In which we compare Nancy Pelosi to Arjuna

Arjuna and Krishna at the Battle of Kurukshetra. Via.

Well, good old Nancy, being the prime minister I always hoped she would be, teaching our lazy and learning-disabled emperor who holds the purse strings. If as they say he's really signing the bill he refused to sign five weeks ago, it's been a very expensive lesson for all of us, not just for him, but I think well worth it; if, as I suspect, what really kicked the White House and the Senate over was this morning's airport chaos, it's even testimony to the power of labor unions, because all the TSA workers who couldn't make it in were signaling to the obdurate rulers just what a strike would be like, you know. Yesterday, these fools couldn't imagine a TSA strike, and now they can, and it's terrifying.

Though it could just as well have been dim Ron Johnson screaming at McConnell:

Literary Corner: The Endless Endgame

Prophecy

by Donald J. Trump

BUILD A WALL
& CRIME WILL FALL!

Somebody in my Twitter feed was saying there should be a poem in response to this, but it was too hard to find a rhyme for "criminal", a challenge I couldn't resist, so this somewhat Freudian contribution (heavily revised from the initial Twitter version):

There was an incompetent criminal
Whose castration fears were subliminal:
     "If I try to get fancy
     With creepy Ms. Nancy
The men won't kill me but the women'll!", 

Mitch Switch

Yellow-headed temple turtle with retracted head, via Wildscreen Arkive.

The weirdest thing about Trump's dead-in-the-water proposals (for $5.7 billion he'll free the 800,000 hostages he took over Christmas and ensure a three-year air supply to hundreds of thousands of immigrant hostages he took earlier in the year) is McConnell's evidently positive response: he'd been saying for weeks that he wouldn't allow a budget bill on the Senate floor unless it was something Trump and Democrats had both signed onto, and now he says he's ready to push this one, although it's completely unacceptable to Democrats:

This bill takes a bipartisan approach [his office announces] to re-opening the closed portions of the federal government. It pairs the border security investment that our nation needs with additional immigration measures that both Democrat and Republican members of Congress believe are necessary. Unlike the bills that have come from the House over the past few weeks, this proposal could actually resolve this impasse. It has the full support of the President and could be signed into law to quickly reopen the government.

[Narrator: nobody including McConnell believes the immigration measures on offer are "necessary" or sufficient, for that matter; the DACA recipients are safe for another year at least anyway, since the Supreme Court has turned down the administration's request to hear their their arguments that the program is illegal; and in October the administration's attempt to take away Temporary Protected Status from 300,000 Haitians, Sudanese, Nicaraguans, and Salvadorans was found unconstitutional by Judge Edward Chen in California's Northern District, and another TPS case in New York will be getting through its first round in March, and who knows how long the appeals on these cases will stretch, with the odds better than even that Trump will turn out not to have the power to wreck the programs anyway:

He's Misbehavin

The Life of Trumply. Adam Gabbatt/The Guardian, photo by Joshua Bright.

I’m in the White House, waiting. The Democrats are everywhere but Washington as people await their pay. They are having fun and not even talking!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2019

Trump literally shouting into the phone for this interview.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 13, 2019

I'm in the White House
I'm all alone
my silent night house
just tweetin on my telephone
I'm misbehavin
ravin cause I miss you

don't see nobody
it never ends
it's kind of cruddy
just hangin with my Fox and Friends
I'm misbehavin
ravin cause I'm missin you

like a fox here
in a box here
out of luck here
guess I'm stuck here
forever if Pelosi don't come through
—believe me

don't call it chaos
it isn't true
if you betray us
I'll shoot you on Fifth Avenue
I'm misbehavin
ravin cause I'm missin you

President on Strike

Thisbe, Wall, and Pyramus in the 2010-11 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the University of Delaware Resident Ensemble Players.

Well, that's a relief:

JERUSALEM – President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said Sunday that the U.S. military withdrawal from northeastern Syria is conditioned on defeating the remnants of the Islamic State group, and on Turkey assuring the safety of Kurdish fighters allied with the United States.

