I’m Familiar with Danger Mouse and Mighty Mouse and Jerry Mouse.

And the lesser-known but equally important Timothy Q. Mouse.

I have listened to Modest Mouse.  

I've used a Transparent Mouse (a novel idea), and am using a Laser Mouse right now.

I have read "The Mouse That Roared".  I've also read "Flowers for Algernon" which seems depressingly appropriate at the moment.  

But I'll be damned if I've ever encountered Transgender Mouse, which, according to Grandpa Syphilis, is an actual thing on which we're spending a few taxpayer pfennigs which is why [checks notes] Elon Musk is awesome and we need to cut Medicaid and fuck over American farmers.   

Yes, I watched the whole awful thing, and I wondered where in the world?  And to my complete lack of surprise, that story originated in the addled brain off rom psychological train-wreck Nancy Mace, and was then filtered through all the usual poison garbage sites -- 

Daily Mail

Shocking revelation woke Biden administration scientists spent millions turning monkeys and mice transgender

Nancy Mace makes stunning admission about trans lawmaker  

South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace slammed the Biden administration for using more than $10million in taxpayer money to fund ‘painful and deadly transgender experiments' on mice. 

Breitbart

Trump Reads Out ‘Appalling’ Examples of Waste Discovered by DOGE: ‘$8 Million for Making Mice Transgender’

Fox News:

$10M in taxpayer funds spent creating transgender animals: Rep. Nancy Mace

-- until, at last, Grandpa Syphilis puked it out on live teevee in front of an international audience. 

This was, of course, all deeply embarrassing to the sentient members of our species, and immediately debunked by [checks notes again] everyone who has ever taken high school biology.  

From everyone is entitled to my own opinion: 

“eight million dollars for making mice transgender. this is real.”

no, no, no, no. nobody is spending government money to make mice transgender. you low-wattage dolt. the word is transgenic.

let’s say you’re a cancer researcher, and you implant some human genetic material into mice, in order to better study how cells mutate. boom! — you’ve just created transgenic mice.

nobody is doing sex-change operations on mice and setting them loose in Nancy Mace’s bathroom.

reading comprehension, how does it work? how clownfuckingly illiterate do you have to be to screw that up? and how hot do you have to be to demonize people that every time you see trans at the beginning of a word, your brain goes fuckity-bye and visions of entire teams of boy mice playing against girl mice in mouse schools across the nation dance in your head?

Not that this will make one iota of difference, but those of us still living in the Real World do appreciate the effort.

Now take it away, The Irish Rovers:

Burn The Lifeboats

Who's Your Daddy? Ctd.

Now that he has begun positioning the his army to complete the conquest of Ukraine, and now that the United States has taken a  very public stand against such action, Russian President Vladimir Putin needs something sharp and pointy and very public with which to poke President Obama in the eye.

 Cue Uncle Vlad allowing Ed Snowden to "interview" him on Russian state teevee!

And by "interview" I mean he was permitted one softball question with no follow up. Eerily similar to the way David Gregory "interviews" every Republican who has ever been on on Meet the Press...except, of course, Greggers* is not living under the surveillance and protection of the person he is questioning -- a person who has a long record of locking up or killing dissidents and journalists and is middle of the slow-motion military invasion of a neighboring country.

Mr. Snowden's sock-puppet question was introduced by one of the programs co-hosts as follows:

"We've got really sensational, really outrageous video message from a person who revolutionized the world by leaking information about American secret services."

Let's see how that worked out, shall we?

Putin replied by stating Russia did not carry out mass surveillance on its population, and that its intelligence operations were strictly regulated by court orders.

"Mr Snowden, you are a former agent, a spy, I used to work for the intelligence service, we are going to talk one professional language," Putin said, according to translation by state-run broadcaster Russia Today.

"Our intelligence efforts are strictly regulated by our law so...you have to get a court permission to stalk that particular person.

"We don't have as much money as they have in the States and we don't have these technical devices that they have in the States. Our special services, thank God, are strictly controlled by society and the law and regulated by the law."

...

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Greenwald took to Twitter to explain this development to his 347,000 followers in the same calm, reasonable and evenhanded tones for which he is legendary:

Snowden should storm the Kremlin, take their surveillance docs & demand to be sent to the US: just like his brave patriotic critics would do
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 17, 2014

Once again, if you are one of those people who believe strongly that neither Mr. Greenwald nor Mr. Snowden are the story I strongly urge you to send your comments to:

President Vladimir Putin

23, Ilyinka Street

Moscow, 103132, Russia.

