Archive: June 2025

Order in the time of chaos

calvinball The new basis for law and order

As is my wont, I spent some time today reading the latest missive from fellow baseball and politics nerd Craig Calcaterra. On many things, as you know if you've been here before, Craig and I, we reach. (Not on everything. I could not care less about European football and I have never been into indie bands like so many of my generational peers are/have been.)

Anyway, Craig devoted some of his newsletter today to his emotional state of mind regarding, well, the world, and in the wake of my Saturday rant I've been feeling much the same way. As Craig put it, "I do not believe it is hyperbole to say that America's 249-year old legal, political, and philosophical order has been effectively destroyed in a little over five months and whatever is left of it is severely wounded." I do quibble about the "five months" part, as the five months in question are in actuality a resumption of the destruction that started at a much slower pace in 2017 and was suspended in 2021, but the point is spot-on.

I don't think Craig is unique in this, I think a great many of us are freaking out to one degree or another as the POTUS47 regime and its compliant agents on the Supreme Court take a blowtorch to the Constitution without a peep of resistance from the majority party in Congress. I mean, there were big marches and stuff just a couple weeks ago. But the fact that despite the protests in the streets, despite the outrage and the lawsuits, despite the blatant betrayal of oaths, nothing seems to matter—at least, on a short- or medium-term scale.

In my latest spiral, my mind went where it most likes to go, to the universe of Star Trek; in this case, though, it wasn't uplifting at all. The Trek canon has been prescient in a lot of ways despite missing the mark on the eugenics wars of the 1990s (which has been suitably retconned to a few decades later). But ever since 1967 the shows were telling their audience that to get where we needed to go, we were going to hit the skids in a big way in the 21st century. Now that we're actually in the 21st century, the accuracy of some of the future history details is less impressive and more frightful. 

Craig is less of a nerd than I am in that regard, but he got to a similar place without the Trek references, living with anger and depression over the utter chaos being wrought. Order and the predictability of cause-and-effect, of action-and-consequence, are out the window because, again quoting Craig (who is a better writer than I), "we're living in an era of legal Calvinball." It used to mean something profound to be American, but now "even the most basic and explicit Constitutional rights mean nothing to this Court or this regime and that there is little if anything that can be done about it, at least any time soon."

Baseball is where Craig's and my nerddom intersect most completely, so when he discussed how attending a couple of games over the weekend provided a kind of therapy I completely understood. "Those games helped me feel like I was living in an orderly world," he wrote, continuing:

[I]t was worthy effort, because baseball is rooted in order. There are rules. They are enforced. There is a mathematical logic to how the proceedings in a baseball game unfold and following those proceedings required that I assume a logical and ordered mindset. There's nothing I know better or that I have known longer than how baseball works and retreating into a headspace where nothing was happening other than the baseball game in front of me had the same effect as reciting a mantra. It quieted my mind. It banished the chaos, at least for a while. It made me feel connected to something in ways I've not felt connected to anything for what feels like ages.

...  I felt more calm and centered than I've felt in several months. I know that feeling won't last because we live in an age of fresh daily horrors. I know that my disorientation at the lack of order and predictability of these times and my attendant depression will return the moment I begin reading the news once again. But any reprieve is a welcome one and the two ballgames I took in while in Detroit were just what the doctor ordered. They served as a reminder that, if I try hard enough, I can probably find my way through this shit.

 We can't take our eye off the ball, if you'll excuse the metaphor, but these reprieves are essential. We need to keep sane so we can eventually recover from the wreckage of the regime. If for you it's not baseball but something else, have at it. But take the break, clear your mind of existential dread, and come back fighting.

Because in the words of Captain Pike, "the future is what we make it."

Tagged Politics, Baseball, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on June 30, 2025 at 4:16PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Saturday rant

scotus

Being angry is merely the default state for most of us here in POTUS47’s reign of American carnage. How could it not be with every action, every speech, every embarrassing Troth-Sential post, every unhinged and tyrannical impulse to come out of the White House since noon on January 20th?

But today my anger had kicked up a few notches to irate.

And this time not so much at POTUS47, although he is, of course, a mammoth factor in all of this. No, today my ire is aimed at the entire Republican party.

Each and every Republican elected official and, yes, many of the people that voted for them. I know a lot of them were duped and hoodwinked, but others were all-in on ushering in bigoted despotism, so they get some emotional fury too.

Why the uptick in bloodboil? Look no further than the allegedly Supreme Court.

