Category: [Politics]

Orange card!

Haven’t written about the World Cup cos it hasn’t particularly interested me, by virtue of it being a sporting event, and despite some shenanigans before the tournament, the whole thing does seem to have gone off without too much fuss after all the grumbling before it. And then Mushroom Cock interfered.

President Donald Trump has confirmed he asked Fifa to review United States striker Folarin Balogun’s one-match suspension at the World Cup.
Balogun, 25, was set to miss his side’s last-16 tie against Belgium after being shown a straight red card for a foul on Bosnia-Herzegovina defender Tarik Muharemovic in the previous round.
But Fifa made the shock decision to suspend the automatic one-match ban for 12 months, leading to widespread criticism, including from Uefa, Belgium and England boss Thomas Tuchel. […]
Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump said he had asked Fifa to review the decision because he “didn’t think it was a foul”.
He confirmed he had spoken to Fifa president Gianni Infantino but said “all” he did was ask for a review and added he did not tell the Swiss he had to suspend Balogun’s ban.
Trump added: “I think it [the suspension] would have left a big stain. I can’t tell them what to do. I don’t believe they made the decision; I believe it was the commission that made the decision. And it was the right decision.”

Apparently the only other time anything like this has happened at the World Cup was in 1962, and that was also considered political interference, so it’s not unprecedented but rare enough that it’s stunned people this time round, especially given how open Trump was about it. Pretty much everyone seems to acknowledge Balogun’s foul against the Bosnian bloke was an accident rather malicious, but that sort of thing still needs to be dealt with per the rules… except when you’re Trump, of course. And the latter didn’t just “ask” for the review; he may not have ordered it outright, but I’ve no doubt Fifa ddn’t make this move without some incentive to do so. I mean, this bullshit was enough for SEPP FUCKING BLATTER to come out and snipe at Fifa for going too far with the corruption thing, so…

The Belgian football association was kind of livid, since the Belgiam team were next in line to play the US, but Fifa essentially told them to go fuck themselves. So the Belgian players responded in the best way we could have hoped for: by thumping the US team 4-1:

“A lot has happened off the pitch over the last two days,”said Belgium and Rangers midfielder Raskin.
“There was a sense of injustice within the squad, and we were determined to respond on the field.”
Belgium captain Youri Tielemans insisted the affair had boosted his side.
“We told ourselves we had to respond on the pitch. That’s what we did,” he said.
After Belgium scored their fourth goal several of their players were pictured dancing in a style similar to the ‘Trump dance’ – where he rocks his hips and slowly pumps his arms – which gained notoriety during the 2024 US presidential campaign. […]
Iran also took a swipe at the US and the Balogun incident, posting a screenshot of their draw with Belgium beside the US’s heavy defeat on their official website.
The screenshot was accompanied by the message: “Now the whole world is dancing for the humiliating defeat of politics against football”.

The US is now out of its own tournament, but that‘ll hurt more than anything. Apparently Balogun met with the Belgians afterwards and everyone was cool, and I suppose honour has been duly satisfied for now. Though I still expect Fifa to give Trump some sort of prize at the end as compensation…

Insert Gyorgy Ligeti here

Look, I don’t really want to keep shitting on the Great American State Fail and everything associated with the 25o birthday of the US, but that’s a bit of a lie and I’m quite happy to continue with it. This was another amazing shot I saw of the 4th of July celebrations—again, the sky seems unimpressed—and OP’s characterisation of the illumination of the Washington Monument as “incredible, unsettling and symbolic” strikes me as correct. I couldn’t find any other way to sum up my own feelings about it…

…so fortunately someone else did, and the words “fucken Stanley Kubrick apes around the freedom obelisk ass” just nailed it even more exactly. Precisely the caption this image needed. Except that I don’t think this “monolith” will advance the evolution of these apes…

Happy birthday, I suppose

I’ve seen a couple of particularly fascinating images from the fourth of July:

I’ve included this (via) at full size—click on it to view it accordingly—cos it’s so stunning. This is from the fireworks show at the end of the day in DC, and, well, it looks like the heavens are sick of it and decided to put on their own show. Shame they couldn’t have struck down Mushroom Cock while they were at it…

Unfortunately, I think THIS (via) should be the definitive image of the 250th anniversary of the erstwhile US of A: a black woman on a train surrounded by masked racists going to DC for a masked racist march, or “First Amendment activities” as the DC mayor’s office euphemised it in the article.