Or use this handy link to forward them to Uncle Vlad using electronic mail.

If you have anything constructive to add -- pro or con -- as always, the comment section is yours.  However to save myself the time and trouble of individually approving each of the approaching torrent of comments about my jackbooted fascistic hatred of all things freedom-related, let us just stipulate that I am a terrible person who obsessively refuses to post anything but long, anti-free-press, pro-dronekill screeds (while drooling, also too) and you should steer clear of my horrid little sellout blog at all costs.

*Commenter gratuitous is quite right that I screwed up my analogy.  And once I repaired my dumb mistake, it's clear that comparisons with Gregory -- who also depends entirely on pleasing and serving the interests of many of the people he is "interviewing" -- is is actually closer than I thought.  

And Here Come The Chicken Farmers, Ctd.

No one could have predicted that once the Rapture didn't come the Black Usurper in the White House didn't toss the keys to the country to Ted Cruz and scurry back to Kenya, the Judean People's Tea Party would end up in a slap fight with the People's Tea Party of Judea:

Tea Party Eats Their Own

New GOP primary challengers are looking to serve their Tea Party challengers a scolding hot cuppa change. Their goal? To oppose!

They arrived in January of 2011, unfamiliar with the ways of Washington, and promising never to adapt. The Republican freshman of the 112th Congress had helped take back the House, riding a Tea Party-infused, throw-the-bums-out wave of conservative disgust with career politicians.

But after three years in office and an election season looming, a number of GOP Congressmen find themselves facing scrappy challengers who say that they are now the ones with a serious case of Potomac Fever.

“I didn’t expect Renee to go this route,” said Frank Roche, a conservative Internet talk show host, who is challenging Renee Ellmers in North Carolina’s Second Congressional District. “I am sad she did. Unfortunately she has chosen to go along with the establishment in Washington D. C.”

Ellmers was a nurse and a Tea Party favorite when she emerged out of a crowded field in 2010, and went on to eke out a win against the Democratic incumbent. Then, she harped on the building of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in New York in her campaign speeches, compared President Obama to Louis XIV and said that his administration is establishing a “socialistic form of government.”

Even in 2012, Roche counted himself as a supporter. But her backing of immigration reform convinced Roche to throw his own hat into the ring.

“I think that is a danger to our country.”

Plus, Roche added, since running as an outsider in 2010, Ellmers has cozied up to leadership.

That was a complaint heard again and again, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Florida’s Gulf Coast to points in between: The one-time Outsiders had gone inside, and for evidence just look to a House Republican leadership that was embracing the one-time radicals.

...

First, as every reader of this blog knows, (say it with me now) There. Is. No. Tea. Party.

There never has been.

There  has never been anything but the same, old, lumpen, pig-ignorant and often-bigoted Republican base. The same orc army that was dreamed up and assembled by Team Nixon, perfected by Team Reagan and behind whose vanguard every Republican victory has come for the last 40 years. The same infinitely reprogrammable Golem that made Rush Limbaugh and his imitators multi-millionaires, launched an entire, multi-billion dollar propaganda network, and turned Christianity into a Libertarian club for beating the shit out of the poor, the weak, the lame, the halt, dispossessed, the outsider, the justice-seekers and the peace-makers.

Or, as one, scurvy, low-born smartass said way back when the Republican Rebranding Machine was still test-market the name "Tea Party":

...

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

To achieve electoral success, the Conservative Brain Caste bred a generation of adherents who are so completely unmoored from reality that the mere presence of facts that run contrary to the Wingnut Slogan of the Day automatically triggers a supercharged fight-or-flight reflex.  So congratulations Republicans --  you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams!

Of course, once you gave up on actual governing and turned your Zombie Army of Wingnut Purity loose to wreck the country in the name of Rush Limbaugh's idea of ideological conformity, it was only a matter of time before they would begin picnicking on each other. Or, as one low-born, bootless blabbermouth once said about another Purity Cult:

...once purity itself becomes all you care about -- once  it becomes a distillery race to see who can get to 100% -- the chicken farmers are never far behind:

The main Islamist group in Algeria, the GIA, ended up being led by a Mr. Zouabri, a chicken farmer, who killed everyone who disagreed with him. He issued a final communiqué, declaring that the whole of Algerian society should be killed, with the exception of his tiny remaining band of Islamists. They were the only ones who understood the truth.

This World Was Never Meant For One

As beautiful as you.

