WEEK THREE - KRAZEE DAY TWO

There are 140 days to the mid terms.

Today is primary election day in Georgia, where two varieties of Jaw-ja Republicans will be up for voter’s choice as the candidate to face off with Democrat Jon Ossoff in November for the U.S. Senate seat. One of these is what passes for a “more traditional” Southern Conservative, who’s endorsed by Governor Kemp. The other has made headlines repeatedly for... hiring a chief of staff accused of various violent acts... replacing said staffer with someone caught in a white nationalist group chat... making light of the January 6th insurrection attempt, calling it a “self-guided, albeit unauthorized,” tour of the Capitol... promoting the sick conspiracy theory that former President Biden ordered an attempted assassination of Trump... On Sunday night, Trump posted to Lies Anti Social an endorsement of the latter guy - Mike Collins - saying, “Mike is strongly supported by the most Highly Respected MAGA Patriots in Georgia and beyond.” Of course, there’s no possibility that the fact the other guy said in 2020 and Trump did lose Georgia had anything to do with it, right? Ah - we have a correction from the control room: Trump made clear in the post that Dooley’s refusal to promote conspiracy theories about the 2020 election was a disqualifier, complaining that Dooley “said that I lost Georgia in 2020 when, in actuality, the facts have now proven that I won by a lot!”.

Tol’ ya so: Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday the Senate will attempt to pass an extension of FISA 702 without the SAVE America Act attached, rebuffing Trump’s demand to link the two bills. Thune, who has repeatedly warned that letting FISA 702 expire poses a risk to national security, said he would try to move an extension of the controversial surveillance law as a stand-alone measure. “We will try and move 702 as soon as we feel like we have the votes to do it,” Thune told reporters. He told Punchbowl News on his way into the Capitol earlier Monday that it would be “unrealistic” to get the SAVE America Act passed simply by attaching it to an extension of FISA authorities.

I’m sooooo surprised: The TrumpDOJ gave the green light last week to a controversial mega-acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN, by Paramount Skydance, a media giant with a Trump-friendly CEO. But reports suggest they may have rushed the process and ignored the opinions of career officials. According to the Wall Street Journal, “A team of career lawyers who had spent months scrutinizing the deal was leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law, the people said.” However, ultimately the TrumpDOJ told this team they were closing the investigation before they had formally made a decision, and announced publicly it was their opinion the merger wouldn’t pose a threat to competition. Senior leaders at the TrumpDOJ, according to the report, “believed that Paramount Chief Executive Officer David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder and Trump ally Larry Ellison, persuasively addressed many of the staff’s questions,” including “how the combined company could meet its commitment to make 30 theatrical releases a year, given its increased debt load.” The TrumpDOJ statement reads: “The Antitrust Division conducted a thorough investigation to assess whether the proposed transaction would harm competition. The investigatory record indicated that the transaction will increase competition across the media and entertainment ecosystem, benefiting American consumers and workers.” Did you know cows can too jump over the moon and it really is made of green cheese?

Some people familiar with the matter believe the TrumpDOPJ approval of the Ellisons’ takeover of WBD Discovery was deliberately crafted to make it harder for state attorneys general to ask courts to stop it. But California AG Rob Bonta is reportedly about to do exactly that. The California suit against the merger is expected to drop anytime between now and t he end of the month. The takeover is expected to close as soon as the end of July, but California’s lawsuit could put things in the deep freeze while the issue is resolved if a California judge declares the issues raised are significant. We can trust they’ll qualify as such. The deal is also under antitrust review in Europe which would also put a freeze on finalization. Paramount’s failure to consume the deal by September 1 would result in the company paying multi-million dollar weekly penalties until they do - or walk away. We’re seeing the plain evidence the fix was in the whole time. The only question remaining is whether states can get the courts to step in. (FWIW, Yours Truly is one of over 10,000 Hollywood creatives who signed on to the complaint against the merger - it turns out I do have a dog in the fight. I dislike Putzes ever winning anything.)

Sundowning Grampa called for the impeachment of Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, after the lawmaker criticized his decision to pull out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in his first term, during his Saturday night Adderall Overdose. “Senator Jack Reed, a Dumocrat from R.I., lied when stating the the Deal we just made is not as good as the Obama disaster known as the JCPOA. Reed is either an outright fraud, or incompeten. The Obuma Deal was a road to a Nuclear weapon for Iran, cash and all, one of the worst and dumbest (hence Dumocrats!) Deals ever made by the U.S. Our Deal is a WALL against Iran ever having a Nuclear weapon, the complete opposite of Obuma. Impeach Jack Reed!”