Hundreds of masked men carrying banners, including the Confederate flag, marched through Washington DC on the Fourth of July, the 250th anniversary of the US’s inception.
The group appeared to be led by Thomas Rousseau, founder of the neo-fascist, white supremacist organization Patriot Front. Members of the group wore white masks and gathered in front of DC’s Union Station. They later marched towards Capitol Hill, WTOP reported.
Members chanted “Life, liberty, victory!” and “Reclaim America!” during the Saturday demonstration, according to video posted on social media.
Images published by Reuters also showed masked members riding the DC Metro as other riders looked on warily.
The white supremacist group’s gathering attracted some counter-protesters. In one video, a man with a bullhorn shouted at Patriot Front members: “Every single one of you justifies the fucking right to abortion.”

I’m with THAT guy. That’s more condemnation of these cunts that Trump will offer. The losers of the Civil War waving the losers’ flag in the nation’s capital on its 250th birthday… how did that happen? I’ve seen a lot of nostalgia online for the 1976 Bicentennial, which people seem to have been far more enthusiastic about than they are about the 250th, and 1976 wasn’t as bad a time as 2026 but it still had its problems… Gerald Ford had overseen the loss of the Vietnam War, economic disaster, a swine flu outbreak that’s been blamed for kicking off the whole anti-vaxx movement in the US, letting Indonesia annex East Timor, a low point in US-Israel relations, a resurgence of the KKK, and would end 1976 by losing the election to Jimmy Carter. And for all that people were still excited by the Bicentennial, he still had that to his credit… I’ve seen other claims that people just aren’t as excited by a half century as they are a full one, but I don’t feel that’s right somehow. Something really is different in 2026. If the Klan had pulled that stunt in 1976, I feel like Ford would at least have been critical of the event and of the Klan, unlike someone else we could name…

State Fail continues…

I saw someone call it “State Fail” yesterday, and now I can’t resist calling it that myself, much like I can’t resist reposting this video:

Video via Aaron Parnas on Bluesky. Can we say “fucking YIKES”? I’m genuinely impressed that no one was hurt by this, and faintly appalled that it took everyone so long to stop playing… This is apparently from a rehearsal for Mushroom Cock’s July 4th show, and though the bit of the set falling down does neatly symbolise the country’s condition, I don’t think it was meant to.

There’s a screenshot in case the video doesn’t work for some reason.

In other news, God Emperor is apparently pissy about the crowd turnout:

Trump grew livid over the small crowd at his campaign-style speech last week, two sources familiar with the matter said. Those remarks were thrown together after planned musical acts backed out en masse over the state fair’s close association with the politically divisive president.
Trump announced he would headline the event instead and spoke for roughly 30 minutes, most of which he spent recounting his accomplishments and boasting about America’s revival under his administration. Though he wasn’t initially aware of the size of the crowd, he later saw an aerial photo that showed acres of sparsely populated fields beyond the audience that had crowded around the stage.
The visual enraged him, the sources said, and multiple White House officials who had posted the photo deleted their posts. The revelation led to a defensive Trump lashing out on social media, claiming that the crowds were “packed to the brim.” […]
It’s also prompted a round of internal finger-pointing, with some in Trump’s orbit questioning why more wasn’t done to ensure a better turnout for events they view as a test of the president’s hold on the country and its culture.
“The mistake here was not driving attendance,” one person close to the White House said of the sparse crowds at the fair. “It was an ‘if you build it, they will come’ mentality that failed.”
For Trump’s July Fourth address, one source said the viewing section directly in front of the stage will be ticketed, to ensure it is filled. However, the tickets are free, and another official familiar with the event noted that there is likely to be huge swaths of people who sign up to secure a spot but ultimately don’t show.

