The Hollow Return of Mitch McConnell

Monday afternoon, Mitch McConnell rolled back onto Capitol Hill in a wheelchair. He cracked a joke to the waiting press pool, quipping that after twenty years of dodging their questions, he was surprised anyone bothered showing up. The reporters laughed even though they shouldn't have. Ninety-two days had passed since anyone outside his immediate circle had seen him in the building. The man who helped run so much of our country into the ground came back visibly wrecked, physically frail, and politically neutralized.

His legacy was already completely rotten before he fell in June. And it looks even worse now. The Senate simply has no functioning rules for an official who refuses to let go of power after his body stops working.

McConnell missed 60 roll-call votes. The blackout started June 14, when a fall in his Washington home knocked him unconscious. No resignation. No temporary delegation of duty. Under current Senate rules, no mechanism for either exists anyway. McConnell vanished behind closed doors, drew his taxpayer-funded salary, and left the public staring at silence.

His absence brought an unintended consequence: it ground part of the standard conservative machine to a dead stop. On August 6, the Senate Agriculture Committee took up the 2026 Farm Bill. It failed on a 10 to 11 vote. McConnell tried casting a proxy vote from his sickbed. So did Alabama's Tommy Tuberville. Committee rules require warm bodies in seats, so neither proxy counted. Without McConnell there to rubber-stamp the party line and push the package through, the measure stalled cold.

Committee chair John Boozman told farmers they would have to wait until September.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear eventually ran out of patience. Beshear fired off formal demand letters through late July. In one, he stated plainly that he was writing under the assumption that McConnell was still capable of reading, speaking, and was not cognitively incapacitated. Read that again. A sitting governor had to put in writing that he could not verify whether his state's senior senator was conscious enough to think. Beshear asked him to prove his capacity or quit.

McConnell's camp responded with two staged photos and boilerplate press releases. Nothing else. Forty-three days went by without a public sighting. Rand Paul brushed off the uproar as political theater. Senate leadership looked the other way.

When McConnell finally wheeled in this week, his own public statement gave up the game. He admitted his recovery has been brutal, complicated by childhood polio. He admitted he is still not back to 100 percent. Then came the real confession: he promised John Thune he would do his best to show up when leadership desperately needed a vote.

He converted a constitutional office into an on-call tool for partisan tallies. Whenever he manages to summon the strength to show up, it is purely to supply a reliable, destructive party-line vote on life-tenured judges and deregulation, chipping away at the country one procedural threshold at a time.

We are watching the end stage of Washington's gerontocracy. Dianne Feinstein dragged herself through the Capitol halls the exact same way until her death, propped up while her staff insisted everything was fine. McConnell sat ten feet away and watched it happen. He chose the exact same route. Senate rules impose no capacity tests, no health disclosure mandates, and zero accountability short of expulsion.

McConnell is out the door in January. He handed leadership to Thune; Donald Trump's coalition stepped over him months ago, and his influence in the chamber is gone. The self-styled "Grim Reaper" showed up Monday as a damaged backbencher, wheeled into the well just to cast a low-level judicial vote and run out a clock that expired long before his arrival.

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Brent Molnar: A voice of reason 

SO, WORLD. AS NIGHT FALLS IN NEW YORK CITY, THE BREAKING NEWS IN AMERICA IS THAT 84-YEAR-OLD KENTUCKY SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL HAS REAPPEARED - AND HE ACTUALLY AIN'T DEAD...

The news that SHOULD be breaking?

His ancient, corrupt, and decrepit ass SHOULD be announcing his retirement.

Why?

Because we don't need people that most of the country has thought were dead for MONTHS having anything to do with the direction of this country.

Or ANY country, for that matter.

See, McConnell, the longest-serving senator in US history, has been in place for a staggering 41 years - which is more than enough time for anyone to become corrupted by that sustained power and influence.

And over time, the older he became, the further right McConnell helped push the American government.

