Eight days into The Trump Shutdown where 800,000 federal employees are either furloughed without pay or still working without pay, Trump decided to add insult to injury by signing an executive order stripping away a 2.1% pay raise that was coming on January 1.  He cited “fiscal sustainability” as his reason, this after blowing a gigantic trillion dollar hole in the budget by ramming through an unseeded and cynical tax cut for his billionaire donors in 2017.  Happy New Year.

If you’re a federal employee and voted for this carnival barker, you’re getting what you deserve.  The rest of you, I’m sorry he’s been inflicted on you and the rest of us normal people.

I’m taking a couple of days off, so unless El Jefe gets the itch, I’m outta here today and tomorrow.

However, I want to give you some damn place to talk if something BIG happens.

So jump right in and say whatever the dickens you want to.

You know how Rudy Giuliani keeps going around saying that Trump will testify to Mueller’s grand jury over his dead body and I keep saying “Hey Tootles, that right there is a plan I can get behind”?

Well, here’s another one.

Louie.  Louie Gohmert.

During an interview with Fox News on Friday, Gohmert — a dedicated hype-man for President Trump — said the President should consider keeping Washington shutdown “until hell freezes over.”

Here’s the deal, first Louie goes to hell with an ice scraper and sends us back a message when it thaws.

Works for me.

Thanks to everybody for the heads up.

Normal people have gone from laughter to shock to anger to abject fear of the Trump presidency as his reality television drama has torn at the very fabric of our society for almost 2 years since he was inflicted upon us by voters who are idiots.  I worked in New York during the eighties when Trump was a punch line, the target of derision and anger over his trashy gold plated branding and real estate failures.  Many New Yorkers called him Donald Chump.

How did he go from laughingstock to the most powerful job in the world?  In one word, television.  Were it not for The Apprentice, Trump would still be relegated to the pages of tabloids like the Enquirer and the Daily Post.  The Apprentice used trumped up drama (no pun intended), manufactured qualifications, fake controversies, and personal destruction of contestants as a formula to transform Trump from widely known failure to a successful businessman.

Who accomplished this seemingly impossible feat?  His name is Mark Burnett, who invented the first major reality television series, Survivor, in 2000 and then The Apprentice a couple of years later.  After meeting Trump Burnett identified him as the perfect character around which to build a fake “successful” businessman who ruled over contestants each week.  Burnett called it the “Urban Survivor”.  The formula worked, and the rest is our nightmare today.  The New Yorker has just profiled Burnett, and the article reads like a…wait for it…reality television show.

So, if you want to blame someone for the train wreck that is now our daily reality, here’s the guy.

This is a pretty big deal.

The Christopher Steele dossier mentions a meeting between Michael Cohen (Trump’s lawyer) and the Russians     between late August or early September 2016 in Prague.   Trump and Cohen deny it and the Russians ain’t talking.  Such a meeting, had it happened, would be the billowing smoke of collusion.

Well, McClatchy is reporting that Cohen’s cell phone pinged off cell towers in Prague in the “late summer of 2016” at the height of the campaign.

Incidentally, no visa is necessary to travel between Germany and the Czech Republic.  And records of whether or not Cohen went to Germany around that time aren’t public. But the dope just could not resist making a phone call.

As more and more of the things in the Steel dossier turn out to be true, we may find out that Trumpp is withdrawing troops from Syria because of hookers and peeing.

Here’s some nice news.

The cable network, which media observers often portray as the liberal counterpart to the conservative Fox News, also finished ahead of its two main competitors in prime time for the fourth consecutive week.

And it boasted the most-watched program on cable news last week, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” which drew an average of 3.21 million viewers.

I love Rachel. I do. I started listening to her when she was on Air America radio.  I love her but Stephen Colbert’s imitation of Rachel is totally spot on.

We have a saying in the south and it goes like this.  In speaking about a woman with too many words, one says, “I just love her, but, Honey, she do carry on.”  There’s a compulsory small eye roll at the end.

To be honest I also like Brian Williams at 11:00 Texas time. I’m not a big fan of Chris Matthews because he makes me yell at the screen, “Shuddup and let the guest answer, Mr. I’m So Full Of Myself.”

And I just renewed my subscription to the Failing New York Times.

The NYT has it for a dollar a week right now for a full year.  It goes up after that but you can cancel.

So there, Trump. Ponder on that at Mara Lago.