our dipshit dictator-wannabe is in Asia right now, glomming all credit for ending another imaginary war.
Congress has been a ghost town for twenty-six days and counting. Holy Mike Johnson keeps refusing to gavel the House into session — all in service of keeping the Dead Pedo Bestie Files from ever seeing the light of day.
so, how is our government still managing to function? do we even have a government? fuck if I know. Donny and Mikey are basically Wile E. Coyote right now, twenty feet past the end of the cliff and refusing to look down.
remember when Congress used to appropriate funds, and then spend those funds, and everyone got paid, and government more or less functioned?
yeah, well fuck that. that ain’t the way shit happens any more.
here’s the way our government works now: some morbidly rich oligarch ‘donates’ some tiny portion of their obscene wealth to fund some government service that our Mad King deems essential, and then we’re all supposed to fall all over ourselves and kiss their ass in gratitude.
for example: plutocrat Timothy Mellon just donated $130 million to ‘pay’ the military during this government shutdown. sounds like a lot of money, right? ha fucking ha.
there are approximately 1,300,000 active duty service members in the US military. so let’s see. um, one-thirty million guzinta one point three million … okay, carry the zero …
oh wait, The New York Times actually committed a journalism and did the math for us.
A $130 million donation would equal about $100 a service member.
because nothing says ‘I support the troops’ so much as ‘here’s your hunner, bro. don’t spend it all in one place.’
you’re welcome, America!
so what’s even the point of making a virtually useless donation to the military? well, to generate favorable headlines — and curry favor with Dear Leader — of course. but there’s a more insidious goal here: it’s to get us used to this shit. to normalize it.
“The amount is meaningless — less than one day of salary. But the principle is important: once the armed services are paid by the oligarchs, they become a private militia, and no longer have a country.”
oh. huh. that sounds kind of bad.
by the way, for the Pentagon to accept a direct donation from a private individual isn’t even legal.
Still, the donation appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money in excess of congressional appropriations or from accepting voluntary services.
but listen to me, still prattling on about what’s legal in this year of our lord 2025, as if ‘Donny can’t really do that’ is a phrase that still holds any meaning.
shut the fuck up, Jeffrey. get with the program.
hey, here’s a fun fact about the Pentagon’s new benefactor, Timothy Mellon: he seems nice.
His book also contains several incendiary passages about race. He wrote that Black people were “even more belligerent” after social programs were expanded in the 1960s and ’70s, and that social safety net programs amounted to “slavery redux.”
I, for one, welcome our new racist overlords.
but still, it must be said: this isn’t the way it’s supposed to work. the president’s cronies aren’t supposed to get to pick and choose which parts of government they feel like funding. they’re supposed to pay their fair share of taxes (ha!) and Congress is supposed to allocate that shit.
imagine what would happen if a bunch of rich fuckheads decided to pool their money and pay for the East Wing of the White House to be torn down, and a gaudy Epstein Ballroom built in its place.
oh wait.
speaking of which, can Ross Douthat, at long last, finally fuck all the way off?
I read the whole thing, so you don’t have to. you’re welcome, America. here’s Douthat’s premise: Donny was right to clownfuck the East Wing into oblivion, because reasons. also because leftists suck.
But there is another issue besides bureaucratic sclerosis that makes it hard for left-leaning jurisdictions to overcome opposition to new building: namely, the widely shared awareness that when development happens under progressives auspices, it is often soul-crushingly unattractive.
oh, please. shove all that polysyllabic nonsense straight up your bureaucratic sclerosis.
also something something Obama.
But how you think about Donald Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for a large neo-Classical ballroom should be connected to how you feel about the Obama megalith and the larger urban-progressive approach to public building.
is there any rhetorical pretzel Ross Douthat won’t hysterically twist himself into in order to justify the fascistic excesses of Dear Leader?
but I digress. here’s a more urgent question: would any plutocrat out there like to pony up a little scratch to, maybe, y’know, help truly needy Americans feed their families? I’m asking because in five days, the money that funds the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will run out.
oh wait, what’s that? plutocrats don’t have to chip in, because our government already has money set aside to continue funding SNAP? that’s awesome!
oh wait, I’m forgetting about the part where the needy can go fuck themselves, because Dear Leader has decided not to release those funds.
here’s Heather Cox Richardson to lay it out.
Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The government shutdown means that states have run out of funds to distribute to the more than 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.
once again, it must be said: this isn’t the way it’s supposed to work. according to that apparently obsolete document known as the Constitution, a president can’t dick with money that Congress has already allocated for use.
but there I go again, flapping my gums about Donny can’t do this and Donny can’t do that.
this isn’t how a representative democracy works. it’s how a monarchy works.
our government has always been made up of useless fucknuts and dimwitted shitwazzles, but at least it functioned. Congress made a budget, Congress appropriated funds, and Congress spent those funds. but not any more. apparently we now have a king again — only this time he’s really fucking dumb — who appropriates our money, goes ‘mine now,’ and does whatever the fuck he wants with it, as if it were that World Cup trophy he stole from FIFA and pretends he won.
how is that sustainable?
spoiler alert: it’s not sustainable, and Holy Mike Johnson could end the Mad King’s de-facto monarchy in a heartbeat, if he wanted to.
he could gavel the House back into session, and take back its Constitutionally-mandated power to control the purse strings. he could also exercise the House’s power to control tariffs, putting an end to Donny’s incoherent trade war insanity.
he could agree to Democrats’ demand to restore the ACA tax credits, and end the shutdown.
but the limpest dick ever to wield the Speaker’s gavel won’t do any of that shit, because gaveling the House back into session means having to swear in Adelita Grijalva, making her the 218th and deciding ‘yes’ vote for Tom Massie’s discharge petition and forcing the release of the Epstein files — and nothing is more important than making sure that whatever shit Dear Leader was getting up to with his dead pedo bestie never comes to light.
whatever is in those files must be super fucking horrifying.
release the full, unedited Epstein files, you fucking fucks.
here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.
this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:
practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.
to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.
we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.
881 / 970
Thank you Jeff.
I'm hoping to answer that question with my next article:
"Control Without Consent: Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Murdoch, and Ellison on Mt. Olympus"
Excerpt:
The United States is not governed from Washington DC anymore; it is ruled by a handful of men, all armed with truly bad ideas. They gaze down upon the rest of us from heights afforded them by mountains of accumulated wealth. They see us below, ants moving to and from our tiny little ant homes. Elon Musk describes us as "NPC's" -his term for "Non-player characters" -meaningless pixels in a video game he controls.
The United States is now controlled from private islands, superyachts, and compounds wired to satellites, a new class of self-proclaimed gods. They preside over democracy’s destruction, — not with armies or decrees, but with software code, vast capital, and conviction. Elon Musk tweets policy before governments can draft it. Peter Thiel bankrolls candidates whose contempt for democracy rivals his own whether they share his demented beliefs that societal protections are equivalent to apocalyptic end times.
We have a Dick Tater