Speaking of This, That, and the Other Thing

Michael Lampers
Sep 5, 2018 · 6 min read

A Quick Look At What’s What and What’s Bullshit

Sometimes it seems like Donald Trump’s plan is to commit obstruction of justice every single day just so Robert Mueller can never end his investigation.

Exhibit #999 for the prosecution

Speaking of obstructing justice, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings continue apace, with Chuck Grassley trying to see if there is an upper limit on the different number of ways he can mangle the pronunciation of “Sotomayor.” There should be something called The Grassley Challenge, where we all try to come up with a phonetic spelling for all the ways Grassley says it. The winner gets a no expenses paid trip to Guantanamo Bay.

At one point during the Kavanaugh hearings I thought Kamala Harris was going to go all Al Pacino in . . . AND JUSTICE FOR ALL on Grassley.

Chuck Grassley is out of order! The Republicans are out of order! This whole hearing is out of order!

At another point I was sure that Ben Sasse was going to ask Kavanaugh whether or not he thought Kamala Harris should get an hysterical-ectomy. They looked nothing so much like two guys in need of a testosterone injection and a high colonic.

Sen. Harris gives small men a big sad.

Truly, I have not done the kind of research into all the potential 2020 contenders’ positions on the issues yet, but I will be very surprised if I do not come out fully in Kamala Harris’ corner. And to my eyes she also appears to be by far the most electable of the bunch. The polls don’t show that yet, but the polls at this point are all about name recognition, and hers will only go up the closer we get to 2020.

Is it really a good move to show your opponent looking this cool?

Speaking of name recognition, Beto O’Rourke has now pulled into a statistical tie with Ted Cruz in Texas despite upwards of a third of Texans having never heard of him. But I think polls will need to show him up at least five points before I am going to buy into Texas turning blue this cycle. The Texas voter suppression tactics are very effective, and I could easily see them costing the Democrat 4-5 points. But it is funny to see Cruz panicking. Distributing pictures of a long haired O’Rourke and mentioning that he once had a DUI was pretty pathetic considering we have some pretty embarrassing old pictures of Ted Cruz, too, and we know that he killed between 8 and 36 people in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1963 and 1972.

Ted Cruz’s baby pictures are really awful

I am guessing that the Cruz campaign’s internal polls are even worse for him than are the public polls we have been seeing.

Speaking of polls, Donald Trump has now slipped into the 30’s in three new polls out this past week. One is an anomaly, but three is a trend. And they coincide with changes to the generic ballot that has put Democrats up 8–9. Being up 8–9 is a world away from 5–6 in generic ballot polling, which tends to move very slowly. Were it not for all those effective voter suppression tactics I just mentioned, I’d see Democrats as a near lock to pick up 30+ seats in November. But I just cannot tell whether or not the fix will be even more in now than it has been the past few cycles.

Ehhhh, not so much.

Speaking of fixed or rigged elections, I noticed that on again/now off again non-Democrat Bernie Sanders ran in and won the Vermont Democratic Primary, then immediately declined it. This is Bernie’s old trick, and everyone by now should understand that he’s right up there with Donald Trump when it comes to accusing others of doing the things he does (they both also share an aversion to releasing their tax returns). After all, Bernie Sanders, a well known demonizer of super-delegates, is still the only person to ever attempt to convince super-delegates to overturn the popular vote in a presidential primary.

Speaking of the delegates that are super, the Democratic National Committee responded to the election of a sociopathic Republican demagogue by getting rid of the only barrier Democrats had to prevent the nomination of a sociopathic Democratic demagogue. And they did it while conspicuously not getting rid of the single most undemocratic thing in our entire system: caucuses. It never ceases to amaze me how Democratic leadership always knows exactly the right way to make a bad situation worse. A little over 26,000 people participated in the Washington state caucus. Nearly 700,000 people voted in the Washington state primary. But Washington only uses the caucus to distribute their delegates, so Bernie, who won the caucus, got 74 delegates, while Hillary Clinton got 27. Clinton then won the far more democratic primary, which netted her zero delegates.

Jayne calculates caucus math

Anytime 26,000 people are making the decision for 700,000 people, that’s a bad situation.

I totally lost my head over HEREDITARY

Speaking of bad situations, you definitely do not want to marry into the Graham family. No movie in my adulthood has scared the living shit out of me like HEREDITARY did. And it did this with only one jump scare in the whole movie, and with hardly any of the gore that has become de rigueur in horror movies. It was simply a never-ending dread festival of a family drama until about the last third of the movie, by which time I was a nothing but a jangling raw nerve just from watching how this dysfunctional family could tear the hide off one another with a casual remark. This is a horror movie where the scariest thing is when the characters talk to each other. When they got together for a family dinner halfway through the movie, I wanted to scream, “GOD, NO, DON’T SIT DOWN TO DINNER WITH EACH OTHER!!!!! EAT IN YOUR ROOMS. STARVE YOURSELVES. DO ANYTHING BUT TALK TO EACH OTHER AGAIN!”

“Is there something wrong with your salad, mom?”

Seriously, this is one freaky, fucked up movie. It’s an Oscar caliber family drama about grief and mental illness wedded to a psychological horror movie on the order of THE EXORCIST. (Side note: it totally held up on a second viewing, and even improved once I no longer had to worry that I was going to jump out of my skin; expect me to stump hard for it and Toni Collette come Oscar time).

Pay it forward, people. Always pay it forward.

Speaking of the stumping, this is my wife’s latest Donor’s Choose project for her Akron City Schools classroom. I have no shame about this; you should donate.

As common as a cold, which is something we’d also like to ban

Speaking of having no shame, Brett Kavanaugh said that an assault weapons ban was unconstitutional because assault weapons are now “too common” to ban them. Hey, didn’t Laudanum (opium) used to be common and available without a prescription, too?

It’s marked as ‘poison’, but it’s got a dose for babies!

But no lie is too transparent for Republicans anymore, and “shame” is just a random collection of letters with a meaning they cannot discern. I suspect that when the now common protection for preexisting conditions appears before the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh is going to rather conveniently forget all about his legal argument of commonality.

And finally, speaking of lies and a lack of shame . . .

HEY, BOB WOODWARD DID A BOOK! WOULD YOU READ IT TO ME?
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