Doing Our Part

Kim, Oliver , and I went down to City Hall to vote today.

It’s an important election here in Wisconsin, which you can tell by the fact that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is attempting to buy it. He’s sunk over twenty million dollars into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race – the equivalent of about ten bucks to you and me, but a significant amount of coin for what is supposed to be a nonpartisan judicial race – in order to buy a seat for the right-wing candidate and return the court to where it was a few years ago: a reliable rubber stamp for whatever Teabagger nonsense the brutally gerrymandered Wisconsin legislature cared to propose in defiance of morality, common sense, and (surprisingly often) the desires of their own voters, many of whom are not nearly as far out on the edges of right-wing extremism as their purported representatives are.

There’s also a statewide race for the Superintendent of Public Education – a post formerly held by the current governor, and a race which features the current incumbent Jill Underly running against a paid lobbyist for private schools. The challenger tried to lie about that in a recent softball interview with one of those pet “news” outlets on the right but couldn’t even keep up that pretense for ten seconds (literally) before backtracking and declaring that yes, indeed, she was exactly the paid lobbyist everyone knows she is and therefore not an appropriate person to lead the state’s public schools since she’s been working to destroy them for a while now.

We also had some City Council races and some slots open for the local school board, and those are also critical because it’s at that level that the world is run. My general tactic for those races is to go to the local GOP website, find out who they endorse, and then cross those people off my list because honestly a two-pound bag of carrots would do a better job of promoting the public interest than anyone the Republican Party favors these days. Having done that I then have to choose from whoever remains, which is a bit more challenging, granted, but not all that hard once you get down to doing a bit of research.

The actual election isn’t until a week from now, but the State of Wisconsin opens things up for in-person early voting a week or two in advance and it’s easier just to do that than deal with the crowds that will appear on election day. Not that election day crowds are a bad thing unless you’re actively working toward the death of American democracy in which case Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has a job opening for you. It’s just easier this way.

Honestly, I suspect this may be the last free election I ever get to vote in, given the accelerating path of the United States toward Fascist dictatorship. Can’t miss out on that, now, can we?

It’s a pretty painless process, for all that. You go to the City Hall and find your way to the big room where the volunteers running the voting are stashed. You provide proof that you have paid your unconstitutional poll tax and possess the state-sanctioned qualifications of a voter, and they check you off their list, though for some reason they can never find me the first time and I have to suggest alternate ways to look me up until they do – apparently this is something that happened the first time I registered to vote here in Our Little Town back in the mid-90s and is now uncorrectable. They hand you a big cardstock ballot, the kind that can’t be hacked by some feral teenager working for DOGE. You take it to one of the little privacy stations and fill it out, put it in an envelope, and then you take it to the volunteer at the other end of the room from where you got it and they seal the envelope, have you sign it, and wish you a good day.

Sometimes you get a sticker, and today was one of those days.

With any luck, Justice Susan Crawford will be seated on the Court soon and there will be at least a chance that Wisconsin can resist the general tide of authoritarianism that is engulfing this nation. Given my general history in elections and the express hostility to free and fair elections that has become standard on the American right these days I’m not all that confident of that, but you do what you can when you can with what you’ve got.

I did my part.

Further Dispatches From the Coup

With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!

My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.

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1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s plans to install himself as Dictator For Life are proceeding at a breakneck pace and if you’re not infuriated by the dismantling of the American republic you are either kidding yourself or part of the plot.

2. One of the defining features of Fascist state is the fact that loyalty to the Dear Leader is the only criteria for any job in government, and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been cutting a path through the federal government firing anyone he sees as having any independent existence other than his will. For example, he recently fired the two Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, in violation of the federal law governing appointees to that body and the 1935 Supreme Court precedent upholding that law. FTC appointees cannot be fired by presidents, period. The FTC enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws and cannot legally have more than three of its five commissioners of the same party, but laws and citizens mean nothing to Fascists and so here we are.

3. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also declared that the pardons issued by Joe Biden at the end of his administration – pardons explicitly designed to shield Americans who had spoken out against the crimes of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves – were null and void because they were signed by an autopen, which is frankly the dumbest thing he’s said this year and there is some pretty stiff competition for that title. First of all, how things are signed is completely irrelevant. Biden declared they were his pardons, and that’s all that matters. Second, no lawfully given presidential pardon can be repealed under the Constitution. There are limits to who can receive a pardon – a president cannot pardon anyone for state or local crimes, only federal crimes, and no president can pardon himself as that is a bedrock foundation of Anglo-American law going back centuries – but such limits do not apply here. All that is happening is that a wildly out-of-control rogue president is claiming absolute power he does not legally have, and we’ll just throw that on the large and ever-growing pile of impeachable offenses that an actual Congress would have acted on by now.

4. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump continues to impound funds expressly approved by Congress, in violation of both multiple court orders and the entire Separation of Powers enshrined in the Constitution, which alone is reason to have him removed from office on a rail and dropped into a holding cell somewhere in the desert.

5. J. Michael Luttig – a former mentor to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and one of the most conservative judges on the bench during his time as a federal judge, though now retired – has put it plainly. “The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America. In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system, and the nation’s legal profession. … America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment.” There is a difference between a conservative and a right-winger, and while I suspect that I would have disagreed with most of Luttig’s judicial decisions I respect him as a conservative mind and not a right-wing extremist. When people like him are sounding alarm bells, the situation is dire.

6. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump along with Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, are following along the checklist of tyrants, as Robert Reich points out. Are we great yet?

7. And why is anyone surprised?

8. Another obvious sign of tyranny is the fawning sycophancy that it engenders among the gutless cowards to latch onto it as a way to protect themselves and promote their own ambitions and petty hatreds. This has been abundantly clear among the GOP faithful as a once-proud party has degenerated into a personality cult for the worst person on earth. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) last month introduced a bill to make Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s birthday a national holiday – something generally reserved for kings or the dead. Brandon Gill (R-TX) introduced a bill earlier this month to put Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump on the $100 bill, displacing Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. Legally, only dead people can be put on US stamps or currency, so this may be an idea I can actually support. And perhaps my favorite FAFO moment of all of this lunacy came when a bunch of GOP state senators in Minnesota led by Justin Eichorn introduced a bill to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” – i.e. any criticism of the Dear Leader for anything regardless of objective evidence – as a mental illness, which would allow state Republicans to institutionalize anyone who dissents from the Dear Leader’s agenda. Later that same day Eichorn was arrested for soliciting sex with a minor, joining the long list of Republican pedophiles lecturing the rest of us on morality and patriotism. Eichorn resigned from the Minnesota Senate before he could be expelled.

