A Film in Stormy Daniels' Career That Makes a Whole Lot of Sense Now (with a Lengthy Side Note About Her Financial Prowess)

In 2007, Stormy Daniels starred with Randy Spear in the porn film Black Widow (sorry, not a porn parody of the Marvel film, although, yeah, those exist. Look up The Assvengers). It was one of the first films she made after she had sex with Donald Trump one time in 2006. And, in context, I gotta tell you: there’s a dissertation that could be written about this confluence of fucked-up history and fuck film. 

Lemme set this up for you: Stormy plays Peyton, a poor young women from an abusive mother and a cruel, neglectful father, and she grew up in south Louisiana (like me). The movie takes place after Stormy/Peyton is grown up. She has decided that the way to get anywhere is to find a sugar daddy, marry him, and then murder him. When the movie starts, we know that Peyton is married to Randy Spear or “Charles,” a wealthy corporate lawyer with a heart of gold. She’s 20 and he’s 56. She says, “He was just attractive enough to fuck…He was quiet, gentle, and suffered from chronic depression.” Nothing like hearing about mental illness in the midst of jacking off to porn.

But think about it… think about it...The reason that Stormy Daniels let Donald Trump fuck her was because he was making promises about getting her on Celebrity Apprentice and helping her go mainstream. Except he ended up failing on that promise. So, in real life, she had sex with an unattractive, mentally ill man because she thought she’d get something out of it. 

Back to Black Widow: In order to get what she thinks she deserves, Peyton decides she’s going to poison Charles and take his fortune. She even finds a small book on assisted suicide she uses as a guide to see what to give Charles to kill him. 

Now, I suppose you’re wondering, “Wait, isn’t this porn?” Well, sure. And, just like Stormy with Trump, Peyton has sex with Charles, although I'm sure this was a lot more athletic. There’s a bunch of cocksucking and pussy-eating before some condom covered dick-in-vag action. But the whole thing is scored to some minor key strings, like a bunch of evil shit is happening. It’s like Charles is jizzing on Peyton’s face while saying, “That’s fucking awesome, yeah, yeah” while on the soundtrack isn’t the usual "bang-chicka-wah-wah." No, it’s like a horror movie with dissonant violins screeching.

Which, again, if you think about it, must have been what was going through Stormy Daniels’ mind while Donald Trump lumbered on top of her and thrust his mushroom dick into her without a condom for a couple of seconds before heaving off her and saying how awesome it was. Can you blame her for saying, “Oh, fuck, yeah, you’re paying me for silence” when they offered it to her?

And, by the way, Daniels (or, you know, Stephanie Clifford) is no slouch in the business acumen department. Indeed, you could teach a seminar in supply and demand with her autobiography cum business guide, Full Disclosure. Check out this look at the capitalistic give and take of the strip club:

“If you walked in at ten p.m., you were going in cold, trying to get the attention of guys when you were one of many to choose from. But that’s where the money was. There were three set shifts: 3 to 11, 8:30 - 2, and 10 - 2. Dancers had to pay a house fee for the two later shifts, with the last shift asking the highest house fee for the shortest time. A house fee is the ‘rent’ you pay the club as a contractor occupying their space to offer your services. The same way hairstylists will often pay for their space at a salon. There was no fee if you came in at opening, because no girl wants to be there when it’s three guys.”

Now, here is where Daniels reveals herself to be far wiser than you’d think. She says, “I wanted to avoid the house fee but wanted to maximize profit, so for the first five months, I worked the 3 to 11 shift, clocking out just as many girls were getting there. Then I got smarter and I would work a double, starting at three in the afternoon and not leaving until two in the morning. I could skip the house fee, establish my guys, and stay with them when the later girls rolled in.” 

Am I wrong, economics nerds, that this is an example of market optimization, maximizing profits based on your marketing efforts? I think so. Contrast that with Donald Trump, who saturated the market with his own gaudy, debt-heavy casinos that ultimately went bankrupt because of a fundamental misreading of the market. 

