Maggie Haggerman is reporting today TFG’s next grift.  He’s now selling “digital trading cards” of, you guessed it, himself.  Just as one grift stops working, he comes up with another, and this one is hilarious.  TFG was (is) the worst physically conditioned president since William Howard Taft, who weighed in at a whopping 332 lbs.  He’s well known for being unable to walk any distances and famously rode in a golf cart during the G7 meeting in Sicily in 2017 rather than walking through the town with other world leaders.  His physical presence looks like a soup sandwich.  Hilariously, his first “trading card” is his head spliced onto Superman’s body.  I actually burst out laughing at the idiotic image, but I’m sure his sycophantic base is lapping it up.  At the risk of offending, here’s the image, complete with his, “buy it now because it’s selling fast!” sales pitch.

We are living is some strange times.

In a Truth Social post this week, TFG signaled to the public that reality has set in at Mar a Lago.  Not only is there now a special prosecutor hot on his trail, his announcement a few weeks ago that he’s running for president again went over like a fart in church.  These facts emphasize that not only is his ability to take back the White House is in serious jeopardy, his chances of even being nominated are greatly diminished.  Only his rabid supporters are still behind him, and Republicans in Congress are desperately trying to help him get elected to extract pardons for themselves for their participation in the insurrection before and after January 6th.  All of this is as obvious as pink ballet slippers on a bull rider.

At this point, TFG’s only chance of avoiding criminal prosecution for any number of crimes is to actually be the occupant of the Oval Office.  Since the chance of him winning in 2024 are very slim to nada, reality has set in; this is why he’s gone full Daniel Ortega, calling for “…the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” repeating his lies about non-existent massive fraud in 2020.  Knowing that he can’t win in 2024, he’s doubled down on negating the lawful outcome of Biden’s win and calling for  “installing” himself as president by suspending the Constitution and all federal election law.  Left with little else, he’s Fat Elvis, playing his hits from 2020 for his decrepit fan base trying to stay relevant and keeping the spotlight on himself.  He’s even taken an assist from Elon Musk who is leading the field for first prize in Worst Investment of 2022 after his purchase, and subsequent trashing, of Twitter.  Musk has threatened the release of the “Twitter Files” which reveal supposed “free speech suppression” by former management by refusing to allow conspiracy theories about “Hunter’s laptop” during the 2020 election on the platform.  Hard to tell what Musk is trying to do besides setting a world record for destroying $44 billion of wealth in the shortest amount of time.

TFGland is in full frenzy about now with every resident frantically trying to stay out of jail.  Like all other radical movements, this one will soon collapse.  The sooner the better.

We all saw it (or at least heard about it) when Elon Musk posted an easily manipulated poll asking if TFG should be reinstated at Twitter.  Recall that Musk, just a week ago, announced that any decisions about reinstating any toxic user would be deferred until he convened a “content moderation council” of outside experts.  Well, like almost everything Musk announces, that didn’t come true, and after Musk got a very split decision (52/48) to his poll, including votes from who knows how many bots he regularly criticized before buying the platform, he ordered that TFG be reinstated using the Latin term, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, translated “Voice of the People, Voice of God.”  With the dramatic flare of a Caesar granting a pardon, Musk unleashed TFG back on normal people.  Jesus H. Christ.

This morning, Quinta Jurecic of The Atlantic published a piece about the stupidity of Musk’s decision and it is a must read.  The operative quote that says it all:

“You are reading this, and I am writing it, because a very rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him posted an easily rigged poll on the website he’d just bought for $44 billion. The answers to many of the questions I have just posed will depend on the fancies of another rich man who desperately wants people to pay attention to him. There’s an indignity to having one’s attention jerked around this way.  Demanding that people simply ignore these bumbling titans is too simplistic: Their flailing has a tendency to wreck the world that the rest of us live in.”

Amen.  One can only hope that the media has learned something from the last train wreck of a presidency, but my confidence is at a low ebb.

