General Discussion

TheFerret

(630 posts) Fri Jun 29, 2018, 11:17 PM Jun 2018

Ferret/Shower Cap Wants YOU to fight to take back Congress!

Hey you. Yeah, you. Crawl out from under that blanket. Yes, I know it's been a shitty week, but we have work to do.

(Today of all days, you'll want to click over to my blog site to get links: http://showercapblog.com/shower-cap-wants-you-to-fight-to-take-back-congress/)

Did I say shitty? That may be understating it. The Supreme Court really rubbed our faces in the whole “instead of Merrick Garland you have a plutocratbot that hates people” thing. They're busting unions and upholding racist travel bans plus there was that one decision that says I have to give Reince Priebus a handjob whenever he asks. (That one was actually 5-4 with Ginsburg as the swing vote, just because she likes fucking with me.*)

And as if we weren't already having the time of our lives with judicial hippopotami tap-dancing on our groins in stiletto heels, Anthony Kennedy decided it was finally time to retire and write those dinosaur porn novels that've been percolating in the back of his mind all these years, leaving Fat Q*Bert to fill his spot on th'Bench with some Monster from Lou Dobbs’ Id.

And Mike Pants got his hairshirt all sticky because he'll finally get to steal bodily autonomy from all the filthy whores and get back to the good ol’ days when women were practically property, and also let's shove the LGBTQ folk back in the closet where they belong, and he's probably fantasizing that by the end of his second term maybe he can even bring back a little light slavery.

Fuck.

And while the media enters day 34,272 of their Ignoring How the Administration is Running Concentration Camps for Children in Favor of a Hand-Wringing Debate on Civility, Maxine Walters is canceling events due to credible deaths threats.

So at this point, the week has basically locked you in a Lollapalooza port-a-potty, knocked you over, and rolled you end over end down a very large, steep, hill.

And then, after more than two years of this shameless hate-monger demonizing the press on a damn near daily basis, a lunatic with a grudge and a gun shot up the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland, and five more innocent people are dead.

FUCK.

To the disgust of all decent people but the surprise of no one, Gazette employees were still trying to sort out who was safe and who was gone when some of the scummier corners of the online MAGAsphere responded to the slaughter of their fellow human beings with...gleeful celebration? Jesus.

FUUUUUUUUUCK.

So yeah, it's been an absolutely brutal week. I've seen a lot of despair. Fuck, I've FELT a decent amount of despair. It feels like the bad guys are winning. It feels like we can't stop them.

On the other hand, I JUST SAVED A BUNCH OF MONEY ON MY CAR INSURANCE.

...

Folks, I know time seems to move at a goddamn crawl these days, but we beat these motherfuckers just last week. Remember that? When Drumpf and his pet Klansman Jeff Sessions tried to mobilize the full force of the American government to steal children from their parents in an effort to terrorize asylum-seekers out of coming here?

Who stopped that shit? We did. We the People. We the Fed-Up, Oh Hell No You're Not Turning My Country Into a Place That Runs Concentration Camps PEOPLE.

So I wanna do something a little different tonight, before I get back to providing my usual service, which, again, is filtering the news through a series of poop jokes...not what I envisioned back in college, but here I am.

Let's remind ourselves of what we can DO. Let's fight back. With every tool at our disposable. Even right here, right now, on your phone or your computer, you can fight back right now.

And if it seems futile, let me remind you what we've already done; avalanche victories in Virginia, where the new government we elected expanded Medicaid under the ACA, and in New Jersey where they adopted bold new gun control measures. That's real impact. That's lives saved. We haven't been able to shift national politics that dramatically yet, but the (goddamn) midterms are closer than ever.

To that end, I'm working with my (super-awesome) webmaster to build a new page on the ol’ Shower Cap Blog site, a single, shareable, resource consolidating information on how you, dear reader, can fight back, with the heaviest focus on the battle to take back Congress this November. It'll be awesome and (I hope) comprehensive and full of snark and info and links, and it's coming very soon, perhaps even within the next week.

But let's get a head start right now. I'm gonna give you links to the campaign sites of some of the candidates in the races that will determine control of Congress. Click around. Donate if you can spare the money. Sign up to volunteer if you have the time. If nothing else, spend some time getting to know the good people on the front lines of this fight, and use your platform, however great or small, to talk them up to everyone you know.

Just for now, let's focus on House candidates that A) Have already won their primaries, and B) Are running in districts rated most competitive by Cook.

Jeff Van Drew in NJ-02

Mary Gay Scanlan in PN-05

Chrissy Houlahan in PN-06

Mike Levin in CA-49, Darrell Issa's old seat.

