In the United States, the guidelines from the CDC suggest adult men should limit alcoholic drinks to two or fewer per day, while adult women should stick to one or fewer per day. This is not the law. They also say you shouldn’t eat butter. I eat butter. A lot. And nobody has been out to arrest me since the 1960s when, and I am sure this is just coincidentally, I didn’t eat butter at all.

Well, Ted Cruz lost both his brain cells when he heard about the guidelines and jumped to the Harvard-educated conclusion that this meant the liberal government was going to limit all red blooded American men, and most tragically Justice Brett Kavanaugh, to two beers a week.

I am not kidding you. So he takes his outrage, his Shiner Bock, and some friends to beg Americans to kiss his ass on the electric teevee. Yeah, the boy really likes his ass kissed. Or licked, I dunno, but begging for it so damn often is kinda a dead give away why his wife puts a padlock on his house robe.

So, here’s Ted and his fine specimen of American white men, all suffering greatly with certifiable medical cases of dickiedo. (For those with less medical training than the average Texas woman, dickiedo is the scientific term for, “His stomach sticks out more that his dickiedo.)

this is one of SNL's best cold opens in a while https://t.co/YSQaMpT2Hs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 31, 2023

He also says they want to regulate ceiling fans. Honey, I have so many ceiling fans in my house and on my back porch that it’s built on a two foot concrete slab just to keep it from flying around in circles. The only suggestion I’ve been getting from my local government is to turn those suckers on full speed to keep from frying.

And while we’re on the subject of fans, I do not have a ceiling fan in my kitchen because it blows the food around. But, in this current heat I put a standing oscillating fan in there which I tripped over and knock it out cold. My oldest son came over for dinner and saw the fan laying on the floor.  “Oh Momma,” he said, “I feel kinda guilty about that. I should have warned that fan not to provoke you.”

I live with smart asses but not the kind that need kissing. Thank you, Sweet Jesus.

I am normally against fat shaming people. Ultimately, in a real sense no one should care that much. Obviously, body issues play a lot in our own lives and goodness knows many of us have enough self-esteem issues to worry about. However, I enjoy playing amateur psychologist. What does this whopper mean?

Trump’s behavior reminds me of a golfer I played against in high school. No one keeps their own score in competitive golf. So, I kept his. On the first hole he dribbled it a few feet in front of the tee box, snap hooked the next one out of bounds, and then proceeded to dribble it up the fairway in an agonizingly slow pace. He was lying about six by the green. He chilly dipped his chip, then dribbled it on the green. He finished with a three putt which put him at 11 by my count.

When I asked him what he got he told me a five. That was a non-starter, so we kept bartering up. I think we settled on a nine. Something inside told me to just accept an approximation. He was in no danger of beating me and his team would be in dire trouble if they actually used his score. This was my day. He would throw out a number as if it were a negotiation. We’d haggle for a few minutes until we settled on a score that loosely resembled what he had actually done.

There are tales from the golf course involving Trump that sound equally infuriating. On one occasion he browbeat someone and bulldozed a fellow player into accepting that their ball on the green was actually Trump’s and their ball had in fact gone in the water. The reverse was the real truth but I can imagine the emotional fatigue.

Most of us that play golf accept a certain amount of cheating. We are fond of saying that the USGA rules are really just a suggestion. We allow bumping to improve the lie. We allow one mulligan per round. We allow two shots off the first tee. Putts within a certain distance of the hole are considered good. Most people that play golf are familiar with this kind of setup.  Others of us omit strokes every now and then. As long as this practice is occasional and not routine our playing partners don’t seem to mind. Golf can be a great allegory for life.

This is the same as the height and weight. What we know is that neither of those numbers are anywhere close to accurate. Trump is somewhere between 6’0” and 6’1”. There have been enough people that have met him that we know the 6’3” isn’t accurate.  The estimation by most that have met him is that Trump is likely closer to 300 pounds. That would throw him into the obese category and would make his frequent insults of other people (say Chris Christie) to be hilariously hypocritical. Yet, this is the golf thing all over again. If I ambush you with a slew of whoppers in one sitting you will become mentally and psychologically exhausted before the round (or activity) is through.

No one is really fooled by any of it. No one really believes that all of these people came up with tears in their eyes to beg him for anything. Yet, he has millions defending each of these things. They rationalize it in their mind somehow. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to make a calculation of which lies we will contest and which ones we will just let go. After all, what is the difference between an 8 and 10 on the scorecard at the end of the round?

Y’all, our long awaited O. J. Simpson presidential endorsement is out. The Juice endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy in the presidential race and suggested he pick Nikki Haley as his running mate.

I think Ramaswamy has promised O.J. the coveted position of Secretary of Needless Bloodshed and Chaos, a position formerly held by Donald Rumsfeld, who is currently burning in hell so hard that it probably has something to do with the current heatwave. Since O. J. is going anyway ….

So there you have it, the news you need to know.

“Tuesdays with Morrie” just might be the greatest book I’ve ever read. Mitch Albom began as a sports writer, but has morphed into an author that is somehow relentlessly positive. The book I am thinking of here is “The Five People you meet in heaven.” That book got me thinking in a round about way about death. Each of us reaches of moment of mortality when we realize we will die someday. More importantly, we realize that those that are closest to us will also die one day. One way or another we have to come face to face with our own mortality and the mortality of those we love.

