Buttermilk Sky

 Trump hates dogs but he loves polls, so when he saw that  81 percent  of Americans disapproved of Kristi Noem shooting her puppy Cricket, he dumped her faster than Jeff Sessions.  In January, pretending to have read her book, he  pronounced  it "a hard hitting story of a very interesting life" and urged TRUTHers to "Get it now!"  Fortunately for him, most MAGAts have the memory capacity of a goldfish. The word of the day is  "submitted."  As in, bowed down before Trump's dominance.  He re-posted a QAnon video claiming that a cross-section of world leaders "submitted" to him.  It's hilarious.  I note that "UltraMagaRocky0017" omits the United Nations General Assembly, which famously greeted his single speech with laughter.  To get the full flavor you have to watch him handing an enormous trophy to a sumo, who of course bows.  Yes, even traditional Japanese wrestling knows it is in the presence of One Greater Than Its...

 Politics has been called show business for ugly people, and their Oscar night is the  White House Correspondents Dinner .  This year CNN even carried the equivalent of the red carpet, with nobody tripping over a dress.  The difference is that the people we depend on to tell us the truth about Nicole Kidman or Robert Pattinson are not supposed to eat with them or laugh at their jokes.  I mean people like Amy Goodman and I.F. Stone, not the hairsprayed headline readers.  Maybe that's why there are so few. The rich, said Fitzgerald, are not like you and me.  Hemingway demurred ("Yes, they have money"), but I think Scott has won the argument.  Take Dubai.  Most places where the airport was put out of commission for two weeks by flooding would look into improved drainage.   Dubai 's response is to announce the construction of a new airport in the southern desert at a cost of $35 billion.  I wonder what the climate will have in stor...

 Defense lawyers by definition have to talk a lot of bollocks, but there's no need to overdo it.  When your client (Harvey Weinstein, say) is unquestionably guilty but gets his conviction overturned on a technicality, thank the court by all means but don't call it  "a great day for America."   It sounds like you think powerful men should get away with rape.  (If you do, Mr. Aidala, Trump interviews lawyers on Wednesdays and Saturdays.) Politico  has a long article about noses being out of joint at the New York Times over the lack of access to Joe Biden and his administration that they feel entitled to.  They haven't been invited to the "insider" briefings or had an exclusive interview with the president where they can assess his fitness for the job as Robert Hur did.  Times coverage is going to be pissier than ever, I suspect, after Biden went to the Sirius XM studio for an interview with  Howard Stern.    Among other topics he said...

 This is the fiftieth anniversary of Portugal's Carnation Revolution , an event virtually unknown in the US and certainly not likely to distract us from our troubles.  It's worth reading and thinking about as we contemplate the dissolution of our own freedoms.  The  Portuguese do not take these things for granted. The right of the people peaceably to assemble, for instance, is everywhere under violent attack.  Demonstrators at the University of Texas , Austin, were met by mounted police with truncheons and the risible order, "I command you in the name of the people of the state of Texas to disperse."  His one good deed behind him, Christian nationalist  Mike Johnson  showed up at Columbia to declare, "This is dangerous.  This is not the First Amendment, this is not free expression."  In other words, this is not January 6 at the Capitol.  He urged students to "go back to class.  Stop wasting your parents' money."  It's not...

 It's just like January 20, 2017, the biggest, most crowded inauguration of all time, so many people, the most people, over a million, many of them disguised as folding chairs. Of course, it was raining. New York's Finest (the police) love Trump, but they're being forced to deter the huge crowds of supporters who fill the streets of lower Manhattan every day, clamoring for an end to his persecution.  Or so he says.  That's why demonstrators have burned Columbia University to the ground, because all the police are down in Foley Square.  With tears in their eyes. It's all Joe Biden's fault.  Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton  demanded  he send the National Guard to Columbia after Gov. Kathy Hochul refused.  Calling the protests "nascent pogroms," Cotton is terrified for "our Jewish brethren."  But can the Guard handle a big job like unarmed protesters?  Hawley wants the 101st Airborne.  I understand SEAL Team 6 is sulking today.   ...

How do you distinguish the wars from the war crimes?  What we consider crime -- the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations -- is as old as war.  The ancient world expected cities like Carthage to be vaporized, to employ a modern word, by the vengeful victors -- old people killed, women and children enslaved, nothing but empty ruins left to crumble under the North African sun.  Probably more Carthaginians died at home than fighting the Roman legions, with the same pattern repeated countless times from China to Britain.  The oldest western epic the Iliad opens with a squabble over an enslaved girl and ends just before the destruction of Troy. It was not until the twentieth century that anyone began to consider war on non-combatants to be a crime.  The best estimate of the 1914-1918 war is that more civilians (ten million) than military (9.7 million) died, many of them victims of the great pandemic known as "Spanish flu."  The Red Cross and the first Gene...

