Buttermilk Sky

 We can learn much from the British. "Four people were arrested Tuesday at British Prime Minister  Rishi Sunak's  estate in northern England, one of whom entered the property to defecate in Sunak's private lake as a form of political protest." Yes, there's video, but it had to be censored to suit the delicate sensibilities of Elon Musk.  Which might be even more telling than the protest. I refuse to panic about last night's debate except to point out that the format not only discouraged but actually prevented all fact-checking.  Kasie Hunt cut off Karoline Leavitt when she started to lie about Jake Tapper.   Jim Acosta  silenced an anti-choice spokesmodel named Kristan Hawkins when she accused Joe Biden of "weaponizing" (one of their favorite words) federal agencies to make abortion a federal issue.  But Tapper and Dana Bash lacked both the mechanism and the will to say, "Mr. Trump, sir, you're full of shit."  The tight allocation of ti...

  I love the smell of panic in the morning. Andy Ogles will fix it.  The pride of the Kentucky 5th went to Newsmax to announce his new bill:  "The 'No Juicing Joe,' which would require him to divulge, to report to the America people anytime that he takes a mind-altering stimulant like we know he's gonna have to do before this debate.  They're gonna have him juiced up and jacked up on some sort of cocktail so that he can be lucid and take on, or at least try to debate Donald Trump."  Better hurry, Andy, the show starts in a little over six hours.  Have you ever tried passing a bill before?  Or a kidney stone?  No one could accuse a Kentucky Republican of taking anything that might stimulate thought or cognition.   Margie Malaprop assured Steve Bannon of her love for Trump but she's worried:  "He is walking into a trap, he is walking into a rigged debate, he is walking into an arena filled with people that want to murder him.  He...

  All right, who put up the  metaphor ?

The Rightzis sometimes give the impression of being tightly organized, with so-called news organizations in lockstep with SuperPACs and religious corporations, but there's an awful lot of flailing going on.  They have never worried much about consistency and now they're picking targets at random, a little like the Russian army. For example,  Charlie Kirk  has decided it would be popular with the MAGAts to attack women's basketball.  It's not as if Caitlin Clark's salary of $76,000 a year compares with what an NBA bench jockey gets, but the rivalry between her and  Angel Reese  is already being compared to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird over four decades ago.  WNBA games draw large, enthusiastic crowds and take up space on America's surviving sports pages that isn't being devoted to the boys.  So Kirk, known to have issues with women anyway, announced based on nothing that only LGBTQ people attend the games and has called for "Straight Night."  ...

  It's Tuesday afternoon and CNN has not put a countdown clock in the corner of the screen, as they do for scheduled events like State of the Union.  Does this mean they don't think The Debate will happen? Trumpworld is definitely on edge and giving the convicted felon every possible excuse to wimp out.   Ronny Johnson/Jackson  continues to demand a drug test based on nothing but his expertise in keeping the Trump White House on a four-year buzz.  Dare your opponent to disprove a lie, then jump on his refusal to do so -- it might impress Kennedy voters and other confused people.  Texas should follow the Navy's lead and bust him down to medical student. Steve Bannon is doubling down on  CNN's "insult" to Karoline Leavitt, the worst in the history of television according to Pigpen.  And she a "national press secretary" to a criminal!  Even if Kasie Hunt abased herself, the narrative has shifted slightly -- Trump has no chance because CNN ...

 Where do I begin?  Woodrow Wilson after a stroke made more sense.  Abraham Lincoln with a bullet in his brain would have made more sense.  How can anyone think this should be a leader? "Where there's so much water you don't know what to do with it.  It's called rain.  It rains a lot in certain places but uhhh...no.  Their idea...you know, did you see the other day, they just put...I opened it up and they closed it again.  I opened it, they closed it.  Washing machines to wash your...dishes.  There's a problem.  They don't want you to have any water.  They want no water." It's called rain. Jesus Christ on a bicycle.  If Jesus Christ on a bicycle showed up at Saturday's "Faith & Freedom Coalition"  wankfest he would have heard this: "Together we stood up to the communists, Marxists and fascists to defend religious liberty like no other president has ever done.  And I have the wounds all over my body.  If...

 Checking in on the seven-and-a-half billion or so people who aren't fortunate enough to live in the greatest country of all time. More than a thousand pilgrims have died making the hajj in  Saudi Arabia , where the temperature is over 120F.  Jeff Landry can stop calling himself pious for tacking up a few posters. The latest, weirdest scandal to hit the UK Conservative Party involves twelve insiders placing  bets on the date of the upcoming general election.  Betting on virtually anything is legal in the UK.  Betting based on inside information is not.  Could Craig Williams, an aide to Prime Minister Sunak, have heard that the election would be called for July 4?  That's something the Gambling Commission would like to know. A forest fire on the Greek island of  Hydra  was apparently started by fireworks launched from a yacht despite hot, dry and windy conditions.  Thirteen people have been arrested and went before a magistrate Sund...

 The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases defines  prion diseases  as "transmissible, untreatable and fatal brain diseases of mammals."  The esteemed Charles P. Pierce has long diagnosed prion disease as the reason Republicans are this way.  It's the "transmissible" part I want to start with today. Nobody has spent more time cuddling up to Trump than  Sean Hannity,  and a piece at Meidas suggests he may have come down with the condition.  During his regularly scheduled attack on Joe Biden's mental functions he addressed Rep. Michael Waltz as "Florida," referred to AOC (Rep. Ocasio Cortez) as "AOL," introduced Kellyanne Conway as "Kellyanne Trump" and Texas AG Ken Paxton as "Governor Paxton."  Is Hannity too incapacitated to serve as a Fox host?  (If he's correct in calling Ted Cruz a "former Texas senator," I promise to apologize as soon as I uncork the champagne.) Perhaps sensing an open...