This isn’t about the five people you meet in heaven, but the three people you actually want to die. It could seem like these three folks are all the same, but they aren’t. The first kind is one we have all run into at one time or another. They are suffering. They are in incredible pain or their life is not nearly what it once was. Sometimes they are suffering from physical ailments or disease. Sometimes it is psychological or spiritual in nature. We want them to no longer feel any pain. A wish of death in that moment is not intended with malice or anything other than the love we feel for that person.

The other two aren’t that. The other two might be a reflection of us as much as them. The first is the rich uncle, aunt, or distant relative each of us imagines that we have. We don’t know them or don’t really care about them, but we each imagine them leaving their millions to us for some reason. They would put us on easy street and we don’t lose anyone we particularly care about. That is pure fantasy. We somehow convince ourselves that their money and inheritance is worth more than their lives as it pertains to us. Again, any of us that honestly feel this way are not exactly living our finest moment.

Then, there’s the third kind. It has nothing to do with money and it has nothing to do with mercy. Simply put, our lives would be better and easier if they were not around. We hate to create it like a balance sheet, but the net negatives greatly outweigh the net positives. In most cases, we can’t necessarily even see net positives. They may or may not be there based on the person, but we have all come to that calculation at some point.

The cruel irony is that those of us that have that feeling have it because we are better than that. We recognize that our existence impacts others’ existence. We make people’s lives better or worse on a daily basis. Some don’t have that internal struggle. They just don’t care. Other people are not independent entities into themselves. They exist only to enrich that person’s life. They are an extension of them and not their own person. When that person goes, the people in their life are just happier. A weight has been lifted. I can’t think of a more soul crushing thing to say about anyone.

So, when I say that no one will shed a tear when the ex-president goes I don’t do it gleefully. I can’t. Melania will definitely be happier. His children will likely never admit it, but their lives will become easier. Those in his orbit will breathe easier. The entire GOP might throw a private party for themselves. Anyone that actually knows the ex-president personally will be happier when he goes than they are now. I can’t think of a sadder commentary than that. I know Mitch would be disappointed in me that my mind went to the dark. Maybe I will come up with something more positive next time.

Just as Twitter is gasping for air, my lawyer son Mark – the Perry Mason of Alex Jones trials – has started a Twitter account. Yeah, he even kinda explains why he did it.

He was just named 2023 Trial Lawyer of the Year from Public Justice, which is a pretty big deal.

And, he’s fixing to file another big case, but I can’t talk about it yet.

I am told that if you’re brutally allergic to Twitter, you can follow it on Nitter, which you can get without joining. It’s a little difficult to follow and getting pictures requires you to click on the question marks in a box, but it’s all there.

You can follow him by clicking on follow.  You will probably enjoy the pictures most. He takes you behind the scenes of a trial and promises some amusing stories.

I will warn you that Mark talks politics a lot and he’s probably more liberal than you are. And you will meet his partners, Bill, Kyle, and Wes, who are really good guys.

Thanks for letting me share this. He was not an easy child to raise so getting to enjoy him now is well-earned.

When we were in high school, the school experimented with something called Channel One. One of the challenges schools have across the board is what to do with extra time they have during the day. Most schools have class periods that are the same length except for lunch and maybe one other period during the day because home room or advisory is connected to it. Channel one was a way they filled the gap when we were in school. It was a group of teenagers that were covering the news of the day. The news of the day when Channel One started was the saga over the Branch Davidians.

Over the years, there has been a huge debate over who fired the first shot and who was really responsible for how this ended. Some blame the Davidians and some blame the feds. Beyond that, these cults ended the way these cults always end. Jim Jones and Jonestown ended the same way. Charles Manson’s cult ended the same way. We can’t literally say that every cult ends exactly the same way, but they usually end in disaster.

The dictionary defines a cult as “a small religious group that is not part of a larger and more accepted religion and that has beliefs regarded by many people as extreme or dangerous.” Trumpism doesn’t fit that specific definition, but a growing number of people are considering it a cult. Are they off-base? We have seen a recent poll referenced in a number of places where more people who consider themselves Trump loyalists believe him than people from their own family, their religious leaders, or other right wing politicians. We have seen other loyalists say that they will back Trump no matter what until the day he dies.

So, how does all of this end? This is what worries me. If Jonestown ended in mass death and Waco ended in mass death then how does this all end? If it were a point of just cultists perishing then that would be one thing. We would do what we could to save our family and friends caught in the cult and let the rest of the lemmings jump off the cliff. Several agents died in the standoff in Waco. Jonestown even claimed the life of a member of Congress. It isn’t the plight of cultists that concerns me. It’s what happens to the rest of us. How many innocent victims go down when this finally ends?

We have already seen some of these isolated events go down. We have seen mass shooting events that were based on his rhetoric. We have seen a few loose nuts perish in showdowns with FBI and other agencies. The good news is that every time Trump calls for his followers to protest on his behalf it seems that fewer and fewer people show up. This is what happens in traditional cults. Members peel off when the trance breaks. As Trump gains more felony indictments, more and more members peel off. They may still vote for him, but they aren’t going to stick out their neck for him.

All it takes is one though. Who knows where the next crazy person will come from? Who knows what they will have up their sleeve or how many damage they could wreak if they are successful? Some of us could very well be collateral damage. That’s what frightens me. The trick is balancing that fear with the negative impacts of giving into it. We have to finish this thing. We can’t let the Freedom Caucus blackmail us into dropping charges. We need to finish it, but it doesn’t change my terror of what will come of it.