In case you’re hankering for an update on higher ed in Iran.

“Biden is aging. Trump is dementing… He can’t get through a whole rally without revealing himself. And, because this is a progressive illness, he will continue to get worse. And if he is like most patients like this, at some point, he is literally going to fall off the cognitive cliff and he will be completely incapacitated... I am certain that if he is reelected, he will become cognitively incapacitated. There’s no way at the rate of deterioration that he’s showing that he can make it through four more years without falling off the cliff.”

“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” [JD Vance said] three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”

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On Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson:

“Never met him. He’s dead. Don’t care.”

She could have applied for Bangladeshi citizenship until she was 21, but did not, and the South Asian country has said there is “no question” of her obtaining citizenship now.

The UK Home Office stripped her of citizenship when she was 19 years old, meaning she still had time to file for Bangladeshi citizenship…

Plus Shamima Begum was married to a Dutch guy, so she might see whether that country would take her. Plus if it’s true she’s harmless now, let’s have her apply for a golden passport. She can set up a Go Fund Me page. She needs to raise about $20,000.

I don’t want to sound indifferent to the fate of this former terrorist who has possibly made an authentic and complete turnaround. I’m fully aware she languishes in a Beckettian hellscape where insane burqabis attempt every day to kill non-burqabis. (Begum no longer wears a burqa.) But she had options, which she rejected. She still has a few, but seems to be doing nothing about them.

“This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner.”

And since America is already, according to Trump, “a fascist state,” we’d be layering communism ON TOP of fascism.

Yes. Communo-fascism. Fucking scary.

… one reference to anyone doing anything to take the massacrist’s guns away.

Everyone did one hell of a lot of praying, though.

Last December we ran this adorable Ogles family photo. Now the FBI’s raiding Andy Ogles’ house in search of evidence of campaign finance fraud.

Watch for Andy to blow his head off when things with the feds get too hot. Also shooting the wife and kids seems a popular option these days.

This lil ol blog’s been telling you for a week it’s Walz. It’s Walz.

Wanna know how I knew?

Buttigieg is too closely associated with the Biden presidency.

Shapiro trends too urban, too intense. We’ve already got that in Harris.

Kelly’s only a so-so public speaker. And I’ve wondered throughout about the stamina of Gabby Giffords, diminished by a gun attack, in the context of a grueling national contest.

Don’t know about Beshear. Never seemed a front-runner.

I figured it had to be Walz after simply reading his Wiki page and watching a couple of his public presentations/interviews. Although I wonder about the obvious, like his knowledge of the international scene, I’m bowled over by the ECHT Americanness of the dude. I’ve called him Truman on steroids cuz the decency, straightforwardness, modesty thing is there in him like crazy. He seems to be the best of us.

I mean, barring unpleasant surprises about the dude, let me say it again: He seems to be the best of us.

The outcome of saddling up for another four years with Trump is preordained to be cloaked in chaos, anger and vitriol, the same unproductive position as when he disgracefully left office last time. Trump’s obsession with power fuels head-scratching disappointments at unexplainable times and places. 

This writing demonstrates the problem of mixed metaphors. They’re not the worst problem in the world — the meaning of the sentences is clear. But if there are enough of them, they can muddle things. As in – if you’re going to start with the charming, all-American saddle up, your next bit of figurative language should probably not be cloaked, which comes from a place other than the stable. You could write preordained to be a bumpy ride, or something like that. Instead of fuels, I’d just forget figurative language there and write prompts, for instance.

… On Friday, Trump fired off multiple Truth Social posts excoriating Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, the chair of the Republican Governors Association, for being a “RINO.” Lee’s sin, according to Trump, was that he had months ago endorsed an incumbent GOP state senator, while Trump had more recently endorsed the challenger…

[On] Saturday [Trump] uncorked on Georgia Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, calling him “a bad guy” [for being an insufficiently enthusiastic election denialist]. Reacting to that rally message, former Georgia Republican Party leader John Watson said: “Attacking Brian Kemp and his family is a galactic unforced error.”

“Galactic” is good.

We’re definitely on our way to this iconic scene.

He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children…

Let’s stop beating around the vice-presidential bush: While Kamala Harris’s choice – probably Tim Walz – is a mild-mannered older person with two kids, Vance “The Lance” is a raging bull with three kids in quick succession and certainly more to come, if he takes seriously his pro-stiffy convictions.

Pragmatically, after all, the central pillar of anti-IVF natalism (no techno-cheating!) must be what Morrissey, winner of the 2015 Bad Sex in Fiction Award, dubs one’s “bulbous salutation.” Absent a willingness to scale up the “large pink prong,” as novelist/critic Edmund Wilson called his, there’s not going to be any other form of scaling up, Hungarian or what have you.

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A Trump/Vance pro-natalist presidency would perhaps feature graphic encouragement to men along these lines… So for instance take this Pyongyang poster:

Lose the Korean writing, and alter the exploding shaft to look more like a phallus, and imagine this image flashing at you day and night in the middle of Times Square. That sort of thing.

Electrostatic etc. Nice.

His chances continue to look pretty good.

On the vp front: UD‘s thinking that if the Harris campaign’s going to press hard on the weird thing, her pick might be the inventor of the weird meme, Tim Walz. A mere Wiki acquaintance with the guy uncovers abysms of unweird. Tales of the Unweird. Crypts of the Unweird. Nights of the Living Unweird. He’s a sixty year old boy scout, a ramrod-straight product of a world UD – evil right coaster – will never know.

Let’s scrutinize. Working from top to bottom: Bad haircut, goony glasses, flannel shirts, slight beer belly… everything about him’s authentically askew. He’s so deeply him. Up against hillbilly turned cat obsessive Vance, he will look like Harry Truman on steroids. Sounds like Truman too, with that flat prairie twang. No fancy schmancy lectures about the therapeutic society from this Chadron State College-trained high school geography teacher, babe! Tim Walz won’t be checking your sheets for spilled sperm. He’ll let you decide how you want to bonk.

“I wish people would paws and catually hissten to the words he says and try to understand their preening and purrpose.”

Just cannot get away from it.