Soft, warm sunshine this late-afternoon Tuesday here in California’s Central Valley, another example of a really comfortable fall season — so far.

Weather-wise OK, but not so ‘comfortable‘ overall being in the nowadays — such as this afternoon. In a short interval of less than a couple of hours (an attempt at a nap) news popped inside the reality of America today and showcased the horror story we’re all living, whether we know it or not. Double bogey events illustrating the small, vicious circle of our country’s national political life.
After the pseudo-snooze, I hit the iPad to check the news, and whoa, pure, nauseating shit had hit the fan.

America is operated/governed by two political factions, and the really, really shitty angle here is that one of those has left the building. Despite a lot of random, terrible shit, the story of the Republican party in the right now is a hefty, humungous tale of incompetent, cruel arrogance laced with viremic capabilities of shredding this country into tiny, ugly bits. Seemingly, more and more the 2024 election appears the big one, probably the make-or-brake election — the choice between democracy as we’ve practiced the last 250 years, vs a strong example of a crippling, idiotic authoritarian-run government — scary shit to face after a failed attempt at a nap.
And the gagging irony is all this terrible is right out front.

Probably a swirl of major shit — for the first time in those 250-plus years, the speaker of the House was kicked to the curb, by his own fellow party. And really without clear-cut reasons. Upfront and center at the start, Kevin McCarthy is-and-always-has-been a piece-of-shit asshole with no spine who is really terrible at being Speaker, and really terrible at being anything other than a piece of shit, tied to the T-Rump.

There’s a shitload of stories on McCarthy’s political demise (it was coming sooner or later) and subsequent denial of seeking the office again all over the InterWebs, put forth by major news operations and great bloggers/writers better equipped than I. This is a peek.

Here’s a noted summary per The Washington Post earlier this afternoon:

McCarthy (R-Calif.) lost his job despite the support of a vast majority of Republican lawmakers. That’s because the current House is set up to benefit large majorities of one party, or bipartisanship. Republicans have only a slim majority in the House, so to pass legislation that Democrats oppose — or to keep a speaker the Democrats despise — they have to be nearly unified. They can only afford to lose five Republicans on key votes, and McCarthy lost eight. And he didn’t have the support of a single Democrat.

“The House does not govern as a pure majoritarian body,” explained Matthew Green, a professor of politics at Catholic University and co-author of a book about Newt Gingrich. “It’s not the will of the majority, it’s the will of leadership of the majority party, and if you only bring things to the floor that the majority party wants, and your majority party is small, that gives leverage to a tiny fraction of that party.”

Democrats thought about voting with a majority of Republicans to help McCarthy keep his job. They contemplated it but ultimately decided not to; every Democrat present voted against McCarthy.

There are lots of reasons Democrats dislike McCarthy: He’s all-in on Donald Trump; he just launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over “allegations”; and he thwarted Jan. 6 investigations. But the last straw for them was seeing McCarthy on TV over the weekend trying to blame Democrats for the near-shutdown, reports The Washington Post.

“He dug his own grave,” one person in the know told The Post about why Democrats weren’t saving him.

And with a shutdown barely avoided and another coming in less than 45 days, part of the US legislative government is f*cked (Salon): ‘At this moment, the House has no speaker and cannot advance legislation. Although Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., will serve as temporary speaker, normal legislative business will cease until a new speaker is elected. There is no clear indication of who that might be, although Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, is a likely leading contender. Reports on Tuesday night suggested that McCarthy has told Republican colleagues he will not seek the office again.‘

In the spotlight of this whole clusterf*ck as always, is the despicable Matt Gaetz, who unfortunately represents my way-old stomping ground, the panhandle of Florida — attended grade school, graduated high school there, attended/graduated the University of Flordia — and makes me hurt for the area, a deep, abiding shame.
Gaetz is a piece of shit-work extraordinaire. Yesterday, he made a motion to vacate on the House floor which led to McCarthy being chunked to the curb this afternoon.

Gaetz’s attraction comes through the T-Rump, who allowed him to win re-election last year in northwest Flordia. Noted Mark Lombardo, who lost to Gaetz in the Republican primary: ‘ “He was Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump … and the First District is all about Trump.”‘

And shit like that just hurts. A lot of retired military live there, so there are probably now more Republican voters in the panhandle than when I was growing up, but still.
Gaetz still adores him some T-Rump, even today:

Gaetz: I would say that my conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I'm doing the right thing. pic.twitter.com/M14hzN2jmY

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 3, 2023

And once again, the T-Rump also couldn’t help himself to be blubbering into the limelight. He was in court again in New York on the real estate fraud case, and another unprecedented shot at history — he was hit with a gag order after talking trash about the judge’s law clerk.

An intelligent female: 

Defaming the judge's clerk is top-notch galaxy brain; Trump gains nothing from it while pissing off everyone in the entire court system.

(FYI, clerks aren't all recent grads. She's been a lawyer since 2010 and Judge Engoron's principal clerk for nearly five years.) https://t.co/t1SoUSP9yW

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 3, 2023

Nutshell details via The Daily Beast this afternoon:

Donald Trump was ordered to shut up and stop launching personal attacks against a judge’s court staff on Tuesday afternoon, a rude interruption of his bank fraud trial’s second day in New York.

At 3 p.m., after an unexpectedly long lunch break, Justice Arthur F. Engoron revealed that he had previously warned the former president’s lawyer to not engage in the aggressive and libelous attacks against the justice system he’s done across the country—only to discover today that Trump had crossed the line by aiming his hatred at the judge’s law clerk.

Sometime Tuesday morning, Trump took to his Truth Social media network to share a MAGA-aligned Twitter user’s post asking, “Why is Judge Engoron’s Principal Law Clerk, Allison R. Greenfield, palling around with Chuck Schumer?” Trump also linked to her personal Instagram page, drawing the attention of his huge fan base against her.

Greenfield has earned the politician’s ire by consistently shutting down his legal team’s delay tactics and spurious arguments in court. In his short-lived post, Trump called her “Schumer’s girlfriend”—Greenfield is not dating the senator—and complained that she “is running this case against me. How disgraceful!”

The typically warm judge turned ice cold when he delivered his stern warning.

“Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I will not tolerate them under any circumstances,” Engoron said.

Trump quickly deleted the post midday Tuesday. The judge explained that it only happened after he had personally ordered Trump to do so, a rare flex of power against the politician who has yet to face similar repercussions from other judges overseeing nearly half a dozen criminal cases across the eastern seaboard.

The judge then disclosed a conversation he had “off the record” with one of Trump’s defense lawyers in which he specifically warned about this.

“Consider this statement a gag order forbidding all parties from posting, emailing, or speaking publicly about any members of my staff,” Engoron declared, warning that “failure to abide by this will result in serious sanctions.”

I don’t know if they’d toss his orange ass in jail, but it’s possible.

We’ll let The Police sing us out of here:

The drama of violence and all, and arrogantly bad at it, too,  yet once again here we are…

(Illustration out front found here.)