We saw the crack in the dam of invincibility a few days ago when the RNC confirmed they’ll stop paying TFG’s legal bills after he declares for the presidency.  Today, total waste of oxygen, Mick Mulvaney (who is inexplicably now a CBS News “analyst”) said that “[TFG] is the only Republican who can lose in 2024.”  Granted, he told that truth only after telling the whopper that election denial is a “both sides do it” problem, with the caveat that in order to come to that conclusion, you have to ignore January 6th.  LOL.

Mulvaney is a clown, liar, and partisan hack who most certainly has no place taking up time on national television; but he is a measuring stick for the Red Tide, and when he goes against TFG (and he’s been moving there for a time) that tide is clearly going out for him.

Today, the dam holding back all political challengers, critics, and investigators of TFG cracked.  And it cracked big time.  The RNC responded to his non-announcement announcement the other night where he said he was “…very, very, very probably” going to run.  Obviously, that non-announcement announcement pissed off the committee, especially since it is just a few days before the mid-term elections, and uncharacteristically, the committee pushed back hard, stating publicly that if he announces for president, they’ll stop paying his legal bills.  Up until today, the RNC has had its nose so far up TFG’s ass they couldn’t see daylight, and they have continued to use donor money to cover these bills, even two years after he left office.  The RNC’s rationale to keep paying, which is complete bullshit, was that they were for the investigation and subsequent lawsuit from NYAG Letitia James calling it “political”, and not for the fact that he and his entire family of arrogant shitheads who have been engaged in questionable shenanigans for years, cheating on everything from taxes to financial accounting.

For over 6 years now, the RNC has been all in for TFG, understanding clearly that he controlled their base of mouth-breathing, gun-toting screwballs who see a dark skinned bogeyman behind every corner and who are worried to death that their kid is going to be indoctrinated with nonexistent CRT propaganda and books about kids getting along with others.  Apparently, they see him (what took so goddam long?) as weakened by the mountain of the scandals, especially the federal document theft case, which clearly holds a whole raft of felonies that have in the past sent a lot of people to prison for a long time.

Is the TFG dam of intimidation finally going to break?  Clearly the RNC no longer sees him as the all powerful Oz (no pun intended), and this is a brush back pitch to tell him, “Not so fast, buster, we have an election, and then primaries for 2024.”  TFG pissing off Ron DeSantis yesterday didn’t help his case.  DeSantis is the GOP’s greatest hope to take back the White House in ’24, and he wants TFG out of the way.

This one will be a real soap opera to watch.  I’m popping popcorn.

I’ve never been much of a Twitter user, primarily finding it occasionally useful to follow breaking stories.  When Elon took over the platform, though, I decided to follow him and others to see the effects on the platform itself as he consolidated power in the company.  My conclusions, as you can imagine, are not good.  First, just an observation, and it’s no secret – Twitter is already an open sewer of nonsense, misinformation, and dumbasses who don’t know how many hours are in a day, those who can’t do simple arithmetic, and those who have very low reading comprehension.

Then Elon took over, and it’s gotten worse.  A lot worse.  First, Musk is as impulsive and immature as a high school freshman complete with erratic behavior and childish judgment.  Add that to the fact that he has no guardrails to guide him, and being the richest man in the world there’s no one around him to keep him from acting out his worst tendencies.  After the takeover on Thursday, he fired the senior management team including those in charge of moderation of the platform, and has been hinting at massive layoffs of other employees.  He’s also on record of being opposed to blocking racists, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, anti-semites, and outright weirdos.  He’s more than hinted that he’ll let TFG and Kanye West back on the platform.  Use of the N-word on Twitter  is up over 500% since he took over.  Worse, he’s participating in misinformation himself retweeting, then later deleting an idiotic homophobic conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was actually a male prostitute that Pelosi had brought to the house. His deleted retweet was directed at…wait for it…Hillary Clinton.  That’s right, the “Chief Twit” showed such poor judgment that he amplified this idiocy to his 112 MILLION followers.

Elon’s control of Twitter has a LOT more downside than upside for not only him financially, but for simple common decency.  Twitter is highly influential over global society and it’s critical that it gets it right between balancing free speech principles against threatening language and intentional disinformation.  He’s demonstrated that he has no qualifications to not just manage this issue, but even to recognize it exists.

I am not hopeful for any good coming from this takeover, and can only hope that twitter goes the way of MySpace and Lotus 123.