This Friday I’m not going long (nor early, neither!) with ‘Round-the-Horn, because I’m on vacation. Yes, both this and Roy Edroso Breaks It Down will be in abeyance till the week of Jan. 5 while I lie in a stupor.
This week, I mostly eschewed the new and did a four-installment Week in Re-Phew! As my final magnanimous gesture for 2025, I have opened all parts to the punting public! You may find them here:
Part 1: Musk and the Feral Rich; RFK those germs away!; and Vice-President Fuckface goes full fash.
Part 2: Democrats: Wussys vs. Winners; AI vs. humanity; No Kings, or Mild in the Streets; and Bari-atric Surgery.
Part 3: ICE Follies; and Charlie (Kirk) and the Chaos Factory.
Also, when the FUBAR FBI finally found the (alleged, dead) perp in the Brown University shooting, he turned out to be from Portugal, so Tubby’s retaliating against all foreigners by killing another visa program, as if the shootings prove that immigrants are more likely to do murder than native-born Americans. It’s a preposterous supposition but one familiar to students of previous rightwing immigrant panics, like the Kate Steinle shooting, which led to much xenophobic screaming in 2017. The overreaction then was not so outrageous, probably because the actual killing took place before Trump came to power; now any headline provides cover for his racial-purity campaign. Maybe next he’ll tell us his bombing spree in the Caribbean is actually retaliation for immigrant murders going back to Sacco and Vanzetti.
Speaking of which, I was surprised Tubby didn’t use his Wednesday night address to announce Operation Fracas in Caracas -- guess we’ll have to wait for the release of some creepier Epstein Files to goad him into declaring war. As it was, the speech turned out to be a bizarre tantrum. As I’ve observed before, even when touting his (largely fictitious) achievements, Trump seems totally uninterested in persuading anyone who isn’t already prone to believe anything he says; like his other wacky displays -- the giant ballroom, the triumphal arch, sticking his name on the Kennedy Center and dumb insults on Presidential portraits -- it’s all just an endless ego rampage by a dangerous lunatic who should be nowhere near the levers of power.
It’s not like I’m gonna get very optimistic about the State of the Nation but there have been some good tidings lately. For instance, the long, vicious persecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by the Trump goons in ICE, the Border Patrol, and DOJ seems to have reached a temporary lull at least as, after months of judicial findings adverse to his detention and extraction, Judge Xinis ruled he must go free pending further hearings. The assholes are still snarling and slashing at him, hoping to cheat justice for their mob boss, but for the moment they are thwarted.
They’re thwarted in Indiana, too, where the Republican legislature Trump attempted to threaten into passing a new gerrymander said, you know what, fuck you, Tubby.
This is good for a few reasons, not the least of which is that it punctures the puffed-up image people have of Tubby as an unstoppable force. I remember when the Prestige Press used to call him the “Teflon Don,” a homage to John Gotti and that other piece of shit Ronald Reagan, as if their ability to escape the consequences of their actions were a gift from God rather than the result of cold political calculations by cowards too scared to stand up to them (aided, of course, by the greasy obsequity of the press itself).
This has put those of us who opposed the fucker from jump in a bind: We have to make clear how massive a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness Trump is -- but being clear about it also helps make him look unstoppable, because he keeps performing outrages and, thanks to the cowards (and to the weaknesses of a system not designed to withstand the consequences of rule by mobsters), getting away with them.
Well, now he’s not getting away with them as much, and that’s something that needs to get around: Despite having control of all three branches of government, this bum can be beaten. That’s the theme of the first of this week’s ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies for non-subscribers, “The End of Invincible Trump.”
And for our second freebie, I’m gonna change it up a little and let you in on the latest Fun Friday -- our weekly invitation for readers (who always make good use of the comments feature) to respond to prompts like “what’s a book that lit you up as a kid,” “what’s a piece of furniture you loved,” and, in this case, what’s the first movie you remember seeing.
