It’s Monday, June 4th, 2018…but before we begin, ICYMI…

Millennial evicted from parents’ home paid for car storage, but balked at child support, records show

“…Rotondo lost joint custody of the child last year after battling the mother in Onondaga County Family Court. And the court’s judge, Julie Cecile, described Rotondo’s efforts to find a job “minimal at best.”

A June 2017 filing said Rotondo opposed paying more for child support, despite paying $920 yearly for a storage unit to house his broken Chevrolet Camaro and Volkswagen Passat vehicles, according to the New York Post.

“When questioned why he did not sell such belongings, he claimed that they had no value except sentimental, and that he had no legitimate answer for the obvious question of why it made sense to spend more than $9,000 over the last five years to store valueless belongings, at the same time asserting that he could not afford to pay support for his son,” Cecile wrote in a ruling that sided with the mother.

Rotondo reportedly testified that he applied to only two jobs in 2016 – but turned his nose up at working in retail or fast food establishments because “he did not want to accept a position he did not think he could work at for at least three years,” Cecile added…”

This lazy clown’s another example of life imitating art, as he’s the embodiment of Cousin Eddie:

By the way, if you haven’t figured it out, THESE clowns…

…are lying, scum-sucking scam artists…which constitutes an insult to self-respecting scam artists the world over!  Sorry Kenneth, but flying commercial isn’t akin to getting into “a long tube with a bunch of demons”; that would be getting into any aircraft with you!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as the editors at the WSJ term it, The Donald’s thrown caution to the wind and it’s now…

Singapore or Bust

Trump gets the summit he wants with Kim Jong Un.

“The Trump Presidency is often harrowing but never dull, so perhaps it was inevitable that a summit between Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un would be back on again. The two adversaries who were publicly trading schoolyard taunts a few months ago will now meet on June 12 in Singapore after all, and the only thing we can say with any confidence is that no one has a clue what will happen.

Mr. Trump announced that the summit is back on a week after he cancelled it amid North Korean insults and unanswered phone calls. But in a sign of the surreal nature of this diplomacy, Kim then sent a top emissary who is on the U.S. sanctions list, Kim Yong Chol, to meet in New York with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. On Friday Kim Yong Chol met with Mr. Trump for more than an hour in the Oval Office, and the summit was full speed ahead.

“I think we’re over that, totally over that, and now we’re going to deal and we’re going to really start a process,” Mr. Trump said at the White House. “The relationships are building and that’s a very positive thing.” Asked if the North had committed to giving up its nuclear weapons, Mr. Trump said, “I think they want to do that. I know they want to do that.”

But there is the rub. If the North is committed to giving up its weapons, it hasn’t said so publicly. It has merely committed to a diplomatic process and a “phased” denuclearization in return for certain unspecified concessions from the U.S. But that is also what the North committed to do in the 1990s and again in the 2000s only to continue its nuclear work in secret and eventually toss out United Nations inspectors.

The summit will be an immediate propaganda coup for Kim, a sanctioned rogue who will appear on the world stage with a U.S. President for the first time. The question is what Mr. Trump will be able to take away beyond the photos of a presidential meet and greet. Mr. Trump is nothing if not confident in his negotiating abilities, and he clearly savors dominating world attention with this kind of made-for-global-TV drama.

But he also isn’t known for mastering policy details, and it was only days ago that the North released three American hostages after months of captivity, and only months ago that it essentially murdered American tourist Otto Warmbier after arresting him for trying to take home a wall poster.

On Friday Mr. Trump ignored all that and said “I don’t want to use the term maximum pressure anymore. I don’t want to use that term.” He added that “we’re getting along. You see the relationship. It’s not a question of maximum pressure.” Mr. Trump always overdoes the diplomatic flattery, but no one should forget that Kim and his family run a country that is essentially a prison for millions—and a literal prison for tens of thousands.

Perhaps a summit like this is worth trying since nothing else across four American Presidencies has worked to stop the North’s drive to become a nuclear power that can strike the U.S. We certainly hope for success, but Mr. Trump will have to be prepared for the consequences if Kim is merely there for the show.“

In a related item, The Dear Douchebag is apparently a little short on cash, as he’s looking for the Donald to…

Pay for My Hotel!

Seriously, is there anything else you need? 

Since we’re on the subject of the vainglorious and narcissistic who believe the world revolves around them, in a absolutely must-read commentary from The Washington Free Beacon, Matt Continetti records The Dear Misleader’s misrepresentation of history:

The World as It Wasn’t

Barack Obama’s revealing reaction to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory

Maybe you can help me out. I’m puzzling over a line in a New York Times story on The World As It Is, the forthcoming memoir from Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes. The article, by Peter Baker, is about the parts of Rhodes’s book that deal with Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton.