9. Another sign of a tyrant trying to shift a country away from democracy is that they seek to control every aspect of elections so as to guarantee their power, and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves are doing precisely that. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump fired Ellen Weintraub, one of the Commissioners of the Federal Election Commission, without cause – something no other president has ever done, probably because it’s illegal. This is an attempt to stack the FEC with loyalists and weaponize it against anyone who opposes him. He’s also planning to dissolve the independent leadership of the US Postal System – which handles mail-in ballots – and incorporate that into the Department of Commerce under his control. This administration has also gutted electoral security programs designed to protect against foreign (hello, Putin!) interference in American elections, stripped federal funding for systems that alert state and local officials of election threats, and disbanded the FBI special unit tasked with confronting foreign threats to elections. He has taken over control of the Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting equipment and determines what standards it should have for security. And he’s weaponized the Department of Justice into his own personal vendetta-pursuing machine, ordering it to drop voting rights lawsuits against Texas, Virginia, and Alabama (all red states) and withdraw from a lawsuit against Louisiana’s rampant gerrymandering. As we learned in Wisconsin during the reign of Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries), if you control the elections you determine the results. Watch your back.

10. If you think that’s hypothetical, notice what’s going on in North Carolina, which hasn’t been a democracy in over a decade. GOP candidate for State Supreme Court Jefferson Griffin lost the popular election by 734 votes – a result confirmed by two separate recounts – but has now decided that he deserves the seat anyway because he’s a white man and his opponent wasn’t and the best way to ratify that would be to retroactively disqualify 65,000 North Carolina voters because “the right to vote is not absolute.” Over 200 North Carolina jurists, attorneys, state government officials, bar leaders, and legal educators have publicly called on Griffen to knock this stupid shit off, grow up, and accept that he lost, but so far he has refused. The Republican National Committee has also refused and has its own separate lawsuit trying to do the same thing for the same reasons. Your vote only counts if it supports the GOP, apparently.

11. Perhaps the scariest feature of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s regime’s increasingly arrogant slide into dictatorship is their insistence that they can just disappear people from the streets. Remember, they tried this the last time, back in 2020, when faced with American citizens exercising their Constitutionally protected right to protest their government – jackbooted thugs were grabbing people off the streets and shoving them into unmarked vehicles that summer, which most Americans seem to have forgotten – and they’re back at it. Right now the most well-known example (and remember, the whole point of this exercise is that you, the American public, will NOT know when people get disappeared) is Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University who has a green card entitling him to all of the legal protections of American citizens, and yes I discussed this last time but it is worth revisiting his case just because it is that important. Khalil was a leader in the protests against the Israeli government’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza last summer, and this month ICE agents broke into his home and arrested him in front of his pregnant wife. It took days of intense media attention to determine that he had been taken to a holding facility in Louisiana where he faces deportation under the express orders of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. At no point has the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump accused Khalil of breaking any law – they simply objected to his position against war crimes and decided they could just make him disappear. They also decided that they could just randomly revoke his green card because Reasons – an outright lie and another indication that this rogue regime will not follow either laws or Constitution if they decide they don’t like someone. And if they can do that to him, my fellow citizen, they can do that to you. You are not safe. You should stop pretending you are.

12. This regime also insists that it can deport people anytime they want for any reason they want or even for no reason at all, a willful violation of law, morals, and Constitution. It leads them to do stupid and immoral things, such as deporting a 10-year-old American citizen recovering from brain cancer, on her way to an emergency visit to her doctors in Texas. Her family are not citizens, but with letters from lawyers and their daughter’s doctors they had been able to enter the country and take their daughter for medical treatment. Nobody in this story has any criminal record whatsoever, so the harpies and mouth-breathers who invariably try to make that case can fuck off now. Seriously, this is what happens when cruelty is the heart of your agenda.

13. They also deported a kidney transplant surgeon at Brown University – a highly specialized medical professional who had a valid visa to be in the United States – despite a judge’s order halting any such action. Defiance of court orders is a running theme here – keep it in mind

14. They also deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants despite another court order forbidding any such thing. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump asserts that he cannot be stopped from doing these things – a criminal assertion that should be added to the large and growing pile of impeachable offenses referred to earlier in this post. The administration has claimed that they were gang members – something Venezuela has confirmed is a lie – and therefore he can deport them under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same law that was used to justify the forced incarceration of Japanese-American civilians in WWII. The Alien Enemies Act was passed by Federalists as a partisan effort to deny Democratic Republicans support and it has continued to be a favorite among lawless politicians ever since.

15. While we’re on the subject, ICE (“America’s Gestapo!”) rounded up 48 undocumented immigrants on March 12 and nobody knows what happened to them. The regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not identified any of them or where they are or what conditions they are being held in. They have simply been disappeared, the way any unfortunate people who crossed a dictator would be. Folks, this is blisteringly immoral and violates both US and international law. And you could very well be next if you’re not careful.

16. Meanwhile, tourists – yes, there are still people brave enough to try to come here despite our Fascist government – are also being disappeared or just blocked from coming into the US. Becky Burke, a UK citizen on a backpacking trip, was held for 19 days, chained by her legs, waist, and wrist, without anyone being aware of her location for most of it. Jessica Brösche, a German tourist, was held for over a month – including 8 days in solitary confinement – despite having a valid passport, visa, and return flight booking. And a French scientist traveling to a conference in Houston was stopped at the border and had his phone searched, and when they found messages critical of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s science policies they refused to let him in. Read that again – they’re denying entry to people based on their opinion of the Dear Leader. Why France, Germany, and the UK haven’t cut diplomatic relations with the US is an interesting question. It’s been done for less.

17. Also, why people would want to keep coming here is another interesting question, because increasingly they’re not. Tourism is already down significantly since January 20, as many Europeans are canceling trips out of fears they might be unlawfully detained. Chinese tourism is down 11%. Canadian tourism is down by either 13% if you count air travel or 23% if you look at vehicle crossings – about 15% overall. Tourism overall is expected to fall by 5% this year, a total cost of $64 billion dollars in lost revenue – this from an initial outlook before Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump took over that anticipated a 9% growth in US tourism. That’s a turnaround of -14% if you’re not good with math. This happened during the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump too, but not so quickly and not with such obvious justification. Honestly, I don’t blame people at all for not wanting to take a chance coming here while this petit-Fascist regime is in power.

