This blog lags behind a little bit

 I'm not a political junkie.  I follow politics in a tangential general sort of way but I don't follow say every bill working its way through the Congress.  My cats need to eat.  I have yardwork to do.  I'm not like the old people who look at the TV screen all day and follow the news 24/7.  I see the headlines on my devices that's enough.  Ok so the leader of South Africa met with Trump at the WH.  Trump has given refugee status to some white Afrikaaners.  Trump has accused the leader of some kind of genocide.  Perhaps Trump is projecting onto him what he should be saying to Bibi but I'm not a shrink.  I know way back in the day the South African government was harassing the white landowners but again I'm too busy of late to dive down these rabbit holes.  Media calling it false.  Again I'm not up to speed on a lot of stuff.  I'm more likely to google lizards of New York State as I have varied interests.   I don't discuss politics with my vet or when getting an oil change.  FWIW I don't think Biden was healthy enough to hold the most important position in the land but at the same time I don't think it amounts to treason so you can call me not a team player.

Just some light opining here.  Pour yourself a drink and let's have a chat.  Not everything is binary.

Does James Comey want a restaurant to deny Trump service?

 Never short of something to blog about.  As you know former FBI Director James Comey posted something on FB (later deleted) that he was walking along the beach one day and found a sea shell configuration in the form of "8647."  Major controversy followed and the SS is currently investigating him for possibly calling for Trump's assassination.   In restaurant parlance to 86 someone is to deny them service.  Also bouncers in bars may have to 86 or remove someone.  Perhaps the most common interpretation is when the mob uses the term it means to take someone 8 miles out of town and put them 6 feet under.  Trump is of course the 47th president hence the sinister meaning of "8647."  Tulsi Gabbard wants Comey in jail over this.  Comey's a dick and Chris Wallace recently destroyed him in an interview over the whole Russiagate hoax.  He's as corrupt as they come but what do you make of all of this?

Less executive orders mean less tangles with judges

 As a practical matter.  A wise young manager I had once said you have to choose your battles.  This does NOT mean the judges are right on all the issues.  They're not but many see themselves as gods, the most powerful branch of the government but that's a separate post and I've blogged about it.  Trump started his second term like gangbusters with a swagger and a new sheriff in town kind of 'tude.  Practical advice lose the 'tude!  You can't govern for four years on executive orders alone.  You're not a monarch.  If the issue is important enough yes have at it with a judge but you don't have to right every wrong or every perceived wrong in four years.  Leave that to the next guy or gal.  Trans soldiers there can't be that many of them let it go.  DEI I had to google what this meant but it seems to be taking up a huge chunk of the President's time and on and on it goes.  What does it all matter if most people are going to sucky jobs in the morning?

I don't know what the guy's doing.

Maybe next time add a Houthi to a group chat?

 Maybe someday you'll be able to get Yemen war plans on your Smart TV.  If I was new to blogging struggling to come up with a name during the early days of the 2nd Trump Administration it would have just hit me in the shower,

You Can't Make This Shit Up

Meanwhile JD Vance is going to join his wife Usha in Greenland for a creepy visit upcoming. See the sights dine on whatever Greenlanders eat and exert some pressure.  A kind of friendly Mafioso sitdown.  Is  Musk going to abolish the DMV?  The dismantled DOE workers where do they wind up slicing deli meats?  I get the OAN channel crystal clear in these parts and some nights host Riley Lewis looks like he's going to uncork one.  The erstwhile sensible National Review is all MAGA now.  Lonely.  Maybe I'll go smoke a pipe with Mitch McConnell. 

You know it would all make sense if I was involved in a horrible car accident and wound up in a comatose state and this was all a bad dream.  The Orange Man is real though.  It'll all be over in 3 years and 10 months if we have a country left.

Trump vs. the judicial branch

 Trump/Musk fire/layoff federal workers and a judge says they have to be reinstated.  Trump freezes spending and another judge says he has to unfreeze it. The President invokes some dustbin in history law about alien enemies to speed up mass deportations of Venezuelan gang members and yet another judge blocks that.  NOW STOP RIGHT THERE.

