Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, is an entrepreneur just like her Dad.

Also just like her Dad, the product she’s selling is dangerous.

The U.S. consumer safety authority is recalling about 20,000 Ivanka Trump-branded women’s scarves over concerns they could catch fire and injure their wearers, the agency said Wednesday.

The 100% rayon scarves, manufactured in China and embroidered with the name of the daughter of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump “do not meet the federal flammability standards for clothing textiles, posing a burn risk,” the Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a notice.

The scarves were sold for between $12 and $68.  Not bad for a cheesy rayon Made in China scarf.

Her Dad also poses a burn risk but he’s going to cost us far more than that.

AND …

She’s also in trouble because she forgot to register to vote for her Dad in the New York primary.

Trump admits that Ivanka and Eric won’t be able to vote for him and explains why …

“They had a longtime register and they were, you know, unaware of the rules, and they didn’t register in time,” Trump told the hosts of “Fox and Friends.” “So they feel very, very guilty.” He continued: “They feel very guilty. But it’s fine. I understand that. I think they have to register a year in advance and they didn’t. So Eric and Ivanka, I guess, won’t be voting.”

One problem here.  They did not have to register a year in advance.  The registration deadline in New York was March 30th.  That’s 19 days before the primary.  Maybe her calendar caught on fire.

Thanks to Brian for the heads up.

The county commissioners in McLennan County have decided that it is too expensive and not a great idea to allow the carrying of weapons in the county courthouse.

Now, we’re not talking about some kale-eating free-loading bastion of liberalism. The only major city in McLennan County is Waco.  They have posted the required No Weapons Allowed signs on the courthouse door, so currently indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sprang into action.  He sent a stern letter advising the county judge that not allowing weapons in the courthouse is “a violation of state law.”

McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara said he’s not against guns and the county isn’t trying to take away anyone’s second amendment right.

McNamara said if guns were allowed in the courthouse, it would cost the county a lot of money.

“Money wise it costs a lot more. Manpower wise, yes, it would be I feel like an extreme outlay of manpower and money to accomplish what we would need to do to provide safety for our citizens,” said McNamara.

According to McNamara, the county would have to add personnel in the courthouse and would also have to provide lock boxes for the weapons outside each court room.

Best anybody can tell, there’s gonna be a standoff.  McLennan County says they will fight the Attorney General and the rightwing Texas Attorney General is saying screw local control.  I’m suspecting that both sides will bring guns to the fight.

I guess we could look at it this way – maybe if they allowed shooting inside the courthouse, maybe there would be less shooting outside the courthouse.  And the overpopulation of attorneys would not longer be a problem.

Thanks to Ralph for the heads up.

Those darn caucuses!  You never know what’s going to happen, and what you think happened when it does, didn’t actually happen how you think it did when it’s done.  Just ask Donald Trump, who is hemorrhaging delegates to Ted Cruz at state conventions that he thought he had already “won” at the precinct level.

In similar fashion, due to the vagaries of Wyoming Democratic politics, the estimated take from Bernie’s big “win” yesterday there is:  Sanders 7, Clinton 7.  Given that all 4 Wyoming superdelegates have already declared for Hillary, you can add the Cowboy State to Sanders long string of pyrrhic “victories,” where he outspent and outperformed Clinton, yet gained little ground, while she husbanded her resources and marshaled them for the fight yet to come.

“Seven in a row,” they crow, conveniently forgetting the size, scope and implications of those seven, versus the seven in a row Hillary had won prior to that.  All these contests have taken place over the last month, since the surprising Michigan win gave Bernie another apparent good night, even as he lost ground to Hillary’s blowout in Mississippi.  She then went on a run that included closed, semi-open and open primaries.  Plus the Marianas!  Those victories netted her 115 more delegates than Bernie.  Then the worm turned, and Bernie went on a tear, winning 6 caucuses and an open primary. 

Net gain?  79.  By contrast, Hillary netted 68 out of Florida alone during her run. Tell Sad Trombone he’s on in five.

And so, in the long month since Bernie’s Michigan win was said to signal his resurgence, he’s lost ground to the tune of 36 delegates.  It doesn’t sound like a lot, until you remember that, between the two of them, they’ve burned through nearly 1000 delegates during the same time.  He’s STILL 250 delegates down, with 1727 remaining.  A month ago, he needed to win 55% of the remaining pledged delegates to go into the convention tied.  Now, that’s climbed to 57%.

He has just about run out of runway, especially when you consider that the only two remaining caucuses are the US VI and Guam, each with 7 delegates.  Also, most of the remaining primaries are closed, meaning only registered Democrats can vote.  Why is this paragraph important? Because, quick! name all the non-caucus states where Bernie won an actual primary.

New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Vermont, Michigan and Wisconsin – all open primaries.  And, to be fair, he did win one closed primary: Democrats Abroad.

Recognizing that the pledged delegate count is out of reach, the Sanders campaign has shifted tactics and is hoping to convince all the superdelegates – the previously reviled and roundly criticized anti-democratic superdelegates – to change from Hillary to him.  And that’s a little sad.

… that when he dies, we can just screw him in the ground.

I can tell you one thing about Republicans in this state – they can’t accuse each other of hogging all the stupid.  Hell, honey, we have an attorney general under indictment for stock fraud who isn’t even the most dishonest Republican elected official in the state.

Sid Miller, our Agriculture Commissioner, thinks he won the free-ride lottery when he got elected.  One time after another, he gets caught stealing taxpayer money.  Remember about three weeks ago when he got caught spending taxpayer money to go get a Jesus shot in Oklahoma?

