FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: INTERNATIONAL SCUMBAGGERY AFOOT EDITION.

Can you dig it?

Hey, remember when the bad guys were the lunatics who performed executions in front of cameras and broadcast it to the world? Well, guess what! 

The execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, will be live-streamed, a Pentagon official told ABC News on Thursday...

Public executions were once common in the U.S., but states began restricting and abolishing the practice in the mid 19th and early 20th centuries. The last widely recognized public execution was carried out in Kentucky in 1936.

Makin’ America Gruesome Again! Vice President JD Vance doesn’t condemn it (“I hope that people don't forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people”) but says that he, personally, won’t watch the execution. Clearly he intends to run in 2028 as a moderate.

Speaking of the insane bloodlust of this administration, you probably heard that Tubby has been fantasizing aloud at his rallies about Los Angeles and San Diego getting bombed by Iran. The first time he did it people cheered, so his handlers have gotten him to stick in some shit about “protecting our cities,” which just makes it funnier given how he typically rags on any jurisdiction that has a museum and a library where the preacher doesn’t clear all the books.  This week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie is about this, and why Trump likes doing it. 

(Yeah, only one freebie this time -- I can’t be giving away the store, baby needs a new pair of shoes -- subscribe already, it’s cheap!)

Further cementing America’s status as a pariah nation, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned the International Criminal Court, where he probably worries about ending up one day, threatening states and vendors that work with the ICC after a six-month grace period. The announcement was probably rushed out when Tubby saw they'd given the Nobel Peace Prize to a former ICC judge instead of his fat ass. (This also made Bari Weiss mad, natch.) Some civilized countries have complained but it remains to be seen how they’ll handle it when our mob boss starts throwing his considerable weight around. Oh well, at least he’s not annexing the Sudetenland. 

ICE shot a guy in The Bronx, too, and Secretary of DHS Markwayne GaryWayne went to the press squeezing a stress ball and telling them he’s going to keep doing this because Sanctuary Cities Worst of the Worst blah blah.

“[Mayor Mamdani] said he wants to abolish ICE,” Mullin said. “Well, Mayor, if you abolish ICE, who’s going to take your criminals off the streets of your own town? Who’s going to take the murderers and the thieves and the gangbangers?”

Mamdani did try to pick up Netanyahu but they wouldn’t let him. The guy they shot is in the hospital and a judge just said they can’t ship him to Eswatini or whatever concentration camp they had warmed up for him, though as always it remains to be seen whether these scumbags will abide by the law. Try and hang on a little longer, ICC, we’ll be filling your dock soon enough.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GOOD FOR WHAT AI'S YA EDITION.

These guys are local!

This week has been, as is now customary under Tubby II, a cavalcade of horrors, and perhaps the most illustrative horror was the “MAHA Summit” at which the dangerous lunatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denigrated medical science and instead pimped potions and -- as is now de rigueur for con artists -- AI:

Mr. Kennedy said OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, told him during a recent visit to his office that it would be “malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking A.I.” Mr. Kennedy apparently agreed...

“If somebody tells you, ‘Masks work, trust the experts,’ A.I. may tell you otherwise,” [Kennedy] added. “If somebody tells you, ‘Social distancing works, trust the experts,’ A.I. may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, or you need to take it to protect your grandmother, A.I. may say it actually doesn’t do that.”

AI will agree with you, in other words, that germs don’t exist, and that your illnesses would be better treated by MAHA-accredited hucksters than doctors. As with less figurative total eclipses, this is better viewed through the smoked glass of satire, so our first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie treats the Summit as it deserves. 

Our other REBID freebie is related to all the fresh evidence that Trump’s brain is in an advanced state of deterioration. When we talk about his “policies” we’re mainly talking about the evil, corrupt, and often illegal machinations that operatives like Vought and Miller get him to sign off on by telling him how great he is and how they’ll make his enemies suffer. This week we once again saw Tubby yammering moronically in interviews and at the podium and it becomes clearer by the day that he’s non compos mentis.

