Tag Archives: Marjorie Taylor Greene

Who Doesn’t Love a Hot Mess?

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Democrats Demand House GOP Reprimand Marjorie Taylor Greene for Showing Hunter Biden Nudes

Let’s be honest, shall we? We all love a hot mess. Not that you want to be related to one (or two) or live next door to one or work for one, but from a distance hot messes supply a certain ghoulish sense of superiority-inducing reassurance. “I may be a mess,” you say to yourself, or spouse, “but I’m not nearly as hot a mess as [insert object of current fascination.]”

This deep insight came to mind yesterday watching the surprise appearance of Hunter Biden at the MAGA-led House Oversight Committee hearing into you know … Hunter Biden. It was a surpise because as everyone with more than two functioning neurons knows that very same commitee has been howling and puffing ad nauseum for over two years now demanding Biden show up and answer all their questions about how he scammed $2 billion from the Saudis to A: buy a new laptop, B: buy a new pickup truck, or C: take more d*ck pics on his cell phone.

(Oh, sorry. That bona fide/actually happened $2 billion scam was pulled off by a different relative, a guy actually in a government job, and not Hunter Biden, who did however get a roughly $6000 loan from his old man to cover the payments on his new truck.)

The issue of course is that Biden, who is to be honest more than a bit of a hot mess himself, has repeatedly said he is only willing to testify … in public. With cameras rolling. (The nefarious, tricky bastard! What’s he tring to pull?) So what happens when the Oversight MAGA crew spots Hunter right there in their hearing room? They demand — demand, by all that is MAGA and God-like — he be arrested on the spot and jailed and soon thereafter voted to hold him in contempt … for … for … showing up and being willing to answer their questions?

Nancy Mace and the scarlet 'A' - The Washington Post

One perpetually camera-ready MAGA congresswoman sniped at Biden that he didn’t have “the balls” to … to … mmm … I’m not sure what. And minutes later the biggest MAGA-naut of all, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Atlanta suburbanite carpetbagging over in Georgia’s Cracker Holler First District was holding up … yup, you gussed it … the same d*ck pics of Hunter Biden she’s flashed in other super serious MAGA hearings. (She’s flashed these pix so often I think it’s fair to ask if she has them Velcroed to the ceiling over her bed.)

Simultaneous with all this, MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson, the forelocked Bible study savant from Lousiana’s Cracker Holler Fourth District, was getting the word from some of the same people irate about Hunter Biden showing up to answer questions that his days are numbered. Why? For agreeing to a deal with Democrats to fund the government, avoid another MAGA-driven shutdown, supply bullets to fight off a Russian invasion in Europe, and keep Israel in the business of driving every Palestinian into the Sinai desert.

And with all that, I won’t even bore you with the story about the lawyer for Orange Jesus, the Supreme Leader of the Cult of MAGA, arguing in court and with what I presume was a straight face that his client — the very large, weirdly groomed fellow to his right — had the absolute immunity to murder a political rival if he woke up one day and felt like it.

And folks, that was pretty much 36 hours in the Fevered Hot Mess that is MAGA-verse 2024.

So okay, maybe the only way to “love” a mess as hot as these Real Ding-A-Lings of DC is to take a step back to a safe distance from the dumpster and just savor that fleeting sense of superiority. A moment that reassures you that no matter what indisputably stupid thing you may have said or done in your life, you at least stopped short of doing it live in public, on an official record and on camera for the entire world to see.

All this is a long wind up to encourage you to take 15 minutes out of your day and watch the two videos I’m linking here.

Since the war in Ukraine war began I’ve been watching the daily, Moscow man-on-the-street interviews conducted by a young guy named Daniil Orain for his 1420 YouTube site. Shot mainly in Moscow — which truly a world apart from everything beyond its city limits — the interviews are a revealing assessment of what ordinary Russians think and dare to say in public, in front of a camera beaming out to the entire world.

For the most part, older Russians habituated to state TV (think FoxNews Rooskie style) believe Ukraine is full of LGBT-loving fascist Nazis and Glorious Leader Vladimir Vladimirovich is the only man to protect the empire and stop NATO from overruning the Motherland. Younger people, when they’re not reluctant to “talk politics”, seem to understand what’s really going down but are helpless to do anything about it, lest they get hauled before some hot mess Kremlin tribunal and forced to explain what they saw on the internet.