Yesterday the six corrupt and illegitimate justices occupying SCOTUS ruled that lower courts have no say over the lawless authoritarian power-grabs of President Temper Tantrum. They also overturned Supreme Court precedent on a free speech case, told public schools that parents can exempt students from learning anything they choose on religious grounds, and told Louisiana voters to shut up about gerrymandering until at least 2028, among other things.

SCOTUS has destroyed its legitimacy completely with the anti-Constitutional and pro-authoritarian rulings as well as the slow-walking approach in deliberately failing to hear critical cases over the past few years. The six so-called "conservative" justices have been tools of POTUS47’s fascist takeover and are as dangerous to the rule of law as is anyone in government.

And they are being allowed to be such, allowed to further shred the Constitution, allowed to whittle away the rights of everyone in this country, by the Republican party.

Republicans, thanks to our dumb electorate who already lived through the 2017-2021 horror show and apparently learned nothing, have the majority in both houses of Congress and thus have the power to put an end to these abuses of power right now. Today. In fact, they are the only group empowered to do so by legal means—I mean, the Cabinet theoretically could invoke the 25th Amendment and remove POTUS47, but the very reason most of them are in their positions is that they won't do that under any circumstances.

So that leaves Congress.

But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a feckless toady. Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer, Kevin Hern, they are either fascists or cowards; the rank-and-file House Republicans include even worse individuals. If they were not, if even some of the Republican House caucus actually believed in and abided by their oaths of office, they would bring articles of impeachment to the floor immediately for at least a dozen officials. If the Republican contingent in the Senate were even partly beholden to the Constitution and the values of a democratic republic, the impeached would be promptly convicted and removed from power.

The blob of sociopathic insecurity that is the president would be first among the list to be impeached, but Vice President Hillbilly Elegy has betrayed his oath of office as well, and then there are the Cabinet secretaries—the stunningly incompetent RFK Jr., the rage-drunk Pete Hegseth, the empty shell of Marco Rubio, the cruel criminal cosplayer that is Kristi Noem, the should-be-disbarred AG Pam Bondi—and at least four Supreme Court Justices. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are corrupt as hell, John Roberts uses his position as Chief Justice to support lawlessness, Brett Kavanaugh perjured himself countless times in his confirmation hearings. Gorsuch's seat was stolen. (Barrett's was technically legitimate despite the political opportunism that allowed her nomination, so there's less of a case for her.)

This Supreme Court has already:

You want to talk about "activist judges?" There they are.

We have this court because (a) Republicans in the Senate stole a nomination from Barack Obama and gave it illegally to POTUS45; (b) our dumb electorate was snookered into voting for Republican POTUS45 in the first place; (c) Senate Republicans chose to confirm three appointments to the court by POTUS45 despite  those nominees' demonstrated abuses, perjury, political intent, and fealty to a corrupt president; and (d) no Republicans in Congress will remove any of the justices despite their corruption and their wanton disregard for upholding law and Constitutionality.

There is so much about this time we're living in, this post-2016 era, that will require enormous repair if and when the despotic administration of Donny Cruel Whinybaby is overcome. So many safeguards that will need to be enacted, so many protections against rogue Justices as well as rogue and unAmerican electeds.

But that requires getting through to the other side of this safely, and right now I just see preambles to the worse that Star Trek told us we'd have to get through before the better comes. SCOTUS' blessing to criminalizing homelessness is a step toward Sanctuary Districts. SCOTUS declaring that the law only applies in certain areas and to certain populations puts us on the path toward balkanization of the United States and the second civil war. President Psychopath's bombing of Iran could easily lead to nuclear proliferation and escalation in that region that involves mushroom clouds, from which it isn't a big jump to WWIII and the post-atomic horror. We can only hope we get a visit from the Vulcans by then to shock us into sanity.

 

Tagged Politics, SCOTUS, Star Trek, Posted on June 28, 2025 at 11:38PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Family dynamics

UncleJim James C. Harrison, 1950-2025

This post is going to be a bit rambly, I haven’t quite sorted out my thoughts yet, so bear with me.

My Uncle Jim died a couple of months ago. It wasn’t a surprise, he had been ill for a while and had some months earlier opted to quit his treatments, so when the day came I was not thrown for any loops, really.

This past weekend I joined my dad and Marty in going down to central Oregon, where Jim had lived and where his widow, my Aunt Marion, still does, for a sort of family get-together/mini-memorial for Jim. I had not been aware of his actual memorial service until after the fact, so I was glad to attend this whatever it was going to be even though I really had no idea what to expect.