Later, Daniels offers a lesson in long-term investment strategy through her regular customer who she called “Bear” because “his white hair and beard gave him the look of a polar bear.” She writes, “He was definitely a creature of habit, coming in every night at midnight after finishing his job as the nighttime manager of a car wash and taking his usual spot to stay the last couple of hours. Once I saw he came in every night, I always made a point of dancing for him. Bear was never a big spender. He would tip a five onstage, and he only got table dances if it was a two-for-one, which they did every hour. Table dances were only ten dollars, but he always gave a twenty and he always closed out the night with me. That meant Bear was good for between twenty-five and fifty dollars a night. But late on a Friday or Saturday night, there’s always a guy who wants to go into a VIP room and you can get six or seven hundred dollars, so the girls would ignore Bear to make that money. Not me - I would always give Bear the last dance of the night. Girls would be like, ‘This guy wants to give you a hundred dollars for a table dance.

“‘No, I only dance for Bear.’

“‘What’s wrong with you?’ was the constant refrain.

“‘He’s twenty dollars every night,’ I said. ‘Every week. Every month. Do the math.’

“He was sensitive about things, and why be rude to him one night to get two or three hundred dollars off this guy who I’m never gonna see again? It’s the long game, and Bear taught me it.”

Here, Daniels evinced an ethos based on self-control, on customer retention, rather than short-term gain. Customer loyalty allowed Daniels to get through times when there was a reduced market in general. 

When Daniels started doing pornographic films, she acted in dozens before she started to write and direct them. She became recognized as one of the best directors for actors, never demanding they do more than what they had agreed to do. Women especially like to work for her. That's a hell of a great reputation. 

She is currently worth over $2 million and she says that she carries zero debt. By some of the most pessimistic (or optimistic, depending on your bent) estimates, Donald Trump holds at least 1.1 billion dollars in debt. And some other estimates put his assets at around 600 million dollars. That means that there is at least a small chance that Stephanie Clifford - Stormy Daniels - is worth more than Donald Trump.

In other words, being a respectable porn artist and stripper is better for your portfolio than being a wildly irrational real estate speculator and brand operator. To put it another way, Stormy Daniels dealt in less fantasy than The Art of the Deal. And if Donald Trump is indicted and arrested this week, we can thank Daniels for taking advantage of Trump's weaknesses, like a good capitalist.

What You Think You Know About Colleges and Universities Is Wrong

(This was originally published over on my Patreon page. I'm posting it here for two reasons. First, DeSantis continues to be a belligerent, anti-education jerk, including blaming the Silicon Valley Bank failure on diversity. And, second, well, to get you to subscribe to the Patreon.)

To listen to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other politicians attack the curricula of colleges and universities in their states and in the country as a whole, one could come away with the clear impression that a college student in the United States is subject to a nonstop barrage of critical race theory; enforced diversity, equity, and inclusion; and indoctrination into a liberal ideology that says white, straight males are evil and need to be repressed in favor of gender-noncomforming people of color. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, all you need to do is spend five minutes watching a conservative news network or listening to right-wing podcasts, and you’ll hear that left-wing professors are the doom and damnation of the American dream. 

Speaking as a tenured liberal with over 30 years of experience in higher education who is a current  department chair, I can tell you that this version of university classroom life is a perverse fantasy. It has very little to do with the experiences of the overwhelming number of students at the overwhelming number of colleges and universities in this country. Simply put, what the right-wing fabulists want their viewers, listeners, and readers to think is a lie. 

Most schools are not Harvard or Oberlin. Most are like mine, which is part of the City University of New York and which teaches about 10,000 mostly working and middle-class students, most of whom have jobs and families, and many of whom are the first in their families to go to college. Yes, all the students start with similar general education courses. For example, before they get to their major, students are required to take two courses in composition, where they learn to write at a college-level, including how to argue using researched evidence. The topics vary from professor to professor. The students take multiple math, science, and foreign language courses, along with a selection of basic social science and a couple of humanities classes. 

We do require that students take courses within these requirements that cover Pluralism and Diversity as a category, as well as Contemporary World. That sounds scary to the conservative overseers of the curriculum who must think this is where the forced CRT and cis-gender confessions happen, but, again, the reality of it is far different. The choices for P&D include classes like The Japanese Economy or Modern Art in Latin America or The History of Education in the United States. Yes, there are courses like Islam: Religion and Culture, as well as Gender and Sexuality. But no single topic is required. And while a student is completing this General Education curriculum, they move on to majors and minors, and most will never have their hair mussed by Queer Theory or African American Studies. 

