Sunshine and warm skies this late-afternoon Monday here in California’s Central Valley — once again, a day in the life.

News nowadays makes me more than a little depressed. I doomscroll the InterWebs seeking ideas for a post and get so shitty-assed gloomy I don’t want to set at the laptop and write. Over the weekend I surfed and surfed but came up dry for any kind of relatable subject matter even as the news environment is soaking wet.
Now the shit on the debt ceiling, which is supposedly about 10.11 days away and the shithead Republicans are still hardcore cruel and nasty about it. There’s an indication there’ll be a worldwide economic meltdown. Or worse (if such a thing).

Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy met again this afternoon, and still nothing.
Same old shit (Reuters):

“We reiterated once again that default is off the table and the only way to move forward is in good faith toward a bipartisan agreement,” Biden said in a statement after the meeting, which he called “productive.”

McCarthy told reporters after over an hour of talks with Biden that negotiators are “going to get together, work through the night” to try to find common ground.

“I felt we had a productive discussion. We don’t have an agreement yet,” McCarthy said. “I believe we can still get there.”

Main reality point, though: ‘He said he expected to talk to Biden every day. But he was not willing to consider Biden’s plan to cut the deficit by raising taxes on the wealthy and closing tax loopholes for the oil and pharmaceutical industries. McCarthy was focused on reducing spending in the 2024 federal budget.‘

Republicans have taken the US and the world hostage — and T-Rump is full-blown happy:

The dynamics of the House Republican Conference—with a small number of the most Trumpy members able to disrupt or end McCarthy’s speakership—make it difficult for McCarthy to give an inch in negotiations, especially now with Trump himself piping in.https://t.co/S8sYbM4RaH

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) May 22, 2023

One must remember: T-Rump doesn’t give a shit and has no shame — pain and chaos are what he seeks and encourages.
A good reflection from The Bulwark this morning:

The dynamics of the House Republican Conference—with a small number of the most Trumpy members able to disrupt or end McCarthy’s speakership—make it difficult for McCarthy to give an inch in negotiations, especially now with Trump himself piping in. Which means that the risk that no agreement will be reached is very real. The American people would be nothing but collateral damage to Trump.

[…]

By screaming, “Do not fold!!!” to Republican House members, Trump has pinned the tail of blame on his own donkey.

He could have stayed out of this fight and let others take the political hit if the worst-case scenario occurs. But he wants to be sure it happens. Should it occur, no one should forget his central role—certainly not as the 2024 presidential campaign heats up.

Keep in mind, too, Trump’s glaring hypocrisy here: This is the self-described “King of Debt” who spent like a drunken sailor during his four years in office, raising the national debt by $7.8 trillion.

He’s not in it to keep America safe from overspending. He’s in it for himself.

He doesn’t even mind telling us he’s a hypocrite. At the CNN town hall on May 10, host Kaitlan Collins confronted Trump with his prior statements on raising the debt ceiling:

Collins: You once said that using the . . . debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge just could not happen. You—you said that when you were in the Oval Office.
Trump: Sure, that’s when I was president.
Collins: So why is it different now that you’re out of office?
Trump: Because now I’m not president.

Trump can’t help saying the quiet part out loud. As he did by insanely bellowing in his January 2017 inaugural about “American carnage.” That is precisely what he seeks to bring about now, in service of his own interests.

It is up to President Biden to protect the nation and avert the chaos Trump is aiming for. And in the months ahead, it is up to sane middle America to speak, act, organize, and vote to ensure that Trump does not get the second term for whose sake he is eager to see the economy crash.

Another angle, contextual in nature from Richard Wolffe at the Guardian last Friday — T-Rump is still shitty:

Trump for one knows how this is going to play out. Not because he’s a genius, although clearly he thinks he is. But because he knows that only one side is going to behave like grown-ups and that side isn’t his own.

“I don’t believe they’re going to do a default because I think the Democrats will absolutely cave because you don’t want to have that happen,” he told CNN.

That of course is what Obama did. And that is what Joe Biden has already indicated he will do. Earlier this week, Biden said he was “confident” that there would be an agreement to avoid default.

“We’re going to come together because there’s no alternative way to do the right thing for the country,” he said. “We have to move on.”

By “we,” he meant his own Democrats. The man on the other side of the Oval Office sofa was Kevin McCarthy, the catastrophically weak House speaker, whose majority – and job – rests on the internal monologues of just a handful of Trumpy Republicans.

The side that needs to be house-trained is sadly, barely, in control of the House. If McCarthy loses just four or more of his own 222 members, he is doomed. Which means we are all doomed.

Welcome back to the fold.
And welcome to the morons in a hostage situation — idiots all around:

Batshit crazy, or not, here we are once again…

(Illustration out front found here.)