FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: CIRCULATIN' LIKE CYCLOSPORA EDITION.

I never knew it was him! Infectious, ain't it?

Sorry I missed last Friday -- my normally crowded week got further squeezed by birthday celebrations, which were delightful if (given my late stage of life) a shade premonitory. In a decent society I would be not only retired but also exalted as a Living Treasure. Oh well, that’s life.

The week’s been full of awful news, and ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN got into some of it. Like the nutcake in charge of HHS. Check this latest nightmare from Garglin’ Bob:

A panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration, several of them sellers of experimental peptides, dismissed the concerns of the agency’s scientists on Thursday, voting in favor of allowing broad production of poorly understood peptide treatments...

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the F.D.A., has long supported lifting restrictions on peptides. In the weeks before Thursday’s hearing, his office nominated eight new members to the committee of academics and doctors that would review the issue, six of whom have sold peptide products, some banned, with health claims backed by minimal science.

The grift, like all MAGA grifts, is dispiriting, but this dangerous lunatic’s ongoing rampage against public health makes it much worse. This is the same guy who wanted to spend $5 billion -- a tenth of the NIH’s entire budget -- studying a purported link between vaccines and autism, among other outrages. He’s also the guy who booted and keeps booting the cyclosporiasis crisis. 

And because bad news sometimes brings the silver lining of amusing absurdity, RFK’s the star of our first REBID freebie, which shows him hot on the trail of whatever miasma or evil spirit has gotten into people's bowels, and waving a smudge stick.

The second no-paywall item is a scene from the version of The Odyssey that Elon Musk says he’ll get Grok to make on account of the woke. Like everything the spaceship-exploding drug addict says, it’s bullshit. He can only relate to listeners as marks, and is constantly offering them the equivalent of perfect robots but delivering instead a mime in mechanical drag. But when he made this comment in a disastrous recent interview, I think his guard was down and it really reflects his thinking:

Musk was asked how his companies would make money in this version of the future, and he insisted that “money won’t matter in 2036.” He claimed that everyone would have a high income from doing nothing and that people might still perform some kind of labor as a hobby, much in the same way that people might grow their own tomatoes in a home garden. Musk insisted backyard tomatoes weren’t as good as those you can buy from the store, but people still do it anyway. 

If there’s a drug that makes grocery store tomatoes taste better to you than homegrown tomatoes, I don’t want to take it. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: CLEARING THE DECK IN MAINE EDITION.

No, really, is that how you pronounce "kilometre"?

We’re rid of Graham Platner at last. His removal comports with the widely-known difference in approaches to this sort of thing between the two parties; Democrats expel their sex pests while Republicans make them President. The latter are still trying to make hay of Platner's brief dalliance at the head of the Maine Democratic ticket; at The Hill, the malignant Liz Peek says that “after winning recent primary races in New York and Colorado, the elimination of the accused rapist brought the soaring far left back to earth — at least, for the moment.” 

As this claim is unsupportable, Peek spends the rest of her space shaking her fist at Zohran Mamdani, insisting the popular New York Mayor is riding for a fall because of shit no one actually cares about (e.g. “he refused to criticize the phrase ‘globalize the intifada’”). I’m surprised none of these idiots has tried “if they love collectivism so much why don’t they collectively share Platner’s guilt.” The centrist dipshits pushing other centrist dipshits to take Platner’s place (“he worked with Republicans to stop the deeply unpopular progressive push to extend government healthcare benefits to illegal immigrants”) are only slightly less bad.

Anyway, the first of this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues to come out from behind the paywall is my Platner envoi. Here’s hoping Maine Democrats, who will soon find the Prestige Press inattentive to their state, can stop bickering and arguing about who killed who and run Susan Collins out of office. 

The other REBID freebie is a dramatic speculation on what’s up with Mitch McConnell. Coming on the heels of Jersey GOP Congressman Kean’s long-unexplained absence from work (which he finally revealed to be government-financed depression treatment of a sort that, were it proposed for actual working persons, would be supported by exactly zero Republicans), McConnell’s vanishing act and the weird coyness of his enablers reenforces the impression that Republicans not only can’t do anything for their fellow Americans while in office, they also can’t even be bothered to show up; also, the possibility that McConnell is some kind of dead can’t be discounted, as nobody thinks that trying some shenanigans with his Senate seat is beneath them. (There may not be any percentage in it, but you can imagine them lying about his demise merely out of instinct.)

