Paul LePage the nominal Governor of Maine

has been reduced to screeching threats into the phonemail of a democratic legislator who'd earned his considerable ire.
Y'know, in pro wrestling patois, LePage is a jobber, a dumbass sap who loses matches for short money, cuz his latest outburst in all its vulgar impotent fury was prized audio on the national news not even 72 hours later.
Yes Paul LePage's behavior is reprehensible (my white haired ninety three year old mother suspects alcohol abuse is in play here, she may be right), but he can't back up any of his threats at this point who the hell is he kidding?
Huey Long when he was the tyrant-governor of Louisiana, made threats ten times as scary but the crucial difference is the Late Kingfisher could back it all up with bayonets and more.
So LePage is, by definition an embarrassment to the State of Maine, most especially to the roughly sixty six percent of the state that did not vote for his @ss, but being obnoxious and crude is not an impeachable offense. So in turn, getting LePage to resign requires a sense of shame that his career to date indicates he does not possess...so good luck making that happen.

Huma Ankles The Joint...

Word comes down that Huma Abedin must put upon wife of Anthony Wiener, has finally pulled the plug on a marriage marred by sexting shenanigans on the part of her useless soon to be ex husband.
I wasn't shock that Anthony backslid on her (he has that blank baffled look common of serial marital trepassers he understands nothing), no I was shocked Huma was still married to him!  I mean the dope embarrassed her twice in front of the whole world and still she stuck by him.
I hate to say it but I blame Huma's pal, Hillary Clinton, the noted feminist is paradoxically the poster gal for "stand by yer man" rectitude....Ms Abedin probably was feeling some peer pressure.
Frankly she is better off without the dope and shoulda ditched his boney ass years ago....

Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Lethiathan

has been holding rallies in NH and in Boston over the weekend. Clearly they are on the prowl for disaffected conservative voters to grab off from Donald Trump and I wish them the joy of their prowlings.
Ever taken a look at the 2016 Libertarian Platform, the Preamble and the Statement of Principles are both vastly longer than the total verbiage given over to National Defense/Foreign Policy.  Their whole program comes down to "defending the homeland", "avoiding entangling alliances" and opposition to selective service.
Two out of three straight out of HenryWallace's 1948 Progressive Crusade...not bad...I'm curious though is Libertarian VP candidate Bill Weld aware that his party apparently plans to disband NATO once they get into office?
Or does he even care anymore?

Jeff Jacoby...

Opined in the Globe this week that overpopulation was a good thing since a toxi birthrate meant a growing economy.
And I offer this up merely as an excellent illustration of the sort of utter rubbish a wingnut must vigorously spout in the public prints in order just to KEEP UP with the pace of intellectual decline in movement conservatism.
What next? Carbon monoxide is somehow good for you? Tobacco makes you healthy? Cancer has an upside?
To be a US Conservative these days, given the degraded nature of their political and intellectual leadership, you have to "choose delusion". Alas though, once you choose delusion you have to keep going deeper into it until you literally retreat into stupidity.
And thats the cut and dried of it here, Jeff can't handle reality so he chooses stupidity...look for more of it, this is an election year after all.

They are getting ready to Tear Down

"Lanes and Games" (AKA "The Turnpike Bowl-A-Drom") and replace with multistory residential complexes, tidily built on stilts to resist the local flood plane. Awful news as far as Humble Elias is concerned, North Cambridge used to be a Blue Collar Redoubt in Greater Cambridge but the forces of gentrification cannot ever be denied for long.
I went to a Parochial High School in North Cambridge back in the 1970's and I can recall dire and entirely prophetic warnings that if the Red Line Extension went thru to Alewife Gentrification would arrive on the First Train.
And so it did, and haven for lower level civil servants, store owners and retirees is now to become barracks for aspirational millenials.
Sad to say nothing of the loss of one of Boston's Last Remaining Fully Functioning Bowling Alleys....another avocation that has gone the way of hula hoops, VHS rentals and penmanship.
Sad....

