Jason Kelce will never pay for another drink in Philadelphia. He stole the show at the Eagles victory parade yesterday, dressing up like a Mummer (somebody in the Avalon String Band had saved an old costume big enough to fit him), engaging with fans along the route and giving a barn-burning, expletive-riddled speech calling out just about everybody who ever doubted his team. Unfortunately the Eagles will probably still be playing when New Year’s 2019 rolls around, or Kelce would be invited to do it all again as an official Mummer. He even plays the baritone saxophone, so he could earn his keep.
The fallout from the White House wife beater continues, as if harboring a wife-beater even makes the list of top 100 outrages emanating from this White House. More interesting than all the posturing by pundits is the apparent source of Rob Porter’s belated ouster: Trump-loving shit stain Corey Lewandowski, whom I would have guessed would beat his wife if only he had one. The whole crew is a bunch of rageaholics. I’d be surprised only if turns out one of them doesn’t beat his wife.
Joint Finance Committee hearings continue in Dover, an the State News’ Matt Bittle is keeping tabs. Yesterday educators wanted to know why special-ed costs are going up faster than the rest of the budget, and when they didn’t get the answer they wanted they sprang into action and announced they will study the issue. My favorite part of Bittle’s story is Harris McDowell (D-Wilmington and sometimes Middletown) wondering if we couldn’t just take some of the students out of special ed to save money. He’s running on 80-proof fumes at this point.
Nobody wants to admit it, because supposedly Americans would never be able to stand the shock of finding out our “democratic” voting system is a sham, but evidence keeps growing that the Russian hacks into voting systems might have included manipulating vote totals. This is an amusing case of people looking at all sorts of complicated explanations for how Trump won while avoiding the simplest and most obvious — they cheated. If you apply Occam’s Razor, that’s the simplest explanation for why it took only 80,000 votes in just the right places to give him a wide Electoral College victory despite a 3 million-vote loss in the popular vote, by far the largest deficit of any popular-vote loser to assume the office.
We have a new challenger in the What’s Wrong With Trump sweepstakes: Ambien abuse. Someone noticed that, amid that phony doctor’s report about Trump’s excellent health — the best health of any human, ever, except for a couple of now-vanished bone spurs — was a note that he sometimes used Ambien. The well-known side effects would explain both his faulty memory and his mush-mouth.
Finally, as the person who does the laundry at my house, I would like to note the difference between conservatives and shit stains: Shit stains are easier to remove. Case in point: Editorial cartoonist Sean Delonas, who used to draw for the New York Post and, once that gig ended, went to work for Cagle, a syndicator with a conservative bias (they distribute the columns by WDEL’s Rick Jensen that sometimes run in TNJ). He outdid himself this week, drawing a cartoon so racist that when the conservative-leaning Albuquerque Journal (yes, conservastupids, right-leaning newspapers not only exist, they are common) ran it they got condemned by an enormous number of New Mexicans, 47% of whom are Hispanic, as well as both the state’s senators. The clueless editorial page editor — one of the side effects of the death of print journalism has been the elevation of stone cold morons to important jobs — said she thought it would stimulate discussion. Most of the discussion ought to be about removing her from her job. For those who can’t click the link, the cartoon shows a white couple being held up by gang members labeled “MS 13” and the guy saying, “I think they prefer to be called Dreamers… or future Democrats.” Right there we get to the real reason Republicans are against immigration — they are convinced Democrats just want them to beef up their voting rolls. And why wouldn’t they think that? That’s the only reason a Republican would want immigrants — that, plus they’ll work cheaper than minimum wage.