Keeper of the Clown Bell

Did you know that president Trump is accused of having an affair with this woman 10 years ago? Playboy Model No, seriously, Trump had sex with Karen McDougal, or so it is claimed, A LOT over something like a 10 month long relationship in 2007 (W's 2nd term) and then in 2016, when she was looking around for a way to make an additional buck off of her adultery, Trump and his fixer Michael Cohen convinced David Pecker (great name) of National Enquirer to buy her story and spike it - which he did. McDougal extorts $100K+ from the Donald and goes on vacation while he goes to the White House. End of story, right? Nope, and that's because the #NeverTrump Wall Street Journal published  its "investigate report" on the transaction 4 days before the 2016 presidential election in a last gasp effort to ding The Elvis from Queens and win it for Hitlary. The Journal's scheme died but the story lives on and yesterday CNN "obtained" and broadcast a confidential co

Trump Neverending Story When I'm driving around the countryside I sometimes like to scan the podcasts on my phone and see if there's anything I might listen to in order to pass the time. Sometimes it's Dan Carlin's Hardcore History or The Solopreneur Hour (becoming profitably unemployable) by Michael O'Neal that fills the drive-time hour but honestly, I'll listen to almost anything. Last fall I listened to a reading of  The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (wonderful) and also  Shakespeare's Restless World via the BBC (also wonderful) but I'm not all highbrow - I even listened to  the most imperfect messenger Glenn Beck and other "whack-jobs" (as DJT calls them) to, IDK, expand my mind(?). And sometimes I listen to the tears of my enemies tap, tap, tapping on the formica desktop underneath the mic in the podcast studio and for that I usually turn to  NPR Politics Podcast or The Daily hosted by Michael Barbaro and broadcast from

No more games FIFA awarded the Russian's the privilege of hosting the 2018 World Cup eight years ago (2010) which was 2 years after Russia invaded Georgia and 4 years before Russia's annexation of Crimea and none of those actions (or anything else Russia is accused of doing) had any impact on International Football organized out of neutral Switzerland. It's not easy to host the World Cup and once a country sets itself to the task of building stadiums, hotels, transportation hubs and the like - not to mention the logistics of moving this circus around - the games must be played. Hardly anyone in America cares about soccer at the international level but that's American exceptionalism for you because everyone else in the world is obsessed with the spectacle. As it happens, I watched a lot of soccer over the past month and found myself enjoying the games more than I did 4 years ago even though some of the top talent got knocked out of the competition in the early roun

Last Sunday the AP dropped a bomb (of sorts) by somehow/someway unearthing a "confidential memo" Trump lawyers sent last year(!) to special councel Mueller claiming that fired FBI Director James Comey was "Machiavellian" and “unbounded by law and regulation.” They also claim that Comey is "dishonest" implying that he shouldn't be taken seriously as a potential witness in the ongoing (over a year now) investigation that Mueller is sheepherding. The KOTCB blog has gone over and over the Comey dishonesty and unbounded nature of the investigations he ordered and (presumedly) oversaw during the 2016 presidential campaign season. Is he dishonest? Yes, he is so deeply dishonest that he doesn't even know he's dishonest and NOTHING will ever change his mind or even open it to the possibility that he was in the wrong. So he got fired . Any FBI Director is (or aught to be) "unbounded" because the very nature of the job is to go after the ab

Have you ever seen the Media Bias Chart (v3.1)  hosted at the All Generalizations are False web site curated by Vanessa Otero ? It was created to help folks understand what kind of news they are consuming and let them know what's #FakeNews and what's real news and where it all fits in the larger mediasphere. The chart is what one would expect from a patent lawyer turned media analyst and it's formal Left/Right axis with a "fair" scale for news sources is predictable, by the book, Blue Pill conventional wisdom. However, looked at the right way it can be very instructive and so I have inverted and annotated Vanessa's chart in an effort to give "news consumers" a clearer picture of what, in fact, they're gobbling up in their day to day info grazing.  The first thing to point out about the chart is that it leaves off Facebook, GoogleNews, Twitter and many other social media news sources that are becoming the primary means of gathering inform

Happy Birthday America! It doesn't get any better than Hostess CupCakes washed down with some Corona at 10 AM on a Wednesday morning - At least that's what I'm told. I'm a big fan of the Orange CupCakes but this time of year they roll out the  Star Spangled CupCakes and they are delicious. Not sure what they'd taste like washed down with some Mexican piss water but I'll leave that for my left of center friends to enjoy. I eat them straight up with some hot 7-Eleven joe which I consider a true American breakfast. Here's the scoop on Corona - it's owned by InBev and all the beer is made domestically in the good old USA. Here's a nice article on the History of the Hostess CupCake from 30 years ago - yes, 30 years ago, before the 2013 bankruptcy. It's okay now, fired most of the employees and use machines to make the cakes - got rid of the union contracts - so the CupCakes are rolling on, just like America. Can not be defeated because we can alw