Aside from Marion, I knew no one there; even my two cousins I had not seen in maybe 35 or 40 years, so though I had technically met them they were basically unknowns as well. So when we arrived and joined the group for dinner it was a little awkward. (Well, not for Marty, he’s a social butterfly, but for me and, to a lesser degree, I think, Dad.) Turns out all these other people were from Marion’s side of the family and that crowd had been getting together every couple of years or so for I don’t know how long.

The fact that this group of 20 or so folks—Marion is one of, I think, seven kids, so add spouses and children and whatnot and you get a large number pretty quick—had been a close-knit extended family struck me a bit in its contrast to my upbringing.

Extended family for me, when I was growing up, was very much an ancillary thing. There was some, those folks existed—a couple of them had weird designations like “uncle-cousin,” but that’s another story—and occasionally I would see some of them. But really, aside from my grandparents they were just relatives rather than family to us. (Well, to me, anyway; I shouldn’t speak for my sister, her mileage may vary.)

And there weren’t that many, really. My mom had had a brother, but he died in the mid-’70s at a rather young age and I never had much of a chance to know him (all I really remember about him that isn’t something told to me by others is that he also liked to watch Star Trek, so I liked him). My dad’s two brothers we would see once in a blue moon. I remember Jim and Marion visiting one Christmas when I was in single digits, and I recall maybe two visits to see them in Oregon. Visits with my Uncle Bob I recall even less; there was one trip after Christmas when I was 18, but I don’t recall any others even though there must have been at least one. Bob’s two kids were reasonably close in age to my sister and me, Jim’s two were younger. (Later on my mom remarried and we added some step-relatives, but they were strewn all over the globe and when we saw them it was a different sort of thing, usually involving a lot of conversation in a language I don’t speak.)

But the point is we didn’t see them much. We weren’t close by any stretch, partly because for each of them there were, let’s call them issues.

Bob and his wife were/are über-conservative Republicans who got their view of the world from Rush Limbaugh and Fox “News.” As I recall, they didn’t make a big stink about that when we’d get together, but it did pervade the atmosphere, if you will (I don’t know if they’re full-on MAGA cultists now or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me). With Jim and Marion it wasn’t politics so much as religion. They were devout churchgoers under some Christian denomination or other (I want to say Baptist, but that could be wrong) whereas I was raised with no religiousity whatsoever. The doctrine could feel a bit oppressive even though, as I would later think about it, they weren’t ever overtly evangelical with us or anything like that. It was enough, though, that they both were different and, in those particular ways, unappealing due to intolerant values from either the GOP or the church, and I tended to think of Bob and Jim not as individuals but simply as “Dad’s conservative brothers.”

It got more complicated after I moved out on my own, because a couple years after that my dad came out of the closet. Neither of his brothers took that very well given the aforementioned issues and thus my attitude toward them became even less charitable.

Around that time, maybe a year or two later, I came home from work and found a message from Uncle Jim on my answering machine (kids, ask your parents). He had come through town and looked me up, though he wasn’t sure if he had the right number; I guess there was more than one TC Harrison in the phone book. It was a friendly message, a nice attempt to get together for a meal or something, but in my mind, he had been a jerk to my dad and thus I didn’t want to talk to him, so I ignored it.

In the ensuing years, Jim had come around regarding my dad’s gayness and they mended fences; he and Marion would often visit Dad and Marty and occasionally we would cross paths when I would also be down to visit. It really wasn’t until around then that I recognized, with the distance of independence and some measure of maturity, that the grouping together of “Dad’s brothers” wasn’t a fair label—the two of them were very different people and deserved to be considered individually. As I thought about it, I recalled that every one of my interactions with my Uncle Jim as a kid were positive ones, from his showing me how his model trains worked to his generosity in picking up stuff like an old “Mr. Spock’s Music From Outer Space” record in his travels and sending it to me just because he knew I was a giant Star Trek nerd.

I still had to reckon with my biases regarding religion—I tended to (and, if I’m being honest with myself, still do to a fair degree) gravitate toward the sentiment articulated in the Mahatma Gandhi quote, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians”—but I did adjust my perspective, to be sure, and I definitely answered the phone if Jim called while passing through town again.