18. Meanwhile the oncoming economic recession means that Americans are not going to make up that difference by traveling around the US. Are we great yet? Asking for a friend in the hospitality industry.

19. One positive sign is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are getting their collective ass handed to them by the courts. Federal judges – many of them appointed by the Convicted Felon himself in his first go-round, so you know they’re right-wing as hell – have blocked dozens of the illegal Executive Orders that our wannabe king has issues from his gold-plated throne, 46 of them as of March 21. They’ve overturned the attempt to suspend the US Refugee Admissions program. They’ve overturned the “blatantly unconstitutional” attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by fiat (“Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It boggles my mind,” said the judge in that case). They’ve overturned the order to fire every single female agency head. It’s pretty much been a massacre, and deservedly so.

20. The judge who shot down Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s plan to ban trans people in the military was particularly unforgiving of this illegal nonsense, it has to be said. “The military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext,” she wrote. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.” The entire case presented by the regime “egregiously misquotes studies and ignores data.” If you’ve ever read a judicial opinion, you will know that they are almost always written with a restraint that requires you to read carefully to see any hint of anger but this? This judge is ready to burn them all down over such willfully illegal and immoral conduct, and it’s good to see.

21. This has also been the case regarding the regime’s illegal deportations, which have uniformly been ordered halted by judges hearing those cases – often scathingly. The chief judge for the US District Court in Washington DC has barred the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act and demanded that all such deportations be halted, which would bring the regime into compliance with the law and Constitution if obeyed.

22. But they’re not obeying, and that’s the problem. Chief Border Lackey Tom Homan actually stated publicly, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” And the rest of the administration has followed suit. Folks, this is a Constitution crisis of the first order. When one branch of the government refuses to recognize the Constitutional authority of another it is a direct assault on the republic. The Founding Fathers understood that the branch most likely to do that was the Executive, and that when the Executive stomped on the Legislature (by refusing to recognize that Congress and Congress only has the right to determine what federal money gets spent where) or the Judiciary (by refusing to obey court orders) that is tyranny. The Founders wrote the Constitution to prevent this, but it will only work if we make it work.

23. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are calling for the impeachment of any judge who dares uphold the law and the Constitution because that’s what tyrants do. Tyrants, historically, don’t tend to end well, though.

24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is also attacking the lawyers who work to defend the people he’s assaulting, a clear attempt to intimidate his opponents into silence by weaponizing the federal government against them. You know, folks, when Shakespeare wrote “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” it wasn’t meant as something a hero would say. It was the sentiment of a tyrant getting rid of any effective opposition.

25. Here in Wisconsin we’re having another election for our Supreme Court, and there are two candidates left – a far-right extremist and a Democrat. The extremist, naturally, has found a happy ally in Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk who has spent over $20 million to get him installed onto the court where he can block any number of lawsuits aimed at Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk. The Unelected One has also publicly offered $100 to every voter who would support his pet, which last time I checked is illegal. Wisconsin, do not let that soulless automaton purchase your Supreme Court as a trophy – not if you want to survive. Vote for Crawford.

26. Is it just me or is there a real whiff of 1935 Germany in the air here in the Land of the Free (tm)? PZ Myers, in his blog Pharyngula, has outlined the historical stage we’re in as Gleichschaltung, a term that usually gets translated as coordination or consolidation, as the totalitarians in power use the authority of the state to shift loyalty away from the constitutional state and toward the Leader. It’s designed to unnerve the institutions that have served the nation and force them to comply with the diktats of the Leader instead. It’s designed to isolate people, take them away from their support networks, and make them easy targets. To resist, we must stand firm and keep focused. As always, do not obey in advance, and if possible do not obey at all. If we wish to avoid the fate of Germany, we should heed the lessons it offers.  Thanks to Lucy for the head's up on on Myers' blog post, by the way.

27. In case you think I’m exaggerating, remember that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk sent out something on his very own Xitter about how Hitler wasn’t to blame for the Holocaust – that was the public service workers. And it’s surely just a coincidence that public service workers are so far the most effective opposition to the radical agenda being pursued by Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, right?

28. A little history lesson.

29. If you want to institute a dictatorship, one of the first things you have to do is crack down on education because educated people are notoriously difficult to herd. And this is precisely what you are seeing now, as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves engage in an all-out assault on American universities. They have cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from universities to punish them for daring to hold differing opinions or do things the Dear Leader disapproves of – the University of Pennsylvania, for example, was denied over a hundred million dollars in grants it had already won because there had been a trans woman on the university swim team three years ago. Please note that this student doesn’t even attend Penn anymore. It is enough that she did at one time. They are cutting scientific research. And this past week they tried to destroy the Department of Education, which doesn’t do most of what people think it does (it has no control over state education curricula, for example). Instead it funds student aid through grants and loans. It funds programs that help students graduate from college so they can get better jobs. It helps universities create the kind of educated citizenry that the Founding Fathers understood was critical to the survival of the republic. Tyrants always crush education. When you see education under siege, you should get very worried and very angry.

30. The Department of Education also has an important role in protecting students’ civil rights and providing funding for poor districts, and if you think that’s not why they hate it so much you should think again.

31. Meanwhile the right-wing project of turning the US into an explicitly white supremacist state is continuing to move forward with this administration. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump recently lifted the ban on federal contractors having segregated facilities, so we can all move back to Jim Crow America with confidence. Don’t you want “separate but equal” facilities, citizen? Move along.

32. This white supremacist project has been most obvious in the extreme purges currently taking place on federal websites, notably the Defense Department’s pages. They took down Jackie Robinson’s page. They took down the page for the Navajo Code Talkers who were instrumental in the Pacific Theater – the US Marine Corps acknowledged that they could not have taken Iwo Jima, for example, without them. They took down the photos of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima because it was named after the pilot’s mother – Enola Gay – and the word “gay” was apparently too much for their tiny minds to handle. They took down all mention of the 442nd, the most decorated combat unit in the entire US military during WWII, because it was mainly composed of Japanese-Americans. They took down any evidence of women in the military, or blacks. And yes, this was deliberate.

33. They also took down all of the websites for the Medal of Honor soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The Medal of Honor is the highest award this country gives, and it is given to military personnel who have demonstrated extraordinary heroism under fire. For President Bone Spurs and his Chicken Hawk Brigade to dishonor these veterans like that is unforgivable.

