Can Donald Trump conjure grifts so immense and appalling that even Republican Senators can no longer swallow them? This revolt would be a lot easier if those dissenting were vertebrates, but to paraphrase Rumsfeld, you go into battle with the legislature you have.

It's about time someone gave Meyer Lansky and Charlie Luciano a fair fucking shake. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/u...

No way. Using military force to butcher civilians without due process in or over international waters is subject to legal indictment and prosecution? Which politicians and admirals will we be extraditing to Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico?

Under authoritarian rule, there will always be an obscurant reason and contorted argument to explain why the consent of the governed is not really necessary to proceed. Whatever this fascist throws up in bricks and mortar before we finally spit him out, the rest of us will vote to tear down.

This is correct. The parliamentary paradigm that relies on coalition building can easily devolve into a tyranny of the extreme minorities. We find a way to cut the throat of the electoral college and we have a better chance to approximate an actual republic. Hard as that may be.

Ok, for those of us watching the republic implode and keeping a list of all those complicit, this is now pornography:

To paraphrase those philosopher-kings, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong: "Do something!" "I am doing something. I'm praying, man." "Come on. We need a miracle and you're gonna sit there praying?" Lightning has to hit someone in the ass now and then. Everybody close their eyes and bear down.

I've just concluded 90 minutes of hard post-American Century doomscrolljng. Does anyone know a good opium den that is open in the afternoon in any New York borough? Even North Jersey, or hell, Staten Island.

Appropos of nothing save lunch in an otherwise excellent pho joint: It is long claimed that the accordion is the bane of music lovers worldwide. But I own the discographies of Clifton Chenier and Flaco Jimenez and really, it is the delicacy of an electric piano playing jazz standards that must die.

No, shitheel. We should be asking you and your kind.

A man who took the refusal to suffer fools to high art.

If your byline sits atop a think-piece this morning about how Donald Trump is still a powerful political monolith because he can get GOP voters in deep red districts to heed his endorsement in primary contests, you need to go find an actual journalist and let him use you to wipe his ass clean.

Fuck it. Let's try.

Just endured all of that interview with Jeff Bezos. Too much money contorts any human being. And what was once a man is now, for the rest of the world, a fully metastasized cancer.

Take a breath. Now read it slowly. Move your lips as you read if it helps: 1) A Republican legislator broke with his party to demand information be made public about which rich and powerful men fucked children. 2) Republican allies spent $30 million to make him stop it. 3) Voters stopped him.

My god. The only thing left for the city of Cleveland to do after the last seven minutes of that basketball game is pour gasoline in the Cuyahoga River and set it on fire again.

He's not leaving, folks.

Inscrutable Chinese bastards writing stuff in their own language. They don't even use the same letters we do to make it even sneakier. Has every hollowed-out moron in America affixed themselves to our governance? Has Trump left a single trash human behind? Or does every last one have a paying gig?

You made a weak O.J. joke. I replied with a better one. Now you vent about it as if you've are the only soul here dabbling in humor. That is peak bluesky indeed.

Yeah, because Mark Fuhan was a racist shit, they got the wrong man to court for svagly murdering two people. And ever since, they've trying to find some other guy with O.J. Simpson's blood so they can arrest him for the crime.

In the words of Mel Brooks, one of our most sagacious political philosophers, "It's good to be the king." fortune.com/2026/05/18/t...

Idaho says it all.

That ass is not large enough.

Cool, the Trump admin issued Xi his own statue.

When my daughter stood on the USS Arizona memorial and looked at the submerged hulk of the ship and thought on the 900 sailors entombed below, she became distressed, then furious that a few nearby tourists did not observe a respectful silence. But then, she was 13 and had a human soul.

Much respect for those enduring and beleagured souls who, hoping for better lives, are always found doing the hardest, most unforgiving jobs that Americans don't want.

A beautiful and sincere elegy from Jordan Hirsch, a fellow pilgrim on an improbable narrative venture into New Orleans that HBO allowed us some years ago. His father broke real ground where it mattered; Jordan is breaking it still.

You're a fucking cocoon, mook.

Every mook who ever sat at the Algonquin Roundtable is now spinning in their holes, thinking, fuck, I made everything way too complicated.

Secretary of War Hegseth is now ten minutes late to the podium to declare that the God-sanctioned bombardment of Sydney and Melbourne has now commenced, and that it shall involve overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.

A confession. Since 2015 there have been folks assuring me that Donald Trump's base of support includes people who find him to be humorous and bantering in an off-the-cuff way. Not once since then have I encountered a moment of real wit, certainly none self-aware or self-deprecating. Until now.

Hunter Biden was a fucking piker.

This presumes something false: That social media platforms are actually a digital marketplace of ideas wherein robust debate occurs that changes the minds of those so engaged. Horseshit. Shards of rhetoric turn no one. This platform can gather, rally and encourage the sentient and sane. That's it.

The U.S. Supreme Court is conducting a coup d'etat. It is at war with the very premise of an electoral democracy. Nothing about that institution or its work is legitimate. Nothing.

Paper loss. This is a conduit for raw bribery.

As opposed to, say, let me do the math here, hold on...double checking to be precise... ...one fucking judge.

Moo.

The most notable revelation is that according to these files, now finally available after years of delay, we see that Donald Trump was close friends with a notorious sex trafficker and seems likely to have routinely engaged in sex with trafficked women and girls while here on planet Earth.

The fact-based world was fun while it lasted.

A first thought is that this hollowed-out, fading old crank needs to be in assisted living. A second thought is that having surrounded himself with an adiministration servile, ass-licking sycophants. the White House is, in fact, an assisted living facility.

The necessity of the air strikes on Mountain View and Cupertino, California is now made manifest. This is not a man who is willing to be corrected on any error, much less auto-corrected.

Respect for the thought. But if given a shard of the franchise, it would center on the crushing bureaucracy of The Empire and the ruthless egotism of the lead revels and the fact that nothing fucking changes.

I don’t know shit about Star Wars, but they should let David Simon direct a Star Wars series that’s basically Treme and people just hang out, talk about conspiracy theories about the empire, cook in some spaceport kitchen, have cool second line jams etc etc.

Now that the Supreme Court has tossed every last pretense of electoral integrity into the gutter, does Mr. Ferguson, our Maryland Senate President, have any regret about refusing to redistrict on the premise that the legality/constitutionality of such might be challenged? Challenged how? Where?

Lincoln? A mook. Without Grant and Sherman, he was nothing. FDR? It took that guy nearly four years and all of the Red Army to battle the Axis into submission. How dare we even compare these empty suits to a C-in-C in little more than a month managed to bomb a girl's school and close Gulf shipping.

James Brown at the Apollo, 1962. Solemn nods of affirmation and whispered Amens are the only replies we shall recognize. Amy open dissent will be recorded and punished appropriately at every future opportunity.

(A contemptuous joke about a Four Seasons hospice that might get a sincere man tossed off a social media site platform was slated for this space. Discretion and politesse intervenes.) Instead, thoughts and prayers for America's mayor. And by this, of course, I refer to Fiorello LaGuardia.

Keeping this handy to reply to any shitheel who frets about the number of American crazies who take potshots at Trump and suggest it's Democrats who need to tone down the rhetoric. Trump is fascist, racist, misogynistic, corrupt, vulgarian and submoronic. I do hope he dies of a cheeseburger only.