Even more recently, after Jim’s cancer had started its lethal invasion and he was approaching the end, my dad shared with me some things that Jim had written. He and Marion were both schoolteachers, and even though his focus was on the mathematical side of things he still had an educator’s facility with language and wrote very well. One of the pieces I read was a long essay about his personal evolution—his changing values, his attraction to and then subsequent alienation from his church, his concerns about how that evolution would affect his relationship with his daughters (who had been raised under those heavy doctrines), his wrestling with having a homo brother and how that related to the rest of it, things like that.

It was a moving piece, really, and made me realize that, unlike my Uncle Bob, my Uncle Jim and I were really a lot alike. Not in a shared interests kind of way—Jim was into cars and motorcycles, math and model trains, music and instruments; my nerdiness was always inclined to science-fiction and Star Trek, comics and cartooning, baseball and politics—but in terms of personalities. We were both introspective, process-oriented thinkers; idealist romantics; and, I’d like to think, of generous temperament.

So I wanted to be at this thing over the weekend. Maybe learn a little more about my uncle and see his daughters and whoever else might be there.

At the memorial portion of the weekend, my cousins read a little from a different selection of Jim’s writings that had similar themes to what I had read. They had photos from different points in Jim’s life displayed all around the room. And several of these other people, the strangers form Marion’s family, had splendid things to say in my uncle’s memory. It all has me thinking, not in a really profound way, but in a general sense, that I missed out by not spending time with him when I had opportunities to before. Uncle Jim was a pretty good dude.

The remainder of the weekend was just socializing, really; I chatted with a couple of my cousins’ kids and one of my cousins herself (the other was pretty busy organizing everything, so I didn’t talk much with her), made small talk with some of the others, ate a lot of salad (I wasn’t the only vegetarian in attendance, but I might as well have been). On Sunday a few of us went to the Class-A Eugene Emeralds baseball game, where I discovered just how devoted my cousin’s youngest daughter is to the Tri-City Dust Devils of the Northwest League (who were not playing in this game), which is fantastic—even Class-A players need fans, right?—and shortly afterwards I packed Dad, Marty, and our stuff back into my car and headed up I-5 for home.

It was an interesting few days. Nice to have a connection to my cousins as middle-aged adults rather than pre-teen children. Interesting to see an extended family unit that seems to function better than most. And nice to learn a little more about my late uncle.

And now, back to the world. Such as it is.

Posted on June 26, 2025 at 5:44PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Patriot Day: Protests and baseball

protest I frequent this place a lot as an umpire. Today the fields were swarmed by protesters, eventually reaching 70,000 strong

A lot happened today. Most of which I didn't actively participate in, but it still deserves some mention here, I think.

I fully intended to attend one of the smaller No Kings protests this afternoon; one took place not far from my home, I was planning to at least go and take photos and add my voice for a little while. I'd intended to, but my nocturnal ways caught up with me and I failed. I was umpiring last night until almost 11:30, got home well after midnight, then watched the full Mariner game from earlier in the evening, then had trouble falling asleep... anyway, when my alarm went off at 10:30am I had only been asleep for maybe three hours. Still, I got up and fed the cats, but then plopped back down to check in with things on my phone and before I knew it I had fallen asleep again. (In a rather awkward position, to, leaving me with a nasty kink in my neck that is still annoying me.) I re-awoke around 2:30. A quick shower and I moseyed out to the protest site, but it had mostly dispersed by then. Alas.

But even without me, Seattle showed up in style, with over 70,000 people congregating at Cal Anderson park (often the site of my umpiring adventures) before marching to Seattle Center. Along with several smaller events around town, the greater metro area represented well in the nationwide protests today and I am most gratified to see the great masses of Americans giving POTUS47 a metaphorical (and occasionally literal) middle-finger salute on his birthday. It's especially gratifying to see the split-screen, as it were, of protest turnout on one side and the "crowd" at Donny's multimillion-dollar ego parade in DC on the other. I hope he's seething about it.

Seems the vast majority of the events were civil and trouble-free, but there were bound to be a few exceptions, like the Virginia MAGAt who drove his SUV into protesters and someone in Salt Lake City shooting a protester. The forces deployed to LA unsurprisingly escalated things there, but not until after the No Kings event had ended; I wasn't there, I have no way to really know if the violence perpetrated by law enforcement/Federal forces was appropriate or not, but my instinct is to believe it was at best an overreaction. I know the elderly veterans being arrested in DC for nothing more than protesting Donny's ego parade will have quite the case when they sue, though.

