I miss the old, light, mostly-boring news. Reading the paper today is like strolling down to the local dinner theatre, expecting a pleasantly innocuous evening of Neil Simon, only to find an antagonistically artsy local troupe has barricaded the doors and intends to perform some six-hour-long mid-twentieth-century Czech agitprop, and there’s nothing left on the buffet except the fish, which has gone very, very, bad.

Ken Cuccinelli, too racist for even this GOP Senate Caucus to confirm, is looking to make the most of his brief tenure as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, offering some helpful suggestions to give the Statue of Liberty a white nationalist makeover. “We’re getting rid of that stupid ‘give me your tired, your poor’ stuff and replacing it with a Whites Only sign, and actually if there’s any way to get a new, cross-shaped, torch, that’d be just swell,” he said, after delaying a press conference until the non-white reporters agreed to leave the room.

Sonny Perdue is a regular Mike Huckabee with the whole “sneering disdain for working people disguised as humor” thing. Addressing an audience of farmers who were all, “hey, if it’s not too much trouble could you maybe get your idiot boss to stop crotch-stomping our industry with his dumbfuck trade war,” Sonny told a hilarious joke about how farmers are whiny, because who doesn’t enjoy getting mocked by the very assholes who’re fucking up your life in the first place?

Conservative Thought Leader/Supbar Internet Troll Ben Shapiro agrees that working people are stupid failures who should probably just be turned into mulch, for taking low-paying jobs instead being smart enough to be born to wealthy parents like Ben Shapiro, and I confess I think it’s weird that people vote for Republicans when it’s so glaringly obvious that Republicans hate people.

After two and a half years of incompetence and defeat, MAGA nation experienced their greatest victory since November 2016, when they were given the opportunity to collectively “dunk” on CNN’s Chris Cuomo over some dumb internet video. Raise their taxes, jack up their grocery bills, steal their health care, whatever, just give them a “lib” to “own” and they’ll go to bed with malicious little smiles on their faces. They don’t even need the bread, thanks, the circuses will do nicely.

Julián Castro took out an ad during the President’s daily intelligence briefing, excuse me, I mean “during Fox & Friends,” to call Hairplug Himmler out directly for his hateful rhetoric. In fact, Castro had such success getting the Dotard’s attention, he’s now considering renting ad space on the pockets of Ivanka’s jeans.

Once upon a time, President Gas Station Urinal Cake surrounded himself with a team of economic advisors who, while certainly not the best or the brightest, were at least smart enough to warn him against starting a Big Dumb Trade War. Because he has a small cluster of rabbit droppings for a brain, he decided the solution to this problem was to replace these advisors with dumber, asskissier ones, who would tell him that his bad ideas were in fact very good indeed. And so here we are.

Somewhere within that cavernous cranium of his, he’s starting to draw a line between the two lonley pulsating pus-sacks that scream “me go to jail if me not president” and “me not get re-elected if economy go down-down,” and so he’s filling diaper after diaper as the stock market fluctuates wildly in response to his boneheaded trade brinkmanship. Naturally, he’s more focused on ducking blame than finding solutions, but at least he’s backing off the majority of his latest round of threatened tariffs, which he’s trying to spin as an Xmas gift to American consumers, who apparently ARE paying the tariffs after all, it turns out. Thanks, Santa, for taking your holly jolly boot off the economy’s neck.

But signs of a possible recession keep mounting, with the yield curve inverting, and I won’t pretend I understand what the fuck that means, but TV economists throwing around indecipherable jargon is never a good sign. You see some tweed-jacket-and-horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing motherfucker on CNN going on about how “the tromboonler hasn’t been this vajazzled since the Hoover Administration,” and you start thinking about burying gold coins in the back yard.

ABC helpfully rounded up a list of all the cases where the Candycorn Skidmark’s shitty little name has been invoked in connection with violent crimes and/or threats. Surely this is the sign of a healthy nation, that we can, and need to, quantify that sort of thing. Anyhow, “more acts of violence inspired than consequential pieces of legislation enacted” is certainly a novel re-election pitch.

Steve King, having grown fidgety in the absence of committee assignments, decided, for whatever unfathomable reason, to raise his never-welcome voice on behalf of the neglected causes of…rape of incest. “Where would we be without rape and incest?” wondered King, who I am assured is, in fact, a 9-term U.S. Congressman, and not, as would seem likely, a Sacha Baron Cohen character. If they still let Steve come to the State of the Union next year, his guests will be the Ebola virus and Hitler’s brain in a jar.

