It read, "Don't blame me, I voted for Trump." Placed on a back of a pickup truck who insisted on driving circles around the gas station with it.

Nothing really new about that slogan; I remember it in the early to mid 90s. Not as a flag, of course (because flags centered around persons are forever odd), but as a bumper sticker: "Don't blame me, I voted for Bush."

Back then, it wasn't worth much more than a chuckle. Republicans were assuming Bill Clinton would run things into the ground and they could look smart in retrospect. Of course, they were wrong; the economy soared under Clinton to record levels. So anybody by 1995 or 1996 who still had a "Don't blame me, I voted for Bush" sticker came off looking rather silly, and it invited a rather pithy response: "Okay, I won't."

By the time of Clinton's re-election, the bumper stickers were all but gone, an unspoken admission that their gamble had failed.

But on the other hand, George HW Bush himself--the last single term president to lose re-election--graciously conceded his loss, did not inspire a deadly insurrection on the US Capitol, and did not fashion himself the leader of a cult like movement. (A political patriarch and patrician, no doubt, but his plot merely involved grooming at least two of his sons for a future run for office several election cycles down the road. And yes, we did suffer for that, but not nearly as much as we have suffered in these recent years.)

Still, "Don't blame me, I voted for Trump," while a recycled messaged, hits a little differently several decades later. Especially when it's fluttering in the wind off the back of a late model oversized pickup truck.

And while we could easily respond the same--pointing to the improving economy and decreasing virus numbers--something tells me that the people flying those flags will be far more recalcitrant to admit that they were wrong, or anything bearing any semblance of reality.

During the on-going audit of 2020 election ballots in Arizona, being conducted by a private consulting company at the behest of the Republican controlled Arizona Senate, reports have surfaced that auditors are now bringing in live panda bears into the Phoenix Veterans Memorial Coliseum to assist with the process.

A spokesperson for Cyber Ninjas--the company conducting the audit, neither actual ninjas nor experienced in the area of ballot auditing--stated that the bears will be used as a discerning mechanism.

"If the panda bear attempts to eat the ballot, there's good cause to believe that the ballot may contain bamboo fibers and thus may have been smuggled into Arizona from China," the spokesperson said. "But if the bear ignores the ballot, it's most likely legit."

"However, we can't rule out that the bear may have simply eaten a lot of bamboo before he got here and is just full," he added. "So even if the panda bear ignores the ballot, it can't necessarily rule out voter fraud."

Initial complications to the process arose when audit personnel mistakenly brought in polar bears instead of panda bears, resulting in the inadvertent mauling and hospitalization of at least three Cyber Ninja personnel at the scene.

DETAILS AT ELEVEN

Stumbled across one of his ludicrous proclamations issued from the Mar a Lago bridal suite wherein he gushed praise upon Kim Jong Un.

In the old times, the Twitterverse would have been beside itself obsessing over such a shameless display of affection towards a brutal tyrant.

I checked the date.

He issued the statement a week ago. Very few people cared to comment on it.

It up and vanished like a fart in the wind.

Slowly he’s being suffocated for attention and that’s a very good thing for this country and this world.