Matt Gatz is Not Even Old.

 

What in the world is with the button-nose no shift of genetics had given this weird, appalling man? The unnaturally pointed chin, the Suprise brows?  A man in his thirties should not look more weird and fucked up than a Las Vegas superstar in his--I don't know--70's? He seems like a bastard Wayne Newton or a mutant Chuck Woolery. 

Situation artificial, also pretty fucked up. 

This is a guy who has "too much hookers and blow" written all over his trampoline-tight face. Theory people in TrumpWorld do not even really love themselves.

UPDATE: Why does he try so hard to be pretty when he has this mind of his?

A Story for the Audience of One

 

WATCH: Vance explains that in the immediate aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, PA, he loaded all his guns and stood watch at his front door, ready to defend himself and familypic.twitter.com/08iVRkDz7A

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) October 31, 2024

JD Vance was not yet picked as Trump's running mate. Trump within moments of the shots fired was on his feet pumping his fist. No one would have thought that Trump was dead. No reasonable person would have inferred from a single nutter shooting at a political figure that, therefore, all political figures were endangered.  

I would not have even assumed all Republicans.

From this, it really seems to me that Vance is just too emotional to be considered for higher office. He relates himself as operating on adrenaline and immediately thinking he would need to resort to violence without seeking more information, which would have been forthcoming within a short duration. Do we really want someone who immediately segues into a knee-jerk hypervigilance to be in charge of anything? 

The Mystery of Bob and the Bear

 

You don't get weirder than RFK Jr. talking to Roseanne about dumping a bear in Central Park in an attempt to get ahead of a story about it. We have his version, I'll be interested to hear the real story. This man is a maniac.
pic.twitter.com/vPDE50yfqB

— TheRealThelmaJohnson (@TheRealThelmaJ1) August 4, 2024

You know, I love a good mystery and this whole scenario has several. The first being--did this actually happen? Yes, someone left a dead bear in Central Park 10 years ago, but RFK, Jr. is out of his mind and might think this is actually really funny even if he didn't do it. Conversely, now that he brings this up, it does seem like something that could happen to him. He is.... interesting. Let's call it that.

But if he did it....

Do I believe someone else hit and killed the bear? (Maybe, but mmmm?)  Do I think he might have been not-sober and hit it--and the story is blaming some random van-lady so he can remove himself from the actual deed? (The idea of a Kennedy just scooping up asphalt specials like Cousin Eddie out here is killing me.)

Is this a story you want on the internet? Especially if you are running for political office? And I don't mean president. Like, city council? Dog catcher? Probably especially not dog catcher.

How is it he is happening to tell this to MAGA superfan Roseanne Barr? (The best part is this is Roseanne freakin' Barr, and even she is shooting him looks like "You crazy son of a bitch!")

Why stage an accident?  And "just for yuks" makes no sense. You don't have to stage an "accident" with a roadkill animal. It's roadkill. Leave it on a road. People will assume hit and run and pay it no mind. This poor critter got left in the exact way and place to generate attention. That is very weird. Government resources got spent trying to figure this out.

Straight as a Plumb Bob

 

pic.twitter.com/4BdOaktzqU

— Rep. Paul Gosar, DDS (@RepGosar) August 30, 2021

I genuinely don't know what this is, and because Rep. Paul Gosar, DDS, is likely to get Tweet-yeeted eventually for insurrection stuff, I will screen cap it:

 It's a picture of himself, hand in pocket, apparently using an arrow to demonstrate that he is standing very straight. It reminded me at once of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, when the protagonist, Mary, advises her cousin Colin that he hasn't a hump at all and she thinks he's ridiculous. His back is as "strong and straight as any boy in Yorkshire" it is! 

Gosar also Tweets some other pics, which leads me to wonder if this is a game--I think I've got this right:

Of course, this is ableist crap and I don't want to play anymore--I have a touch of scoliosis myself (which causes my traps to look peculiarly pronounced and tilts my head forward a smidge, not that you'd know if I never said since few have seen me IRL), and Gosar is so healthy (like a horse, he says!) he doesn't even need ivermectin. And everyone bends at some point, or leans or changes position, so long as one doesn't have rigor mortis!

Without much more context, I'm at a loss to determine if this is a commentary on his health, his manhood, his "virtue", or whether he's trying to convince us all that his fingers are not at all long enough to be poking the bulge the arrow is pointing to through his pocket.

