Keeper of the Clown Bell

What could have been... Pathetic sniveling Buckleyite #NeverTrump "conservative" establishment nerd, Rich Lowry, penned one of the most underhanded, willfully ignorant, sour-grapes pieces ever composed about the Elvis from Queens for Politico today titled  The Crisis of Trumpism and (yet again) made a sterling case for the necessity of Donald Trump - NOW MORE THAN EVER!!! - with a vultures-eye-view of the current political landscape and fun house mirrors looking backwards and forwards for "sober" perspective. It's obvious that Rich is assessing the Trump presidency without taking into account many possible scenarios that might have played out over the past two months (or two years) and not acknowledging things as they are today and will be in the future. In other words, he's not being realistic or fair or honest in his assessment of the past, present or future - so what else is new? There is, without questions, a crisis going on, but it isn't a cris

Good news - Dolezal is b(l)ack and talking truth to white power privilege and black power poverty in an  NBCBLK interview where she blew up the social order with an impassioned defense of her trans-black worldview. I've always had a soft spot for Rachel Dolezal and felt that she got a bad rap from the start because her views, and the way she manifest them, were too heterodox for our stupid age of racial, gender and ethnic classification. She's written a book, "In Full Color", which looks great on the outside but I fear it might read something like this universal answer to almost any question you ask RD: Well I did, and for people who read the book you can kind of go walk through that journey. The funny thing is that when I was asserting that in college, for example, people were constantly — when I was like, "I was born to white parents," people are like, "What are you? " and I would tell this long story, which people's eyes would glaze

It has been pointed out on this blog in the past that failure is not a bad thing and, in many cases, should be viewed as a wonderful experience (granted, that's hard to do) as it provides painful guidance on how to improve your "game", as they say, for the next time you attempt to do something. People who have never failed (if there are such people) have never tried to do anything and the more difficult the undertaking the more frequent the failure will be - so honesty and persistence are key elements of long term success in the face of inevitable failure. The implosion of the  American Health Care Act of 2017 is viewed, almost universally, as a crushing failure for the GOP, Trump and the Speaker of the House with friend and foe alike casting blame and "explaining" why it happened and what "lessons" might be learned from its failure. Case in point is Byron York's 14 "lessons": The Obamacare train wreck was a failure for President Tr

Do you like spy novels? I do. Forget about Health Care reform, SCOTUS confirmations, London Calling or any of the other news stories floating around in cyberspace - there is only one story that interests me and, unfortunately, it's a story that can't be told and will never be told. That story is about the civil war that's being fought in the intelligence community - the Justice Department (especially the FBI) and their mouthpieces in congress and the media. On Monday Comey pulled out his piece and fired a round right through the Oval office window and Wednesday Rep. Devin Nunes walked out of the White House with two six shooters drawn and shot some bullets into the air . Today Comey dropped by the White House for just under an hour long visit - short and sweet. "reminds me of Waco" Ever since Trump nuked Obama 20 days ago the silent civil war has been raging around the world, but especially in Washington D.C. Like all wars some of it has been funny, some o

I've always had a soft spot in my brain for pirates. From Sir Francis Drake (circumnavigated the globe) to Donald J. Trump I just can't get enough of them and have studied their exploits and instructed my children on their methods and motivations that they might become something of a pirate themselves. The brotherhood (and sisterhood) of these outliers is worthy of emulation and the live free or die (and many did die) ethos must be inculcated at a young age before life has a chance to beat you down into an office cube and annual spring vacation to some exotic local where licentious debauchery is your only release from the mundane paper shuffling that consumes your "life." The sad fate of Captain Kidd, the barbarity of L'Olonnais, the scrappy opportunism of Calico Jack and his shipmates Anne Bonnie and Marry Reid have been recited and, if I do say so myself, enhanced in hours of parental instruction to my young charges. I have paid particular attention to the st

I'm wondering if the FBI has some kind of formal scale to measure hate? - you know, something like: FBI Hate Scale  1= Mosquitoes is in the tent 2 = Coffee grounds in the bottom of my Starbucks cup 3 = "Hotel California" just came on the radio 4 = I can't find a parking spot 5 = Opioid induced constipation (OIC) 6 = DMV 7 = Obamacare 8 =  Armed robbery and rape 9 = Leprosy 10 = Jumping out of the plane without your parachute (and when you need to turn it up to eleven) 11. The Cross Bronx Expressway at 5pm on Friday in July And the reason I'm wondering is because I would like to know where Jim Comey would place Vladimir Putin's hatred for Hillary Clinton on that scale? Exactly how much does the Russian Bear hate Her Highness? If I had to guess, based on today's testimony , I'm going with 11 because it's pretty clear that Putin really, really, really hates Her. He hates HRC so much that he's willing to cheer for the other team - A team tha