It's rumor at this point, but oh my (from Mediaite):

Meet The Press Reportedly in Jeopardy as NBC Looks to Cut Back DC Bureau

As we head into 2014, the fate of the longest-running news program on television is starting to look uncertain. According to a new report from the New York Post’s Claire Atkinson, NBC News chief Deborah Turness is looking to make some major cutbacks at the network’s Washington D.C. bureau, where Meet The Press is produced.

Atkinson quotes one unnamed executive as saying, “Instead of getting better, NBC News has been getting worse [since Turness arrived earlier this year.] It’s a mess.” In October, the reporter cited rumors about Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski adding Meet The Press hosting duties to their already full 15 hours a week on MSNBC.

Meet The Press, which used to be the perennial first place finisher on Sunday mornings over ABC’s This Week and CBS’ Face The Nation, fell to a 21-year low over the summer and has been coming in third place behind those two show for much of 2013.

...

 Dear Ms. Turness,

Give me a week and I can fix "Meet the Press".  Seriously, send me a check for what David Gregory makes in one week and I will fix your flagship show.

Unless, that is, you're goal is to continue appeasing your sponsors and personally enriching Mr. Gregory by using MTP as a dung wallow for every shit-slinging, Both Sider shill, lie-spouting Republican hack and Wall Street parasite who wants to roll one more re-retread of player-out Beltway drivel into my living room and sell it to me as the received wisdom of our culture's best and brightest.  

In which case you're fucked.

If not, drop me a line and a check: I've cleaned up worse midden piles than yours.

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

Death of the Anti-Gonzo

The Washington Post's write-up is as good as any:

David Broder, 81, dies; set 'gold standard' for political journalism

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2011; 12:39 AM

David S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most respected writers on national politics for four decades, died Wednesday at Capital Hospice in Arlington of complications from diabetes.

Mr. Broder was often called the dean of the Washington press corps - a nickname he earned in his late 30s in part for the clarity of his political analysis and the influence he wielded as a perceptive thinker on political trends in his books, articles and television appearances.
...

Mr. Broder had a "relentlessly centrist" philosophy about politics, the political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker magazine. Mr. Broder brooked little tolerance toward what he termed, in describing the action of 1960s militant antiwar activists, "confrontation politics, with its constant threat of violence and repression."
...

While there were many, many things David Broder loved -- centrism, politics, bi-partisanship, equidistanthood, divarication, bisect-uality, decussation -- one thing he really hated was hippies.

Those those damn, dirty, disrespectful fucking hippies.

He especially hated those fucking imaginary hippies: they were the sawdust and breadcrumb filler he kept heaping into his increasingly inedible journalistic meatloaf; the thumb he pressed down ever harder on the scales of his funny little rambles about America during his declining years (which encompassed all of the 21st Century and a big chunk of the end of the 20th) to artificially "balance out" the clear and horrifying fact that Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower that he had known as a barefoot lad growing up in the swampland of Chicago Heights was devolving into a billionaire-industrialist-funded mob of fundies, racists, imbeciles and sociopaths.

In fact, this fetish became so obsessive that, in the end, it became the great, tragic irony of David Broder's professional life. Because at last he simply could not bear to part with his fantasies about what he wished America to be and face the brutal realities of what America was actually becoming, David Broder -- this "Dean of the Washington press corps" -- totally missed out on covering the greatest story of his time; the utter collapse of the American news media and the mutation of the GOP from a political party into a dangerously fascistic cesspit of oligarchs, lunatics and rubes.

It was a story which his background and years of hard work had almost uniquely prepared him to cover, and one that was literally staring him in the face for much of the last 20 years.

And he completely fucking blew it.

But more than anything else, he super-duper-especially hated it when those dang, dirty, disrespectful, imaginary hippies moved into that nice White House at the center his little town and fucked everything up with. From Taylor Marsh:

...David Broder represented commentary that is the worst of insider Washington D.C. thinking and an elitism, a leading member of Sally Quinn’s clan, which meant he was an original member of the Clinton hater club and helped churn the anti-Clinton fervor with gusto.
Sally Quinn’s infamous “In Washington, That Letdown Feeling” captured the insider feelings about the Pres. Clinton after the Lewinsky affair broke:

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”
[...] “The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

Nothing annoyed the Washington elite more than the hicks from the sticks, Bill and Hillary Clinton. After Ronald Reagan, the Arkansans were see as interlopers. To understand Washington that’s where you have to begin.
Broder turned Pres. Clinton’s moral failings inside out and made it all about them, the D.C. community who considered Washington a small town.
...