34 Meanwhile the recession is coming. Remember, when 2024 ended the US economy was the envy of the world. Under Biden the US had rebuilt its economy more quickly and on a more stable footing than any industrialized economy in the world after COVID. The US economy was, according to such liberal rags as The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, “the envy of the world.” And it took Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves less than two months to destroy that. Every economic indicator is blinking red now. The stock markets are, depending on which index you look at, either in correction territory or in full-on bear market territory. Banks are pulling back on loans and other credit. Consumer confidence has tanked. Of course Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is saying that it won’t be a problem when the economy crashes. It won’t to him, of course. But for you? Yeah, probably will. You’ve been warned.

35. One of the key factors leading up to this economic crash is the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s policies have made the US such an unstable place to put money that investment money is flowing to other places. Bruce Kasman, JP Morgan’s chief economist, notes that “The US seems to have established itself as a place where people can be comfortable about the rule of law … comfortable about the integrity of information flow, and they can be comfortable that the government isn’t going to be, in unexpected ways, getting involved in the rules of the game. The term which has been in place for a very long time is that we have “exorbitant privilege.” That we end up paying a much lower cost for financing our deficits and debt, we have much greater capital flows and attractiveness of the dollar and assets because of these things. The risk that that stuff starts to come under pressure and becomes a structural issue in the markets is not something I would, by any means, underplay.” In other words, once investors lose trust in the US because of the erratic and harmful policies being implemented by the current regime, that trust will take decades to recover if it can recover at all and in the meantime investment will go elsewhere, our costs will go up, and our economy will suffer. And so will you.

36. And this is why the open assaults on Social Security are going to be so painful if they succeed. Right now Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his band of feral teenagers are demanding access to all of the data in the Social Security system, a catastrophic breach of federal law that would damage both the economy and US national security for decades. Their efforts have so far been rejected by the courts, and in response the current director of Social Security has threatened to shut down the entire program. Think about that. I hope your grandmother is independently wealthy, because this administration is working to steal all of the money she put into that system for her retirement.

37. And while that’s going on the measles outbreaks continue to spread. Measles is a highly contagious disease that is fully capable of killing people and we’d nearly had it eradicated before the halfwit antivaxxers reared their idiot heads and declared that they’d rather see their children die than get vaccinated against the disease. Which of course, given how contagious it is, means that they’d be perfectly happy to see your children die too. And that’s what’s happening. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert “Brain Worms” Kennedy Jr. advises you to do your own thing, which is at least consistent with a man who has been brain damaged. He needs to stop advocating cod liver oil, dietary changes, or other nonsense as preventatives. Seriously – is there any part of this administration that isn’t an embarrassment?

38. Remind me of their priorities again?

39. Of course this is the same administration that is currently working to halt all research into mRNA vaccines – you know, the ones that brought the COVID pandemic under control and the ones that are currently nearing breakthroughs in curing some forms of cancer? The cruelty is the point with these soulless assholes.

40. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy continues to be catastrophic for the US. NATO has formally told him to shove his plans for conquering Greenland up his ass, and at least one member of the French Parliament has demanded the return of the Statue of Liberty since the US was clearly no longer an appropriate place for it. When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s amateur press secretary responded to that by chortling about how the French should be grateful to the US or they’d be speaking German right now, the French MP – Raphaël Gluckmann – noted the gratitude the French have and have always had regarding the US actions in WWII but pointed out that the current administration has more in common with the Nazis they fought than they do with the Americans who served in that war. “The America of those heroes fought against tyrants,” he said. “It did not flatter them. It was the enemy of Fascism, not the friend of Putin. It helped the resistance and did not attack Zelensky. It celebrated science and didn’t fire researchers for using banned words. It welcomed the persecuted and didn’t target them. It was far, so far, from what your current President does, says, and embodies.” Put some ice on that burn, Donnie. You’ve just been owned.

41. In these dark times, remember that false idols prey on the unwary and do not send your devotions to those who would harm you and everyone you love.

News and Updates

1. I keep trying to quarantine the political things to one more or less weekly post but damn those fuckwits make that hard. Every day is a new world of cruelty, lawlessness, arrogance, and destruction. When historians finally get a chance to write about this year – if there are any historians left and anyone to write it for when this year is over – there will not be enough obscenities in the language to encompass the sheer disgust that anyone with more than five working brain cells and even a rudimentary moral code should have in reaction to it all. I remember once, as a fairly small child, watching some terrible made-for-tv movie in the 1970s about the Lincoln assassination and at one point one of the prison guards watching over the convicted conspirators pointed to them and growled at another character, “There’s more bodies than souls in this world.” That line has stuck with me for over half a century, and the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk has certainly proven it correct many times over.

2. But life goes on and we do the best we can. Even as the world ends, there are flowers.

3. Kim and I have begun the project of trying to clear out at least some of the nonsense in our basement. I don’t really want to do this – I would much rather just leave things be and stare aimlessly at the walls – but it has to be done so we get on with it. We’re going to try to spend a couple of hours every weekend on it and this weekend was our start. I picked my own little corner of the basement and decided that, nearly a quarter century after being awarded my PhD and only a few years away from what one hopes will be my retirement, I am not likely ever to revise my dissertation into anything that a publisher would want to see. So the recycling bin is about 2/3 filled with old paper now, and I’m not going to add any more until it gets emptied because paper is just finely sliced lumber and it gets heavy quickly. It was sad but kind of cathartic to see all those drafts and notes disappear. I’ve still got about that much left to get rid of.

4. My back has neither forgotten nor forgiven this and remains unhappy, but unhappiness is the state of things these days so it can just take a number and get in line.

5. What’s really kind of pathetic is that I genuinely can’t tell that anything has been removed just by looking. This is going to be a very long-term project, but so it goes. A few years ago, when Lauren graduated high school and we were worried we might have to move her graduation party into the garage if the weather didn’t hold up, we took everything out of the garage – everything, down to the joists – and piled it in the driveway and then got rid of half of it, donated half of the rest to Goodwill, and put the last bit back. Lauren told us that this was what convinced her we could actually move if we had to. So on to the next step.

6. We bought a wine rack to store our collection of Basilicata reds since it has now outgrown the closet shelf where we used to keep it (a sign that we’re not actually drinking it quickly enough, I suppose), and it arrived this afternoon in a flat-pack box that included a single-sided instruction sheet containing exactly zero actual words. This meant that putting it together was a bit of a trial and error sort of affair but I got it done and set up in the dining room and now the cat is annoyed because it was a bit longer than I thought it would be so her food plate is three feet to the right of where it used to be and that just is not something cats deal with very well, at least not this cat. Maybe we’ll let her have some wine.