1420 by Daniil Orain - YouTube

Then there’s the two people in these videos. One, an 83 year-old woman, a “babushka” in Russian terms, absolutely unloading on Putin, authoritarian bullshit, the astonishing sheep-like cowardice she sees all around her.

1420 by Daniil Orain - YouTube

And second, a 30-something construction worker/remodeler with the wit and affect of a stand up comic walking his interviewer through the facts of life in Russia 2024.

I’d enjoy seeing both of them live on camera at a MAGA House Oversight hearing.

Biden’s “Junk Fee” Fight Should Include Broder’s Deli as Well as Las Vegas

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Currently lost in all the excitement about Chinese spy balloons and Marjorie Taylor Greene discovering that the feds sent $5 billion to one Illinois elementary school to teach kids that being white is a bad thing is the announcement yesterday that Joe Biden is going after … junk fees … or zombie fees if you’re into the whole “Last of Us” thing.

I couldn’t say, “amen” any louder if I had Metallica’s sound system. There’s no end of things that can annoy the living bejesus out of you (if you let them), but this pervasive and ever-growing gaming of otherwise straightforward retail pricing is truly out of control. The Biden gang says specifically they’re after …

  • excessive online concert, sporting event and entertainment ticket fees
  • airline fees for families sitting together on flights
  • exorbitant early termination fees for TV, phone and internet services
  • surprise resort and destination fees

This is the kind of populist-oriented legislation you’d think would rally the masses and engender wide bi-partisan support. But I’m not going to get carried away with reckless hope. Lobbying pressure from the likes of Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Delta and United et al, Comcast and Las Vegas will likely convince those lawmakers perpetually giving lip service to “hard working Americans” that this idea will only suppress our great and wonderful entrepreneurial spirit, not to mention negatively impact shareholder value.

Simultaneous with reading about what they’re calling the Junk Fee Protection Act my wife was following a blow up on Next Door, the local community site usually overrun with stories of feral cats, porch pirates and baroque theories of gross mismanagement if not outright corruption by city administrators … in Edina, in our case. The kerfuffle was over mandatory, ill-defined fees creeping into the tabs at local restaurants. In other words, the zombie virus-like spread of “service fees” slapped on top of the cost of whatever you eat and drink … plus tip.

In our cozy corner of the world a restaurant/deli operation called Broders announced it was instituting a 15% “service and equity fee” on top of everyone’s order while still … you gotta love this … allowing patrons to tip another 15%, 18% or 25%. The Next Door trolls were not happy. And rightfully so.

However Broders and other venues want to ‘splain it, it’s tacky price gaming no different than that Vegas hotel you booked for $150 a night plus tax hitting you with a 30% “resort fee” as you hit the check out button. Or, to use another current example, Live Nation/Ticketmaster collecting an extra $20, $30, $40 in “service fees” on top of the $150 they’ve already charged you for booking that Kid Rock concert … via a computer.

What makes it all even more annoyingly laughable is the constant refrain that this fee-upon-fee-upon-tip scam is something they’re doing to benefit their overworked, underpaid staff in the back of the house. Because, you know, actually paying the busboys, salad choppers and dishwashers $18 – $20 an hour is an obligation that must fall upon the customer, not the restaurant’s owners.

And which it would under any rational, gaming-free system, where a business meets its cost of doing business, including compensation for employees, by … dare we say it out loud? … raising prices to cover all costs and show a profit. It’s an insane concept I concede. Likely a radical socialist conspiracy if Marjorie Taylor Greene gets wind of it. But until the private equity boys and hard-driving Type A business school grads picked and tossed their chump customers into the deep end of “fee world” pool it worked just fine.

Capitalism. Insane, I know.

Want a room in Vegas? Well, based on demand that’ll now cost you $180 a night. Don’t want to pay that? Fine. Stay out in Primm and drive in to catch the animatronic Grand Funk Railroad Tribute Band at the Sahara. Want a pound of prosciutto from Broder’s for your next elegant soiree? Well, based on the rising cost of hiring competent staff and everything, that’ll now cost you $16 instead of the $13 it was last year. If you want to tip the kid that wrapped it and rang you up another couple bucks, knock yourself out.

Just stop with the word salad explanations and the pretense that bullshit price gaming is the only fair way to sustain your business. And by that I mean gibberish like this from the owner of Broder’s: “We’re trying to create a compensation structure that looks different than it did before the pandemic … and strive for pay equity between front-of-house and back-of-house service members.”

To which I say, “No you’re not. You’re simply attaching yourself to an obnoxious trend that others have successfully got away with … until now.”

