yourpalmooney

  Is anyone genuinely shocked by the results in New York? Zohran Mamdani’s been in the lead since the Democratic primary and barely lost ground. Curtis Sliwa remains a walking caricature of 1970s New York - earnest in his own way, but hopeless. He couldn’t even beat Mamdani on Staten Island . Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, drew support mostly from those who couldn’t take Sliwa seriously. A corrupt, scandal-stained has-been, Cuomo barely campaigned and only closed the gap on Mamdani by using grotesque imagery of planes hitting the Twin Towers. New York City’s GOP establishment is a hamster wheel of turds. Every election cycle, they toss a sacrificial lamb into the race and then promptly forget he or she exists. Joe Lhota. Nicole Malliotakis. Curtis Sliwa (twice!). Lhota pulled 25%. Malliotakis managed 28%. Sliwa? 28% the first time, and this year a staggering 7%. Going back to Curtis Sliwa is the political equivalent of saying, “Maybe we’ve got something in Tommy DeVito.” My brothers ...

  A few weeks ago, I wrote what I'd call a  colorful   critique of the Democratic Party's leadership. Within it, I noted that they had "helped  pave the way for palpable fascism to ascend in both the Oval Office and Congress." I hadn't set out to examine the Republican Party's relentless streak of frothing illiberalism, but a few people noticed that single line and called me on it. It's fair to question whether this kind of rhetoric is just the usual hyperbole you see from partisan extremes.  I'm a Republican - not that I'm entirely sure what that means anymore. This version of the party is neither conservative nor liberal, neither libertarian nor constitutionalist. Are we witnessing "palpable fascism" in senior leadership? The answer is... kind of . We're wired to recoil at the big, bad labels - dictator, Nazi, communist, Marxist, fascist - and rightly so. They're often misused, their meanings diluted into little more than rheto...

  Looking at this picture in 2020 nearly made my eyes roll so far back they'd plinko down my spine at such velocity they'd perforate my bowels and crack the earth's crust. Viewing it feels like a sudden memory jolt - the kind that transports you back to being 12 years old, frozen in place trying to talk to a girl, only to stand there beet red, gooning silently until her evolutionary instincts kicked in and she chose to deny your existence for the rest of her natural life. To call it cringe would be a tragic understatement; these people are so hopelessly unserious and disconnected from tangible reality that they'd drape themselves in Ghanaian Kente cloth - a rare textile actual Ghanaians struggle to access - and kneel in solemn performance art for... whom, exactly? Who was this for?! George Floyd's death was tragic (if you think otherwise you're a neanderthal who jerks off to state violence), but it's the same energy as dressing up like Natives to apologize f...

  It's essential to recognize that chaos is not a byproduct - it is the objective. The relentless cascade of executive actions with questionable legality, the deployment of both veiled and overt threats to allies and enemies, and the appointment of individuals who are at best unqualified and, at worst, dangerous to positions of critical authority all serve a singular purpose: to incite hysteria among those who are most susceptible to being hysterical. I'll concede it's wildly effective - each news cycle feels compressed, to the point where it feels as if we're distorting time. The onslaught is so relentless that meaningful debate becomes impossible. As you process the current crisis another one has already taken root.  He wants Greenland. No, actually, it's Canada. Hold on - we're going to slap our two neighbors with insane tariffs because tariffs are good. Nah, actually, we got concessions so we'll cancel that, tariffs are actually bad. We're going to t...

  I went to bed with the 2024 election undecided, though I knew the outcome. One of the first pieces of media I consumed at 4:47 am featured MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid earlier in the night mid-cope & flabbergasted, calling the campaign Harris ran "flawless" and pointing out that she even got the endorsement of Queen Latifah. My word! You don't say!  If I could boil down everything wrong with the Democratic Party establishment and their associated elites, add pigments and thinning agent to paint a picture like bald Bob Ross, I wouldn't come close to depicting what Reid did that night. I have made no effort to hide that I voted for Kamala Harris. And I have no qualms with that decision. Even the friendliest polls for Donald Trump did not predict the sheer magnitude of this outcome. So, to perform a competent postmortem, one must point out the painfully obvious. My lens is probably irrelevant to most - an apostate Republican clinging to an idea of conservatism that n...

  "It's time to pull Trump's mask off so that people can see what we are dealing with here. He is a con artist. First of all, he runs on this idea that he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy." - Marco Rubio, 2024 Trump surrogate, in 2016.  “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical genius—a really good sociopath—and that he’s America’s Hitler." "Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” - J.D. Vance, 2024 Republican Vice Presidential candidate.  As I write this, Fox News is cutting away from a Trump press conference in LA that happens to be a promo for one of his golf courses. They had to cut away and sanewash his performance because he's talking about toilets and David Muir's hair. As one does.  Look, I think we can agree no one's changing their minds here. If you're a Trump person, and you made it past those first two quotes, I...

