December 29, 2020

Vatican priest who appeared in Religulous dies

NPR remembers the Rev. Reginald Foster — perhaps the world's foremost Latin scholar. He was the official translator for four popes and inspired Roman tour guides for Latin enthusiasts worldwide.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/28/950886281/reginald-foster-worlds-renowned-latinist-dies-at-81

Here's the clip from Religulous. Quite a character!

December 21, 2020

Inadvertent or deliberate humor?

Moscow (CNN) - A Russian agent sent to tail opposition leader Alexey Navalny has revealed how he was poisoned in August -- with the lethal nerve agent Novichok planted in his underpants.

The stunning disclosure from an agent who belonged to an elite toxins team in Russia's FSB security service came in a lengthy phone call following the unmasking of the unit by CNN and the online investigative outfit Bellingcat last week.

In what he was told was a debriefing [italics mine], Konstantin Kudryavtsev also talked about others involved in the poisoning in the Siberian city of Tomsk, and how he was sent to clean things up.

December 12, 2020

Trump has gone from disparaging windmills as nothing but bird-killers

to tilting at them in his quixotic, traitorous, bird-brained, cuckoo coup attempt. Like all his other endeavors, it was a miserable failure.

To revise slightly Orwell's first line in Nineteen Eighty-Four: "It will be a bright cold day in January and the clocks will be striking twelve."* This time, however, the clocks will be marking not the continuation of a decades-long dictatorship, but the end of a four-year attempt to create one.

*Original line: "It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."

November 16, 2020

Disgraced

For all his lies & failures of omission & commission (too many to recount; not the purpose of this post), George W. Bush handled the transition to the Obama administration in the same smooth, time-honored manner as his father (who had been defeated) & all his predecessors (as far as I'm aware). To be sure, W. presided over a failed presidency (and how!), but he doesn't deserve to be called a disgraced former president.

Trump, by acting exactly in defeat as most (all?) DUers & others predicted -- & we're still in the early stages, oy -- has earned himself the adjective forever applied to so many politicians who resigned for criminal or ethical breaches: Disgraced.

If Anthony Weiner, e.g., will always be known as "disgraced ex-congressman Anthony Weiner," Donald Trump should suffer the same fate.

Will it happen? Not in the current boiling cauldron, but farther along, I believe history will regard 45 as "disgraced."

November 9, 2020

Considering his seething rage that's unlikely to subside for a looong time,

I don't think Trump's going to pardon anyone (besides himself, which will fail) before leaving office, whenever that might occur between now & Jan. 20. Not even the 2 Thanksgiving turkeys.

November 7, 2020

I doubt that Joe Biden will become the 46th POTUS

That's because Trump will resign, making Pence #46.

Any thoughts on when the Great Abdication might occur? My guess is as soon as he's get his legal team assembled to do battle in Manhattan & other state venues.

October 6, 2020

"Bless us, O Lord Donald J(aysus) Trump"

Kayleigh is a Jesus Camp alumnus if ever there was one.

July 9, 2020

Judging from the surge in Covid cases after many states reopened prematurely,

imagine what the numbers would look like had we not gone into lockdown, flawed as it was, a couple months ago.

Had Murka remained open for business as usual in April & May, we'd be at multiples of the current number of daily cases & deaths.

Has even one of the troglodytes, Neanderthals, imbeciles, incompetents, mental defectives, low-IQ morans, greedy bastards, "freedom" lovers & sociopaths in DC, the media or the general pop. who vehemently opposed the lockdown come forward publicly & admitted they were wrong, BIG TIME?

Of course not. Silly question.

What Democrats, liberals, progressives, moderates, The Lincoln Project, Never-Trumpers, Rational Republicans (is that an oxymoron?) & anyone else acquainted with reality need to do is remind voters very loudly & constantly that Trump & his nest of vipers opposed the lockdown with every fiber of their miserable, twisted souls & that it was the governors & mayors -- Dems aggressively & 'Pubs reluctantly -- who brought things to a halt, saving tens of thousands of lives & preventing hundreds of thousands of cases of a sometimes deadly & often-disabling disease.

And also remind voters that it was overwhelmingly the Rethug governors who reopened prematurely, imperiling the lives of their constituents & of us all.

July 1, 2020

If Bill Clinton could be compelled to testify under oath before a grand jury

about a BJ & then get impeached for lying to the grand jury about said BJ, why can't Drumpf also be compelled to testify under oath (to Congress, to the FBI, name your venue) about whether or not he committed the clearly treasonous act of betraying the military, next to which Ukraine pales in comparison (relatively speaking) as a matter of national security?

I'm aware that Clinton's testimony was connected to Paula Jones's civil suit, while the current affair has no legal action attached to it (yet), but heavens to betsy, gosh & golly, holy fuck, we've got to amend the constitution to require a sitting president to potentially perjure him- or herself in the case of a High Crime such as this, where impeachment AND REMOVAL will surely follow. (And no 5th Amendment for you, Mr./Madam President.)

In the meantime, can't someone with standing (like maybe all the troops in Afghanistan) sue the fucker & make him testify under oath?

June 18, 2020

Question: Would Drumpf still have run for prez

if President Obama hadn't eviscerated him to his face (with just cause) at the White House Correspondents Dinner?

My sense is that Trump was leaning toward running but was not totally on board until Obama skewered him like a modern-day Cyrano at the WHCD. That was the moment imo that Trump vowed to undo everything Obama had accomplished.

Trying to plumb Trump's mind is best left to professionals, of course, but that's my take. While writing this, it occurred to me that creating flowcharts of Trump's decision-making process in various situations over the past 3+ years could yield some truly hilarious results. Any software engineers out there willing to take a shot? (Just give me a credit if your book is a best-seller.)

In no way, shape or form do I hold our former leader responsible for our current state of affairs, which calls for some new adjectives to describe properly the depths to which we've sunk. Just curious as to what DUers think.

Apologies if this has been discussed before. A cursory DU search didn't return any similar posts.