“In the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election,” Baker reports, “Mr. Obama went through multiple emotional stages,” including flashes of “anger,” “rare self-doubt,” and taking “the long view.” Do not think, however, that during the final weeks of his presidency Barack Obama was withdrawn or more self-obsessed than usual. People needed him. The day after the election, Baker continues, “Mr. Obama focused on cheering up his despondent staff.”

For example—and here is the line that confuses me—”he sent a message to Mr. Rhodes saying, ‘There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.'”

Say what? How does a dimly remembered Carl Sagan quote relate to 2016? Was Obama speaking in code? Was this an example of him taking the “long view”—implying that lol nothing matters because we are all cosmic dust adrift in the void? Was he suggesting the planet might be saved from Trump by an alien invasion? It sounds like the message you’d find inside an especially pretentious fortune cookie.

Obama’s words once again revealed his colossal lack of self-awareness. The passages of The World As It Is that Baker quotes in his piece reinforce the widespread impression of our forty-fourth president as an aloof, smug, vainglorious chief executive totally divorced from political reality (Along with any other form of reality!). The shock, disgust, confusion, and horror with which Obama and his team greeted the election results exemplified the very attitudes toward democratic procedure and populist conservatism that fueled Trump’s rise. The only lesson Barack Obama drew from the election was confirmation of his own moral superiority.

Even the former president’s moments of “self-doubt” were framed as opportunities for lackeys to remind him of his greatness. Rhodes describes a ride in the presidential limousine during which Obama asked, “What if we were wrong?” A leading question no matter the situation, particularly when the man posing it is president of the United States. What did Obama expect Rhodes to say—”Yes, Mr. President, we royally screwed the pooch?”

Apparently Obama had read a column—I have an idea of which one—about the role of identity in shaping peoples’ lives and political choices. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he mused. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” No question his fellow passengers that day reassured him that no, no, he did everything he could to bend the arc of history a little more toward justice. It’s not your fault, Mr. President. You didn’t push too far. All you did was troll Donald Trump into running for president in the first place, stand by while Ferguson and Baltimore rioted and burned, give Iran billions in exchange for empty promises, allow Russia to establish a beachhead in the Middle East for the first time in half a century, browbeat Israel at every opportunity, ram through Obamacare after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, preside over the mass migration of children across the southern border in 2014, expand the DACA amnesty despite saying 22 times you lacked authority to do so, use the permanent structure of government to devastate the Appalachian economy, convince half of America that liberals were ready to take their guns (this wasn’t hard to do), have your Education Department issue orders that led to the campus-assault craze and the deterioration of classroom discipline and that, months before a presidential election, mandated trans-bathrooms in schools, have your Justice Department preside over a sloppy (I’m being charitable) investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server that included, at one point, your attorney general secretly meeting with the husband of the subject of the investigation on an airport tarmac, muscle out Joe Biden, who might have won, from the race, and hand the party back to the less-likable half of America’s most polarizing and corrupt political couple. Not to mention the eight years of lecturing. Oh, the lecturing.

One of the refrains of the Obama presidency was that, yes, America may have let Obama down in the past, and America may let him down still, but America remains worthwhile, so long as it maintains the capacity to become more like Obama. “Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” he says in the book. What was he early for? “Fundamentally transforming America”? “The moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow”? For the death of the olds who stood in his way?

Imagine carrying the burden of Barack Obama, of being too enlightened, sophisticated, mature for his time. In his conceit that historical progress is assured and irreversible, and that challenges to such progress are reducible to irrational prejudice, Obama is a paradigmatic liberal. Yet America’s frequent elections, tendency to rotate offices, decentralization of power, avenues for the expression of popular discontent, and multiple veto points continually frustrated his desires. By the end of his second term, he was expending a great deal of energy working around the constitutional structure established in 1789 and amended 27 times since.

Rhodes gives us a glimpse of Obama’s interactions with the political leader he most resembles. “Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama that she felt more obliged to run for another term because of Mr. Trump’s election to defend the liberal international order,” Peter Baker reports. “When they parted for the final time, Ms. Merkel had a single tear in her eye. ‘She’s all alone,’ Mr. Obama noted.”

One tear: How noble, how poetic, how sad. Poor Angela. She crushes Greece in a vice, destabilizes an entire continent by inviting a million Muslim immigrants into Germany, and this is the thanks she gets: Brexit and Trump. It never seems to have dawned on either Obama or Merkel that the only people truly invested in defending the always-vaguely-defined “liberal international order” are the men and women who sit at the top of it. Certainly the voters are not as satisfied with current circumstances as they.

Last year, it was Merkel’s turn for electoral repudiation. Then Italians repudiated their elites last March. Unlike their American counterparts, however, the undemocratic liberals of Europe have sophisticated ways of bypassing popular sentiment. Obama must be envious. No third term for him, either literally or figuratively. Instead Hillary is out, Angela is alone, and Obama is left with his $65 million book deal, his “high-8-figure” Netflix deal, and, above all, his vanity intact.