  Last week I published some schadenfreude at the GOP's expense, seeing as how they cycled through countless candidates for Speaker while they sabotaged any chance at keeping the House of Representatives under their control in the next Congress. They finally elected one! And... ...it's Mike Johnson! You might ask just who the hell this is, and I have to concede that I don't know! He's just some guy.  People tend to misunderstand what the Speaker's role is, or what it entails. It's a thankless, hideous job that requires expert deal-making, vote-whipping, and fundraising. The Speaker is a political animal that needs to lack a certain measure of humanity to succeed. John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, whatever you think of them, were mildly effective Speakers. They managed their majorities well and kept the things moving. They worked to get their incumbents re-elected with fundraising and shrewdly targeting ripe districts. GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert had the job for awh...

  Much like the Big Bang, the GOP's self implosion wasn't a singular, one-off event. It's a slow and perpetual expansion that manifests as organized chaos. But unlike the Big Bang, we know the cause.  When Trump was elected in 2016, the Republican party fractured into its conservative, moderate, and nationalist wings - the latter of which has dominated much of the party's business in the six-plus-years since that general election. Anyone who dares wander from the base is described as "RINO," which will never stop being amusing seeing as how the dominant wing of the party long ago abandoned "conservatism" to embrace populist, conspiracy-mongering madness.  Kevin McCarthy was toppled as Speaker when one of his fellow caucus members, Matt Gaetz, decided to make a name for himself. Steve Scalise, who once alluded to himself as "David Duke without the baggage," mounted a bid to replace McCarthy. He failed. Up stepped Jim Jordan, who declared ...

  Look at this abomination. This absolute toilet of a car. It sucks, and when you see it on the road you think "that car sucks, and so does the person driving it. They should die in a fire." I don't blame you. It's a Buick Lucerne. It's 12 years old, which is 96 in Lucerne years. If this death trap could speak it would say "kill me" in a deep, guttural roar you'd hear from some misty bog. This thing cruised off the lot one day in 2010 at a crisp 20 mph and immediately became a shitty used car. They stopped making the Lucerne the year after this model was built. Buick had enough. The plant workers probably threatened mass suicide if they had to slap together one more of these metal boxes of death.  So I don't blame you for hating it, or for hating whoever happens to be driving it. But I drive this car, and I need you to stop disrespecting us on the road.  Most people driving this vehicle are on the wrong side of 85. Not to embrace ageism here, but...

Back when Senator Ted Cruz was watching Sesame Street at the tender age of 2, an episode of the famed children's show featured a eight-foot-tall, effete, gangly bird stumbling upon a vaccination stand. This bird can not fly, and he encountered several children patiently standing in line to receive a measles vaccine.  The measles vaccine was developed and tested in the late 1950's before being licensed in 1963 and eventually combined to the MMR vaccine in 1971. The "Don't Wait - Vaccinate" campaign, aided by the absolute abomination pictured above, was featured on season 3 of Sesame Street in February of 1972. Measles persisted for several years until cases dropped precipitously in 1981 thanks to the effectiveness of the vaccine. By 2000, the disease was considered eliminated in the United States.  But in 1972, measles was still affecting millions of people, including children. Sesame Street was quite young when this campaign was aired, but had already made a po...

  A phenomenon I sincerely enjoy is when privileged fools publicly take aim at other, rich fools in their pursuit of moral supremacy.  Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Baldy of the Great Celtic Sea, Enabler of Chains, The Sunburnt, Prince of the Blandals and the worst men, protector of the single smoggy kingdom - has some words for Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson regarding their recent foray into space exploration.  The English Royal Mascot decried the promotion of space tourism and said great brains and minds should be "trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live." Couple of things here. One - sending Captain Kirk to the thermosphere is not finding the next place to go and live. Two - simply picturing the mammoth proportions of the ball sack this guy must have to publicly chide "great brains" has broken my poor brain into several pieces.  For the record, I find this space tourism bit to be the wasteful folly of the ri...

I am not here to sully the patron saint of gabagool (pronounced capicola), or to suggest we rename holidays or tear down statues. We're just going to discuss some facts - some commonly known, others not so much. Then we can make a full determination on the life & legacy of Christopher Columbus, the director of  Home Alone . I can't cover everything here, so if you are upset that something positive or negative was omitted, or that I casually glossed over something you deem important, please email your mom.  Columbus was an Italian explorer with several big boats who convinced the Spanish to finance a trip to the Far East, after which he'd be entitled to a cut of whatever colonial enterprise & trade routes he subsequently established. But he landed in the Bahamas like a big dingus and called everyone Indians. This is the "spacing everything double to meet the two-page minimum in Word" of exploration. Subsequent trips included exploration of several islands i...

I have poor taste in shows, movies, music - any consumable entertainment you can conjure. So I am hardly a voice of reason or authority here. But how many shows featuring nurses, doctors, and first responders are they going to make?  I watched four or five commercials last night during the sports game and it's just a reel of shows coming soon, some old & some new, and the repetition is noticeable.  Something called "New Amsterdam" returns with a new season this fall. I have not watched a single episode of this show, but I can tell you that these people wear scrubs, save lives, and  fuck.  Some quick research tells me this show is based on the memoirs of an  actual  physician. It also sucks. The audience doesn't like the show. NBC renewed it for three (!!) additional seasons despite 34% audience approval.  Networks will shove first responder porn down your gullet and you will lap it up like a good dog. Here you have a show that hits all the right no...