AND IT’S ON SALE! Order an annual subscription between now and December 25 (that’s Xmas, heathens!) and get 20% off. Yes, that’s 52 weeks of my five-day-a-week brilliance -- 260 editions, if you’re counting -- that usually goes for the absurdly low price $70, marked down to the GTFOOH rate of $56! That’s like a nickel a newsletter, you’re insane if you don’t CLICK HERE FOR THE DISCOUNT!
In the not-too-distant future, I hope and pray, we will look back on the Age of Tubby II and think, “Holy shit, I know I complain about President AOC’s mandatory composting and land acknowledgements but have we forgotten how FUCKED UP AND FASH things used to be?”
The Prestige Press is acting like the big takeaway here is that Hegseth might get in trouble, but if we were anything like the country we pretend to be, we’d be worried that an angry God might just blow us all up.
Also the Supreme Court, the conservative majority of which just endorsed a gerrymander obviously created to suppress the minority vote in Texas because that favors the party that gives them bribes, has agreed to hear a case that hinges on whether, when the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment said “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” they didn’t mean “except if it makes bigots mad.”
Smart people are saying SCOTUS would never, but I’m not so sure. All Democrats to the left of Schumer and Jeffries (that is, most of them) are saying pack the court for fuck’s sake, these guys are crooked as Satan’s pecker, and even the normally indifferent public has grown sick of their janky jurisprudence. The Roberts gang know it’s curtains for them if the Democrats ever get back into power, so I wouldn’t be shocked if they did outright fuckery and sprinkled some Latin over it in hopes that Tubby and his mob will appreciate it let them keep their jobs when they go full Franco and I don’t mean Zeffirelli.
I could go on, but it’s Friday, let’s not make ourselves miserable -- in fact, the two (2) ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies I’m linking are comic sketches, which is to say laffs if you don’t mind a darker blend of fun: First, a meeting of Top Centrists on how the Democratic Party can best hem and haw and bothsides its way into irrelevance so sellout dipshits can make big bucks; second, a look at Tubby backstage in these deep days of his dotage -- the old bastard's looking plenty rough and his minders have taken to giving him fake Peace Prizes to keep his fading mind occupied, so who knows -- maybe someday soon we’ll open the news and get a more pleasant sort of surprise than usual.
Hope your Thanksgiving was good! Mine was fine and now that I’ve had my gratitude I’m ready to move back into my usual ingratitude mode. (But not into ungraciousness -- no, I think we can fail to appreciate the bullshit we’re being handed by our leaders and bosses and assholigarchs without losing the grace to appreciate our fellow man. In fact that’s what my Thanksgiving edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down is about -- have a FREE look thanks to my Friday ‘Round-the-Horn policy!)
(It's like the world's stupidest hostage situation -- this guy is ruining institutions and lives, yet reporters and administrators and other people with public platforms keep their mouths shut about it because they're a-scared of losing their phony-baloney jobs. C'mon, fellas, everybody dies!)
His most despicable recent action (most recent despicable action may be a better way to put it) is the order to send 500 Guardsmen to DC because two of the Guard stationed there were shot. Yeah, that'll help. "People hate living under military occupation -- let's make it worse! They're bound to calm down."
This is of a piece with Tubby's original order to send the Guard to DC because DOGE asshole Edward “Big Balls” Coristine allegedly got beat up there: If anything happens anywhere that makes him mad -- shootings, protests, a fake ass-kicking -- he sends troops and talks tough. He’s not trying to protect anybody or anything except his own hyperinflated self-regard.
I’m glad more people are catching on -- though a 36% approval rate still seems high to me -- but I wish someone would tell the Democratic leadership and kick them in the ass while they’re at it. We can’t count on clogged arteries to do it all for us, and JD Vance ought to be given advance word by the opposition that we’re not gonna take any shit from him either.
