Merry Christmas, Fellow Screamers!

Also, a Merry Catsmas open thread!

Even during the holiday season, clown world continues to roll along, so I want to do a quick recap of some huge stories before I forget all about politics for a couple days.

Cementing their place as the Washington Generals of the Uniparty, 18 Republicans joined with Democrats to (finally) pass a budget to fund government — in the form of a gigantic $1,700,000,000,000 omnibus bill. This timing is extremely suspicious, considering the GOP is set to take over the House (and presumably block such ridiculous spending) in just a couple weeks.

As with any bill (much less one coming in at $1.7 TRILLION), the pork seems to be priority one. Rand Paul blasted the bill in song while pointing out billions of dollars of waste:

Hold up……..

Ah, here’s this year’s article:

I often say that we’ve reached the point where the ‘leaders’ are grabbing everything they can before the whole house of cards comes down, and this is further proof. All with the support of Mitch McConnel and Liz Cheney — stalwarts of the Republican party. 🥴 🤢 🤮🤮🤮

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The 2022 Lake/Dobbs election trial in Arizona is EXTREMELY interesting, with election official Scott Jarrett seemingly committing perjury this week by claiming no knowledge of 19” ballots being printed (they should be 20”), then the next day claiming this had been an issue for a couple elections and they were looking into the issue.

The “mistake” in ballot size caused ballots (42% in a sample!!!!) to be rejected, possibly ‘adjusted’ by humans, and then (probably) placed into a special box for tabulation.

This is another unacceptable integrity hole in our election process, and it was made worse by ‘leaders’ telling potential voters to simply go somewhere else. And — of course — the ‘errors’ occurred overwhelmingly in Republican areas. Maricopa County attorney Tom Liddy even went so far as to say that people who wait for election day “reap what they sow” — a complete inversion of everything we know about election security.

In a move that surprises no one, the judge rejected Lake’s case in spite of all of these issues. Suddenly ensuring everybody’s vote counts isn’t such a big deal.

Obviously we shouldn’t need “backup options” for in-person voting — we need paper ballots, in-person voting, ballots hand-counted in public without moving them from the polling station.

This is only difficult because the ‘leaders’ want it to be difficult, and they want it to be difficult so they can alter the outcomes of elections. There’s simply too much at stake to allow the people to (perhaps) make a difference — so we have to destroy democracy in order to save it.

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Matt Taibbi gave us all an early present with the release of Twitter Files 9, which highlights all the non-FBI government agencies that are neck deep in censoring the legal speech of all Americans. The rabbit hole goes as deep as I said it did — and this is why nothing has made sense for years. Nearly all of our information is curated and approved before we’re allowed to discuss it.

And now the agency claims that their own emails are misinformation.

Absolutely no shame whatsoever. And the media is still ignoring the story, as expected.

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Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, time to move to Catsmas!

Catsmas is about hanging out with family, even the ones who ruin your Catsmas card photo.

But it’s also about destruction of everything humans hold dear.

Why else would they put breakable things in paws reach?

Alternate soundtrack: Let the bodies hit the floor

And once you find the perfect tree topper, you know it right away.

Merry Christmas to all my wonderful subscribers and those of you silently following along as well! I’ll be back on Monday with a new recurring feature, and Tuesday with the conclusion of “When Incentives Go Wrong”. Until then, consider this an open thread for all sorts of holiday love! Have a wonderful Christmas weekend!