7. This is spring break for one of the campuses I work for. Next week is spring break for another. There are thus two half-breaks and no actual breaks and ain’t that just the story of the year.

8. This week has been forever and it’s only Tuesday. If you had told me this afternoon that it was Thursday I would have absolutely believed you.

9. I’m still out there doing my Wordle and posting it to the family text thread, which pretty much identifies me as old though Oliver and Lauren will join me occasionally and sometimes even Kim. It is a nice way of touching base now and then in a busy world. Oliver and I compare notes on the Spelling Bee as well. Nobody but me does the Quordle, but that’s fine. I like to do these three puzzles because then I feel as if I’ve actually won something – a rare feeling in these parlous times – and that’s enough to keep moving forward.

10. If I ever do make it to retirement I have enough projects to last me for decades. I think that’s a good place to be, really. I hope I will get to work on them.

Stocking Up

We went up to the Giant Wine Store yesterday to stock up before Tariff McTariffson decides to reimpose Prohibition in the name of his dimwitted trade war.

This is a strange sort of thing for us, really, as we are not all that much of a drinking group. We ended up with maybe ten bottles of nice mid-range Italian wine – mostly red, almost all from southern Italy (Aglianicos from Basilicata, for example, which have become my favorites of late) – as well as a couple of other non-wine things that struck us as interesting.  The wines will likely last us until the end of 2026 at current consumption rates though to be honest the news headlines these days would seem to require more than that just to survive.

It is a strange thing to realize that if you want to have a small treat you have to outwit your own government to do so.

Not that outwitting this crew of nitwits is all that hard, in principle. It just takes a bit of money (and not all that much of that – not one of those wines was more than $20, and since we bought more than eight bottles we got a 15% discount on the lot) and some planning, and if you have any ability to plan you’re one step ahead of the current regime anyway. They seem to careen from snap decision to overreaction to panicked backtracking and back again in a way that I haven’t really had to deal with since before my kids were old enough to go to daycare.  Even as toddlers they knew how to plan better than the current administration.

Of course, not everyone has a bit of money in this economy – we are fortunate that way, at least for now, though as educators we do have a big red target on our backs and may well find ourselves either out of work or jailed for daring to teach actual knowledge instead of the white-supremacist-washed propaganda that is fast becoming a requirement. And if the majority of Americans had any ability to plan we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

The Giant Wine Store is a fascinating place, on its own terms. It’s as big as an aircraft hangar, stocks almost but not quite everything alcohol-related that you could possibly want (my vague quest to find chinotto liqueur remains unfulfilled – it’s not exactly a pressing thing, though, more like an unfocused sort of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool?” kind of side quest) and more than a few things that I’m not sure that anyone actually wants (Malort?), and they give you free samples from the moment you walk in the door. Yesterday they were running a deal where if you bought two six-packs of Irish beer they’d give you a free glass and engrave it for you while you waited. The glass will go to one of Lauren’s friends as a gift, and now we have Irish beer. I’m not a beer drinker, so perhaps we’ll have a party.

We celebrated with some Thai food afterward, because there haven’t been any moves to make that illegal yet and it tastes good.

Sláinte!

Further Dispatches from the Coup

With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!

My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.

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1. If you’re not actively infuriated by the deepening spiral into pure unadulterated Fascism that the current regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is imposing on the once-proud United States, you’re deluding yourself. You need to be taking this deadly seriously, as in “this could – and more likely than not will – end in bloodshed that might well affect me personally” seriously. Every article I’ve read from political scientists, military strategists, and intelligence specialists over the last few weeks has explicitly noted that there is only one way this goes and our window to stop it or even slow it down is rapidly closing. Do you want to know why I devote so much space to all of this here? I’d really rather not, you know. It sucks. I’d rather be discussing my own life and opinions because that’s the kind of wild man I am. But this is a fast-moving and potentially catastrophic crisis and I am going to do everything I can to throw sand in its gears, even if most of that is just shouting into the wind.

2. Perhaps the most frightening development of the last week has been the abduction and disappearance of a green-card-holding US resident because he participated in protests that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk disapprove of. Mahmoud Khalil helped to lead protests at Columbia University against the Israeli war crimes in Gaza last year, and for this explicitly the current regime has vowed to deport him without trial. Folks, the First Amendment to the US Constitution – literally the first one, written by James Madison and approved by the Founding Fathers mere months after the Constitution was ratified – explicitly bars the federal government from persecuting people it disagrees with. And if they can disappear a green-card-holder for speaking publicly about an issue, there is nothing to prevent them from doing that to citizens. You are not safe. You have been warned.

3. ICE – “America’s Gestapo!” – summarily declared that Khalil’s green card was revoked, a flatly illegal act. Any change in Khalil’s status has to be done through due process of law, including a hearing before an immigration judge. The idea that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s minions have any authority to unilaterally say otherwise is grotesque and criminal and everyone involved in that decision and action should be jailed.

4. When questioned, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (sic) could not provide any clear justification for why Khalil was arrested beyond the fact that he spoke out on an issue on the opposite side from that which Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves are on. As the Alt National Park Service (a site you should be following) put it, “If the mere act of demonstrating is grounds for arrest and potential deportation, it represents a significant erosion of civil liberties and a step toward authoritarian tactics where individuals are punished for their political beliefs rather than actual crimes.”

5. This, by the way, is the time-tested strategy of dictators. Crush dissent, terrorize citizens and residents who were doing nothing illegal, and make people afraid. If you don’t see where this is going there is no hope for you. None at all.

6. For fuck sake, even Ann Coulter – a right-wing ghoul of long standing – thinks this is unconstitutional. “Isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?” she asked. Credit where due, I suppose. Perhaps other right-wingers will start to realize that the current regime will come for them too if they let it continue.

7. Because we are in a new age of McCarthyism. Did you know that there is an entire list of words that you’re not allowed to use anymore if you work for the federal government, according to this regime? Every last one of them is something that would allow Americans to realize that the world is composed of more than just wealthy straight white men. You’re not allowed to say “belong.” You’re not allowed to say “bias.” You’re not allowed to say “climate science.” You’re not allowed to say “cultural differences.” You’re not allowed to say “diversity.” You’re not allowed to say “female.” You’re not allowed to say “hate speech.” You’re not allowed to say “inclusivity.” You’re not allowed to say “LGBTQ.” You’re not allowed to say “multicultural.” You’re not allowed to say “Native American.” You’re not allowed to say “privilege.” You’re not allowed to say “pronoun” or “race” or “segregation” or “sexuality” or “stereotype” or “transgender” or “traumatic” or “tribal” or “victim” or “women.” Again, the First Amendment is specifically designed to prevent the federal government from doing any of this, not that this Fascist regime seems to notice or care.