Anyway, I did not attend but fully support the No Kings events. After my abortive look at the remains of the small suburban one, I came back and fixed a sandwich and started to clean up a bit before heading down to the ballpark. Not knowing what traffic would be like after today's disruptions, I left pretty early but getting downtown turned out to be a breeze and I was over an hour early to the game. Still didn't get a giveaway Steelheads cap, though, that was a small bummer. (I'm over it.)

Turned out to be a fun evening. One of my umpees (hi, Neal) was there and had free seats near him down low, so my Spuds teammate Mona and I ended up taking in the whole game from pretty close in, which was pretty cool. I am still very much used to my perspective from 327, so tracking the ball was a little tough from the more expensive seats. It's a nice change of pace, though, and the opportunity was much appreciated.

It was a great game, too, with the hometown M's staging a 9th-inning comeback to win in walkoff fashion. One dude sitting in the row behind me struck up some conversation here and there during the game, first about my scorekeeping then about ballparks and then about game strategy. Always fun. Nice to talk with Neal a bit off the softball diamond, too, though the PA onslaught at the game makes for a less than stellar discussion venue.

All in all a good Saturday. (Edit: Events in Minnesota notwithstanding—I just read about that a few minutes ago. Jesus.)

Below are a few of my favorite photos/signs from the nationwide protests today. Please to enjoy.

 


From Los Angeles. The Constitution is a perfect prop for today, but I also really enjoy the sign held up by the guy in the lower left corner.


Handmaid's Tale imagery has been used a lot, but hey, cliches are cliches for a reason. The sign is great, too.


From Florida. Glad to see the rest of the GOP get a mention, but mostly I like rooting for gators here.


A little hard to read, but it says "You don't get to talk about what's illegal when you voted for a felon."


Truly inspired to use "Schoolhouse Rock" here.


No notes. 100%.


And, just for fun, the celebration after the win at the ballpark. J.P. Crawford (2nd form left) had a perfect night, going 3-for-3 with two walks
(though he did get picked off 2nd base).

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Baseball, Society, Posted on June 15, 2025 at 12:49AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Extortion of the press

costas

I've always been a fan of Bob Costas, the legendary sportscaster that wrote a book on baseball back in the early 2000s that made me think he is the one guy in the world who could solve all of MLB's problems if he became baseball commissioner. He might be a little too Yankee-centric, but he's a pro's pro and he always knows what he's talking about when he's on screen.

Costas was awarded the Mirror Award for “distinct, consistent and unique contributions to the public’s understanding of the media” last Monday and used the platform of his acceptance speech to scold the news media in general and several media outlets in particular for failing to commit journalism.

Most of his address surrounded the sports news business, which included this beauty: "Network TV sports is the only business I can think of where the buyer must continually flatter the seller. 'Here's your billion dollars or more, and if we pulled the Brinks armored truck up to Park Avenue and haven't delivered it in the proper denominations, we apologize profusely and we'll be right back.'" Broadening his focus to news generally, he deplored the reluctance of (primarily) TV news from "identifying and acknowledging the elephants in the room."

"Beyond sports," he went on, "the free press is under attack." Excoriating ABC and CBS for "paying ransom" in the form of settlements to frivolous lawsuits brought against them by President Convicted Felon, Costas articulated what to most of us is the blindingly obvious but to news organizations apparently a novel concept: Journalism is about reporting fact, not propagating two sides of an argument. Especially when one side is completely nonsensical BS.

“What’s happening now are not matters of small degree,” Costas said, citing "ongoing assaults on the basic idea of a free press."

Costas approached the close of his speech with this:

Donald Trump’s view of the world ... is through a prism of what benefits him, there are no higher ideals. There are no principles at work other than what benefits him.

...Because he is the president, what he does and what is done in his name has been normalized so that "responsible journalists" have to pretend that there’s always two sides to this. There really isn’t two sides to much of what Donald Trump represents.... If someone is contending that the Earth is flat, in order to appear objective, you are not required to say, “Well, maybe it might be oblong.” No, it’s not. Certain things are just true.

And regrettably, something that’s true in America right now is that the President of the United States has absolutely no regard, and in fact has contempt, for basic American principles and basic common decency.

Seems like a good place to close this post as well.

Tagged Baseball, Politics, President VonClownstick, Bob Costas, Posted on June 12, 2025 at 5:28PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Bring us the finest muffins and bagels in all the land

SpudsCapLogo

My softball team, the Smiling Potatoes of Death, is old. Yes, the team in one form or another has existed for a very long time—one or two of my teammates were on the team in the 1980s, if I'm not mistaken—but what I mean is, our current roster skews "mature." I'd guess our average age is around 52 or so (with outliers at either end of the spectrum), while the rest of the league is generally around 30ish.

