What we really need in these anxious, shit-hitting-the-fan times:

An afternoon’s moment within the next couple of hours. And a particular doomscroll on how America is getting fucked, and fucked in a hurry. We’re currently cracking up, way off the rails, and displaying sad, harrowing signs we’ve maybe reached the end of the track for 250-plus years worth of freedom and democracy. Although we knew the life-long, shithole make-up of the T-Rump all along and knew from his own diarrhea mouth about the schemes/schematics of the shit to happen once he was back in power. Nasty, shitty stuff, of course, but … fuck!
Actual watching it, though, has been a lot, lot worse. And in real-time, all the shit is worse. And I way-underestimated Elon Musk’s cast-character in all this and how he’s a much bigger monster-sized piece-of-shit than I faintly realized just a couple of weeks ago. An enormous bunch of cruel, mean, and nasty pieces-of-shit, awash in racist, bigoted, ignorant arrogance has our government by the short hairs (as they say). Some of those pricks are recently just out of high school, and high on being a tool.
A nearly incomprehensive list of “coup” goings-on can be found this afternoon at Balloon Juice, from firings at DOJ/FBI to Musk gutting government agencies and assorted items. A big list, and horrible-looking.

First off this afternoon’s scroll, an on-point noted nutshell conclusion of our shitty-mischievous predicament from Heather ‘Digby’ Parton at her must-read blog Hullabaloo: ‘There are very serious consequences for the impulsive, wrecking ball mode of government that Project 2025 and Elon Musk are carrying out. They don’t care. Musk is a sociopath and Russell Vought (who is clearly guiding this behind the scenes as well) is a racist white nationalist religious fanatic who no doubt thinks that people with HIV were asking for it. Neither they, nor Trump, care at all if 20 million people die. In fact, I suspect they think it’s probably a good thing since the sick are a burden on the rich people (producers) who are responsible for everything good in this world.‘
Digby is a national treasure.

Sunshine in the rain:

Good news!"A federal judge paused the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offer to federal workers until at least Monday. Federal workers had just hours left to decide whether to accept an offer to resign from their positions now while retaining pay and benefits through September."

— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) 2025-02-06T22:28:44.188Z

Plus yesterday AG Pam Bondi explained her new  job — via LawDork (h/t LGM): ‘“It is the job of an attorney privileged to serve in the Department of Justice to zealously defend the interests of the United States. Those interests, and the overall policy of the United States, are set by the Nation’s Chief Executive, who is vested by the Constitution with all ‘[E)xecutive Power,’“ Bondi wrote in an order titled, “GENERAL POLICY REGARDING ZEALOUS ADVOCACY ON BEHALF OF THE UNITED STATES.”‘
Bondi also whipped out an ironic/hypocritical DOJ memo, which called for ‘… the formation of a “Weaponization Working Group” responding to Trump’s January 20 executive order on “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”‘
Shit on a stick.

And another instance this afternoon of idiot-diarrhea mouth:

"There is no dictatorship here other than our leader dictating what can and cannot happen."

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) 2025-02-06T23:44:44.930Z

One heavy-duty thing for the good guys is all the bad guys are stupid, or at minimum, ignorant as a stump, and loud-angry about it, too.

Unsurprising but still a hard slap (via The Washington Post): ‘The Senate on Thursday confirmed Russell Vought as the next director of the powerful White House budget office, installing a conservative fiscal hawk who has promised to pursue sweeping spending cuts and empower President Donald Trump to conform the budget to his political views.‘
Vought is a piece of work (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington):

Vought’s repeated threats and attacks on career civil servants make him unfit to lead OMB. Vought has publicly stated that he wants to put career civil servants “in trauma,” and that when “they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” Vought called for “an army of investigators” to prosecute current and former government officials who sought to hold Trump accountable. This vilification of government employees makes it abundantly clear that he cannot be entrusted with this role.

Another asshole on the job.

Meanwhile, it’s finally early evening and there’s more shit than I can stir right now.
Just keep in mind other venues as you sadly go about your business (the Guardian):

It might not be the world-ending apocalypse foretold in the Netflix drama Don’t Look Up, but astronomers have significantly upped the odds of a direct hit from a giant asteroid currently hurtling towards Earth.

According to Nasa’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (Cneos), the odds of a strike in 2032 by the space rock that goes by the somewhat unassuming name 2024 YR are calculated to be 2.3% – a one-in-43 chance.

Barely a week ago, the European Space Agency (Esa) gave the asteroid a 1.3% chance of hitting the planet on 22 December that year, the day it will make its closest approach to Earth. Or, phrased another way, it had an almost 99% probability of passing by without incident.

At up to 300ft (90 metres) in width, according to Nasa-funded skywatchers who spotted it from a telescope in Chile just before new year, the object is roughly the same size as the Tunguska asteroid that flattened about 830 square miles (2,150 sq km) of remote Siberian forest when it exploded in 1908.

And the end result as we close with a blog favorite:

Catastrophic disaster, or not, yet here we are once again …

(Image out front by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here.)