To put it plainly, this is how it is at virtually every college and university. Of course, there are exceptions, generally at private schools. But even at the college that has become Gov. DeSantis’s bete noire, the New College of Florida, the current curriculum simply doesn’t support all the allegations made against it. DeSantis said, “The mission has been, I think, more into the DEI, CRT, the gender ideology rather than what a liberal arts education should be.”

But the catalog of the New College clearly shows that its mission is to give students a broad education along with the specialization of their majors. Out of ten classes in distribution areas in the Chart Your Course general education curriculum, one is in “Diverse Perspectives.” Within majors like Economics and Chemistry, no course that might be considered “woke” is included. Within majors like English and Political Science, of course, students can choose courses in the literature of “Globalized Gentrification” or “Freedom and Slavery in Political Thought.” But they can also take courses in ancient Greek literature or the U.S. Constitution. In addition, by Florida law, all students have to take a course or pass a test that demonstrates Civic Literacy, and NCF offers several paths to accomplish that requirement. 

The point here is not to reduce the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as ideas that benefit students who will have to work in a diverse world. Even the evangelical Christian Liberty University has an Office of Equity and Inclusion. It has a Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President of Equity and Inclusion because the school recognizes the benefit of these kinds of programs. It’s strange that conservative colleges and universities like Liberty or Pepperdine aren’t condemned for their DEI efforts. Meanwhile, DeSantis demanded that all the public schools of higher education in Florida outline their spending on these kinds of programs. It amounted to less than 1 percent for almost all the schools. 

But it’s simply a lie-filled attack on higher education in the United States to proclaim that all the students are being inundated with left-wing ideology. A small percentage of students at a small percentage of schools are exposed to anything remotely controversial. Those who condemn “censorship” or other perceived thought crimes concentrate on obvious examples of over-reach, like the Islamic art incident at Hamline University.

Students have to seek out classes where anything approaching critical race theory is being taught, classes like mine, to be honest. When I dove into the subject while discussing Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman in an American Drama class, the students were fascinated. Several said they had never thought about American culture or the legal system from that perspective and it was eye-opening. I didn’t demand that they had to believe what I was presenting, which were mostly facts about racism in their country. 

I simply told them the historical background to the play, history that I’m sure a few students already knew. Perhaps, though, the ones that didn’t know had their perspective changed or at least had new information to consider. Isn’t that one of the things a college education is supposed to do? Challenge students? Expand what they know and maybe what they think?

That’s at least part of what DeSantis and, for lack of a better phrase, the anti-woke forces really want to stop.

(If you want more rudeness, join up for my Patreon, starting at a buck a month. You can even pay a year at once. It's a great community of people trying to make sense of a nation gone mad. Usually, there's a lot more cussin'.) 

 

What You Haven't Heard About: Biden's Gonna Veto an Anti-ESG Bill

Back in December, I warned that the next round of fuckery the right was going to pull had to do with ESG investing. While it's a way more complex thing than I have the ability to explain, lemme give it a shot: investing in well-governed companies that give a shit about the environment and social issues. There you go. E=Environment, S=Social, G=Governance. So, like, it's investing in a corporation that isn't run by shitbags, and instead by those who think climate change is gonna fuck us if we don't do anything and who don't treat their workers like garbage. It's not new, but it's taken off in the last couple of years, and now "ESG accounted for $1 of every $8 in all U.S. assets under professional management."

Doesn't that seem like a good thing? Like, wouldn't you want to invest in companies that don't have completely skeevy motherfuckers in charge? That take things like carbon emissions and the effects of rising seas into account in how they do business? That pay fairly and offer benefits that keep workers happy and productive? I mean, how is any of this bad? In fact, wouldn't it be doing due diligence to see if a company is taking into account, say, droughts and flooding when determining where to build a factory? Or if it isn't, say, hiring migrant children to clean the kill floor of their slaughterhouse?

Well, it is bad because we live in the age of the sentient asshole, and it's a problem because of course it is. See, this is apparently making capitalism "woke," and we can't have that. We can't even have that as a consideration.

The administration of Joe Biden decided to undo a Trump administration rule that said the only thing you could consider in retirement fund investments was "financial factors." In other words, it doesn't matter if Mafia-run Amalgamated Sewage Dumping is pouring shit into the water supply and will likely face future fines and maybe even more enforcement. As long as it's making money now, your retirement plan can put tons of money into it (or a fund that contains it in its portfolio). 

