medicare/rx sux

medicare:rx sux

I just received, via the failing us postal service, my most recent medicare/rx supplemental insurance statement which shows that my plan has paid precisely zero toward any of my prescriptions this year. Yet this coverage is, according to the incessant anxiety inducing advertisements, the only thing standing between me and the monstrous vortex of the dreaded “prescription donut hole” that will suck my bank account dry and leave me lying destitute and infirm on the side of the road clutching a tattered cardboard sign that reads “will work for plavix if I don’t stroke out first.”

So, I pay about $600 a year in premiums, with a $405 annual deductible…so just from the get go MJE is out a cool thousand bucks. As any typical overmedicated boomer, I ingest at least five prescription meds daily, as well as a few almost certainly useless nutritional supplements primarily to offset the results of ingrained unhealthy lifestyle choices, which I have no intention of changing.

So in order to try to sort out the vexing question of why am I spending money on supplemental insurance, which does not appear to supplement anything, I went in search of some answers, However, the federal government, which administers medicare has, in the interest of cutting government spending, deleted customer service entirely. This move, in addition to reducing governmental employee salaries and benefits, offers the added benefit of hastening the demise of legions of doddering lowlifes living off the government’s pharmaceutical tit. But my third party insurance provider, recommended by none other than the esteemed aarp, still employs customer service agents who do ultimately pick up the phone, but not before subjecting callers to a muzak loop obviously intended to force them to hang up and speed dial dr kevorkian instead.

However, MJE don’t scare that easy…I finally got connected to j joey who assured me most heartily that he could without a doubt answer any and all of my questions to my full and complete satisfaction. And true to his word he provided a lengthy and intricate explanation of exactly how each perceived expense had actually been a benefit that actively reduced my deductible, which currently stands at $35.97 thanks to my having spent $369.03 in cold hard cash.  I then got an unsolicited tutorial on the pricing tiers of various medications should the elusive deductible ever be realized: tier 1 for example would only cost $1 for a 30 day supply, tier 2 would cost $3 for a 30 day supply and so forth. As the tiers get higher the formulas revert to random percentage coverages, which are then sliced into tranches, bundled with other medication pricing structures and sold as derivatives on the big pharma futures markets.

So according to the gospel of joey, two of my meds are tier 1, (theoretically cheap), one med was tier 2 (less cheap theoretically) should I ever meet my deductible, which unfortunately lies somewhere between the end of the rainbow and my shallow grave. My three other widely prescribed medications are not covered at all. The good news is that the pharmacy I use is not a preferred vendor so my costs are much higher. Why is that good news…because in the through the looking glass reality of insuranceland the more expensive the drug the faster I will be able to claw my way to the top of mount deductible!

When I suggested that perhaps I should look for another rx supplement provider, joey patronizingly advised me to simply take different meds. Well, that was the pill that broke this camel’s back. MJE’s response was as follows, “You sound as though you are about 22 years old and since you’re working the graveyard shift (in whatever your time zone is) at an insurance company customer service desk I’m gonna guess that you haven’t been to either pharmacy or medical school. And furthermore you are most likely not suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, anxiety, depression, arthritis, bursitis, fallen arches, bleeding gums, tingling in your hands and feet, dry skin, memory loss, or swollen ankles, just to name a few common afflictions of your client base. So please leave the prescribing to the professionals and stick to convincing your pathetic geriatric medicare dependent customers that they are not being taken to the cleaners by your employer, you little prick.”

To which he replied “Thank you ma’am for that excellent feedback which I will certainly pass on to my supervisor, and have a wonderful rest of your day.”

 

lunch meat madness

cold cut karma

What is it with old geezers who seem to think they, and the rest of us, have all the time in the world when they dodder over to the grocery store. And puhleeze, don’t get on your high horses about the dignity of our elders and how MJE should be respectful. First off, have these fossils looked in a mirror lately? The grim reaper doesn’t take a number at the deli counter my friends. We’ve all been at the mercy of geriatrics who stand in the lunch meat line clutching their paper numbers, peering into the case with an intensity usually reserved for members of the bomb disposal squad trying to figure out which wire to clip. Even after reaching the head of the line they remain maddeningly indecisive, weighing the relative merits of olive loaf vs hogs head cheese, liverwurst vs bologna, etc. At long last they cautiously settle on a preference. Then the weary hair netted clerk embarks upon the hunt for the buyer’s selection, rummaging half heartedly among logs of salami, hunks of ham and slabs of pastrami. However, more often than not, the selected item cannot be found and the clerk shuffles off into the meat locker for the remainder of his shift.

