In any circumstances, the Senate’s arcane procedures mean that lone senators, determined to make a stand, can hold up business or block nominees to get their way. When the ruling party holds only 51 seats, or for the moment 50, the power of any one or two members goes up astronomically. With great power comes great responsibility—a responsibility that 50 men and women are choosing to shirk.

Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
This is not the President Pigasus for which the Yippies had hoped.

There are seven pigs for every person in Iowa.

In DeeCee, of course, the pig-to-person ratio skews even higher on the Sooey Scale, and thus the relentless oinking from that quarter has become deafening.

The truth is simply not in these swine, when it comes to immigration detention or anything else. If Kirstjen Nielsen told me the sun was rising in the east I would step outside to verify it. And all she’s doing is spreading the aromatic manure provided by her boss, Il Douche, King Donald the Short-fingered.

“(N)o law actually requires that families be separated at the border,” says The New York Times.

Even tools like Texas Ted Cruz the Gucci Shitkicker, Orrin “Down the” Hatch and Joe “The Moderate Mannequin” Manchin find the separation of children from their parents distasteful. And those guys will swallow anything.

Ironically, this administration may have provided its own solution. Il Douche wants a space force? Fine. Let’s draft him and every one of his appointees, fixers, enablers, thugs and stooges, and deploy them via Elon Muskmobile to Mars.

The Martians may detain them in cages for a spell, just to see whether “they could be murderers or thieves and so much else.” Especially since we’ll stencil that warning on the exterior of the spacecraft. “Contents: Murderers, thieves and so much else.”

But hey, they’ll just be trying to protect their interplanetary borders. Ack ack!

‘Save Money. Live Better. Do As You’re Told.’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
This mural depicting Il Douche greets children at Camp Walmart. That should keep appetites suppressed and food expenses down. Arbeit macht frei, bitches. | Department of Health and Human Services via Jacob Soboroff (MSNBC) and Kevin Drum (Mother Jones)

As a child I went to summer camp in Texas. I didn’t like it.

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like this modern version, either, especially if I didn’t hablo the Inglés and didn’t know when (or if) my parents would be coming to take me home.

Time to call the congressional delegation again. Lord, are they gonna be tired of hearing from the O’Gradys.

“Go back to Ireland already before we put you in a camp,” they’ll mutter after hanging up. Ná bíodh eagla orm.