I read this in a Huffpost article called ‘Donald Trump Challenged Nikki Haley To An ‘Aptitude Test’ And You Know What Happened.’ Donny had this quote: “In fact, when I heard the word ‘cognitive,’ you know, I’ve taken two of them now,” Trump continued. “I took one with Doc Ronnie, who’s now a fantastic, you know, White House doctor and a fantastic congressman from Texas. Admiral. The White House doctor. Jackson. Ronny Jackson. And he’s now a great congressman from Texas. I took one then, and I took one recently. I think the result was announced and it was, I aced it twice. I aced it.”

Trump added, “But I would say that, you know, I’ve actually called for a cognitive test for anybody running for president because I actually think that’s a good idea. It’d be nice to have an intelligent person be president.”

The first paragraph shows Donny’s ‘wander around’ technique of managing words he can’t say or sometimes an idea he can’t quite connect. It happens in nearly every public speech I’ve ever heard him give. He gets to a word and, for whatever reason, he can’t say the word. He keeps talking, though. He kind of verbally wanders around the word he’s trying to say, all the while riffing, freestyle, on what he meant to say, until he gets the word down or finds a replacement word, then goes back to his speech like it never happened.

You can see it in that first paragraph as he tries to recollect who he took the test from and who that guy is. It’s one of those, “Whose that actor? He was in… It was a wolf thing… He did… Uh, Jackman, Hugh Jackman!” In Donny’s case, though, it was more like, “I took it from a doctor. Who’s that doctor? He was the White House Doctor, what’s his name? He’s an admiral. Oh, Jackson, that’s it! Ronnie Jackson.”

Coupla things. 1 – Someone in his inner circle needs to try to make him understand, one does not “ace” a cognitive test. It’s more pass/fail. 2 – The last line of the second quoted paragraph suggests that Donny thinks he’s taking an IQ test when he takes a cognitive test. Which means he thinks the fact that he can still identify an elephant makes him a genius. 3 – Finally, he might want to STOP bragging that, twice now, someone has felt the need to have him take a cognitive test. TWICE!

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There’s a possibility that Alina Habba may have lied to a Federal judge. Nice, eh? One of the jurors in the E. Jean Carroll case wasn’t feeling well and there was some Covid concern. The judge, most likely, would have just replaced that member with an alternate and Donny would have been free to give his promised testimony the day before the New Hampshire primary.

But then Habba, Donny’s “lawyer,” said SHE wasn’t feeling well, either, and may have been exposed to Covid, so the trial was delayed. The thing is, she was later photographed out in public and at campaign events with Donny. She didn’t look sick at all.

Donny’s testimony, if he makes it at all, is most likely to be more of his current hit, “Oh, poor, poor me,” (assuming he can remember who he is long enough to get his self-pity into the record). I would GUESS it won’t amount to a hill of beans. It certainly is not going to off-set all the new evidence he keeps generating in the case. But here’s the thing; one does not get to “call in sick” as a “mental health day” when one is an attorney and a trial is happening. If she told the judge she was sick and she wasn’t? Federal judges tend to take ‘lying to a Federal judge’ seriously. Stay tuned…

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Okay, here’s exactly how badly MAGAGOP wants to stop immigrants from coming to America. Cons in Congress have been negotiating with the Biden administration. They’re holding hostage the funding for Ukraine and Israel until a deal gets hammered out on the southern border. It was a pretty “asshole” move but I already indicated it’s MAGA. The “asshole” part is implied and expected.

But now? With Donny’s win in New Hampshire, MAGAGOP has decided he’s got a lock on the nomination (duh…) and – get this – Donny wants to use the immigration “issue” in his campaign. If the two sides reach an agreement, he has less he can say. So MAGAGOP is turning sour on the deal. Moscow Mitch “the bitch” McConnell cleverly said, out loud where people could hear, “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.” Like…make an agreement on immigration policy?

So, when one can simply set aside their oh-so-urgent, absolutely imperative, gotta do it NOW, issue for a little while in order to boost their preferred candidate’s campaign? I’ll tell you this: I really had believed the immigration issue was important to them. Now that it, too, has been revealed to be nothing more than a campaign wedge issue, I’m not going to worry about it too much any more.

(Shakes head) Effin’ cons…

I’m hearing a lot of talk about how Donny is going to dominate the Republican primary process. It seems true, to me. Then again, it’s true because the Republican party has been, essentially, taken over by MAGA. Sane Republicans left the party. Not all of them, but lots of them. When the party started bending the knee to Stinky Don, many people saw the extremism and didn’t want to be associated with it. Of course, they didn’t become Democrats. They’re still conservatives. They’re just not “burn the country down” conservatives, like MAGA.

But the Republican party tends to let ONLY registered Republicans vote in their primaries, and THAT’S the problem with conservatives leaving the Republican party. Of COURSE Stinky Don is best-positioned to win the nomination. He’s not being supported by the majority of conservatives, only the MAGA wing, the only segment that can cast votes in the primaries.