As for the allegedly fun media story about Robert Fucking Kennedy Junior and the scumbag journalists who covered for him until it was too late, I see the humor but my enjoyment is limited by the wreckage Garglin’ Bob is making of our public health. Thanks to the alt-med garbage he peddles and the idiot parents who believe it, children are dying of once-dormant children diseases and I have a hunch his regimen of raw milk and pull-ups isn’t going to stop it. I begin to think Kennedy is a more dangerous lunatic than Trump, and may do even more damage to the country in the long run. We can roll back most of Trump’s idiotic orders but when the U.S. is ravaged by once-rare diseases spread by right wing hippie dipshits who’ll blame it all on bad chi or feng shui or some shit, the counter-counter-enlightenment could take generations.
The most obvious reason for the Mamdani coochy-coo was… the rest of the week, which had made Trump look like an unhinged monster to everyone -- not just us wise guys but independents and squish Republicans too, appealing only to his small, rabid base. Oh, and there was Epstein -- nobody buys his bullshit about welcoming the release of the files, and nobody expects them to be delivered intact, either. It was not only lose-lose, it was lose-lose-lose-loseloselose whooo whooo like a runaway train of loserdom.
So what’s the play? Hitch his fat caboose to a genuinely popular politician! Trump knows the GOP is as popular as cancer and that Mamdani’s an undersold stock -- that is, while he won his election convincingly and proved dynamite in interviews and public appearances, the loathed Republicans are blind to his appeal and the centrist dipshit Democrats act embarrassed by it. Ezra Klein says instead of Mamdani, the Dem future is -- I shit you not -- Josh Shapiro! It’s like they want to lose! Whereas Trump would throw Vance, Noem, Rubio, and everyone else under a hundred busses to win.
If we were to psychoanalyze -- something I’m loath to do, as I barely consider Trump human -- I’d say Trump sees himself in Mamdani -- that is, he sees a political outsider (right) who is hated by the establishment (right) and is a natural on camera (right) and just happens to run a cheerful-inclusive con on the rubes rather than Trump’s own mean-psychopathic one. (I expect he’s wrong there, but monsters like Trump always think everyone’s as crooked as they are.)
His smarm offensive seems to be working for him already -- apostate Marge Taylor Greene is quitting Congress, no doubt to podcast and maybe do an exercise show. I think it was Atrios who said that most of our top politicians aren't really interested in politics and actually want to do talk shows. It's an absurd enough motivation for the collapse of democracy -- which, I remind you, has yet to be arrested. Maybe Tubby and his tribe thinks if they do an occasional sunny good-news stunt we'll forget they're still invading cites and arresting and trying to kill (and sometimes successfully killing) innocent people. Wonder how many people that works on? Not enough, I hope.
AI company unveils avatar app that recreates deceased loved ones in interactive form
…The Los Angeles–based startup, 2Wai, went viral when co-founder Calum Worthy released a promotional video showing how the technology works.
The clip features a pregnant woman speaking to an AI recreation of her late mother through her phone.
It then jumps forward 10 months, showing the AI “grandma” reading a bedtime story to the baby.
Later, the child, now a young boy, talks casually with the avatar while walking home from school.
The video ends with the grown son telling the digital grandmother that she is about to become a great-grandmother.
“With 2Wai, three minutes can last forever,” the video states.
Worthy added that the company is “building a living archive of humanity” through its avatar-based social network. He also wrote, “What if the loved ones we’ve lost could be part of our future?”
I saw the video and I felt like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now when he saw the pile of arms (“I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do”). I felt like the Monster at the end of The Bride of Frankenstein. My God. What have we become?
Well, not us, gentle reader! If you come across anyone who really wants to make AI Dead Loved Ones, please tell them forcefully that humanity has its back against the wall and however the battle goes we will remember the names of our deserters. We must recognize what’s sane and insane if we are to have any hope of pulling out of this tailspin.
