The Home Depot - how Tom Homan gets more done

 Trump now says we have to use lots of common sense about the illegals.  The migrant farm workers and those in the hospitality and leisure industries are essential workers hard to replace they're telling him.  Will we see a change in direction, of tone? So Trump is still lagging behind Biden's deportation numbers this is not a sports contest.  Homan and crew should be helping them pick the vegetables and ask them how their day is going not loading them into paddy wagons.  Homan laying down the law at a press briefing.  There's no grayscale with him just be a hardass.  Watched some NYC ICE footage last night on the news.  The always masked ICE agents lack simple basic professionalism and seem to have an apelike intelligence.  Dr. Phil has sure taken a hard turn to the Right but he's from Texas.  As they used to say in the Old West f#@k you and the horse you rode in on.

Are we EVER gonna get to the cost-of-living?

Trump is at war with his own country

 It might be any day now Marines come up the Hudson River to land at the Yonkers City Pier.  As I said in my last post the majority of today's conservatives ain't that freedom loving to begin with.  Yes I'm looking at you Hannity.  They have no issues with the Trump Administration censoring pro-Palestinian speech on campus.  They're ok with the Administration monitoring the social media posts of foreign students.  They're down with the possible militarization of major US cities in response to the growing ICE protests.  No libertarian concerns whatsoever.

One of the first things any would be dictator/fascist does is go after freedom of speech.  MAGA is just a bunch of gutless wonders, a cult at this point.  In my view Trump is a hater and a joyless prick no matter how FOX News and Dr. Phil try to spin it.

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?

The X-rated Diddy trial

 Just talking about it might earn you an NC-17.  If I were to provide verbatim court transcripts this post might come with a warning for sensitive viewers.  Court TV is covering it in their own way of course but so far when I turn Court TV on during primetime they're not discussing Diddy as you'd expect but some other trial.  Court TV is a family show after all where they talk about serial killers and spousal murder.  I myself don't have the money to run freakoffs.  Hey Google didn't correct that word must be in the vernacular now.  I just want to make sure I have enough money to pay my energy bill so ConEd doesn't flicker my lights.

Some people feel he's gonna get off.  Weird sex is not a crime so long as there's consent.  I'm into vinegar.  Been buying tons of it to kill off poison ivy in my backyard.  Diddy likes the baby oil for his hobby.  It's I don't know not making a prediction here but he ain't livin' right.

Ever have a conversation with a Trump cultist?

 It's spooky.  I personally know at least three of them.  Now we all have our political leanings.  I'm not talking about those who are supportive of Trump but the true believers out there.  When you gingerly and politely bring up even a mildly negative point about Trump they rationalize it.  There's no hesitation about it either as if they've imbibed the talking points. They agree with and defend EVERYTHING the man does and says.  For me personally Trump is not positive.  He doesn't inspire and unite and has no real gravitas for the most important position in the land but for them it's always the Democrats and the media's fault.  The Trump cultists it's a phenomenon. 

2 dolls instead of 30

 Trump has announced 100% tariffs on all foreign-made movies.  It's hard to figure out why certain things bug the man.  Said in an interview with NBC News he's not sure if he believes in due process or not.  Does he not know how to bone up for interviews?  MTG no longer a fan.  You kind of want to forget he's president.  He's like a kind of depressing backdrop as you go about your life.  Won't seek another term.  On a brighter note they told me at work the bird flu is over.

The PBS thing is to distract you from not getting your $5,000 DOGE check

 Trump is the everything but the cost-of-living president.  Trump also wants to defund NPR through executive action.  Actually ending taxpayer funding for both NPR and PBS would require an act of Congress as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by that body in the first place.  I don't listen to NPR so don't have much to say.  As for PBS let's say they do have a political slant most of the shows on PBS have nothing to do with politics.  Saw a sewing show once that put me to sleep.  Bob Ross takes the edge of a rough day and you have your penguin documentaries and cooking shows and music specials.  Also a lot of stuffy British fare.  Don't watch PBS as much anymore.  Heavy channel-surfer or just watch YouTube.

When is Trump gonna take over Yonkers?

The media made me do it

 Yes the left-wing media doesn't like Trump.   Never did.  This was really obvious during the campaign.  My daily newsfeeds were saturated with anti-Trump stuff.  If the media could have gone with Trump ate somebody's dog they would have gone with Trump ate somebody's dog.  Having said that Trump has tracked a nuttier course than I would have expected but conservatives are still blaming the msm.  Trump lost me after Gulf of America and Greenland.  The media didn't make him almost trigger a worldwide recession.  Not speedily correcting deportation mistakes.  Squelching free speech on campus etc. etc.  To paraphrase Flip Wilson's Geraldine the media made me do it.  Not good enough.  Doesn't wash anymore. 

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 renames the Bermuda Triangle as the American Triangle

 May as well be.  Apparently AP reporters are banned from all Trump press conferences for not using the new coinage Gulf of America.  The man has splinters in the windmills of his mind to use a phrase from the old Carol Burnett Show.

You can't make this shit up.

Tariffs on Greenland?

 I'm not getting it.  Nobody wants to retire and move to Greenland.  It's a strategic military location and is said to have rare mineral resources.  OK.  25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting today but Trump cut China some slack with only 10% tariffs.  His endgame may be to end the federal income tax and fund the government with tariffs.  Is he shifting the Overton Window?  What's the deal with Greenland?  Can't really put a golf course there.  The subject never came up on the campaign trail.  Look every president does things we disagree with.  Biden didn't do enough to protect the gray wolf.  There was his covid authoritarianism.  I always thought it would be interesting to have one of the Star Trek spinoff shows do an episode on the crew encountering the race of Covidians who always stand six feet apart and worship a Fauci-like figure but I digress point being Trump is taking things to another level and how did the National Review become part of the MAGA cult?  When he's done deporting can he get back to the price of Fancy Feast?  Health care?  Families shouldn't have to go bankrupt because somebody has cancer.  Homan is in his glory but can we take a breather?

