Headline of the Day

Gambling Addiction Group in Shambles After It Turns Out It's Funded by Kalshi

—Futurism, on how the National Council on Problem Gambling f%$#ed itself.

This is unbelievably stupid.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide sports betting ban in 2018, gambling has taken off in the United States. Enabled by popular apps, the practice has become a common fixture in daily life amid an inescapable barrage of advertisements urging users to start gambling away their hard-earned cash.

The rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of practically any type of event, has accelerated the trend even further, triggering what experts are warning is a massive increase in gambling addiction.

And now, it turns out that even the National Council on Problem Gambling, the largest nonprofit in the US designed to address gambling addiction, quietly struck a deal to accept donations from Kalshi — a revelation that’s thrown the group into chaos, as Barron’s reports.

An April board meeting about a major donation required attendees to sign a non-disclosure agreement, setting a concerning precedent for the nonprofit. At the meeting, NCPG executive director Heather Maurer, who had assumed her role just three months prior, announced that Kalshi was poised to donate $2 million — the second largest donation in the nonprofit’s history.

Understandably, the news that one of the biggest suspected contributors to gambling addiction was looking to fund a nonprofit that’s trying to address the problem was met with plenty of skepticism. The deal, which Maurer had finalized behind the board’s back, “landed like a bombshell in the gambling addiction advocacy community,” per Barron’s.

Taking a donation from a prediction market is like a “national council on teenage sex abuse taking money from Jeffrey Epstein,” longtime NCPG member Marc Lefkowitz told the publication.

(emphasis mine)

To quote not Tallyrand, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake." 

A Toxic Mix

What do you get when you define healthcare, the Trump administration, and artificial intelligence?

You get a clusterf%$# of ineluctable evil.

In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn’t required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization.

Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties, long delays in decisions and care, puzzling denials, frustrated doctors, and patients suffering in pain. Those reports were largely confirmed earlier this month when the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a tranche of federal documents about the program, called WISeR, that the group obtained amid litigation. The documents included feedback from healthcare providers, including one who called the program “a disgrace to the human race” and reported seeing patients crying in pain as they waited for care.

Amid the worrying reports, lawmakers have been trying to get answers and shut the program down. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office determined in May that Trump officials did not follow proper procedure in setting up the program, calling its legality into question. Still, it appears to be moving ahead unabated, with plans to expand in the years to come.

I'm thinking that this is not sabotage.  I think that it is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the most popular government healthcare system in the United States to scare people off of alternatives like single payer,

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), So Much Winning

In Michigan Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is leading in the polls against Mike Rogers and Maine’s Troy Jackson is behind Susan Collins.

The difference between these campaigns?  Troy Jackson is following the advice of the mainstream Democratic Party political consultants.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are to winning elections what Ebola is to French kissing.

The New York Times has a new article headlined “Democrats Show Strength in Michigan Senate Race but Trail in Maine, Polls Find.” It highlights the divergent electoral prospects of two Democratic Senate candidates: Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson. Both Michigan and Maine are swing states that have voted statewide for both Democrats and Republicans in recent years, yet polls currently show El-Sayed leading his opponent, Mike Rogers, by five percentage points, while Jackson is trailing Republican Susan Collins by three percent.

We have to regard polls skeptically. In the primary, polls showing El-Sayed far ahead of his rivals turned out to be wildly wrong, and his ultimate victory was very narrow. But the paper’s report also presents some illuminating facts, beyond the raw polling data. They note that:

In Michigan, support for Dr. El-Sayed appears to be fueled by the popularity of his economic message and his vocal support for single-payer health care. He is more trusted to handle the cost of living by nine points, the only Democrat who is more trusted on the issue across the three states. And despite a bitter primary, a whopping 95 percent of Democrats are now supporting his candidacy. Dr. El-Sayed is also winning 8 percent of voters who supported Mr. Trump in the 2024 election, more than either of the other two Democrats in the survey. Abel Kang, a social worker from Grand Rapids, said he knew very little about Mr. Rogers other than his support of Mr. Trump. Mr. Kang said he planned to support Dr. El-Sayed largely because of economic issues and his support of single-payer health care. “He is talking about free health care,” said Mr. Kang, 47, an independent. “Personally, I think that is a necessity. It’s a basic human need.”  

