Welcome to the centrifuge

 Does it seem as if the rotation of the earth is accelerating, and stuff is flying off into space?  Or is it me?

The long-predicted Second Civil War has begun but appears to be pitting MAGA against MAGA.  Readers of Corriere della Sera must have been bemused to read that Steve Bannon thinks Elon Musk is a racist and that he considers this a bad thing.  "Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk are all white South Africans...Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth...making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?"  We don't need a bunch of foreigners teaching us racism.  Slavery was well established here before the Boers even set out on their Great Trek.  Trump doesn't need any help on that score -- didn't Fred teach him to march with the Klan when he was in short pants?  Musk wants to expel all of our beloved Hispanic migrants while providing H-1B visas to the "geniuses" he hires for his rocket and car enterprises. 

I don't know, maybe it was badly translated from Italian.  Here's an equally confusing story from an English-language paper where Newt Gingrich says the mass deportations Trump has spent years promising MAGA will never happen.  "I think there's a very small faction of the party that's rabid about this."  He's also a supporter of the Dreamers and scoffs at the idea of annulling the Fourteenth Amendment.  "We are a nation of law despite some of the things that have been said," he adds, with a straight face.  Turns out Newt and Callista (she's the new ambassador to Switzerland) have a PBS documentary about the ways immigration enriches American life. 

"Nation of laws"?  You want to talk about laws?  Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, was impeached after attempting a coup last year.  He's barricaded in the presidential residence, using his bodyguards to resist attempts to take him to jail.  And he still gets a scheduled pay increase along with all the country's other civil servants.  It sounds like something Congress would vote itself.

Speaking of skeevy Congressmen, James Comer has a "book" about corruption in the Biden family which purports to quote Bob Woodward as saying "everyone in DC knew that Joe allowed his family to sell access to him."  Woodward immediately retorted that "the statements attributed to me are false...I made none of those statements he attributes to me."  What's more, Woodward says he recorded the dinner where the discussion supposedly took place, with Comer's knowledge.  Oh lordy, there are tapes -- two hours and fifty-five minutes' worth, which is a long time to watch Comer masticate.  Now Comer has one week to find a passage where Nostradamus seems to prophesy about "a certain man from Scranton" or admit that he has wasted the last four years of his life (much like the preceding 48).  He's tried everything else short of contacting Richard Nixon in the spirit realm.

Is he up on the ceiling, Jim?

Time is also running out on Trump's promise to end the war in Ukraine even before taking office.  He can't even seem to turn the tide in Russia's direction.  Despite threats from Kim, the North Korean troops he dispatched are deserting or dying -- reliable information is scarce -- and as for Putin's pathetic army, they're still short of everything and being driven to the front in golf carts.  What's the next move?  Magic.  He's got Patriarch Kiril engraving his (Putin's) initials on crosses distributed to soldiers.  The two of them celebrated Christmas at St. George's Church in Moscow while Russian drones knocked out Kyiv's electrical grid.  

"If there is Putin, there is Russia," one of his flunkeys proclaimed in October; "there is no Russia today if there is no Putin."  He's acting more and more like Trump, only Trump would not give the crosses away.

What would you do if your doctor told you 70 percent of your health, or lack of it, is your own fault?  The people of Kansas took the drastic step of sending their most callous doctor to Washington to be a senator.  Which might solve their problem, but what about the rest of us, when Roger Marshall and his caucus take a scalpel to healthcare funding?  And worse, sign off on Roadkill Bob as HHS secretary?  What's the matter with Kansas?  Hippocrates much, Roger?

We should have expected this when North Carolina MAGAts ran FEMA workers off'n their land because of somethin' they seed on Fox.  The tsunami of bullshit about the fires has led Governor Gavin Newsom to set up a webpage called "California Fire Facts."  To counter lies like "Oregon sent 60 fire trucks to California to help with the fires, but they're being held in Sacramento for emissions testing!  You can't make this up!"  But Dinesh D'Souza did.  Or "Please be careful in some areas, as there is non-zero risk of armed looters."  Elon Musk fans are still puzzling over what "non-zero risk" means, other than "I am smart and know words."  A Ms. Taylor Greene from the other side of the continent asks, "Why don't they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?  They know how to do it."  Unfortunately, "they" don't know how to create moisture in the clouds first, but thanks for playing.  Then there's this from Doctor Naomi Wolf:

As you can see, her handle is "8 NYT bestsellers," which means she knows as much as Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling about science.  I think one of the governor's IT people just quit and went home with Jim Beam.

J.D. Vance joked about skipping his inauguration to attend the Ohio State-Notre Dame game in Atlanta, and a surprising number of people fell for it.  (Looking at you, Keith Olbermann.)  Had Kamala Harris said she was taking part in a Martin Luther King Day event instead of sitting through "American Carnage 2:  This Time It's Even More Personal" we'd never hear the end of it.