Buttermilk Sky

 Yesterday  Mediaite  reported that a man tried unsuccessfully to bring his "emotional support" alligator to a Philadelphia Phillies game.  That was ordinary compared to events in Our Nation's Capital. Insert a Babelfish in your ear and tell me what this means:  "Did Nightly News have to grab, did Lester Holt have to go because you forced it, because it's a forcing function?  Exactly something they have to touch?"  It sounds like something painful happened to Lester Holt, but it's  Steve Bannon  trying to make sense of a public session of the House Oversight Committee, televised for all the world to see.  James Comer introduced a series of witnesses who had not witnessed anything and testified that there was nothing to witness in the matter of the Trump Party v. Joseph R. Biden.  "If you're going to impeach a president of the United States, act like it's serious," Bannon advised his audience, possibly unable to remember the matter o...

 Bob Menendez has yet to be indicted but the verdict is in:  Resign from the Senate today, say Governor Phil Murphy, Dick Durbin, Cory Booker, AOC and any number of other important people.   Let me see...George Santos, criminally indicted and free on bail, still in Congress?  Ken Paxton, survived impeachment but under multiple criminal indictments, still attorney general of Texas?  The most corrupt judge of all time Clarence "Boss Tweed" Thomas, still on the Supreme Court?  Alongside the second-most corrupt judge, Sam Alito?  So what's different about Menendez? (thinks) Oh, right.  He's a Democrat.  And Democrats, like Caesar's wife, must be above reproach.   My ass. The softball game must end, because the fascists are not playing slow-pitch.  Cornered, they rear on their hind legs and utter death threats.  No need to go full Trump but at least fight back. If Menendez resigns, Governor Murphy should name Al Franken as...

  South Carolina  is one of thirty-one states without a red-flag law, although a poll conducted after the 2022 Uvalde massacre found nearly 80 percent of voters in favor of one.  Such a law would allow law enforcement to remove, at least temporarily, guns from those who pose a threat to themselves or others -- for example, anyone who called for a "Second Amendment solution" to a political opponent or boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without consequences.   Anyone threatening to shut down the news media.  Anyone clearly deranged on the subject of, let's say,  windmills,  or recommending the consumption of bleach to fight a viral infection.   Two days after the Biden administration set up the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, Trump made a point of visiting  Palmetto State Armory  in Summerville, where Ryan Palmeter bought the AR-15 he used to murder three Black people in the Jacksonville Dollar Gen...

 Whether from jumpsuit panic or mental deterioration, Trump is no longer even attempting to sound like a political candidate in a democratic republic.    General Mark Milley  gave an interview to the Atlantic that made Trump look even worse than usual and he has been the object of the Two Minutes' Hate all weekend.  Seedy Amin took to Ministry of Truth Social to vent some  rage and spittle, of which my favorite phrase is "if the Fake News reporting is correct."  But if it isn't, that means you're full of shit, right?  Does not compute, does not compute.  Right on cue, the interstellar cockroach from planet Gosar chimed in with calls for Milley to be "hung" (or "hanged, as we say here) and calling him a "strange sodomy promoting" traitor.   If NBC expected gratitude, or even silence, for Kristen Welker's public fellation of "Mr. President," they should have known better.  He's also mad at parent company Comcast and MSNBC ...

 ...when they insist on electing one another. There's a halfwit running for governor of  Missour i on a promise to burn books outside the governor's mansion if it's the only way to protect children from "vulgar pornographic material."  It's not clear what set him off, probably The Diary of Anne Frank again.  If his flamethrower is out of gas, he is also open to bulldozing or "launching books into outer space," which is certainly creative.  (The flamethrower may displace the AR-15 as America's National Weapon, depending on how high Biden drives the price of gasoline.)    Book burning is nothing new, Gott weiss,  but its mainstreaming marks a new phase in American barbarism.  We know what we mean by Orwellian and Kafkaesque -- perhaps we need a new word:  Bradburian, and not only for the destruction of books and what they represent.  In Fahrenheit 451  Ray Bradbury posited a future where firemen would start fires instead of putti...