The paper spends less time trying to explain why Troy Jackson is not having as much success during an electoral cycle that is widely assumed to favor Democrats, who hold an 11-point national lead on the “generic” congressional ballot. They note that Susan Collins is seen by “a majority of Maine voters as more likely than Mr. Jackson to be an effective senator and as having better character.” But a recent report in New York magazine adds critical additional context to help us understand why the Jackson campaign isn’t catching fire. In it, Rebecca Traister documents that Jackson’s campaign has been directed in large part by establishment Democratic consultants who are crushing Jackson’s main sources of appeal: his populism, his authenticity, his ability to connect with ordinary people. Traister’s report is full of utterly damning findings:

“These advisers are frustrated by Jackson and his backwoods cadence, his insistence on taking questions, and his unapologetically progressive stances. Jackson, a decent, marble-mouthed logger with a phone belt clip[…] has often deferred to their expertise, angering longtime allies and organizers who have their own thoughts on how he can win. “These people are very convincing… He’s being taken advantage of by people who have a lot of power and influence in this political sphere.” 

[The] effect of the campaign on the 58-year-old Jackson is readily apparent. Typically an impassioned speaker, Jackson has become more tentative, with answers on Israel and ICE getting muddier. His political identity is now undergoing an awkward transformation before voters’ eyes as he struggles to incorporate new, seemingly foreign talking points. Internal campaign documents instruct him to say, when asked about his position that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, “No matter what you’re comfortable calling it, I think we can all agree this is senseless violence.”

“The Jackson campaign’s wariness of in-person events seems to merge with a general suspicion of Mainers and their conviction that they know what’s best for Jackson. A handful of them who work as staffers at this point “are treated like garbage” by the campaign bosses, according to one source[…] “They think it’s going well when Troy is boring AF,” said another person with knowledge of the campaign.” […] “They want to run this campaign through numbers and spreadsheets. And wherever a campaign is connecting with people or doing anything quirky or unique, they’re like, ‘This is bad and weird.’” A lot of this friction comes down to competing theories of how to win elections. The people running Jackson’s campaign are relying on heavy vetting, poll testing, and data that pinpoints exactly who may be persuadable. They focus on ads, the messages neatly sculpted, while the candidate attends fundraisers and does call time, raising more money to pay for more ads. Emphasizing ads over a field operation is more profitable for the companies running that campaign. TKO and McCollister’s firm, Frame, make and sell ads for Jackson.”

Say what you will about Graham Plattner, but he went all over the state, and he listened to and talked to voters.

This was popular and provided a contrast with both with Collins and his primary opponent Mills.

Of course, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) consultants cannot tolerate this, because campaigning in person and talking to voters does not make them any money. 

Republicans may be the opposition, but the The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is the enemy.

Pathetic

Remarkable achievements 😜

[image or embed]

— Antifa H.R. Manager on Blueskee (@starfinder.bsky.social) September 19, 2026 at 11:07 AM

Lame

So, it appears thatTrump's, "Triumph," on Greenland is little more than a restatement of an agreement that has been in force for over 75 years.

So much winning. 

Donald Trump is celebrating a Greenland security deal as a “dream come true”—even though it stops short of the thing he has spent months demanding: control of Greenland.

Trump crowed on Truth Social Friday that the proposed arrangement with Denmark and Greenland addresses “ALL” of the United States’ concerns about the strategic Arctic territory.

Denmark and Greenland had a different take on the proposed agreement, which involves an update to a 1951 treaty between the U.S. and Denmark that already allowed the U.S. to maintain a military presence and expand its activities in Greenland.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a joint statement that the agreement will strengthen the security of the Arctic and the North Atlantic. The proposed deal also pointedly recognizes “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom and the Greenlandic people’s right to self-determination,” while keeping Greenland under Danish sovereignty.

………

Trump boasted in his post that no other president has been able to work out any deal, but he failed to mention the 1951 agreement.

Seriously, just how tiny is Donald Trump's schwanzstucker?

Headline of the Day

This Is the Worst Possible Time for OpenAI to BfЖ7!م#2猫$9&क

Gizmodo, on OpenAI's plans to roll out an even less responsible version of artificial intelligence.

Yea, this is gonna go so f%$#ing well, innit.

