They will screw you every chance they get and try to make you think they’re doing you a favor.

Tom Price.

“Today, I will write a personal check to the U.S. Treasury for the expenses of my travel on private charter planes,” Price said in a statement. “The taxpayers won’t pay a dime for my seat on those planes.”

“… for my seat …” Cute, huh?

He pays for his seat and we pay for the rest of the airplane because … well, we are suckers.  Price did not charter a seat.  He chartered an airplane.  So next time he can charter an airplane seat, a mess of helium balloons, and a sack lunch.

And while we’re doing this, let’s talk about another damn reason I hate Republicans.

In Puerto Rico we are having what Sanjay Gupta called a “humanitarian crisis.”  Humanitarian crisis happens in third world countries, not the United States of Damn America.

And amid his talk of of restoring the Paris Hilton/Ivanka Trump inherited tax credit, Trump tweeted this morning.

We can’t afford to rebuild the homes of American citizens?  We have to stop and think about that because … well hell, they’re in an ocean, a really, really big ocean.

What the damn tarnation hell is wrong with Republicans?

In Texas, we have Governor Greg Abbott, and the minute the cameras left town he put his grubby fist around Texas’ Rainy Day Fund and refuse to help rebuild the Gulf Coast.  Good Lord, J J Watts and Deshaun Watson did more to help than my own state government.

Okay, I’m gonna go find something to laugh about now.  It’s Friday!

Thanks to everybody for the heads up. 

Okay, so we just found out why there’s a picture of Jill Stein having dinner with Putin.  Russia was buying Facebook ads for her.

So how does she respond … ?

She Twitters.

Hey, I do not feel threatened.  Nauseous, yes.  Threatened? No.

No, seriously, she tweeted that.  And 1,500 people loved it.  We are so damn doomed.

CNN says their polling shows that …

Asked whether “most members of Congress” deserve re-election, just 22% of Americans say they do while 68% think they don’t. Among registered voters, only 20% want most members re-elected while 70% would rather the majority of members not return to Congress.

What’s even more striking is how low those “yes, deserves re-election” numbers are among Republicans and self-identified conservatives who, presumably, should be pleased with the Republican majorities in Congress.

Now, of course, those numbers skew when asked about their own personal congressman.  People tend to hate congress but like their congressman. However, these numbers are the lowest ever recorded, going all the way back to 1991.

There is other good news for sane people.

Inside Elections, a non-partisan political handicapping site, lists 48 Republican held-seats in jeopardy as compared to just 14 Democratic seats. In addition, there are 23 Republicans who hold seats that Hillary Clinton carried over Donald Trump in 2016.

Okay, ya’ll, this morning I was hunting up a new keyboard cover for my laptop because some of you  guys make me spit coffee on my keyboard.  Mine is getting a little crusty so I figured good ole Amazon would probably bring one to my house.

And here’s what I came upon.

Don’t do this.

Just don’t.

A week or so ago, Donald Trump, Jr. a.k.a Sonny, demanded that the Secret Service leave him the hell alone.  He did not want those busy bodies following him around with their guns and secrets and whatnot.  He wanted some damn privacy, and apparently he was willing to die for it.

So two weeks pass by and nobody sees much of Sonny.  But then …

The President’s son had previously requested his protection be scaled back, seeking more privacy.

By law, as an immediate family member of President Donald Trump, his son is authorized, but not required, to have protection.

It is not clear what prompted the move.

Americans are weird. No, really; Americans are weird. We play the national anthem, wave flags, and parade active duty military and veterans around before major sports events. EVERY major sports event. Even some little league parks play the national anthem before the little tykes run out on the field to play for 30 minutes.  And we love HUGE flags.  Not just any HUGE flag, cover the entire football field HUGE.  In fact, if you don’t get all weepy when you see that HUGE flag, you’re a reprobate and un-American.  It’s like, “BE PATRIOTIC!  IF YOU’RE NOT PATRIOTIC TO OUR SATISFACTION, WE’LL SLAP IT INTO YOU PATRIOTIC!!! DAMMIT!”

This is a strange custom that is unique to the US. No other country does this Kabuki play every time we gather to watch huge guys beat each other to a pulp.  When did it become tradition to play the Star Spangled Banner before sporting events?  Well, according to an article in Time, the first time the tune was played before a baseball game was during the Civil War in 1862 (before it was declared the national anthem), was played again before the opening game of the World Series in 1918 at the end of WWI, but didn’t really get ingrained in sports until after WWII when loudspeakers replaced live bands and they could play the tune any and every goddam where.

Up until 9/11, it was a tradition with really no controversy.  We’d get up, discreetly sip our beer and wait for the song to be over so we could drink more beer.  However, in 2003, when we invaded Iraq for no good reason,  the US government started using the national anthem before nationally televised games as a propaganda opportunity using veterans and active military as props to whip up all those patriot emotions and tears.  In 2009, the NFL started requiring players to be lined up on the field for the anthem.  The government even started paying the NFL for these displays.  In fact, between 2011 and 2014, the Department of Defense paid over $5 million dollars to the NFL for all the pregame red, white, and blue hoopla.

So, all this televised nationalism is really very recent and has been normalized by bribing the NFL and other major leagues to promote it every week.  It’s not surprising then, that when Colin Kaepernick starting sitting out the anthem as a protest against systematic racism in America, that all the jingoists would go nuts.  After being thoroughly hated on, he was then blackballed from the league even though has has one of the best records in the NFL; he also became the new punching bag for Fox Noise. The whole controversy just kind of rocked along until last week when Tweeto Jesus wandered into the mess looking for something to distract from the Mueller investigation.

Hilariously, the Orange One got more than he bargained for.  Suddenly, the Great Divider actually became the Great Uniter, at least this week, by galvanizing the protest movement.  The pressure on NFL owners is so great now that even THEY are taking a knee on the field, if only just before the anthem than during.  The whole thing is pretty entertaining.

But let’s look at the real issue here…There is a lot of hand wringing by my conservative friends on social media fretting over young athletes daring to disrespect the (flag, veterans, active duty, our country, our patriotism… Insert your descriptor here) _______.  The problem, though, is that they are not doing that.  Not at all. They are exercising their right of free speech – to protest what they see as injustice.

Let’s take other examples of protests:  When Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, was she protesting public transportation?  Of course not.  She was protesting institutionalized racism.  The young black men who sat at the Whites Only lunch counter.  Were they protesting lunch counters?  No, they too were protesting institutionalized racism.  There are many examples of civil disobedience for the greater good, and that is exactly what these young athletes are now doing.  They play a prominent role in our modern culture.  They can have an influence on our society, and they, led bravely by Colin Kaepernick over a year ago, are doing just that.  Good on them.

So, for all my conservative buds who are fretting over this whole thing or burning their cheap Made in China replica jerseys in their trashcans in the backyard, maybe they should just think a little bit about this protest.  Even today we live with the scar of the cancer that was slavery.  Even today, over 150 years after it was ended, we still live with the symptoms.  Even today, we still face institutionalized racism on a daily basis.

This is still a free country, and people can express themselves how they please.  That is what’s happening here and the movement has grown with the inadvertent assist from Tweeto Jesus.

We can be thankful for that, even if we are just a little weird.