Hope everyone who celebrated had a marvelous holiday feeding their little beasts two dolls and five pencils! What do you know, in spite of a certain Grinch rage-posting through it, Christmas came. Down in Scumville it came just the same! (Mother Jones)
And how sweet, Trump took Christmas phone calls from children.
“You sound so beautiful and cute.” “I’m eight!”
And just as reports in those Epstein files surfaced with Donald Trump allegedly being present when a sex trafficker drowned a child rape victim’s baby. And a report from a limo driver, who claimed he met a girl who reported being delivered by Ghislaine Maxwell to be raped by Trump and Epstein in 1997, and then was later found with her head “blown off” in Kiefer, OK in 2000. When you said you’d put nothing past the guy, how much did you mean it? (Justice dot gov link one / second link)
Seems like it should be bigger news that the US bombed Nigeria. (The Guardian)
Also bankruptcies in the US have reached a 15-year high. (UK Independent)
Anyway, after fooking Chreesmas was over, Trump got back to work to make peace in Ukraine, chatting with Putin, then meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then chatting with Putin some more. Trump’s boss sounds like a real micromanaging dick! (CBC)
Marco Rubio’s State Department banned visas for five Europeans it accuses of wanting to censor online speech, including French former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, and British-born US permanent resident Imran Ahmed, CEO of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate. Spreading disinformation and anti-vax conspiracies is very important to these people, surely not for sinister reasons. Anyway, Ahmed is the only one of the five currently in the country, and a judge has just blocked his detention. Legal permanent residents like Ahmed don’t actually need a visa to legally remain in the US, but when has “legally” ever stopped them? (NBC)
Trump pardoned Colorado election-system breaker-and-eneterer / professional victim Tina Peters, even though his pardon is impotent against state charges. And now, as is his way, he is trying to extort Colorado’s governor by dismantling Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research unless the governor pardons his princess, and is denying the state disaster relief for floods and wildfires. And Peters is whining to the CO appeals court that the state should defer to Trump’s authority. (Colorado Newsline)
The WSJ profiled James Blair, Susie Wiles’s deputy who is in charge of bullying state reps and “Blairymandering,” a self-described “junkyard dog.” As if any of them is some kind of a prize poodle! (WSJ gift link)
Kash Patel announced that the FBI is moving out and permanently closing its brutalist-hulk DC headquarters at the J. Edgar Hoover building. Employees will now move into other spaces, including the former USAID headquarters. (The Guardian)
The FBI, ICE and police in Anne Arundel County, MD are all separately investigating after an ICE shooting in Glen Burnie on Christmas Eve. ICE claims they fired into the van after the driver, Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins, tried to run them over, and then the van crashed. But other people online are claiming that the person who ICE says was the passenger — Solomon Antonio Serrano Esquivel — was actually not, and was already injured and handcuffed in the back of ICE’s van, and that ICE is claiming Esquivel was a passenger and injured in Sousa-Martins’s van to cover up that ICE injured Esquivel. Guess we’ll eventually find out who is most credible. (NBC)
Behold dead-eyed slug Stephen Miller, whose grandfather was a Jewish immigrant, taking to X to jizz some fantasy about a US with no immigrants, and either pretending or being genuinely ignorant as to who built the atom bomb. (JoeMyGod)
Arts:
Musician Chuck Redd decided he didn’t want to preside over holiday Jazz Jams at the Kennedy Center after Trump illegally tacked his name up there. So delicate snowflake Ric Grenell had a meltdown and is gonna SUE Redd for a MILLION DOLLARS. (AP)
ArtNet had 10 curators pick their favorite shows of the year. (ArtNet)
John Waters picked his 10 favorite movies! (NY Mag archive link)
Oh my GAWWWD the profile and photoshoot of Rama Duwaji, artist future first lady of New York City in The Cut! John M. Villa will fashion-splain. (New York Magazine archive link)
Meanwhile her husband has been listening, Marina Abramović style.
Times may be tough, but art, glamor and kindness are going to rule New York City, baby!
Your hed gif info: https://martiniambassador.substack.com/p/itchy-joey
And meme chat: https://open.substack.com/chat/posts/7666d0b2-0771-4938-acb8-b6101d4993b5?utm_source=share
“You sound so beautiful and cute.”
“I’m eight and you sound like someone that my parents warned me about."