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"A child, a moron, a failure, and a psychopath. Quite a little team you've put together."
"What do you want, Brunt?"
"I’m here to sign up."
DS9, 6.10

1:09:43: Purse lips, cue violins, read off teleprom .... look right, look left, dang, the teleprompter isn't prompting, keep pursing lips, keep pursing lips, read off teleprompter: and here comes the stream of lies. Banks collapsing, begging Venezuela for oil. We just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will repedoing - ahh - will be reducing their oil production, so sad. We are a nation that is consumed by the left screen new deal. (The new deals on the right screen are better?)

Shark attacks, boats so heavy they can't float, "nobody ever asked this question, and it must be because of my relationship to MIT, very smart", shark biting off a young lady's leg, and electrocution by battery (41:12–44:40). Getting lost while reading "The Snake" (29:51) for the umpteenth time: "'I saved you, cried the woman, and you're so tender and so nice. But you know that if I hadn't taken in, your skin would not look so good and you would've bitten me. But why you bit me? Why did you bite me? Please, please tell me. Why did you bite me? You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die.' 'Shut up, silly woman said the reptile with a grin. You knew damn well, I was a snake before I took you in.' And this is what is happening at our border."

(39:15–40:05) We have higher poll numbers now than we’ve ever had. Too big to rig. That’s what we want, too big to rig, too big to rig, too big to rig. That's what we want. I have higher numbers than we’ve ever had. We're leading this crooked thief of a president, and I would never have said that before. I didn’t speak glowingly. He’s a lousy president anyway, but I would never have said he’s a corrupt, very dumb person. He’s a low IQ individual, and he always was. This is an age. He's worse now than he was 10 years ago. But if you go back 30 years ago, he was considered the dumbest person in the US Senate. Ted Kennedy told me that himself, who was a friend of mine, which is shocking, shocking that he was a friend. He was of a slightly different persuasion Marjorie."

Soup's on — Hale and Hearty meets hail fellow well met. September 23 rally in Indiana, PA, 40:39–41:33:

He didn’t mean Iowa. I mean the whole thing. But I said, you know, if you were Winston Churchill and you make a mistake as to location, like I’m here with you. And if I say it’s great to be in the great state of Illinois, can happen. No matter how great your speech is, you could make the greatest speech in history and people will go, “That was a disaster.” Right? He did it all the time, but she’s worse than him. I’m telling you, watch. She’s not as smart as him. He’s not smart. He never was smart. He wasn’t smart 40 years ago. Always he was a hale and hearty guy, well-met. Did you ever hear Shakespeare? He was hale and hearty and well-met, but he wasn’t a smart person. But she is a very dumb person. And we can’t do that. We can’t do that. I don’t want to be rude. I don’t want to be rude.

David Rothkopf on X, 8:22 PM, Oct 15, 2024: "The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon." Space4Time3Continuum2x🖖 18:05, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Huh: the Wayback machine crawled the tweet (post, whatever) on December 2 but captured [a white page]. The post was about the Oaks, PA, townhall where Trump stopped taking questions and swayed to his playlist for 39 minutes.

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

...

I wonder if, in the end, the undecideds aren’t the biggest pessimists of all. Here they could order the airline chicken, but, then again, hmm. “Isn’t that adding an extra step?” they ask themselves. “If it’s all going to be chewed up and swallowed, why not cut to the chase, and go with the platter of shit?”

Ah, though, that’s where the broken glass comes in.

David Sedaris, Undecided, October 20, 2008

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, The Life of Reason.

It is unfair that Americans chose someone like Donald Trump over someone like Kamala Harris, and I fear the nation and the world will regret that decision. I’m going to be angry and frustrated. But I’m not going to spend all my waking hours stewing over the fact that Trump is going to be president. I’m going to follow the news ... but I won’t take his nonsense personally. I’m going to find a better politics-life balance and catch myself when I start obsessing over the latest outrage.

