Day of the groundhog

It's the end of May, it's hot and muggy, but I could swear I woke up this morning to the strains of Sonny and Cher singing "I Got You, Babe."  Please help.

Once was bad enough.  We seem to be going around and around and around...

SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on takeoff for the third, sixth or ninth time, depending on the source.  They call it a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," but it's still an assload of money down the crapper.  It's as predictable as Halley's comet.

Literacy tests for voters were abolished in the 1965 Voting Rights Act but Trump's nominee for the federal bench in Missouri wants to bring them back.  Josh Divine is 35, which means he wasn't born in 1965, but he wrote an opinion piece favoring the tests while a junior at the University of Northern Colorado.  Since then he has worked for Clarence Thomas and Josh Hawley and is currently Missouri's solicitor general.  The test for black people seeking to register in Jim Crow states used to involve asking them to interpret a passage from the Constitution, on which basis Kristi Noem would fail.  (Disturbing statistics here.)

Oh, Canada...the 51st "state" doesn't get mentioned for a while and it looks like Trump has moved on, especially since Canadian voters told him to "Take off, eh?" by giving the Liberals a real mandate, not like his.  But Grandpa Syphilis has never moved on.  He issued this love letter:

I'd be willing to bet all my loons that they are not "considering the offer," unless you mean "laughing at the effrontery," and have no wish to be included in the newest iteration of "Star Wars," which didn't work during the Reagan administration even in rigged tests.  (And they want SpaceX to get the contract -- see above.)  If Canada were a state it would be forced to chip in like the other fifty, so that's just a lie.  Where does he think the federal government gets its money, by shaking down billionaires in dubious crypto schemes?  Earlier this week King Charles, who is still being treated for cancer, had to travel from London to Ottawa to open Parliament with a speech confirming Canadian independence.  Take the hint, hoser.

As for Trump's other threats to this hemisphere, I followed a hint and found this interesting article.  Have you heard of the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower?  It's a very popular spot in Panama City known as Narco-a-lago for its involvement with drug cartel money laundering and the shadowy activities of eastern European and Russian oligarchs.  Robert Mueller investigated it in 2017.    Now can you guess why he wants to reclaim the Canal?  Revenge is job one.  Speaking of which...

Melania Trump emerges from seclusion about as often as Punxsutawney Phil.  This time it was to deny (through a spokesman) that her weird and creepy son Barron failed to gain admission to Harvard.  "Barron did not apply to Harvard, and any assertion that he, or that anyone on his behalf, applied is completely false," said Nick Clemens, so it's probably true.  Famously, Malia Obama was accepted, which could only be the result of DEI.  

Some Christian haters staged an anti-LGBTQ rally in Seattle and chose Cal Anderson Park, named for Washington's first openly gay state legislator.  There were protesters, of course, so K$H Patel's FBI has chosen to investigate the incident as "targeted violence against religious groups."  As long as you bring along a religious symbol, you're now a "religious group."

"They wanted a sunny speech about going off into their careers and instead they got a load of garbage," said Kayleigh McEnany, who did not appreciate Scott Pelley's address at Wake Forest and who knows exactly what the graduates wanted.  "What do you know about journalism being under attack?  Sixty Minutes should be reduced to zero minutes."  Maybe that's what Pelley meant, but MAGAninny wasn't through.  "He should have been arrested...he is literally the man who brought on Marc Elias to talk about law firms being targeted, the man who paid for the dossier.  He had Andy McCabe on..."  Interviewing people Trump doesn't like, how is that journalism?  When she goes to vote, she should be asked to explain the meaning of the First Amendment.

Another expert on higher education is the pride of St. Anselm College, Karoline Leavitt:  "Electricians, plumbers, we need more of those in our country and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University.  And that's what this administration's position is."  To my knowledge Harvard does not offer a degree in LGBTQ and neither does any other college, but sure, electricians and plumbers.  And "young women with small fingers" who can assemble iPhones here so Trump won't be forced to tariff the price up to $2,000, and are willing to work long hours for miserable wages.  And most of all, people willing to perform agricultural labor before a pound of tomatoes costs as much as an iPhone.  Stephen Miller's lust for 3,000 deportations a day addresses none of this.  Maybe the ghoul should spend a day picking beans.  Or an hour.

I suspect I'll wake up tomorrow to the faint sounds of Sonny and Cher, and some MAGA will be demanding the arrest of Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times.  Armstrong's offense was to invent the term TACO, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out.  "Once he delivers bad news [like the 50% EU tariff] investors are buying those stocks when they are beaten down waiting for him to chicken out and watching the stocks rebound in value," he wrote.  "It was always taken as a given that when the president spoke on Monday he would likely still mean it on Tuesday.  That's no longer true...it's not even obvious when it'll be true and when it won't.  Madness."  Chickening out?  Or manipulating the market so investors can cash in?  It can't be dementia, or Jake Tapper would be reporting on it.  Right?

Trump wants to cancel the pitiable amount of money PBS and NPR get from the federal government, and here's why.  First appearance of Academy Award winner Joe Pesci on the blog!