Santa’s bedroom. Santa, looking very scrawny, is trying on his red suit. The jacket is way too big and the pants are falling down. Mrs. Claus, annoyed, says: “I told you not to get those stupid shots.”
Some people just look better fat.
Ali Redford ends a long, long drought of reader art by submitting this wonderful nine four six:
Ali thought my cartoon was funny even though, she confesses, she’d never previously heard about the free U2 album that mysteriously appeared on peoples’ phones ten years ago. It occurred to me while I was writing it that I might mystify some of my younger readers. So yeah, while they were rolling out a new iPhone a decade ago, Apple and U2 rather presumptuously “gave” all iPhone users this new U2 album. Everyone woke up with it on their phone and just felt… invaded. Even U2 fans were a little put off. I think it bothered people to discover that they were not in charge of their own phone.
Most people deleted the album (or kept it and enjoyed it). Then there were people like me, who had the unwanted album follow them, from phone to phone, for a decade.
Ali, I love the cartoon you drew — it’s maybe your best yet. The women feel very real, and the speaker’s sense of liberation is palpable. Thank you!
(This is a valid POV. Also, if you go ahead and click the links, you’ll get simply the embed you clicked on. If you click the link above, you can see the whole story with the embeds. The whole story is here, with the embed links.)
The response to UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson being shot and killed in Manhattan last week has been…interesting, to say the least. Dude, whose identity remains unknown and is probably somewhere cooling in Istanbul while the Feds and everyone else continue searching for him, has turned into a something of a pop culture icon.
The online reactions of Black folks to the killer and Thompson himself have run the gamut, from outright hostility, like this guy…
…to intellectually nuanced and dense articulations of why they are unmoved about the killing of this white man who theoretically became rich off the back of the misfortunes of the sick. (Let’s call this intellectual hostility.)
What’s most surprising is the amount of love this hoodie wearing, N95-masked gentleman who used a silencers to kill a man in broad daylight in the heart of New York City is receiving. There has not been this much adoration for a white man since Channing Tatum took his clothes off dancing off beat in Magic Mike. I mean, there’s already been a lookalike competition:
…ain’t no damn way a Black man would get this kind of love if he pulled the trigger. I’m quite positive that there are white people in the sundown town of Cullman, Ala. who are fine with a white man doing this crime but would pull out their big ass trucks with a Confederate flag on the front to find the perpetrator if he was Black.
Denzel Washington could have pulled the trigger, and folks would have thanked him for the years of joy he brought to their lives and thrown his ass under the jail.
The response to this murder (I refuse to call it an “assassination” because Thompson could have caught some lead for something as simple as sleeping with the nanny and her boyfriend pulling out the .44 on him.) is at once expected in our society and, well, pretty nonsensical.
And like all things that make no sense anymore, I blame this on Donald Trump…and that dude hasn’t even moved into the White House yet. I’m just glad the killer wasn’t a Black man, because we’d all be face-down in handcuffs getting profiled throughout the damn country.
Yesterday I was reading Oliver Willis’s Substack (with a great photo of Kal El, as always,) and he’s begun a news aggregator for liberals/progressives called Breaking News USA. Oliver Willis knows of what he speaks, so I’ve bookmarked it to look at every day. Today, I ran across 2 I want to post here today.
Women walking into the bathroom on Capitol Hill Thursday morning found a buoyant dance party in progress: A group of trans artists and activists staged a protest in a women’s restroom in the U.S. Capitol, dancing to the song “Meeting in the Ladies Room” by the all-women pop and R&B band Klymaxx.
Thursday’s dancing protesters include trans actor James Rose, nonbinary influencer Jerome Trammel, comedian Elizabeth Booker Houston, influencer Alexis Rose, transgender model June Raven Romero and activist Hope Giselle-Godsey. A video posted online starts with a panorama of the Capitol building’s interior before panning to a nearby restroom filled with dancing women. Some wear shirts with the colors of the transgender pride flag, pink, blue and white, and slogans like, “Flush the Hate, Not Our Rights” and “Trans People Are NOT Dangerous. You Are!” (snip-MORE)
The campaign is over; the election is done. The cases against Donald Trump—for the theft and improper storage of sensitive and classified government materials; for the effort to obstruct election administration in Georgia; for the attempt to overthrow the government of the United States on January 6, 2021—are wrapping up, unfinished in some cases and never really started in others. His sentencing for the 34 felony counts where he was found guilty of falsifying business records to hide election interference has been postponed indefinitely. In the executive branch, the transition is underway, complete with smiling photo ops and assurances from President Biden that he won’t stifle or undermine the incoming administration the way he was hampered—by the very man Biden is welcoming back to power. Everything is on track for January 20, 2025: the day that Joe Biden will cease to be president, and Donald Trump will be crowned as king.
There is no question that Donald Trump will not be limited by the Constitutional strictures on the presidency. Not only has the Supreme Court granted his absurd and expansive view of executive power as per Trump v. U.S., but Trump has spent the last four years out of office actively campaigning for the right to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, however he wants, without consequences. The incoming Republican Congress won its power on much smaller margins than Trump took the presidency, and he is barely two million votes ahead of Harris in the popular vote. Neither the slim and chaotic majority in the House nor the thoroughly Trumpified Senate will reject his whims, either because they’ll agree with his interests or they’ll be too cowardly to object if they don’t. Trump’s early appointments—sex pests and conspiracy theorists, incompetents, lackeys, bootlickers, and sycophants—reveal the nature of what this administration will be. These aren’t people put into place to work for the American people; they will be installed to preserve, protect, and defend the interests of one Donald J. Trump, damn the country.