The Biden rule change said, simply, if a retirement fund wants to invest primarily on ESG factors, it totally can. That's it. It didn't mandate it. Trump's rule mandated something. Biden's just says, "Hey, your call." Or, to put it another way, "The rule simply makes sure that retirement plan fiduciaries must engage in a risk and return analysis of their investment decisions and recognizes that these factors can be relevant to that analysis." But it doesn't force investment one way or another like the Trump rule did.

Put another way: Trump said, "You must be shitty." Biden said, "You can be shitty if you want, but you can also not be shitty."

But ESG is ready to be exploited by the shitmongers of the right, like CRT and other abbreviations of the damned. So away we go. 

In Republican states like Texas, Indiana, and, of fucking course, Florida, the cockflea legislatures, encouraged by their dickweed governors, are starting to pass anti-ESG bills that prevent state retirement funds, among other things (like municipal bonds), from being invested with any firms that use ESG as a factor. Florida pulled $2 billion out of Blackrock because it used ESG factors. Governor Ron DeSantis, who always looks like he's gonna giddily evict an orphanage for a single late mortgage payment, has proposed legislation that he says will prevent "financial institutions from discriminating against customers for their religious, political, or social beliefs — like owning a firearm, securing the border or increasing our energy independence." 

By the way, another word for the government controlling the financial sector is "socialism." 

Of course, of course, it shouldn't need to be said that, at the end of the day, the word "douche" is in "fiduciary," and those motherfuckers aren't going to put money in anything that isn't going to make money. And ESG investing is making money. Yeah, companies that are moving away from oil and coal, that are diversifying their boards, that are acting as semi-decent citizens in an indecent economic system are doing well. Why wouldn't you invest in success? In fact, states that prevent such investment are essentially setting money on fire.

Which brings us to Biden's first veto threat. Republicans in the Senate, with the help of fossil fuel Democrats Joe Manchin and Jon Tester, passed a bill to prevent enforcement of Biden's rule. The House passed it on pretty much party lines. And Biden said, "Yeah, go fuck yourselves" and has said he will veto the bill. 

Obviously, Republicans were hysterical pricks while discussing the bill. Sen. John Bearasshole or whatever from Wyoming (motto: "It's fucking hilarious that we have the same number of senators as California") said, "The Biden administration wants retirement plan managers to invest people’s retirement funds based not on the best return for the money — nope — based on woke ideology" and added that it was part of Biden's "radical left" agenda." 

But you know who says the senator from Wyoming should sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up? The Republican-controlled legislature of North Dakota. Yeah, they shit on an anti-ESG bill, going down 90-3 in the House, because the fucking bankers told them it was nonsense. "Our biggest concern is the idea of somebody telling our banks who to do business with or who not to do business with," said the head of the North Dakota Bankers Association. "We believe our banks should be allowed to do business with customers they know, the people they know and to make those decisions." Damn, that's some folksy shit right there in service of both crass capitalism and freedom of association and speech.

The screaming propagandists of the right are going to try to make ESG into the next boogeyman. It'll be interesting to see how far they get.

It Pisses Them Off That We Were Right About Regulations and That We Actually Do Give a Shit About East Palestine

Two things can be true at once. We can believe that the people in East Palestine, Ohio, are a bunch of fucking idiots who vote against their own interests repeatedly, electing horrible motherfuckers who don't give a happy monkey fuck about their health or safety, but, man, they sure hate Black people and migrants, so they got your vote. And we can also believe that they should get all the help they desperately need to recover from the toxic chemicals that were spilled and burned when a Norfolk Southern train derailed in their town. 

You can hear the nematodes of the right spout off about how Democrats and the "left" ignored the disaster because, as Fox "news" Tucker "You can tell I'm lying because I'm breathing" Carlson put it on February 15, "East Palestine is a poor, white town that voted for Trump. So honestly, who cares? No one in the Biden administration did care and that's an atrocity." And you can wonder, "The fuck are they talking about?" It's a fucking lie. The train derailed on February 3. By February 4, the National Transportation Safety Board was already investigating it. By early morning on February 4, the Environmental Protection Agency was already there to monitor air and water and help where it could. (Seriously: the derailment happened at 9 p.m. on the 3rd. By 2 a.m., the EPA was there.) The Department of Transportation was there, and FEMA was in contact with Ohio officials about what it could offer. 