Curt Schilling was, for a time, preternaturally good at throwing a baseball, a talent which earned him millions. The gods apparently decided to balance this gift out by making Curt an absolutely reprehensible human being. He’s like the Danny DeVito in TWINS (to Alex Jones’ Arnold Schwarzenegger) of ultra-far-right loons; a mean, stupid, bigoted, colon polyp of a man, who’s fond of spreading the horrible conspiracy theory that the mass shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook were “false flags,” so naturally President Crotchvoid thinks he’d make one helluva Congressman.

A maniac with a lengthy criminal history and an AR-15 held off Philadelphia police for hours, shooting and wounding six officers, prompting Kellyanne Conway to take a quick contempt break between Hatch Act violations to attack Philly’s Mayor Jim Kenney for suggesting “hey, maybe allowing violent criminals access to weapons of war so they can slaughter cops is bad and we should stop it,” because while guns matter to Republicans, human lives don’t.

Keeping with the Let’s Shit on Local Officials in Communities Suffering in the Aftermath of Recent Gun Violence theme, Dorito Mussolini apparently called El Paso Mayor Dee Margo a “RINO” during the infamous Well What Did You Expect Sending a Sociopath on a Consolation Tour trip last week. “Look, just because I inspired a white supremacist terrorist to massacre a bunch of your constituents doesn’t give you the right to correct my lies, bro. ‘Republican’ means ‘brainwashed toady who gobbles up my turds like nectar and ambrosia’ now, and you best learn to love it.”

Corey Lewandowski has been subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, which isn’t particularly funny, unlike his ongoing flirtation with a Senate run in New Hampshire.

In this month’s issue of Pissant Autocrat Team-Up, Donnie and Bibi get together to ban U.S. Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering Israel. This is very smart of Netanyahu, because of course Donald Trump will be president forever, so surrendering to his every momentary whim is sound strategy, and there will never be any negative consequences.

Anyway, Weehands McNoDick has this rather obvious fantasy that he can make the 2020 election a referendum on a quartet non-white lefty Congresswomen rather than his own failures and atrocities. And while you can’t leave the house today without tripping over half a dozen pundits breathlessly proclaiming the brilliance of this “strategy,” I have to tell you folks, this little blip in the news cycle isn’t going linger in our overburdened memories for a month, let alone a year and half; in a week or so, he’ll change the headlines by grabbing some visiting dignitary’s ass live on camera, and we’re not gonna remember that, either.

Speaking of the Manchurian Manchild’s immature fantasies, I guess the dopey old fuck wants to buy Greenland. Yep. Probably imagines he can negotiate a low down payment, then stiff the Danes once he’s moved in and loused up the joint with gold toilets and overcooked steak farts. Oh well, I suppose we’re all safer when he’s daydreaming about self-aggrandizing nonsense like Nobel Prizes and island impulse purchases rather than the actual affairs of state.

Hey, congratulations, Earth! July 2019 was the warmest month ever on record! Hot Girl Summer is right, ayyyyyyyyyy I am so very young and hip to the pop culture of America’s youths to the absolute MAX, y’all! Cowabunga!

And the Marmalade Shartcannon, no doubt incensed about all the empty seats at his New Hampshire hate rally, mocked a man he believed to be a protester for being overweight, as well as having tiny little doll hands and not knowing how umbrellas work. Then the dude turned out to be a loyal Cult45 drone who was apparently delighted to be shat upon by his Turd Emperor, and I kinda get that; I still remember the day President Obama asked “hey, who’s the sweaty lunatic in the bathrobe and luchador mask?” while the Secret Service dragged me away. I only wanted a selfie, Barack.

A State Department inspector general’s report reveals that Fat Q*Bert’s malignant political appointees, Kevin Moley and Mari Stull, were fond of harassing and abusing employees they deemed insufficiently loyal, because smooching the saggy Trumpal buttocks is certainly more vital to the department’s mission than any of that silly “diplomacy” crap.

Log Cabin Republicans endorsed Government Cheese Goebbels today, even as his administration of, by, and for, the hateful rolled out new rules allowing federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ employees. When President for Life Trump rounds them up into camps, expect Log Cabin Republicans to publish an op-ed praising the chow in the mess hall.

Hey, don’t look now, but Susan Collins’ 2020 re-election bid has migrated from the forsaken lands of Leans Republican into the verdant hills of This Shit is a Toss-Up, according to the Cook Political Report. Turns out disappointment is a two-way street, Senator. Anyway, give Sara Gideon a whole bunch of money, ‘kay?

Alright, I probably missed some shit, but I’m blaming it on the cough syrup. Anyway, I’ve got to get a tribute screening of Easy Rider in before bed, so I’m signing off, Shower Captives. See y’all next week.