Stop Normalizing Trump-Inspired Death Threats

Over on the online version of the conservative magazine American Spectator (motto: "We're batshit right-wingers but also pretentious as all fuck"), Jeffrey Lord, who is what you picture when you think,  "Soon-to-be-extinct kind of old white man," wrote a thing last month titled, "The Trump Gag Order: Corrupt Judge Assaults Free Speech." It's an attack on Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is on the January 6 trial, for the now-stayed limits on the incendiary accusations and lies that Trump has been gleefully tossing like a stink-faced 1930s street urchin cackling as he throws firecrackers at dogs and horses. 

One moment in the "column" (if by "column," you mean, "The pathetic bullying of a bully-adjacent loser") has stuck in my craw. It comes after Lord quotes Chutkan's order. After discussing the truly fucked-up shit that Trump has said, she wrote that "once an individual is publicly targeted, even revoking the offending statement may not abate the subsequent threats, harassment, or other intimidating effects during the pretrial as well as the trial stages of this case." 

And Lord, who I need to remind you at this point is an actual elderly adult, writes in reaction, "To which I can only say: Oh boo-hoo." Which might be the most bitch-ass moment I've seen in a while, and that includes Elon Musk's whiny twerp tweets. Lord explains, "The moment anyone steps into the world of 'public service,' they are putting themselves out there for others to ridicule, scorn, and, yes indeed, threaten them. A situation multiplied endlessly by both the internet and television." Then he asserts that all the public workers who don't want to get nonstop streams of rape and death threats, as well as antisemitism, sexism, and more just because they're doing their goddamn jobs "clearly have no business whatsoever being in public service."

Obviously, being a judge is one thing. You always face the possibility of crazy and violent people taking shit out on you. But Trump's game is not to just go after the people at the top. He wants to wreck the system by hacking away at the foundation of it, too. So, yeah, he still goes after the former FBI agents he regularly attacked while president. He derides the work of election workers. And, more to the point here, he's accused the clerk of Judge Arthur Engoron of being Chuck Schumer's secret lover or some such shit. 

Engoron, who is on the bench for Trump's civil trial on being a big fucking fraud, and the clerk (who I will not name because I fucking won't) have suffered a barrage of constant threats from Trumpist goons and fucknuts. These were detailed in a filing by lawyers for Engoron and the Attorney General's office asking for the reinstatement, fully, of a gag order on Trump. In a children's sampler of the 275 single-spaced pages of transcribed threats and disparaging phone calls and messages, you can see how much shit anyone involved here has to deal with.

Since the transcriptions were done by software, the curse words are just a string of stars. But I'll try to fill in the blanks by using my awesome powers of profanity. Here are just a couple of the hundreds and hundreds of voicemails left for Engoron about him and his clerk, who is a woman:

"Honestly, you should be assassinated.You should be killed...You should be executed. Put on trial. Executed for your crimes. You sick [fucking] pig."

"Arthur, you are a corrupt Nazi and one of the ugliest people to ever walk the face of the earth. And your clerk, who's also a corrupt Nazi, is a fat [bitch] who blew Chuck Schumer and everybody knows it." The clerk is Jewish, by the way, and the number of references to her weight is pretty stunning, like that's the only thing they know how to insult. 

"We are going to get you and any one of you dirty, backstabbing, lying, cheating Americans. You are nothing but a bunch of communists. We are coming to remove you permanently."

"Do you think being a judge changes the fact that you're a pathetic little [fucker]? You little [fucking] dork with little [fucking] Jew girl [fucking] helper [bitch]. You [fucking] stupid [shit]. God, I hope you [fucking] die. I hope they [fucking] come for you and [fucking] string you up."

I know that most of these threats aren't real threats. Nearly every one of these troglodytes is too dumb and lazy to get off their couches to make the effort to kill anyone. But it only takes one, of course. And there's always one.

That aside, why the fuck should the price of getting up and doing your fucking job be getting doxed and maligned? The clerk has said that "she has been receiving approximately 20-30 calls per day to her personal cell phone and approximately 30-50 messages per day." Imagine that shit. Imagine just trying to catch up on your regular email while you're getting a few hundred messages a week telling you you're going to suffer or die and, oh, hey, you're also unattractive. 

Let's not even think about the wave of horror that New York Attorney General Letitia James and her staff must deal with.

