You know, I’m going for cute, adorable kitties here but in a nutshell-

So let’s say you accept bosonic quanta have a supersymmetry (as Inigo says, “There is too much.” Just replace it with “Grandpa Blaine’s Old Ram” and get a sufficient drunk on and soon you’ll be reminiscing about Miss Wagner’s glass eye that was yaller on one side and green as a bird’s egg on ‘tother which didn’t neither one match her blue good eye and used to scare the children so when it would spin around like a top and pop out because it didn’t fit, belonging to Miss Jefferson as it did who was a sport and didn’t mind lending it if Miss Wagner had visitors.)…

Where do you put the extra dimensions?

I’m not kidding. People get Doctorates for this, win prizes.

One answer is that they are really teeny tiny dimensions so if you look at them with “Normal” physics eyes (and enough Blotter) they kind of seem like a string with additional characteristics from those we usually are exposed to, like vibration and twisting.

Now of course I think it all a vast conspiracy by the Scientific Establishment to frighten us with silly fairy tales about the ‘Heat Death Of The Universe’ and ‘Global Warming’ to try and thwart God’s Favored (because they’re rich, duh. How do you think God displays his favor on Earth?) Capitalists from their divine mandate to husband and harvest the Lord’s bounty.

Strings? Mere Paleolithic playthings, bundles of fiber unworthy of recognition even as a “Simple Machine”, complex but unpurposeful.

Meow.

The scope of Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling. New developments show how.
By Greg Sargent, Washington Post
November 5, 2019

At this point, the broad contours of the Ukraine scandal are well understood. President Trump appears to have used hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money appropriated as military aid to extort a vulnerable ally into helping him rig the 2020 election on his behalf.

But there are two other aspects of this scandal that need elaboration. The first is the degree to which this whole scheme is corrupting multiple government agencies and effectively placing them at the disposal of Trump’s reelection effort.

The second is that two of the scheme’s goals — getting Ukraine to validate a conspiracy theory absolving Russia of 2016 sabotage, and to manufacture smears of one of Trump’s leading 2020 rivals — are really part of the same story. At the core of this narrative is Trump’s continuing reliance on foreign help in corrupting our democracy to his advantage, through two presidential elections, and the covering up of all of it.

New developments provide an opening to pull together these bigger pieces.

The New York Times has a remarkable piece detailing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s role in this whole scheme. As the Times reports, when Pompeo was CIA director, he accepted the conclusion — reached by U.S. intelligence services and established in deeply granular detail by the special counsel — that Russia carried out sweeping electoral sabotage on Trump’s behalf.

Now Pompeo has changed his mind. He played a key role in ousting Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to the Ukraine, to clear the way for Trump and lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to create a shadow foreign policy to pressure Ukraine to carry out Trump’s corrupt political bidding, including making Russia’s 2016 interference disappear.
…
Then there’s Attorney General William P. Barr. In an overlooked
interview, the national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee claimed that when Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to carry out the “investigations” Trump wanted, he wasn’t trying to help himself.

Instead, Trump was merely trying to get Zelensky to cooperate with the ongoing Justice Department review of the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference, the RNC spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said.

“He asked for help looking into the Justice Department’s legitimate investigation into the election meddling in 2016,” Harrington told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “That’s what the favor was.”

This is a reference to the fact that as part of his review into the Russia probe’s origins, Barr may be working to validate the conspiracy theory holding that Ukraine hacked Democrats’ emails and set up Russia to get blamed for sabotaging the election.

In other words, Trump and top officials at the GOP’s main national political committee are using Barr’s review to confer legitimacy on Trump’s extortion of Zelensky for his own corrupt purposes.
…
All this comes at a time when new documents from the special counsel are underscoring just how eager Trumpworld was to profit from the Russian interference effort.

We still haven’t gotten our arms around the mind-boggling scale of corruption on display here. Multiple government agencies are actively helping Trump absolve Russia of sabotaging the last presidential election on his behalf — thus burying his own campaign’s eagerness to benefit from it — and helping him cover up his effort to solicit more foreign help in cheating his way to victory in the next one.

Cute.

Kitties.

Look- Texting and “The Internet” are not the same except for the underlying technology being digital. You can have one without the other. It’s like boats and farms, they both use water. Ask me about my Winnowing Fan because I’m tired of carrying it and want to build a Temple to Poseidon, God of Horses.

Ehh… too hard, many Western Civ references. Cute fuzzy animals, that’s the ticket.

Come to think of it Bars use water too. Scotch. Rocks. Don’t lose the bottle.