Speaking of the Trump Surrender Documents, Trump and Corporal Couchfuck McGee electronically signed the MOU with Iran on Sunday, while Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, speaker of the Iranian Parliament, signed for Iran. The details of the memorandum will be released Tuesday or Wednesday, the officials said. The agreement is only the first step, one said, and then “real technical discussions” will begin later this week and will be led by Corporal Couchfuck, god help us all. “We’ll be releasing the text this week, and what everybody will see is that Iran doesn’t get a dime of money unless they perform their obligations, and the money that we’re talking about is fundamentally sanctions relief,” he said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday. Trump echoed those sentiments while meeting with French President Emmanual Macron in France for the G7 later Monday, saying the full agreement would be released “sometime after Friday.” This is the agreement t o agree to sit down and develop a plan of action to agree on further meetings to agree on other meetings to agree on something perhaps happening on November 4, 2026.

Barack Obama has taken a swipe at Trump’s emerging agreement with Iran, suggesting the president is trying to bully his way back to a deal that may end up looking remarkably similar to the one Trump spent years attacking.In an interview with ABC News, the former president said it was “doubtful” that any agreement negotiated by Trump would prove to be “significantly different” or a “significant improvement” on the 2015 nuclear accord brokered by his own administration. “It’s a reminder that on a lot of different foreign policy problems, the notion we can just bully our way or bomb our way to a solution may sometimes seem appealing,” Obama said, adding that it was better to create a diplomatic solution to avoid war. “You’d think we would’ve learned that lesson by now, but it seems like every so often we have to learn that lesson again.”

In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols wrote that - even without the details - “it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.” His article concludes, concludes: “The war leaves Iran battered, but more powerful and with more cash at its disposal, while it leaves America weaker, with important stocks of weapons depleted, and with its consumers paying the price for the war at the gas pump.” That is how one defines what the answer is to the question, “Who won?” The answer - no matter how the facts get arranged - is: “Not the United States.” Trump is now the American president who created the greatest decline in power and influence of the United States in the nation’s 250-year history.

Phillips O’Brien says of the agreement: “So, Trump signed a deal with the Iranians but is refusing to release its terms for days. Best bet is that he knows they are a massive defeat and is trying to set a completely false narrative by flooding the airwaves with misinformation for as long as possible.” I’m sure the DC Press Corpse will be busy this weekend slobbering all over Dear Leader’s “widdle mushwoom” to let us all know how magificently amazingly wonderful Dilbert’s Victorious Conclusion to HisWar truly is.

Uh-hmmm - tell us another one, maybe we’ll laugh: Grammy-winning and Emmy-nominated comedian Nate Bargatze only went to Donald Trump’s birthday cage match—and posed for a photo with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cheryl Hines - because UFC is his “favorite sport,” a source close to the comedian claimed (why is it dweeby guys who have spent their lives staying as far away as posible from the Jason Hokits hae such blood lust?) According to the source, the appearance was “not political.” The comic, currently America’s top-selling stand-up for his clean, profanity-free material, was spotted at the unprecedented cage-fighting spectacle on the White House’s South Lawn on Sunday, to the surprise of some of his anti-Trump fans. Bargatze, a devout Christian who grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, has remained mostly coy about his personal politics in interviews. (Sorry, you just spelled out your “politics” in detail with those facts. In 2024, Bargatze told The Washington Post that he isn’t apathetic about politics but is intentional about keeping it out of his comedy. “I actually enjoy politics,” he said at the time, “I don’t talk about them, but I enjoy them. I don’t think it’s what people are coming to me for.” In February, he posed with Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, an ally of Trump’s who strives to “fight wokeness” by dismantling DEI initiatives, limiting abortion care, and introducing legislation that prevents the “ideological indoctrination” of students by penalizing teachers for “pushing far-left ideology,” according to her website. Bargatze was meeting with Blackburn to discuss his proposed Nateland theme park, which he plans to open in his hometown of Nashville. A Redditor posted: “I sometimes wonder if some celebs have no idea about the amount of damage their reputation takes once they are in close proximity of Trump. It might not be immediate, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses audiences in some places. As one posyer put it: “There is no quicker way to torpedo your standing than sucking up to this administration.”

Here’s another smack, Dilbert: Trump’s plans to build a “National Garden of American Heroes” are being challenged in court, in a new legal bid to stop his MAGA-fication of Washington D.C.

