Listen, I'm not saying these assassination attempts on 47 are faker than his burnt Turkish apricot tan, but I've seen more convincing death scenes in a rural Arkansas high school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. They couldn’t even get hired to wear a Goofy suit at Disney World because they are so unconvincing. The facts don’t add up. Their performances are so lazy that the effort to hard sell these narratives only works on the feverish indoctrinated cult members. You need MAGA atrophied brain matter to not give yourself a concussion with eye rolls. Let’s break this down because it is too much. They are doing too much.  The Butler Rally: A Masterclass in Melodramatic Timing Let's start with the pièce de résistance: Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13, 2024. We are to believe that a 20-year-old with a rifle can climb onto a rooftop 400 feet from a former president during a campaign rally, and no one notices until he starts shooting.  Yes, some guy just gets up on a rooftop with ge...

If, after voting for him in 2016, someone had come out and said they had regrets, one of my favorite old German friends, Schadenfreude, would have paid me a visit. I would have enjoyed their pain, their sorrow, their humiliation, but after they finally woke up, I still would have needed to see them make amends, do better, and educate themselves. I wouldn’t have befriended them or wanted them in my life. That’s asking too much. But I could have appreciated their remorse and horror at being so wrong and stupid. I wouldn’t have been sympathetic because ignorance is not an excuse when their orange messiah’s irredeemable psychopathic behavior was on full display and had been for decades. Eventually, I might have been able to tolerate them. Beyond those initial feckless fools, no MAGAt deserves grace, kindness, forgiveness, understanding, or any shred of decent treatment. They deserve to be shunned forever. They deserve hate. They deserve to be mocked and ridiculed. The only other thing they...

Generation X did not drift to the right by accident; long before politics, they were shaped by latchkey childhoods in the 80s and 90s that trained a specific emotional survival strategy. In countless “Anywhere, America” houses, kids came home to empty rooms, a key under the mat or on a string around their neck, and a TV for company instead of an attuned adult; they were fed and housed, but their inner lives went largely unnamed. Parents were overworked and emotionally unequipped, offering structure without intimacy, managing feelings instead of exploring them, teaching children to adapt silently: everything is fine, and if you aren’t, pretend you are, because help is not coming. What later got praised as toughness was early emotional self-reliance, hardened in the glare of divorce, AIDS, crime headlines, mass layoffs, and glossy consumer culture insisting that everything was “awesome.” That survival code followed Gen X into adulthood. When faced with economic instability, workplace ine...

Call the Police LCD Soundsystem

  Icky Thump The White Stripes

Viagra Boys  Troglodyte

Devo Don't Shoot (I'm a Man)

Death Cult Zombie Genesis Owusu

Expect much wagging of that damn dog this week, just like Obama. Psyche! Obama never launched a conventional military attack against Iran.  Meanwhile, in Washington DC:  All we can do is pray for the midterms and hope for the future:  Photo Credit: @AdameMedia/X

Trump and The Epstein Files! It's the nightmarish gift that keeps on giving (this list continuously updates).  And not just in America, but across the pond, too.  Recently, however, it's not the perpetrators who're leaping into the the spotlight, but their enablers, chief amongst them, Pam Bondi,  America's execrable Attorney General who refused to apologize to the many victims of sexual assault and rape in The Epstein Files - quite a few of whom were underage at the time they were victimized. Why? Because doing so, she said, would be getting "down in the gutter." Whose gutter, her own or someone else's, was not specified.  Also unspecified, or left unexplained, was what the stock market has to do with prosecuting rapists and their enablers, or why pursuing justice against criminals, ostensibly Pam's job as Attorney General, has taken a backseat to the NASDAQ. Some stunt, Pam! Monday, 2/16, is President's Day in America, and happily, citizenry in...

The ongoing revelations from The Epstein Files are shocking to many, but to some, it's merely confirming what's already been known for decades about its many boldface names, including Trump, of course, his wife-in-name Melania, and Jeffrey Epstein's pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell. After all, Jeffrey was investigated for under-age sexual assault and sex trafficking in 2005, indicted in 2006, and walked scott-free in 2007 with a slap on the wrist, or what was called the "deal of the century," in which he served no jail time for pleading guilty to two felony prostitution-related charges. The deal required him to register as a sex offender. So people knew. Especially all those bold-face names who continued to party with him at various locales, including the notorious "Epstein Island."  Yet it's Hilary and Bill Clinton who'll soon come under fire in closed door depositions they're required to give the federal government in a Republican-led probe later th...

He bungled his big boy takeover of Greenland, his ICE initiative has resulted in two government-sanctioned murders (as of this writing), consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest rating since 2014, and our European allies are fast abandoning us. Is it any wonder that Trump's approval ratings have tanked to historic lows?  Even a substantial percentage of MAGA faithful are wondering when the good times will roll, since tariffs have caused prices to go up in almost all sectors, not to mention the continuing flood of damning, stomach-churning Epstein files. Oh, and Black History Month? "What's that?" says Trump.  This first year of Trump's second Presidency has felt like ten years. If  Democrat politicians don't grow a spine - instead of sitting back and pining for the midterms - then doom is certain. The only amusement we'll enjoy will come from the rest of the world, like Italy, which recently made a home crafts suggestion:

The Highest Product of Capitalism (after John Heartfield) 1979, Jo Spence, with Terry Dennett Austerity is not an unfortunate economic reality; it is a political weapon. It is how the state disciplines the public while protecting capital, and it has been doing this without impunity for decades, if not longer. Oversight is nonexistent. There is no culpability. It isn’t even questioned, and both political parties are complicit in pushing this as an undeniable truth. The messages differ, but the flavor is the same.  The Republicans are undoubtedly more corrupt, crueler, greedier, more vindictive, and recklessly divisive. This creates the illusion that the Democrats are positioned to be the answer and that once they are in power, everything will change. Democratic politicians push this narrative; however, they never rise to the occasion, resulting in bitter disappointment and frustration for those who vote for change. With tepid moral outrage, they make the rounds on MSNBC, give rousin...

Every January, America takes a moment to dust off Martin Luther King Jr., aggressively smooth his razor-sharp edges, only to put him back on the shelf by dinner. We do this and congratulate ourselves for it.  We quote the dream speech because it’s soothing and comforting. However, we skip over the demands as if they never existed; we do this partly because they don’t fit the narrative we prefer. Mostly, though, it is that fairness is still being sold to the public as being too costly.  We remember the great orator and his tone, but the substance is criminally discarded. Martin Luther King Jr. is presented today as a passive, gentle unifier, a moral mascot for civility, a man who asked us to be kind and then carry on with business as usual. That sterile version of King is safe. He fits neatly into corporate emails, school assemblies, and social media platitudes. He asks for nothing. He is no threat to the status quo. This version allows people to avoid confronting themselves or...

For decades, the United Kingdom has presented itself as a model of democratic maturity. Procedural. Measured. Governance by pragmatic norms rather than overblown theatrics. Even its scandals arrive packaged and presented with a polite veneer.  However, now that reputation functions less as an admirable virtue than as subterfuge and camouflage. The UK has become a case study in how a liberal democracy can fracture silently, outsource devastating cruelty to the mostly tabloid press, and erode minority protections while smugly congratulating itself on restraint. It is a mistake to view Brexit as merely a referendum outcome. It was a cataclysmic structural event that rewired British politics, possibly forever. It normalized grievance as a governing force, degraded public trust in expertise, and created an unyielding state of cultural agitation. The economic damage is no mystery. It has unfolded exactly as the critics predicted: reduced growth, trade friction, labor shortages, and a con...