POKING AROUND: 12-11-24

Today’s topic is Small Victories. Given that the next four years are going to suck - sometimes majorly, sometimes less so, but things will suck every day - we will have to look for wins where we can find them. Whatever size they are. Those wins are going to sustain us through four years of the dumbest motherfuckers in history fucking up our country every way they can.

Soooo...

Kari Lake will not be ambassador to Mexico! She lost again, after losing for governor and for Senate. She’s the Bimbo of MAGAt Baloney. Someone with a Dunning-Kruger score so high it must be astronomical - she’s convinced she’s a fucking genius and she’s even dumber than Trump. When you consider the kinds of campaigns she did - going for the lowest thing she could find, like saying Rueben Gallego was somehow deficient because his father was in prison, her dogma’s being run over by her karma. She’s every Santa Monica New Age yuppie bimbo I’ve ever wanted to watch being thrown off the end of the Santa Monica Pier in a winter storm. And now she can’t even get an appointment in the Dumbest Fucking Political Administration in History. I love it when shitbirds like Kari “get theirs.” She was well past her Peter Principle high point when she was the bimbo news reader.

Trump’s not getting off in New York State! Both New York City DA Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James have told him to fuck off. They’re not going to drop the case where he became a 34-felonies convicted criminal, or where his criminal scam, the Trump Organization, got slammed with a $454 million civil fraud judgment. As Bragg said, “President-elect immunity does not exist.” AG James said that a civil case does not pose a burden to his future presidency. So remember, the way you describe the fat old asswipe who’s going to be an illegal resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 40 days is “Convicted felon 34 times alleged president Donald Fuckhead Trump.” As Joyce Vance put it, speaking of Bragg, “His courage should inspire us. It is a measure of the courage we are all capable of. We do not have to accept Donald Trump and the demise of the rule of law as inevitable.”

Further on about the New York cases: A one sentence order from SCOTUS: “The application for stay addressed to Justice Alito and referenced to the Court is denied.” With that one line, the Court, acting through Justice Alito (!!), denied review of a New York ruling that affirmed the gag order in Trump’s Manhattan criminal case. After the guilty verdict in Trump’s criminal case, Judge Merchan left in place portions of his gag order limiting what Trump could say about court staff, jurors, prosecutors, or members of their families. As Harry Litman observed on Talking Feds, the Supreme Court wasn’t prepared to act proactively to protect Trump from the orders and the power of a New York Superior Court judge, at least when it came to what he could and could not say. That means that even a sole judge like Merchan inside a county courtroom can continue to hold the most powerful man in the country answerable to his rulings.

(AP): President-elect Donald Trump is promising expedited federal permits for energy projects and other construction worth more than $1 billion. But like other Trump plans, the idea is likely to run into regulatory and legislative hurdles, including a landmark law (The National Environmental Policy Act signed by Nixon, for those not in the know) that requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impact before deciding on major projects. In a post on his Truth Social site Tuesday, Trump said anyone making a $1 billion investment in the United States “will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.” File under Future Small Victories when his ginormous ass gets slammed in court over this.

No small victory here - unless somehow House Democrats manage to kill this - but it is further proof that Harry Truman was right when he said “The only ‘good Republicans’ are pushing up daisies,” back in 1948: House Republicans have tucked a provision into a must-pass defense bill that would strip health care from military families’ transgender kids, putting parents in a position of having to choose between their careers in the military and providing medically necessary health care for their loved ones. The language slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act, which the House is voting on later this week, is buried on page 399 of the 1,813-page bill. Republicans added it at the last minute, after Democrats had worked with them to help craft the legislation. It’s just one sentence: “Medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization may not be provided to a child under the age of 18.” MAGA Mike Johnson said Tuesday that he’s “proud” of the NDAA bill and specifically pointed to its provision that blocks TRICARE, the military’s health care program, from covering the costs of gender-affirming health care for servicemembers’ kids. “We banned TRICARE from prescribing treatments that would ultimately sterilize our kids,” he told reporters at a press conference. Republican candidates spent a whopping $215 million on ads vilifying transgender people in this election cycle — and they’ve now found a way to tie trans issues to legislation that authorizes federal spending for the military. They are such fucking scum, each and every one of them - and most definitely every mouth-breathing dumbassed ignoramus Republican voter. Fuck them all to hell.

Ending with good news: The American public trusts Dr. Anthony Fauci on healthcare issues over Donald Trump 45-32% and over RFK Jr. 45-30%; they trust Fauci over Elmo Muck 45-25%; over “Dr. Oz” 45-23%; over Jay Bhattacharya (COVID denier soon to be head of CDC) 45-15%; and over Marty Makary (COVID denier soon to be head of FDA) 45-14%. Basically, after January 20, you want to be sure to tell every MAGAt you know to follow the words of Trump’s science deniers exactly, while you do the exact opposite of that. Let Darwin decide!

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Thank you very much to those who have already done so.

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