To me, that’s the real question. Will the conservatives who left the party and, therefore, were not allowed to voice their preference for someone other than trump, come out and vote for him, anyway? If you’re not MAGA, even if you ARE conservative, you can see that Donny is a criminal, a traitor, and an incompetent. I know the cons like to say it about Biden, but Donny seems to losing command of his faculties. MAGA can’t (won’t) see that, either. Will not-so-MAGA conservatives vote to return him to the White House even after knowing his intention to not leave again, ever? I’m not so sure. I hope not.

But I’ll tell you this: having to rely on conservatives for sanity is an increasingly lengthening long-shot…

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This is really key: MAGA will not compromise. Pretty much everything they want to do, they want in a “my way or no way” approach. Case in point? MAGA Mike, the Speaker of the House that managed to sneak into the job after the ousting of Mike McCarthy for making a deal with the Democrats, is on the verge of making a deal with the Democrats – and MTG is publicly calling for his removal from the Speakership. Why? Well, the deal isn’t her perfect dream. (It, simply, does not harm enough people…)

The thing is, politics is the art of compromise. Sure, it’s frustrating. There’s always something I’d like to see that gets left on the table at the end of the bargaining. But that’s usually true for both sides. That’s a compromise. MAGA sees compromise as weakness. They’ve decided to take a stand.

MAGA ALWAYS decides to “take a stand” when Democrats are in power. When Stinky Don was infesting the Oval, conservatives increased the national debt by $8 TRILLION dollars. They didn’t even bat an eye. You can look this up. The Republican party raises the national debt the most, not the Dems. Going back to Reagan, it goes up record amounts under Republicans, almost always.

In fairness, there was Obama. Bush 43 had left him quite the economic mess, what with two wrong wars caused by conservative panic and a crashed economy caused by conservative deregulation. Bush 43 had raised the debt a LOT but he did it “off books,” trying to hide the increases. One of the first actions of the incoming Obama administration was to count all the money 43 had tried to hide and it sent the debt soaring. Then Obama had to stimulate the economy Bush 43 had crashed and that cost a lot, too.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? When Democrats raise the national debt, it tends to be because they’re trying to recover from the economic damage caused by Republicans. When Republicans raise the national debt, it’s almost always because of their precious tax cuts for the wealthy.

In THIS case, though, the cons just don’t want to fund the government because there’s not enough stuff in there to attack people coming in at the southern border. MAGA is perfectly happy to let Americans suffer (not themselves, of course) in an effort to make sure desperate people running for their lives suffer even more. And if “MAGA Mike” makes any kind of deal, any kind of compromise, with Democrats? He’ll go from being “MAGA Mike” to being a RINO in a heartbeat – and he’ll be out as Speaker. Lovely…

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MAGA reminds me of a LOT of things but I realized the other day, it’s NEVER anything good. Ever. Sometimes, they remind me of carnival hucksters. Sometimes, they remind me of Nazis. Sometimes, they remind me of whining little babies. Sometimes they grow up, but never more than, say, second grade. These people are paranoid, delusional, and LOUD. They remind me of the homeless guy walking down the street SHOUTING at his demons.

I’m often stunned at how deeply MAGA has penetrated our society. We wouldn’t (I hope) knowingly allow that homeless guy into the halls of Congress but he managed to get there anyway, in the form of MAGA. And there are several million people out there who want to be just like him. I really don’t get it…

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As every rational person knows, abortion and the overturning of Roe has been a deal-killer for voters from sea to shining sea. Republicans have been trying to run campaigns without talking about it. ”Hey, let’s all pretend we didn’t do that, okay?” Um, no. Thinking Americans KNOW you did it. Trying to downplay it, isn’t going to work.

Especially with Stinky Don out there taking bows for it. “For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it. And I’m proud to have done it.” Well, yes and no. Roe was one of those wedge issues politicians like to keep around but never solve. They’re great campaign tools but once they’re addressed and solved, what do they run on after? So they don’t. They just leave the issue out there. That’s why we have so many problems with obvious solutions that just never get resolved – candidates want to run on those “issues” again.. (I wrote a song about it. You can hear it, here…)

So, Republicans campaigned against Roe but never took the steps to actually remove it and Democrats campaigned in support of Roe but never took the steps to actually protect it. Until Donny. He just doesn’t understand subtlety. In his “culture war” he actually packed the High Court with enough ideologues to get the job done. They overturned Roe, and the cons have suffered ever since. People, even many conservative people, liked having the choice or, at the very least, understood the importance of access to medical care for such things. If you’ve been around the sun enough times, you remember, before Roe, the regular, heartbreaking news stories of so-called “back-alley” abortions – and the often horrifying consequences that came with them.

I think, Republicans haven’t won an election since (except where gerrymandering protects them, of course). So, the Republicans are all trying to ignore the abortion issue, acting like they don’t know HOW that happened, the overturning of Roe. Then comes Donny, ever the dumbass. ”I did it. I did it. Women across the country are going to suffer because of me for years to come. That was all me. I’m so proud of myself. Suffer, bitches…”

Yeah, Don, we know you did. We’ve been voting accordingly and I suspect we’re going to KEEP voting accordingly. So you just keep wagging your tongue on the subject. Do everything you can to remind people, it was Republicans who took rights from the American people, not the Democrats. Make sure they know you’d do it again and that you intend to strip MORE rights from Americans. Just keep talking…