So, yeah, despite what Jeffrey fuckin' Lord and the death threat apologists of the right say, this shit is exactly what a gag order is meant for. Trump inspires all of these mongrel idiots, chewing on their own asses until they come up for air long enough to click out some bullshit. Shut him the fuck up already. Stop acting like it's just Trump being Trump and we all just have to fucking deal with that.

And don't fuckin' talk to me about Trump's freedom of speech. That clerk has freedoms, too, and she's not free as long as Trump puts a target on her back. She's not the one on trial. But she's the one who's been put in a kind of prison. 

A Poem for Thanksgiving from Indigenous America

For Calling The Spirit Back

From Wandering The Earth

In Its Human Feet

by Joy Harjo, who is from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that

bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel

the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and

back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were

a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the

guardians who have known you before time,

who will be there after time.

They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people

who accompany you.

Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought

down upon them.

Don’t worry.

The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,

interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and

those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few

years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and

leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the

thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning

by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return

in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be

happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and

given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who

loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no

place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

The Media Won't Make Republicans Own Trump's Fascist Rhetoric

You are never gonna put a stake in the heart of Trumpism in this country. That bullshit is here to stay until its followers die of some illness they could have gotten vaccinated for, or from shooting themselves with one of their dozens of guns, or of old age, alone with a red hat faded by the sun and a threadbare "Let's Go Brandon" flag they bought at a rally years ago, like an old Nazi treasuring that handkerchief the Fuhrer gave him after wiping the sweat off his brow. Truly, a Pandora's box was opened once Donald Trump began running for president on an explicitly racist platform in 2015, except in this version, all the curses that were unleashed had beaten Hope to death in there long ago. 

Trump's rhetoric in the last few months has taken the racism and general hatred of anyone who doesn't unabashedly love him and his awful family and amped it into explicit calls to round up and deport or imprison or flat-out murder large swaths of the population. It's not just that he now regularly says some variation of his "vermin" line: "We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." That shit is frightening enough.

But he's broadened his targets. Look at this from a speech on November 11, which starts with a rant against the "deep state," that weird imagined cabal of, I guess, people who are loyal to the Constitution and not Donald Trump: "We're going to expel those horrible, horrible war mongers from our government. They want to fight everybody, they want to kill people all over the place, places we've never heard about before. Places that want to be left alone. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxist fascist. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media until they become real." So the plan is to gut the government by defining, as broadly as possible, the criteria that makes you an enemy to the nation. Along with that, the government will be used to attack the media and destroy it.

What's probably most ironic here is that the "fake news" media Trump is describing is still mostly giving him a pass on this move to openly saying full-on, actually fascistic dictator shit. Sure, they're reporting on it. But they are letting other Republicans get away with not owning Trump or his rhetoric. Today on one of the goddamn Sunday shows, Ron DeSantis was asked about Elon Musk's antisemitism but not Trump's tilt into totalitarianism. Some Republicans have been asked about the "vermin" line, and, predictably, the response is a wimpy half-swat, like 2028 GOP presidential nominee Nikki Haley, who said, "I don’t agree with that statement" before turning to Trump's weird statements about Israel and Hezbollah. Well, groovy, Nikki. 

That's not good enough. They need to be asked if they agree with, say, Trump's desire to end the DACA program and deport 800,000 migrants who were brought to the United States when they were children and are American in every sense except immigration status. They need to ask if they agree when Trump says, "We'll stop the invasion on our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history." According to meth-faced Trump advisor Steve Bannon, that means the deportation of 10 million people. Ask Republicans from farm states how they feel about that. Ask if they agree and will support Trump, and ask the rest if they're okay with Trump opening up giant internment camps for migrants and having no due process. Hell, ask them if they agree with shooting shoplifters, as Trump has also said he'd allow.

Trump promised, "I will immediately restore and expand the Trump travel ban on entry from terror play [that's really what it sounds like he said] countries, which was a big thing." How do you feel about that, Republicans from Texas, where the Muslim population is growing? Or do you also admire Hungarian leader Victor Orban, who Trump praised because "He didn't allow millions of people to invade his country...So he doesn't have crime and he doesn't have the problems that they're having in other countries where millions of people are allowed to go in"? Do they believe that immigrants cause crime? By the way, except for that Orban fuckery, just about every other word here is from the written speech. It's not off-the-cuff. 

Sure, way too many Republicans would say they agree with all this shit because they are, by simply being Republican, shitty people. But you can fuckin' corner these assholes like George Stephanopoulos did when he trapped over-inflated balloon animal Steve Scalise and refused to move on until Scalise said whether or not the 2020 election was "stolen." That's what needs to be done on answering for Trump. And not just whether or not they will vote for him if he's the nominee (although that's a totally valid question).