You probably heard about Megyn Kelly’s “well it’s not like he fucked babies” defense (“she implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was ‘into the barely legal type’ of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as ‘like, 15-year-olds’—who look like they could be legal adults…”). Josh Marshall finds Ungar-Sargon working yet another angle as to whoever got trafficked to Trump via the nightmarish
Schrödinger's jailbait! What do you think? Me, I don’t believe Tubby would be satisfied with almost-underage sex slaves when his buddy had the real thing on tap. No sloppy seconds for Donny Two-Scoops! On the other hand, his White House interior decorating shows he’s even less aware of what’s genuine or isn't than the buyers of Trump Steaks and Trump Wines, so who knows. (Ha ha, kidding, he guilty.) (Also ha ha: Now Tubby’s trying a “No pedo, no pedo, you're the pedo!” strategy against the Democrats, with Bondi taking the lead! How long before he tells us that Epstein actually trafficked those girls to Venezuela and that’s the real reason we’re murdering fishermen in the Caribbean?)
Heard this in a restaurant -- you remember this? I don’t and I don’t know how I missed it.
I missed ‘Round-The-Horn last week, and I’ll let you know in advance that this one isn’t going to be an all-timer. But like Groucho says in one of my favorite bits from Animal Crackers, they can’t all be good, folks, you've got to expect that once in a while.
In Bucks County — Pennsylvania’s largest swing county, which Trump narrowly won in 2024 — Democrat Danny Ceisler was elected county sheriff after the Republican incumbent signed a deal to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year…
For the first time in 13 years, Democrats in Mississippi have broken up a GOP supermajority in the state Senate…
Etc. Apart from the political power shifts, the wipeout had the effect of forcing the Prestige Press to relent for a few minutes from their usual Dems in Disarray routine. The press lords have been talking about Trump and his Republicans ass-lickers as if they were invulnerable, even as polls show general violent disapproval of their misgovernance. A lot of what people call “doomerism” is really the effect of the media’s failure to acknowledge the reality we all observe, like Trump’s lunatic economic policy driving up prices and throwing small businesses into chaos while his rich asshole friends prosper. Hell, they don’t even seem to notice his swift, steep mental decline, even as they point cameras and microphones at it. No wonder a lot of people came to think resistance was futile! But the election broke the spell.
Of course the big news is Mamdani getting elected Mayor of New York despite the unified opposition of the Prestige Press -- or maybe in part due to it, because his victory was a massive refutation of several kinds of stand-pat bullshit. Cuomo’s ham-handed campaign, and the refusal of many major New York Democrats to endorse him -- and Cuomo’s attempt to threaten the city with Trump’s wrath unless they voted for him -- really hit every New Yorker’s fuck-you button. And I’m guessing the unusually literate New York electorate also noticed the press’ hard-on for Mamdani and didn’t like that either. No wonder he got a majority!
I’m amazed that some people are saying Democrats shouldn’t talk about this because it’s not The Price of Eggs. Not that The Price of Eggs isn’t crazy. I just bought some and, like, wtf. But damn, it’s like the attack ads write themselves, and yet here’s Gretchen Whitmer -- who I thought was one of the good ones, not to mention a dish -- waving it off:
“Well, as I have talked to people, I’m telling you right now, no one is worried about building a ballroom in Washington, D.C.,” Whitmer replied. “What they want is to make sure that they can feed their kids next week. And the longer the shutdown goes, the more precarious it gets for people.”
The governor said most Americans are “never going to step foot in a ballroom over the course of their lifetime.”
AAARGH don’t you get it? Trump has been lying his ass off about everything including the economy. And to the extent that he still has support among voters, it’s because many of them are invested in his lies.
Like, for instance, his repeated lie that the cities he's invading with his ICE goons are burning to the ground. Sure, to you and me this is obvious bullshit, but to people who never leave their cul-de-sacs or hollers it could be true and, rather than believe the President of the United States is sending no-necks to Portland just to wreak vengeance because its citizens didn’t vote for him, they may be inclined to take his word for it to comfort themselves.