Actually I’m just the type you want to meet- too old to care and only looking for flickering sports distraction and highly alcoholic beverages, though sociable enough if provoked. I like to think I give off this Leaving Las Vegas, Lost in Translation vibe that’s not at all creepy unless you actually are Scarlett Johansson and I ask you to autograph my body with a Sharpie so I can go to the tat parlor across the street and get it permanently inked.

Nothing weird about that at all.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

FDR wins unprecedented third term in the White House; Richard Nixon elected President; Former President Reagan says he has Alzheimer’s; George Foreman sets boxing record; Pianist Vladimir Horowitz dies.

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.

Eugene V. Debs

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If a President lurches into, say Main Street USA straight out of Cinderella’s Castle in Orlando (because I certainly wouldn’t like to be accused of coastalism), grabs a baby (White baby, hate that it would make a difference) from a stroller, and tears out its heart and starts eating it, still vainly pumping, while the WOFL Fox 35 News Chopper circles around doing dramatic crane shots of the spurting gore simulcast on live national TV…

Is he guilty?

Well we’re not contending it didn’t happen, my dry cleaning bills attest to that, but a sitting President can’t be investigated because it would distract him from important stuff like being a Twit on the Internet, sucking up to wannabe Nuclear Dictators like Kim and Erdogan or real ones like Putin and Xi, and stealing Brown Babies from the arms of their Mothers.

You should try that one at Thanksgiving, shut the last Republican I talked to right up.

Anyway we can agree that this is all very important and even if not these particular things it’s a possibility that the President could be too distracted by pressing events of National importance to co-ordinate a criminal defense of infanticide and cannibalism and thus be denied due process which would be a shame and beneath our dignity according to a memo by the Office of Legal Council of the Department of Justice of the United Sates of America.

A memo. By a partisan political appointee (Republican of course).

Well that certainly overrides the unanimous consent of 13 States assembled, stop living in the past.

Today was another victory for Conservatism of the type that stands athwart (another elitism, a “thwart” is a horizontal brace with an open frame that spans port to starboard as opposed to longitudinally from stem to stern or vertically from keel to deck, meaning it’s a fence rail across a boat you can sit on) history.

Only the Supreme Court can keep Trump’s tax returns hidden now
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post

When President Trump goes to court these days, he arrives with two problems. First, the fundamental position he takes is usually indefensible. Second, the specific arguments his lawyers are forced to use to justify that position are themselves not just questionable but positively ludicrous.

As a consequence, he keeps losing. A federal appeals court ruled that his accounting firm does indeed have to turn over years of his returns to the Manhattan district attorney.
…
In case it isn’t clear, Trump’s lawyers argued that if he walked out on the street and shot someone, not only couldn’t he be indicted on a charge of the murder, but the police also would not even be allowed to investigate him.

First the district court and now the appeals court have found that argument to be somewhere between laughable and horrifying, which means that Trump has only one shot left to protect his tax returns from falling into the hands of prosecutors and then possibly the public: the Supreme Court.

There’s really no telling what the court will do. While the conservative justices have long adhered to the legal principle known as “Republican presidents get to do whatever they want,” Trump’s argument for keeping his tax returns hidden — in this case and in others, in which he is keeping them from Congress — are both farcical and extremely specific to him, meaning that they’re unlikely to impact future presidents.

If you were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., or even one of the other conservative justices, you might decide that this would be a good case to hand Trump a loss, thereby demonstrating that the court can be nonpartisan to bolster its legitimacy (which it will need when it starts nullifying half the laws the next Democratic president signs).

Those other cases concern Congress’s legal right to obtain anyone’s tax returns, but this one has a much clearer allegation of wrongdoing. The Manhattan DA is investigating Trump’s role in potential illegal activity around the payment of hush money to Trump’s (supposed) mistresses in 2016.

As you may remember, Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who administered those hush money payments, is now in jail for his role in that scheme (among other things). By making payments to keep those women quiet while the campaign was going on, he made what were in effect undisclosed in-kind contributions to the Trump campaign, contributions that exceeded legal limits. Trump then reimbursed him, which means he made undisclosed contributions to his own campaign. (A candidate can contribute as much as he wants to his own campaign, but the contributions must be reported.)

But that’s not the only crime Trump may have committed. To disguise their plan, Trump and Cohen set up a system in which Trump and his company made a series of monthly payments to Cohen totaling $420,000, disguised as legal fees. That means Trump almost certainly deducted them on his taxes as a business expense, which would be illegal.