A new meat monger eventually appears on the scene and the entire process begins anew. Finally, we reach the point where a choice has been finalized, and we enter into phase two of the process. The all important taste test. I may be overly suspicious but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the pensioner’s first rodeo in the cold cut corral. And I will further surmise that he or she has a pretty good idea what that slice of compressed meat tastes like. Yet one can’t be too sure, so a tranche is gently laid upon a square of wax paper and offered to the potential buyer like the krupp diamond upon a velvet pillow. It gets a good once over, a sniff and then is masticated slowly and deliberately. Our senior gives the appearance of a master sommelier thoughtfully pinpointing the terroir of a fine vintage, assessing the bouquet and savoring fruit forward notes of cherry or kombucha followed by a clean mineral finish. The buyer hesitates, the throng in line behind him shuffles restlessly, hopeful for a swift and positive judgment; he hesitates, then offers a nod of approval. The crowd goes wild! No it doesn’t because by now all of the other geezers in line have had to dash off in search of the bathroom.

However there is one final hurdle: the intensely subjective preferred proportions of the slice. The deli meister carves a sliver and holds it up for approval. If it should get a thumbs up, then the full order of 1/16 of a pound will slide over the counter, however should it receive a thumbs down, off the scrap goes into the trash bin. And it often takes several attempts before the ideal slice is achieved, with each imperfect pass tossed onto the garbage heap.

For god’s sake america, half of ethiopia could subsist for weeks or even months on one grocery’s single day’s cast off bits of deli meat. But then those poor people would all develop hypertension and high cholesterol and drop dead of stroke or heart attack before they had a chance to starve to death.

family tree

family tree-2

Politics, gun violence, russia and porn stars have worn me out so I will turn to another soul deadening topic, family. MJE tends to roam alone with the OB&C as an occasional traveling companion. Perfection. However, once a year I am burdened with one of the fragments of flotsam floating in my familial gene pool in the form of my half-sister, astrozeneca. Many years ago she abandoned her perky nineteen fifties given name and was reborn a self-proclaimed sufi, purportedly ascetic and mystical. Well if asceticism means that she limits herself to herbal tea infusions, comfy shoes, voluminous stretch pants and injesting only those foodstuffs prepared by others and which require no effort on her part, then I guess she’s ascetic. As far as mystical, that’s a mighty grey area. According to merriam webster, mystical means “inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, fascination and awe.” Well it’s a mystery to me how we could possibly be related. And in point of fact, she does inspire a profound fascination with the thought of putting my head in an unlit oven. Awesome.

Siblings aside, MJE and the OB&C have two offspring with whom my loyal readers will be familiar, daughter albatross and son knot, neither of whom displays a single intellectual or cultural trait of ours, good or bad. Albatross is easing comfortably into her late forties having conned us into paying her freight since birth by producing two grand children. She supplements our generous contributions by taking full advantage of the largesse of the united states of america, the state of california, the county of alameda, and the city of oakland. We suspect she is also a grifter of some success as exhibited by her elaborate and presumably expensive head to toe tatts. We were able to pry loose her elder child bandoliera early on and she has miraculously grown into a wonderful young woman unscathed by her early childhood brush with her mother’s narcissistic personality disorder. But in a surprise move, albatross issued forth a second child, jesus! one day shy of bandoliera’s 17th birthday. A miracle baby, apparently the result of a virgin birth as any human paternal being has thus far failed to materialize, at least to us. We have every confidence that she’s got her financials covered in that regard, although the notion of birthing a child in order to guarantee an income stream is deeply perverted to say the very least

Then we have son knot and his long-suffering wife, alhambra. Knot is a graduate of the university of georgia, but is of the opinion that college is a complete waste of time. According to him, success in life boils down to having the right contacts. Wish we’d known that before we went into the poor house to put him through four years of wasted education when we might have simply signed him up for the rotary club. In fact he states with some pride that he never learned a damned thing in college. We could not agree more.

