I’ve been an advocate of BYU football all season long. The Cougars are physical, they’re smart, they have playmakers and they play with energy. So how come, faced with open dates the next two weekends, are they not taking Washington up on its offer to play in Seattle this weekend?
The Huskies are the best team west of Ames, Iowa. Or the Cougars are. One of the two. Both schools could use this win to advance to the playoff or an NY6 bowl. Of course, the loser would be out. But isn’t that why you play?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more impressive BYU team than this one, at least not since the national champs. What I don’t understand is how an administration looks its players in the eye and says we’d rather you not play so as to not jeopardize our position in the playoff standings. In other words, we do not believe in you.
Another Day Of Trump
Random Thoughts:
*Seeing as how Donald has reacted with continued recalcitrance to every judicial or election official beatdown in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, I’m beginning to form a better understanding about how he reacted all those times women told him no.
*I never felt off-base in assuming that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. Now, seeing how brazenly Trump is willing to jettison the U.S. Constitution and democracy itself in order not to lose his home on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., I’m quite sure of it. There is no deed Trump won’t be in favor of if the consequences of not doing that deed would be ruinous for him. He’s the greatest sociopathic narcissist of our lifetime.
*Remember when Sidney Powell was the lawyer for both the White House and Trump, spewing his lies about hacked election machines in a presser as the warm-up act for Rudy and the Dye-Sweats? Well, she’s already been consciously uncoupled from the White House and Trump in less than one week. As someone tweeted, “She only lasted .67 Scaramuccis.”
Oh, and Kayleigh McEnany is maybe the one person in the White House who is as shameless a liar as the president.
*The judges acknowledge that one comes from actor/director Ken Olin. There’s also Democracy Dyes In Darknessand Ru-dye Giulianiand Just For Mendacity.
As damaging generationally as the Trump presidency has been, something Susie B. notes here almost daily, it has also been a comic goldmine. If the country survives, we’ll always have Rudy Giuliani to thank for offsetting the grim malevolence of thugs such as William Barr and Mike Pompeo.
Also, The New York Times asked hairdressers what was going on with Rudy’s scalp. No one suggested Rudy got his hair colored at Four Seasons Total Scalpscaping, but many thought he’d done a last-minute touch-up of his sideburns with mascara or even shoe polish.
There Will Be Blood?
Those wondering how this post-election cycle will all play out would do well to read (or re-read) Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, or William Goldman’s Lord Of The Flies or George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Or perhaps watch the final moments of the 1972 Olympic men’s gold-medal basketball game between the USA and the U.S.S.R.
When the time comes that adherence to the rules or law fails to benefit the party in power, it has a choice: adhere to those rules and lose power or simply make up new rules. And then the side that was not in power but had the rules on its side has a choice to make. Suck it up or resort to a defiant act, anywhere from publicly refusing your silver medals or stabbing Caesar in the back (we repeat: Brutus was not a traitor; to Caesar, perhaps, but not to Rome).
Donald Trump just lost his own ordered recount of the ballots in Georgia (it took Notre Dame two-plus years to lost to Georgia twice; Trump just accomplished the feat in two weeks). Everything he’s tried in Michigan is going nowhere. And yet he still won’t back down. He’s going to lean on willful William Barr to turn this into a Dept. of Justice issue.
He won’t back down. He won’t concede. Maybe it’s just that he knows what waits for him in the abyss.
He keeps firing people at the tops of departments who might get in his way and replacing them with toadies. But here’s the thing: Those toadies give orders and you cannot fire everybody. Eventually, men (mostly men) in positions of influence or enforcement must decide for themselves: Secret Service personnel, the National Guard, the military. Some men in these roles are loyal to Trump and may just defend him in his White House bunker. Many more than that, we feel, are not loyal and will not. It’s just a matter if Trump will leave office with (even more) blood on his hands (than the 250,000 Covid-19 deaths).
We don’t see Trump going gracefully. But he IS a coward, so he’d never stand and fight himself.
Tucker, A Man And His Scheme
It’s been a fun parlor game: How far will the Fox News millionaire on-air person be pushed before he or she abandons his or her sycophantic ways of Trumpiness? Neil Cavuto got off the Trump train long ago. Shepherd Smith formally exited in the summer of 2019 and recently resurfaced at CNBC.
Earlier this Brian Kilmeade of “Fox and Friends”, a show title Trump construed as being attuned directly to him, said something about there being no fraud in the voting process. But Tucker Carlson? Did you really ever expect to see Tucker Carlson defy Trump? Happened last night.
Tucker Carlson calls out Sidney Powell, saying he asked her for evidence to support her election fraud claims, but "she never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page."