 Trump and his cult have had an edgy relationship with Fox News since the network was first to call Arizona for Joe Biden in November 2020.  They recognize that its ratings surpass those of upstarts like Newsmax and One America (if that's even still around), but they also worry that its occasional embrace of facts is not useful to them.   In a typically schizoid response this morning, Trump praised his faithful handmaiden  Maria Bartiromo  for an interview where Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) was invited to repeat the immigrants=criminality slander ("Keith really knows his 'stuff,' " he purred).  But Fox also reported a poll that showed Biden ahead for the first time and this brought on the customary explosion.  The problem isn't the poll, it seems, but the presence of Paul Ryan on the Fox Board of Directors.  Why Ryan?  You can't fire everyone who responded to a poll.  Always Be Blaming Someone. This afternoon he was still raving :  "...

 You will see it on every news broadcast and you will be amazed all over again.  The Catch,  Willie Mays's  over-the-shoulder-at-full-speed catch of Vic Wertz's long fly ball in the 1954 World Series, and his even more astonishing throw to the infield to keep Larry Doby from scoring.  Mays was one of the greatest, possibly the greatest baseball player of the twentieth century and he has died at age 93.  He lived long enough to see Major League Baseball acknowledge the importance of the Negro Leagues, where his career began, with the records of its players incorporated into baseball's formal history.  He never made a million dollars a year; nobody of his era did.  He was drafted into the Army for no particular reason (we were not at war) and the time he served was time he did not add to his lifetime 660 home runs.  Fans will argue forever about whether military service kept him from surpassing Babe Ruth before Hank Aaron did.  Maybe he wa...

 As the BIDEN stock market continues to surge -- just under 39,000 for today -- one lonely social media platform is dying.   Trump Media  lost another 12% today with a share price of $30.69.  Despite being host to many all-caps rants about DEGENERATES and LOSERS, despite the skilled guidance of dairy farmer Devin Nunes, DJT (as it's known on the Street) is acting more like 2008 than 2024.  After paying himself a generous bonus Nunes followed the Trump approach:  blame everyone else.  He wants the SEC and Congress to investigate what he's pretty sure is big investors deliberately tanking the stock to ruin the small investors and make Trump and Nunes look bad.  Apparently even ass-kissers like Margie Greene avoid the place in favor of Xitter, which is also where Melania advertises her jewelry.  Since Elon welcomed all the nazis and QAnons back, who needs TRUTH SOCIAL?  But Nunes has a cunning plan:  TS will soon stream old TV sho...

 More election fraud?  According to  Ramin Setoodeh 's book Apprentice in Wonderland, he interviewed Trump about Joan Rivers, who was a contestant on The Apprentice in 2009.  "I thought she might have been a Republican," Trump told him.  "I know one thing:  She voted for me, according to what she said."  Rivers died in 2014.  I see where the president of  Argentina  seeks advice from his dead English mastiff, Conan, so who's to say it couldn't happen?  (Javier Milei does not claim that Conan voted for him.) Other highlights:  Trump apparently also thought he had a shot with  Debra Messing,  then the star of Will & Grace.  He considered her "quite attractive" -- no Stormy Daniels but OK -- but she told him to get lost and "I watch her today and it's like she's a raving mess."  He also devotes a lot of space to trashing Omarosa Manigault, who briefly worked in the White House and says she has heard the tap...

 Ronny Jackson will have to change his name to Johnson.  And then claim it was always Johnson and only Trump was smart enough to know it.  That's how sycophancy works.  Like Mussolini, Trump ha sempre ragione. The old fool was bragging again about identifying a camel, or remembering five words, or whatever he did years ago to demonstrate his lack of dementia and astonishing IQ, and of course he misnamed the doctor who supposedly administered the test.  The one who certified his weight at 215, perfect for a stunning individual of six feet four.  It was made for the headlines, for erasing all the other garbage that came out of his face.  He does this on the regular.  When he said "Nancy and I would be perfect together" he probably confused Pelosi with Nikki Haley again. A Florida nonentity named Greg Steube abased himself with a proposal to -- let me check this -- rename all the coastal waters, about four million square miles, the "Donald John Trump...

 There have been a lot of mass-murders under the bridge since then, but the clever device known as a bump stock jumped into the headlines on October 1, 2017, when  Stephen Paddock  and his curiously heavy bags checked into the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas.  His window overlooked the Route 91 Harvest festival on the Sunset Strip, and as thousands enjoyed country music he methodically shot over 400 people, killing sixty.  His motive, as they say, is still unknown, but the bump stocks allowed him to convert his assault weapons into machine guns and claim the title of worst single mass shooter in American history.  Even the scale of the horror did not move Congress or the Trump White House to infringe on the sacred right of gun ownership; it was left to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to ban the devices.  That ban has now been lifted by the most corrupt  Supreme Court in US history for lacking a legislative basis, so...enjoy! ...

 While calls were heard to defund the police, the FBI, the Justice Department and the post office, the federal government has been defunding firefighters, perhaps the only part of the public sector that everyone wholeheartedly admires.  From the  Guardian: "Priced out of local rentals or deployed to remote duty locations, many [federal firefighters] are forced to choose between overcrowded, substandard government barracks, or spending the season living outside in their tents or trucks...a recent survey by the organization FiredUp! found that 86 percent of respondents have lived in their cars, crashed on couches or stayed in campgrounds while they fight fire due to lack of available housing or financial constraints."  Fire season gets longer every year, and some firefighters live on $15 an hour.  "Funds that should go toward updating firefighting housing units...are often spent on roads and recreational facilities instead."  The "deferred maintenance backlog...