Which is something I think they should be concerned about, cos that has become a legitimate practice in recent years to disrupt events like this, and I think it’s going to happen bigly with this one…

And further furthermore!

Oh, when I saw this I couldn’t not preserve it here. This comes via Bluesky from one Philip N. Cohen, all credit to whom; he did admit in another post that he thought there might actually have been about 2000 people there in total at the whole State Fair, but goddamn they clearly weren’t all there for this particular bit of it. Someone else commented on another of brother Philip’s photos from the day:

WOOF. I saw this after someone else posted… this on Threads and wondered what the eleven stars on it might mean:

How interesting. Someone else in the thread noticed a certain… similarity:

Eeeeeh.

Now, I gather the first picture is actually an AI image of the sort that cuntface posts on Truth Social all the time rather than an actual defacement of the White House, and the possibility of overreading the image is obviously real; I saw Snopes commenting on another photo of the State Fair saying it was a real picture of hardly anyone being there (similar to the one I posted yesterday) but also nothing it might not necessarily be representative of the entire event. So Krasnov and his eagle might not mean much either; sometimes an eagle with eleven stars is just, etc.

But, as yet another person in that thread noted, there are people in the administration for whom details like this do matter and are quite important. If Trump doesn’t know, they do. Consequently we can’t really rule out that it is perfectly intentional… and they could claim plausible deniably cos the Parteiadler‘s head looks to its left but Krasnovadler looks the other way. See? No similarity whatsoever…

And furthermore…

In fairness, this is indeed a very fine view, from the top of a ferris wheel it would have to be, but the problem is what’s not visible, i.e. the thousands of people not attending the State Fair. This is a picture of an absence. Erstwhile Superman Dean Cain is a full-bore MAGA shit, too, so he presumably meant this picture as, you know, promo if not propaganda. This is him trying to pretend this isn’t a picture of an absence. This is a picture of all the people staying home that day. It’s like an advert against the State Fair. Which, to be sure, is appropriate for a president against the United States…

Meanwhile, as America melts down…

So the Freedom 250 mob’s next trick, the Great American State Fair, has so far proven to be yet another debacle… you’ll recall all those musicians that were supposed to perform at it but who pulled it when they realised what the gig was? You may also recall Mushroom Cock basically said fuck ’em, he’d just hold a rally himself instead, and that’s pretty much what he actually did…

A milestone anniversary like 250 years of independence calls for the epic vision of a John F Kennedy, the immaculate timing of a Ronald Reagan or the soaring oratory of a Barack Obama. What it got instead on Wednesday was an 80-year-old convicted criminal who appeared in Home Alone 2 and seems hellbent on dividing the nation.
Donald Trump, speaking at the kick off of the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington, did not meet the moment with poetry, a moonshot or a promise to bind up the nation’s wounds. Instead he went small. Very small. […]
But most dismal of all was the way in which the president, whose war in Iran has pushed consumer prices to a three-year high and his approval rating to new lows, turned a national celebration – and potential moment of unity – into just another Trump campaign rally.
Cabinet members and the House of Representatives speaker, Mike Johnson, were in attendance, but Democrats were nowhere to be seen. Among the crowd, along with US flags and America 250 caps, it was not hard to spot Maga hats or other Trump gear. Liberals were as scarce as vegans at a Texas barbecue. […]
But perhaps most sinister of all was the insight into what this anniversary really means to Trump (or his id, Stephen Miller). He described the US as “superior to any nation that’s ever been built, no matter how many years it took” and insisted: “We are the ones who are carrying forward the light of western civilisation.” (The far right loves to use the phrase “western civilisation” as a proxy for white Christian nationalism.)

And the booth representing North Carolina at the Fair evidently had a particular vision about its place in the nation:

A video board in the North Carolina exhibit at the Great American State Fair on Washington’s National Mall drew some unwanted attention Friday by displaying a Confederate flag.
Late Friday afternoon the video was removed.
“On Friday, we became aware of an unapproved image in a video displayed inside the North Carolina Pavilion,” a spokesperson for the North Carolina pavilion/exhibit said in a statement. “As soon as we were made aware, we immediately removed the video and began reviewing how it occurred. Our focus remains on celebrating America’s 250th birthday and North Carolina’s role in our nation’s history.”