Yet King Trump, first of his name, is not an inevitability.
It’s his blatant disregard for the Constitution, the disinterest and disrespect for its limitations, checks and balances, that provides us with one last chance to derail the coming coronation. On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood at the Capitol of the United States and swore an oath to the country, the one every president has taken, as prescribed in Article 2, Section 8 of the Constitution. And on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump broke that oath in an attempt to overturn the election, overthrow the duly-appointed government of the United States, and install himself as dictator. It was, in word and deed, an insurrection. And, despite our republic’s long history of peaceful transfers of power, we have an answer for that, if we will only ask the question.
Does the 14th Amendment apply to Donald Trump? (snip-MORE)
I only got up about 2 hours ago; I was up late again, and stayed abed like a lazy person. I just read this in email, and it really hit the spot for me! Enjoy.
“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding, the third.”
It’s Monday. There are 700 days until the midterm elections. The FBI is about to get way scarier, a warning from a monster’s mommy and Dark Brandon goes Dark Daddy.
Be advised: This newsletter uses profanity. And it’s been saving that shit up for like a week.
Note: Sexy Patriots! Holy shit we sure missed your hot asses. How the hell are you?! How was your Thanksgiving? Does Uncle Trump Trash have third-degree burns on his crotch thanks to an “accidental” gravy boat spill? Oh that’s a shame. Well we sure are glad to be back with you, and we’re damn grateful to you for letting us take some time off to recharge. Lots of scary fucked up shit happened while we were away. But right now we need to talk about this…
Um… We don’t really know what to say here. There’s weird, there’s fuck-a-couch weird and then there’s whatever the hell that is. We kinda like that Jello Diddler (JD) Vance has gone missing, but when he pops up just to do shit like this it really freaks us the eff out. It’s like there’s a roomful of horrifying serial killers but the one you really gotta worry about is the guy who keeps disappearing. We like to think Trump traded him out for Elon Leon or he’s just off defiling a sofa, but we all know he’s probably up to something stupid and evil. Whatever it is, dude, it ain’t worth it if you’re posting shit like that on Thanksgiving. Yikes. Y’all have a blessed day.
Note two: We’d just like to take a second to congratulate all the dumbshit mainstream media reporters who bought Trump’s bullshit denials about Project 2025. More: AP News
Note three: Jamie Raskin is making a move to replace Nadler on the House Judiciary Committee. Nadler is a nice man, but this needs to happen. We need warriors in key places, and few people fight like Raskin does. More: Axios
Note four: Ex-convict Charles Kushner, who was pardoned by his son’s father-in-law, will be our next ambassador to France because the only thing Trump loves more than criminals is nepotism. More: AP News
Note five: We like y’all too much to show you the clip of RFK Jr. in the shower while Cheryl Hines sells her crap. So here’s the story without the video. You’re welcome.
Note six: We understand there are people who wish Biden hadn’t done what he did for Hunter (more in the news section), but watching Colorado Gov. Jared Polis try to cozy up to the right every chance he gets is really pissing us off. Go ahead and run for president, asshole. More: The Hill
Note seven: You’re not gonna believe this but pardoned criminal Dinesh D’Souza is totally full of shit. Ok so you will believe it. This weekend Dinesh apologized for the lies in his movie, 2,000 Mules, which was about voter fraud in the 2020 election. He should have kept lying. He might have gotten elected president. More: Independent
Note eight: Did y’all watch “A Man on the Inside” over the break? Isn’t it wonderful?
Note nine: Elon Leon Musk has like 50 kids of his own, but he spent Thanksgiving with Baron Trump. How fucking weird is that? More: CNN
Note 10: Politico and other kiss-asses just don’t understand why normal decent people are leaving Elon Leon’s nazi playground Twitter for Bluesky. (snip-MORE)
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OK. Now for the message from Ali. Can you tell I watched a lot of PBS this weekend, with the interruption of a perfectly good and funny bit of work to remind people that democracy and freedom are not free? I feel like I’m doing that.
The thing is better and more succinctly explained here, but very briefly, tomorrow the US legislature opens a session, and we want to meet them with the message that “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back.” And neither are your allies-we aren’t going back, but we are going with you wherever you need us to, and many of us have free mom hugs to go along with that. After you wash your hands. Anyway, my bit, which I’m working on and is saved in drafts, will be to encourage all of us to write to our Congress critters, and any other Congress critters to whom we’re moved to write. I’m likely to do the Congress critters writing tonight, so they see it in the morning first thing. As the draft post here will be.
We can fight like Jamie Raskin! (See above; Parkhomenko has that bit of great news up there. It could be a great idea to write to him, and encourage him to make the move.)
Maybe the other way around. Dance, dance! I don’t know a lot of Dua Lipa’s work, but I really, really like the work that I’ve seen and heard of hers. She’s quite talented, and has a neat attitude, too-
Scottie's Playtime 