Russian state media is laughing at the US, saying that the files in TFG’s basement contain information about new nuclear weapons, and that they’ve already seen them.  Let that sink in.

Meanwhile in Russia: Putin's mouthpieces on state TV are taunting America about "Top Secret" documents sought during the raid of Trump's estate, which they claim had to do with the newest nuclear weapons developed by the US and gleefully imply that Moscow already got to see them. pic.twitter.com/hmmphB4Utf

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) August 13, 2022

For decades now, decades, I have lived in either a right-leaning or a full-on batcrap crazy Republican congressional district. I was being represented by people that didn’t represent me. The doozy to beat all doozies was (not) being represented by Tom DeLay, whose house, by the way, was 3 blocks from my workplace.

All of the negatives of that last experience was more than balanced by meeting a bunch of the scrappiest Democrats that I had ever seen. The Fort Bend Democrats. Texas politics invaded my life and I was hooked. Out here on the Left Coast we Californians are much more calm and soft-spoken. In large part because we all agree (for the most part) and pass blue urine.

But when I landed here in CA CD-42 my congressman was a guy named Ken Calvert, who was at the time, a 20-year veteran who never had a serious Dem opponent and never accomplished anything. Basically he’s office furniture, maybe a credenza, but I prefer him as a chair.

A La-Z-Boy.

So the only good thing about him as my congressman was that he didn’t ever do anything which was fine with me.

Then came The Former Guy (every time I see the shortened TFG reference I think of the other phrase that must have been invented in New York (starts with “this”, ends with “guy”) and you say it with a Queens accent). Calvert obeyed and went totally MAGA. Then in ’21 came the redistricting, and Calvert lost his comfortable 62-38 edge. He was moved to CD-41, currently represented by Mark Takano, a Dem (Takano is running in CD-39), and CD-41 is now a by-god swing district.

But wait, it gets better. Ken Calvert’s new district is only half California redneck. The other half, new to him, is the Palm Springs area. To those who don’t know, Palm Springs is dominated by the largest LGBTQIA+ community in the country. He doesn’t fit in at all. No one east of Banning is going to vote for him.

And his Democratic opponent? Will Rollins, a young, energetic former federal prosecutor who brought many a 1/6 insurrectionist to justice. My sister calls him “eye candy”. And you can see from the photo of him and his partner, Paolo, that she isn’t far off.

Calvert is flush with corporate funding, chiefly oil companies to the tune of over half a million. He hasn’t held a town hall in 10 years. Will depends on small-dollar donors, and has gotten the attention of the DCCC. But if you wanted to support Will I don’t think he’d mind. Go here.

And yes, I buried the lede again.

My friend Pam is a perfect lady, an AKA with pearls, a graduate of the University of Texas with a degree in English, and attends the Methodist Church.  She is about the same age that I am.  Having been friends with her for 30 years, I have rarely heard her curse and even then it’s mild.

She defended Beto’s speech by telling me, “That was not cussin’. That was punctuation. That was an exclamation point.”

She’s right, you know.

Tonight, in Mineral Wells, Texas

When a @GregAbbott_TX supporter laughs, yes, laughs out loud so everyone could hear, while Beto described the massacre of 19 children and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Beto quite appropriately lets loose with a MF.
Yep.
It was a pretty good one too. pic.twitter.com/t5LLMIPXeP

— BetoMedia (@BetoMedia) August 11, 2022

Late reporting by WaPo has indicated that the extraordinary step of raiding Mar-a-Lago was due to the presence of Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) regarding nuclear state secrets still in possession of TFG despite the fact that he promised he gave it all back to the National  Archives. But this is not the 1/6 call logs, or secret Space Force intel, or even transcripts of Putin meetings. This is not something that gives Trump any personal leverage or advances any political agenda. Why would Trump do this?

Let’s review Trump’s motivations, starting with his narcissism. The fragile construct of his ego in stark contrast to his actual attributes means that zero zero zero tolerance can be had for anything that makes him look like the loser he is. This supposed superiority is rooted in his belief in himself as the ne plus ultra of eugenics.

