I don’t know if you recall (of course you do) when pre-45 bragged to Billy Bush that he could just kiss beautiful women and grab them by their…um…inappropriately, without their permission and he could get away with it because he’s a celebrity. I never really believed it was anything other than braggadocio. 45 was riffing and Bush was laughing which fed 45’s desperate ego so he kept going and upping the ante, so to speak, until the now infamous line spewed forth and…scandal. Well, for Bush. 45 still got to be President.

I’ve never believed he would actually do something like that because I see him, fundamentally, as a coward. However, I DO think that he sees himself as so magnetically attractive that no woman, once involved, could ever tell him ‘no.’ The result? I don’t buy the Access Hollywood recording as anything more than talk but I can actually see him forcing himself on women depending on the circumstance.

One of the many, many, many, many…okay, many legal issues 45 is currently facing is a civil rape charge from a woman named E. Jean Carroll. She claims he raped her. He denied it but he didn’t just deny it, he said he never knew the woman and claimed she was “not his type.” (Later, he thought a photo of Carroll was actually a photo of his wife, Marla Maples, so it seems likely that, like everything else he says, he lied but that’s up to the courts, of course…)

Now, a judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, has ruled that the Access Hollywood recording can be used during the trial. He wrote that a jury could reasonably find that in the recording, 45 admitted to having “contact in the past with women’s genitalia without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so.”

To be clear, pre-45 apologized for the comment and dismissed it as “locker room banter.” If you’ve ever been in a men’s locker room, you know that translates directly to “b.s.” but wouldn’t it be sweet if 45’s own, vile mouth did him in?

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The Biden administration released it’s budget proposal recently. The GOP immediately pronounced it dead in the water. I like that Biden said he doesn’t expect his budget to pass. It’s really about the fight. He’s going to force the cons to come out against the best interests of the population, though the con rank and file won’t know anything about that. They’ll be focused on gay penguins, or whatever. Biden’s budget does things the GOP likes to pretend to like. It increases the already bloated Pentagon budget and allocates more money for border protection. It even decreases the budget deficit by nearly 3 Trillion dollars. But…

It does these neat little things by asking the wealthiest among us to pay a bit more in taxes and the cons will have none of it. Even if they might, they’re not allowed. Thanks to the horrifyingly stupid Citizens United ruling of the Roberts Supremely Kangaroo Court, our Congress critters are owned and operated by the very people who might be asked to pay a little more.

Most people don’t realize that tax cuts for the rich mean tax increases for everyone else. By “everyone else,” I mean YOU. YOU get to pay more so Elon Musk can pay less. Nice. In the long game, though, the actual goal isn’t just to make a cushy life a bit more cushy. The actual end-game is to so financially starve the Federal Government of operating capital, it crashes. It’s working, too. You see it everywhere, all the time.

You’re told a wide variety of reasons for the various failures of the government but there’s really only one truth, the government has to keep cutting functions because Congress keeps cutting it’s own income. The Federal government is a huge operation and in any huge operation, there’s going to be some dead weight so, initially, the cuts were probably okay. But now bridges are falling down because nobody has the money to fix them, sinkholes open up around failed water mains that can be as much as a hundred years old, municipalities don’t have enough cops to enforce traffic laws, we all get health insurance but there are STILL huge numbers of Americans with no health care. Everything gets handled in emergency allocations and the national debt just keeps going up and up and up. Generally speaking, the place is filthy, failing, and falling apart.

But, hey…rich people don’t have to pay taxes so, there’s that…

You want to make American great again? High taxes on high incomes is what did it in the first place and high taxes on high incomes is what will do it again, if that’s really what you want. Everything else is smokescreens and mirrors…

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Yeah, it wouldn’t be Daylight Saving Time without me bitching about having to change my clocks just so energy companies can extract a bit more money from the populace and add to their already disgusting profits. So…there. I did that.

Oh, since we’re here, Congress is apparently working on trying to adopt Daylight Saving Time year round. That would be a stunningly stupid example of refusing to learn from our own experience. Of course, “stunningly stupid” seems to be the stock-in-trade of the US these days. We tried year-round Daylight Saving once. In summary, it kills kids. Nice. That’s not hyperbole. It really does. So many kids were slaughtered so quickly, the “experiment” was ended in less than a year. (It has to do with the kids going to school in the black as pitch darkness…) Now we’re going to do it again? How very, very…VERY stupid.

I’ll tell you this: I’m all for putting the clocks on one schedule and leaving them there. But let’s put them on standard time and drop all of this Daylight Saving crap once and for all, shall we?