If you actually watch Tucker’s rant, it’s hilarious in its irony. First, he calls the alleged theft of this election from Trump “the single-greatest crime in American history” (I’ll wager the widows of Lincoln, JFK and everyone who died on 9/11 might dispute that). Then he says, “A lot of people with impressive-sounding credentials are frauds.” HA!
But here, finally, Tucker finally comes out and says that the show kept contacting Sydney Powell for evidence and that she never, ever provided evidence of her allegations.
So what happens next? Tucker’s minions abandon him. The nest has been attacked! The hive is agitated.
lmao at magaites turning on tucker carlson bc they finally realize that he's just a millionaire working for billionaires who occasionally spouts populist-sounding rhetoric for branding purposes. welcome to what everyone else already knewpic.twitter.com/iebJ1wQnMX
But by sending out this tweet they only further make the point that Fox News is a company run by the billionaire class where millionaire hosts schill for them to (almost always) dupe well-meaning middle- to lower-class white folks. It’s the Bob Rumson strategy all over again.
A Modest Proposal
Let’s game it out to the WPC: Worst Possible Circumstance. Somehow Barr and Trump and the Supreme Court obviate 244 years of democracy and prevent the inauguration of President Joe Biden (happy 78th birthday, by the way).
Here’s what we’d suggest happen next: The “Hollywood liberals” and the “social justice warriors” in the NBA and NFL should simply stop working. Movie studios and actors/producers/directors, most of whom do not support Trump, should simply stage a walkout. Same with NBA and NFL players who feel the same.
How would this country be without TV shows, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Showtime, HBO and the NBA and NFL to constantly distract us? I guess PlayStations will become even more expensive on the black market, but besides that, the president would have a lot of frustrated and not-distracted Americans on his hands. There’d be more fighting in the streets.
We’d love to see this (not so much the fighting in the streets, but the artists and athletes who oppose Trump simply walking out until he follows suit). Could it happen? Doubtful. Should it? Yes.
Cramer’s Epiphany
SOTS in less virusy times
We don’t watch CNBC any more except for occasionally our three guys on “Squawk On The Street”: Carl Quintanilla, David Faber and Jim Cramer. Now, ever since the pandemic began Carl has been subtly subversive on his Twitter feed. He never quite comes out and says anything against MAGA himself, but he’ll retweet people who have something of efficacy to say about how the virus is being handled, etc.
Faber, you can tell, is no fan of Trump on TV but he keeps most of his comments clipped and never uses the president’s name. He’ll dryly comment on something that is utterly ridiculous without getting into a lather.
Cramer is Cramer. Sometimes he’ll go to far sarcasm but he never, like his partners, directly excoriates the president. However, in the past day or two on his Twitter feed Cramer, under the guise of saying that we need a steady government for stable markets, has begun to warn his followers of the coup that is openly being attempted right before our eyes.
i know i am getting ZERO traction here but nobody believed that Trump would ever be president and now few believe his tweets that he's going nowhere. I think that's ill-advised…
yes i am concerned about the idea of two presidents. If you aren't you must not be following the president who believes that he won pretty big and it was rigged and i think the Justice Department will agree.
So I guess it’s good that Cramer is saying this. On the other hand, these are three very savvy men who for years would allow Trump officials such as Larry Kudlow, Steve Mnuchin and Peter Navarro to come onto their show and blatantly lie to the American public. They gave them a forum and rarely gave any push back. Now, they don’t book these people. But simply by being on their air they gave them legitimacy.
Navarro, for one, often cited an economics book as his guide to his own machinations while never mentioning that he’d actually written that tome under an assumed name. Seems, I dunno, fraudulent.
Anyway, this has not been a very fun blog today. Sorry. We’re writing it in the wee hours. You’ll have to count on Susie B., Wally, Don, Jacob and Micah for the chuckles today.
With the first pick in the 2020 NBA Draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves selected Anthony Edwards. In his two most famous roles, as Goose in Top Gun (F-14 Tom Cat dog fight war games) and Dr. Mark Green on E.R., he died (cancer). So be careful, T-Wolves.
Our favorite pick came in at No. 48: Nico Mannion, a 6’3 red-headed Italian guard via the University of Arizona and before that Pinnacle High School (same school as Spencer Rattler). He’s a Donte DiVencenzo doppelgänger. Nico’s dad, Pace Mannion, played at the University of Utah, briefly in the NBA and then for Shampoo CLEAR of the Italian League. The NBA needs more white-guy mustaches.
This is real. From 20 years ago. The president thought sexual assault, as part of a skit, was funny.