I think regardless of the picture, there's something very twisted about Gosar, and his family seems to think so, too. And he might not like to be called a white supremacist, but why are all these white supremacists right the hell with him? 

Many people can stand up physically straight. But that doesn't mean they aren't standing for crookedness, deceit and lies over and over again. 

UPDATE: And is this weirdo actually being like: "also I am straighter than these cactus", because my stars and garters I am not a Freudian analyst but really?

UPDATE 2: Wow! Okay, following on what commenter Eddie Blake said about the incel thing, I looked about and huh! So, a grown-ass man and actual elected representative of the people is going in for the goofy-ass aesthetic rantings of a shitposter? And yet, no, that's exactly where I think we are on the whole Republican decline deal. Clown shoes, shitposting, snake oil sales and Christianist Daesh.

Keeping the Confederate in Christmas

You know, I like to think of myself as a current events blogger, and so, I guess I'll start with what brought me to this really weird place, which is that Wake Forest cancelled their Christmas parade because people were going to protest the Confederacy floats. 

You can't have Christmas without those Confederacy floats, you know. If Antifa, Yankees in general,  or the revenuers show up, there goes Christmas. You take out the Daughters of the Confederacy and their world-famous pecan pies and Santa Claus and the Baby Jesus will boycott, and you can't have that. You are basically the Grinch that stole Dixie Christmas. (No shade to Christmas in Dixie, which gives shout outs to Chicago and California, and Motown and is basically blameless here. As far as I know.)

I did not know, because I am Northeast Philadelphia born and bred, that Confederate Christmas was a thing. I had no idea that a rich Christmas lost and found cause thing was going on.  This eerily intrigues me.  A revanchist memory capped with holly and ivy and associated with family and religion and good works might blot out the dark truth at the core of that society--if no one ever pointed out that it came to no good and the fight wasn't noble at all. It was beastly. As a nation, we should be looking back in horror, not with mistletoe and eggnog. What the entire fuck?

Anyway, we are still living with inequality born out of the enshrinement of racism that is still respected by jusqu'au bouters who believe that toppling bronze monuments raised in the 1950s and 1960s that celebrate a war of treason in defense of slavery over 150 years since Appomattox is somehow too soon.  

I have never felt like I had a war against Christmas (this is not a real thing, but people may have been conditioned to believe by umpty-gazillion movies or tv shows where Christmas had to be "saved" for some reason followed by Fox News conditioning) even if I have a war against Bad Christmas Muzak (which IMHO amounts to psyops against retail workers, thanks!) But making Christmas a signifying thing about a bloody Civil War?

I just don't know you guys. That's kind of weird. Maybe more "Peace on earth goodwill to men" and less "brother against brother" is how I think of Christmas? But I guess happy holidays anyway. 

The Internet of Made-Up Things

I just don't know about this, you guys...

I'm a Big Deal in Romania

Ok, so I don't know what this is all about, but it seems like whenever there is news about how Donald Trump is basically so owned because of Eastern European Hackers working at the behest of Vladimir Putin (p.s., I highly recommend the book The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election by Malcolm Nance--it's a great explainer of how we ended up with 17 US intelligence agencies thinking Russia was trying to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 presidential election--you might not agree, but it's well-sourced and the result of multitudes of reporting) I get a spike in blog visits from Romania.

I have an English-language only D-list political blog that doesn't really concentrate on foreign policy that much. These sort of "false-positive" Romanian-located hits don't make a lot of sense, but only really started after about May 2016. Is this a thing other political blogs have been experiencing? May 2016 is right about when the DNC leak was reported right? I don't think this has anything to do with spamming, because no spam comments. But what are the visits for?     

I dunno, I just wouldn't mind other, smarter bloggers' input about this weird phenomenon.        

Milo Yiannopoulos to Keynote CPAC

Oddball Breitbartian queer fetish-object Milo Yiannopoulos, recently seen on Real Time with Bill Maher, has been selected to be the keynote speaker at CPAC, a conservative shindig that pretty recently wasn't even cool with the Log Closet Cabin Republicans a mere two years ago. But after the reputed "smooth sailing" experienced by even the LCR last year, it's really quite something to have a very out British non-straight person actually as a feature, and not some weird kind of bug. Right? Progress! Big-ass tent. Room for Caitlin Jenner and all that.

I don't even know what to think about this. I actually think I should think nothing about it at all, and just make sure I have ample popcorn handy while viewing YouTube videos of what he has to say.

