March 9, 2019--Saturday's Rats

This past week saw heated competition for Saturday's Rat. Who among Trump's closest people tried to push their way to the top of the gangplank in a panic to get off his sinking ship? 

First there was House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, whose anti-Semitic trope last November claimed that Jewish money provided by George Soros, Mike Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer was being deployed to "buy" the midterm elections. He tweeted this anti-Semitic canard and then a day later deleted it--

"We cannot allow Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg to BUY this election! Get out and vote Republican November 6th"

McCarthy had been on a campaign to cultivate Trump in the hope that he would allow the California congressman to ascend to and keep the House leadership seat abandoned by Paul Ryan.

But McCarthy could take only so much. Especially after seeing the disastrous results of the midterm election and then sensing Republican members of Congress acting friskier and friskier, wavering somewhat in their blind devotion to Trump.

Fearing for his own fate, McCarthy screwed up what little courage he has to squeak out a statement that though he agreed that Trump has the authority to declare a national emergency wouldn't it be better not to do so. 

Trump smacked him and as with the Jewish-money allegation he quickly backed off. No profile of courage here.

So McCarthy was a contender, but there were other Republicans who showed a bit more independence. Senator Rand Paul, for instance. He led the effort in the Senate to reject Trump's emergency declaration, speaking more forcefully and not willing to back off even if it meant no more visits to Mar-a-Lago. 

Paul sounded genuine and it was clear that establishing a few degrees of separation from Trump is perhaps a good strategy for him if he intends one more run at the presidency. 

Here is a little of what Paul said--

"I think he’s wrong, not on policy, but in seeking to expand the powers of the presidency beyond their constitutional limits.”

Moving quickly down the list of aspirants, there are a couple of others scrambling for the title--Mat Drudge in the Drudge Report declared Trump "swamped" after the Cohen testimony and the collapsed summit with Kim Jong-un; and Trump fave, Lou Dobbs who excoriated the president for his failed immigration and economic policies. He said Trump and the White House, "have lost their way."

Runner up though in the rat race is Ty Cobb. Not a household name, he was among Trump's first small group of lawyers hired to deal with the Mueller investigation. He is one of Washington's most esteemed attorneys and some wondered why he would want to sully himself by association with the likes of Trump. 

A fair question but one with an easy answer--even the most reprehensible individuals are entitled to strong legal representation. 

But Cobb, after leaving Trump, seeking to reestablish his reputation among the Washington establishment, in an interview with ABC News, felt the need to clarify why he agreed to be involved with Trump.

Among other things he said-- 

Mueller is an "American hero" and the probe he is leading is not a "witch hunt." He rejected the president's repeated characterizations of the Russia investigation and the man leading it.

This week's Saturday Rat, though, is Matt Whitaker. 

Remember him? Trump appointed Whitaker acting Attorney General after he finally tortured Jeff Sessions enough that he quit. At the time, as Whitaker was so obviously unqualified, it was thought that he got the job because he publicly boasted that he, like Michael Cohen and others, would "take a bullet" for Mr. Trump. This led Trump to assume he would take the initiative to fire Mueller.

That even a dunderhead such as Whitaker refused to do, but he may have perjured himself when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee.

The Wall Street Journal reported--

"The House Judiciary Committee believes it has evidence that President Trump asked Matthew Whitaker, at the time the acting attorney general, whether Manhattan U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman could regain control of his office’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and his real-estate business, according to people familiar with the matter."

After the next Attorney General, Robert Barr, was confirmed and took office, Whitaker was given a no-show job at the DOJ. But after just a few weeks, under cover of darkness, like Omarosa, he departed. No one seems to know where he is and what he might be up to.

My favorite speculation, which I am attempting to promulgate is that he is in a safe house somewhere, spilling what he knows to Mueller's investigators in the hope they will grant him immunity from prosecution for lying to Congress. 

Wouldn't it be confirming if he could provide corroborating evidence that Trump did in fact try to get him to assign a Trump-friendly U.S. attorney who would back off from investigating Trump and his family's nefarious business dealings in New York City?

Therefore, though there are other strong contenders, Matt Whitaker is this week's Rat!

December 16, 2013--All the XXX That's Fit to Print

I know things are difficult these days for newspapers. The kind delivered to your front door. Even for the "paper of record," the New York Times that proclaims each morning that it offers all the news "That's Fit to Print."

Put simply, they are losing readers and in turn advertisers are abandoning them.

Fit to print suggests editors make strategic decisions about what's important to report and, connotatively, fit also means what's appropriate to write about. To the gray-lady, fit has traditionally meant what to cover as well as what not to.

When, for example, supermarket tabloids and gossipy blogs such as the Drudge Report were the first to report about President Bill Clinton not-so-allegedly fooling around with an intern in the Oval Office, the Times did not see that as fit to cover. Instead, after a few weeks, realizing they were losing readers who were panting to learn all the lurid details, they began to cover the coverage, letting readers know what Drudge and the Sun and Enquirer were up to, assuming there were any Times readers who didn't notice the blaring headlines or sneak peeks as they dawdled in the checkout line.

So you can imagine my non-surprise when two Sundays ago the Times in its Magazine and special Style sections published stories that I would have expected to find in Cosmo or the Enquirer.

The first about "Sexercise," a detailed look at the fitness value of canoodling; the second, "What Lies Beneath," about various approaches to managing and grooming one's mons pubis.

WARNING--You must be over 18 to continue.

Times reporter Gretchen Reynolds asks, "Do intimate acts count as working out?"

And concludes . . . sort of.

Some sexercise advocates claim that sex burns up to 100 calories per session (about the number of calories in two medium-size chocolate chip cookies), but until recently that has never been scientifically verified.

To measure the potential aerobic benefit of having sex, researchers at the University of Quebec undertook a careful study. They signed up 21 young heterosexual couples and began by having them jog on treadmill for 30 minutes to create a baseline. They noted their energy expenditure and other metrics. Next, over a full month, they had their subjects fool around and then engage in sexual intercourse, all the while keeping track of various metabolic reactions.

They found that sex qualified as "moderate exercise," a little more so for men than women. About the equivalent of playing tennis doubles or walking uphill. For brief periods, they found, men exert more energy during sex than when jogging. They also found that for men sex burned four calories per minute while it only consumed three for women; and thus for "sessions"that lasted an average of 25 minutes (no comment) men burned two chocolate chip cookies' worth.

Not so surprising, 98 percent of the subjects reported that "sex felt more fun than jogging." I'm more interested in the responses of the remaining two percent. And why they left gay people out of the sturdy.

Meanwhile, over in the Times Style section, Amanda Hess reports that, "After years of razors, wax, and lasers reducing pubic hair to the bare minimum--or nothing at all--there's a return to a more natural state."

She continues--

Marilyn Monroe's maid claimed she once walked in on the actress naked and splay-legged, bottle and toothbrush in hand, meticulously bleaching the hair between her legs a perfectly matching platinum . . .

Enough? Or too much information?

If you would like more, here are a couple of other things from Ms. Hess and the New York Times--

For women of Monroe's generation, pubic hair was a game of peekaboo--on full display in the privacy of the bungalow, but carefully hidden from popular view. In recent years the bombshell bush has essentially disappeared. Wax-wielding estheticians and permanent lasers have whittled it down or erased it entirely . . .

I'm done. If you're not, read the piece in full on-line to see what porn stars are up to as well Gwyneth Paltrow.

As for me, I'll get back to reading about the protests in Ukraine.