Now, I'm no big-time professional con artist pretending to be a journalist, but I'm pretty sure that both the NTSB and the EPA are part of the Biden administration. I'm pretty sure the DOT and FEMA are, too. I'm pretty sure that means the Biden administration did care and that no atrocity occurred. No, President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg didn't rush there, but that's not really an accurate measure of the care the area received.

And if the motherfuckers in conservative media and in politics want to racialize this, let's fuckin' go.  You know what Tucker Carlson didn't berate the government about? The Flint water crisis, but Black people were the main victims, so fuck 'em, right? You know what they don't talk about on Fox "news" or, indeed, much of anywhere? The continuing effects of toxic chemicals in places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, which is such a fucking tragedy of high cancer rates in a region of primarily Black Americans that the United Nations has declared it "environmental racism." 

Or how about this: In November 2019,  there was a huge explosion at a petrochemical plant in Port Neches, Texas. It was one of several such events at chemical plants in the area in 2019. This one caused an evacuation of a half-mile radius and the force of the explosion blew out windows on residences, with others downwind of the place told to shelter in place (and close their windows, if they still had windows). It was one week after the Trump administration had shitcanned a rule on warning people when there were toxic chemicals being stored near them. The rollbacks of a bunch of regulations almost immediately affected the health of people living near these facilities, especially in Texas. Not a fucking peep out of right-wing media because it was all Black and brown people who were affected. 

What? You want train derailments? How about the one near Barstow, Georgia, in 2019, where hydrochloric acid was spilled? It's a majority Black town and needed evacuating, but no one demanded that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao or President Trump visit to comfort people. 

Yeah, so, sure, please racialize these things.

Let's acknowledge a few things, too. The Obama administration could have supported tougher rules on what's labeled as hazardous on trains. The Trump administration shouldn't have repealed an Obama-era regulation on updating brake systems on trains carrying hazardous materials. In fact, the East Palestine fucking over might have been averted only if both of those sentences were in effect because the train wasn't labeled "hazardous," so it didn't need the updated brakes. Even as the pathetic hate junkies of the right try to spin political gold out of this environmental disaster hay, they are being cornered into admitting that maybe some fucking regulations are necessary.

What really pisses them off is that the Biden administration, and, indeed, most Democrats and people on the left do give a fuck about the people of East Palestine. It's like they can't comprehend that idea that we might fucking hate their politics but still not want them to be poisoned to death. Left-wing media (real left-wing media, not what the right bullshits about being liberal) has been all over the story, including Mother Jones and Democracy Now!. The right-wing nutzoids can't get their tiny little brains to believe that the federal government might actually be doing what it's supposed to do because it's being led by a Democrat and thus must be degraded no matter how competent it might be. Are there people on the left being total dicks about this (and not just semi-dicks, like me)? Sure. There always will be.

What also complicates shit is that the Republican governor of Ohio and man who looks like he's spent too much time staring through a hole in the guest shower at the mansion, Mike DeWine, as well as all the Republican officials in the state, are declaring that the air and water are fine, just like the EPA. But I suppose they'll just be called "RINOs" or some such shit because they don't toe the Tucker line.

Here's the thing, though, fellow aghast and amused libs. We should do our best to welcome the right-wingers who have newly discovered that we need, you know, government to protect people when it comes to shit like this. Welcome to the party, motherfuckers.

By the way, about a third of the people in Columbiana County, where East Palestine is, are on Medicaid, including a bunch on there because Ohio accepted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, you know, Obamacare. 

If you're in the area and feeling sick and getting medical attention that you need because you're covered, thank a Democrat, not Tucker Carlson.

(Note: I'm gonna bet they almost all vote for Trump or DeSantis or whoever in 2024, no matter if the Biden administration gets them all new houses, new jobs, and all the pussy or dick they could want.)

