Murder by Hegseth (Updated)

Hegseth ordered the murder of survivors of a wrecked "drug boat" and those orders were carried out by SOC Adm. Bradley. It was a criminal and murderous act in violation of the law.

Eighty years ago (11/30/45), three German submariners were shot by firing squad for machinegunning the survivors of the SS Peleus. It's highly unlikely that Hegseth or Bradley will be staring down the muzzles of a squad of riflemen. But the precedent exists, and the law, both international and American, are clear:

It was murder most foul.

ETA: An excerpt from the DoD Law of War:

Hegseth's and Bradley's orders were clearly illegal.

Your Sunday Morning Turboprop Noise

Twin-Otter at Saba:

1,300' is a short runway, but at least the approaches are clear.

Massive Trumpist Hypocrite

Nancy Mace, who is taking credit for things that happened as a result of a law which she voted against.

That was a result of the 2021 infrastructure bill, which she voted against. She is lucky that the Democrats don't operate like Trump, or that grant would have never happened.

Macy is a horrible excuse for a human being, let alone a congresscritter.

Caturday

A store cat.

Because We, As a Country, Have No Guts

Bolsonaro began serving a prison sentence for trying to overturn the results of a presidential election by sending his supporters to storm the capitol.

But we didn't have the guts to do the same.

Trump Celebrates Thanksgiving With His Usual Racist Screed

He was in fine form, spinning his favorite racist fiction, and blaming immigrants for everything.

Maybe we should have stopped poor women from Scotland from immigrating a century ago, or Bavarian draft dodgers 120 years ago. But those were white folk (and his ancestors) and that passes muster for those racist pricks.

Orange Piggy Pivots on a Pinhead, DC Shooting Ed. (plus)

First, they were foaming at the mouth about immigrants when the news came out that the shooter was an Afghan immigrant.

Then, when it came out that the shooter had been vetted and granted asylum by the Trump Administration..

If that's the current official line, Pee-Wee German is going to be sitting in the dark in his office, drinking straight bourbon, eating mayo with a spoon straight from the jar and moaning at the loss of yet another opportunity to ramp up his promotion o racism and xenophobia.

And this:

Because It's Friday

Some night steam.

Murdering These Down, Here

Happy Thanksgiving

On a number of radio stations back in the day, playing the entire song was a Thanksgiving tradition. Some of them were commercial stations-- almost nineteen minutes of no commercials. And some of them played it twice, at noon and 3 PM.

The judge was really blind, he had a Seeing-Eye dog. He played himself in the movie (as did Officer Obie).

I hope that if you're in America, you and yours have a good Thanksgiving. Try not to punch out your racist uncle or your commie nephew.

And please, enjoy the day without resorting to rampant consumerism.

Or burning down your hostess's house.

And you can maintain peace at the table by dividing up the attendees.

(Yes, the above is almost a complete repeat from earlier years. So sue me.)

And a bonus meme or two, plus a classic clip:

Right-Wing Terrorism

The unofficial brownshirts of the Right are trying to work their intimidation campaign on Indiana Republican legislators.

I spoke with a Republican member of Indiana’s legislature who opposes President Donald Trump’s push for the state to redraw its congressional map to gain two GOP seats and help the party hold its House majority in next year’s midterm elections. Trump, with support from Indiana’s Republican governor, Mike Braun, has vowed to back primary challengers against members of the GOP who are, for now, blocking the redistricting plan. The lawmaker I spoke with asked that I not publish his name. He isn’t worried about Trump’s political wrath; he doesn’t plan to run for reelection. His fear of speaking out is much more personal: “I’d rather my house not get firebombed,” he told me by phone.

Such a worry is not as far-fetched as it might sound—not in an America that has seen an eruption of political violence over the past few years, and not in Indiana over the past few weeks. Republicans in the state have faced a wave of “swatting” incidents, in which a false call to emergency services draws a police response, for not endorsing the redistricting plan. (Braun said he and his family have also received threats.)