Thus, we routinely get pasted.

Our first game this season was a 21-3 loss, which was fairly typical. Our league sadly has a mandatory mercy rule, meaning that if you're behind by 15 runs after, I think, four innings, the game ends, so we usually feel pretty good if we get to play five-plus frames. Last week we lost 12-0, but since we got a full seven innings for the first time in god knows how long it felt like an achievement.

Yesterday, though, the Spuddies actually were smiling when we left the field, because we won a game. It's the third time in the 7-8(?) years I've been with the team that we've been victorious. It's almost like a genuine bigfoot sighting in its rarity.

True, we were playing against a team on the lower end of the talent meter in Bat's Amoré, but a win is a win, especially when you're the league's analogue to the last few years' editions of the Colorado Rockies. More than one of my teammates claimed they would be celebrating the event—and using it as an excuse to slack off on other things—for at least a month.

The world sucks right now. We're contending with an attempted fascist takeover of our Federal government, U.S. Senators are being assaulted and handcuffed by security staff working for a cabinet secretary, our legislature is debating how cruel they want to be in robbing and endangering the public in order to give billionaires more money and build up secret police forces (and that's just today).

So we'll take our joy where we can find it.

Tagged Softball, Posted on June 12, 2025 at 4:33PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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This must not stand

hydra

Well, the news cycle sure took a turn.

On Sunday, when President Convicted Felon illegally seized control of the California National Guard to put down a rather mild protest against ICE, DHS, and POTUS47 deportation policy, the reaction in the "legacy media" was, "meh." Another day, another impeachable offense, whatever. But by Monday evening it apparently became clear to news directors that focusing on LA was critical—just not for the right reasons.

The White House would like us all to believe that (a) Los Angeles is on fire and out of control and severe military measures are needed to right this wrong; and (b) when Los Angeles was actually on fire earlier this year that the Federal government had no role to play in getting things under control. Sadly, legacy media news is abetting this propagandistic redirection away from the actual problem. The reality of the situation is that to the extent there is chaos in LA, it's due to the actions of the LAPD and the National Guard. POTUS47 is instigating trouble, not mitigating it. (And he's doing it with stunning incompetence.)

Seizing the National Guard and, now, deploying U.S. Marines to the two-block area of downtown Los Angeles that has been experiencing the sort of chaos that football fans celebrating a Super Bowl win would mock as tepid, is fundamentally illegal as well as counterproductive. The administration is attempting to rationalize the actions by claiming the forces are needed to quell an invasion of criminal gangs from Latin America, but of course there is no such invasion. The only legal way to do what POTUS 47 is doing would be under the Insurrection Act, which would have to be invoked to override Posse Comitatus, which bars the government from using military force, including Federalized National Guard, against the population within the U.S. (Normal, state-controlled, National Guard has different regulations.)

Unfortunately, the language of the Insurrection Act is fairly arcane and open to misapplication; the intent of the act is to allow for military involvement if and when state and local law enforcement are overwhelmed and Federal help is needed to "suppress rebellion." But while the language may have been considered definitive in the 1870s, today one can easily imagine unscrupulous actors twisting it to suit their own authoritarian aims.

To the extent the media should be focused on the LA situation, it should be on the illegality of POTUS47’s actions, the threat it presents, the waste generated, the escalation of chaos it generates, and the underlying criminality it is being used to support.

I'll close this post with another excerpt from our pal Craig Calcaterra:

Trump either wants [military troops] on the streets of L.A. to kill Americans who Trump has decided are his enemies or he simply wants make himself look like a military strongman. Neither of those things are compatible with American democracy or basic morality. Indeed, like so many other things Trump has done over the past four and a half months, this act is something that would get any single one of his predecessors impeached and removed from office.

... Last night involved scattered protests, a couple of trash fires, and a small handful of arrests. While the mood is certainly pitched, and for good reason, the situation is, kinetically speaking, barely lukewarm. Around 150 people have been arrested in Los Angeles since Friday. There are Big Ten football games which require more police activity....

Donald Trump is seeking bloody confrontation. He wants to foment a violent response and he wants to kill people. It could not be more plain....