Pregnancy Is Used as a Form of Legal Torture in Parts of the United States

There's a level of cruelty built into the anti-choice laws passed just prior to and then in the wake of the corrupt Supreme Court majority shit-canning the Roe v. Wade decision. I mean, proponents of the savage legislation behave as if this is some kind of benign law, that women will either travel somewhere to get an abortion (thus allowing, say, Louisianians to wash their hands of the whole procedure) or that women will suck it up and give birth and everything will be peachy fuckin' keen the entire time. 

But we know, we fucking well know, with the experience of the entirety of human history, that pregnancy is not a smooth trip from fucking to birth. It's absurd to even have state that. It's fucking absurd to have to say that pregnant people's bodies change in ways that are often permanent, and that's if everything goes fine. It's fucking absurd to have to say that even a minor issue with a pregnancy can cause all kinds of permanent shit to the pregnant person, starting with an episiotomy or bladder issues and moving up through death. And a c-section is fucking surgery. Going through that when you want the pregnancy is one thing. Going through it when you don't? What kind of fucking monsters would do that to someone? But obvious shit apparently has to be said all the goddamn time now because the only way you can pass the laws outlawing nearly all abortions at 15 weeks or 6 weeks or any time. You either have to ignore the obvious shit or you get off on torturing pregnant people. And I'm seriously thinking it's the latter in Florida and Texas and all the other states that pretend to give a fuck about the fetus. 

And I'm saying "pretend to give a fuck about the fetus" because you can't say you care about the fetus when it's going to die horribly within a couple of hours of being born after suffering in the womb. That's the case for Deborah Dorbert, whose fetus is suffering from Potter syndrome, which leads to multiple underdeveloped organs: "Babies with Potter syndrome often die before they are born when their umbilical cords become trapped between their bodies and the wall of their mother’s uterus. Those that survive the birth process typically suffocate within minutes or a matter of hours." Fucking nightmare, right? At 24 weeks, the Dorberts decided they wanted to go through with an abortion because they didn't want the fetus to suffer. But Dorbert is in Florida, and there's an almost total ban after 15 weeks and Deborah's doctors, all of whom have given the same diagnosis, are afraid they will run afoul of the harshly punitive law that could destroy their careers or put them in prison. And the Dorberts can't afford to go to another state, which would mean South or North Carolina at this point, to get the procedure done. Instead, Deborah is going to have to carry her fetus to term and give birth to a child that will desperately gasp for air for a little while and die. 

If you think your god wants that to happen, your god is a dick and no one should give a shit what you or your god wants.

On and on the cases go. Amanda Eid in Texas almost died because she couldn't get an abortion for a fetus when her water broke at 18 weeks until she was too sick to function. The same thing happened to Texan Elizabeth Weller. In Idaho, Carmen Broesder documented on TikTok how a hospital's ER rejected helping her remove the fetus that she was miscarrying over the course of 19 days. She also nearly died. In Ohio, Beth Long's fetus had its organs growing outside its body, but because she works for the state and Ohio bars the state health insurance from covering abortions with just a few exceptions, she would need to pay for the complicated termination of her pregnancy. It took the Longs weeks to make arrangements to go out of state for a less expensive procedure, which made the abortion that much more difficult. Anabely Lopes, a woman from Florida denied an abortion even though her fetus was going to die, was Debbie Wasserman Schultz's guest at the State of the Union, where President Biden should have said a hell of a lot more about this horror show Republicans have brought on. But on and on it still goes.

The trauma that these pregnant people already suffer is magnified because the medical system and the doctors they trust are unable to give them the care they know is needed. It's fucking horrific. The state is adding trauma on top of trauma. And that's for pregnancies that are wanted, that are planned, where families are preparing for a new child.  It's another kind of torture.

And the assholes who passed the laws that are destroying pregnant people body and mind are the ones who should be prosecuted, not the caregivers trying to help patients while being forced to watch their backs and certainly not the pregnant people, whether they want to be pregnant or not. Abortion isn't cruel. Stopping people who want or need an abortion is cruel. And it's become a tool of torture and control for the savage anti-choicers.

(Note: I used "women" at the beginning because that's the binary way those who wrote the laws view procreation. But trans men and nonbinary people can get pregnant, too, as can young girls. So, yeah, "pregnant people" is way more accurate unless talking about a specific person.)

Republicans Are Utterly Devoid of Ideas (Except the Ones They Take from Democrats)

This one ends with a twist, one I'll admit I didn't see coming until I did like 15 seconds of research.

