The elephant in the room is deeply disturbed. It hasn’t had a rational thought in at least a decade. It continues to Putin its head far up its ass. In recognition of its struggle with truth telling, a change from ‘bullshit’ to ‘elephantshit’ is in order. Elephants are known for their prodigious memories. The republican version clearly cannot even remember its sacred oath of office, let alone whatever nonsensical gibberish it spouted yesterday.
Other elephants and elephant aficionados are understandably upset. To add further insult to injury, the idiot spawn, Junior and Eric, want to actually kill one (if they haven’t already). We either need to find another word for some of our pachyderms — perhaps ‘not republicans’, or get a new mascot for the republican party.
87% of elephants surveyed requested that their association with the republican party be terminated. The other 13% requested more peanuts (except for the one outlier who just kept repeating, “Stomp Kevin. Stomp Kevin”).
It looks like the party may be aware of the situation and are actively searching for a replacement mascot. They took a publicity hit for sauntering off to Hungary to introduce their newest belle of the nutball, at the recent Racists Of The Traitorously Enraged Neocon And Sociopathic Society convention (aka Criminals Pretending About Conservatism). That nutball, Victor Orban, the misbegotten hate child of Vladimir Putin and Tuckems, makes Rand Paul look borderline human. Couple that with their good guns with timid police showing in Texas and they can’t afford more bad press in this cycle.
That’s why Kevin “Please don’t stomp me” McCarthy, Elise “Virus Factory” Stefanik, and Corona Romney McDaniel are pushing for a formal resolution in Congress to replace the current elephant with the much more appropriate Corona-19 virus. The current sticking point appears to be Speaker Pelosi’s insistence that the resolution acknowledge that republicans are no longer worthy to be associated with elephants.
Yeah. Yeah. So what the hell did that have to do with good news? I just felt like some heartfelt derision was richly deserved, so I let fly.
Slava Ukraini!
Remember the Children
Here’s a little icing on the disparagement cake from Don Caron at the Parody Project
And one more, just for dear old Vlad.
Ok, it’s time for the news
Science Speaks
If only we could get the republicans to listen. Sigh. The statistics are damning and that makes the gun lobby a bunch of thrice damned murdering profiteers. There are things we can do. We need to do them. Let us resolve to vote out the gunmongers wherever we find them. There is no place for a cult of gun fetishists in a modern society. Republican taking points about guns have always been a giant pile of elephantshit. I call ES.
Scientific American: The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives
✂️ The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.
In the U.S., we have existing infrastructure that we could easily emulate to make gun use safer: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Created by Congress in 1970, this federal agency is tasked, among other things, with helping us drive a car safely. It gathers data on automobile deaths. It’s the agency that monitors and studies seat belt usage. While we track firearm-related deaths, no such safety-driven agency exists for gun use.
During the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began to explore gun violence as a public health issue. After studies tied having a firearm to increased homicide risk, the National Rifle Association took action, spearheading the infamous Dickey Amendment, diverting gun research dollars and preventing federal funding from being used to promote gun control. For more than 20 years, research on gun violence in this country has been hard to do.
✂️ Science points to laws that would work to reduce shootings, to lower death. Among the simplest would be better permitting laws with fewer loopholes. When Missouri repealed its permit law, gun-related killings increased by 25 percent. Another would be to ban people who are convicted of violent crime from buying a gun. In California, before the state passed such a law, people convicted of crimes were almost 30 percent more likely to be arrested again for a gun or violent crime than those who, after the law, couldn’t buy a gun.
The Reckoning Approaches
Remember how so many pundits and doom & gloomers keep yammering about how the DOJ isn’t doing anything? Norm Eisen begs to differ. And he does it well.
Salon: Chauncey DeVega: Merrick Garland "fears no person," says legal scholar Norm Eisen — and he's coming for Trump
✂️ To discuss the current state of the Trump movement and America's efforts to defeat it, I recently reached out to Norman Eisen, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution. He served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Donald Trump's first impeachment, and is the author of the new book "Overcoming Trumpery: How to Restore Ethics, the Rule of Law, and Democracy."