And some men knows he has 21 military bases and 50,000 troops in that "powerful" woman's country  while other men just assume she loves him for who he is. Politico was at it again last week when they let  Christiane Amanpour's husband write The Leader of the Free World Meets Donald Trump and some drivel about the "evolution of the Trump-Merkel dialogue" and Merkel's "moral leadership" on the world stage. This is all part of coordinated effort to elevate Merkel and denigrate Trump in the eyes of the public and if that won't do then at least in the eyes of those people who read Politico. It might surprise these worldly critics to know that the US military has bases all over Germany and we've been there since 1945. When the German Chancellor comes to Washington D.C. she's there to get her marching orders and figure out a plan to execute them. Sometimes she gets a pat on the back and drinks champaign to celebrate our lon

32. We can lead by example again rather than following the script of terrorists & dictators. But only if WE the people lead. #Resist /Thread — Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) March 17, 2017 Twitter Moments are like little tweet stories for writers -  when 140 characters just won't do the trick you can create a moment to get your point across and that's what Beau Willimon of House of Cards fame did yesterday. One wonders what Mr. Willimon was trying to "get at" when he tackled the issue of Islamic inspired terror in the TV program he created - at least he stayed away from it in Season 1 or Season 2  - because it would have been the perfect platform to show how "WE" can "lead by example" again like we did for the 16 years of the Bush/Obama era. But his message even then, while the light worker was working his magic, was "WE are the terror" and now he's calling on "WE" the #resist movement to remember that wonderful

A friend of mine who's banking on an impeachment of Trump to save his day posted a very funny article from the WGBH web site announcing this orthodox "news": " A Major New Study Shows That Political Polarization Is Mainly A Right-Wing Phenomenon ." Knock me over with a feather that Government TV can take a CJR report titled " Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda " and find the "right-wing phenomenon" in it. Not that the study doesn't have something to tell us, but you've got to read between the lines (which WGBH can't do) to figure it out. The mud buckets of vitriol and hate thrown against T-POTUS is shocking and dirty, but very understandable if you stand back and "look at what's going on" as the Elvis from Queens likes to say.  The CJR study, by scholars at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard Law School, and the MIT Center for Civic Media, e

Dreams Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. Langston Hughes   When I was a boy, probably 8 or 9 years old, I had a dream that I was on the beach, stepped up onto a clump of rocks on the shoreline and pushed myself up into the air where I flew high into the blue and weaved my way through emerald archways the likes of which I had never seen. I'll never forget that sensation of flight and the quiet simplicity of soaring through my imaginary world. The sensation was so real that I found myself on the same rocks the next day jumping off and expecting to fly but falling to the grey sand with a thud instead. Call me a slow learner but that was not the last time that I attempted to replicate my dream in the wide awake world because I knew - I just knew - that flight was possible because I had experienced it so vividly in my slumber and it wasn't unt

There are those who claim that smoking cannabis is a relatively benign recreation with marginal deleterious effects on the user - especially when compared to alcohol and other intoxicants. Though its used is common by both high and low performers and is now legal in some states there remains strong Federal laws prohibiting its consumption and those laws were enacted for very good reason . While the short term effects of ingesting the THC SOMA simply make a person stupid (and sometimes paranoid) the detrimental impact of long term toking is significant. "Marijuana also affects brain development. When people begin using marijuana as teenagers, the drug may reduce thinking, memory, and learning functions and affect how the brain builds connections between the areas necessary for these functions. Marijuana's effects on these abilities may last a long time or even be permanent." Exhibit A: Cordozar Calvin Broadus, Jr. is 45 years old and assuming that he started puffi

Let me take you on a journey back in time to the evening of September 26, 2016 and the first Trump-Clinton presidential debate - I'm sure you remember it well, as do I . The summer was over, Trump was in hiding and David Plouffe was on Morning Joe claiming that "Clinton still has a 100% chance of a win" (if you want to laugh your ass off take 5 minutes to watch the video ). Of course, HillBilly did have a 100% chance of winning just like I had a 100% chance of winning or you had a 100% chance of winning and Donald J Trump had a 100% chance of winning. But what of the odds? For that we need bookies , er, pollsters to eye the horses, survey the track and entice the suckers to place a bet. The team at Echelon Insights did some polling on the two days following the first presidential debate and tabulated their findings showing a clear win for HRC among the viewing audience - 58% for Hitlery and 26% for The Elvis from Queens. The firm sent out an email crammed with addi

Back when our nation was in the heat of the presidential battle (late October 2016) Politico published what I assumed was a hit piece on Donald J Trump claiming that he spoke like a girl . I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, but I revisited the article today and boy was I wrong because it turns out that Trump's speech patterns and mannerisms are almost off the charts feminine. Look at the graph on the left which I stole from the Politico article and notice just how much of an outlier Trump is on the continuum. Not much of a difference between HRC and JEB! and things don't really start to get overtly masculine until we get to the Biggest Little Hobgoblin in the Union towards the bottom fifth of the list but Trump... Trump is way more feminine (WAY MORE) than Jim Webb is masculine and you would be hard pressed to get more masculine than that. Trump stands alone and far apart from his political rivals and it goes a long way in explaining why the man is so captiva