AI models are notoriously likened to black boxes, meaning the humans who build them can’t look inside to see how they transform mountains of training data into lines of code, sonnets, or whatever else they’re asked to generate. Not completely, anyway. A subfield called interpretability research has blossomed in recent years, aimed at shining various lights on how AI models “think.” One of the brightest lights is called chain-of-thought reasoning, or CoT. Think of it like a recorded transcript of the steps models take while working through problems—like a student showing their work on a test. It’s widely regarded as a critical safety mechanism as models become more capable and less predictable.

OpenAI is now experimenting with a technique that could make it harder for researchers to interpret models’ CoT reasoning process, according to a Tuesday report from The Information.

The latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—all based on an architecture called a transformer—process data via a series of steps, recording their reasoning process in natural language the whole way through (albeit not always totally accurately).

The new technique, on the other hand—known as recurrent depth—turns that linear reasoning process into a cyclical one: the model iteratively refines its internal representations by repeatedly passing them through the same set of layers. The takeaway is that the relatively clear CoT transcripts generated by traditional transformers can be replaced with a much more opaque reasoning process. In other words, we can’t be sure what it’s thinking when it isn’t thinking in words.

For Sam Altman and the rest of the Silly-Con Valley fraudsters, the solution to AI hallucinations is to make sure that diagnosis becomes more difficult.

Wonderful. 

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I get that recruiting at the FBI is not what it once was, but recruiting people who frequent prostitutes and f%$# animals seems to be desparation.

Worst timeline ever, 

Kash Patel's FBI is being pilloried online after a new report revealed the bureau quietly loosened the vetting standards that once automatically disqualified applicants who had hired sex workers, stolen from an employer or engaged in bestiality.

According to CBS News, the FBI in June eased some background check rules so that those acts, most of them illegal, are no longer instant disqualifiers for would-be agents. A candidate may now get a pass on prostitution as long as they did not hire sex workers three or more times and not within the past decade, and someone who committed bestiality as a minor could still make the cut, sources told the outlet.

The change comes as the FBI lost more than 1,000 special agents in 2025, part of an exodus of firings, forced retirements and polygraphs since Trump returned to power. Critics say the loosened rules point to a recruiting crisis.

"How can this not be reflective of a recruiting problem at the FBI if you are lowering your standards on issues like bestiality and prostitution?" attorney Mark Zaid told CBS.

Only the very best people?

Speaking of Political Malpractice………

Trump's disastrous and incompetent Iran adventure is deeply unpopular, and it's getting less popular by the day, but the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) refuses to come out against the war.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, "This is worse than a crime, this is a mistake." 

There’s definitely something uncanny about this: We’re five months and 10 days into Donald Trump’s war of choice with Iran, and it’s been about five months and five days since he lost it. Trump won’t end the war because he can’t accept terms that make clear how badly he fucked this up, and we’re all captive to his narcissism. The result is that U.S. credibility is in tatters. Everyone’s mad at us for creating a global energy crisis, and rightly so. Nobody trusts Trump to honor his word, because he’s a liar. Nobody trusts him to make good on his threats, because he makes them endlessly but never follows through. He’s depleted U.S. munitions stockpiles badly enough to leave service members, and allies that rely on our preparedness, vulnerable to adversaries.

It’s a cockup of world historic proportions. And yet… it’s often not among Trump’s biggest day-to-day political liabilities. The war is slow-bleeding support from the GOP. But there are no sustained calls for Trump to resign in disgrace, or face impeachment, or any consequences that match the scale of the failure. And yet we know, because we weren’t born yesterday, that presidents and cabinet officials have been mired in damaging controversy for much smaller military blunders. Remember Barack Obama’s redline in Syria? Or Benghazi?

………

What do you think would happen to Democratic Party approval ratings if Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries wrote up an agenda like the one I proposed here, including a promise that if Democrats win the election, they’ll defund Trump’s war against Iran? Would they go up or down?

What if they were able to communicate, unabashedly, that Trump had humiliated America. That through his own foolishness, megalomania, and dishonesty, he had made the United States seem weak and feckless to the world. That this is, for the pendency of his regime, a disaster for U.S. strategic power—but also that it’s fundamentally aberrant. Something Democrats will set right once Trump is gone.

What if Democrats told the electorate, but also the world, that American renewal could begin early, but only if voters gave Democrats enough power to dog walk Trump to the end of his term. No more threats to invade or occupy enemies or allies on a lark. No more denial about the failure of his foreign policy. He might serve his last two years in full—Republicans could still ensure his acquittal on impeachment—but he’d be muzzled and on a tight leash?