8. Part of this censorship here in the Land of the Free (tm) is that the current regime is actively scrubbing historical archives of any hint that there were anything other than straight white men at any point in American history. This photo, of black women soldiers during WWII, for example, was removed from its archive without explanation or warning.

And if you really want to know the depths of the blind fanaticism, so was this one.

That’s the Enola Gay, the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. Apparently the word “gay” is too much for their tiny little minds to handle, so they scrubbed this photo. Perhaps there has been enough public ridicule that they put it back by now, but it wasn’t there when I checked. Again, this is right out of the totalitarian playbook. We have always been at war with Eastasia, after all.

9. The next obvious step is to target universities, which are notoriously unruly when it comes to free speech. Even universities can’t police universities – lord knows they try sometimes. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has cut $400,000,000 in federal grants to Columbia University because they offended his precious feefoos somehow – again, entirely illegally and I’m sure that Columbia has an army of lawyers working on this now. He’s cut $800,000,000 from Johns Hopkins University for the same unconstitutional reason, so the’re going to start laying people off while they pursue legal responses. Which is why the current regime is now explicitly targeting for political persecution any law firms who dare to represent people that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump disapproves of.

10. If you want to destroy American science – and with it any hope of American prosperity going forward – that’s how you do it.

11. Iowa State recently sent this out to a prospective graduate student in Chemistry. I have no doubt that it will not be the last such letter sent out this year. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk are not working for the United States, folks. You need to figure out who they are working for before they destroy it all.

12. Is anyone surprised that the US is now on an international watchlist as a violator of human and civil rights? We’re right there with a host of dictatorships and rogue states, and honestly I can’t really fault the watchlist people for it – they’re not wrong.

13. But we’re a free country, right? Right? Hello? Is this thing on?

14. As the next step in the unfolding coup against the United States by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk they are seriously considering invoking the Insurrection Act over a non-existent “emergency” regarding immigration, and if they do that there likely will be no further elections in this country. The Insurrection Act allows a president to declare martial law across the United States – he wouldn’t even have to declare that there is an insurrection happening. Ordinarily the US military would be oath-bound to disobey any unlawful orders that might result from that, but since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump purged both the highest level of military commanders across all four services and most of the Judge Advocates General – the military lawyers who would be responsible for determining what is and is not an unlawful order – and replaced them with blind loyalists, that may or may not happen. One thing about Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is that you should always take him seriously. Like most sociopaths he has no sense of humor, and like most people slipping into dementia he has no ability to stop saying the quiet part out loud. During the campaign he flat out said that if he won nobody would ever have to vote again. Believe him.

15. As the recently purged Secretary of the Air Force put it, “There is one characteristic of this President and this administration, and it is the utter lack of respect for legal restraints. … It is time for the American people, across the political spectrum, to realize what is happening. We have a rogue President and a rogue administration, and we need to acknowledge that and respond.”

16. D. Earl Stephens, the former managing editor of Stars & Stripes, the official newspaper of the US military, is very clear on where we’re heading. It would be helpful, he said, that Americans get over the idea that democracy is theirs by right and has no end date because the US may well be arriving at that point now. “We are in deep, deep trouble, and now would be a wonderful, necessary time to step in front of your favorite mirror and honestly ask yourself what you are willing to do to fight for our nation’s survival.” The clock is ticking, he said, and “there will be blood.”

17. And once that starts nobody has any idea where it will end up or who will die. That’s why it’s a stupid idea. But history is full of stupid ideas that people acted on, so watch your back. I don’t condone political violence in this country, but like every observer with more than half a dozen brain cells I do predict it.

18. Meanwhile, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk have managed to take an economy with the lowest unemployment rate in half a century and a stock market that had increased by nearly 50% in the previous four years and destroy it in less than two months. Stocks have fallen into “Correction” territory (a decline of over 10% from a previous high) and are heading closer to bear market territory with every passing day. The cost of living is going up, not down. Treasury yields are falling. Long term bonds – a sign of how confident investors are in the health of the US economy over the next decade – are down. Corporations are pulling back from investing in new productive capacity because they realize nobody is going to be able to buy any of what they produce and the economic chaos unleashed by this administration makes it impossible to make sensible plans. The price of eggs remains high. All of the economic lights are blinking red and it is very likely that the US will be in a severe recession within four to six months. All this from a position of strength relative to the rest of the world when Joe Biden left office. Truly, everything that Trump touches dies.

19. Even conservatives are noticing this. Fox “News” talking head Peter Doocy – a reliable right-wing mouthpiece for the last few years – went after Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at a recent White House briefing. “This is a White House that came in trying to get federal workers to retire by the hundreds of thousands but it’s tough to make the argument that you should retire if your retirement accounts are getting throttled, which is what is happening right now. … You said that the Dow dropping and dropping is a period of transition. You’re sure nobody here at the White House shorted the Dow?” It will take a shift in the mindset of conservatives to make any real change happen, as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves have already written off everyone else. They’re more likely to write off the right-wingers who disagree with them than listen to them, but it has to start somewhere.

20. No wonder Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is posting “Shut up about eggs!” on his social media feed.

21. The ongoing tariff war is not going to help anything. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has imposed random and punitive tariffs on all of our biggest trading partners – Canada, Mexico, the EU, and China – and has reacted with all of the petulance of a spoiled toddler when they responded with tariffs of their own. I mean, who saw that coming, right? For those of you who have no fucking clue how economics actually works, a tariff is a tax paid by your own consumers. Good luck, my fellow Americans! Everything you buy just got more expensive.

22. We’re going over the roots of the Great Depression right now in class, and it’s interesting how timely the discussion of how “the vast wealth inequalities of the laissez-faire 1920s led to an unsustainably narrow consumer base, which collapsed the economy, and when the US imposed punitive tariffs on its trading partners (despite every competent economist in the world screaming at us not to do that) it made everything worse” actually is.

23. The Wall Street Journal, that noted bastion of fuzzy-minded socialism, called it the “dumbest trade war in history.” And you will lose. Not Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump or Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk – they have more money than they know what to do with. They’ll be fine. But you? Sucks to be you.