Orange Weary
So if it feels as if the entire civilized world (minus 70 million misguided or ignorant or deluded or racist citizens) is waiting for one 74 year-old spoiled child to get over the fact that his feewings wuh hoit, well, that’s where we stand. The president has virtually gone into hiding (unless you are White House staff or a caddy) as he sits and stews and waits to see if his latest attempt to cheat a system (in this case, the U.S. Constitution) will work out.
For us it was telling this morning that CNBC’s Jim Cramer even publicly acknowledged that Donald Trump has no intention of going anywhere. He’s just hoping that his 70 million or so will continue to buy the blatant lie (evidence of these people doing so is ubiquitous) while his minions and sycophants work hard to manufacture just a shred of evidence to make it easier to sell.
Who here gets the emails? The Pence email yesterday? The kids' emails? Lets face it, the president wants Pa, Mich, Ariz, Ga. thrown out and won't take no for an answer
Trump’s not going anyhwere. Not willfully, at least. Meanwhile, 1,964 Americans died of the coronavirus yesterday. All we can hope for is that with their deaths a lot of red baseball caps were left orphaned.
There’s a part of us that wonders daily: Will these Americans one day wake up? The ones who insist that they’re not racist, or that they love America. Why are they so blind? Oh, that’s right. Because if the Democrats win black welfare mommas will take all their hard-earned money.
(Ever heard of Enron? Halliburton? Goldman Sachs?)
Here’s something to consider: We’ll soon be north of 2,000 dead Americans per day. And a president with no intention to do anything about it. And even that isn’t changing the will or mood of his base. You have to wonder just how many Americans would need to die daily for them to come around to the fact that he’s a fantastically mendacious, narcissistic and incompetent megalomaniac and buffoon because apparently 2,000 a day isn’t enough. 10,000 a day? I still doubt it.
So if that many people die per day and his base won’t be moved, then there’s no chance he’ll be moved to concede. He’s taking this full TWO SOLARIUMS. Watch.
DDS For The Cards
About two weeks ago another of our high school friends, one who does not sit home alone and write songs about the environment, informed us that he was working on the grills of two Arizona Cardinals. Our pal is not a mechanic but rather a dentist… so, okay, a tonsorial mechanic.
And he happens to be the team dentist for the Arizona Cardinals. So he sent us text telling us that he’d worked on the grills of quarterback Kyler Murray and wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins just a day or two earlier. And then what happens the following Sunday? The Hail Murray pass. You saw it.
Now, we’re not saying that Doc Zach’s expertise in the dental arts is what led to these extraordinary feats by both Murray and Hopkins, but then we’re not saying that it didn’t, either.
It’s just the damn truth: we have very talented friends.
The Worst Wing (Cont.)
A photo like this would knock the Dems out of presidential politics for at least two election cycles. In TrumpWorld, it barely lasts 24 hours.
In today’s New York Times, a contest for “The Worst of Trump” which, sadly, has become an annual thing. When we do our own rankings, we use a sliding scale of 1) mendacity and 2) effectiveness. So while Rudy is high up on No. 1, he’s so criminally incompetent that he’s low on No. 2. Herewith, our rankings:
Donald Trump (actually, he’s lower, but if we don’t put him at No. 1 he’ll pout and refuse to leave the contest).
William Barr (because of No. 2)
Mike Pompeo (because of No. 1)
Moscow Mitch (because of both)
Paul Manaforte (gone but not forgotten)
Roger Stone (was gone, now isn’t)
Sean Hannity (chief of propaganda; this is a team award that should be shared in parts by Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters)
Mike Pence (the Sgt. Schultz of this outfit)
Stephen Miller (probably deserves to be higher, but we can Nazi whom he’d actually overtake).
Rudy Giulani (because we need to reward comic relief)
It’s funny how red-staters ramble on about terrorists from ISIS or the Taliban, or about “GYY-na” as threats to our democracy. I’m not sure most of us understand how close we came to losing our democracy two weeks ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vEyHfhq8jg
We were watching a documentary on PBS (we’re such elitists) last night about the rise of the Nazis, and there were three important components (besides men such as Hitler, Goehring and Himmler). First, the destruction of the free press. Second, the elimination of an independent judiciary. Third, the eradication of meaningful elections.
How we doing?
Do you think scenes such as what happened above in Washington, D.C., would be less plentiful if Trump had won? It’s a sad thing when 70 million Americans are able to brain-wash themselves into believing that their righteousness makes everything alright.
Graham, Cracker
Lindsey Graham, asked yesterday why a Senator from the state of South Carolina was phoning election officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada. “I’m trying to preserve our democracy,” said Graham.