People are disinclined to vote for careerist coward hypocrites.

Useless as Tits on a Bull

I am referring, of course, to the dead eyed leader of the House Democratic Caucus Hakeem Jeffries.

He decided that it would somehow be a good thing to come out in opposition of Medicare for All, because lobbyists gotta write those checks.

If the Dems take over the House and Senate this November, it will be in spite of mooks like Jeffries, not because of them.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) announced his opposition to Medicare for All on the same day a CBS News poll found 90 percent of Democratic voters support the idea — and 72 hours after a Yale University study showed the program would save 114,000 American lives and $1 trillion every single year.

Here’s some important context: Jeffries has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign cash from healthcare PACs in the 2026 election cycle and didn’t face any primary challenge holding him accountable to Democratic voters’ desires, despite him representing a deep New York City blue district.

If you think what I’ve just described is so cartoonish that it must be an overstatement, think again — it’s all too real and all too emblematic of Democratic politics.

But the good news is that other prominent Democrats are starting to speak out more forcefully against their party’s direction and this kind of betrayal.

The very epitome of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

Fraudy McFraud Face is a Fraud

And by, "Fraudy McFraud Face," I mean Flock Group Inc.

It turns out that the eponymous private surveillance firm provides little evidence that it reduces crime.

Gee, It's all a corrupt fraud?  Who do they think that they are, the Trump Org?

Since the launch of Flock Safety in 2017, the ACLU estimates the company installed some 100,000 automatic license plate readers throughout the United States. The dragnet comes with plenty of downsides to privacy and civil liberties: it’s ripe for abuse by crooked cops, powered by sweatshop labor, and nearly impossible to escape once it designates you a target.

But police officials insist it’s worth the trade off — because at it least it helps them catch the bad guys, right? Unfortunately, the reality isn’t quite that peachy.

Atlanta, Georgia has experienced far and away the largest influx of ALRPs in the country, with over 5,000 various Flock cameras now blanketing the city. Yet as bombshell data released by the FBI shows, the city’s massive web of surveillance has had virtually zero impact on the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to solve crime, with some clearance rates for offenses like homicide even experiencing a decline over the past few years as the cameras have proliferated.

First reported by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, the FBI data is a damning refutation of Flock’s primary claim: that ALPRs are necessary to help officers keep the public safe.

According to the ACPC, the rates at which the APD resolves crimes like homicide, robbery, miscellaneous larceny, and shoplifting have actually decreased between 2021 and 2025, when the city’s ALPR build-out hit its full stride.

For homicide, the numbers are especially embarrassing, with the FBI reporting case closures at just 48 percent in 2025, down from 53.4 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, rape remained flat year over year, holding steady at a pitiful 37.7 percent closure rate from 2021 to 2025, and dipping down to just 21.2 percent at its lowest point in that four-year span.

(emphasis original)

This might explain why Flock shrouds its marketing in secrecy and non-disclosure agreements.

It also explains why so many public officials involved in approving the camera deals end up getting payoff of various sorts from the company. 

DoJ F%$#s Up Again

Their felony charge against David Hearn for touching the Washington, DC Reflecting Pool has been dropped, because it is obvious that the failure of the pool renovation, algae blooms and the coating peeling off, was as a result of piss poor execution by the by the Trump aligned contractor selected for the job.

Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.” 

Imagine that? 

This is Literally Beyond Parody

So, the paper run by the Amazon sociopath just published an OP/ED titled, "Will Maine uproot Susan Collins? I went to a potato festival to find out."

The rest of the article is even worse. 

That's the hed printed at the top.  The title you would see on a news search would be, "Susan Collins faces a populist test in Maine Senate race," which is what the title tag is set to.probably to avoid widespread mockery.

No link, they don't deserve even the meager traffic that my sh%$#y little blog would send them.

Yeah, the author is a MAGAt, and yes, the Washington Post OP/ED page has gotten even worse than the travesty it was under the mismanagement of the late (and unlamented) Fred Hiatt. 

This is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

It’s worth noting that Taco Bell identified the source before the FDA did, and promptly pulled it from their stores. The FDA didn’t even name the source until Taylor Farms outed themselves, and hasn’t issued a recall. Basically, Taco Bell is now a more reliable authority than the FDA.

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— Emily (@emilyrose.bsky.social) July 17, 2026 at 4:54 PM

Roll Tape!