One Hundred and Twenty One Medals at the Rio Summer Olympics for the USA

so much for Declinism Eh? I guess our multicultural rainbow proud Olympic Athletes proved themselves something other than mere token SJW fan service....
Hard to make an argument that equal opportunity is a bad thing when so many persons from so many backgrounds accomplished so very very much.
But then thats the USA we will always wrestle long and hard for the golden mean between equality and achievment....and last week that paid off....Trump wants to keep em' Out, I wanna get them trained up for Tokyo in 2020...:)

Stephen Kinzer (in today's Globe)

was discussing Daniel Ortega's attempts to nominate his wife for VP of Nicaragua in their upcoming election. Kinzer went on at length about the durable nature of dynastic politics in South America where public institutions & mores can be weak and elections often do not establish legitimacy. I'm surprised he didn't linger over Juan Peron's nomination of his wife Isabel as VP of Argentina in 1972..."Isabelita" (alleged to be a stripper and Peron's third wife) in due course became President of Argentina when Peron died in 1974. Allegedly, Isabel Peron holds the distinction of being the first woman to lawfully become President of a Nation State.
That is about her only claim to fame, Isabel unleashed the armed forces onto the streets of Argentina to battle the infamous "Montoneros", a Trotskyite guerilla movement who'd happily dickered with Peron in palmier times.  In due course on grounds of her mounting ineptitude, Isabel was deposed by a military coup in 1976 whereupon the Junta unleashed an anti communist purge of Argentina that would have done Lavrenty Beria proud.
NOW THAT is a cautionary tale about dynastic politics....And if you think I am trafficking parallels to our current election let me assure you that there was never a more bumptious wingnut populist than Isabel Peron, she was the Donald Trump of her times believe me.

We can all thank the people of Rio De Janeiro for

definitively exposing Ryan Lochte's antisocial tendencies.  Now we can take the poor boy in hand (actually he IS only thirty two years old a baby really) and treat his illness....via a curative reality show "Ryan Lochte Unleashed" or the like....

The Massachusetts Democratic Party has come out against

taking the cap off Charter Schools via ballot question this Fall.
Ah'm agin' it too...now I realize there is a worthwhile debate to be had about the intrinsic worth of charter schools but as it stands now the local school committees and thus property owners pay for the brunt of said charter schools sans any real oversight all on behalf of some four percent of the "pupil population" of the Commonwealth.
If we take the cap off charter schools the locals become burdened by expensive exclusive schools literally leaving the special needs kids and disciplinary cases to the "regular public schools". This is to me a hateful passive aggressive formula for creating the short of elite-driven school system they have in Japan or the UK by financial fiat sans debate.
I'm willing to discuss raising the charter school cap but only if the Commonwealth comes clean and offers a financial solution that does NOT burden localities, but then this is Massachusetts so that ain't happening believe me.

There is a sturdy meme going around out there...

to the effect that Hillary Clinton is getting "lucky" in that Donald Trump is about the only republican She could have beat this year.
Waaal, I dunno about that, I suspect that she and her redoubtable husband the ex-president were eagerly hoping to run against some premature geezer like Jeb Bush (like they don't know how to beat a Bush in a general election....) or a twitchy ideologue like Ted Cruz.
But she got Trump so be it.
Normally I jump ugly on said notion at this point in said blog post...but for once lemme opt for a tincture of empathy. A LOT of the people espousing said meme are themselves republicans who cannot vote for Donald Trump with any kind of a clear conscience. So if they are bolting the party they have to console themselves with some scenario, because lord knows voting for Hillary (even staying home or taking a libertarian ballot) is a traumatic prospect for today's republican. Keep in mind they've been demonizing and or fundraising off of her name for Twenty Five Years Now....the irony of Hillary Clinton being Senator McConnell/Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan/The Bush Family's last best hope of rescuing the GOP must be bitter indeed.