Apparently North Carolina couldn’t be bothered actually doing anything for this State Fair thing, so they had it assembled by private sponsors. I think someone needs to become public now. Maine’s booth is almost as minimal, though less racist:

The funniest thing to (not) happen so far, though, is probably Vanilla Ice’s performance on Friday, which got called off due to the threat of wild weather that never actually manifested:

Some observers quickly took to speculating that the threat of low attendance was the real reason for the cancellation, since Freedom 250’s website promises that events will go on “rain or shine.” There were indeed weather issues heading into Friday evening in D.C., although how serious they were was up for debate.
“Tonight, a few evening storms— not everybody sees rain tonight,” said a weather forecaster for D.C.’s NBC4. “It’s not like widespread thunderstorms moving through; we’re really not having any concern for severe weather,” she added, predicting “scattered showers” and a possibility of lightning in the early morning hours. Weather sites show no measurable rain showed up in Washington during the evening.
Vanilla Ice had been posting earlier in the day from the site, showing a panoramic view of the massive stage and huge lawn and referring to the proceedings as “once in a lifetime.” “We’re all gonna come together and be teenagers for the night!” A typical response read: “So awesome you didn’t bow down to the woke mob. Liberals think they control people and they think people aren’t allowed to use their freedom to perform where they want. Kudos to you and Flo Rida for standing your ground.”

I suppose this means weather is liberal now cos it cancelled him…Still, at least someone was getting something out of the whole experience:

The MAGA live-streamer known as Manny was taken into custody by DC police on Thursday afternoon after being seen allegedly pleasuring himself during a Cirque Mechanics performance.
Gian Rachtelli, 54, was reported by three different witnesses on the National Mall and charged with one count of lewd, indecent or obscene acts.
One witness said she saw the streamer dressed as Uncle Sam “doing inappropriate things during a performance” at around 3:50pm, per a police report.
“He returned for the second show, and I saw him with his hand in his pants likely doing what we all thought he was doing,” a witness told cops.
“I was approached by a female member of the acrobat team who had noticed an older white male that was making her & other female performers uncomfortable,” a second witness reported.
“They informed me that they noticed him making lewd gestures in his pants (as if he was attempting to/masturbating) while they were performing.”

The fact that this clown is also a MAGA influencer is just icing on the whole shit cake. And this fucking thing still has two more weeks to run. I’d feel sorry for American taxpayers, cos it’s their money being wasted on this shitshow, but tens of millions of those American taxpayers voted for Krasnov to do shit like this, so I’m reserving my sympathy for the ones who didn’t…

Well there’s a shock

Turns Out There Was Voter Fraud in Georgia—by Elon Musk

If Donald Trump’s administration really wants to find evidence of foreign interference in Georgia’s elections, then they need look no further than the president’s old friend Elon Musk and his shady super PAC.
Members of the Georgia State Elections Board voted Wednesday to issue a formal letter of reprimand to Musk’s America PAC over the billionaire technocrat’s illegal scheme to get Trump elected. Georgia, a key battleground state in 2024, was the target of aggressive campaigning by Trump’s team.
In October 2024, the Georgia secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after receiving numerous reports from residents across several counties saying they’d received partially prefilled absentee ballot applications from Musk’s America PAC, according to John Fervier, the State Elections Board’s chairman.
There was evidence to suggest America PAC had violated a state law that prohibits any person or entity, other than an authorized relative, to send an elector an absentee ballot application prefilled with the elector’s required information, according to Janice Johnston, the SEB’s vice chairman.
America PAC had also failed to display in a conspicuous location that this was not an official government publication, was not provided by the government, and was not a ballot, Johnston added.
The board swiftly voted to issue a letter of reprimand to America PAC.

Wow, I’m sure THAT’s got him shaking in his jackboots and he won’t dare try that again in 2028…