Otherwise, it’s business as usual: ICE murdering a guy (and trying to remove the witnesses); Tubby choking the Iranian chicken; and the GOP prepping for November with candidates like the self-professed mass murderer who is now their official candidate for governor of Colorado. It’s as if every moment we allow the current crop of scumbags to remain in office emboldens Republicans to try and install even worse freaks and madmen. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: WATERING THE TREE OF LIBERTY EDITION.

I guess you’ve heard that, on top of his destruction of the Reflecting Pool (which he says is in great shape) and the debacle of the Great American State Fair (which he says is a huge success) Tubby plans to blow up about ten times as many fireworks as usual in DC on the 4th and have hours of flyovers, so with the continuing National Guard occupation it’ll be even more like a war zone than usual. For the first time I’m not sorry I moved away.

The photo above is from the 4th of July on the Mall in 2021, when the country had not gone mad -- or rather had briefly gone mad but temporarily come to its senses. People came and went freely then and had a good time. This year the site will be heavily restricted and you’ll have to get there by 6 pm in 100 degree heat well before the gargantuan display of noise and smoke, after which I expect ICE to sweep in among the chaos and bust heads. I don’t think Trump voters realized that fascism’s not so much fun when its brutal stupidity is aimed at you as well as at the people you hate. 

Well, honor the Declaration as best you can, far from the madness. And enjoy a couple of free ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN editions! First, there’s our favorite mainstream media politics show, Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, tackling the narrow escape of SCOTUS’ birthright citizenship ruling. When we get back in there, we oughta pack the Court so they have to hear cases in a mid-sized concert venue at least. And second, here’s one about the New Red Scare that not only conservatives but also watered-down liberals are ginning up now that voters are nominating and electing socialists instead of Better Things Are Not Possible Democratic gerontocrats, feebs, and shills. Keep panicking, guys, I want to get as much enjoyment out of this as possible. It's what Tom Paine would have wanted! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: EYE ON THE SPARROW Y'ALL EDITION.

DANCE PARTY!!

 It seems the closer we get to the big two-five-oh -- that is, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence -- the stupider the current U.S. government acts. Now Tubby and his mob are bombing Iran -- I guess they figured that tired old act needed goosing if they were going to hold the audience -- and the Supreme Court’s six ringers just cheerfully unleashed a bunch of insane rulings, including the ICE-Raid All Haitians and Syrians Decision (look out, white people of Springfield, Ohio, grandma’s gonna need a new home health aide soon and I guess it’s gonna be you!)

Plus which Vice-President Fuckface solidified his status as America’s Least Likable Politician by comparing himself to Richard Nixon. (In defense of Tricky Dick, I must say he lost the presidency once by refusing to wear makeup, whereas one cannot encounter the chipmunk visage of JD Vance without unconsciously thinking “oh, honey, too much eyeliner!”)

On the plus side, don’t mess with the Zohran: on Tuesday the Mayor of New York lugged several real lefties over the finish line in the Democratic Primary, whereupon all America’s useless centrist trimmers cried foul. (“Vote Blue No Matter Who” only goes one way, it seems;  we have to vote for Dems who promise More of the Same [Only With Slightly Less Overt Racism], but just ask them to vote for what the Party stood for in the days of FDR -- that is, the last time it was massively popular! -- and the middle-of-the-roaders go into rebellion. Fuck them and especially James Carville who, one wag observed, was probably thrown into shock by the rare sight of Democrats winning an election.)

So even with the pigs and scumsuckers running their usual games, there’s a glimmer of hope; after years of bullshit and two Trump terms of bullshit cubed-to-infinity, the Democratic Socialists look like the next big thing, and the feebs and dweebs trying the usual message of “Expect Nothing and Settle for Even Less” look like losers. Prosit! 