If Hunter Thompson's coverage of politics in 1972 was (according to George McGovern's 1972 campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz) "the least factual, but the most accurate" of all the correspondents, the award for being "the most factual, but the least accurate" correspondent of his generation must go to David Broder.

The eponymous Father of High Broderism (from the Urban Dictionary)

The worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. The main goal is the establishment of a permanent ruling class of Washington insiders, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. The establishment of an aristocratic class in America.

and its staunchest Fidei Defensor (from Rick Perlstein)

...
Richard Nixon ran the most secretive presidential campaign in national history—even making reporters sit in rooms far from the crowds and watch his events on closed-circuit TV. George McGovern made Nixon's secretiveness a major focus of his campaign—begging Nixon every day to debate him. And yet somehow Broder recollects a situation of equivalence. I think it shows how his mind works—and why our political press corps is so badly broken.

David Broder sired and suckled an entire generation of well-heeled, well-connected, establishmentarian insider merchants of Beltway Common Wisdom who have made a massively profitable cottage industry out of displacing honest reportage in favor of passing around empty "process" stories, vapid D.C. gossip tricked out in somber political rhetoric and the status and style updates of Very Serious People like Tennessee Williams' proverbial "dirty postcard".

And the glue that holds the whole ugly, toxic scam together is the relentless, reflexive, completely-dishonest buffering of any and all Republican crimes, treasons, hypocrisies and obscenities...of any kind...in any context...in any venue...on any given day of the week...with the Broderite mantra of "...but the Liberals": a habit so ingrained b y now in the Villager Hive Mind that the Center-Right Shill Factory known as Politico could not help but go out of its way to take a gratuitous swipe at the dirty fucking hippies in the middle of their eulogy to Mr. Broder (emphasis mine):

Broder, who grew up in Chicago and was a graduate of the University of Chicago, revered the political process and admired those he saw as rational voices focused on achieving results. That sometimes opened him up to criticism from ideologues on the left, who saw him as the epitome of conventional, inside-the-Beltway wisdom. But he also earned respect from prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle, many of whom released statements soon after news of his death was announced Wednesday.

Sorry, Politico, but however much of a legend his hard, on-the-ground, sandal-leather reporting on what the Average Roman thought about the first Punic War ("Hiero II of Syracuse shoulda listened to his general onna ground!") may be, David Broder's lasting legacy is ultimately a tragic one.

For against the tide of imaginary of dirty hippies who were forever plotting to mess up his lawn, and in the name of an idolatrous worship of the God of Fake Objectivity, the Dean of the Washington press corps' most enduring contribution to his profession has been as the Patient Zero of a lethal strain of syphilitic Villager Centrism which may be more responsible than any other single factor in all-but wiping out anything resembling honest national political journalism in America.

And that is the definition of tragedy.

UPDATE: Welcome Vanity Fair readers and many thanks to the matchless James "The Enforcer" Wolcott for pointing you in my direction.

Sadly, Not From "The Onion"

Republicans Urge "MOAR VAMPIRE FACE SUCK PLEASE!"

From Reuters:

Summers successor to set tone on economic policy

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republicans on Wednesday urged President Barack Obama to pick a more business-friendly successor to economic adviser Larry Summers, a move that would signal a shift to the center.

But a decision on Summer's replacement is months away, a White House official said.

A day after Summers announced plans to step down as director of the National Economic Council, speculation about his replacement focused on female candidates, many of whom would bring business expertise that some say is lacking in the Obama White House.

"We'd like to see someone who had good understanding of what it takes to create private-sector jobs," Senator Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said in an interview at the Reuters Washington Summit.
...

Got that?

The Conservative diagnosis of the problem with Summers is that that he has been too Socialist-y.

That if Obama wants to be more Centrist-y (And who the heck doesn't!) he needs to make a massive leap to the right of this unapologetic architect of radical financial deregulation and the creature of the Goldman Sachs mobster mentality.

No news on whether or not anyone offered to shove a nuke up Senator Lamar Alexander's ass to make him more "fusion-friendly".

Whither Ken Mehlman?

Only time will tell.

Ken Mehlman: time will tell how much regret he actually feels
by Jeff Epperly

Wednesday Sep 1, 2010

If someone had told me back when he was head of the Republican Party that I’d feel a twinge of sympathy for Ken Mehlman when and if he ever came out of the closet, I’d have told them they didn’t know me very well.
...

Who could dispute that time does indeed pass?