What Fresh Hell Is This?

Filed in National by on February 1, 2017

A Guest Post from Alby Damned

We don’t know what the ratings on last night’s “Apprentice: Supreme Court” edition are, but the winner is Neil Gorsuch, a religion-loving, cop-loving Coloradan. Think Antonin Scalia without the obnoxious personality flaws. This AP report draws on interviews with people in Colorado who have worked with him, and truth be told it sounds as if Trump could have done much worse.

So what do Senate Democrats do now? Has the public’s spine-donation program worked? Don’t count on it. Talking Points Memo runs down the political implications of the pick and what Democrats might do. Short version: They’re cautious. Betcha didn’t see that one coming.

While the rubes watched the TV, a draft of a presidential order targeting legal immigrants on public assisstance for deportation made the rounds in Washington. The leaked release follows the same pattern as the original immigration crackdown order, which leaked early in the week before being signed Friday.

The media still doesn’t know how to deal with the Trumpocalypse, but at least they’re policing each other for egregious kow-towing. The editor of The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by noted immigrant Rupert Murdoch, was outed for directing his reporters to use mealy-mouthed language to avoid angering the popular vote loser.

Details are coming out about Trump’s first drone strike, the one that left a Navy SEAL dead in Yemen. How’d it go? “Almost everything went wrong,” an unnamed senior military intelligence official said. Contrary to earlier reporting, the raid was Trump’s first clandestine strike — not a holdover mission approved by President Barack Obama. The mission involved “boots on the ground” at an al Qaeda camp near al Bayda in south central Yemen, where an MV-22 Osprey experienced a hard landing near the site, injuring several SEALs, one severely. The tilt-rotor aircraft had to be destroyed. A SEAL was killed during the firefight on the ground, as were some noncombatants, including women and an 8-year-old girl.

You might have missed it amid the rest of the blundering, but Trump has added Germany to his Targets of Wrath list. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones explains why, and why it’s mostly just hot air.

The old adage claims sports don’t build character, they reveal it, which doesn’t say much for bicycle racers. Having apparently run out of ways to enhance the human body, the sport’s never-ending search for the perfect cheat is now concentrating on the machine– think hidden motors and electromagnets inside the rims. As unsporting as it sounds, I want to know when I’ll be able to add one to my bike. It’ll come in handy on the hills.

Alby Damned is the nom de guerre of retired journalist and talk show host Al Mascitti. He lives in Hockessin.

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Comments (7)

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  1. Jason330 says:

    I guess we’ll get four years of hearings about that botched raid, right? About how the planning was rushed for political reasons and how thoughtlessly Seals were fed into a meetgrinder so President tiny hands could prove his dick still gets hard.

  2. nemski says:

    @Jason330: The cold meds kicking in?

  3. Jason330 says:

    That sonnet took two hours to compose. So…I guess

  4. bamboozer says:

    Heard that there are already sufficient DINO votes to kill a filibuster on Gorsuch, suspect he’ll lie fluently like justice Roberts at his hearing and claim he’s “above politics”. At which point they’ll lay a wreath on Scalia’s grave that proclaims “He Is Risen”.

  5. Dana says:

    I’m just disappointed that President Trump didn’t nominate Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court.

  6. Dana says:

    Hmmm, I guess I’m not banned anymore, ’cause I got a short one through. 🙂

    I can’t remember her name, but a lady with some position with moveon.org was on MSNBC this morning, telling us that the Democrats who boycotted the committee votes were ‘catching up’ to the Democratic base. Well, maybe she’s right, but the Democratic senators just shot themselves in the foot. Orrin Hatch passed the nominations through committee by suspending the rules, providing just the example of backbone that Mitch McConnell will need to use the ‘nuclear option,’ which he previously said was off the table.

    By the way, while I sort of like the new masthead, the correct translation would be Либералы в Делавэре, pronounced Lib-er-al’-y v Del-a-ver’-ye; try to run the ‘v’ right into the D, to make it sound, to American ears, like one word. What your masthead uses for an ‘a’ is actually a ‘d’ in Russian, the ш is pronounced “sh”, the я is a palatalized form of ‘a.’

    Here’s a good Russian keyboard.

    Пожалуйста!

  7. nemski says:

    Oh, we had a correct translation, but we opted for it to be readable in English.