All the best to all on this Christmas morning from the staff at the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Salon!

After hastily signing the Make America Poor Again bill on Friday, His Orangeness fled to Cheeto Lago to defile the Christmas holiday on home turf among his sycophants.  In his wake, he left fellow Republicans who were also getting the hell out of Dodge to get away from inquisitive reporters.  All during this debacle, there was one BIG LIE that rose above all other lies, and that was that this bill was focused on tax cuts for the middle class.  Anyone actually paying attention knew that assertion was completely false, but Trumpists and billionaires alike supported it for obvious reasons.

Trump, as we all are painfully aware, is in constant need of praise and admiration, and their is no better place for him than Cheeto Lago, where he surrounds himself with his own rapacious crowd mingling within the cheesy gold-plated walls and dining on “beautiful chocolate cake”.  In these surroundings, when he is immersed in praise and adoration, Trump often lets the truth slip out; Friday was not different.  When mingling among guests Friday night, he told them, “You just got a lot richer.”

And there it is.  This bill was not about kick starting the economy, because it doesn’t.  It’s not about companies creating new jobs with the billions of dollars in tax relief, because they won’t.  The deficit hawks cowered under the Trump McConnell cabal, blowing a trillion dollar plus hole in spending.  This bill was about one thing, and one thing only; fulfilling promises to donors.  It repeals the healthcare mandate; makes the corporate tax cut permanent; it puts over a trillion dollars in the pockets of the rich; it forces mandatory cuts in medicare and other social spending; it even opens the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil and gas development.  What the hell do any of those things have to do with improving the lives of Americans?  Answer: Nothing.

It was never about the middle class, and those people in that class who voted for him were (and are) chumps who inflicted this regime on the US and indeed the world.

Thanks for nothing.

You’ve experienced it, I’ve experienced it.  The entire country is suffering Trump fatigue as we witness him upend our most sacred traditions and indeed turn the presidency of the United States on it’s ear.  As we’ve discussed before, it’s turned into a drinking game – think of the worst possible person for an office, a jolting insult to blurt out, a tradition on which to urinate, and when he does it, DRINK!  My liver is under great stress.  Another of his maddening traits is the way he and his entire sleazy family has made the White House over into their own gaudy image, complete with gold-plated everything and Traditional Tacky being the style of choice.

AND, he’s now done it again, this time with the challenge coin tradition.  What’s a challenge coin, you ask?  Well, it’s a tradition started in the military where branches or units will have commemorative coins minted with mottos and imagery that honors that particular unit or senior officer.  Those coins have been traded and collected for years; one tradition for the coins is for officers to put their own coins on a bar in a sort of “challenge”.  The last officer to put up his coin (or if he/she doesn’t have a coin), gets to buy a round of drinks for everyone else.

Presidential challenge coins have become popular in recent years.  I was given one of President Obama’s coins during his first term.  I also have his first Inaugural challenge coin.  The coins are normally bronze or pewter, with the official seal of the president, the president’s name, and the motto of the Founders, E Pluribus Unum.  Here is President Obama’s:

And. Then. Comes. Trump.  Like everything else he’s touched, HIS challenge coin needed to be bigger, gaudier, even thicker.  The phallic parallels with his new coin are, uh, disturbing.  Instead of bronze or pewter, of course it clad in a cheesy gold color.  As well, he’s replaced our country’s motto, with…wait for it…”Make America Great Again”.  For the first time EVER, Trump has politicized the challenge coin tradition with a campaign slogan.  He took off the original 13 arrows on the seal (which represented the original 13 states).  AND, to make sure you know it’s HIS coin, his name is emblazoned  on it THREE TIMES, two on a rocker below the coin that also serves as a makeshift base.  Here it is, in all it’s tackiness (compared to traditional coins):

Oh, and it’s SO thick:

This toad infesting our White House is an ever-present threat to our democracy.  Worse, he’s making us a laughing stock in front of the entire planet.  He doesn’t give a hoot-in-how-chow about our country or anyone outside of his mob-like family.  His entire tenure is not about America, its citizens, or the common good.  It’s ALL about him, 24/7, 365.  His behavior, even in the tiniest detail, is predictably deplorable.  He makes me want to puke.

This nightmare can’t end too soon.

