Where Do I Even Start With This Day?

Just to top it all off, right now trump is trying to distract everyone from this whole week's worth of scandals by calling air strikes into Syria. As though starting a war would help him.

And wasn't this a goddamn movie plot point from the Clinton years?!

But this all follow-up to the ongoing news about trump's criminal lawyer Cohen (both meanings apply right about now) and the fact he traveled to Prague without reporting it to anybody because that trip involved a meeting with a key Russian official. Damn, everybody can afford to travel to Prague except me. *I'D* love to go to Prague, but then again I'm honest enough not to work for a scuzbucket like trump...

It's not helping that federal investigators likely got to Cohen's taped conversations with people. Considering that the warrants to search his materials - and that it's officially a criminal investigation on him now - any of those conversations relating to trump AND Russia and/or Manafort and/or anyone else under investigation opens up a can of worms where the worms are from Arrakis (the spice MUST flow...).

Throw in the roiling turmoil that is the Republican Party, where another rich white guy connected to Cohen had made arrangements with a Playmate (NOT the one who had an affair with trump by the by) to cover up their affair, covered up that she got pregnant, and then covered up that she had an abortion(!) which kinda violates a lot of things the goddamn evangelical base is supposed to care about.

Not to mention the fears that trump is one temper tantrum away from firing Deputy AG Rosenstein in another attempt to shut down the criminal investigations into Russia's interference with our 2016 elections and their questionable business ties to trump and his partners.

Also consider how trump is reacting to the guy he fired to commit Obstruction, smearing former FBI Director Comey over Comey's latest tell-all book that describes just how unhinged and dangerous trump is behind the scenes.

So yeah, this WAS Friday the 13th after all.

We are so very very VERY royally fucked, America.

The First Long Week Of a Hellish Age

So, how goes the ongoing train wreck?

It's officially been one week since Lord Vulgamort swore at the millions who protest him on a daily basis uh swore on a Bible to violate every part of the Constitution starting with the Emoluments Clause and working his way down to the 27th Amendment uh... you know what unstrike that line because that's pretty much what he's doing right now.

It's been overwhelming to keep up with the ongoing wave of crazy and chaos that is coming out of the White House now. Other news sites are documenting the atrocities, but here are the ones that have snagged my attention and deserve a serious amount of HOLY F-CK WE'RE SCREWED:

Trump's inauguration endured sparse attendance on Friday, and many media observers and Twitter tweets made the obvious comparison to Obama's packed turnouts in 2009 and 2013. Photo after photo displayed empty parade benches and meager numbers. The post-ceremony balls and parties were not much better. A mini-scandal erupted when it turned out Trump's celebratory cake was copied from Obama's 2013 cake... and worse, it wasn't even real cake but a Styrofoam mock-up.

The Women's March on the following Saturday blew the roof off the world. Rallying against the rise of an openly misogynistic sexual predator like Trump, hundreds of thousands of women AND men (plus kids and puppies and even a cat or twelve), marched down not only Washington DC but also hundreds of cities around the world (plus Antarctica).

It reportedly drove Trump crazy. He called the National Parks Service to insist they report HIS turnout was higher than documented. He sent out his press secretary Sean Spicer to insist "this was the largest audience to watch an inauguration both in person and around the globe, period." It was too obvious a lie, and the national media outlets started breaking protocol using the "lie" word to describe the meltdown.

I want to write more about those two days, but it may take me some time...

To say it went downhill from there is an insult to hills. It was more like a cliffside Saturday onwards:

• He declared his own inauguration a Holiday for Patriotic Devotion (dafuq?)
• He spent Saturday at CIA headquarters, ostensibly to repair strained relations with the intelligence community... and spent nearly the entire appearance lying about the size of his inauguration attendance, bragging about his successes, and threatening to launch another war in Iraq to seize all the oil. And he brought an entourage to cheer him on while the intel people sat there.
• He signed an executive order freezing most federal hirings, essentially planning to reduce the federal government through attrition as jobs stop getting filled. This means the government won't be able to handle the demands on public service, and a gradual loss of expert employees to retirement or ragequits. If you got a resume on USAJobs.gov website, it's worthless now.
• He confirmed his insane plan to build a wall on the Mexican border, and is threatening to have it paid for via tariffs on IMPORTS coming into the U.S., meaning Mexico doesn't pay for it but the American consumer will. His announcement about the Wall came right before a visit from the Mexican President, who canceled the visit in protest.
• Still railing against immigration, he signed another order authorizing his administration to go after "sanctuary cities" that provide social services to illegals.
• He signed a block on the refugee process for certain Middle Eastern nations he declared were threats to national security that included Syria, which is suffering a major violent downturn in their years-long civil war. Trump specifically targeted Muslims to be blocked from any vetting process, allowing only Christian refugees for consideration. The impact on U.S. relations with Muslims is going to hurt: Trump is giving those ISIL and Al Qaeda extremists a huge propaganda gift doing this.
• Trump is essentially wiping out the State Department and putting the torch to every foreign alliance we've got.

In other news, Trump is still obsessing over his losing the popular vote. He's rehashing the lie that there were millions of illegal voters, and is going so far as to threaten another federal investigation - remember kids, the Republicans tried this shit back during the Dubya administration and couldn't find a thing to confirm their Narrative - focusing entirely on the states he lost and blatantly on "urban areas" AKA cities with large minority populations. The threat of voter suppression - of using this as an excuse to purge voter rolls of citizens - is part of this gambit.

In the meantime, his approval ratings are stuck in the low 40s (except for the conservative Rasmussen), which for a starting President is a terrible place to begin: most polling drops for elected officials once the rough work of doing the job puts a strain on the official's public perception. It's a nice taste of schadenfreude, but it's going to give Trump and his handlers more impetus to shut down on media coverage in an attempt to stop any more "bad news" to get out.

So, to the eight regular readers of this blog: how are you and kids doing? Busy week for yourselves?