Here’s a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie about a key part of the de-Nazification process: The increasingly inescapable fact that Trump is mentally disabled.  

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: RETURN TO FORM EDITION.

You know what, I never knew what this was called until this week.

Well, looky here -- for the first time in weeks I got one of these R-T-Hs published on the appropriate Friday. Of course, I had the assistance of a federal holiday. Thanks, Joe Biden!  Juneteenth has fast become one of my favorite days of observation. The first one, which I experienced in DC, was a treat, as was, in a perverse way, the bitching of white rightwingers over it. (Go here for Dan McLaughlin’s 2021 complaint at National Review that Juneteenth “is presently being pushed by progressives... who wish to use it as yet another club with which to denounce America over slavery” and that we already had too many federal holidays. No, I’m not kidding.) Now it’s a great reminder that, as fucked up as America can be, we still have the capacity to right the ship, as I hope we’re going to see in the coming months.

In that spirit, we have two (2) ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies this week, brought out from beyond the paywall for you folks who have yet to realize what a bargain it is (SUBSCRIBE WHY DON’TCHA). 

The first is another rarity: A free Fun Friday edition. Fun Fridays are when I give a prompt, like what’s your favorite comic strip with a female lead character, and our brilliant readers (you can be one! It’s easy and cheap!) sing out. Today’s FF is about small acts of citizenship -- that is, little things you do out of civic-mindedness. The responses are well-said (natch) and heartwarming. Go on, dip in.

The second is (mostly but not entirely) about Tubby’s Iran debacle and what it says about him and us. There’s obviously a lot going on there, not the least of which is the total mismanagement of one of the few crucial duties of the executive; in this case the Commander-in-Chief, with no apparent casus belli, threw soldiers and ordnance like a tantrum, fucked up the region and world trade, and, after months of bluster and slaughter, called the whole thing off. 

The thing about it that I can’t get over is its incredible unseriousness -- most obvious in Tubby’s post-war (I guess we can say) yammering about how if no one likes it he’s gonna blame it on Vance. Imagine if LBJ went on TV and said “if Vietnam goes tits-up, remember Westmoreland did it.” This has opened the Republican floodgates for some of the craziest shit I’ve ever seen American politicians say, e.g.: 

Worse yet, I’m now seeing allegedly serious people asking why liberals like me aren’t praising Trump for ending the war. As if the old dotard weren't perfectly capable of telling his goons, “Look, there’s this classy broad I wanna bang, I said I’d give her a south sea island paradise, so go steal me one, we can tell people they had nukes.”

(BTW be fully prepared: When we haul these bastards before tribunals, they’ll start claiming they were actually in the resistance -- like Hegseth will say he kept Trump from bombing Minneapolis by dangling a suncatcher in front of him. I don’t care what Merrick Garland says, don’t go easy on him!)

A big part of our problem is that many citizens can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and between actual people-get-killed war and a funny show on TV. Looks like there’ll be some forced tours of former concentration camps in our future.

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: SILVER LININGS PAYBACK EDITION.

Nice cover, lovely sentiment.

Sorry for the day of delay -- still healing up from the knee thing, and carrying a full load work-wise. But I have been paying attention to the poor old world, and I can report that while it remains full of atrocities and outrages, there’s some argentum on the cloud cover and hope that the sun will break through. 

In fact, one of those atrocities -- America’s latest war crime, the extrajudicial murder of an alleged drug lord in Venezuela under the cover of diplomacy -- was probably arranged by Tubby’s goons to cheer him up because things have been going so badly from him at home.

We’ve still got some federal judges who respect the law, and they swatted the old dotard around last week, making him put back the signs he removed from federal parks because they admitted the U.S. held and abused slaves (thus stalling the “if Parson Weems were mentally disabled” approach to history with which Tubby hopes to replace current standards) and refusing to accept Todd Blanche’s pinky-swear that he won’t steal the $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund as soon as John Law’s back is turned. 

And they made Trump take his whore name off the Kennedy Center -- which his minions did in the most disgraceful way, delaying as much as possible and shielding the operation from the public. Not sure whether this was out mere peevishness, or whether his sycophants hoped he’d die before the operation was completed, thus sparing themselves whatever gruesome indignities they’re usually forced to suffer when he doesn’t get his way. 