Trump, 80, has bragged about building the statue garden in West Potomac Park, a space near the National Mall that already includes the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. Monday, a coalition of organizations, including the D.C. Preservation League, National Mall Coalition, National Parks Conservation Association, and The Cultural Landscape Foundation, sued to prevent the proposed statue garden in West Potomac Park from proceeding without congressional authorization. “The National Register-designated West Potomac Park is not available open space; it is part of the National Mall, which is one of the world’s finest achievements in civic landscape architecture, architecture, city planning, and art,” said Charles Birnbaum, TCLF’s president and CEO. The coalition filed its 44-page lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday against the Department of the Interior, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the National Park Service and its acting director Jessica Bowron. “The West Potomac Plan is unlawful. Congress has made clear that the National Mall is a “substantially completed work of civic art”—not a personal sandbox for each President to renovate however he likes,” the lawsuit reads.

And that doesn’t include the Arc d’Dilbert, which is its own can of worms for any Trumper who gets caught in that tar baby. In a letter sent Monday to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and two National Park Service officials, Independent Senator Angus King of Maine and Democratic congressman Jared Huffman of California outlined at least three federal laws the administration would be breaking if construction moves ahead. One is the Commemorative Works Act, which governs monuments on federal land in the capital. A 1912 law that flatly says structures “shall not be erected” on federal land in Washington without express congressional authority. The Height of Buildings Act also generally caps building heights in D.C. at 160 feet, while Trump’s arch would be 250 feet high if built. The letter warns that officials who use unauthorized funds on the project could face “suspension without pay, removal from office and, for knowing and willful violations, criminal fines and imprisonment.” Senator King, who’s been a practicing attorney for more than 50 years, called the project “stone-cold illegal,” adding it was “one of the clearest legal cases I’ve seen.”

Newly-released internal contractor estimates reveal that Trump’s Dance Hall project carries a price tag far exceeding what he has told the public, with taxpayers footing most of the bill. The Washington Post obtained a project summary prepared for the White House by contractor Clark Construction in early March that estimated the total construction cost at $600 million - $200 million more than the maximum figure Trump has ever cited publicly. The documents also show that roughly $307 million of that total was projected to come from federal agencies funded by taxpayers, including the Secret Service and the White House Military Office, while only $293 million was expected to come from private sources. “This is taxpayer-free,” Trump said on March 31. “We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.” By that date, the Post reported, federal agencies had already approved more than a dozen payments to Clark Construction totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds. Contracting and procurement experts who reviewed the documents for the Post said some government spending on security features falls within normal bounds: $155 million from the Secret Service; $149 million from the White House Military Office; $3 million from the Executive Residence. Congress has not authorized the project or allocated monies for it. The Secret Service and White House Military Office routinely fund security infrastructure at the White House complex. But they drew a clear line at what the documents appear to show: taxpayer money flowing into the ballroom structure itself. Stan Soloway, a former Pentagon acquisition official, said: “You can’t disentangle the entertainment space from all of the other parts that are in here. It’s one structure.” A former GSA official was more blunt about the use of Secret Service funds for demolition of the original East Wing, telling the Post: “That is a stretch. How is that something Secret Service should do and fund?”

For those wondering what in the actual fuck happened to the Reflecting Pool, a tale: when Dilbert announced he was painting it “American Flag Blue,” numerous experts warned that painting the bottom of the pool a dark color was effectively “painting it black,” and that the sun would warm the water sufficiently to cause vastly-increased algae growth resulting in massive algae booms filling the pool. Also that it would take less than a week in summer for the result to become obvious. As it did. Add the Reflecting Pool to the rest of Dilbert’s lifetime of failures as further proof that Everything Trump Touches, Dies.

The graft, corruption and criming metastasizes: HCR explained something interesting in her post last night about how Trump even scammed his own birthday party/barbarian contest/desecration:

“... at 9:30 Friday night, as Aram Roston and Joseph Gedeon of The Guardian reported, the UFC issued a press release saying that the cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, which emerged on Wednesday as an official sponsor of the event, would be the “Presenting Partner of a new $250,000 Performance of the Night bonus pool.” (For those keeping score at home, World Liberty Financial is the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, overseen by Zach Witkoff, the son of billionaire Steve Witkoff. The elder Witkoff is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and for peace missions, including to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.) Here’s the scam: “In addition to connecting World Liberty Financial directly to the White House, UFC is giving cash to World Liberty Financial. World Liberty Financial gives its crypto to the fighters. World Liberty Financial then invests the cash in U.S. Treasury bonds and keeps the interest.”

Remember, you are not the crazy ones, and we were made for these times. Regardless of what you may feel right now, act as if you believe that and redouble your efforts.

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” - Abraham Lincoln

We geese don’t care about your steenking political crises!

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