Well, this time he took your our money and went to Mississippi.  Now before I even start telling you this story I want to let you know that if I was gonna steal money to go on a trip, it sure the hell wouldn’t be to Oklahoma and Mississippi.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller spent almost $2,000 in state and campaign funds to fly to compete in a rodeo in 2015 for prize money

Miller wrote a check several weeks later from his campaign account to pay back the state for the flights, the obtained records show.

Miller, who competed in calf-roping events at the February 2015 rodeo, won $880.

Miller says the taxpayers spending money for his flight is legitimate because he intended to meet with the Ag Commish of Mississippi but he admits that the meeting was never scheduled.  Okay, so it is Mississippi and maybe somebody borrowed the pencil needed to “pencil in” meetings.

Miller says it was “totally legitimate” that his campaign fund pay for the trip because while at the rodeo, he “spoke to” rodeo participants and vendors who donated to his campaign.

Let me tell you this – nothing Sid Miller does is ever totally legitimate.  Nothing.

Let’s say you’re a young, wealthy dilettante who has been trying to win the approval of domineering male figures throughout your lifetime.  Raised to privilege, your formative years were spent in a military academy, where physical abuse, mental cruelty and social humiliation were served before breakfast, and if you didn’t want to take it, you’d better be dishing it out.  Despite being a star athlete in a military academy, somehow “heel spurs” kept you out of Viet Nam.  Instead, you went into business with Daddy, whose approval you never could earn, and ended up being sued right alongside him by the US government, for racist housing practices in New York.

Then, you meet another domineering figure who, on the surface, seems to be the exact opposite of you.  You attend the trendy me-first church run by Norman Vincent Peale.  He’s a Jew.  You cut a wide swath through the young ladies.  He cuts a wide swath through the young men.  You’re young, tall and a catch.  He’s old, short and not-so.

BUT…

He’s a legal shark, who never backs down, preferring to counter-attack, and to continue to attack, no matter the truth of a situation.  He’s an anti-Semitic Semite and a homophobic homosexual.  He is plugged in to every level of power in New York: political, religious, criminal and social.  He’s also plugged into the gossip in all those realms, and loves to prove how plugged-in he is by sharing that gossip.  And he’s an expert at slaying a person’s character through innuendo, insinuation, bending of the truth and outright lies, as he displayed to the world during the McCarthy Hearings, back in the Fifties, when he was Drunken Joe McCarthy’s consiglieri and hatchet man.

Right when he needed to, Donald Trump fell in love with Roy Cohn.

Although they eventually lost the federal suit, Cohn so obfuscated the issue with counter-suits and bullshit that the Trumps claimed it as a win.  Cohn then became Donald’s entre into Manhattan power, and brokered many of Trump’s signature early deals, including his first iron-clad pre-nup and his first deals with construction-industry mobsters.

Finally, Donald Trump no longer had to seek the approval of the domineering men in his life.  With Cohn, he had the respect of one of the most domineering, Machiavellian evil trolls ever to galumph across the American political landscape – and Cohn worked for HIM!   If a particular negotiation was not going Donald’s way, he could – and did –  pull out a picture of Roy Cohn and threaten, “You could deal with me, or you could deal with him.”

In 1986, after being disbarred for unethical conduct, Cohn died from AIDS.  Although he maintained until the end that it was liver cancer, his protégé, Donald, was now as deeply ensconced in NYC gossip as anyone, and the truth was an open secret.  So Donald offered the greatest homage to Cohn’s mentorship he ever could:  he coldly dumped the dying man as a liability.   The student had surpassed the master.

More than anyone in the dysfunctional dystopia Donald Trump has bought, built and stolen to support his addiction to attention, Roy Cohn is responsible for the man we see as the front-runner for the Republican Nomination for President of the United States, who is ascending to his highest eminence ever, while simultaneously being mocked and reviled in a way his mentor would remember well.  Wearing a Roy-Cohn-design suit of dynamite, Trump has marched into Republican Valhalla and Götterdämmerunged the place in a political murder-suicide.

If there is a Hell, Roy Cohn is there now… chuckling.

Aladamnbama Senator Jeff Sessions is saying that he doesn’t think that Donald Trump will pick him to be vice president.

I have no idea why not.  I mean, face it, there aren’t many people who could make Trump look sane and smart by comparison, but by gawd, Jeff Sessions is one of them.

Trump has faced a tremendous amount of opposition from within his own party, raising questions about whether he will be able to secure the 1,273 delegates necessary to be the nominee before the summer convention.

In recent weeks, he has been in contact with prominent Republican lawmakers including Sens. Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Tom Cotton (Ark.), which some have interpreted as an attempt to unify the party.

“I think highly of him, there’s no question about it,” Hatch said.

Oh wait, there’s two more!  I forgot about Republican Senators.

I gotta say something about Tom Cotton.  He gave me a headache earlier this week.  I was trying to figure this mess out:

“In 2012, they did elect President Obama, in part to nominate justices and judges, but in 2014 they elected me and a net nine new Republican Senators, in part, to say: ‘Stop. Stop to the Obama agenda.’”

Okay, so they elected Obama to nominate a justice and then elected you to stop him? Oh yeah, that was our thinking.

Son, even the least of your math problems with that reasoning, other than it makes no sense whatsodamnever, is that President Obama was elected by the whole country.  You were elected with 475,000 votes by people who can’t read in Arkansas.  President Obama was elected with 66 million votes.  Shut the hell up.