Papa John’s CEO, John Schnatter, is a serious jerk and has never hesitated to show it.  The problem is that when you own a major consumer products company and you take strong political stands, you’re going to piss off at least half of your customers.  Schnatter has now learned that lesson, stepping down after touching off a firestorm by ranting about NFL players protesting police brutality during the national anthem at the beginning of football games.  In 2009 and 2010 he took strong positions against Obamacare, saying he was going to cut employees salaries and raise prices in response to being required to provide health insurance to his employees.  He’s made no bones about how much he hates President Obama and any Democrat.

Welp, Democrats eat pizza, and inexplicably, they had been eating Papa John’s pizza, which is some of the worst on the market. They stopped. After Papa John’s sales started sliding over the political firestorm, other pizza companies, more inclusive of political views, started piling on Schnatter.  White supremacists came to Schnatter’s defense, naming Papa John’s the “pizza of the alt-right”, help that the company clearly didn’t need or want.  The board got enough of it and cut him loose as chief executive.  He still owns 25% of the stock, but I suspect that percentage is going to go down in short order.

Literally.  LOL.

UPDATE:  Trump just signed the bill before blowing out of town to Cheeto Lago.  He didn’t get the PayGo waiver, so cuts to Medicare and other social programs should begin in early 2018.  It looks like Trump, like with so many of these issues, could care less what happens to Congress, or he has some trick up his sleeve in a signing statement.  This will be interesting to watch.

There’s a LOT in Trump’s tax bill to be upset about, especially after the vomit-inducing love fest at the White House Wednesday when the sucking up by Congressional Republicans got so pervasive that they actually dropped the barometric pressure in Washington.  This bill is bad, horrible, unsettling, __________ (add your descriptor here).  This bill is so bad that even Marketwatch, owned by the Wall Street Journal, published an editorial this week called The Four Worst Things About the Tax Bill.   And here are those four things: 1) It’s Unnecessary – the economy is growing at an average 2.3% which is normal for our economy and is stable with the growth of the work force.  US corporations are sitting on piles of cash already.  Trump yesterday said that this tax cut will increase our grow rate from 3% to 6%, which is a blatant lie. The economy historically grows at 2 to 3% and tax cuts have little to no long term effect on the economy.  2) It’s Inefficient – We already know what’s going to happen with this windfall to corporations; they’re going to buy back stock.  There will be little short term gain and virtually no long term gain, AND we’ll add over a trillion dollars to our accumulated deficit just because we can. 3) It’s Unjust – Tax cuts for corporations are permanent.  The tiny tax cuts received by the majority of Americans will vaporize in 10 years.  In the interim, Donald Trump and his cronies in Congress stand to put millions of dollars in their own pockets through preferential cuts to taxes on their incomes. 4) It’s corrupt – this is nothing but a shopping list for big GOP donors.  It repeals the ACA mandate; it keeps the carried interest deduction for hedge fund and private equity executives; it opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development.  And, as I already mentioned, it includes the #CorkerKickback, giving preferential treatment to passive income from real estate.

As you dig into the 500 page bill, it gets worse and worse, but that’s not the actual worst of it.  The worst is that the drama and rush to get this bill passed was 100% Kabuki.  The drive to getting this bill on the books by yearend was complete and total fabricated bullshit.  After rushing the bill through, Trump is now sitting on it and won’t sign it until January.  The reason?  The gigantic deficit that this bill creates will trigger the Pay as You Go budget provisions enacted by Congress originally under Reagan and HW Bush which will require mandatory spending cuts including Medicare and Social Security.  If the bill is signed this year, those cuts will come early 2018, which is political suicide for Republicans.  The only way the mandatory cuts would not occur is if Congress passed a waiver to PayGo, but that would require 8 Democrats to cross over and vote with the GOP, and that will NEVER happen after they ran over the Dems to pass this bill before the end of the year.  So, everyone just went home, and Trump is headed off to Cheeto Lago for Christmas.

So, by signing the bill in January, the mandatory spending cuts will come AFTER the mid-term elections, and most voters won’t realize they’ve been pantsed once again while they stupidly vote for the people who are doing the pantsing.

This is not a “giant Christmas present” as Trump calls it.  It’s nothing but a giant bait and switch.