Trump obviously views the executive branch of government as properly being the most powerful.  On the other hand federal judges view themselves as the most powerful branch of government.  You can quibble about my formulation but for all intents and purposes..  THEY'RE BOTH WRONG.  Checks and balances.  Three CO-EQUAL branches of government.  Too complicated to put into a blogpost without it turning into a dissertation.  We're reaching a constitutional crisis and yet nobody properly understands it.

It's not conservatism it's rule by oligarch

 Breaking with my fellow conservative bloggers.  I do not celebrate thousands of federal workers across multiple agencies losing their jobs.  I do not support massive tariffs levied against our allies.  I am against trying to censor and punish pro-Palestinian speech on campus.  Re Trump's tailspin into dementia or whatever it is if Canada and Greenland did become U.S. states how many electoral votes would they hold?  How would the new Canadians and Greenlanders lean politically?  I'm thinking Canada to the Left.  WHO elected Elon Musk???  He's our de facto president on the domestic side of things.  The sentiment among many people I've talked to is he needs to go and these are middle-of-the-road people not radicals.  Go back to running Tesla and Space X and whatever else.  Go to Mars and start a colony if you want I'm not a fanboy.  We need to grow up.  Stop blaming Dems and lefties all the time.  Trump's nuttery is the issue at least for now.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Keeping it psycho

 Trump's Greenland obsession

I was thinking about blogging about other things today as a break from the Trump Follies but this caught my attention.

You don't suppose Musk can send me a stimulus check for the price of eggs

 Taking a chainsaw to government.  How much is Homan's budget btw?  When is Trump gonna lower my grocery bill?  He said during the campaign it would happen "very rapidly" (his words).  What's his obsession with the Gulf of Mexico?  There's not even a movement behind this.  Has he forgotten about Greenland?  So much on his plate.  About the only good thing is he wants to open up the JFK files.

It's wearying.  I might devote the rest of his term blogging about cats.

Day One of the New Year

 A Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the entrance to the Trump Hotel in Vegas.  Being investigated by the FBI as a possible terrorist event.  Driver killed and a few others suffered minor injuries.  Also a truck plowed through crowded Bourbon Street in New Orleans around 3 in the morning and killed at last count at least 15 revelers and injured 35 others.  42-year old Army vet and Texas native Shamsud-Din Jabbar was the driver and killed in a shootout with police.  Had an ISIS flag in his pickup.  Both the Cybertruck and pickup both rented through the car renting app Turo.  Possible link between the two events being investigated.  FBI thinks Jabbar was not a lone wolf but possibly had terror associates.  NYC and Yonkers recorded their first murders of the New Year.

Not an auspicious start.  It would have been really nice not to have anything to blog about today.  Ease into the New Year ya know?

Building a better blog

 Cats?  Pipe smoking?  The Middle East?  No foreign policy post for Dennis Rodman in a Trump Administration?  My drone is better than your drone?

Recent case in Yonkers.  A couple brought a very young cat which was severely injured to a local vet clinic and dropped it off without giving their names or phone numbers.  Anonymous good Samaritans but there's a bad twist.  Cat later died and tested positive for rabies.  The County Health Department is desperately trying to track the couple down to have them tested for the virus.  Got me googling rabies again with my hundred other topics.  Rabies is still generally considered fatal but...

As always though talk about anything you like.

The Dummies Guide to the Middle East

 I'm not one of those knowledge off the top of my head type guys.  I'm more of a Captain Google tbh.  Wikipedia the Assad dynasty in Syria and you could easily go into the wee hours.  Get your brandy snifter.  Bashar al-Assad during his earlier life actually graduated medical school and then went to London to train to be an eye doctor but was recalled back to Syria after his older brother died in a car crash and he then became heir-apparent to the regime....military academy...Syrian occupation of Lebanon...Arab Spring...Syrian Civil War...war crimes...human rights violations...chemical weapons...the UN, Obama, Trump.  Turkey's Erdogan later became a kind of foe and worked behind the scenes...LOTS to go through.  Bashar al-Assad has now been ousted as we all know by rebel forces and the head of HTS an al-Qaida offshoot is practically running the new government.  Turkey is heavily involved and the new HTS-led Syrian government is trying to moderate its image.  Putin has granted al-Assad and his family political asylum in Moscow.  He may have brought a bag of gold coins with him.  He always wore nice suits and believed in climate change and even recognized the State of Israel in private.  Otherwise a brutal dictator.