In my post I go over what’s left rattling around Tubby’s brainpan (mostly stuff that was turning him on in the 1980s). But I also talk about the fact -- and let us never forget it -- that the entire Republican Party and conservative movement are wholly sworn to his repulsive reign, and even on the cusp of a midterms wipeout continue to stand with him. A few try to pretend they only happen to be standing near him -- don’t let them get away with it. Because when Grandpa hits the bricks, whoever they replace him with may do less senile rambling and sleeping in meetings, but he'll still be kidnapping immigrants and sending them to “third countries,” immiserating minorities, siphoning billions from the Treasury for their donors, tearing out the bottoms of such safety nets as we have, etc. He'll probably make racist creep Christopher Rufo U.S. Attorney General and Ezra Klein will applaud the appointment as the dawn of a new era of bipartisan cooperation shortly before he’s spirited away to Eswatini. 

Oh, let me add: My buddy Martin Downs has published a magnificent fantasy novel called The Favorite, on sale now. It’s got dystopia, ancient gods, sea battles, sex, and snappy dialogue, and plenty of each. Go get! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MAKE HIM MAD EDITION.

Like The Streets? Sleaford Mods? Then this might be for you!

Maybe I’m just contrary -- I won’t say “contrarian,” that’s obviously a synonym for “dork,” like “libertarian” -- but as the prospect of a blue wave seems to rise, I actually feel more nervous rather than less. 

God knows the portents are good: Tubby’s tanking in polls, even Kansas seems in play, and Republican rats dare to dispute Dear Leader on immigration of all things. Still, Trump is the biggest and most feral rat of them all, and if cornered will not play fair; it’s mainly a question of whether the institutions he needs to defeat democracy have been sufficiently corrupted to assist him if he goes berserk. 

There’s evidence either way. On the one hand, Todd Blanche is a moral void; on the other, he couldn’t even get the reptilian Joe diGenova to prosecute Biden and Obama for him (nor keep his mouth shut about there being no evidence to support such a prosecution). On the one hand, Pete Hegseth is even worse than Blanche; on the other, his subordinates are leaking his stupidities so regularly that he’s been forced to investigate (and that he announced his investigation just shows how clueless he is).

We’ll see. Sometimes I think Tubby bulldozed the East Wing and destroyed the Reflecting Pool just to signal to his opponents that he’s crazy and will do anything, like the street lunatic who smashes shit to show he means business. Hurry November! 

How about a couple of free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stories? (Remember, subscribers get these every weekday for rock-bottom prices -- so cheap you should buy two subscriptions in case one breaks.) First one is an example of our famous Oval Office scenes, in this case a high-level conference on how they’re going to make the Smithsonian more patriotic and white. The papers report the actual plan includes, and I wish I were kidding, “warning labels” -- reading “Here be wokeness,” I suppose. Tubby must imagine Mr. and Mrs. Suburbanite heading toward the famous American History Museum and halting as if at the edge of a quicksand pit when they read that they might be exposed to photos of Thurgood Marshall and Jesse Owens. Maybe the next step will be to move all negritude to the African American History and Culture building where it can be separate but equal.

The other freebie is one of our multi-focal Caen Spree editions, which covers among other subjects the latest commercial starring Sydney Sweeney’s Tits. I get why sponsors keep putting the pretty girl naked in ads, but why rightwingers act as if it’s some kind of wicked burn on liberals is baffling. I mean if I had to ensure Donald Trump approved of my porn before I could beat off to it, I’d seriously consider aversion therapy. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN? UNFORTUNATELY, NO EDITION.

Labor Day, Shmabor Day -- there's yet some summer wine left.

Been a while, sorry! As Ralph Richardson says in O Lucky Man! when told his daughter needs him, “the trouble is, I’m so frightfully busy.” (You might try subscribing to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down and getting this stuff five days a week in your inbox. The cost is negligible!) 

Welp, it’s 9/11 25. Five years ago I said I wasn’t going to commemorate the occasion anymore, but our precipitous decline since then demanded a reconsideration, so -- for our first REBID freebie of the week -- here’s that essay with an update. In its heyday 9/11ism was mainly experienced as jingoism (and of course racism), but recent events show that, to this day, it colors everything rightwingers do. 

And while we’re at it, here’s the second tower of my nineeleven-related posts, about why Trump is suddenly lying so hard about his involvement with it. (Senility is only part of it!)