The source of the ongoing Cyclospora outbreak now appears to have been located.

It appears that both the supplier, Taylor Farms de Mexico, and Taco Bell identified the source of the parasitic infection before the FDA did.

That is terrifying.

Topline

Taylor Farms said it would remove iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico out of the U.S. market, the company announced Friday, as federal investigators marked the produce company as the possible source of a cyclosporiasis outbreak that has possibly sickened nearly 7,000 people.

Key Facts

• Taylor Farms de Mexico is voluntarily pulling the iceberg lettuce, citing information from the Food and Drug Administration as the agency’s investigation has indicated a “specific independent farm” may be responsible for the outbreak.Taylor Farms noted that none of its popular salad kits contain iceberg lettuce.
• Taylor Farms supplies produce to major fast food and grocery chains such as Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Walmart and Trader Joe’s.
• Taco Bell said earlier this week it was removing ingredients like lettuce, cilantro, onion, pico de gallo and guacamole from its menus in the Detroit area

The level of ineptitued of the US public health establishment after just 18 months under Trump and RFK, Jr. is a complete mind f%$#.

 

Headline of the Day

CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

—Techdirt, stating the obvious about American business management.

I have come to the conclusion that any business management fad is inherently wrong.

This time, it is AI. 

Yes

In response to the question, "Screwworm Is Back In Texas Cattle—Is DOGE To Blame?" the answer is, "Yes."

DOGE killed the programs fighting the flesh eating maggots, because they all are flesh eating maggots.

New World screwworm, a parasitic fly with larvae that burrow in healthy tissue of cattle, deer, horses and other warm-blooded animals, was discovered in La Pryor, Texas.

The case is the only one that has been identified in the country so far, according to the USDA, but a wider outbreak could severely impact already-suffering cattle numbers and put even more of a strain on ranchers as they spend money on treatment and prevention.

In turn, the price of beef—which has gone up roughly 75% since December 2020—could continue to rise.

The U.S. cattle herd is already at its lowest level in 75 years, and a major screwworm outbreak would cause more calves to die, adult cattle to lose weight and limit what animals are suitable for sale, meaning fewer pounds of beef reaching the market.

Even without a major outbreak, containment efforts may cause the government to implement widespread cattle movement restrictions, limit border crossings or impose quarantine on certain herds, all of which would further impact the nation’s cattle numbers.

The return of screwworm comes after the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, launched by the Trump administration, last year cut funding for a project dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworm in Central America.

The funding was axed days before the U.S. ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was allowed to cross the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID).

Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.

If the next Democratic President does not prosecute the sh%$ out of these folks, they will have betrayed their obligations at the most basic level.

Because They Are Cowards and Hypocrites

Over at The Nation, they are asking, "Why Do the Democrats Keep Expanding the Institutions They Claim to Oppose?" 

How's that a simple answer for a simple question? 

In January, the senseless killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti briefly forced many Americans to confront the brutalities of state violence. Millions took to the streets nationwide to express their anger and outrage over the murders of a 37-year-old mother and poet and a 37-year-old nurse who cared for veterans. The idea that ICE is beyond reform and should be abolished was no longer confined to the left. Even prominent conservative pundits began saying openly what many progressives have known for years: This agency cannot be restrained by norms, oversight, or exposure.

But as the administration’s “shock and awe strategy” advances, launching a war with Iran and generating new crises domestically, public attention has largely moved on from ICE violence to other outrages. Meanwhile, the deportation operations have not stopped. ICE has continued making hundreds to more than a thousand arrests daily, with more than 32,000 people booked into ICE detention in March alone. Tens of thousands of community members continue to cycle through a detention system operating at full scale, largely out of public view, and increasingly untethered from any coherent claim of public safety.

Instead of endorsing popular calls to abolish ICE in this critical moment, establishment Democrats have again sprinted in the opposite direction. In headline after headline, Democrats are described as standing firm—blocking funding, demanding reforms, holding the line. But look closer at what that “line” is: They are not fighting to shrink the enforcement state. They are negotiating the terms under which it continues.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is corrupt and incompetent.  They need to be completely turfed out of politics.

Gee, You Think?

When you read a headline like, "Maine Dems Angry About DCCC Interference in House Primary," you know that the story is incomplete.