The Republican response to President Biden's quite sane and unexpectedly lively State of the Union speech was honestly just fucking odd, and not just because it was delivered by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a tone best described as "a Little Rock barista's worst nightmare." What was legit fucking strange is how utterly devoid of ideas it was. I mean, sure, yeah, all these speeches, the State of the Union and the response, are at best fantasies where the speakers list a bunch of shit that will almost surely never happen. But, at the bare minimum, we can say that they are aspirational. There were almost no aspirations to do a goddamned thing in Sanders' 14-minute whine about shit that, truly, has nothing to do with making people's lives better.

Half the response was basically a Libs of TikTok reply thread on Twitter: "The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left, the choice is between normal or crazy. It is time for a new generation of Republican leadership. Upon taking office just a few weeks ago, I signed executive orders to ban CRT, racism and indoctrination in our schools. Eliminate the use of derogatory term Latinx in our government, repealed COVID orders and said never again to authoritarian mandates and shutdowns." Somehow, banning critical race theory (which she never says is "CRT," thus demonstrating that she's only speaking to right-wing fucknuts) never put food on someone's table or helped children out of poverty.

The other half was another blow job for Donald Trump, who was Sanders' boss for a couple of years. Apparently, everything was just chocolate and orgasms before Joe Biden came along: "President Biden inherited the fastest economic recovery on record. The most secured border in history, cheap abundant homegrown energy, fast rising wages, a rebuilt military and a world that was stable and at peace. But over the last two years, Democrats destroyed it all." I mean, I'm not sure what the measures of any of these things are, but, you know, shit was fucked up when Trump left office. And Trump inherited Obama's economy, which was doing just fine. That's how this shit works. 

You will not be surprised that Sanders ended with a version of a Trump "Dear Sir" story, with a trip where members of the military in Iraq lost their shit and cheered when Trump walked in on a surprise visit. And then a soldier gave her one of his patches because "you have a tough job."  By the way, Biden recently signed the biggest military budget in U.S. history, and while that's ridiculous and harmful to other needs in this country, it sure as fuck doesn't seem to indicate that Democrats are "destroying" the military.

In every facet of their alleged leadership, Republicans fail to offer anything in the way of ideas or bills to actually help Americans. This void of an agenda continued last week with the utterly buffoonish hearings on the "weaponization of government" and on the Twitter files. No, really, they had hearings about this dumb shit that no one outside of Tucker Carlson's fever-brained hatemongers and Elon Musk's taint cleaners gives the remotest fuck about. Seriously, it's like complaining that someone has taken their dick out on the top of Mt. Everest and we better pass laws against dicks and mountains because of it. Actually, that would have more of a purpose than these hearings did.

Of course, Democrats spanked Republicans' voluminous asses red. Of course, none of it mattered. Sure, you can look at Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat from California, absolutely incinerate Republican goat eater Marjorie Taylor Greene, and get a little cream in your jeans from it. But that's all it's good for. No one in the conservative fascist bubble will hear about it on Newsmax or Fox. They'll hear that Hunter Biden was accused of evil shit. They'll hear that Twitter execs who were fired by Weird Elon are pedophiles. Nothing pierces the dome of fucknuttery.

But I promised you a twist, so lemme give it to you. It means we gotta go back to Sarah Sanders. 

Yeah, her speech was basically Truth Social posts strung together into another American Carnage rant. But there was one policy proposal in it. Sanders huckabeed, "Tomorrow, I will unveil an education package that will be the most far reaching, bold, conservative education reform in the country. My plan empowers parents with real choices, improves literacy and career readiness, and helps put a good teacher in every classroom by increasing their starting salary from one of the lowest to one of the highest in the nation."

When Sanders did reveal her plan for education, it included the usual harmful bullshit on what teachers can teach and an expansion of funding vouchers for students to use state funds to pay for private schools (or, you know, "school choice"). But Sanders is also proposing to raise the starting salary for public school teachers by around a third, to $50,000 a year. What's fascinating about this is that just last year, Republicans in the Arkansas legislature refused to even allow a vote on a raise to $42,000, which Democrats were trying to get passed. Then, even more recently, a Democratic legislator tried to get a pay hike to $50k passed as a stand alone bill, but Sanders wanted it as part of a bigger education package. So Sanders' big idea comes from Democrats in her state.