 To paraphrase the funniest line in Sunday Bloody Sunday, "Here come those tired old nukes."  No sooner had the Ukraine aid bill passed the House than  Sergei Lavrov  popped up to warn yet again about the impending nuclear doom of the west.  He says we want to "contain" Russia to the "last Ukrainian," whatever that means.  Yawns.  Putin is not the shiniest samovar in the dacha but even he knows better than to irradiate territory he wants to occupy.  Mushroom clouds move around.  In 1986 the world learned the truth about Chernobyl after high levels of radiation were detected in Sweden.  Put your nukes away, Sergei, we've heard it before.  Besides, it's Russia -- probably someone drained the rocket fuel and drank it long ago. There was a minor outbreak of Hillary Derangement Syndrome but I think it's been contained.  First disgraced ex-Speaker  Kevin McCarthy  went on Fox to tell Howard Kurtz that she never conceded the...

  I hope this is not Photoshopped. Happy Day, people of Earth.  Given the firestorm when Easter happened to coincide with Transgender Awareness Day, it's nervy of Joe Biden to recognize Earth Day on the first night of Passover.  Nevertheless, he's at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia to announce a $7 billion  solar energy initiative  with special emphasis on poorer communities.  Why Virginia has a park named for the Prince of Wales is anybody's guess. In addition to Earth Day, National Jelly Bean Day and the start of Allergy Awareness Week, it's Let's All Dump on Marjorie Taylor Greene Day, when Americans on the left and especially on the right express how bloody sick of her they are.  She's got the New York Post front page to herself... ...a Fox News editorial bluntly says, "Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot," and former Rep. Ken Buck reached back for Lenin's phrase "useful idiot" and then corrected himself:  "I don't even...

  Evidently Max Azzarello was unfamiliar with the work of Richard Pryor.  He probably thought death by fire would be quick and relatively painless.  Had he listened to the man Roy Blount, Jr., called "the funniest living American" he would have known that self-immolation can also lead to months of excruciating recovery (and in the hands of a genius, comedy gold).   Azzarello lived only a few hours after igniting himself, probably pumped full of morphine.  We must assume he traveled from St. Augustine to New York because that's where the world's media had gathered to relay Trump's daily exercises in self-pity, protesting his persecution as Nelson Mandela and Alexei Navalny never did.  No matter how spectacularly you kill yourself in St. Augustine, it's a one-day story.  In New York it took a full two days for the media to lose interest.  The only detailed account I could find was from yesterday's  Hindustan Times.     "We are vi...

 Trump is a sociopath and a coward who believes he is above the law, considers most of the earth's people "animals" and has the emotional maturity of a two-year-old crack baby.  And he has lousy taste in show tunes. According to  Stephanie Grisham's  forthcoming memoir, a Senior Adviser known as the "music man" was detailed to follow him around with a boom box and be ready to soothe him with songs from musicals, "Memories" from Cats being a particular favorite.  (This therapist is said to be Max Miller, an ex-boyfriend with whom Grisham has issues.  I'm sure we'll learn more when the book comes out in October.)  Reading this triggered a memory of my own.  After leaving the White House Jacqueline Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that she and her husband would unwind before bed by listening to the original cast album of the Lerner and Loewe musical, and White retroactively named the Kennedy years "Camelot."  This is not li...

 It seems like only four days ago -- it was! -- that  Clay Travis,  who describes himself as a lawyer and writer, was on the Xitter helping out with the jury selection part of Trump's latest trial.  "If you're a Trump supporter in New York City, do everything you can to get seated on the jury and then refuse to convict as a matter of principle, dooming the case via hung jury.  It's the most patriotic thing you could possibly do."  Counselor Travis was probably beating up protesters against the Iraq war when they covered jury tampering, so maybe he gets a pass.  But this morning, on Xitter rival TRUTH SOCIAL  Trump  posted, "'They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury,' Jesse Watters."  What a dilemma.  It's almost as if Trump is challenging the verdict ahead of time, not unlike his claim that the 2024  election is already RIGGED AND STOLLEN.   Jury selection is...

 Do you suffer from shedding?  Like chemtrails and woke, it's hard to define.  If you're feeling a little bit Monday morning, a little under the tea cozy, if your testicles are losing their tan, it could be shedding.  Someone who got the covid vaccine or the dreaded boosters has been close enough to shed their  spike proteins  where you could pick them up.  Don't despair, Kash Patel has you covered.  For only $90 or three shares of Trump Media and Technology (this morning) you can get yourself free.  Warrior Essentials sells a three-dose detox to promote autophagy, increase endogenous polyamine production and inhibit autophagic dysregulation.  Probably won't kill you unless you're seriously allergic to dandelion extract.  Patel was chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, so he knows about these things. It looks delicious. Erika de Souza Vieira is under arrest and charged with fraud in Brazil .  She wheele...

  In the final frames of Erich von Stroheim's butchered, pitiless masterpiece Greed  (1924) we see the murderous dentist McTeague in Death Valley, handcuffed to a corpse.*  One wonders if General Erich Ludendorff had read Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague  when he described Germany's Great War alliance with the Habsburg Empire as being "shackled to a corpse."  The United States may learn how that feels if it cannot persuade Israel to see sense or unlock itself from one of its oldest and closest alliances. American support for Israel was already waning when the bombing of Iran's consulate in Damascus occurred.  It was certain that Iran would retaliate, surprising that its response would be so measured -- several hundred slow-moving drones almost all rebuffed by the "Iron Dome" defense system.  The damage to some buildings by the one that got through has been played over and over to demonstrate that Israel is in jeopardy and must not be abandoned now,...