Now, there has been some question about whether Yiannopoulos is a supporter of pedophilia based on a certain video. . If Milo Yiannopoulos was a victim of pedophilia as a minor as he infers in that exchange (by a cleric in particular), and also in his Facebook disavowal of any support of pedophilia, I am prepared to support him in that disavowal as a supporter of victims' rights--

But he's proven over time that he has a slippery set of ethics in his reporting about various things. He mostly seems to be stunting, rather than having an actual intellectual point. His mishpacha refer to people being pedos either for the lulz or for great justice with no apparent commitment either way.  It's like "Jackass", but for Right-Wing ideology.

Let's Not Make the Super Bowl Weird, OK?

I don't follow sports because for the most part, nothing is actually ever going to be as good IMHO as WWE/WCW/ECW through the mid-to-late 1990's. That was just an incredible era for wrestling, and the fact is, I never bothered to learn all the plays or teams or could follow who was part of what team anyway. I really did super great at fantasy baseball for a couple of years because even if I suck as a sports fan, I am really great at understanding how statistics work and managed to get players like Wade Boggs and Lenny Dykstra in my batting rota to maximize hitting for on-base which routinely led to higher scoring, while keeping stiffs like Canseco off because who needs the errors? He totally gave up more bases than he hit for (homers are a misleading stat).

Anyhow, I don't know much about football even if I once wore one of the world's homeliest Eagles starter jackets back in the day (I think it was like this) when I was dating a total sportshead. (I looked so boss, though, with my mall-bangs, door knocker earrings, and skintight acid wash jeans. I am so glad pictures do not still exist of this late '80's/early 90's incarnation of yours truly, even if I was quite the Generation X East Coast artifact.)

But anyhow, the Super Bowl is like some kind of weird national holiday even for people who don't really follow sports. Even if you don't like football, there's something just right about the everybody eating snacks and judging commercials that feels so uniquely American. We're watching millionaires give each other brain damage, but we're also coming together as a nation to absorb something to say to our co-workers the next day in the break room.

Then along comes this weird post-2016 election season where people are still all politicized and being weird. Tom Brady and Bill Belichik are Trump supporters, apparently. Anyhow, the graphic above represents some alt-right guy making it weird.

Um. I don't really think it's cool to make the fandom of people in the US northeast about white supremacy without their signing off on it, and from what I gather--not all of them really would based on things like the electoral scoreboard. I'm not sure it's really a great thing for Trump that some of his followers automatically assume his support is also an endorsement of white supremacy, but I am damn sure it is not a great reflection on the New England Patriots organization that the alt-right wants to co-opt their talent and sports prowess to try and make some bullshit point--but I don't think the team invited this at all. And I know of so many NE sports fans who manage to be gung-ho about their sports teams while not being actual RW assholes at all! They are cool people who are homers! They just represent with the jerseys and the ticket buys. They aren't like, goose stepping and what not.

I'm just saying--let's not make the Super Bowl weird, where odd political signifying nonsense takes up our bandwidth, instead of factual sportshead stuff like whether the Atlanta defense collapsed and Brady et als capitalized. Let's just enjoy nachos and rewatch commercials like they were shorts put up for Sundance. C'mon. This should be entertainment. Not another "But I want to punch Nazis" day.

FWIW--I kind of always want to punch Nazis. But that has nothing to do with football. And also doesn't always mean "with a fist".

Denali's Not Just a Mountain in Alaska...

 

What's in a name? Would a mountain by any other name be quite as high?

 

 

The name "Denali" actually means "high" or "tall"--it's about as phonetically close as we get to what the peak has been called for centuries by the indigenous populations in Alaska, and it's the name the locals most commonly use. It's a name that is descriptive of the highest mountain in the US, as well as the name that the National Park in which it rests now goes by.

 

For some reason, President Obama agreeing with Alaskans that the mountain should go by the local name grates with those who feel that calling it "Mount McKinley" is somehow more seemly because it's a tribute to a former US President.

 

We can seriously name other stuff after President McKinley if you want, you guys. If Ohio has something that is already going by a dumb name, for heaven's sake, just change it to "McKinley" if it makes you feel better. But for crying out loud, this seems to me like this is more of an issue for Alaska, and Ohio, you put chili on spaghetti. So I can't even with you guys.

 

Alaska has been calling it "Denali" since before there even was a state of Alaska or a President McKinley. But I kind of notice so many of the people having little fits over this are GOP, so I'll just say Obama did it on purpose.