Susan Wild in PN-07

Jennifer Wexton in VI-10

Josh Harder in CA-10

Katie Hill in CA-25

Gil Cisneros in CA-39

Jason Crow in CO-06

Abby Finkenauer in IA-01

Sean Casten looking to beat that rat-bastard Pete Roskam in IL-06

Tom Malinowski in NJ-07

Antonio Delgado in NY-19

Anthony Brindisi running against Claudia Tenney in NY-22

Danny O’Connor in OH-12

Scott Wallace in PA-01

Lizzie Pannill Fletcher in TX-07

Colin Allred in TX-32

And then in the Senate, we're facing one ugly-ass map. We're defending a bunch of seats in hostile territory. We need to hang onto every single one if we want control. So why not lend your support to:

Bill Nelson in Florida

Sherrod Brown in Ohio

Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin

Claire McCaskill in Missouri

Joe Donnelly in Indiana

Jon Tester in Montana

Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota

Joe Manchin in West Virginia

Hang on to those seats, pick off a couple of these, and we can shut down the McConnell/Trump judicial appointment pipeline once and for all:

Jacky Rosen in Nevada

Phil Bredesen in Tennessee

Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona

And ok, it's a longshot, but I say dream big:

Beto O'Rourke in Texas

Whew. Lotta fronts in this battle, but we ain’t got time to bleed. Our country needs us.

If the Capital Gazette can get a newspaper to press mere hours after a mass shooting in their newsroom, surely the rest of us can pick ourselves up after last week and get back in the fight, right?

Alright, did you donate to at least one? Assuming you gave what you could, let's get back to the gags.

CARL, DID YOU REALLY DONATE? (Glares at Carl)

While we're talkin’ Congress, we may as well check in on the bad guys real quick, they're amassing a real dirtbag all-star team over there. If you forgot about that one LITERAL NAZI running in Illinois, perhaps you'll enjoy the profile Politico published today. Meanwhile, you probably heard about the pimp who won a primary in the party of family values? Well now he's been accused of rape. Maybe he can swap endorsements with North Carolina's Russell Walker, running on the novel “God is a white supremacist” platform. Don't forget Idaho's Priscilla Giddings, with her hilarious joke about shooting peaceful student protesters, which gets bonus points for timeliness!

Anyway. There's a weekly poker game at Roy Moore's favorite bar. The one down the street from the high school.

Y'know, since I'm feeling a little low, maybe I should outsource the jokes to Jeff Sessions today. He's out there doin’ a tight five on ripping children away from their parents and throwing them into camps! He's a regular Mike Huckabee, only with goofier ears. (Has anybody else noticed the Republican brand of humor is basically just laughing at their power to hurt people?)

Actually, the funniest joke I can come up with is “Some people think they can shame Mitch McConnell in adhering to the “rule” he pulled out of his shriveled turtles ass about delaying SCOTUS confirmations during election years.” If you imagine that guy gives two shits about being called out on his many hypocrisies, please contract me about some thrilling real estate opportunities.

Somebody suggested “Maybe Jeff Flake will stand, a rock-ribbed colossus in the Trump's path, holding pure and true to his threat to block the President's judges until he gets his tariff vote, a 21st century Jefferson Smith, a beacon for HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAH I HAVE ACTUALLY DIED AND THE REST OF THIS POST WILL BE COMPOSED BY THE LAWYER HANDLING MY ESTATE.

Trey Gowdy had a funny joke during a congressional hearing. He was all “Rod Rosenstein, you wrap up your investigation tout suite!” as though he wasn't the very same partisan hack who funneled endless bullshit into the Benghazi “investigation” in order to extend it for seventy years or however long it ran, and as though he wouldn't still be shrieking about Hillary's emails if James Comey hadn't been such a self-righteous ass and fucked up the entire course of human history. SUCH A KIDDER, THAT GOWDY DOODY.

Or maybe the biggest joke of the day is just Jim Jordan. Seriously, watching that knuckle-dragger regurgitate Hannity propaganda, expecting to be treated like a serious adult would almost be funny if he weren't trying to, you know, destroy the republic and all.

Could anybody possibly be a bigger joke than Jordan? I kinda doubt - LOOK OUT, here comes Marco Rubio, screaming “HOLD MY TINY WATER BOTTLE!” Yes, though the nation finds itself immersed in more crises than we count, with new disasters popping up seemingly by the hour, the only use Senator Rubio can find for his post and platform is to whine about reading the F-word in a news story. I swear, it's like Florida found a piece of toast that got dropped in the toilet and decided to send it to the fucking Senate.

(If it wasn't so cliched by now, I'd tell Marco to fuck himself in the fucking ear with a rusty fucking trowel, but it is, so I won't.)