Student Loan Forgiveness and The Ghost of John Kline, (Who?)

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Rep. John Kline

I know and you know that if a Democrat president signed a bill tomorrow giving every kid a pony, every hard-working goober a shiny new truck and every family a week’s pass to DisneyWorld, Republicans would leap up and howl about how unfair all that is to … kids who wanted a dog, guys who just bought a new truck and families who agree with Ron DeSantis that DisneyWorld is a woke cesspool of transgender grooming.

As the parent of a (fully employed) kid who stands to get roughly $8900 wiped off his monthly bills, I am pleased with Joe Biden’s long brewing decision to wipe out chunks of federal loans. It is certainly a lot of money — up to $500 billion by some estimates — and I don’t see what if anything it does to suppress the rampaging rate of tuition increases. But hey, removing $8900 in bills from mostly middle-class family ledgers counts as a good day to my way of thinking. Those people will almost certainly turn around and (inflation hysteria alert!) spend it on something other than a check to the government.

But while we’re listening to the usual hytperbolic ranting from the usual suspects — Marjorie Taylor Greene, (a bail out for Ivy League brats!), Ohio Senate candidate J.D.Vance, (so unfair to D+ kids who couldn’t get accepted to Hillbilly Ellegy Community Bible College!) and Mitch McConnell (a reckless giveaway to the takers!) let’s pause and consider Minnesota’s own John Kline.

You say you’ve already forgotten old John? The guy who parked himself in Congress representing southern Minnesota’s Second District for 14 years? The guy whose most noteworthy accomplishments were hoovering up prodigious amounts of campaign contributions from for-profit colleges? In turn for proposing more and more legislation that let those, um, conservative benefactors, burrow ever deeper into taxpayer-supported federal guaranteed loan programs? Where they mined fat profits off their hefty tuition costs? While quite often delivering dubious-to-worthless degrees to students then saddled with serious decades-long debt?

That guy.

Here’s a quote from a (U of M) Minnesota Daily editorial back in Kline’s day: “Kline and two others introduced the bill, titled ‘Supporting Academic Freedom through Regulatory Relief Act’, July 10. [Think about that name for a second as you read on.] It would prohibit the Obama administration from restricting federal student aid from schools whose students graduate with lots of debt and have low repayment rates. The for-profit college industry became the subject of much criticism after a 2012 investigation by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee revealed excessive tuition prices, abhorrent recruiting practices, poor student outcomes and wasteful use of taxpayer dollars. The investigation reported taxpayers had spent $32 billion on companies that run for-profit colleges, but the majority of students who enrolled later dropped out. Federal data also shows that a majority of for-profit colleges receive more than 70 percent of their revenue from U.S. government programs.”

Point being — and I realize I don’t have to point this out to you, dear informed reader — but the howling of today’s MAGA-nauts about the “unfairness” of Joe Biden’s “giveway” is 99.9% pure hypocrisy and bad faith. They led the fight to game the federal student loan program, which certainly did not drive tuition costs anywhere but up while saddling thousands of kids from “hard-working, middle-class families” with a mountain of debt and a generally value-less degree.

And THAT is before we mention ol’ Mitch’s signature accomplishment in the Trump years, namely the $2.3 trillion worth of tax cuts Republicans gave away to, you know, “benefactors”, “productive Americans” and people who don’t blink at $30 cocktails at the 19th hole of their private club. [If you’re scoring at home that’s four times the size of Biden’s student loan forgiveness] Maybe you bought a new Porsche with your winnings off that sweet deal, but my taxes jumped up about $900 the next year.

So, as usual, let’s ignore the raging of cynical fools.

Bottom line here is that I suspect Republicans will go hunting for a judge who will slap an injunction on Biden’s executive decision. And, whether it stands or not, loan forgiveness will do next to nothing to stall out the 130% increase in tuitions since 1990.

Oh, and one more thing, entirely unrelated I’m sure, did you see where the University of Alabama just signed football coach Nick Saban to a contract extension worth $94 million over eight years?

And have you forgotten that the highest-paid public employee in the vast majority of states is a … basketball or football coach?

I Still Take Omar Over Samuels

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It’s a running discussion, whether newspaper endorsements mean anything in a modern world where crazy Uncle Steve and a few hundred Russian bots can create a groundswell of enthusiasm for the dimmest of political bulbs. But this morning’s Strib shout-out for Don Samuels over Ilhan Omar in next Tusday’s DFL primary may be a bit different in that, unlike a Republican primary, it’s talking to a mostly sanity-based audience.