Knot and Alhambra have three little moppets in their clutch; apricot, seymour and the ear-splitting caboose decibelle. They are as different from one another as avocados are to armadillos. Apricot is a pile driver, unwise to get in her way. Destined to be the big boss. Seymour is the thoughtful and kind one, also apparently something of a savant, a whiz with numbers, especially sports stats. Destined to be a very successful bookie or a hedge fund manager. Decibelle is the wild card, a vegan from birth she subsists on pasta and strawberries. She is destined for something beyond our current realm of knowledge; discovering the source of dark matter, figuring out what sketchy stuff sarah huckabee sanders has in her past that keeps her from getting security clearance, or perhaps she’ll hop aboard the astral plane with astrozeneca. We’ll be watching from the other side.

bang, you’re dead

bang you're dead-1

Do you really want your kid’s teacher packing in the classroom? Really? Boy oh boy I am neither a sociologist nor an education or behavioral expert but even MJE can see the (literal) fatal flaws in this idiotic idea. The conald has revised his blanket suggestion that all teachers be armed to a vague recommendation that only teachers that are “adept” with guns should carry. Hmmmm. Adept, does that mean someone who can hit a target in the protected confines of a gun range? Or someone who is a pretty good deer hunter? Or maybe someone who is terrific on his or her playstation shooting up all the aliens?

Proficiency with a gun is obviously vital, but what about the psychological ability of an educator to actually shoot another human being, even in a relatively calm situation of danger. Never mind in a chaotic atmosphere of panicked students and staff members wildly running amidst a hail of gunfire? What are the chances that the armed teacher would remain icy calm, take accurate aim at the gunman and hit him (I just say him because virtually all mass shooters are men…another good topic to explore) without harming any innocents? I imagine those odds are pretty slim.

I think perhaps a far more likely scenario might be a student who gets pissed off at another student or his teacher and advances on the teacher, overwhelms him or her, takes the gun or gets the key to the drawer where it is locked and is so pumped up that he just starts shooting. Or say a troublemaker kid starts towards the teacher in a menacing manner, does that teacher have the psychological capacity to take out a gun and shoot the unarmed student? Without the availability of a gun there might instead be a fist fight in the hall or a melee on the playground, leaving some bruises, black eyes and detention slips when it’s all over. No one is dead or mortally wounded and there are no traumatized and heart broken survivors.

And what are the consequences for the armed teacher who may commit murder or inflict grave injury on an unarmed student? Censure, suspension, criminal charges? Even without any punishment, would that teacher ever be able to face going back to teach her students as though nothing had ever happened. I suspect that he or she would be damaged forever from the terrible guilt.

And now we have the news that the armed and trained broward county deputy charged with protecting the students from harm at parkland simply stayed outside the building “in a defensive posture” as he heard the gunfire inside. He couldn’t bring himself to do what he was actually trained and hired for. When the gunfire stopped and the bodies lay dead on the floor he finally summoned the courage to enter. Which begs the question, if this experienced person could not handle the situation, why in the world would anyone expect mr peplum in the department of fashion design and teacher of the wildly popular ap class “from the bustle to the hustle” or mrs cruller in the cafeteria, who can serve up 500 lunches, tray to trash, in under 30 minutes, to be more effective in such harrowing circumstances. The idea is absurd on its face and its being put forth by the president is the highest form of crass political gamesmanship. He glibly throws this red meat to his base, knowing full well that it has absolutely no chance of going anywhere. Then when the next school shooting happens, and it will, he will puff himself up in righteous indignation saying if they’d only listened to me those kids would be alive today. Using dead children to promote oneself politically is truly the vilest form of indecency I know of.

empathizer in chief? SAD!

be still thy beating heart-1

If our president cannot display heartfelt compassion and empathy after a tragedy like that which took place in parkland florida last week what the hell could possibly move him? Wait I know, getting impeached and or indicted for conspiring with the russians and money laundering, bet that would get him good and choked up.

The speech he gave to the nation after the massacre was almost painful to listen to. It was so patently obvious that he didn’t give two figs about those kids and he just did it because the president is expected to say something. The only thing missing from his tepid remarks was a plug for mar-a-lago. I suspect the wordsmith for this bit of synthetic pathos was none other than stephen ‘lead lids’ miller. It had all the hallmarks of his typical homilies and his own personal style of delivery; plodding, pedantic, condescending, and completely and utterly devoid of any human feeling. It was almost laughably hypocritical, “answer hate with love,answer cruelty with kindness” telling the audience how important it is to “make deep human connections”, uhhh, haven’t seen any sign that the conald follows that sage advice in his own life. He then addressed the children directly saying “you may feel lost, alone, confused or even scared.” Gee ya think? Yet another nut case sauntered into a school and gunned down seventeen people and wounded a score more with an easily (legally) acquired automatic weapon and kids might be feeling scared? Wow, how perceptive conald, you really nailed that one.