While the Shart of the Deal demands praise for being the Gandhi of the Korean Peninsula But Better at Golf, satellite images show the Kim Jong-un regime is actually upgrading their nuclear sites, and increasing production. It's hilarious, isn't it, watching this bloated goon strut around, boasting about how America's more respected than ever before, while a dime store thug teabags him in front of the entire world?

Heh. This is even funnier when you hear they're playing the North Korean anthem at pro-Shart parties. I wonder if they're doing the new version, with everybody laughing their asses off at the rube who keeps offering concessions in exchange for a pipin'-hot stack of NOTHING.

A growing number of Democrats are joining the call to abolish ICE, and they're supported by...a bunch of ICE agents? Yeah, I guess being increasingly perceived as Orange Julius Caesar's personal Gestapo isn't good for business.

Bill Shine is so scummy, he got fired by Fux Nooz for enabling a culture of sexual harassment, so naturally he's about to be the new communications director aboard the Shartanic. I guess if you don't have any reputation left to destroy, you don't have as much to lose by serving that evil fuck as, say, a decent human being might.

Hey look, Cowboy Ryan Zinke has an inspector general investigation of his very own, but I think he's just doing it to copy Scott Pruitt, who everybody knows is the coolest kid in corruption. Speaking of Pruitt, of COURSE there are fresh new scandals, the man is devoted to his work! Scotty's allegedly been ratfucking** former aides who exposed his embarrassing “Could I please have a used mattress that the President personally farted on” behavior. Naughty, naughty, Scotty!

Larry Kudlow is finally adjusting to his new work environment, and look! He just told his very first Goebbels Lie! The deficit is “coming down rapidly” proclaimed Kudlow, shooting a nervous glance at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his orientation buddy. “It's ok, Larry! Our base will believe whatever shit we feed ‘em! Remember Pizzagate?”

What's that? When Strawberry Shartcake's reputation was ruined by a lifetime of failure, bankruptcy and fraud, and the only institution on the planet that would lend him money was Deutsche Bank, and the dude in charge of doling out the loans was...Justice Kennedy's son? Really? REALLY? Honestly, I think George R.R. Martin finally nuked the fridge with that one.

Through it all, Rascally Robert Mueller plugs merrily along. He's circling Roger Stone, who's surely sweating the pinstripes right off his suit by now. He's investigating everyone from the oligarchs at Shartboy's ill-attended inauguration party to the Brits who financed the Brexit campaign to whoever had the idea to make another Transformers movie. He's delaying Mike Flynn's sentencing, probably because he's going to need the treasonous former NSA to pop out of a cake at somebody's perp-walk party.

On the international front, the Marmalade Shartcannon seems to be doing all he can to fuck up America's reputation among the community of nations, as surely as if he were traveling to all the world's bathrooms and pissing on the seat.

Reports say this blundering, babbling toe of a man actually tried to bribe President Macron into pulling France out of the European Union. "C'mon Manny, I'll give you a discount on Trump steaks plus I'll sneak you into a beauty pageant dressing room, anyway please do it, Vlad says if I break up the E.U. I can have my left testicle back.”

And he's preparing for a big summit with Putin, parroting his “Interfere in American elections? Who, me?” propaganda, which I guess is the America-destroying collusion version of laughing too loud at your boss’ jokes.

Oh, and word is he wants to pull the U.S. out of the World Trade Organization. Advisors are like, “No Donnie, that would be really really fucking stupid and would probably blow up the global economy,” but you kinda worry it's like leaving a spoiled rich kid alone in a room with a cake you say he can't touch until after dinner; he doesn't believe you'll really spank him, so what's to stop him?

But hey, don't worry, the nuclear codes are safe with the CUDBRAINED TURDWORM WHO FELL FOR A PRANK CALL FROM STUTTERING FREAKING JOHN.

Tantrum in the trade war as Canada became the latest nation to announce retaliatory tariffs, instead of meekly submitting to Tangerine Idi Amin's bullying like they were ‘sposedta, no fair! Meanwhile, hundreds of companies are seeking “You'll destroy our whole fucking business you moron” exemptions from Drumpf's own tariffs, and General Motors is sounding the alarm. Lord, nobody tell Wee Don that Obama saved the auto industry, or he'll destroy it out of spite.

Alrighty friends, that's what I got tonight. I'm sure I missed some shit, I always do. I'll have that new page for you in a few days, but in the meantime, scroll back up and donate to some more House candidates, and I'll see you at the march tomorrow!

PS, Weehands McNodick is mad at Angela Merkel and is looking at withdrawing all U.S. troops from Germany, SLEEP TIGHT!

*Yeah, we hang out. Cuz we're both superheroes.

**"Ratfucking" is political slang, not to be confused with "Pigfucking," which is what Devin Nunes does, in a much more literal sense.