Trump's not going to pull US troops out of Syria until all the reasons for not pulling troops out of Syria go away. He's totally going to do it, just not as long as it's a really bad idea. As soon as it's a good idea he'll be there.

Or, putting it another way, the Anonymous Resistance is still at work even though "Mad Dog" Mattis has bowed out. All we have to do is wait until Trump's obsessed with some other crazy project and you can correct the current mistake without him noticing, at least as long as the mistake is so terrible even Bolton and Pompeo and Netanyahu know it's a mistake and they all get on board.

Wall Is Lost!

And the best part is free shipping.

Have the Democrats finally realized that we desperately need Border Security and a Wall on the Southern Border. Need to stop Drugs, Human Trafficking,Gang Members & Criminals from coming into our Country. Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 27, 2018

OK so for starters the Mexican border is secure. Found a very nice account from the human rights advocacy group WOLA providing US government statistics. Migrant apprehensions are at their lowest levels since the early 1970s. Children and families make up about 40% of them now, as opposed to 10% as recently as 2012, and they're overwhelmingly from the Northern Triangle of Central America, not Mexico. Of unaccompanied children, 0.06% are suspected of being members of MS-13 (no word on how many are actually members, suggesting they haven't found any). Of migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol, 0.03% are from "countries of interest" as defined by the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (i.e. countries with lots of scary Muslims), and of these, 788 of 1,010 in 2017 were from just two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Terrorists, like eonomic migrants in increasing numbers, prefer to enter the US with legitimate visas and then overstay, which is a lot easier than crossing the Mexican border. Drug deliveries of opiates and amphetamines overwhelmingly come through the USPS or by vehicles crossing the border at official crossings; the only drug significantly crossing where the Wall would go is marijuana. Human trafficking may be bad, there are no reliable numbers, but bringing victims, prostitutes and slave workers, to America, endangers the foreigners being trafficked, not the Americans who are going to exploit them. There is no crisis, and there is nothing wrong that a Wall would fix. Repair fencing, by all means, install more cameras, hire some of those contract agents you've been unable to hire—

So, the shutdown has shut down. Next?

Image via fivethirtyeight.

I don't know. I'd appreciate if people didn't say "Democrats caved". I've been running around saying for three days that it's not the Democrats' shutdown. If we didn't do it, then it stands to reason we didn't give up on it.

But keep telling us it's the Democrats who did it https://t.co/A6AORmr309 via @voxdotcom #TrumpShutdown

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

Here's the Republican messaging: WE RULE! OUR DADDY IS THE BIGGEST!

For the Record: Junior

Image by Instagram via Deadspin.

For those not getting it. To avoid the shutdown you need 60 votes in the Aenate. Republicans only have 51 seats so you need 9 dems. So Schumer either wanted a shutdown putting illegals ahead of Americans or is bad at his job and can’t wrangle 9 votes... or both. #SchumerShutdown

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 22, 2018

Your father and McConnell can't be trusted. They make promises and don't keep them and then insult the people who were deceived. Where's the health care assistance they promised Collins in return for her vote on crappy tax bill?

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

As Republican Lindsey Graham said, Congress has no negotiating partner in the White House, just your father watching TV all day and white nationalist Stephen Miller ordering him what to do. Can't make a deal that way. #TrumpShutdown

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

Republicans turned down McCaskill's bill to fund the military. You had four months to renew CHIP and did nothing until you decided to use it to extort money for the fantasy wall. #TrumpShutdown

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

Dope springs eternal

Updated 10/16

They really can't help themselves. The zombie story of the martyrdom of the padres ministering to our Catholic troops who might imaginably have been arrested, though it took a pretty creative mind to imagine it (I gave it quite a bit of space here and here), continues to not die. Although it is quite clearly not true.