From then on it was a laundry list of the officials he was to meet with which I suppose was meant to demonstrate the depth of his concern to the grieving parents and schoolmates. Maybe it’s just me, but if my child had just been killed in his or her classroom I don’t think having the president meet with the nations governors and attorneys general (at what was without doubt a previously planned confab) would provide too much balm for my broken heart. Unless of course if gun control might be on the agenda which it almost certainly will not.

Perhaps the fact that he and melanoma delayed their weekend getaway at mar-a-lago by a couple of hours (and a round of golf) to zip over to parkland offered them the solace they need from their president. Or not.

be still thy beating heart

be still thy beating heart-1

MJE and the OB&C keep an apartment in the big sleazy for reasons that are 1000% legit.business. First off, the apartment is the registered worldwide headquarters of our small intestinal bug biz. It’s location is entirely unrelated to the fact that louisiana has one of the lowest state income tax rates in the country as well as a well documented laissez faire attitude when it comes to regulating potentially hazardous materials. In summary: an excellent business environment for us.

We are located in the lower half of a duplex building in the uptown area of new orleans. Conveniently situated close to a large park, which provides relaxation and exercise opportunities so critical to the mental and physical health and well being of our employees, including the corporate canine. The proximity to excellent restaurants, venues for our many, many company team building get-togethers, is crucial. Our policy is to offer the finest food and drink to our hard working employees and in particular to our board members to encourage and reward their dedication and hard work.

There is however one major drawback to the building: the tenants occupying the upper space. They are a couple, one is a teacher and aspiring base player, the other some sort of environmental “consultant,” although what exactly she does is about as clear as the water that flows down the mississippi and right out of our taps. One thing we know for sure is that her home “office space” is a mere 12′ above our heads and that she heavily and constantly stomps about in bare feet. Her footfalls are so loud they sound like a forking budweiser clydesdale.  And we are all now doubly blessed as she just issued forth a new baby! Not sure what the colt’s name is but understand it’s a stud. Too much joy for sure!!!

Those of you who have procreated understand that newborns are needy and require a good bit of attention. In the dark ages of MJE’s early motherhood we put our babies to sleep on their stomachs, transported them on the floor of the car so they wouldn’t fall off the seat, toted them in cheap carriers made of lead based chinese plastic, fed them food filled with additives, surrounded them with choking hazards and pushed them around in flimsy cloth strollers that folded into something that could fit in a fly rod case, and yet they survived. Some less well than others (see: albatross) but that’s a story for another post.

Today’s new mothers, including the aforementioned clydesdale, are far more aware of the perils of the world and how difficult it is for a recently hatched being to adapt to the less than comfortable environment outside the womb. In an effort to ease this transition some new parents resort to devices that mimic the mother’s heartbeat in utero. And that my friend is exactly what roused us this morning, after the clydesdale’s 4 am milking. Duh, dum…duh, dum…duh, dum…hum, for almost two hours. As we all know, the OB&C is deaf as a forking post and even HE heard it. At first we thought it was rain dripping from the gutter or a plumbing pipe but then it dawned on me, no man, it was big momma’s virtual heartbeat that woke us up, pissed us off and creeped us out all at once. What it did not do was lull us to sleep nor calm us down, in fact quite the opposite. It took all the restraint I could muster not to climb a ladder and pound on the ceiling screaming foul obscenities at mother and babe alike.

If the clydesdale could do either of the following it would immensely improve my quality of life.

Get a pair of really plush cushiony slippers or a pair of running shoes, and wear them all the time. No exceptions. A few nice thick rugs couldn’t hurt. Send us the bill.

Stop your goddam heart. Are you going to play that thing forever, say until he hits adolescence because that’s a pretty stressful time, or takes the SAT’s or goes off to college, or maybe after he graduates and can’t get a job. Or when he gets married and realizes that it’s not nearly as much fun as bar hopping and frat parties with his old girl friend. Or when he has his first kid and it won’t sleep…

But with my luck I’ll be like the narrator in poe’s tell tale heart, doomed to hear that heartbeat unto eternity regardless.

it’s carnival time, again

mardi gras again-1

Good mardi gras to all. It is particularly welcome this time around as an excuse to stay blind drunk until the stock market settles its stomach and we get a new president. MJE and the OB&C have long since stopped walking the avenue mardi gras morning, although I do miss running into many of the neighborhood marching clubs that meander through the streets. And there is the occasional creative family lot who all dress as crawfish, or hotdogs or I suspect this year one of the conald’s wives, but sadly the tradition of dressing up is, like the louisiana marsh, slowly disappearing from the planet.