I’m not used to looking on the sunny side, so when the Blackshirts of Great Britain -- with the assistance of the equally fascist First Trillionaire -- stirred up a racist pogrom against the Muslim residents of Belfast, I made such satiric lemonade of it as I could -- in the first of last week’s unpaywalled Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions, I considered how fucked up the Mother Country had become and noted that at least America still mostly conducted its racist persecutions under the color of the law, happy 4th of July ha ha. But I’m a bit ashamed to have said so -- because apparently, in Blighty as here, there are many good people who’ll turn out to smack the bastards down, helping the victims and making their objections known -- not only at the crime site but elsewhere, as we see in Brighton under the leadership of local hero Fatboy Slim.

It’s true, as I often say, that fascism is an international movement -- but so is resistance. 

One more REBID freebie: A consideration of the Right and their conspiracy theories -- one of which, the UFO bullshit, Trump recently re-fueled -- and how their behavior shows that even they don’t believe them.

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: A LITTLE SOMETHIN' EXTRA EDITION.

Cool new(ish) shit. Thanks, Gabbie. 

OK, so it’s not like last week when I was a month and a day late, but late is late so I apologize. In my defense, as God’s Angry Man and the uncremated conscience of my race I’m under a lot of pressure these days. Outrages spray out like Faygo at a Gathering of the Juggalos. (Deep cut, eh?) Like this:

Trump officials planned to mark 2.7 million living people as dead, whistleblower claims...

Social Security carried out a smaller version of such an effort last year, The Post previously reported, moving 6,100 immigrants into its “Death Master File” — a database used by banks, employers and government agencies to determine whether someone is alive. Some of those people later showed up at Social Security field offices to prove they were alive and were restored in agency records.

I note that in the catalogue of horrors unleashed in the reign of Tubby II, they got the DOGE creeps in there very early, rightly judging that the system would be underprepared to defend itself from their predations, and that shit like this is typical of how they view their role in government: Immiseration of the needful in the service of plunder.

The first of our Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies is a consideration of the Trump White House’s rasslin’ birthday party and its collapse. This one was published Monday, and since then more musical acts and celebrities have bowed out and Tubby has declared that he doesn’t need any “so called ‘Artists’” -- which perfectly fits my assessment of the situation and how it reflects his philosophy: In MAGAland, “not only are artists who reject the Leader useless; all artists are unnecessary when you have the Leader to entertain you.”

I’m sorry, though, that Trump has decided to get Ted Nugent and some other nostalgia acts to fill the void -- I was hoping he’d go the old-school punk DIY route and hire some DC talent, as urged in this zine I got at Red Emma’s:

Now that I could endorse! In fact if Trump and his mob were real heads, that’s the way they’d play it -- who needs the rotten corporate entertainment complex when one can make one’s own kind of music, let a hundred Telehealths bloom! 

But Tubby ain’t a real anything; he’s just a sad old clown. My second freebie is a tribute to his decrepitude -- no, there’s no happy ending (e.g. him dying screaming in a fire), just a realistic assessment of the inside of his wormy skull.

And because I’m so stinkin’ generous we have THREE (3) freebies! Here’s me on Platnervousness. I see a lot of comrades enraged that this weird guy has gotten so far; some worry he has jeopardized the fight for the Senate, and many don’t like what his rise says about institutional misogyny in U.S. politics. I take their points, but would only note that 1.) the Democrats of Maine can moot all of this on Tuesday if they so choose and 2.) I have been hearing Bizarro emulations of this theme from supporters of Donald Trump, Ken Paxton and every other twisted GOP freak, which I understand is a reflex (pretended moral outrage at Democrats is one of their major tactics) but I don’t know if they’ve thought through how this will land with their own voters, who are currently being told in Texas that James Talerico is unacceptable because he’s not a macho woman-hating asshole -- that is, the opposite of what Platner's alleged to be.  Anyway read it, get mad at me if you like -- it’s all part of the fun of civilizational collapse! 