Republicans right now are losing their goddamn tiny minds. They are in-fighting between the Trump-engorged dicks (like James Comer) and the flaccid dicks who shot their Trump loads and don't wanna go again (like sad insurance salesman Kevin McCarthy). They are pissing away their majority in the House because there are just enough not-completely-bugfuck-crazy Republicans to keep the government functioning. And when they're not losing their shit at each other, they're challenging witnesses at hearings to fist fights, like Senator Markwayne "I totally look like a 'Markwayne'" Mullin of Oklahoma did. It would be hilarious if it weren't fucking terrifying. 

But the reason to keep pushing all these jibbering cuntmites to answer for Trump is that we as a country need to hear that there won't be any checks or balances on him. We need to know the danger, the "stakes," as media expert Jay Rosen has stated, instead of the odds. That's gotta be clear because we also need to know what the fuck is going to happen if Trump doesn't win. It's not just that Trump goes away and it all gets better. 

Another thing that Steve Bannon said recently is that the MAGA movement, such as it is, will continue after Trump. "This movement is ascendant and it’s going to go on long after Donald Trump is even more powerful and broader," Bannon proclaimed, slurping the remnants of a puppy from his lips. "We are far to the right of Trump. President Trump is a moderate in our movement. You’re going to pine in future years that you wished Donald Trump was around."

At least Bannon is admitting that what he wants is for politicians to punish everyone who doesn't grovel at the MAGA altar. Now I'd like to hear if our elected leaders are willing to admit it or deny it so I know how quickly I need to get my Canadian asylum application in order.

Democrats Win Just About Everything Everywhere All at Once

In last night's absolute ass-reaming of Republicans, Democrats proved that the best strategy is just to be fucking Democrats. That means supporting abortion rights without any of the bullshit equivocating that gives credence to anti-choice arguments. That means calling out the culture war shit for the plain idiocy that it is. And it means that polls don't vote. 

A few takeaways on very, very good night, addressed directly to the GOP.

Hey, dicks,

1. You have pissed off the women of the United States in ways you can't even imagine. The last year has been a sequel to the Dobbs decision sending abortion rights back to the states. Call it "The Revenge of Roe" because women are in warrior mode over protecting their bodily autonomy. And you withering cocks have painted yourself into a corner with the blood of women who have been hurt and killed by the Supreme Court's monstrous decision. Who celebrated the end of Roe? Whose likely presidential candidate proudly proclaims that that he appointed the justices who made it possible? You kept telling women that actions have consequences when it comes to sex. Now look who's finding out after fucking around. And this won't stop and won't slow down. Democratic women are coming for you.

2. Another way you pissed off women and all parents is telling them that they don't have the right to take care of their kids. See, your child getting taught at school that slavery was bad or that gay people exist isn't impinging on your "rights" as parents. You can teach them whatever lies you want at home. What does fuck with the relationship between parents and kids is when you fucking outlaw medical treatment that  parents want for their kids, whether it's abortion or transgender care. You pass laws saying what kids can and can't talk about and force them to repress their identities and you are shitting all over parents. That's done. It failed. It failed big time. 

3. And Gen Z is coming after you motherfuckers. I love that we finally have a generation that has no reason to believe the moronic myth of the "good" Republican. They grew up with racist attacks on Barack Obama and then watched Donald Trump turn the joint into a plague-ridden hate camp, and they saw Republicans at every level merrily go along with it. They are woke, and your mocking of their wokeness makes you into everything they fucking despise. They have queer friends, they have trans friends, they have friends of different faiths. They watched the George Floyd video and marched in Black Lives Matter protests and then watched as you lied and said they were violent rioters. And then you banned the fucking books they like and are continuing to destroy the climate, which dicks them over for their futures. Goddamn, you are fucked with this generation. 

You can change. Moderate on abortion. Give up the culture wars. Do shit that shows you understand that science is real. 

But you're motherfuckers, so you'll likely just try to figure out how to suppress the vote. 

Okay, I'm done talking to the conservabitches. Lemme end here with a few awesome races beyond abortion rights in Ohio and the Virginia legislature. 