His power grew to the point that as Barack Obama's second term was ending and an opening occurred on the Supreme Court, McConnell abused his power, along with Paul Ryan and John Boehner, to prevent the SITTING US PRESIDENT from appointing a new supreme - effectively holding that spot open until Donald Trump could be sworn in to choose a conservative.

As hardcore corrupt politicians go, it's difficult to get worse than McConnell, who helped Trump appoint three justices - Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett - resulting in a 6-3 conservative majority that consistently rules in Trump's favor.

McConnell, who will not seek reelection when his term ends this year, has been out of the public eye for more than three months, ever since being hospitalized on June 14.

He has missed numerous Senate votes without explanation and is Exhibit A as to why the United States needs term limitations across all levels of government as soon as possible to prevent another McConnell from happening ever again.

Many conservatives will see McConnell's reemergence as a victory.

As proof of life.

The reality, however, is much more stark.

You see, McConnell showing up with the midterms looming after 92 days out of sight, is more than proof of life.

It's proof that members of the Republican Party will spend their final, dying days on this earth clinging to power.

So, to paraphrase the great Bob Dylan:

Mitch McConnell ain't dead yet...

But he's getting there.

 

BREAKING: Maggie Haberman just dropped a blockbuster front-page investigation cataloging exactly how Trump has been using the full power of the federal government to silence the press, and it's a story he desperately did not want written.

The piece, co-authored with Jim Rutenberg, lays it all out in stark terms.

The Justice Department has sent FBI agents to reporters' homes to serve subpoenas, in at least one case flashing a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon fired the editor and publisher of Stars and Stripes, the military's traditionally independent newspaper, and locked out journalists who refused to sign pledges limiting what they could report. Regulatory agencies have leaned on media companies over their content. Public television and radio funding has been stripped away.

Trump has sued major news organizations personally. The White House seized control of the press pool that follows the president, hand-picking which outlets are allowed access.

And Times reporters investigating security problems with Trump's Qatari-gifted Air Force One were hit with subpoenas of their own, later withdrawn only after it looked like the Justice Department was about to lose in court.

Here's what makes this reporting land even harder.

Trump has spent recent weeks personally attacking Haberman, calling her "unattractive," a "scammer," and a "stalker" after she reported he was skipping the 9/11 ceremony at the World Trade Center because he wouldn't be allowed to give a speech there.

She didn't flinch. She didn't mention the attacks in her story. She just did her job and published the facts.

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On Thursday, with hatred twisting his snarling face, Trump lunged at a woman reporter. For a moment, it looked like he was going to physically assault her. “Not you. Not you,” Trump said. Then came the lunge and the monstrous face, “Hey, not you!”

The lunging incident grew from a single moment. It happened when a woman reporter tried to ask Trump a question.

The previous day Trump had promised every American citizen a $5,000 stimulus check after the midterm elections. The next day on the tarmac of DFW Airport in Dallas, the woman reporter asked Trump why the American people need a £5,000 incentive to turn out to vote if Trump’s economic policies were so successful.

Trump denied that it was an incentive to vote, even though that’s exactly how he’d framed it the previous day. Then Trump told the woman it was a "reward" for people having to put up with “a horrible situation caused by Biden.”

The lunge happened after the woman attempted a follow-up question.

“Hey, not you!”

The reporter was ABC’s Rachel Scott. Ms Scott is an intelligent, highly competent reporter.

She’s also Black.

This isn’t the first time Ms Scott has attracted the unjust ire of Trump. During the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Conference in late July of 2024, Scott asked Trump why Black voters should trust him given his past rhetoric. Trump called the question “horrible,” “hostile,” and “disgraceful.” He later labeled her “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place.”

Trump has a long, ugly history of abusing women reporters, especially when they’re women of colour.

For example, Yamiche Alcindor, Abby Phillip, Akayla Gardner and Weijia Jiang are highly intelligent and competent women reporters of color. They have all felt the vicious lash of Trump’s racist tongue, a tongue he uses only on women, especially women of colour.