There I've done my homework.  Trying to give this blog some heft.

Is being over-informed a good thing?

 A lot of old people watch the news all day.  Had an uncle watched the news at 5 a fire in Brooklyn.  Then he watched the news at 6 the same fire in Brooklyn.   OK so now you're extremely well-informed now go watch a movie.  Old people also big on the weather.  I don't have to look at my weather app anymore.  A customer tells me what it's gonna be.

Being overly or extremely well-informed also means absorbing through a kind of unconscious osmosis the biases of the mainstream press.  Watched the PBS Newshour last night.  Story about "Rising Hate."  They had on an "expert" from the Southern Poverty Law Center who tied it all into MAGA and Trump's cabinet picks.  RFK Jr. might be a little quirky but he's a hater?  The SPLC is a lot like the ADL.  They hate conservatives and conservative groups.  No counterpoint on the Newshour of course. 

Maybe I'll rename myself the Grouchy Blogger.

Political junkies

 Perpetually pissed off about politics.  They may not be able to unclog a toilet but politics is the subject they know best.  Most people might know their local representatives but the political junkie knows every Congressman and Senator in all 50 states and their respective scandals.  It's hard to keep up to speed with them.  "What do you think of Mr. Pepperidge's nomination to be Assistant Secretary of the sub-Interior?"  Who?  My late aunt God rest her soul passed away a few years back from a cancer.  Politically conservative they say she argued politics with her liberal son-in-law right up 'til the end.  Dunno.  I'd be pondering my mortality.

When I came back from my 3 year blogging hiatus I had to google Tulsi Gabbard.  I'm always a little behind the curve and a day or two late on today's news.  Gotta take care of the feral cats.  Half of my YouTube search history is about health problems.  Rearranging my finances.  Puttering around the house.  I'm busy.

What's up with the political junkies?  Like a bunch of angry nerds.

The existential meltdown continues

 I have actually read in some online forums about people who have broken down emotionally and mentally over the Trump victory and have to be counseled.  I kid you not.  Now let's remember Trump also won the popular vote and his victory was big enough you could call it a mandate.  The legacy media is pretty much dead at this point as they're not as influential as they thought they'd be.  People are gravitating more towards alternative independent media like Joe Rogan and not even giving a passing thought to what the New York Times has to say these days.  Ole Gray Lady hubris.

Whither this blog?  Start any post even mildly favorable to Trump and there's threadshitting.   I don't plan on this place becoming a dumping ground or landfill for Trump hatred over the next four years.  Criticism yes but there's a fine line between that and unhinged, valid takes and deranged rhetoric.  I'm also seeing a lack of critical thinking skills like Trump wants every Latino person who voted for him to leave the country.  That's just low-effort shitposting.  Another one people who haven't gone to college don't know how to vote that's just plain intellectual snobbery.  You know some calculus and some Nietzsche that makes you special?  Saw a bumper sticker once that said "Without Truckers America Stops."

Word of advice to the Democrats:  Next time leave Taylor Swift out of it.

If Trump wins on Nov. 5

 It would have been better off if he had won the last time around against Joe Biden.  He would have been nearing the end of his full presidency by now and the era of MAGA would be coming to an end.  We could all be talking about other subjects.  The trend lately has been to give most recent presidents two terms.  Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama.  This is why at the time I thought the American people would reelect Trump.  This gives the president the opportunity to finish the work he started  and gives his foreign policy a certain stability.  World leaders are used to dealing with him.  Instead we got Sleepy Joe.  IF Trump wins now there's talk of riots.  Why I don't know.  If he had won against Biden we wouldn't be going through this.  I make no case that the election was bad just that the American voters should have reelected him the last time for practical reasons.  Not voting for him this time because his personality has reached a critical mass for me.  Other conservative bloggers have said this is not the way to go but to each his own.

This was a tentative blogpost of mine since if Kamala Harris wins on Nov. 5 this thread will have little to no value.  However if I'm reading the polls right she just might come out on the losing end.  IF Trump wins but the election is close he clearly has no mandate and will govern a divided country.