1. In Virginia, pre-election, on the long list of things that matter to voters, transgender issues placed dead last. That's not because they want trans people to not have rights. It's because no one fucking cares if people want to do something that harms no one. And then openly trans Danica Roem, already in the state assembly, became the first trans person to win a seat on the state Senate, beating a conservative ex-cop supported by giant loser Gov. Glenn Youngkin. That ex-cop campaigned on banning trans athletes from high school sports. And that wasn't enough to push voters away from Roem.

2. All over the country, school board candidates backed by the savage hatemongers Moms for Liberty lost bigly. The Moms want your kids ignorant, crazy Christian, pregnant with no choice, and hiding their true identities while not allowing them to read any books that have kissing in them. They are just the fucking worst and deserve all the scorn that can be heaped on them like piles of manure. But, man, they lost so bad everywhere. In Iowa, they supported 13 candidates. Only one won. In one district, they just had to get in the top four vote-getters to get a seat. There were 8 candidates, 4 supported by Moms for Liberty. They all fucking lost. So they can fuck off all the way back to whatever crusty old bible they crawled out from under.

3. And in New York, Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five who was imprisoned for a horrendous crime he did not commit, on whom Donald Trump once took out a full-page ad calling for his execution, who was exonerated 2002 after 13 years in confinement, won a seat on the New York City Council. Yeah, that's right. Soon, Salaam will be an elected official and Donald Trump might die behind bars. That's karma in a perfect form.

It's okay to feel good today, Democrats. It's okay to ignore those shit polls for Joe Biden (which, c'mon, a year out, who the fuck cares?). It's okay to celebrate that we might just have a future. 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson Hates Nearly All of Us

Liquor laws in Louisiana are a clusterfuck. Because of a state supreme court decision decades ago, they are subject to the whims of a community vote whenever someone can get it on the ballot. So a town can allow alcohol sales in, say, restaurants for a while and then, whenever some opportunistic Christian dickflea gets enough people itching, they can vote to overturn the law and go back to being a dry town or county. Or, you know, parish, as they call counties in the state because Catholicism. 

The decent-sized, if generally shitty, town of Minden in the generally shitty Webster Parish was dry in 2003. Minden is 30 miles from Shreveport, which is a decent-sized, if generally shitty, city. The economy of Minden was not doing great 20 years ago, so a group of business owners, with the support of the Chamber of Commerce, wanted to have another vote on allowing alcohol sales in restaurants, hoping that it would attract some chains to town or at least provide a new tax revenue stream. Minden had been dry since a vote in 1974, but after a contentious city council meeting in August 2003, it was decided that the restaurant alcohol sales law would be decided in a special election just a couple of months later. 

The people against allowing alcohol sales were straight out of a 1980s movie about tight-ass evangelicals refusing to allow anyone to have fun. Their warnings were like the lyrics of The Music Man song "Ya Got Trouble." According to one local columnist, "They expanded from simply claiming this was a back-door way to bring about bars and package sales to more extreme connections. They alleged this was an 'end-around' to bring sexually oriented businesses, such as strip clubs to Minden. They also pointed out it could be an attempt to bring legalized gambling into Minden." Churches went into overdrive, with prayer services just to try to get their invisible sky wizard to intervene. They even had round-the-clock prayers just before the election date. 

The anti-fun forces, led by five plaintiffs, tried to sue to stop the election, but they filed their lawsuit too late for it to be heard. Their lawyer was a Shreveport attorney who was making a name for himself as a supporter of nutzoid right-wing Christian causes. And since you read the title of this piece, you already know that it was Mike Johnson, who is now Speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency. That's right. Two decades ago, he was trying to stop alcohol sales in a town.

The voting occurred that November and over half the registered voters went out to the polls. That's how much this meant in an off-year election. And, Lord have mercy, they voted 57-43% in favor of alcohol sales in restaurants in Minden. Johnson's clients considered another lawsuit to question the elections results, but they decided against it, and Minden restaurants and now bars and, yes, casinos can serve alcohol. The nearest strip joint is still about 15 miles away, in the next parish over.

For years, Mike Johnson represented the shittiest fucking people in trying to halt others from having rights or enjoying life in a way that harmed no one. As a dick lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom (motto: "'Freedom' should probably be in quotation marks in our name"), Johnson was on the fucked up side of issue after issue in our bullshit culture war. He fought the city of New Orleans to stop it from offering domestic partnership benefits in the pre-Obergefell days. The law had been in place since 1999, and they sued in 2003 in a case they lost in 2005. He opposed the Obama abortion pill mandate, he sued in favor of various school prayer cases, and more. When it comes to abortion and LGBTQ rights, Johnson is the hardest of the hardcore opposing both. And when he was a state representative, in the panicked days before the Obergefell same-sex marriage decision in 2015, Johnson sponsored legislation that would allow businesses to refuse to serve same-sex couples and, going back to his earlier case, would allow a business to deny benefits to same-sex couples because of "religious" reasons.