24. This may be one reason why Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are so hot to invade Canada – and yes, remember, Trump has no sense of humor and no ability to not say the quiet part out loud, so they are indeed planning to do this. Former US Navy intelligence officer and terrorism expert Malcom Nance predicts an invasion within 18 months, one that will also encompass Greenland (both of which are NATO members, which will trigger an all-out intra-NATO war). The consequences of this will be catastrophic – the US would become a pariah nation, its constitutional structure would likely collapse, and roughly 60% of the US military would likely disobey the unlawful orders that would have to be given to make this invasion happen. Contrary to what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves think, the combat would not end well for the US. Canada is a huge country and its citizens are as well armed as Americans. There would be decades of guerilla war. And if you think this sort of thing is unlikely, just swap “Russia” for the US and “Ukraine” for Canada and see how things parallel.

25. It is an utter moral and political outrage that I even have to point this out. Invade Canada? What the actual fuck? Everyone in the current regime should be removed from office – preferably on a rail – for even suggesting such a thing in public, and then stripped naked, coated in maple syrup and dropped into a forest with nothing but a pair of boots and a pocketknife. And if they make it back, they should have to do it again.  On behalf of every sane American, we're sorry Canada.  It should never have come to this.

25. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Junior Assistant JD Vance tried to bully Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky in a pre-arranged ambush in the Oval Office in what amounted to a complete surrender to Vladimir Putin before Trump declared that he would abandon Ukraine and let Russia have it. This is perhaps the most despicable foreign policy decision the US has ever made, and let me tell you as a historian that this is not an easy title to win.

26. Did you know that the US is actually obligated by international treaty to defend Ukraine? The US, Russia, and the UK signed it in 1994. For Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to shred that in order to suck up to his Kremlin handler is cowardly and subversive. Lech Walesa, one of the heroes of the Cold War resistance to the Soviet Union and now long retired, took time out of his day to remind the US not only of this responsibility but also of our larger responsibility to the world. Not that the American right wing wants to hear about any responsibilities, let alone ones that don’t pay them money. But it’s worth reading anyway.

27. Even Trump voters are “livid” about how Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump treated Zelensky. “I was in my district yesterday,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, “and this city voted for Donald Trump. … The propaganda that they heard from the commander in chief made Americans feel less safe and made them feel ashamed.” As well it should have.

28. It’s not that hard to figure out, though.

29. Meanwhile, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk continues to slash and burn his way through the federal government, though on what authority is not clear. Much of what he’s declared has been overturned by the courts as blatantly illegal and unconstitutional and most of what hasn’t has proven disastrous. Mostly he seems eager to steal all of your information – often, as with the case of taxpayer information, in clear violation of federal law.

30. Efficiency!

31. His “tell me five things you’ve done in the past week or you’re fired” threats were so blisteringly stupid that even officials appointed by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump were telling their people not to bother. And as one intelligence officer pointed out, to comply with this would be an intelligence nightmare and a giveaway to every hostile nation on earth.

32. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s popularity – never high to begin with – has nosedived and taken with it most of his investments. Tesla’s stock has lost over half its value since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was inaugurated. Canada and other nations have canceled Starlink contracts worth billions, and when Musk publicly insinuated that the richest man in Mexico was connected to organized crime that man canceled Starlink contracts worth $7,000,000,000 and then got his allies to cancel contracts worth $25 billion more. Musk has lost more than a million dollars a minute in 2025. He’s overleveraged, and it is entirely possible that his empire might collapse in the near future. It’s not an accident that the first people he tried to fire were the ones in the federal government who had any kind of regulatory authority over him.

33. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to the rescue! He turned the White House lawn into a car dealership and promised to buy a Tesla. Wouldn’t it be bitterly ironic if that was all it took to get all of the MAGAts to drop their gas-guzzling pickups and buy an electric car?

34. The car dealership stunt was not the first time a Fascist leader has used his office for a car deal, of course.

35. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk – the world’s richest man, at least for the moment – has now set his sights on destroying Social Security. I hope your grandmother is independently wealthy, because otherwise she’s going to starve – that’s why FDR put that system in place in the first place, after all, to make sure that the American consumer economy would not run out of consumers in the future and as a byproduct keep the elderly from being turned out into the streets. Social Security is the third rail of American politics and I for one will enjoy watching the world’s richest man – at least for the moment – electrocute himself on it.

36. It all comes down to empathy, you know. The ability to understand and inhabit the position of others. One of the defining characteristics of the right is that they lack this quality and don’t see why that’s a problem. It’s been a problem of the right for nearly a century now, probably longer, and I don’t think it will get better.

I’ll stop calling them Nazis when they stop doing the things the Nazis did.

37. Perhaps this is why Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys and slaves have unilaterally slashed over a billion dollars in food aid given to local schools and low-income food banks across the country, which will not only hurt students and the poor but also the farmers, many of whom were blinkered enough to vote for this guy. FAFO, I suppose. The through-line of wealthy right-wing men immediately using their political power to take food away from children is notable, and pretty conclusive proof of the nonexistence of a loving God.

38. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has introduced his Shiny New Tax Proposal and if you’re at all surprised at who will benefit from this and who will get fucked by it you haven’t been paying any attention at all since Reagan have you?

39. The Culture War continues unabated, since it serves as a useful distraction from the many crimes and embarrassments of the current regime. Did you know that the US has spent millions on transgender mice? You didn’t? Congratulations! That puts you one up on Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump who made that accusation in a nationally televised speech before Congress only to have every responsible commentator in the nation – once they stopped laughing – point out that the mice were actually “transgenic” and were being used for cancer research.

40. Yeah, this is not a surprise.

41. But the assault on trans people – a small and powerless group who just want to live their lives without being destroyed by the blind hatred of the ignorant (and good luck to them on that) – also continues unabated. There is currently a bill in the Texas legislature, for example, that would make the mere existence of trans people a felony punishable by two years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Think about that. Representative Tom Oliverson – a Republican, of course – is so far gone in blind hatred that he honestly thought he could say these things in public and a) not get curb stomped by every normal human on earth and b) have people take him seriously. I have no idea how part “a” is going for him and I frankly don’t care to find out one way or the other, but I do know for sure that part “b” isn’t going well.

42. The GOP is also trying to get rid of 504 plans, because why should disabled people get any breaks? Speaking of lack of empathy.

43. If you haven’t read the transcript of the takedown that Representative Sarah McBride (D-DE) and Representative Bill Keating (D-MA) put on self-important turd Keith Self (R-TX) for his repeated and deliberate misgendering of Rep. McBride (a trans woman), do yourself a favor and look it up. When Self addressed McBride as “Mr.” she responded by addressing him as “Madam Chair,” and when Keating gave Self a chance to exit gracefully that Self obstinately refused to take he told Self that he was out of order. “Have you no decency?” Keating asked – a clear reference to Joseph Welch’s takedown of another self-important turd, Joe McCarthy (R-WI). Whereupon Self dismissed the hearing and fled. Pure gold.

