Oh look - a blatant quid pro quo.

Supreme Court apologists have weakly been trying to excuse the Court's "gifts aren't bribes" ruling by pointing out that it still counts as corruption if the thing of value is given in advance and if there's an overt quid pro quo involved.

Both of those are the case here, so even by the Court's new abysmally weak standards, this counts as official corruption.

So who thinks anything will come of it?

Yeah - me neither.

At the least, that should qualify as manslaughter.

That'd be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.

History, as it does, will recognize this genocide for what it is, and will not only condemn thise who are carrying it out, but those who are standing idly by and letting it happen.

One would think that Germsns would be particularly aware of that fact, and after already being responsible for one genocide, would deliberately not be complicit in another.

I have zero doubt of both of those things.

I think he saw tariffs as something that would provide him with leverage, and that's it. I don't think he's ever had a clear goal or an end game, and I'm pretty sure he's never even been entirely clear on just what tariffs are or how they work. He just saw a weapon to hold over other countries' heads in order to swing some kind of deal, and grabbed ahold for that reason alone.

And while he prides himself on his supposed deal-making prowess, never forget that this is a man who couldn't even keep a casino running in the black.

And broadly - he's really rather obviously insane. It's debatable how much of his brazen disconnect from consensual reality is delusion and how much is lies, but it works out to insanity either way.

Even if he has to make it up.

It goes even beyond that.

Extroverts are for all intents and purposes vampires.

They aren't "rescuing" you. They're capturing you, so they can feed on you.

It's worth noting that they're never talking about actual privatization, which is when a thing that was formerly a government service is turned over to private enterprise, but a grotesquely inefficient hybrid system in which the service is still funded by the government, and the only thing that changes is that rather than the budget being turned over to a government agency, it's turned over to whichever private contractor offers the best bribe and kickback package.

Is there any one quality that more of the people surrounding Trump share than being serial sex abusers?

I can't think of one.

Tate is the main inspiration for my theory that "incel" behavior and attitudes aren't necessarily tied to involuntary celibacy.

I think it's more fundamental than that, and it's just that that personality type often ends up involuntarily celibate, which amplifies their bitterness and spite and misogyny.

But there's another distinctive type of "incel" who, through some happenstance or another, manages to get laid. They share the same bitterness and spite and misogyny as the celibate incels, but the fact that they actually can manage to get laid adds a layer of entirely unwarranted arrogance on top of that.

And Tate is the exemplar of that. He just radiates "incel" - only with an extra layer of arrogance on top of it.

The Toddler-in-chief strikes again.

Yes we do.

He's leading a coup.

On behalf of the would-be US dictator Donald Trump, he and his mercenaries are taking control of vital government functions away from the duly appointed authorities and claiming it as their own.