Through the cracks

 

This is Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, the other one.  Actually thousands of people have been dumped in Gulag Salvador with nothing resembling due process beyond a series of lies about "gang tattoos," but attention is focused on the dad from Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.  Even with 24-hour cable news American media like to play up one story at a time.

Hernandez Romero is a makeup artist who fled Venezuela and lived legally in California before being abducted and sent to hell.  Neither Adam Schiff nor Alex Padilla has gone to El Salvador to attempt a meeting with him.  Only the Human Rights Campaign continues to keep his story alive.  It's almost as if the LGBTQ community has become invisible again.  

Also disappearing fast is the attempted murder of the governor of Pennsylvania and his family over the weekend.  Details about the accused arsonist continue to be revealed, the usual kind of thing (multiple arrests, a history of mental illness, spotty employment record), but mostly we get discouraging reminders of what this country has become.  Governor Josh Shapiro can count himself lucky that he has not had to take a call from The Leader, who was busy raging at Jerome Powell and looking over chandeliers with which to further vulgarize the Oval Office.  He did take a moment from cozying up to the Salvadoran dictator to call Balmer "probably just a whack job" and "not a fan of Trump," displaying his rich vocabulary and moral clarity.  His apparatchiks took it from there.

A Pennsylvania Congressman named Dan Meuser knows who to blame and of course it's "the left" and Shapiro himself, "one of the amen chorus for the Democrat lunatics" because of his lawsuits against The Leader.  He equates the arson attack with one at a Tesla showroom and the (unoccupied) Republican offices in Albuquerque.  If you listen carefully you can hear Goebbels blaming the Jews for Kristallnacht because a Polish Jew shot a German diplomat in Paris.  (The German insurance industry was happy to concur, paying almost nothing on the many claims for fire and other damage.)  

The Leader is a hero of free speech, as long as it comes from his fishy mouth or echoes with praise of him.  He wants to make a trade deal with the UK that will spare them the hourly tariff increases/decreases; he just needs for Keir Starmer to do him one favor.  (Zelensky can tell him what comes next.)  Britain has laws against hate speech, including "abuse targeting LGBT+ groups or other minorities" and he wants them repealed.  A "senior Washington figure" quoted by the Independent says The Leader is "obsessed by the fall of Western civilization," which sounds more like The Boer.  I guess we're done as a civilization if Reform Party thugs can't rant about "homos" and "darkies."  Who else would want to?  Apart from the unspeakable gall of dictating another country's laws as a condition for cheaper goods, it's really very funny.  What The Leader knows about civilization, western or otherwise, could be inscribed on one of his dainty hands.  And point man in this disgrace is the ol' couch fucker himself:  "The president really loves the United Kingdom...But I think it's much deeper than that.  There's a real cultural affinity.  And of course, fundamentally, America is an Anglo country."   No, Jaydee, it's not.  That may be your dream, but increasingly it's a country of people who look like, well, your wife.  Deal with it, pendejo.

It's Maundy Thursday in the Christian calendar and The Leader summoned Christian nationalists to the White House (he doesn't enter churches since that lady bishop very nastily reminded him what the Bible says) to praise himself and remind them that he personally "banned men from women's sports," an important tenet of Christianity.  He told them to anticipate "one of the great Easters ever" now that the Easter Egg Roll has been opened up to commercial sponsorship.  "It will always be 'In God We Trust,'" he assured them, after the ritual denigration of Joe Biden.  I have never been so proud of being an atheist.  

Is courage contagious?  Chuck Schumer noticed what Brian Schatz is doing to keep more MAGAts out of office and decided to sign on:

One of them, Jay Clayton, has never been a prosecutor but would be in charge of going after crime on Wall Street, the job that brought Giuliani to prominence in the far-off Reagan years.  As New York senator, Schumer is in a better position to block him permanently than Schatz.

Harvard's invitation to The Leader to piss up a rope met with the expected response:  verbal diarrhea on Truth Social, a threat to revoke the university's tax exemption, loss of $2.2 billion in grants and something new:  a DHS threat to prevent its enrollment of foreign students because "antisemitism" (i.e., pro-Palestinian demonstrations).  Far from cowering, Princeton, Brown, MIT, Cal Tech and the University of Illinois asked a judge to block the regime from undercutting research funds.  I know, a court ruling means nothing to these criminals -- I'll bet Roberts et. al are sorry they dreamed up "presidential immunity" now that they're also being flouted and abused -- but it's a lot better than capitulation.  

Before signing off until Monday -- I always celebrate Lucrezia Borgia's birthday -- I want to note the serious efforts at euphemism set out by The Leader's personal physician Captain Dr. Sean Barbabella, who pronounced his patient "fully fit."  He claims the Burger King weighs only 224 pounds and underwent cataract surgery in both eyes; recovery is fast if you never read anything.  His "frequent victories in golf events" at courses he owns attest to his ability to waddle from the cart to wherever he kicked the ball and back again.  He's still chugging cholesterol drugs and aspirin instead of improving his diet, and his ear has miraculously healed since July, many people are saying they've never seen cartilage restore itself like that.  Barbabella administered the cognitive test he loves to brag about and he can still tell a person from a camera.  What a genius.  Next year he will undergo a colonoscopy.  Now what would Trump look like with all the shit drained out of him?  An envelope?