45. There are some good signs, though, in all of this. The courts are having none of it – Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk are getting their asses handed to them by increasingly angry and incredulous judges, many of whom had been appointed by Trump in his previous administration. GOP Representatives are now hiding from their own constituents because they can’t go out without being confronted with their crimes. Anonymous took out what was once called Twitter and likely will continue to do so whenever the mood strikes them. Wankpanzers across the country are rotting in unsellable numbers. You take your victories where you can.

46. Remember folks. We’re in this for the long haul.

A Night at the Operetta

Sometimes you just go.

Nolan was part of the Squad back when Lauren was in high school – one of those friends who no longer knock on our front door because they know they can just come on in and be welcome. It’s good to have friends like that. The Squad hared off in different directions once they got to college but they’ve pretty much stayed close anyway – I got a phone call from Lauren the other day with one of those “that’s a weird question that I’ll bet my dad would know the answer to” requests and there were three other members of the Squad there with her. We had a lovely time saying hello! And I actually did know the answer to the original question, though not the follow-up. Win some, lose some.

Nolan ended up as a theater major where he went to college, and this is the year when everyone starts graduating, so his performance as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance would be his last one before moving on to the next stage of his life. Kim discovered this and announced that she was going to see the show – it’s a good couple of hours’ drive from Our Little Town, which is how you know we live in the midwest where such a thing sounds reasonable. I thought about it for a bit because that’s a long drive, but in the end it wasn’t really a decision. Of course I’m going. That’s what you do.

Although we originally thought the performance was today rather than yesterday. It was a bit of a scramble to shift things around, but not all that hard in the end.

Oliver started a graduate program this semester and was weighed down with assignments so he couldn’t come with us. But we picked up Lauren on the way, bought tickets online while driving, and made it to the theater with about ten minutes to spare.

 

It was a really lovely performance. Nolan is one of the most gifted physical comedians I’ve ever seen, and he used that to full effect in this performance. He’s more than that, of course – his slow fade from comedy to madness as the emcee in Cabaret a few years back was a thing of beauty and frankly terrifying – but honestly Gilbert & Sullivan is a place where you're supposed to just let it all loose, chew on the scenery, and enjoy the ride. His footwork during the Modern Major General song was worth the price of admission alone.

I’d never seen a Gilbert & Sullivan show before, despite a lifetime of theater. Oh I knew the play – you can’t spend any time in theater and not have most of the G&S repertoire done for you, one bit at a time, by your peers. They’re like Monty Python that way, which is probably not a coincidence. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it’s basically two hours of set-piece comic songs draped over just enough plot to justify the next song in line, and in this case the story revolves around a pirate apprentice with an overdeveloped sense of duty (chest thump), a squadron of daughters of a retired English general, a dancing chorus of English bobbies, and an unfortunate quirk of the calendar. The sense of duty (chest thump) gets things going, and then everything rolls downhill from there. At one point they haul out an old-fashioned ring life preserver from a pirate chest and I don’t know if anyone else appreciated the fact that it had "HMS Pinafore" painted on it but I did.

The cast was talented, the pit orchestra was live and in form, and I had fun watching the lighting because that’s just me. What more can you want?

We caught up with Nolan afterward just to congratulate him on his performance and we spent some time doing that before he had to move on and make his rounds. We even called Oliver so he could pass on his best as well, as you can see in the bottom photo.

And then we drove home. We got in far too late, but today was not a work day and the cat let us sleep in.

Sometimes you just go. It’s always worth it in the end.

Please Forward

My old personal email address died over the weekend.

It’s kind of the end of an era. I’ve had that address since around 1998, after all. It was the second non-school address I’d ever owned.

The first one was an address I got from a local provider in the next town south of us a couple of years earlier. It was one of those things where you brought your desktop computer down to this brick and mortar store and they configured it for you on the spot, and then they sent you an annual bill. It never really worked right, though. One time I remember bringing my computer back to the store to complain about the lack of functionality and the boss of the store was there at the time. He got mad at me. “Why is it always my fault?” he asked me. “I don’t know, Matt,” I told him. “Precedent?”

So when a new brick and mortar store selling email services opened up a couple of blocks from where Kim and I were living, we switched.

It’s been a while since then. They were the local provider that hosted my first blog, which ran from 1999-2004. It hosted the web site for the homemade soap business that Kim and I ran from 1998-2005, and for which I still get credit card offers. Got one last week, in fact, along with a solicitation from a recruiting firm to look for workers to help us market soap that we haven’t made since the Bush years.

The provider moved away from that local shop more than a decade ago. Maybe two decades. It eventually ended up a few towns north of us.

And it’s been slowly dying on the vine for much of that time.

My original plan was to keep the address until my mother passed away, since she was the main person who used it by then, but even after that there were always more pressing things to do and it was never really a priority. I eventually compiled a list of about 90 accounts that were keyed to that address, though, and last summer I started moving them over to my new email address – at least the ones that I felt were worth moving, which was about a third of them. I don’t need the local public schools to have my email anymore, for example, or the 4H. Those have served their purposes. But the ones that still had some utility I moved over, bit by bit.

I haven’t been able to send email from that address for about three years now – a long story involving a pile of settings that even my internet-savvy friend who does this sort of thing for a living could never quite sort out – and nobody’s been able to access my first blog since long before the pandemic, but until this year I could still at least receive email and then respond to it from a different account. That stopped without notice New Year’s Day and didn’t return until a couple of weeks ago, and even that rather fitfully. I’m down to about five or six accounts I still need to switch, but a couple of them I can do in person here in Our Little Town. The others I’ll have to call. On the phone. With my voice. Because I am old.

My internet-savvy friend has been trying to buy out the provider for a while now in order to salvage it and keep it running. There aren’t many of these old local providers left anymore in the age of gmail, and it’s good to have some local options. But the owner refused to respond to any phone calls, emails, or smoke signals, and by all accounts seems happy to squat on the IP and do nothing with it.

So when I got my annual bill – a relic of a bygone past – I figured it was time to let it go.

I’ve joined the mob over at gmail now. If you still have the old address you should ask me for the new one. I still haven’t quite figured out how gmail works, but fewer and fewer people use email at all these days anyway so I figure I’ve got time.

In the grand scheme of things it’s hardly a ripple, but it feels sort of elegiac.