And if they’re in the habit of eating that kind of shit, they might also tell themselves, well, maybe my big grocery and gas and electric bills are just a fluctuation, or still Joe Biden’s fault; in any case the President must know it’s gonna get better because if he doesn’t that would mean he’s lying and these prices may never go down, and that thought is unbearable.
I remember how Republicans have tried to cover up their administrations’ economic wreckage in the past, and how slow citizens can be to tumble to it -- as I said in 2006 as consumer confidence began to drop (to be followed shortly thereafter by the economy itself), “I have lived amongst Americans for a long time, and I have never known one to minimize his financial status -- in fact, I have heard more than one claim to be ‘doing great!’ when he was in fact two paychecks from a barrel overcoat.”
So it’s important to show voters that the guy is not only obviously but also dangerously full of shit. He said he was going to “renovate” the East Wing and then he just tore it down. To build a golden ballroom! For him and his rich friends! (That the voters will never “step foot” in it is part of the point, Big Gretch!)
People reacted to the ruins of the World Trade Center. Let them gaze upon the ruins of the East Wing until it sinks it.
OK, who wants free editions of ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN? Here ya go: First, another episode of everyone’s favorite news show, Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, confronting the endless and increasingly outrageous shakedowns of deep-pocketed victims (including the U.S. Treasury -- that’s you and me, fellow Americans!) that are the hallmark of Tubby’s reign. And also a consideration of Zohran Mamdani in the home stretch and how the usual suspects are coping with his impending victory, basically by shifting their hatred from the candidate to New York City -- which they hated already, so it’s an easy segue. (Maybe Price-of-Eggs Democrats like Whitmer can learn something from his popularity.)
Getting this Friday ‘Round-the-Horn (which often turns into Saturday ‘Round-the-Horn or even Sunday ‘Round-the-Horn) in just under the wire, but I hustled to do so because I want to wish you all a timely Happy No Kings Day. Baltimore’s daytime festivities have been cramped by the city’s annual marathon, so I’m going over to DC to survey the turnout, but will drop by an advertised Dance Party in the hometown that evening.
For a minute I thought the angry ravings by Tubby and his minions about the rallies (“hate America,” “pro-terrorist,” yadda yadda) must be some sort of weird double-reverse strategy to inflate turnout -- they certainly got people talking about it! Maybe, I mused, the plan was to get everyone who hates Trump outdoors at the same time, then murder us! But no, I finally decided, most likely they were just reacting the way they do to any negative stimulus -- hissing like frightened kittens, except way less cute.
Today, the average teenager in this country has 50 per cent of the sperm count, 50 per cent of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man... Our girls are hitting puberty six years earlier, and that’s bad, but also our parents aren’t having children.
When I heard that shit it reminded me of when he said he could tell kids were fucked up with "mitochondrial challenges" from antidepressants by looking at them "in airports." Now he's doing sperm counts. I expect to see him on camera in the Oval Office conducting taste tests on semen samples. "Ptui! This is obviously from a troubled young person who should be hauled in for conversion therapy."
Maybe the tide is turning. Democrats like JB Pritzker and even Hakeem Jeffries are beginning to talk about Tubby’s crimes as crimes, and even warn that the statute of limitations on those may outlast Republican control of Congress. I know we’re all worried about Trump being our Mussolini, but maybe we’ll get to the gas station part of the story faster than anticipated.
Hey, have two (2) ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN free issues! First, another scene from Bari Weiss’ tenure at CBS News. Got this one out too early to catch Weiss putting her sister on TV -- dare we hope she’ll do the same with her Intellectual Dork Web friends? Will we get commentary from Jordan Peterson’s latest deathbed? And finally, a rejoinder to all the trimmers and feebs who say Democrats shouldn’t talk about Tubby’s fascism and should instead talk about the price of eggs. For one thing, I should hope these guys can walk and chew gum at the same time; for another, I’d say if Democrats pretended not to notice the secret police and extrajudicial killings, that wouldn’t make people think they were moderate, it’d make them think they were blind. But read the whole thing. See ya on the streets!
