Open Thread Dec. 5: This Is Why They Don’t Let Clowns Run the Circus

The Republican Death Star tax bill is not yet fully operational, because the House and Senate versions must be reconciled. The first think pitched overboard: some of the special deals granted to senators Susan Collins and Jeff Flake to win their votes.

The party has sold the bill with outright lies about whom it would help, but ran into a problem when an agency they previously liked, the Joint Committee on Taxation, said that even assuming absurd levels of economic growth result, the bill will still a $1 trillion to the deficit. So they are attacking the agency — killing the messenger is always the go-to move for conservatives, because they’re so fucking stupid — which might have the benefit of getting our illiterate treasury secretary in some hot water.

It takes intelligence to keep a lot of lies straight, which is why Trump doesn’t bother trying. Unfortunately, other people can’t get away with that, so now security aide K.T. McFarland has to answer for contradicting emails. Sadly for her, nobody is running interference for her idiocy as they do for Trump’s.

Just a reminder of what losers and mooks Trump hires: Paul Manafort was caught ghost-writing an op-ed defending his “work” in Ukraine. Mueller wants Manafort’s bail deal revoked.

Just a reminder that the conservative movement is a criminal enterprise: The National Rifle Association is another bond between Trump and the Russians. Remember, the NRA isn’t for gun owners, it’s for gun manufacturers, and some of them are Russian. They can’t sell their product in their own country. Why do we want them in ours?

Just a reminder that Donald Trump gives scum a bad name: After the pussy tape came out, the GOP tried to buy him off the ticket. Sadly, they balked at Trump’s price tag: $800 million.

On the Hollywood sex-harassment beat, Dustin Hoffman got angry at a Tribeca Film Festival benefit when John Oliver asked Hoffman about complaints against him. Hoffman’s “apology” in part read that the allegation of groping a 17-year-old intern “isn’t representative of who I am,” to which Oliver said, “It’s that kind of response to this stuff that pisses me off because it is reflective of who you were if it happened and you’ve given no evidence to show that it didn’t happen.” If only there was an American interviewer who had his balls.

More importantly, actor/Scientologist Danny Masterson finally got the heave-ho from a Netflix series he was on. Despite four rape allegations that the LAPD has stalled because Scientology is a powerful criminal organization posing as a religion, a Netflix exec sealed Masterson’s fate when one of his victims approached the exec at a kids’ soccer game and asked why Masterson wasn’t fired. The exec told her, “Because we don’t believe the victims,” and she told him, “I’m one of them.” And yet some people want me to believe that the karmic wheel does not dispense justice.

Finally, the News Journal took time out from its busy schedule of pretending it can help solve the opioid crisis to print an actual interesting story about a 17th-century archaeological site discovered near Lewes.