The other big cataclysm this week was Tubby’s midterm convention, all accounts of which are simultaneously astonishing and depressing: A drug dealer/would-be murderer (or, as Fox News has it, “libertarian icon”) praising Trump for busting him out of the joint (for a price); JD Vance spitting some overt racism; and of course the yammering of King Shit himself, climaxing in an offered bribe of $5,000 if his co-conspirators keep Congress in the midterms. Amazingly the cost hasn’t gone up since 1935! 

Few in the Prestige Press characterize that last one as a bribe, of course; most stick to Trump’s preferred usage, “dividend,” while Axios explains to their politically savvy readers “How Trump's $5,000 check promise is supposed to work” -- with examples such as this: “The capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and the recent Venezuelan oil deal are evidence that Trump can pull off things Washington once thought impossible, and the $5,000 checks are his next big swing.” If he can steal that big, the thinking goes, surely he can afford to share the loot with you, Mr. Average Citizen!  It’s not as if he has a record of stiffing people who do stuff for him. 

Where all will end, knows God. On the one hand, judges continue to slap down Tubby’s crazier power grabs; on the other hand, a lot of other institutions you’d think would show some spine -- such as international NGOs -- continue to cave to him. Oh well, as least this phase of imperial decline has some thrills ‘n’ chills! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: UP SHIT GULF WITHOUT A PADDLE EDITION

It's good.

Does this seem a bit weird to anyone: Tubby fucks up the Reflecting Pool and demands innocent people be arrested and charged for the damage, causing a major embarrassment for D.C. US Attorney Jeanine “Glug Glug” Pirro, who has to let the top suspect go; Tubby still demands more charges; then somebody goes to the WWII Memorial with spray paint and has herself videoed defacing it, and Pirro gets to charge someone with fed vandalism. No? Just me?

Anyway, another hellacious week closes. At least none of us is stuck on a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, huh? (At least not that I know of!) Jesus, what a clusterfuck. Some people are talking about Trump’s callous dismissal of the sailors’ plight as if it’s a mistake, but he’s just doing what he always does -- making his fuckup a personal matter, because his shrunken base will always side with him if it’s Trump vs. The World rather than a question of competence or policy; the MAGA rump probably don’t like these idiots wrecking the military and losing the war, but when Tubby says “no it isn’t,” they snap to attention and say sir yes sir! 

On to the ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies! Number one: Everyone’s favorite satirical news show, Received Opinion with Bolt Upight, tackles this hot new trend of calling Democrats communists (just kidding, that wasn’t hot when HUAC was in flower); number two, a roundup including my thinking on the Crowley-Hong primary. Enjoy! And maybe subscribe! 

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: HE CALLS THAT RELIGION BUT I KNOW HE'S GOING TO HELL WHEN HE DIES EDITION.

New Bands for Old Heads is great, and here's a reminder
that not all the bands there are some punk-hyphenate.

A day late and -- well, they always say “a dollar short” but, one, what’s a dollar worth anymore and, two, this website is free so I don’t feel like I’m shorting you, exactly.  (Subscribers to ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN don’t pay for days I don’t publish, so that’s not a “dollar short” either; even if they did pay, since the per-issue price is between 27 and 35 cents depending on the plan, they wouldn’t lose a dollar!)  But I do try to keep to the schedule, so sorry about the delay.

Anyway, I regret to report almost everything is still awful. For example, Trump’s mouthpiece Todd Blanche was approved by the Senate to serve as U.S. Attorney General, which is like approving John Mitchell after he got out of the pen. Senator Whitehouse has a good rundown, but you mainly need to know that Blanche was literally Tubby’s criminal defense lawyer and nothing in his behavior as deputy and acting AG shows his perception of his role to have changed with his title. He will continue to use the DOJ to prosecute people Tubby considers his enemies for imaginary crimes with at least as much enthusiasm as did Pam Bondi (not to mention liberal political groups as “terrorist organizations” as well) and is probably so steeped in Trump’s criminality that he has no reason to hold back in hopes that people will give him a pass when Trump’s gone. In other words he’s up there with the most hardcore, nothing-left-to-lose creeps and crooks like Miller and Rubio. 

