The Loved One at first felt beaten down by the election of President Gag. In the ensuing months, she’s been transforming that malaise into action. She ganged up with a fairly big bunch at our sprawling megalopolis’s courthouse square yesterday, protesting L’il Duce‘s Neo-Nuremberg immigration orders. Here’s a shot she took on the scene:
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The Herald Times reports the rally drew a thousand hardy souls. The weather certainly was not conducive to hanging around outdoors. I wonder how big the crowds are going to be come May and June.
Better yet, I wonder how big the crowds’ll be at polling places in 2018 and 2020.
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Just Business
Author John Wasik makes this compelling point: “Trump omitted Muslim countries where he has business interests from his banned list.”
Wasik quotes from this New York Times op-ed piece on President Gag’s selective Muslim ban:
These countries, unlike those subject to the ban, are ones where Donald Trump has done business. In Saudi Arabia, his most recent government financial disclosure revealed several limited liability Trump corporations. In Egypt, he had two Trump companies registered. In the United Arab Emirates, he had licensed his name to a Dubai golf resort and a luxury residential development and spa. Some of these entities have since been closed, and others remain active.
A look at other nations with large Muslim populations only reinforces this troubling pattern. Turkey, India and the Philippines could all pose similar risks as the banned countries of origin that concern the president. Yet Mr. Trump has done business in all three places. They, too, are omitted from his list.
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Make ‘Em Laugh
Was waiting at the clinic this AM for the lab tech to call my name. No big deal — just normal blood monitoring.
Wouldn’t you know it? The TV was blaring in the background with the “breaking news” that President Gag was meeting with small business leaders. Let’s leave aside for the nonce the fact that the president meeting with a biz lobbying gang is not now, nor has it ever been, “breaking news” but that’s illustrative of the state of corporate media news mongering these days.
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Anyway, I was able to watch almost all of the almost-live coverage. I’ll guess I was able to catch some 12 or 13 minutes of the event. And you know what? L’il Duce spent the entire goddamned time talking. He was gesturing and mugging and cracking jokes — his aides, seated behind him, tittered on cue time and again. Not once did the assembled small business leaders speak. No one asked him a question. None put forth a concern or request.
They all sat in thrall as P. Gag did his stand-up routine. So, basically, our new boss learned nothing from his meeting with the entrepreneurs and their mouthpieces. He entertained them.
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Les Enfants Terribles
One of my fave brains-on-two-legs, Alex Straiker, research scientist at IU’s Dept. of Psychological & Brain Sciences, told me this AM he has a new word of the week: infantry.
My first Q was, What does the infantry have to do with infants? Turns out my little pun was spot on.
Acc’d’g to Straiker, the word comes from the French for — you guessed it — infant. The infantry originally were those French kids who were too young and green to have earned their stripes as horse soldiers in the cavalry. They were the infants of the army.
Just Kids
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Makes a lot of sense, no? Which breaks one of the cardinal rules of etymology. That is, if the explanation for the origin of a word looks too pat or makes immediate sense, it’s probably false.
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