I seriously can't vote for the man at this point

 I'll have to sit out the most important presidential election of our lifetime.  Don't they say that about every election though?  If Trump wins it'll be without my help.  Trump's reverse strategy of turning off voters - as I'm sure you've heard at a campaign stop in Wisconsin last Saturday he called Kamala Harris mentally disabled from birth because of the admittedly horrible Biden-Harris immigration and border policy.  Talk like this can only throw sympathy in Harris's corner.  I don't expect any presidential campaign to be totally softball but I don't remember any presidential candidate talking like this.  There is something seriously off about Trump.  While there was still time the GOP should have gone with somebody else.  Might be a good time to blog about other stuff.

Neither candidate is talking about the price of Fancy Feast

 

Drove past a vacant lot today.  Used to be a gas station that they razed to the ground only they left part of the sign up.  Gas at 2.55 a gallon.  Had to be sometime before the Biden Administration era.  T. Swift can easily get a truckload of Fancy Feast delivered to her estate.  For the rest of us it's should I go debit or credit?  Cash on the barrelhead is usually out of the question for most folk.  It's jacking up my grocery bill and they're small cans too.  Talking about the cartons of course.  Seems to be a feline fave.  I always pay cash at the gas station btw.  If I'm gonna use the Visa I want it for something tangible like a garden power tool or clothes at Kohl's not for something as ephemeral as a few days worth of driving.  Don't understand the people who are always using credit for gas.  If I'm gonna go in debt I at least have a nice air fryer/toaster oven sitting on my kitchen counter.

As part of my ongoing aging blogger series my next field of inquiry is varicose veins.  That'd be Misty btw one of my former house ferals.

Conservatives are in a blue funk mood after the debate

 As I said I rewatched some of the clips from the debate on YouTube and thought Trump did well despite the pets.  It has been officially declareth however that he lost the debate.  Mine must be some weird minority opinion.  Welcome to Stranded the place of weird minority opinions.  You might find a few.

A commenter at a conservative blog opined that God intervened in the assassination attempt for a reason and so not to despair.  If you're a religiously-minded person that is not an invalid view imo.  To date not much has come from the FBI's investigation as to motivation.  Kind of odd.  Usually by now you'd hear from some neighbor that Crooks looked up at the nighttime constellations for political messages at 3 in the morning or something.  That he was able to put a ladder up against the side of the building to scale the roof is really something.   The Home Depot - how doers get more done.

For me one debate sufficeth.  If there's another one my biased newsfeeds will declare by sunrise the next morning that he lost that one too.  Regarding the cats and dogs one of my first reactions was there needs to be some serious research on this instead of the usual superficial snoping.  There's feral cats all over the place.  It's not out of the realm.  On the other hand Trump pronounces things in a Shakespearian manner like there's some pet apocalypse going on.  Maybe fodder for the next Stephen King novel.

Conservatives need to pop a Prozac.

What's the deal with the over-polling?

 Seriously though we have polls coming out of the ass.  We could have polls of polls.  What did you think of our last poll?  Harris and Trump haven't even had their first debate yet and I would submit these early polls mean nothing.  Every time I turn on my phone there's another Trump/Harris poll.  Harris has better hair than Trump.  Polls in the past have sometimes proven to be wildly inaccurate.  Remember when Hillary was supposed to win the election handily against Trump?  The polls might mean more if they take a break and don't poll for awhile.  Dunno.

I was never polled in my life.  Well maybe once I got a call on my cell and answered a series of questions.  Where are these people on the street stopping people to ask their opinions?  I'm still waiting to be taken seriously.

What do you think of me blog?  Take a survey.

Is society becoming angrier?

 

Is it the election?  The price of food, 5G, something in the air or water, solar storms, too many boosters, Judge Judy?  The cost-of-living. the Middle East, Google, the weather, medical bills, bad digestion?  Trump......

The Rise of the Kens and Karens

I'm seeing it in retail.  From my end food service.  They come in for an item you don't have that day.  Instead of talking about with the department they go to the manager.  Manager gets involved.  Rookie deli clerk makes their sandwich slightly off as per their instructions they go to the manager.  You're short-staffed that day everyone called out that's not my problem.  Angry shoppers.  I'm a quiet shopper.  I don't make issues.  I don't get the workers in trouble.  Mild Z.

The blogosphere.  Everyone just calm down and let's talk about barn owls.