I will note that one professor of tax law has a semi-serious theory that if Trump’s entire run for president was merely a plan to further his business interests, then he might be able to claim that since he paid off the women to advance his candidacy, it would be a legitimate business expense. It’s so absurd that at this point I wouldn’t be surprised to hear Trump’s lawyers toss that turd right on to the table in court.

I’m not sure if before taking office Trump was aware of the opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concerning presidential immunity from prosecution. But we have to remind ourselves of just how extraordinary it is that the president is claiming not just that he can’t be prosecuted but also that he can’t even be investigated. Though it would be amusing to think that Trump ran for president so he could have a four-year window to commit crimes, there’s every reason to believe that he committed plenty over the course of his life and never bothered worrying about whether he’d be held accountable.

The presidency brought with it a certain limited immunity, but it also brought more scrutiny than Trump probably ever imagined. To achieve the goal of keeping his tax returns hidden — something that is obviously of paramount importance to him — he’s going to have to win every one of these cases. His odds don’t look good.

That standing athwart thing? Bill Buckley’s definition. He’s planted in Evergreen Cemetery North, Parkersburg, West Virginia but he was Cove Stamford guggle to zatch, a Thurberism (he also lived in Connecticut, just like Roger Sherman).

Look, I never, ever watch Dancing With The Stars but really, REALLY? It’s not like he has a hidden talent for it, it must be the guilty pleasure at watching a penguin waddle out and knowing that at least now you won’t be the worst one.

I mean seriously, is there like a Wormhole Singularity at the end of the Faux and Fiends couch that you fall into if Not Steve Doocy wiggles his butt too much? Does that make Not Steve Doocy’s butt like Samantha Stevens’ nose?

Not to speculate would be irresponsible. Enquiring minds want to know.

Barnum/Bunkum Bible-Beating Bastards

Why can’t you be Ben Franklin White like me?

I walk down Main St. in Bridgeport sometimes (it’s a very real place, ask any of the family at Ocean Sea Grill where you can eat the fish and not just sleep with them) and tell people it was once the site of an Elephant stampede, who then look at me like I have a third eye and move over to the other side of the street. Have you no respect for Ted Geisel who worked up the road in Springfield? Was not P.T. a venerated and estimable Mayor of the largest City in Connecticut?

In fairness they elected Joe Ganim, a convicted Felon, after ‘Six in Dix’ for “one count each of racketeering, extortion, racketeering conspiracy, and bribery; two counts of bribery conspiracy; eight counts of mail fraud, and two counts of filing a false tax return”. I’ve met him, he seems nothing out of the ordinary for the Nutmeg State where we’ll sell you a lump of wood for the price and call it even.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Militants storm the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seize its occupants; Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated; Soviet troops move in to crush the Hungarian Revolution in Eastern Europe; Baseball hall-of-famer Cy Young dies; Rapper and producer Sean “Diddy” Combs is born

The unspoken thing, the elephant in the room, is the war against terrorism, it’s tainting everything.

Joanne Liu

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Crush your enemies. Crush your enemies. And see them driven before you…

Never work an act after kids or dogs. Unless you have Gracie dancing backward in high heels.

See?

I write fluently in 7 languages.

Six of them are Computer.

Look left. Look right. Look up.

Only one of you will be graduating from the prestigious Liberty University School of Law. Better pray hard.

Wednesday

What? Yours are not like this?

Chinese or Italian?

You know, Stars Hollow is itself so remote we don’t have delivery anything except for Al’s Pancake World, or even a drive through Dunkin’ Donuts (Luke has been talking about putting in a window for years but I am reluctant to drive the Jeep through Doose’s General Store. Besides, I think he’s kidding, it’s hard to tell sometimes.).

Speaking of Stars Hollow

I try not to. Yes, exactly like this.

Too Millenial?

Yeah, we do Front Page Poetry at The Stars Hollow Gazette and don’t you forget it! Thomas Gray, 1751.

More Thoughts About Death

Bredon. Rhymes with breath, not teeth.

The Face of War

Oh, news. Don’t you know it’s the weekend? Update?

And I’m sure your question is, doesn’t Smokery Farms deliver to Stars Hollow and the answer is- of course they do, we’re cutting edge and can barely dodge the drones, however the point of delivery is the Post Office Box and Mistress already has me on her list.

I could talk about it for hours but I told you we’d run out of time Chris.

“New York?”

“Queens.”

“Ah.”

No Sleep Till Brooklyn – Beastie Boys

1979 – The Smashing Pumpkins

1985 – Bowling For Soup