The endorsement comes within a (very) long recitation of Samuels’ activist-within-the-accepted system bona fides. And there’s no disputing that at age 72 he’s covered a lot more ground than Omar, who is 39.

But as I read the endorsement I was reminded again of something I tell cranky lefties rolling their eyes at positions the Strib Op-Ed page takes on a range of issues. And that is that big newspapers (TV news doesn’t risk opinionated stands) are almost by definition a status quo entity. They see themselves playing a stabilizing role, calming and shushing the hormonal impulses of the fringes. In football terms, news organizations like the Strib prefer, and with their opinions they play a game between the 40 yard-lines. A little wiggle over this way, then a little wiggle back. Never too far or too much. But rather everything at mid-field, far from the over-heated end zones.

This is by way of me saying that I’ll vote for Omar again next Tuesday. Not necessarily because I see her as a more disciplined bureacrat, or even as the Strib argues for Samuels a more imaginative legislator, but because I see value in what the Strib sees as her excesses.

Omar is invariably lumped in with “The Squad”, the band of firebrand liberal women that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. The women, all under age 50, representing barely 1% of the current Congress, yet are constantly irritating Washington’s Democratic leadership with loud demands for an aggressive, progressive agenda. And on the flip-side they are perpetually inflaming the nightmares of Trumpist Republicans who see all women of color as the deepest kind of threat to “the American way.”

These are both qualities hard to quantify but which I find appealing … and valuable.

It’s absolutely true that Omar has stepped in it more than once. In her first term, she exuded more than a bit of the entitled attitude that comes with being a good-looking woman — (a lot like the ‘tude that comes with star athletes, guys like Aaron Rodgers for example, who have pretty much always lived a rareified, revered existence substantially different than their peers.) She seems to have learned to modulate her public comments a bit more in her second term.

I suspect that her much-quoted remarks about Israel and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Muslims in general did very little to stoke her appeal to the Twin Cities’ and U.S. Jewish community. But, for what it’s worth, what I heard in what she was saying, or trying to say, was that today’s Israeli government, only recently and perhaps only temporarily, released from the claws of the rigidly conservative, deeply corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu was the central issue … not simply that Israel is a Jewish state and all Jews are racists.

And what informed audience is going to deny that about Netanyahu and Israel’s version of our bat shit conservatives?

More central to my point here, what American political figure is going to make a consistent point of that? Of drawing regular attention to the crude and frankly ugly, counter-effective ways conservative Israeli governments have behaved in the Middle East?

I know nothing about how well Omar’s office has provided constituent service, but if it’s average it’s good enough, and if it pays particular attention to the Fifth District’s Somali population, that too is tolerable.

The Strib clearly sees Samuels being a better agent for Minneapolis’ black community. But I have a hard time imagining Omar neglecting the north side’s problems, despite her, um intemperate anger over name-your-favorite-Minneapolis-cop-killing of an unarmed black constituent.

And a final note to the bad faith crowd forever playing purely team-oriented politics. Ilhan Omar, AOC and the rest of the scary hyper-liberal “Squad” bear no resemblance — none — to the appalling freak-show idiocy and recklessness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Bobert, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Madison Cawthorn, Jim Jordan and on and on … and on and on … down there in the Republican end zone.

Omar still has plenty learn. But she’s engaged in serious, valuable progressive messaging and legislation. And she remains a unique voice in a Congress badly polluted by authoritarian dimwits and musty, status quo bureaucrats.

So yeah. I’m voting for her, again.

Excuse Me, What Exactly Do You Find “Offensive and Absurd”?

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Classic quotes of the Trump era never stop coming. There was Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”. Donny’s, “My administration has done more for the Black community than any President since Abraham Lincoln” and (my gal) Marjorie Taylor Greene complaining how, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true … .” Truly immortal verbiage, each of them. But to those we now add Lindsey Graham reacting to the (Second) impeachment managers’ meticulous tick tock of the January 6 Trump mob riot by saying, “most Republicans found the presentation … offensive and absurd.”

The issue is not the chaos and violence of the attack mind you … but the presentation of the evidence of it. That’s what a Republican, 26-year veteran of Congress finds “offensive and absurd.”

Really, where do you go with something like that?

Prior to the start of this latest trial my attitude was, “Fine. Knock yourselves out. But we all know how this ends.” Impeachment deux was going to be another noble exercise in futility. There was — and is — no way 17 Republicans will ever vote to convict a life long con man turned reality TV star who is the most potent force in their party.