Indiana lawmakers have reported other apparent attempts at intimidation, including at least one bomb threat, as well as subtler forms of harassment. Not all of them have been made public. Earlier this month, the Republican I interviewed was returning home from an evening walk and saw a Domino’s Pizza car parked out front. The delivery was under his name, with his home address, but he had not ordered it. The phone number that was given to the delivery driver was not his. The confirmation that no one in his family ordered it came when he asked the driver what was on the pizza: sausage and pepperoni. “We don’t eat meat,” he told me with a laugh, “so none of us ordered that pizza.” When the lawmaker later called the number affiliated with the order, it went to the state police in Indianapolis. Hoax pizza deliveries have been a favored tactic of MAGA supporters who have tried to enforce loyalty to Trump and his agenda. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia reported a similar incident before she abruptly announced her resignation from Congress. “The whole idea is, We know who you are. We know where you live,” the Indiana lawmaker said. “They’re trying to intimidate us.”

That's the thuggish Right at work, a movement that has barely graduated from bombing churches and burning crosses on people's front lawns. And it does work, witness the fact that Trump wasn't convicted at his second impeachment because the GOP senators were too cowardly to so vote.

Dear Mike: Just Fucking Quit

Even in a softball interview, Mike Johnson can't help but go all "woe is me" about being the Speaker/Puppet of the House.

And seriously? Stephen Miller is so white that all he eats is mayonnaise?? I thought that was satire, but as we've been finding out, the line between satire and the Orange Piggy Administration is almost invisible.

DC Shooting

I don’t know what the outcome of the DC shooting investigation will be.

But I’m confident that the Trump Administration will respond with the maximum possible levels of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, and overall hatred.

Because that's who they are, a pack of small-minded nasty bigots, a veritable shitstain on the nation.

Which should not surprise you that one of them would use ICE to resolve a custody dispute.

Steve Witkoff is a Russian Asset-- Prove Me Wrong

He was coaching Russian negotiators how to sell their point of view to Trump.

An American envoy who is caught on tape coaching the other party how to sweet-talk his boss into a deal is an enemy agent who should be escorted out of the negotiations in irons.

Pigging These Down, Here

Or Don, jr or Eric:

Accurate description of the P47 regime:

And remember the last time we went to war to liberate oil wells.

The Orange Piggy Will Outdo Neville Chamberlain

Reading the tea leaves from his phone call with Dictator Xi and that they are going to exchange visits suggests to me that the Orange Piglet is going to sell out Taiwan.

He won't care, but his party might be nervous that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan with tacit consent from Trump will cost them mightily in future elections.

As to the rest of the world, they'll trust America's word as though it was written on flash paper.

Demooning

One of the less-fun things of a .45 ACP revolver is dealing with moon clips. They are necessary because automatic cartridges don't have rims and the ejection stars on a revolver won't lift out the cartridges. They were developed when the Army needed more guns in the Great War than Colt could make 1911s. But both Smith & Wesson and Colt had large-framed revolvers that chambered .45 Long Colt cartridges and, well, needs must.

Supposedly the cartridges headspace on a step in the cylinder, which they definately do in a single-action revolver chambered in .45 ACP or 9mm. The moon clips function for loading and unloading double action revolvers.

The Army used half-moon clips.

They, like Garand clips, came loaded and were considered to be single-use items on the battlefield.

For civilian use, full-moon clips are more popular, as there is less handling in reloading,

Removing cartridges from one of these clips is hard on fingers. You can grab them with a pair of needle-nose pliers, but if you want to reload the cartridges, that risks damaging them. It's also easy to twist the moon clips. Bent moon clips with cartridges can jam the fuck out of a revolver.

The remedy is a simple demooning tool.

You insert a cartridge on a clip into the open end, slide it in until the clip touches the lower shoulder, and then twist it right off. The cartridge falls down the hole of the tool and out the bottom.

Bye, Bye, Bonanza

Textron Aviation, which owns Beechcraft, is killing off the Bonanza and the Baron.

The Bonanza's been around since the end of WW2. My late uncle once owned a Debonair, which was sort of a baby Bonanza, back in the sixties, when he had a consulting business that spanned much of the Eastern Seaboard. It was a neat airplane. The Air Force flew them as nighttime low-altitude surveillane drone.

I expect that, with eighty years of production, Bonanzas will be a common sight on airport ramps for decades to come.

A Break

The Smithsonian Cheeta Cub Cam.

The mom is Ambala, she has four cubs.

West Point and King Piggy

This plaque is at West Point:

But President Orange Piggy says that his word is law:

The last time that we had a leader who decreed that his word was law was 1775.

But the constitutional traitors known as MAGA are with him, just as the tories were behind KG-3.