Exactly the opposite.
A Hero In Michigan
Everyone who has ears and a mind needs to listen to this…
I’ve been saying since forever (this is a blog, after all; bloviate, repeat, bloviate some more…) that Donald Trump will not depart with grace or willingly.
As long as Moscow Mitch, Graham Cracker and the rest of the Senate GOP refuse to accept the election results (even Brian Kilmeade of “Fox & Friends” suggested the Trumpeters help the Biden transition this morning), as long as Brett Kavanaugh is still out there doing Fireball shots in his black robe, and as long as the Duck Dynasty doppelgängers are taking out journalists with sucker punches, he’ll continue to grasp at his eddying power.
We’ll see if I’m wrong, but I still think it’s going to take an act of some combination of the Secret Service, National Guard, the A-Team, Jason Bourne and perhaps even the Irish Guard to physically removed Trump from the White House. I just want to see the look on his face when this happens.
Just what Brooklyn needs: another 30ish bro with a hipster beard thinking he’s about to conquer the world.
Actually, TMZ, which pays for information but is almost always on target, reports that 2018 NBA MVP James Harden no longer wants to play for an owner who is a Trump fan.
Been waiting for this. When enough NBA and NFL players of enough stature begin refusing to play for owners, or in leagues, where Trump is supported by that league’s power structure, we will begin to have meaningful change. Now, you say, what right is it of theirs to force owners to change or mask their political opinions?
It isn’t, of course. But it is their right not to help these rich old white men get richer from their labor. Go play in Europe. Or Australia. If you are a ‘baller. And if you are an NFL player, gather ’round with others and create an alternate league. The NFL would wither on the vine without African-Americans. Put them out of business.
If you visit Twitter, you’ll find nurses from South Dakota to El Paso sharing personal stories of patients who refuse, up to the point of being intubated, to believe that they have COVID-19. Anything but, including lung cancer, is acceptable in their minds.
Thousands of Americans dying while, with their final gasps, still refusing to accept that the coronavirus is more than a Donald Trump punchline. Of course, it’s not the reality of the virus that they’re actually refusing to accept. It’s the reality that Trump was a con all along, that their paradigm of American-ism was never quite in keeping with the values of liberty and justice for all.
So they’d rather just fool themselves into believing they died of a hoax.
Look What’s Up: Bitcoin*
*Hate to tell you, Susie B., but it’s true
Lots of stocks have had banner 2020 years: Peloton, Moderna, Tesla and Zoom to name just a few, are all up more than 100% since February (Why didn’t someone tell us?!?). But then there’s Bitcoin, or as we trade it, GBTC.
On March 16 GBTC was at a year-low of $5.01. This morning it’s at $19.59. I don’t understand it, either. But it’s like they always say, “The first rule of investing is ‘buy low, sell high.’ The second rule of investing? Never listen to me.
If you’re curious, the actual price of a Bitcoin from then to now is about 1,000 times what the price of a share of GBTC is.
By the way, my good friend A.J., armed with a high school education and a ton of moxie, phoned in early July and recommended we buy The Gap (GPS). It was at less than $12 a share then. Today it is above $24. Thanks, A.J.
Plant A Tree
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMcVT5RTCY
This is an original tune crafted by our old friend, Sorp. We’re hoping he sees this and files suit for unauthorized usage, as he has gone Howard Hughes on those of us who care about him. If you want to help, please click on it and give him some YouTube views and maybe even write a comment such as, “Is that the same bass line Led Zeppelin used in ‘Whole Lotta Love?’
There is a valuable message in this tune, by the way. Hope you listen.
The First Thanksgiving
So I was thinking about Thanksgiving and its origins. And, sure, you can visit the Wikipedia page and talk about Canadia in the 16th century or the Jamestown settlers in 1619 and I won’t fight you on that. The larger principle to remember is that the settlers were THANKFUL and to be thankful requires, I dunno, a little humility and grace perhaps?
Anyway, I don’t see a lot of that in the good ol’ USA anymore. What’s more, isn’t it funny how the Native Americans welcomed these uninvited settlers to their land and actually helped them to survive? And here were are, 400 years later, separating families from one another who are simply attempting to do the same thing? Interesting.
Higher Ground
I love Van Morrison. You’ll never encounter a more curmudgeonly, cranky live performer, and yet he writes songs such as this. That’s Cliff Richard, who just turned 80, sharing vocals with Van the Man.
Richard may be the most under-appreciated of all British artists on this side of the pond. Only two artists sold more singles in the history of the UK: the Beatles and Elvis Presley.