The people of this country are unsafe until Donald Trump is, somehow, removed from power. Making that happen is the only thing that will end this Constitutional interregnum. And anything short of that is going to lead to unnecessary and unjustified death.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on June 10, 2025 at 4:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Sunday activity

LOcozy

Yesterday saw POTUS47 commit yet another impeachable offense by illegally deploying the National Guard to put down a protest and incite violence in Los Angeles. That's just par for the course in 2025, though, so it might not have made your particular newsfeed. But it happened. Since it happened 2,000 miles away form me, though, and this sort of thing doesn't move the media needle anymore, I wasn't aware of it because I was otherwise occupied on the ballfield.

We're having record-breaking heat here, so it was a taxing day for me. Fortunately, I am well-liked by the teams I umpire for (mostly), so I was kept well-hydrated when I ran out of my own water and gatorade by players tossing me bottles from their own coolers. I got through my games without any real difficulties. (The one time there was a problem no one complained; a batter hit a popup with runners aboard that was deeper than the infield dirt and not immediately near a defender, so I didn't call the infield fly rule; I should have, though, because the defending shortstop had proven himself to be quite good and in fact he did get under the pop and let it fall, proceeding to attempt a double-play. So I did the unusual thing and called the rule after-the-fact, owning my mistake and placing one of the runners back on base. Everyone was cool with it.)

The final game involved The Leftovers, who as readers know are among my favorites, and though they lost in a squeaker, 10-9, they always make a game more fun for me to work and this time they even invited me out to the bar with them after the game. So I joined them for a short while and shared tales from the umpiring side while they told of their experiences with other umps and other teams. We talked about the Mariners latest slide in the standings, our respective elderly parents, and how I am frankly so much older than all the other umpires in the league yet also the most active on the field.

It was a nice time, and when I returned home the heat of the day had caught up with me and I developed a gargantuan headache that was probably building all through the afternoon under the direct sun and I took some ibuprofen and read until I finally conked out. 

Tonight I have a briefer shift, tomorrow a standard three-gamer, Wednesday I'm playing, Thursday back for three, and Friday for two before a killer 8-hour day on Sunday. Here's hoping I can stave off the heatstroke.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Softball, Umping, Posted on June 9, 2025 at 5:06PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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LET THEM FIGHT

DJTEM

Who would have thought that two buddies with egos the size of the Hercules A galaxy, both narcissistic billionaires whose entire relationship was built on a shared desire to be cruel to other people and enrich themselves, would see their bromance blow up in a fiery explosion bigger than the conflagration following a failed SpaceX rocket launch?

Oh, right. Everyone. We all knew this was coming. In some ways, it's surprising that it took this long.

But it did take this long for the self-interest of these two malignant tumors of humanity to conflict, and now we all enjoy the show and pass around the popcorn.

It's undoubtedly entertaining to see—an entirely apropos situation for a reality-TV-show president—but I fear the collateral damage to come. Still, it'll likely be a net benefit in the end if the mutual takedowns succeed at all.

We're here at the point of conflict because POTUS47 insisted that his budget bill include every one of his legislative priorities, that it be "one big [redacted] bill." Then he cajoled Speaker Johnson and the House Republicans to ram through an approval of it in the dead of night without anyone having read the entire bill. Then someone read the bill and the details started to make the rounds.

Officially known as House Resolution 1 (that's right, this is the first piece of legislation the pile-of-manure Speaker of the House has brought to the floor in the five months this Congress has been in session), it's an enormous mountain of cruelty and theft, detailing the means to deprive millions of Americans of healthcare, student loans, services, and assistance of myriad kinds while redistributing all of that wealth to the richest of rich fucks, a full quarter of it to the oligarch class. It would be the largest redistribution of wealth from poor and middle classes to the upper class in generations. On top of that, it would blow another huge hole in the national debt—over a decade, it worsens the budget deficit, that is, the annual shortfall, by nearly four trillion dollars.

Let's put that in perspective. As I researched and noted in my 2024 voting aid pamphlet that apparently no one read, George W. Bush held the previous record for largest budget deficit when he ran the figure in his last year in office to nearly $1.5 trillion. The pre-GWB high-water mark, considered enormous at the time, was about $300 billion under W's dad (adjusting for inflation, about $460 billion in 2008 dollars, so less than a third of GWB's excesses). Barack Obama got it down from GWB's shocker to about $650 billion when he left. Then we got the first term of President Shitbag and it went from that to over $3 trillion before Joe Biden basically cut it in half. Now POTUS47 plans to make the annual shortfall exceed $6 trillion. The national debt is currently about $37 trillion, accumulated over 190 years since the last time the country's debt was zero (January 1835). Factor in interest and the POTUS47 plan would double that figure in no time at all—the CBO estimates that even without this clusterfuck of a budget, just the annual interest payment on U.S. debt will top $1 trillion next year.