Thought you said Hagel fixed this. http://t.co/ZYAOAjI39C Hagel specifically blocked refunding contracted Catholic priests. @Yastreblyansky
— Doug Rink (@TalkSouthRadio) October 15, 2013

What appears to have happened is that a Father Ray Leonard (known around the parish house, I hope, as "Father Sugar Ray")  was due to start civilian chaplaining at the [jump]

Wolf pack. From Howling for Justice.

No, wait, this explains everything! Retroactionism revisited

Rep. Morgan Griffith doing his Eric Cantor imitation, in full revolutionary snarl mode. Love the chin whiskers showing that he's not just an oik but a  pretentious oik.

One Republican congressman who is fully aware of the suffering that is being caused by the federal shutdown and will be caused by any default on the country's financial obligations is second-term Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia. But he hastens to clarify, with a Leninesque grandeur, that those are just the eggs you need to break for this particular omelette:

“We have to make a decision that’s right long-term for the United States, and what may be distasteful, unpleasant and not appropriate in the short run may be something that has to be done,” he said. Griffith, a former majority leader of the Virginia House of Delegates, cited as an example the American Revolution. [jump]

In breaking news, President Obama did not play 18 holes...

Heritage idiots:

Government Shutdown: Memorials Closed, Golf Course…Open?

Many government employees are on furlough. Veterans have been barred from their memorials. Yet despite the temporary slowdown in government, there’s one thing still open: Obama’s golf course.

Last week, the President paid a visit to one of his favorite courses at Andrews Air Force Base. Obama deemed that all military installations remain operational during the shutdown, and therefore, the golf course, too.

From American Stinker, uncredited, August 26, with an article by Thomas Lifson, the magazine's publisher. 

Actually, not one veteran was ultimately barred from the World War II Memorial, and it is now open for "First Amendment Activities". I never thought I'd be citing the Daily Caller for facts, but [jump]

Unconditional gamesmanship

Every time I realize anew that this is not just a late-night comedy meme but that this man really is drinking himself into an impaired state while nominally on the job, as you can hear in the resentful voice-break and the thickness of his tongue, and an extremely important job at that, it's kind of shocking.

I think the worst pandit-prediction I've made since starting these scribblings was around last Christmas when I was certain that Boehner was ultimately going to find his way around that fiscal pavement-cut and avoid the sequester, and I've been kind of shy about trying [jump]

News aggravators: Postscript

After signing off on the great Shutdown Martyrdom and Mass-Acre Event, I was too annoyed to stop and clocked in at NRO to complain some more, leading to the following sort of amusing exchange:

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  Yastreblyansky 

  • a day ago

  
  

  You guys are not Breitbart or Beck. You knew very well that no such thing would happen, and you certainly know it now that the Washington Post has made it absolutely clear. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Yet you leave this idiocy on your website, why?

  
  

   

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    T_Edward  Yastreblyansky 

    • 12 hours ago

    
    

    It happened this weekend in Virginia. Priests were not allowed on base to say mass, not even an open air mass. The priest I know of held a "private" mass at a local, off-base park, attended by almost 300-military parishioners. I have a friend that was at the mass.

    
    

     

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      Yastreblyansky  T_Edward 

      • 11 hours ago

      
      

      I think you are mistaken. Catholic Vote was running a story about this before it was to happen http://www.catholicvote.org/mi... but updates stopped on Friday. Obviously because the priest in question was un-furloughed. Maybe they held the Mass anyway, but there was no reason for services not to happen on base.

      
      

       

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        T_Edward  Yastreblyansky 

        • 9 hours ago

        
        

        It happened at Ft Storey and also at Little Creek I'm told. Why would they have held a Mass at a park if the Chapel was available to them?

        
        

         

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          Yastreblyansky  T_Edward 

          • 8 hours ago

          
          

          Maybe because they'd been planning it for days? Probably fun--gorgeous weather, perhaps a picnic afterwards! And endless political chat. They could make it a victory rally.

          
          

           

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And another reminder that there are real Catholics you wouldn't mind knowing; here, the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of Dayton, Ohio, celebrating their 175th anniversary mass and picnic in 2009 and having a lot more fun than those wingnuts at Quantico.