Then there’s money. Trump uses every means possible, other than hard work, to grub as much money as his tiny claws can catch onto. He ties this to the ego via selling his name as the avatar of luxury and quality when it’s really it’s the epitome of crass and tawdriness. To him, counting up money is how you determine who the “winners” are.

Money and Ego – that’s half of “MICE,” an acronym denoting the usual reasons someone commits espionage: Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego.

And that’s what we’re discussing here – the pilfered documents include nuclear secrets. These are not call logs, or work product or Space Force doodles. These are to a spy what the crown jewels are to a cat burglar.

Ideology is unlikely to be his motivation, unless one counts an affinity towards strongman dictators and his desire to be like them.

Coercion is certainly a possibility – the “Pee Tape” is still a theoretically out there, and if not that, other forms of kompromat abound with TFG.

Even with a reason-challenged brain in a reality-challenged bubble, there is no motive for Trump to have stolen TS/SCI nuclear documents in order to win an election or own some libs or outwit the deep state or write his Mein Drumpf memoir.

He’s clearly broken the Presidential Records Act. It’s looking more and more like he broke the Espionage Act as well.

Code name: Reality Loser

“Patchy” turned 25 this month; he was a 35th birthday present to myself, born of a crisis of machismo.

While folks from the Encarnación side of the family tended away from body modification, male members of la familia Hachecristo had been inked from time immemorial.

Among my grandfather’s cohort, border-area back-room bar tattoos had faded to amorphous green blotches on leathery brown forearms. These were succeeded in the next generation by WWII- and Korea-era tats, especially the Eagle, Globe & Fouled Anchor of the Corps. My cousin, Jesus Hachecristo, is a gallery unto himself. But I resisted until my sister had two, and my machismo pitched a midlife crisis.

Patchy was inspired by Calico Jack Rackham’s flag, and a novelty Jolly Roger from a Wisconsin Dells gift shop. “No Quarter” is the equivalent cry of “No Mercy” or “Take No Prisoners! “No quarter asked! None Given!”

Kill the bloody bastards.

Machismo Intensifies! Crisis Averted!

The origin of the phrase is contested, but the word “quarter” was likely in reference to providing food and shelter for prisoners, much the same as the English government used to “quarter” troops on the American colonies.  The English, including the colonists, abhorred a standing army, considering it a threat to civil liberty. Rarely were soldiers quartered in anyone’s house, but the colonies were responsible for providing the facilities and the supplies to maintain the troops who were ostensibly there to protect them.

Quartered Troops Protect Bostonians

So abhorrent was this affront to every upstanding Englishman in America that they quit being Englishmen altogether. The Declaration specifically calls out the quartering of troops in its laundry list of King George’s tyrannical naughtiness. And the Third Amendment bans the practice of quartering troops. That’s 10% of the Bill of Rights!

Such was the civilian fear of professional soldiery in our nascent nation, that despite the English, Spanish and French actively in armed contention to steal the same dirt from the same original inhabitants as the US, we would not field a standing army.

Nope, we crowd-sourced our conquests. Hence, the Second Amendment.

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The people kept the arms because that’s defense on the cheap. They occupied an ever-expanding militarized border zone, parading with their local militia bros after church because no one had invented softball yet.

This naive romanticized view of the citizen soldier, the Sunday Cincinnatus, reached its climax when 600,000 local militiamen killed one another ushering in the birth of the modern army in the Civil War.

The need for the Third Amendment never arose. It’s never been the cause or remedy of a single Supreme Court case. The need for the Second Amendment is also past, because we have a standing Army now, and a Navy and a Marine Corps and an Air Force and a Coast Guard and gawdelpme a Space Force, all with their own tattoos.

Both Amendments are overdue for retirement, as well as several other provisions in the Constitution.

But don’t you dare touch the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal.  Because yes, I am a pirate…

Two hundred yadda yadda yadda

Oh Honey, Merrick Garland just called TFG’s bluff.  That sucker was cold as a snow cone in the Klondike.

It’s the OK Corrale and TFG blinked.  TFG doesn’t want his troops to see what was taken from his home.

And the good news is that TFG’s lawyers make Alex Jones’ lawyer look like a genius.