But women of color don’t have to be reporters to attract Trump’s invective. Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, “The Squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, are particularly favourite targets for derision by racist Trump.

Trump isn’t merely racist, either; he’s above all a misogynist. Women of any race routinely receive excoriation for their looks, their weight, their intelligence, and their right to speak their minds. Trump abuses women in ways that he rarely uses against men, particularly white men.

Trump clearly hates and fears and feels inadequate around smart women. Where does this come from?

In 2015, psychologists Tali Mendelberg and Christopher Karpowitz at Princeton University, studied how men respond to intelligent women in group settings. The study revealed that men with fragile masculinity showed measurable anxiety and hostility toward women who outperformed them.

Trump has the most fragile masculinity of anyone I can think of. He also obviously has an advanced case of SPA.

SPA, or Small Penis Anxiety, is a persistent worry or distress about penis size. When Trump brings up his obsession with the size of his hands, a psychological misdirection known as "displacement" or "deflection," he’s really talking about his tiny penis.

The revelation from Stormy Daniels that Trump’s penis is minuscule is dismissed by Trump, who says that he never had any relationship with her. But that’s an obvious lie.

Trump’s history of adjudicated rape, alleged child rape, sexual assault, unwanted touching, inappropriate comments, and physical and verbal abuse toward dozens of women would put a less powerful man in prison, if not on the national sex offender registry. Trump has always gotten away with these crimes against women, in part because the Republican Party has evolved into a safe place for rapists and woman haters.

Violence and hatred of women are deep in the MAGA DNA.

It’s the real reason Roe v. Wade was repealed. Not out of concern that a bit of microscopic protoplasm might be a fully-formed human soul, but because some men are outraged that a woman can get pregnant by any means but theirs.

It’s why women whose lives are in peril, who were raped by their fathers, who will die if they give birth are denied life-saving or sanity-saving abortions in some American States.

Neither is it any accident that the so-called online "Manosphere" is Trump-aligned either. Violence against women is becoming a cultural norm among insecure little men who take their frustrations out on all women because their egos can’t handle a little rejection.

Men like Trump are terrified of what they can’t control, and Trump is clearly terrified of smart women. Trump’s lunge at a brilliant and skilled Black reporter has given another increment of permission to the worst and ugliest and most violent impulses of weak men.

In a split second, Trump showed us exactly what he is and what he’s capable of.

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 I added my own variation of this pie - There’s no rule saying we can’t give an old recipe a new little twist. Vintage recipes have good bones, darling! Don’t be afraid to experiment and add your own special touches—you’re simply adding another chapter to the story of the recipe.

There is a group of recipes known as "desperation pies" that came about out of necessity during America's Great Depression, which took place from 1929–1939

Desperation pies, also known as "make-do" pies, are made with simple ingredients that home cooks usually had on hand and were not overly expensive. Common types of desperation pies included vinegar pie, chess pie, mock apple pie, shoofly pie, sugar cream pie, water pie.

When recipes are passed down from one generation to another, it's passing down a story. It's suddenly so much more than a pie or a cake; it's a retelling of our own ancestral past. Food is a key part of social history. When we include such recipes in our own kitchens and our menus, we are living the stories of those times in which they come from. Desperation pies tell us the story of the ingenuity of the Depression era housewives that found ways to still bake for their families using what limited resources were available to them at the time.

 

 

Father of Fauci~ Parasitical bloodlines with scripted life stories. The Hisstory we are presented with is written by our captors. None of these entities on the world stage are who they claim to be. They don't do what they claim to do, and they don't honestly earn the fortunes they've stolen/inherited or acquired. I'm reminded of the song Bullet with butterfly wings, Smashing Pumpkins "the world is a vampire" & "despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage".

This meme just includes the highlights. I've posted extensively on this inverted entity. Nasty vile parasites. All of them.