Donald Trump seems to be

playing around with the idea of a post electoral insurrection should he lose this November....granted he is using coded language in a doubly passive aggressive way, but the hint and the menace are there.
Or there would be if anyone was afraid of this fat mook.
Let me be short and blunt fantasies of insurrection didn't work for Jefferson Davis and his Benighted Crew....Losers Secede in other words and Secession is a Losing Idea.

Olympiad Advice....

I "dabble" in the Olympics lurching from the stuff that gets hyped (ergo "Women's Gymnastics") to competitions where it's easy to tell who the heck won (ergo swimming)...I run the gamut from idly curious to decorously patriotic.

But Holy God Almighty, the sports commentary on NBC is uniformly awful, bumptious, inane and plain dopey!
I think a lot of these guys are used to the professional basketball, baseball, football, hockey axis in the USA so anything off grid like Beach Volleyball or Bicycle Racing or whatnot tends to defeat them.
Which is sad because sometimes its these fringe sports than attract the true and for real "Committed and Talented Amateur" who one and all try harder because the weight of expectations is paradoxically off them as their chosen sport has a small audience.
Anyhow just turn the sound off I say, I mean if you need commentary to figure out who one a track meet then it might be time to take up knitting or solitaire.

2ndA....

All Hillary Clinton has called for in her platform this year, is expanding background checks on firearm purchases and banning the sale of assault weapons to private individuals.
THAT....fairly incremental response to toxic national gun saturation constitutes abolishing the Second Amendment in the blustery reaches of Donald Trump's mind and as such may require violent corrective action visited on her or her judicial nominees (DT's wording is to say the least, ambiguous likely deliberately so).
Just remember thats the modalities here, backing up a lie with the threat of violence, and yes as of today we have officially hit Rock Goddamn Bottom in the USA.

Just what Kelly Ayotte wanted...

Donald Trump's all too surly endorsement in the General Election. The embattled GOP Senator from NH can practically hear the stampede of female voters to Maggie Hassan....
I think Ayotte would sooner have the endorsement of the Zika Virus....
Of course supposedly Trump was mocking John McCain, Kelly Ayotte & Paul Ryan at campign stops til this weekend when he executed a weird surly about-face and suddenly endorsed the above incumbents.
Josh Marshall is wondering exactly who had the whip hand over Trump to force him to recant like that, me I think Kelly Ayotte is thanking her lucky stars Trump endorsed her on the weekend, during the Olympics, which gives her time to get out from under that most unwelcome endorsement....

Senator Kelly Ayotte is allegedly

down a full ten points in New Hampshire mostly on the toxic downticket effect of Donald Trump...
Kelly's response is classic a quadrennial love for seniors, law enforcement and veterans...all of it more than a little forced and artificial.
Kelly's been in the majority for her entire term of office and yet New Hampshire still lacks a VA Hospital despite being a steady contributor to the ranks of combat veterans, for all manner of services vet must literally take a bus to Jamaica Plain.
If I was Kelly Ayotte I'd be campaigning 24 - 7 for such a facility but no....she's been too busy polishing Mitt Romney's black Oxford's to move the ball forward.
Numbers as cited above are likely what is fueling the GOP's current panic attack about their nominee...its one thing to nominate a thin skinned narcissist for President, but if he starts ending people's phony-baloney jobs then it's Katey-Bar-The Door!

Y'know

a regular feature of GOP National Conventions down thru the years has been the appearance at the podium of some grieving police widow who was more or less willing to back up republican law-n-order bona fides by sandbagging the democrats....usually by name.
And the CONSISTENT response of said democrats, be it Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry....has always been "I support the police, they have difficult jobs, I share your pain".
The Khan Family stick it to The Donald at the DNC (over constitutional issues no less) and Citizen Trump squeals like a stuck german pig.
Nothing so easily illustrates Trump's unfitness for The Big Job...his skin is literally paper thin, his instinct whenever the criticism hits home is to lash back without recourse or reflection....you want that sad childish mentality with it's short little finger on the button?

(posting will be sporadic this week, even I must go on vacation sometimes)