In this conversation, Eisen describes the power of "Trumpery," as he calls it — a combination of disdain for ethical restrictions, assault on the rule of law, incessant falsehood and disinformation, the shameless pursuit of personal and political interest, not the public interest, the exploitation and exacerbation of political division, and attacks on democracy itself. He also discusses why the Republican Party so enthusiastically mated with Trumpism in its quest for autocratic and near-dictatorial power and control over American government and society.
✂️ Is Merrick Garland afraid to prosecute Trump and other members of his inner circle because of "norms" and "precedent" about holding a former president accountable? What do you think the legal and political calculus is?
Garland fears no person. I've known him for years and he is a great American jurist and lawyer. He has said that he's going to follow the evidence where it leads and apply the law without fear or favor. He's going to let the chips fall where they may. I believe him. He's very methodical. He's very deliberate.
The Reckoning Approaches, Part Deux
Tish James continues to drub tfg’s attempts to scurry away with some serious pest control mastery. Donald’s long history of fiscal ratfuckery is a trap he set for himself. Now that it’s been sprung, he’s squirming and squeaking, but he’s really got no where to go.
Mother Jones: Russ Choma: A Federal Judge Threw Out Trump’s Lawsuit Against NY AG Letitia James
New York attorney general Letitia James’ civil fraud investigation into Donald Trump’s businesses is one of the few legal cases against the former president that has had real traction. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that the former president’s most serious attempt to stall it has no basis and the case can proceed. James has been investigating Trump’s finances since late 2019 and has recently focused on whether Trump had fraudulently manipulated the value of his business empire in the years before he became president to get favorable terms from banks, insurance agents, and tax assessors. Back in December, Trump sued James, asking New York district court judge Brenda Sannes to stop the AG’s investigation as a “fishing expedition” that amounted to political harassment because James is a Democrat.
But on Friday Sannes rejected Trump’s argument entirely, tossing out the suit, writing that she didn’t have the power to interfere with a state-level case, and that Trump’s claims of political persecution, which might justify her intervention, simply didn’t bear out. In her opinion, Sannes wrote: “Plaintiffs have not established that Defendant commenced the New York proceeding to otherwise harass them. Such harassment is ‘typically’ done ‘through the unjustified and oppressive use of multiple prosecutions.’ Here, there is a single investigation and state court proceeding. While the New York proceeding has been ongoing since August 2020, Plaintiffs have submitted no evidence that the subpoena enforcement proceeding has been conducted in such a way as to constitute harassment.”
In his lawsuit, Trump’s attorneys listed numerous examples of times when James, who served on the New York City Council before being elected attorney general in 2018, has said critical things about Trump. They noted that in her campaign platform, James had said she would investigate him. As the judge overseeing the investigation has noted, the fact that James has simply said she disagrees politically with the former president doesn’t automatically make the investigation unfair. Sannes wrote that Trump “failed to produce any evidence that the state proceeding has been conducted in bad faith” and wrote that his claims of the investigation being a “baseless fishing expedition” are “wholly unsupported.”
The Reckoning Approaches, Part Tre
Don’t forget about Fani Willis and her case against tfg.
Huffington Post: Mary Papenfuss: Georgia DA Could Bury Trump With His Own Words, Says Former Fed Prosecutor
Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is armed with powerfully damaging information on Donald Trump amid a special grand jury probe that could make her the first official to prove the former president had criminal intent when attempting to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a former federal prosecutor.
To charge Trump with a crime, Willis will “need what everyone else who is investigating the former president’s involvement in election fraud or outright election criminality needs — proof of the former president’s state of mind,” Joyce Vance, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, said on MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show” Sunday.
✂️ The call is particularly damning, Vance said, because Trump is “asking not for an investigation into potential voting fraud, not for a look to see whether something went wrong, but he’s asking” Raffensperger simply to “find him the specific number of votes that he needs” to make him a winner.
“That’s pretty good evidence of criminal intent walking into it,” and Willis will rely on witnesses to “put some flesh on the bones,” Vance added.
Take That, Evil Russian Warmonger
They’ve been taking their time about this and they had to soften it to placate Orban and a few others, but it looks like things are going to get a bit tougher for the Vladlerian High Command.