This mardi gras, as in years past, family and friends whom you rarely see and care about even less, appear out of nowhere suddenly dying to reconnect. This year the atlanta circus opted out of the annual visitation based on the lousy weather forecast. Just as well, feeling very old every time I look at the 3 ton wooden ladder and child’s parade seat, so glad not to be dragging that behemoth back and forth from parade routes. Not to mention the requirement to provide and keep ice cold (or piping hot), multiple beverage types (no light beer! lots of sauvignon blanc!), food items (no nuts! and no lucky dogs, decibelle is a vegetarian) and the attendant assorted paraphernalia required to feed a crowd on the run. Happy to hop to it when someone decides to pay me a caterer’s wage but this gratis (and generally unappreciated) business is definitely on its way out.

But we weren’t entirely solo, OB&C’s niece mike and her wife loosy along with their immaculately conceived toddler whom they call cheeto (truly) showed up with two other gals, the married margies plus another woman whose leanings remain obscure. The OB&C and I were definitely, and in his case literally, odd men out. Let me be perfectly clear, the sexual practices of my fellow human beings holds no interest whatsoever for me, in fact the less I can think about it the better. Turtles and giraffes okay but people, no.

So on we march toward tuesday’s bacchanalia of the fatted calf and even fatter population after the ceaseless eating and drinking involved. God I hate that. And apparently so does she because the hammer’s coming down hard on wednesday. Ashes, ashes, they all fall down, which is pretty much what most of the populace will be doing. The good news, and this is not fake I swear, there is a now a drive through option to get your forehead smeared with holy ashes to show off your piety. But if you never leave the car or hang up your cell phone are you truly redeemed?

Hmmmmm……….

like, genius in chief

Genius in chief

The conald, during his “executive time” watching fox and friends had someone read him exerpts of the scathing new book about the dysfunctional trump white house and the low regard with which his staff and cabinet members regard his intellect. He countered that he is a genius or in his words, “like, really smart,” furthermore in his own assessment “a very stable genius.” He had previously thrown down the intellectual gauntlet to his secretary of state, rex tillerson who had referred to him as a forking moron, by daring him to take an iq test to see who is in fact the smarter cookie.

I am sure his staff shifted into super overdrive figuring out how they could create an intelligence test that could possibly display the conald’s superior intellect. Their solution was to have have both men sit for a stanford-binet test of intelligence. The test for mr tillerson would contain actual sample questions from the real test whereas the conald’s test would contain a somewhat different series of questions. For added insurance, the president’s test would consist of ten questions and mr tillerson’s 135 questions. But in the interest of fairness, both men would be given equal time to complete their tests.

MJE has obtained copies of the tests and is happy to share a sampling of them with her loyal readers…

The real questions are listed first with multiple choice answers, followed by the conald’s “alternative” questions and answers:

  1. Four individuals form a business and create a contract to divide the profits equally among the four. Gary invests $11,000, Neil invests $4,000, Jill invests $5,000, and Steve invests $8,000. The profits at the end of the year are $5,600. How much less does Gary receive than if the profits were divided in relation to the amount invested by each owner?

Answer: $1000, $1400, $800 or $2200.

Alternative trump question:

Four individuals form a business and create a contract to divide the profits equally. How much of the profits does each investor receive?

Answer: one tenth, one fiftieth, one fourth, zero. Contracts are for losers. I would get 100%. Winners don’t share.

  1. The number, “three thousand, eight hundred, sixty-eight,” when written backward, is read, “eight thousand, six hundred, eighty-three.”

Answer: true or false

Alternative question:

Spit written backward spells tips.

Answer: true or false

  1. Tony gets married next month. One year ago from the date he will get married, Tony was away in Spain for New Year’s Eve. What month is it?

Answer: October, November, January, February, December

Alternative question: Where is Spain?

Answer: Paris, Equador, the failing European Union or Manitoba

  1. Do the words credit and acclaim have opposite meanings, similar meanings or no relation?

Answer: opposite, similar or no relation

Alternative question: What is credit?

Answer: A way to buy things with money you don’t have, a piece of plastic that gets you free stuff, how you build a business with other people’s money and never have to pay them back, or all of the above

  1. Three painters can paint three walls in three minutes. How many painters are needed to paint 27 walls in nine minutes?

Answer: 3,6,9,12,15

Alternative question: Where is our really fantastic amazing president going to build a great big beautiful wall and who’s going to pay for it?