And none of that deficit spending is to benefit anyone. None of it is for good things. Not only does this budget slash Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, SNAP, student grants and loans, the NEA, state assistance, disaster relief, environmental protections, et cetera, et cetera, it increases spending for defense contracts—guess who those will go to—and the Department of Homeland Security, home to ICE, HSI, and the various other agencies that make up this administration's burgeoning secret police.

But none of that is why the two billionaire BFF crybabies are fighting. No, no, neither of those moronic misanthropes gives a tinker's damn about fucking over the people or going bankrupt; the fight came about because the budget eliminates incentives and subsidies for electric vehicles while providing opposite measures for the fossil fuel industry. It's a direct threat to the existence of Tesla. Herr Elon might claim it's about excessive spending, but we all know that's a lie. It's because not enough of it goes to him.

So they're fighting. Throwing their takedown tantrums in public—on the social media platforms that each of them owns, which is just a chef's kiss to the whole thing—while the world laughs and while the reputation of the United States goes even further into the toilet.

What's coming next? Elon has already echoed a call to impeach Donny. Donny has already threatened to cancel Elon's many contracts. White House sewer troll Steve Bannon and Donny's shadow-president, the undead ghoul calling itself Stephen Miller, have called for Elon to be deported. Elon threatened to reveal what Donny's role in the Jeffrey Epstein saga really was. During the back-and-forths it appeared that each was just then realizing that the other was a corrupt, lying, amoral piece of shit when the rest of us knew they both were from the get-go.

Both of these people are fueled by grievance, take everything personally, and believe they are entitled to total deference and fealty. The escalation of revenge tactics to come promises to be pretty scary. The U.S. has quite stupidly become dependent on Elon for its space program, which could be all but destroyed in this mess. Who aligns with who among the oligarch class could have big economic effects on all of us. But if the end result is that the public sees proof that POTUS47 raped underage girls with Epstein, that Elon loses all his influence with the government and maybe even his companies and wealth, that the Republican Party fractures and self-immolates, then I'm here for it.

Let. Them. Fight.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on June 6, 2025 at 9:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Health insurance may be the worst thing about America (except the current presidential administration)

eyetest

Everyone in this country has at least one story of frustration regarding their health insurance. The vast majority have more than one. Some have many, many more than one. Some are small irritants, others are life-and-death catastrophes, all are consequences of a Republican party that both favors profit over people and the wealthy over the masses.

Youngsters don't have the experience of American health care before the ACA—you think it's bad now, and it is, but it was so, so much worse before. And the Republicans want to destroy that too.

It's amazing that just this one issue hasn't cratered the GOP, but that's the power of propaganda, I suppose.

This is on my mind today because I had another insurance frustration this afternoon. It's certainly on the small irritant side of the scale, but it's maddening nonetheless.

I had a proper optical exam today. I needed one since the last two eye exams I had were el cheapo ones from Target Optical and another discount chain that both resulted in completely useless glasses prescriptions, and I've thus been using an eyeglass Rx that is about six years old and is now inadequate. Anyway, as expected, my health insurance—which is a middle-of-the-road option from the ACA exchange—doesn't cover vision for anyone over 16, so I paid full freight for the exam. I'd like to support the practice by buying new glasses from them too, but one pair will cost me $500 there at minimum; I was still considering that, but then Dr. H—who is a fellow umpire and thus has enough affinity with me to cut me a break on the fee for deep-scan photos of my eyes—discovered something on those photos that he wanted to follow up on with another test. But don't worry, he told me, this is medical and should be covered by your insurance.

OK, cool, let's make the appointment.

I go to the front desk and they ask for my insurance card and regretfully tell me they can't accept that particular insurance. And this is the policy I switched to because what I had the last two years (a higher-tier policy!) was accepted by so few doctors.

So if I want to get the test Dr. H wants, it's going to cost me about $400-$500.

Well, so much for buying my new glasses from them. Not enough cash for both those things, for sure. So cheap frames and unreliable lens quality from the internet it is.

I will probably call the optometrist office back and schedule the test and pay out of pocket. But first I had to process my annoyance and rage a bit at this country's inability to stand up to the private health insurance lobby. 

Posted on June 2, 2025 at 4:40PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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