Oh, and as a little fillip for those of you who still think there’s any such thing as a decent Republican: Here’s a letter of support for Blanche by John Ashcroft. 

But there are some glimmers of hope, among them the good showing by DSA and other progressive candidates in last week’s primaries, particularly the Democratic nomination of Abdul Al-Sayed for the Michigan Senate race. Naturally the MAGA types are going berserk over it, and my first past-paywall-promoted free ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN post of the week is about that, along with what I consider to be a complementary phenomenon: The tendency of conservatives to attack Democratic men and women of the cloth as false to their faith. I think their characterization of decent and accomplished Muslims like Al-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani dovetails with their characterization of decent and accomplished Christians like the seminarian James Talarico and Rev. Lindsay James (also mentioned in the post) as threats to their own very un-Christlike version of Christianity -- not to mention conservatives’ tendency to call liberal Jews either false to Judaism or actually antisemitic. It says a lot about what they think religion is (i.e., a fraud with which to grift the suckers).

Oh, and here also for free is my review of The Odyssey movie. Everyone else had one, so... 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: "AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE" 21st CENTURY EDITION

Oooh, this is a nice version.

Another week of mayhem and mendacity in the books, and the thing that bugged me most was the show trial of Anthony Fauci in the Senate, at which the good doctor wisely and repeatedly took the Fifth because the rightwingers were very clearly laying perjury traps for him so as to get around Biden’s preemptive pardon. Partly I’m pissed because Fauci, even before struggling to save the shitshow Tubby made of the COVID crisis, did great work on HIV/AIDS at the National Institutes of Health (probably part of what they hate him for), and anyone who fucks with the NIH crew is on my shitlist forever. But mainly it’s that this whole insane thing is such a vivid metaphor for everything that’s wrong with this stupid country in what Faine Greenwood has dubbed on Bluesky "our era of total Stupid Immoral Asshole ascendancy... [in which] all the competent people who believe in doing a good job for the sake of it conclude that they’re actively being punished for these qualities, while malignantly stupid criminals are making bank."

For one thing, that after his illustrious public service Fauci has to fend off death threats and malicious prosecution by the scum of the earth -- while the madman Kennedy runs NIH into the ground -- is like a Soviet-era satire come to life. Sovietical, too, is the way the Prestige Press is cooperating with the wingnuts to slur the guy, based largely on purloined diary entries that show Fauci noticing that the crisis had both made him suddenly famous and revealed, less suddenly, the President to be a moron -- unremarkable observations that the media dipshits now use to make Fauci out to be a monster of ambition and ego. From the New York Fucking Times:

More than 1,100 pages long and dating from 2019 to 2022, Dr. Fauci’s diary reads like a black comedy of manners in which a 79-year-old social-climbing scientist becomes the face of the government’s response to a pandemic and then the toast of the town — the toast of this town. As the death toll rises, so too does the doctor’s status and self-regard. He falls in with a fast crowd and becomes consumed by his own image.

It’s like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair crossed with The Plague by Camus.

Shawn McCreesh, author of this atrocity, is like Sinclair Lewis’ Chum Frink crossed with Andrei Zhdanov. He can wrestle Matthew Hennessey for biscuits in Hell. Oh, and the Times put Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni on it, too, and they both agree that Fauci’s diary is a terrible scandal. Here’s Bruni, who I had forgotten sucks: “This was the opposite of a call for comity, cooperation and a big tent. It was a call for rancor, rivalry and a catty clique.” The Conscience of the Cooking Section! I'd wonder what his diary looks like, except careerist drips like him probably don't express any honest and unexpected opinions even in private.  

Meanwhile at the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan opens her wizened maw to tell us that Fauci taking the Fifth “plus his diary may well have been a reputation-destroying event.” God grant it is, but not the way she and the rest of them mean it. 

Well, courage, brothers and sisters, here are a couple of free ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN items released from behind the paywall that churn some humor out of our long national nightmare. First, we visit the centrist Democratic consultants of the Kitchen Table Institute, who are working overtime (or at least billing it) to disabuse the American voters of their distaste for Netanyahu and the Iran War. Then, we go to the Oval Office to track the deterioration -- at every level -- of the Chief Executive. Enjoy! 

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!