Answer: Between Dallas and San Bernadino-paid for by St. Louis, between Brooklyn and Reno paid for by Minneapolis, between us and them-paid by them, obviously, or between Florida and Nebraska-paid for by Spain.

Both tests are extremely difficult, but from comparative percentage of correct answers provided by mr tillerson and mr trump it is clear that mr trump’s intellect and reasoning power are superior. His ability to reduce complex problems to the least mentally taxing analysis is unprecedented and when it comes to “thinking outside the box” he literally has no equal.

fired and furious

fired

It is never wise to turn your back on a poison toad (genus bufo) or to lick his back for that matter. Toads are notoriously vengeful and easily slighted. They are particularly sensitive to comments about their personal appearance, warts specifically, as well as their grooming habits. Any criticism of their intellect, strategic political acumen, or past business success will be met with fire and fury the world has never seen.

Bufo bannonensus was at one time the white house top toad and the most important amphibian in the world. He squatted on the shoulder of the president and acted as his most trusted advisor. Because the current occupant of the oval office is a pretty empty vessel, bufo banno was able to whisper noxious notions into his ear and help tailor american policies to his nationalistic and xenophobic world-view.

Bufo banno was dead set against draining the swamp for obvious reasons, no amphibian with half a brain, is going to deliberately obliterate his own habitat. Hell no, he’s gonna fill that sucker up with like-minded creatures with whom he can easily machinate and maneuver the levers of power. Bufo banno became the apex amphibian for a reason, brother.

A large part of bufo banno’s ideology that the hominid president seemed to find attractive is territoriality and the exclusion of what are considered to be lesser species. Frogs, newts, and salamanders need not apply. The big bufo believes that in the ideal ecosystem there would be an actual wall around his personal space whose perimeters he considers to currently be way too porous. He does not subscribe to what he regards as the misguided notion that a diverse population is beneficial to the overall health and well being of any environment. He views those who support that theory as nothing more than a bunch of loser reptilians bitching about their lot.

Bufo banno also thinks that it’s high time our swamp quit subsidizing other less fecund wetlands. Not our problem. His message is “get your act together, show some initiative you pathetic parasites …we’ve done everything we can to underfund regulatory agencies and peacekeeping organizations, support autocratic regimes, extract ourselves from onerous goody two shoes alliances, not to mention abandoning our allies, so as we toads like to say, hop to it. “

In an amazing twist of fate big bufo got himself thrown out of the swamp, he apparently was too fetid for even that morass. Yet despite his absence the muck continues to ooze along just fine. Turns out that poison toads are a dime a dozen in washington. But two things that make big bufo both unique and particularly dangerous is that he knows who did what to whom and where they dumped all the carcasses. And last, but by no means least, he can sing like a veritable canary when threatened.

MJE strongly advises her readers and their loved ones to steer clear of poison toads and, no matter how tempting, and not to lick them. Ever.

a totally positive 2018!

a totally positive 2018!

MJE tends to lean to the dark side in life but decided to start 2018 with some awesome positive predictions for the new year:

Totally positive:

That congress will work diligently in a bipartisan effort to annihilate the other side.

That the OB&C will wear his pajamas inside out every other day, trust me on this.

That e-vanka will continue to breathlessly pursue her life goal of empowering women who work, except the ones in bangladesh and vietnam who slave away 12 hours a day in dangerous factories to slap together her eponymous fashion crap.

That the conald and congress will open up every national park for oil drilling and natural gas extraction and pursue any potential disney projects.

That the conald will continue to trade insults with dim sum oon about who’s the bigger bad ass, or who in fact has or is the bigger ass in general.

That john kelly will either quit as the conald’s chief of staff, have a nervous breakdown or both.

That jared kushner will announce he’s transgender.

That bannon will prove to be the worst political frenemy in human history. He and the conald are a match made in hell. Gotta love it.

That tillerson will quit and move to a deserted island without wi-fi and outside of range of north korean missiles.

That e-vanka will wake up one morning and realize this orthodox jewish stuff just doesn’t add value to her brand and will say fork it and order in pulled pork for shabbat.

That melanoma will have a safe room installed in her residential quarters should the conald get any randy notions after watching the hotties on fox and friends. Run melanoma, run like the wind.

That the democrats will be their own worst enemy in the mid-term elections. There’s only one roy moore after all.

That the planet’s future is totally dependent upon the conald’s inability to hold a thought including what the secret codes are for launching a nuclear attack.

Stay positive!