… established by UD‘s Montgomery County.

“… Congress can impeach and there has to be a basis to do so… Justice Thomas, who is now saying that marriage equality, that birth control, that all these rights suddenly are at risk, should be impeached for his involvement in election-related cases. He has breached the public’s trust. His wife literally was involved in the attempted violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”

— Jena Griswold, Colorado Secretary of State

Sign here.

Discussion. This article was written a week ago and noted that there were 236,000 signatures. There are now 248,205.

… Five minutes later: 248, 337.

… Five minutes later: 248, 437.

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Later, that same day: 251,075.

Quotation of the day.

Though this one ain’t bad either.

Without the intimidation factor so central to Trump’s hold on power, influential Trump critics such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) may seize the opportunity to deepen the break with the rapidly toxifying Trump. If that happens, Republicans will face an enraged, burn-it-all-down Trump in the run-up to the 2024 elections. That may be beleaguered Democrats’ best hope of returning Joe Biden to the White House.

**************

There’s violence against others (setting a mob on your VP; spawning terrorists like RINO-butcher Eric Greitens), and there’s violence against oneself. I’m going to predict that toxifying Trump will attempt to pull off one final mass murder, with boy soldiers – who are, notoriously, the most unrestrainedly vicious of all – at the front lines. Specifically, Donald Trump Jr and Andrew Giuliani will co-captain a coordinated Proud Boys assault on Martha’s Vineyard. If that fails to decimate the elites, Trump will kill himself.

… January 6 hearing.

Mo Brooks, body-armored rouser of insurrectionists, Trump’s La Pasionaria— until betrayal and defeat twisted her within so badly that she has now agreed to cry her a river to the committee — promises to keep us occupied with her long weepy plaints to anyone who will listen. Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned would seem the appropriate quotation here.

As for Stasigirl: Over the course of two days, would-be Justice Department czar Jeffrey Clark

1. watched several people describe her as a desperate pathetic lying traitorous idiot in front of the entire world, and
2. stood outside in her pajamas in the street in front of her house as the FBI searched it for documents related to her treason.

THE RAID WAS EXACTLY LIKE STASI! she boohooed – until her interviewer, realizing that Fox viewers know fuck-all about Stasi, began calling it Stalinist. Whatever vile authoritarian Thing it was, Clark’s Golgatha (UD advises Clark to switch from historical to religious terminology – much more accessible) will, we have reason to hope, inspire her to unburden herself, at length, to many media outlets.

True, neither of these stopgaps represents our true heart’s desire – it’s Giuliani and Eastman we want, front and center, frothing at the mouth, bleeding from a dye job – but for the moment Mo and Jeff will do fine.

… for photographing spider webs, and UD found a perfectly circular one at the top of her hill; but I felt too unsteady over the thick vines and slippery limbs to get close enough for a good shot. Best I could do.

ÅNGERMANLAND

I will arise and go now, and go to Ångermanland,
And a vast fortress build there, of rage and madness made;
 None else will I have there -- my world will I command
 And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have my rage there, for rage's wind doth blow,
Blowing from the hearings, from where the RINOs sing;
There Bennie’s all aglimmer, and Jamie's all aglow,
And the transcripts full of Liz’s zings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I see old allies dumping me and smirking more and more;
I know that court awaits me some not too distant day,
I know it in the deep heart’s core.

Chairperson Turd has just issued a video of her crouching, naked, over a picture of Rusty Bowers and defecating on his face. “Ah… That’s better. And now to finish this off the Arizona way!” she yells. Someone off-camera hands her an AK-47. “RINO hunting never felt SO GOOD!” She empties the weapon into his picture, tearing up bits of the floor with the weapon. “Let me say to all true Arizona Republicans,” she concludes: “It’s too late to go after Rusty’s dead daughter. But he’s still got plenty of family and friends left. YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.”

***********

UPDATE: OOpsie! Smelli gets subpoenied!

Getting there.

*************

Getting where? To the final speech of Ceausescu, in this our own great county, at an enormous Donald Trump rally.

LAST two people I thought would divorce!

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So. Let me tell you the truth. I’m not surprised. The mistake Murdoch made this time was marrying someone so old. He’s on a quest never to die, via marriage with the younger set. (One of his models seems to be Sumner Redstone.) This latest pairing, with Hall already in her sixties, made no sense to me, given the sex serum regimen he’s on. Number Five will be in her thirties, and this one will guarantee that Murdoch will never die.

Well hell’s bells I’ve heard of “deflection” before, but not deflection that involves deflecting attention from your abuse of your family and toward your murder of political opponents. But whatever.