But after four days I’m here to say that the Democrats have significantly exceeded my expectations. While another acquittal is not in doubt, they have presented for the historical record a vivid, indelible, moment-by-moment, easily-accessible and indisputable chronicle of the highest crimes imaginable short of pulling out a gun and shooting an opposition candidate dead on live TV.

And the Republicans are no in a corner where they will go on record and vote to excuse it.

As W. might say, “Mission Accomplished.”

America’s beard-stroking class is full of punditry of … where do we go now? … when one of the only two viable political parties the country has has become so mired in fears of Trump, of Trump’s fevered and semi-literate base and the consequences of riling either of them to an intramural insurrection that they’ve acquiesced to a fantasy world. A world where for all intents and purposes Trump really did win “in a sacred landslide”, where “patriots” beat and kill cops, where stark visual/audio evidence is “offensive and absurd”, (or “crap” as Graham described it to Sean Hannity a few nights ago.)

Because I’ve come to believe the only plausible route out of this dungeon of grievance-stoked insanity is through a refortification of the so-called center-right, aka traditional country club Republicans, I’ve spent a lot of time lately listening to right-of-center podcasts like Charlie Sykes’ “The Bulwark.” (A former right-wing Wisconsin talk radio host turned mortified/horrified never-Trumper, Sykes has a polished, reassuring manner. He’s been good company as I’ve devoted a mid-winter cold spell to renovating the basement library/bedroom.)

Like other old school conservatives, Sykes and his guests are struggling to see a future for a party where a shameless nincompoop like Marjorie Taylor Greene exerts more influence on likely voters than Liz Cheney, the daughter of the goddam Voldemort of American Republicanism, Dick Cheney, for chrissakes. Facts are tough to ignore. And the fact is that Greene and the roughly 150 other GOP congesspeople like her are far … far… more reprentative of the zeistgeist of modern conservatism (or whatever you want to call it) than either Liz or Dick Cheney, or any Bush or any side show act like Mitt Romney.

Sykes and other former Republican bloviators and strategists correctly see a party overrun with post-policy grifters. People like Greene who clearly don’t have the faintest idea or interest in any form of legislation — save maybe gun rights and another round of tax cuts for their donors — but who have hit on an infallible grift. Namely, raging about any and every kind of hysterical nonsense that trends on social media … and encouraging people to write them a check to “fight for it.” (Greene is reported to have raised more than $1.5 million in the past couple months.)

A few old school Republicans gathered (on Zoom) a couple dsys ago to discuss the idea of creating … wait for it … a new party, and abandoning the “Republican” brand to the Greenes and Matt Gaetz’ and Louie Gohmerts and Oath Keepers of the world. But their central issue would also be money.

While fat corporate/tycoon dough would possibly follow a new party led by Ben Sasse, to pick a name, the Marjorie Greenes (like the Michelle Bachmanns before her) float on a sea of a handful of whack-a-doodle millionaires (Bachmann had Tim and Bevery LaHaye of the “Left Behind” novels fortune), but mainly they tap a fathomless sea of $25 and $100 checks from, well, from the likes of Hillary Clinton’s ‘”deplorables.” That sea will not be writing checks to Ben Sasse.

Historian Jon Meacham, one the more valuable of regular cable pundits, made an interesting point the other day when he said that while it’s true contemporary Republican senators fear Trump and his raging Borg-like base, what they fear is much is the full schism they’d create if they vote to convict Trump. Such a vote would very likely be the impetus for … Trump to create a new party. A Trump party based on nothing but Trump is a fear that is a stark, plain-to-be-seen possibility given the man’s cult-like appeal to seething mobs.

Almost any percentage of Republican voters who followed Trump away from the established party — and poll after poll shows an inviolable 32% who express a near religious attachment to him — translates to certain doom for any Republican caught in a three-way race with a Democrat and a Trumper.

Moreover, it then becomes a good question whether once reliably Republican corporate/tycoon cash continues to follow any Republican — old school or Trumper — into a campaign neither has a chance of winning. Far better, if you’re running the Home Depot political action account, to re-aim that money at “gettable” Democrats who’ll do big money bidding for the right price.

It’s a perilous predicament Reoublicans find themselves in. And if it weren’t for the fact they’ve built their careers on race-baiting, science-denying, economically-divisive “crap” that is truly “offensive and aburd” I might feel sorry for them.