And Sanders' plan goes even further: there's student loan forgiveness and 12 weeks paid maternity leave in there for teachers, as well as performance bonuses. It includes an expansion of literacy programs and a grant to parents to hire tutors for their kids. I'm not totally praising Sanders here - Republican governors have been pushing for higher pay for teachers as a way to get educators to stop protesting and to triangulate on a popular issue and take it away from Democrats (even if their Republican legislatures refuse to go along). Teachers aren't stupid: they know their silence is being bought, but, goddamn, it might be nice not to have to sell plasma to get by. And, certainly, it's kind of ludicrous that Sanders wants to pour money into public education while allowing for money to be taken away from the same schools through the bullshit "school choice" vouchers. 

Actual governing requires more than simply making sure you get that next Tucker hit or praise from Ben fuckin' Shapiro. Letting the lies flow freely keeps the rubes donating. But the real work of improving the lives of your constituents? That shit take effort. Sanders could have filled her speech with stuff from her education plan. Instead, it was easier just to call Democrats anti-American indoctrinators and pretend that's leadership. It's certainly all House Republicans have to offer.

C'mon, Drag Queens, Let's Go Fuck With Some Churches

Tell you what: I wanna gather a whole buncha drag queens from different places around the country, from Tennessee and Oklahoma and Florida and Kansas and every state where knuckle-dragging Nazi and Christian extremist fucknuts are shutting down events and protesting them and getting shit canceled, all because someone in drag is involved. And while the fucknuts say they are protecting children, it doesn't even matter anymore if the events allow children to be present. They're after the drag performers because they say drag is grooming kids for...I don't fuckin' know, man...fabulousness? The fucknuts say that this is about sexualizing children and confusing them and making them gay or some such bullshit that really comes down to "I'm an ignoramus and everyone should listen to me because I'm too stupid to learn different shit."

All the drag performers should protest outside places of worship where a church leader has actually been arrested for sex crimes. Because, lemme tell you, there are a fuckton more child-fucking and rapist preachers and priests and pastors than drag queens. But the Proud Boys and the Jesus Fellaters don't get on the sidewalk outside those churches and scream about grooming and God hating them. Or maybe it's just not really about the sexual assault and pedophilia and it's just about hating LGBTQ people. (It's totally just about the hate.)

You wanna go on this, you masturbation-denying freaks who are so backed up with jizz that you can't see straight? Then let's go:

C'mon, drag queens. Let's go fuck with the Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Fairfield, Illinois. Yeah, their former pastor, the uncomfortably-named Garrett Biggerstaff, was arrested last month on two counts of grooming children for sexual activity. He'd been at it for a while, literally an alleged groomer.  So let's line up outside with signs that say, "Wake up! This is child abuse!" and "Groomers" with a big red X through it. (Real signs outside drag events, in case you were wondering.)

Or maybe we should head to Jamestown, North Dakota, where a Catholic priest, Neil Pfifer, has been arrested for sexually assaulting someone he was supposedly providing mental health services for. Oh, and "an investigation uncovered accusations of crimes in other jurisdictions." Yup. Another priest just moved around because he kept raping his parishioners. Every single person who ever attended a service led by Pfifer was safer with a group of drag queens, as we all would be all the time. So let's show up in our best bustiers and heels and Spanx and ask everyone who goes in if they're ok having given money to house and feed a rapist. 

We could go all around the country doing this, a tour of strong motherfuckers in drag daring the liars and fanatics and fascists to tell us we're wrong. If they confront us, we'll ask them if they're ok with the middle school teacher at the First Apostolic Church in Maryville, Tennessee, who was arrested for sexually assaulting a minor; or with the youth pastor at Harbor Baptist Church in Hainesville, NJ, who pretended to be a teenage girl online in order to get young teen boys to send sexual photos of themselves; or the pastor at Ridge Church in Black Mountain, North Carolina; or the pastor in Florida; or the one in Ohio; or just about anywhere in the country. The list is fucking endless and awful.

Yeah, c'mon, bad ass drag queens. You wanna really highlight who is harming the kids? Who is raping and sexually assaulting and molesting and grooming? Let's fuck shit up outside all these houses of worship and then sashay away.