The Surrender Piggy at Work

He sent Special Lackey and his corrupt-as-fuck SIL down to Miami to get his marching orders from his Russian masters:

U.S. officials and lawmakers are increasingly concerned about a meeting last month in which representatives of the Trump administration met with Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian envoy who is under U.S. sanctions, to draft a plan to end the war in Ukraine, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

The meeting took place in Miami at the end of October and included special envoy Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Dmitriev, who leads the Russian Direct Investment Fund, one of Russia's largest sovereign wealth funds.
...
The meeting resulted in a 28-point plan for ending the war, two people familiar with the situation said. The plan, which was made public this week by Axios, came as a surprise to U.S. officials in various corners of the administration and has stirred confusion at embassies throughout Washington and in European capitals.

Trump's surrender plan was drafted by the Russians, given to Witkoff and then Trump blessed it as his own. If Witkoff and Trump were avowed Russian agents, their actions would be no different from what they are. Krasnov is furious because the Ukrainians won't obey his orders to surrender. It'd be like Chamberlain cmplaining that the Czechs showed no gratitude to him for plunging a knife into their backs.

And, of course, MAGA is blindly following Trump down the road of selling out Ukraine to Russia because they are in thrall to their Orange God and have largely lost the capability to disgaree with anything that he does.

Except, of course, when it comes to Epstein and pedophilia. They still have a few standards, even if the Trump Propaganda Team is trying to push down the definition of pedophilia so Trump gets a pass.

Your Sunday Morning Prop Noise

A C-54:

The C-54 was the airplane that made the Berlin Airlift possible.

Backwatering on Ukraine

The Orange Useful Idiot is apparently trying to walk back his Ukraine Surrender Plan.

U.S. senators critical of President Donald Trump’s approach to ending the Russia-Ukraine war said Saturday they spoke with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio who told them that the peace plan Trump is pushing Kyiv to accept is a “wish list” of the Russians and not the actual U.S. plan.

How is that any better that Cadet Bone Spurs and Chief Lacky Witkoff were pushing Ukraine to agree to surrender on Russia's terms?

I have a two point plan:

1.  All Russian forces withdraw to the 1991 border, and
2.  The International Criminal Court to investigate alleged war crimes.

I also think it's a good idea for all Russian military forces to withdraw to a 50km distance from the border, both in Russia and Belarus.

But once again, we have seen Trump's willingness to do Putin's bidding if he thought that he could get away with it. The man is a venal traitor to his core and has to be watched like the sleazy snake that he is.

True, Dat

If there were a show called the Annual Geopolitical Awards they would give The Neville Chamberlain Award for Craven Surrender Monkey to Donald John Trump with a shout-out to Viktor Orban and Steve Witkoff.

Caturday

Priss loves her fleece.

Because It's Friday

I think the engine was in the roundhouse the wrong way.

The Nazi Coast Guard - Updated

Swastikas and nooses are no longer hate symbols for the Coasties.

If you're Jewish or non-white, the sea-going Gestapo Coast Guard is not for you.

No doubt that the Coast Guard will adopt pointed white hoods as part of their summer white uniform, per upcoming guidance of the DHS Secretary, Kristi the Puppy-Killer.

ETA: After intense blowback, the Coasties have ordered All Engines Back Full.

If Seditious Behavior Was Punishable by Death....

...that fat orange bastard would have been hung in 2021.

ICE Meal Team Six, Beer Gut Squad, In Charlotte

Let's be serious for a few. There is not a single thing on this overweight, piss-poor excuse for a cop that legitimately identifies him as a cop. He's wearing ill-fitting camo and a "police" patch that anyone can buy from Amazon or a surplus store. He could be an ISIS terrorist, for all we know.

There is nothing about his "look" that couldn't be copied by home invaders.

These clowns are going to end up catching bullets from law-abiding citizens who would have a reasonable fear that they are being attacked by crimial thugs. And, as for what they'll testify in court afterwards, the track record of CBP and ICE agents is that they are blatant perjurers.

Itch, Scratched

A newish S&W Model 22 in .45 ACP:

It seems to shoot OK with a euro-hold. I wanted a M1917, but this is more practical with a 4" barrel. The chambers headspace the cartridges, but you need to poke the empties out with a stick or a gimme ballpoint pen if they're not on moon-clips. Or you can find auto-rim cartridges, which are not cheap if you don't reload.

I also took a scoped Savage Mk.II to the range. It has been years since I shot a rifle, let alone a scoped rifle. Good reminder on the importance of breath control.

Helmeting These Down, Here

From The Onion:

Winner of The Lickspittle of the Week award: