THE CANDY MAN CAN! Tabs, Mon., Feb. 10, 2025

Morning news roundup! Things to read!

Tabs gif by your friend Martini Glambassador!

Oh, did you get a draft of the tabs in your inbox? Blame Rebecca, she did that. Here is the genuine article!

It’s been three weeks of That Man, and every day is more like that episode of The Twilight Zone / Simpsons Treehouse of Horror where a little boy controls a town by doing whatever monstrous thing happens to pop into his mind, and everybody must declare it GOOD.

He signed an executive order Friday to prioritize resettling white South African “refugees” suffering from “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” in the US. He fired the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and named himself chairman, so that this year’s Kennedy Center Honors can go to Kid Rock and a baboon that farts Lee Greenwood. He named a grifter/kook who speaks in tongues, Paula White-Cain, as head of some new Faith Office he made up. He’s suing 60 Minutes for a billion gazillion dollars, and now Ronny “Candyman” Jackson has joined the suit because it pained and suffered his Texan brain so hard he was driven to pills. (Joke! That was a joke!) What other fresh hells await us this week? (Independent/ AP /Daily Beast / Joe My God)

Oh, there’s more! He’s barred Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, New York AG Leticia James, former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Biden’s Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and lawyers Mark Zaid, Norm Eisen, and Andrew Weissman from receiving classified information and/or entering secure federal buildings. Oh. (New York Post)

JD Vance has Xitted that the Trump administration basically plans to just ignore the courts: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Yeah, tell it to Aileen Cannon, JD. They haven’t tried defying any court orders yet, and when they do, guess we will see what the Supreme Court has to say about that. Are they going to walk back their own order that whatever Holy Executive Trump does is just fine? Who knows, any more! (Forbes)

The Musketeens have made it into 15 agencies, and now there’s at least 25 other people on the squad. Not all of them have been identified yet, but the Post and other reporters are working on it. Gee, why do they seem to have so much to hide? Meanwhile Elon Musk is working on doxxing and harassing reporters like the WSJ one who found Marko Elez’s “proud racist” posts. (Washington Post archive link)

At least the King of Everything and Everyone has ruled out deporting Prince Harry, yakking to the New York Post, “I’ll leave him alone. He’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” It really burns his britches that Harry has a wife who wants to hold his hand. (NY Post)

Can’t stop thinking about this story about the most Hieronymus Bosch-y bar/restaurant in DC, Butterworth’s, where right-wingers like Kash Patel, Steve Bannon, and Curtis Yarvin eat rabbit and drink espresso martinis. (Washington Post archive link)

New York magazine has also written about the dumb, mean people on the DC young-Republican scene, and how happy they are to be free to throw all the slurs around that they want now. (“Inexplicably, the room smelled like corn.”) (New York magazine archive link)

Signs o’ the times: The Baltimore Sun newspaper got bought by a right-wing Trump suckup, David Smith, who has now filled the office with schlocky photos of sunsets and lighthouses that he took, and then layered typo-ridden, misattributed quotes on on top. They are hilariously terrible. (Baltimore Brew)

More of this please! In Hamilton County, Ohio, residents chased a passel of neo-Nazis calling themselves The Hate Club back into their U-Haul and set their swastika flag on fire. (Local 12)

Scientists from Swansea University, King's College London and Chile have invented self-healing roads that fill their own potholes. Maybe next they can invent something to fill my empty soul. (BBC)

Trump’s “Dumbest Trade War in History” with Canada has set off a surge of patriotism and a 10-point jump in the number of Canadians who say they are “very proud” of their country, which must be nice! Oh, and now Trump plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, most of which comes from Canada. This man does not have a strategy, he has whims, notions, and a 4th-grade reading level. But the other candidate was a lady who laughed, so. (The Hill Times/NPR/Newsweek)

The UK has a far-right deradicalization charity, Exit Hate, and boy could we use something like that around here! (The [UK] Times)

Scientists are getting closer to figuring out how tigers get their stripes. (New Yorker archive link)

Good gracious, when is that North Carolina supreme court judge election fixing to be over?! The federal court sent loser Jefferson Griffin back to state court, where he was told once again that he’s a losing loser who lost. Will he go whine to the state supreme court some more now? Probably! (13 News Now)

Every time I read about Ronny “Candyman” Johnson this song gets stuck in my head, and now it can be stuck in yours too, you’re welcome! Sammy Davis Jr. was a fascinating guy, with a rather tragic life. You can give his biographer a listen on NPR.

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