And perhaps it's here that we need to pause for a moment and say that Mike Johnson loves God. His version of God, I mean, since, you know, God is made up. But he fuckin' loves God as intensely and loudly as a newly-out Omaha lesbian loves pussy. He leans Christian dominionist, which is as weird and insidious as it sounds. He says that the United States is a "biblical republic," whatever the fuck that means. He told Sean Hannity, "Someone asked me today in the media, they said people are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun? I said, Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That's my worldview, that's what I believe." I wonder if that includes all the rules in Leviticus, but I don't want to ask about beard-shaving regimen.

In his speech before being sworn in as Speaker of the House, he said, "I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night. I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a manner like this. I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you, all of us, and I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time."

I know they don't give a shit what heathens like me think, but that shit sounds creepy as fuck. You're telling me that your imaginary invisible sky wizard contorted all time and space and made everything in the universe move in such a way that you could become the leader of one house of the American Congress. That's fucking insane because, see, first, you believe in an invisible sky wizard, and, even worse, you have no problem telling me what your invisible sky wizard is doing and saying, and, even worser, you demand that I follow what your invisible sky wizard says. You can say that there are lots of people who believe in your invisible sky wizard, but that doesn't make it less creepy. In fact, it makes it way creepier. 

While Johnson talks a lot about "consensus" and shit, he sure has spent his career, including trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, approaching every issue with the clear-eyed resolution of someone who just loves to make shit worse for everyone except those who also hate nearly all of us. It won't be some god who ruins the nation. It'll be a very weird man.

(Quick note about Minden, Louisiana: It sucks as a town. But, man, there are awesome soul food joints there.)

Jim Jordan's Combover Can't Hide the Truth About Who He Is

It's one of those questions you get when you're a man and men around you are going bald: Would you ever do a combover? The question is usually phrased with a sarcastic tone, as in, "You're not so pathetic and insecure that you'd do something so fucking dumb if you started to go bald, would you?" And, of course, my answer is that should the day come when these lustrous locks finally thin to the point of scalp exposure, there's no way I'd do a combover. It looks awful and it's a lie. 

See, the combover is the hairstyle where you let the hair on one side of your head grow long enough to be combed over the baldness like hay on a barn floor. While most men who do it leave the hair flat and dead and plastered over the skin, occasionally you have someone like Donald Trump, who does some elaborate bouffant like a pampered, preening prince at Versailles or something. But most don't have time or stylists to create that kind of luxuriant obscenity. For most, it's just a combover. It's supposed to make it look like you have a full head of hair, but you just look like a jackass because everyone knows you're lying. You're trying to pretend that time isn't having its way with you like it inevitably does with everyone, so you fake it. 

I've got a natural prejudice against men with combovers. I find them suspicious and more than a little creepy, and I just feel pity and revulsion at the same time. You can say I'm coiffure-shaming, but I don't fuckin' care. They chose to do this. They looked in the mirror and said, "I would rather my head look like the center of a crop circle than allow people to think I'm going bald." On an objective level, that's hilarious and sad. 

Ohio Republican and multiple-humiliated nominee for Speaker of the House of Representatives, Congressman Jim Jordan, has the kind of combover that looks plastered down with spit and desperation. It's the sort of style that you associate with a third-shift Perkins manager or the last vacuum cleaner salesman at a soon-to-be closed mall Sears. On its best days, Jim Jordan's combover befits a paunchy used car salesman or a community theatre actor playing Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross. His hair is absurd, as absurd as his look of faded blue shirts and yellow ties, worn without a dress jacket as if that makes him more a man-of-the-people instead of a lost soul who thinks he can parlay his proximity to Trump into more power than a person like him has any right to have. That he failed so quickly and so spectacularly speaks to the unexpected existence of the last bare germs of self-respect that a scattered few Republicans still possess, that they would rather vomit the Congress into chaos than put their future in the sticky hands of Jim Jordan.