The a more complete story would have the hed, "Main Dems Angry About Democratic Establishment in House and Senate Primaries," and a truly complete story would have the hed, "Main to Democratic Party Establishment, F%$#-Off You Incompetent Losers."

Among Democrat Party members, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is about as popular as bleeding hemorrhoids. 

Locals in Maine are bridling at the decision by a powerful Washington Democratic group to throw its weight behind one candidate in the contested primary race for the House seat in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.

On Monday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a coveted endorsement of state Sen. Joe Baldacci in the primary race, prompting angry protests from the three other candidates in the race to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Jared Golden.

In response to the endorsement, the Penobscot County Democratic Committee — in Baldacci’s home county, which includes the city of Bangor — will vote Saturday on a measure to condemn the endorsement. The language of the proposal, which was put forward by former Maine state Senate President Charles Pray, denounces the endorsement as being in “total disregard and willfully ignoring” local party rules that bar the Democratic state and county chapters from backing a candidate in a primary.

The Democratic Party base is sick and tired of the professional losers who constitute the party leadership. 

Headline of the Day

Patel’s Proving A Heavy Bourbon for Trump 

—The Status Kuo, Ka$h Patel's many excesses during his tenure at the FBI.

Quoting the old Japanese proverb, "バカにつける薬はない." (There is no medicine for stupidity.)

As I wrote about last month, The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick published a blockbuster investigation of FBI Director Kash Patel based on over two dozen current and former FBI officials, detailing what the magazine described as his “conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.” The report alleged that meetings were delayed because of late-night drinking, that senior Justice Department officials were alarmed by his conduct, and that Patel was often unreachable.

Patel’s allies said it was all fabricated. The FBI pushed back. And a reasonable person might have thought, “Okay, lay low. Let it blow over. Don’t make it worse.”

Kash Patel is not a reasonable person.

The account gets far weirder from there. 

Bye Felicia Janet

Maine Governor Janet Mills has ended her candidacy for the Maine Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins.

I guess that she realized that all that her continued campaign could do was make people dislike her even more.

In related news, we are seeing increased calls for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to shut the f%$# up.

People are sick and tired of his do-nothing centrist bullsh%$:

Chuck Schumer’s critics are using the faceplant of one of his star recruits to argue he needs to get out of the way in other races.

After Maine Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of her state’s primary Thursday, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) called on the Senate minority leader and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to drop their involvement in remaining contested primaries across the map including Iowa and Michigan.

“I think the math and polling would indicate that that would be a good idea,” Heinrich told POLITICO in an interview.

Heinrich, who endorsed against Schumer’s favored candidates in both Maine and Michigan, said Schumer’s Maine miscalculation showed he and the DSCC have operated on an old model of electability in an anti-establishment year.

Heinrich is being too charitable.  The DSCC, DCCC, and DNC have operated on a FALSE model of electability, not an OLD model. 

Snark of the Day

Siri, What Killed the Most S.S. Soldiers in the Final Year of World War 1?

Graphic Firing Table noting that SecDef Pete Kegsbreath will no longer be requiring that US soldiers get flu shots.

For the historically challenged, the biggest killer of US soldiers for the entire war was Spanish Influenza.

I think that the joke might have been a bit funnier invoking one of the AI programs out there, but it is still funny as hell. 

Asking for this dumbf%$#:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning.

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit.

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

The stoopid, it burns.

 

Another Loss in Court

Prosecutors in Chicago took a case of shit-posting on Snapchat and made a federal out of it.

It took a jury three hours to call bullshit on this.

Federal authorities slapped all kinds of sinister labels on Chicago’s Juan Espinoza Martinez when they arrested him last fall, and they did it for all the world to hear.

They called him a “high-ranking member of the Latin Kings.” They called him “depraved.” They even called him a “thug” as they accused him of offering $10,000 for the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino.

But Thursday, a federal jury called Espinoza Martinez “not guilty.” In doing so, it put an end to one of the most contentious prosecutions to result from Operation Midway Blitz.

The panel of regular citizens, led by a teacher who served as the foreperson, answered a call from defense attorney Dena Singer. The lawyer urged them in closing arguments to “stand up to the overreaching government.”

………

After deliberating for about three hours, the jury acquitted Espinoza Martinez of one count of murder-for-hire, which carried a maximum of 10 years in prison. They did so after hearing how Bovino last fall became the face of immigration enforcement in Chicago.