 

U mad? What's good?

"Free-range kids" Used to be the "Old Normal"

I grew up in NE Philadelphia on a pretty basic row-home street three blocks away from my elementary school. From the age of six, I walked it myself. The deli we got our lunchmeat from was across Colgate Avenue, and my mom would sometimes send me there with a list since I was seven. The recreation center (with pool) was two blocks up the Avenue. I went alone from the time I was ten. I also went to the library, or to my friends' houses, who lived usually five or six blocks away, by myself since about nine or ten.

So to me, this thing where "free range children" are picked up by the police for being some walkable distance away from their homes without adult supervision strikes me as absolutely bizarre. (I don't have kids, though. But I do know that violent crime has gone down since I was a kid. Seriously--why aren't people raising their kids to do stuff like play outside?)

Now, I'll admit that some of the ways kids in my day were raised might have been ill-advised. I will admit I played with matches, threw rocks, ate Rio Snappers on a dare, jumped off of second-story porches onto hard-ass lawns, and had monumental schoolyard fights where faces were rubbed with snowballs and permanent scars were received. But this helped me get that being older meant sometimes dealing with consequences. I was followed by a presumed perv from a card shop up Rising Sun Ave three blocks from my house when I was nine--ducked him. I got knocked over by a sixth-grader when I was in second grade and chased his ass with a piece of ice like the size of my head and plastered him.

Hillary Clinton's Email Issue isn't Relatable

I work in an office where email is EVERYTHING. We have regular back-and-forth emails between supervisors of different units to discuss procedures and save a lot of them to justify why we arrived at the procedures we have and how we arrived at them, so that if any question comes up, we can go back to the archives and understand what was going on at the time to generate whatever procedure we adopted or changed. Some supervisors have email archives that go back a decade or so.

If our email server ever goes down, we feel like amnesiacs, a little, with information we kind of recall, but are a little unsure of. It's stressful to have conversations that aren't written down so that they are transparent and available for later use.

They Say "If You're Explaining, You're Losing,"

(h/t TPM)

but if you are explaining that you are people...what does that mean?

I don't even know. I've never doubted that Republicans were people, myself, and I even like some people I know who lean conservative. It's the party's ideas that I'm not sold on.

But I'm some kind of card-carrying "L" word, so what do I know? I'll probably think some more about this over some arugula and latte or whatever.

Rick Santorum Must Update His Personal Slang Dictionary

Okay, I know I post way too often about Rick Santorum. But he is so square. Let me grab my thesaurus.

You can "bash" the president.

You can "knock" the president.

You can "slam" the president.

But oh no, honey, "Bang the president" means something quite....else.  And I don't think Santorum meant to say that at all.

Of Bogeymen and Babes in the Wood

When I was an adolescent, I liked horror movies. The more disgusting, the better. I liked slasher movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th movies that blended the sick with occasional flashes of surreal humor. I was mildly fascinated by real-life stories of mass murderers like John Wayne Gacy or lesser-known local weirdos like Gary Heidnik. I listened to the kind of satanic metal that sounded vaguely like it was already being played backwards and pretty much openly mentioned Satan. (The PMRC was the one thing that really messed me up with regards to supporting Al Gore...) I thought about executing grisly revenge on the daily as a nerdy-ass bullied teen.

In other words, I was a completely normal, wholesome American teenager. That's why the story about two Wisconsin girls stabbing their friend because they wanted to become "proxies" of a fictional bogeyman didn't actually surprise me. Exactly. But some of the implications are actually horrifying. Let me get one thing out of the way--I am not scared of the bogeyman, but adolescents are pretty scary.

Ricin is Not the New Reality TV, Is it?

It's amazing to me that I didn't glom into this story like a very glommable thing, but a couple of months ago, there was a deeply weird story where an Elvis impersonator was believed to be the sender of some ricin-laced letters to assorted politicians, but it turned out that a Wayne Newton-impersonator rival of his was actually behind the dastardly plot.  Or near as we can tell.

Anyhow, it has come to light that another set of ricin-tainted letters has been sent out to assorted pols, this time from an actress who has had bit parts in The Vampire Diaries and The Walking Dead. 

I note that in both cases, the poison-pen posts appear to have been made with the express purpose of setting up some other person to take the fall, but it can not escape ones attention that the mailings in both cases were made by tangentially show business persons. One hopes this is not the thing people are resorting to for attention these days. There is always YouTube is there not?