Everyone knows that Donald Trump has never had an original thought and that most of his insults are simply projection. You’d think the mainstream media would have noticed this by now, and investigated him for any of the complaints he has about someone else. For example, his constant drumbeat of “Joe Biden is old and feeble,” while true, is even more true of him, as as the Lincoln Project has demonstrated with a couple of videos showing his frequent foggy moments. It’s so bad that Trump himself claims it’s been doctored with AI. Sure it has. Hey, maybe this time you’ll finally defeat Barack Obama and win World War II.
Likewise, you’d think the mainstream media might have noticed by now that the gun lobby wants everyone to react to everyone else’s lethal potential by buying a gun. As this Philadelphia Inquirer article demonstrates, it’s working. I used to think it might change if some of these people got shot, but Rep. (short for “reprehensible”) Steve Scalise almost got his dick shot off and he’s still a gun-sucker.
Another Louisiana excrescence, MAGA Mike Johnson, this month’s Speaker of the House, released security camera footage of the Jan. 6 insurrection with the faces blurred because, he said, he didn’t want the Department of Justice using it to arrest anyone. This is performance-art bullshit, as the DOJ has had the footage for years, but it demonstrates that he leads a party of traitors.
More evidence that what we call “Congress” is actually a poorly managed circus: Virginia Rep. Nancy Mace gets a lot of air time because she’s better-looking and only intermittently as loony as MTG or Lauren Boebert, but she’s apparently just as far off the rails. A bunch of her staff, all of whom used to work for Trump, have quit, and one took the office popcorn machine with him. Now how are they going to run a circus without a popcorn machine? Apparently she demanded her staff schedule her a minimum quota of TV appearances to maintain her celebrity status. On the most recent, host Neil Cavuto of Fox News told her, “A lot of people feel that you’re a narcissist.”
I’ve mostly avoided reading about what’s going on in Gaza, partly because I don’t trust my ability to sort fact from propaganda and partly because I can’t figure out what Israel hopes to accomplish beyond killing children. But Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has offered the best guess I’ve seen yet on that second point: Netanyahu wants to destroy the tunnel system Hamas uses to hide the rockets with which it bombards Israel. That’s a big job. Analysts think the system consists of more than 500 km of tunnels, more than the London underground.
I have a fairly libertarian attitude about drugs, based on the historical fact that trying to ban them doesn’t work and most of the harm they cause is to their users. But I have noticed that it’s the legal ones that do the most residual problems. The societal miseries caused by alcohol are too long to list, and tobacco’s toll isn’t limited to second-hand smoke. The environmental damage caused by discarded cigarette filters is estimated to cost the world $26 billion annually.
On the local front, the four-year battle over Incyte’s construction plan in Alapocas is over. The company has shitcanned the expansion of its headquarters, which will please its neighbors but not the Chamber of Commerce.
The floor’s yours.