IMO Puerto Rico is the best candidate for the 51st state

 It's not controversial, many people could probably get behind the idea and it's already a U.S. territory.  Mexico - If Mexico became a part of the United States the illegal Mexicans crossing over would no longer be illegal but would simply be crossing state lines.  Problem solved or at least half the problem anyway.  Watching OAN last night and OAN bemoaning we lost that expansionist spirit where did it go?  Oh yes PR doesn't have any of them rare earth minerals and PR and Mexico apparently have no strategic military importance but just sayin'.  Sure China and Putin are vying for influence in the Artic but Puerto Rico could be an easy pickup if expansionism is your thing.  It could be a historic part of your legacy if nothing else so why are Trump and Vance bullying the Greenlanders?  We already have a military base there and you're pissing off NATO.  In the meantime folks be wondering whatever happened to lowering the price of groceries?

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.

I pretty much don't watch SNL It's past my bedtime

 Everybody's still talking about Tom Hanks and his stupid spoof of a racist MAGA supporter on SNL's 50th Reunion Special.  This was stupid on so many levels.  It's a time-honored comedic tradition to go after the president but not the people who voted him into office.  Plenty of Bill Clinton jokes back in the day but no jokes about Bill Clinton supporters per se.  Tom Hanks' career is basically over at this point.  Other than that I just don't watch the show.  Hash it up if you want but SNL is well past its prime.

Trump reminds me of Mr. Mayhem on the Allstate commercials

 Shock and Awe.  The DOGE.  Have Musk and Trump showered together yet?  Do we really need cancer research?  When am I going to get my tax refund?  Will Trump change the street cleaning days in Yonkers?  Layoffs of thousands of federal workers.  When can I expect my first DOGE check?  Will Medicaid still cover nurse visits?  When is ICE coming to Yonkers?  Trump wants Zelensky to pay the money back with rare earth minerals.  Like what?  Hannity was more interested in what Musk had to say.  Why does Musk want the personal details of millions of Americans?  When are we going to Mars?

Chaos.

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......

Ah well there's always ice fishing

 MN Governor Tim Walz was "a little surprised" he and Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.  He feels "I did the best I could."  Not in the VP debate with Vance you didn't you knucklehead.   In his first post-election interview with KSTP a Minnesota news outlet he said "It felt like at the rallies, at the things I was going to, the shops I was going in, that the momentum was going our way."  Rallies can be a lot like rock concerts.  You go to a blink-182 concert and you think the whole world likes blink-182.  So puberty blockers and transgender surgery for minor kids had nothing to do with your loss.  It's really that the rest of the country isn't progressive enough is his take.

I hope you run into a nice school of yellow perch.

Christmas At Mar-A-Lago

 Would make a great holiday special.  Hosted by Joe and Mika.  Special appearances by Mark Zuckerberg and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau.  Trump jokes Trudeau looks like Fidel Castro's son.

Homan Fights A Migrant Caravan.  With Chuck Norris.

Whoopi Goldberg - Keeping It Psycho.

Life In The UK special.  Ellen DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi talk about life in the Cotswolds region in South West England after moving there following Trump's election.  Special appearance by John Cleese.

You got any better ideas?

I don't recall......

 During my 60+ years on this Earth I don't recall any other president who right after he won the general election we talked about it non-stop everyday right up until the day of his inauguration the following January.  That's almost a good solid 3 months of hype if you do the math and that's the way it's headed.  Normally since Jan. 20 is still aways away, we haven't even made it through Christmas yet you would think this would be a good time to discuss a garden-variety of other subjects no?  Also not getting the continued uproar over the Hunter Biden pardon.  Presidents have the power to pardon, many pardons are controversial but at a certain point it's time to move on.  I don't care if Jon Stewart and some MSNBC host are upset.  Also why is Whoopi Goldberg acting perpetually deranged?  She looks like some medieval gladiator in a movie with a pickaxe.  Put her in a movie with Jet LI.  She looks like she could scare a pitbull.

Everybody calm down.

What do Donald Trump, Joe Biden and NYC Mayor Eric Adams have in common?

 All three believe our legal and justice system has been compromised, that they or in Biden's case his son have been the victims of political prosecutions.  Watched a recent Jimmy Dore podcast in which he talked about the media and Hunter Biden.  I'm taking an idea from there and expanding on it here. 

Trump of course has had his myriad legal problems.  There was the hush money case in Manhattan and the Jack Smith legal bundle since dismissed.  Hunter recently convicted of federal gun charges since pardoned by his father.  Read the WH statement about selective prosecution.  Then there is the complex case of NYC Mayor Eric Adams to go on trial next April.  Charges include bribery, corruption, wire fraud and donations from foreign nationals notably the Turkish government.  Adams too feels it's all a political witch hunt.  Now on to the main point.  Biden and Adams now have a special camaraderie with President-Elect Trump.  If you notice Trump and Biden are now BFFs and Adams has pledged all he can to help Trump deport criminal illegal aliens from NYC.  The common thread in all this is all three see the justice system as being corrupt.

It's not about the Rule of Law.  The legal and justice system is part of the swamp is what all three are saying in their own way.  That's the case that Trump, Biden and Adams are making.  Selective prosecutions, the weaponization of our justice system.  Who else will join the growing list?  That's the main thesis for today folks.

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.

A Room With A Liberal View

 Lots of people wondering how "The View" has been on the air for 30 years.  Basically a bunch of liberal chicks sitting around a table with one token conservative.   Sometimes they start yelling.  I thought "The View" was supposed to be a light and frothy show.  Instead you get Whoopi Goldberg's anti-Trump meltdowns.  The other one Sunny Hostin who I never heard of before says uneducated women voted for Trump meaning they never went to college.  So wait a minute your WHOLE education up to but not including college doesn't count?  Then she says racism and misogyny also were big factors that got Trump in.  The price of pet food had nothing to do with it?

Word on the street is "The View" might be on the chopping block along with Morning Joe.  Elon Musk might buy everything that's not nailed down.  Maybe buy Yonkers who knows?

Pre-inaugural bloviating

 Prediction -- There will be no mass deportation of non-criminal illegal aliens not unless Trump doesn't mind people paying $40 for a head of lettuce.  Meanwhile Morning Joe and Mika are catching flack for meeting up with Trump at Mar-A-Lago.  The Left doesn't like don't hate - participate.  Trump told them he wants to work with Democrats.  Damned if you do damned if you don't.   Wondering any illegal help at Mar-A-Lago?

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?