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: BEEN AWAY, WHAT'D I MISS? EDITION.

You should be satisfied, but it ain't quite right .

A month between alicubi editions? So sorry! Been a busy, busy time, with surgery etc.

Since I know you like it fresh, I won’t reach back too many days for Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies. Here’s a quickie on the White House UFC Cage Match, our latest frontier in national self-embarrassment -- I mean of course there’s a Tubby grift angle as well, but that goes without saying; what really lifts the gorge is its willful grotesquerie. I talk a little here about exactly why it’s specifically this kind of mortifying spectacle and not, say, Donald Trump’s Night of A Thousand Tits or The Most Dangerous Game: See It Live! I will add, and I may elaborate on this someday, that there’s a whole social history to be written on the “populist” impulse to dirty up our federal government, going back perhaps to Andrew Jackson and certainly including the tendency of audiences to cheer in 1996 when they saw the part of the trailer for Independence Day where the White House was blown up. Well, maybe someday we’ll have enough real self-government that this kind of fantasy is less attractive.

And I might as well throw in this one about the ever-receding imminence of the end of the Iran War; the essay is almost a week old yet we may say it’s an evergreen because this shtick where Trump and his goons say they have the war won and the papers rush to cry PEACE IS AT HAND has been going on practically since the beginning and is still happening, on repeat. (Looking right this very minute at USA Today: “Hegseth says US ‘postured and prepared’ for reengagement with Iran.” Postured is right!) For those of us who long ago internalized that Trump is devoted to lies and in fact will never willingly tell the truth and may not be capable of it even if it would help him, this is no surprise. But the Prestige Press must pretend because it fills pages and preserves access -- while also destroying the public’s trust in them, but clearly they don’t see that as part of their remit.  

I imagine this bothers some of the morally-encumbered members of the Fourth Estate, which may be why there has been some coverage of the hilarious exodus of allegedly scheduled musical acts from that UFC thing. It’s a rare case in which you can see in real time how poisonous this regime is to anyone who would actually have to face the public about cooperating with it afterward. That’s part of why it drives conservatives berserk -- check out “Not A Single Modern Celeb Could Be Bothered To Perform For America 250” at wingnut ragesite The Federalist:

This sharp of a patriotic split between the American people, who by all accounts are excited to go all out on this extra special 4th of July, and the people who produce this country’s pop culture cannot stand. There has to be a reckoning between the American people who cry out for patriotic content and a media-entertainment complex that does everything in its power to demonize the United States. It can’t go on like this. Either patriots take back the culture, or the current pop culture regime will destroy the social fabric of the country. There are no other options.

They run all three branches of the whole damn federal government, yet they’re enraged that people who make art won’t slaver over them like Tubby’s Cabinet in one of those televised grovelfests. For the right, culture war is always a war ON culture. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: NO, *YOU* SHUT UP EDITION.

My phlebotomist was singing along to this.

One of the key features of the second Trump administration (or, as I like to call it, Tubby II) is the elevation of hypocrisy to a strategy. Normal political hypocrisy involves saying one thing while doing another and (this is crucial) hoping nobody notices. Its purpose is simply the having and eating of one’s own cake -- winning voter approval with their words while winning donor approval with their actions.

But while traditional hypocrisy relies on obfuscation, the Trumpkin variety relies on obviousness. They clearly want you to see them saying one thing and doing another because it demonstrates the limitlessness of their impunity -- that they’re not only beyond the reach of laws and norms, but also beyond the reach of logic, cause and effect, and the voters, whose disgust with all this Trump simply brushes off as if it doesn’t matter, either because he’s confident the vote is rigged or because his nihilism extends even further than his hypocrisy.

We saw that for sure with the White House Correspondents Dinner almost-assassination -- after years of Trump calling for violence against his opponents, he and his propagandists insisted that it was Democrats who had made our politics a shooting gallery and demanded “lowering the temperature” by firing Jimmy Kimmel for a joke about Trump’s decrepitude, indicting James Comey for a restaurant reference, and everybody shutting up about our Beloved President unless they came with words of praise such as his cabinet lavishes on him in their Daily Affirmations in the Oval Office. 