BTW can Trump at least slip in a stimulus check or two to my direct deposit?

Whatever happened to the mass deportations?

 We may need to strike the S off TDS and just call it TD or Trump Derangement.  The senior editors over at the National Review think taking Greenland by force is not a totally insane idea and Hannity is glossing all the lunacy over by simply posting Don Jr.'s nice video of his trip to the autonomous Denmark territory to make Greenland great again nothing bellicose about it (library word look it up). Meanwhile Germany and France are warning Trump over his threats.  Whatever happened to no new wars and working to end the ones we have now?  What does the MAGA base think of these latest developments?  Trump is either in the pre-Alzheimer's stage dementia or both.  There would have to be serious closed-door discussions at this point about possibly invoking the 25th Amendment Section 4 somewhere down the road.  Meanwhile Homan is probably thinking we got the buses all lined up for the migrants why are we now switching to geopolitics all of a sudden?  He ain't even president yet.

Hell's going on?  I'm willing to eat my vote.  Maybe they'll make a movie about it someday.  "Life Inside the MAGA Cult."

One might mistakenly think Elon Musk is the incoming president

 Nominally tapped to cut government waste and inefficiency with Ramaswamy he sparked a MAGA civil war the other day (see previous post) and now writes opinion pieces for German newspapers.  Writing in Die Welt he said the AfD is the best hope for a dying Germany.  AfD is a fairly new political party there gaining a lot of populist support and could be a player in that country's upcoming snap elections on Feb. 23.  Could become a strong voice in the Bundestag or lower House.  I'm your Captain Google doing your work for you so you can relax.  AfD as in Alternative for Germany (Deutschland).  Many call it a far-right extremist and radical party mostly focusing on moving the migrants the hell out or in some cases at least forcibly assimilating them.  You will speak the German.  Vance also supports the AfD.  Many folk find Musk and Vance's support of the party alarming.  Homan might be considering some work over there when he's done over here.  Meanwhile Laura Loomer's blue check on X is currently under review.  I don't know what that means exactly.  In other news......

Rachel Maddow and the Covid Chronicles

 Maddow has issues with Trump's cabinet picks particularly Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head the NIH.  He was a signer to the Great Barrington Declaration out of Stanford University which was basically against covid lockdowns in general and said herd immunity is the way to go.  There was an important caveat to this however: targeted protection for the most vulnerable groups (e.g. the elderly, people with co-morbidities etc.).  In other words during that covid timeframe you didn't invite Grandma over for the holidays.  We all understood this, everyone was on the same page but Maddow has outright lied about Dr. Bhattacharya and his views.  This wasn't exactly the Swedish model that basically said go about your business and the deaths will frontload early and then level off.  In the U.S. we had one of the highest covid death rates despite the lockdowns and mitigation efforts the 6 Foot Rule not even based on science as Fauci later admitted.  No matter to Rachel Maddow.  We also have early footage of Maddow stating emphatically that when you get covid-vaccinated the virus can't use you as a host and transmission stops with you blah blah blah which we now know is not true.  My brother has been hyper-vaccinated which is what most doctors still recommend these days and he still came down with a few cases of hardcore covid.   I'm not even clear whether Maddow and her hero Dr. Fauci even believe we have functioning immune systems but many people say she's in the pocket of Big Pharma and the military/industrial complex.  Word on the street is she's dragging MSNBC down the tubes with her.  Rumor is Musk might buy MSNBC outright.  Maybe Walmart, maybe Yonkers, maybe a feral cat colony island.  The times they are a'changing.

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.

The media are in denial about their own relevance anymore

 They couldn't even influence the election.  They relied heavily on the fake polling industry to show a neck and neck race to motivate people to vote for Harris but Rasmussen were the only ones predicting a Trump landslide and if you notice they never quoted the Rasmussen numbers.  The American voters have spoken.  The media doesn't respect landslides or the will of the people.  You can give The New York Times and The Washington Post to people for free and many are not gonna read it.  Good for lining a birdcage or wrapping fish.  Now Trump's Cabinet picks are no good.  Expect four more years of a negative drumbeat from the msm.  Meanwhile the rest of us have moved on.

When did loyalty become such a dirty word?

 Trump filling up his Cabinet posts quick.  The msm is spinning everything he does in a negative light saying he's packing his Cabinet with fierce loyalists.  When I was growing up the word "loyalty" had more positive connotations.  Loyalty used to be considered a virtue.  A dog is loyal to its owner.  A wife or husband is loyal to their spouse.  A worker is loyal to their company and doesn't sell trade secrets.  I could use a few fierce loyalists in my own life.

BTW where is the Bobby slot?

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.

Trump's war on women continues with his selection of a woman to be his Chief of Staff

 Little known Susan Summerall Wiles or Susie Wiles for short.  Was Trump's campaign manager.  67-year old grandma and daughter of the late American football player and broadcaster Pat Summerall.  Back in the day involved in Reagan and Florida politics.

The New Republic.  I used to read this when it was just a mag in Barnes and Noble.  Kind of a liberal version of National Review I would read it on occasion.  With Michael Kinsley as editor I found it a tolerable read.  He's gone on to other things and now it's just straight up deranged political commentary basically untreated TDS.  Reminds me of the scene in Easy Rider when they drop acid in the cemetery.  

Is Trump gonna find a role for Snoop?