Even Maureen Dowd can’t stomach The Obamao’s overweening pomposity, observing:

“…in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?“

While at American Greatness, courtesy of Speed Mach, Roger Kimball records…

“In order to understand the shattering surprise that gripped team Obama, it is necessary to appreciate the sensation of absolute moral superiority that wafted them along. This was no mere election. It was a fight between good and evil. And they were in no doubt that they were the good guys. “Cuba, climate, Iran,” Rhodes says, what will happen to those things now that Donald Trump is in charge? Note that he puts forward those items as if they were triumphs for the Obama administration and not disastrous missteps.“

In a related item, as Tim Meads reports at Townhall.com, MSDNC is “happy to announce” they’ve hired the utterly unqualified but conspicuously connected Rhodes as a political analyst on Meet the Press.

While you’ll recall Rhodes as the architect of some of Barry’s biggest lies…

“Rhodes, 38, said in the article that it was easy to shape a favorable impression of the proposed agreement because of the inexperience of many of those covering the issue.

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Rhodes set up a team of staffers who were focused on promoting the deal, which apparently included the feeding of talking points at useful times in the news cycle to foreign policy experts who were favorably disposed toward it. “We created an echo chamber,” he told the magazine. “They [the seemingly independent experts] were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”“

…still, he had a sensitive side:

We feel Ben’s pain…mainly because we’re laughing so hard our sides are aching.

And in a follow-up to an item we published last Friday, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy confirms our concerns about Trey Gowdy:

“Well, well, well. The bipartisan Beltway establishment has apparently had its fill of this “Trump colluded with Russia” narrative — the same narrative the same establishment has lustily peddled for nearly two years. The Obama administration recklessly chose to deploy the government’s awesome counterintelligence powers to investigate — and, more to the point, to smear — its political opposition as a Kremlin confederate. Now that this ploy has blown up on the Justice Department and the FBI, these agencies — the ones that went out of their way, and outside their guidelines, to announce to the world that the Trump campaign was under investigation — want you to know the president and his campaign were not investigated at all, no siree.

What could possibly have made you imagine such a thing?

And so, to douse the controversy with cold water, dutifully stepping forward in fine bipartisan fettle are the Obama administration’s top intelligence official (and well-known liar) and two influential Capitol Hill Republicans who evidently pay little attention to major testimony before their own committees.

Former National Intelligence director James Clapper was first to the scene of the blaze. Clapper concedes that, well, yes, the FBI did run an informant — “spy” is such an icky word — at Trump campaign officials; but you must understand that this was merely to investigate Russia. Cross his heart, it had nothing to do with the Trump campaign. No, no, no. Indeed, they only used an informant because — bet you didn’t know this — doing so is the most benign, least intrusive mode of conducting an investigation.

Me? I’m thinking the tens of thousands of convicts serving lengthy sentences due to the penetration of their schemes by informants would beg to differ. (Mr. Gambino, I assure you, this was just for you own good . . .) In any event, I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine the Democrats’ response if, say, the Bush administration had run a covert intelligence operative against Obama 2008 campaign officials, including the campaign’s co-chairman. I’m sure David Axelrod, Chuck Schumer, the New York Times, and Rachel Maddow would chirp that “all is forgiven” once they heard Republicans punctiliously parse the nuances between investigating campaign officials versus the campaign proper; between “spies,” “informants,” and other government-directed covert operatives.

Sure!

Then there are Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), General Clapper’s fellow fire extinguishers…”

From Lois Lerner to Benghazi, we urge you to look at what Gowdy’s DONE, not what he’s SAID.  Then ask yourself this: if a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, why haven’t Lois Lerner, John Koskinen, anyone even remotely connected with Hillary’s private email server or Obama’s election interference even been charged?!? 

Sorry, but at some point one has to conclude Gowdy and his ilk are playing for the other side.

Next up, Yet Another Sign the Progressive Apocalypse is Upon Us, as FOX News reports a…

Texas teen, 13, is charged in stabbing death of friend; victim’s mother claims adult stood by and watched

“…Anntoinette Carter said that the suspect and her daughter, 14-year-old Nylah Lightfoot, were on-and-off friends, and they asked to have a sleepover at the Carter home. When she said no, the friend asked Lightfoot to come over and collect her clothes, KDFW reported. When Lightfoot arrived at the apartment complex in south Fort Worth early Tuesday, the girls got into a physical fight. Carter said her daughter prevailed but the suspect retaliated.  According to police, that’s when the suspect pulled out a knife and stabbed Lightfoot several times.

…Carter alleged that here was at least one adult inside the home who stood by and watched the ultimately fatal brawl, The Star-Telegram reported….”

So,…explain again how America’s ills would all be cured if we just got rid of guns?!?

Which brings us, inappropriately enough today, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with anther titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Shirtless, knife-wielding man with snake fatally shot by police at strip mall

Now that’s not something you see everyday, even in The Land of Fruits and Nuts.  And in our opinion, this poor soul was definitely the latter.

Magoo