Eugene Robinson, How I’m coping with a Trump win, Washington Post, November 6, 2024

The cowbells make it work: Roland Hedley reporting

Hours after Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2025, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley's official portrait was removed from a Pentagon corridor where the portraits of all former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are displayed. A U.S. official told the New York Times that "the White House" had ordered the removal. On January 29, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth withdrew the authorization for Milley's security detail, suspended his security clearance, and ordered a review of his actions as Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a view to demote him in rank.

what a relief — 21st century coup delayed by 20th century software. Nathan Tankus: To be clear, I 100% believe that the primary barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL.

like a business enterprise

Conan, take a bite out of crime!

17 times 6

I am this giant store. It's a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I'll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay and other stuff ...

Less a trade deal "than a hostage negotiation. Pay Trump what he feels he's due, and you get your economy back in roughly the state it was before, though missing a few fingers and probably traumatised."

2025 West Point commencement speech (starting at 36:55): Think big. Third though, you gotta do this. Uh, brainpower you have to have, potential you have to have, but to be really successful, you're always going to have to work hard. … Fourth is don't lose your momentum. Momentum's an amazing thing. Keep it going. I tell a story sometimes about a man who was a great, great real estate man.⁽¹⁾ … And he became very rich, became a very rich man, and then he decided to sell. … And they gave him a lot of money, tremendous amount of money. More money than he ever thought he'd get. And he sold this company and he had nothing to do. He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn't work out too well. But it doesn't -- And that doesn't work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives doesn't work out, but it made him happy for a little while at least. But he found a new wife. He sold his little boat and he got a big yacht.

⁽¹⁾ William Levitt, builder of Whites-only Levittowns

In memoriam: The Boy Scouts speech in 2017, also featuring Levitt, a yacht, and gallivanting in the south of France. Big news in 2017, Levitt got nary a mention in 2025.

Who's your daddy? "My father would go and he’d pick up the sawdust and he’d pick up the nails, the extra nails, and he’d pick up the scraps and he’d use whatever he could use and recycle it in some form or sell it," Mr. Trump said Thursday in a speech to the National Association of Home Builders. Levitt'd scour the sites for nails, and sawdust and small pieces of wood. And they cleaned the sites so when the workers came in the next morning, the sites would be spotless and clean". "[T]he company that bought his company was a big conglomerate, and ... they didn’t know anything about picking up the nails and the sawdust and selling it, and the scraps of wood. ... they were losing a lot with it".

Clearing Lafayette Square, June 1, 2020, invoking 10 U.S. Code § 12406 - National Guard in Federal service: call in June 2025.

It's a Good Life

from the Professor Watchlist to the President's Watchlist, aka censorship.

with the royals. The entertainment included the Duchess of Edinburgh’s String Orchestra playing the Rolling Stones' "You Can’t Always Get What You Want" (Diet Coke?)

External videos
A statue of Trump and Epstein appears in D.C., Reuters

On September 23, 2025, an anonymous group of artists had installed a statue of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein entitled "Best Friends Forever" on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The 12-foot tall, bronze-sprayed statue depicted Trump and Epstein holding hands and dancing. A plaque underneath it read, "We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his 'closest friend,' Jeffrey Epstein". The group had a permit for an art installation from September 23 to September 28 for artwork "to demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery". By the next morning U.S. Park Police had removed the statue, later saying it was not in compliance with the permit. A White House spokeswoman said in a September 23 email to the Washington Post that "Liberals are free to waste their money however they see fit — but it's not news that Epstein knew Donald Trump". The Washington Post, The New York Times

I asked Trump where [the resident Mar-a-Lago spa physician, a recent chiropractic-college graduate] had done her training. "I'm not sure," he said. "Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I'll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger's photograph, I didn't really need to look at her résumé or anyone else's. Are you asking, 'Did we hire her because she'd trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?' The answer is no. And I'll tell you why: because by the time she's spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don't want to look at her." (Mark Singer, Trump Solo, May 12, 1997, The New Yorker)

Trump, 2018, on Hurricane Florence's landfall in the Carolinas.

counting