Politico: Jacopo Barigazzi and Barbara Moens: EU leaders agree on Russian oil embargo
EU leaders agreed late Monday night on a political deal to impose sanctions on Russian oil imports.
“Agreement to ban export of Russian oil to the EU,” European Council President Charles Michel tweeted from a leaders’ summit in Brussels. “This immediately covers more than 2/3 of oil imports from Russia, cutting a huge source of financing for its war machine.”
✂️ Slapping an embargo on Russian oil would be one of Europe’s most significant steps in restricting the revenue available to President Vladimir Putin to wage war in Ukraine. But the proposed move was held up for several weeks by Hungary, which argued its economy would be hammered by a blanket ban.
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Fail, Fail, Again
Herschel Walker is the epitome of stupid on steriods. He’s trying to lie like tfg, but he’s just not up to it.
CNN: Daniel Dale and Andrew Kaczynski: Fact check: Herschel Walker falsely claims he never falsely claimed he graduated from University of Georgia
(CNN)Herschel Walker, the former football star who is now the Republican nominee for a US Senate seat in Georgia, is piling dishonesty upon dishonesty on the subject of his college education.
In December, Walker's campaign website falsely claimed that he had graduated from the University of Georgia, the school he left after his junior season to play professionally. (Walker's campaign deleted the claim after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution inquired about it.) In April, CNN's KFile team revealed that Walker himself had made the false graduation claim for years -- and that Walker had even asserted that he graduated in the top 1% of his University of Georgia class.
✂️ Walker interjected: "I never said that. They say that. And I said -- that's what you gotta remember. I never, I never have said that statement. Not one time. I've said that I studied criminal justice at UGA."
Facts First: Walker's claim that he "never" and "not one time" said he graduated from the University of Georgia is flat out false. Walker said on camera at least twice that he graduated from the school. Walker's promotional materials have also featured the false claim that he graduated.
Your Bi-Weekly Dose of Andy
I am such a fan boy. Just let me enjoy it. Being from Pennsylvania I don’t agree with Andy’s basic premise here, but I will defend his right to disparage Oz with all my strength.
The New Yorker: Satire from the Borowitz Report: Nation’s Doctors Praying for Dr. Oz to Win and Quit Medicine
PENNSYLVANIA (The Borowitz Report)—With the G.O.P. Senate primary in Pennsylvania too close to call, thousands of American doctors are praying that Dr. Mehmet Oz ekes out a win and quits medicine.
Dr. Harland Dorrinson, a neurosurgeon based in Wichita, Kansas, has been funnelling thousands of dollars to the Oz campaign, all donations from doctors hell-bent on seeing the TV host leave their profession.
“Like doctors all across the nation, I salivate at the thought of Dr. Oz talking about taxes, infrastructure, and foreign policy instead of the healing powers of magic coffee beans,” Dorrinson said.
People Let Me Tell You About Our Best Friends
Pressley has a pick this week, but she feels there’s to much pressure to find something every time we go to press.
Science: Joshua Rapp Learn: Early dogs may have doubled in size to protect livestock
European dogs doubled in size from 8000 to 2000 years ago, a new study suggests. The beefing up may have helped our canine pals protect sheep from bears and even their direct ancestor—the gray wolf.
✂️ Dogs were domesticated between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. Little is known about the size and roles of the earliest pups, though they were likely smaller than the gray wolves they came from. Scientists have speculated that ancient dogs may have helped humans hunt and pull sleds.
To see how the size—and jobs—of dogs changed over time, Martin Welker, a zooarchaeology curator at the Arizona State Museum, and his colleagues examined the remains of 14 dogs uncovered from ancient human settlements in Croatia. They also incorporated data from another 45 ancient dogs, some from Croatia and some from neighboring countries. The remains dated from about 8000 years ago in the Neolithic (or latter Stone Age) to the Roman period, about 2000 years ago.
Ukrainian Musical Interlude
Here’s Dakh Daughters’ To Moye More, featuring, wait for it — rubber ducks.
On the Lighter Side (It’s a bit edgier than normal this week)
Messaging Memes
Closing Notes
From 1974, let’s end today’s roundup with a sweet version of Playin’ in the Band.