Like the purpose of his combover, Jim Jordan was hoping he could hide reality enough to fool enough Republicans or at least allow them to let their guard down for a moment. He wasn't an insurrectionist who sought to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president. He was merely someone who believes there were "all kinds of problems" and he just forwarded a letter about it to the proper authorities. He certainly isn't the same asshole who totally supported government shutdowns in 2013 and 2018. Oh, no. He's the man with a [bullshit, unworkable] plan to avert a shutdown in November. And he's certainly not the coach who looked the other way while student wrestlers at Ohio State told him that the team doctor was sexually abusing them. He's got nothing to worry about from the forthcoming HBO documentary about that doctor.

And if you believe any of that, you believe that Jim Jordan has a full head of silky hair and is not trying to hide just how exposed his scalp is. 

Possibly the greatest fucking cosmic joke in Jordan's failure is that the dumb bastard thought he could Trump his way into the speakership. Hell, he was endorsed by Donald Trump, and, to his deranged thinking, that should have put him over the top because, obviously, pleasing Trump is still the only thing that matters to Republicans. So Jordan not only bullied members of his own caucus, but he did virtually nothing except make a milquetoast plea to stop the death threats and other threatening calls and messages that flooded  the phones and emails of those who voted against him and their families. All that did was piss them off because no one really likes Jordan. That's so obvious when you see other members of Congress around him. No one looks like they're enjoying their time smelling his tuna breath and his flop sweat armpits under his polyester shirts. Motherfucker, put on a jacket and spray some Febreze. 

In his pathetic whine of a news conference on Friday, Jordan attempted to make some strange comparison between his fight for the Speaker's job and the advancement in flight from the Wright brothers to Chuck Yeager, like failure leads to accomplishment. It was total cringe. Interesting fact, though. Neither Orville nor Wilbur Wright hid their baldness under a combover. Neither did Yeager. Maybe being honest about who you are is the first step to real success, or else you simply keep failing until you bumblefuck into oblivion. 

I Locked Myself Out of Twitterx and Now Live on Threads, Which Shockingly Does Not Suck

Higher than I should have been after an extra mango- "flavored" gummy, I went on the Twitterx a couple of weeks ago. A few people I trusted were warning of the joint's imminent collapse, so I thought, "Okay, fuck it. I'll download my tweets," which is a thing you can do. I had to enter my password, which I thought I knew, but, apparently, I did not and had not saved anywhere. "Fuck it," stoned brain said again. "I'll reset the password." But, see, because another time a few people I trusted said I should do 2-factor authentication so I had set that up, I needed to enter my super-secret code I had gotten by linking Google Authenticator (or whatever the fuck it's called) to Twitterx. 

I entered that code, which I had saved, except I guess that I hadn't because it didn't work. "Fuck it," my now aggravated and stoned brain said. "Get a new code," which should have been easy because the app for authenticating had been linked to Twitterx, as I already fucking explained. So I opened the iPhone and Google Authenticator decided to update. And by updating it reset itself and fucked off with my connection to my Twitterx account and now I couldn't get a new code and I couldn't get into Twitterx because I had started the process of resetting my password and I couldn't back out of it once I was at the second factor stage and god fucking damnit, I hate everything. 

My timing was perfect because it was right when I wanted to do all kinds of promotional shit for the 20th anniversary of this here blog.

"Fuck it," I thought one more time. "I'll click on Support." And I did. And I described my situation. And I got an email saying they would get back to me in a few days or maybe a little longer and I've emailed every few days to say, "What the fuck, Elon?" except politely because Elon's a little overly sensitive about that kind of shit and, well, he's the overlord, right? 

"Fuck it," I thought for the last time. "I'll just start using Zuckerberg's Twitter thing, Threads." And I have. And it doesn't suck. It's still working on its place in the social media food chain, especially when it comes to breaking news, and it needs direct messaging (I don't give a shit about hashtags or trending topics). No, I don't feel like I have what little reach I have on Twitterx, but the engagement is pretty awesome. The biggest bonus is I don't have to cringe every time I post something because of how fucked up the billionaire owner is. Zuckerberg doesn't hang out and support Nazis, and he seems to have discovered how great it is to get laid regularly and workout and is letting the actual experts work on shit. 

So if Elon's remaining sad drone workers ever get around to unlocking my Twitterx account, I don't know what I'll do. I may go back to using it like a meth addict finding himself at the Sudafed factory. Or I may just tell everyone to come over to my new place.

But it sucks that I can't post this on Twitterx.

Bonus fun that seems ominous for anyone ever getting back to me: The company that is allegedly called "X" still signs its support emails "Twitter."