Our first ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie, released to non-subscribers today, is about why that’s a lot of hooey and how a much earlier and better (like that’s tough) but still thin-skinned President tried it on his subjects and got his ass kicked. (Note to Secret Service: Figurative language.) 

Our second freebie is an assessment of the Roberts’ Court’s latest outrage, Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively killed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act -- and, since Shelby County v. Holder had already invalidated preclearance, pretty much killed the Voting Rights Act itself, though the conservatives’ cowardice kept them from admitting it. The Republicans are not fooled, and are racing the write black districts out of their voter maps.

It’s a shame, but we can hope (and cajole, and threaten) (Note to Secret Service: Figurative -- oh, who am I kidding, they don’t care about Democrats) our party leaders and politicians into fighting fire with fire and redistricting them right back. Though I usually counsel against counting on the GOP to make mistakes, I also think under the present conditions the GOP will probably dummymander themselves in several states. The rest we must trust to the righteous fury of the electorate, and there we have an advantage over our opponents, because that we need only the truth to stoke.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: BACK IN THE SADDLE EDITION.

Let's take the temperature down a bit.

Yeah, been a few weeks since I did this -- sorry about that, life’s a bitch and sometimes it's hard to get it on a leash. 

ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN has not faltered, though -- still five days a week of premium content. Also cheap! If you want a steady flow feel free to sign up. 

No sense in going back two weeks for outrages to review -- though, talking of ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN, here are a couple of editions concerning JD Vance’s recent dispute with the Holy Father that I’ve brought out from behind the paywall. 

Trump’s beef with Leo XIV is just stupid — he’s old, senile, and vicious, and thinks everything including the mandate of heaven should be his. Vance is another matter: As with everything else he does as Vice-President, his theological dispute with the actual Pope was an act of craven suck-uppery to his boss, of the sort that has made him a figure of fun and contempt across the political spectrum; but the fact that he became a Catholic a couple of minutes ago and decided to lecture the literally infallible leader of his Church on Just War Theory really lifts the degree of insufferability. If Vance keeps it up he’ll have us lapsed Catholics back in the pews by Christmas.

Speaking of moxie, it’s also rich that, when New York Mayor Mamdani recently proposed an exceedingly modest tax on unoccupied second homes in the city worth more than $5 million, and used hedge fun tycoon Ken Griffin’s pied-a-terre as a backdrop, Griffin threatened to retaliate by withdrawing his plan to build a new tower in Manhattan. Oh, no! How will New York live without yet another big, expensive building! This stuff probably plays well with rightwing rubes who think Atlas Shrugged was a documentary, but if Griffin’s really red-mad about it, let him go build his tower in Bumfuck. I bet the employees who would suddenly find their workplace relocated to a red state business park will be thrilled. 

Meanwhile I see Tubby proposed (or pretended to propose -- as he can never be trusted to tell the truth, one can only speculate of the level of lying he’s at) to kick Spain out of NATO because they criticized him on Iran. Again, this probably excites what remains of the MAGA base, who have no idea how anything works, but I bet the other NATO members feel very differently about it; they’re smart enough, too, to reckon that with Trump no capitulation will satisfy, that if they flatter him on this he’ll next require them to send troops and, who knows, maybe kiss his ass in Harrods’ window, so they’d better stand by a partner they can actually count on rather than indulge the feckless Putinite. 

Trump’s mismanagement is something only the badly damaged would consent to assist, and that helps explain why his lieutenants are such transparent frauds and losers and why many of them seem to be cracking under the strain of even the modest requirements of their sinecures. Take hard-drinking FBI Director Kash Patel, for example, who seems to spend more time getting liquored up and then denying he was liquored up than catching crooks (though he can be counted on to stumble over to the press conference when Tubby pushes through another transparently phony political prosecution). The only thing that works efficiently in this administration is its constant looting of the U.S. Treasury. Like all honest people I worry that Trump and his goons may steal the coming elections that are otherwise destined to curtail his power, but if we can avoid that we’re going to have to do more to clean up afterwards than walk through the White House with a smudge stick.