Yes! Go for it, Katie! Alabama lags behind at only SECOND in the nation for gun violence: GET US TO NUMBER ONE and let that new gore gush all over the place!

Your uncompromising defense of the Second Amendment will splatter so much new blood onto our streets that in no time NO ONE will be able to catch up with Bama!!

GONNA BE NUMBER ONE GONNA BE NUMBER ONE

Vote Katie!

Navy in Name Only. (I’m linking via Reddit, because the Kansas City Star is entirely paywalled.)

Big Daddy Mike forced the Navy to sorta take the RINO butcher back, but boy were they pissed to have to do it.

Background here.

Plagiarism, as I’ve told you a million times, is a boring, endemic affair — so endemic, in most of the world, that it’s only mentioned at the very tippy-top. Prime Minister, President, King, Pope, Archbishop, Star Of Stage and Screen – maybe someone will try to make something of that. But probably not. Probably not even that. Plagiarism is a non-event, like graft.

There’s still a tiny slice of the world – the US, Europe, Australia – where people actually seem to give a shit if intellectuals and scientists and artists plagiarize. They seem to think there’s something wrong with stealing someone else’s work – ideas, creative vision, words – and passing it off as one’s own.

Piles and piles of plagiarism go unperceived — there’s so much of it — but on a regular basis some idiot performs such prolific and high-profile copying that it’s not only discovered. It becomes a story.

Such is the ongoing saga of novelist John Hughes, who at this writing has, in his latest novel, plagiarized from F Scott Fitzgerald, Svetlana Alexievich, Tolstoy, Remarque, Eric Newby, WB Sebald, Amos Oz, Loren Eiseley, Saul Bellow, and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam. You and I know that still lurking in his pages are… Let’s see. He seems to like angst-ridden early/mid twentieth century fiction tossed with a petit goût of global conflict … Look for Thomas Mann, for goodness sake, and Günter Grass and Iris Murdoch for starters… If there aren’t some decoupled Auden couplets somewhere in there my name ain’t University Diaries…

France is a secular republic, and this matters to them. Within that secularity, the equality of women and men – anathema to many theocracies – also matters to them. When France outlawed burqas, burkinis, and other overt marks of gender and religious submission, it made a strong statement about the primary importance of preserving to the extent possible a secular, egalitarian, public realm.

The full draping of women’s bodies in an expression of obedience to religious modesty mandates is anathema to a secular, egalitarian republic like France, so no one should be surprised that the city of Grenoble’s attempt to disobey the country’s burkini ban would provoke an outcry.

Grenoble has done what it can within the country’s court system to try to uphold its refusal to ban the garment, but today France’s top administrative court said nope. Not in public.

Grenoble is free to go to higher international courts, and I suppose it will. It won’t prevail there either.

This blog has long argued the importance of rescinding honorary degrees from, er, some of their recipients. Examples:

Bernard Madoff

Theodore McCarrick

Bill Cosby

Lance Armstrong

Sepp Blatter

Donald Trump

Sheldon Silver

James Levine

Almost all of these sex and/or money scumsters eventually lost the honor aura conferred upon them by America’s debauched universities (debauched because, in almost every case, a touch of due diligence would have uncovered enough rumors to stay their hand, but these schools apparently didn’t care).

But what about, say, a law degree? An actual degree you work for and pay for? Is there behavior dishonorable enough to justify rescinding a BA or a JD?

What about an MD? UD has argued that Jumana Nagarwala, who put her Hopkins MD to use allegedly slicing off the genitals of little girls all over the midwest, should have that degree rescinded under… call it the Mengele Rule. It’s pretty easy to argue that people who got BAs under false pretenses (as in the Varsity Blues case, where rejects took the place of qualified applicants because their parents faked their applications and paid various well-connected criminals enormous sums of money to help them) should have their degrees revoked. The principle here is that a legitimate university has a reputation to defend, and when it harbors filthy crooks it should formally, publicly, expel them.

And a lawyer? A student who attends your school in order to learn the laws of our land in order to use those same laws to destroy it? This is much like the 9/11 pilots who attended flight school here solely in order to crash their planes into buildings. It would seem to be rather at odds with the purpose of a legal education, a serious education in the rule of law in our democracy. If I were Chicago I’d be pretty fucking embarrassed to be the school that taught John Eastman the law solely in order for him to twist it to destroy the country. I mean, is my face red!

It’s not too early for UD‘s beloved U of C to start considering a process by which they can cleanly disassociate themselves from this piece of shit.