Activist Justices

These people are serial abusers of power and must be stopped

For decades, the Republican party has made the case that legal matters were being abused and twisted by what they called "activist judges." That is, judges who would, rather than decide a lawsuit on its legal merits or lack thereof, decide it to favor their own ideological preferences.

That was all bullshit, of course. The "activist judges" line was nothing more than Republican propaganda, a talking point to be interjected whenever possible during the Sunday shows and floor speeches and campaign rallies. It was employed to object to, and stoke public opinion against, judicial rulings that didn't favor the Republican ethos of unregulated greed—whether that be economic greed, sociopolitical greed, or the power-based greed of white supremacists.

Judicial activism as a term isn't new or restricted to use by Republicans, but in its use as a dishonest avenue for grievance it is. Nixon used it to complain that courts were "too lenient" on criminals and by implication that Constitutional and legislative protections didn't apply to all. Reagan one-upped Nixon by claiming that "activist judges" weren't just too lenient on criminals, but that they caused crime: "The rise in crime was not an unavoidable accident; it didn't just happen. It was the result of a liberal social philosophy that endorsed and supported leniency in the courtroom ... the result of judicial activism: judges who thought it was their right to make the law, not just interpret it; judges who fashioned new rules that were a catastrophe for law-abiding citizens, new rules that made it harder to convict even the most hardened and obviously guilty criminals." In their minds, or at least in their words, these paragons of Republican dogma resented that Constitutional and legislative protections weren't ignored in some cases. Now, one can certainly argue about the merits of such protections and whether or not they're a good idea, but they do exist and calling judges and justices that fail to ignore them "activist" is disingenuous at best.

Felon47 has taken it to a new level, of course. He decries anything he doesn't like as "illegal" and has abused the Department of Justice in ways that should be intolerable but somehow have been tolerated. That includes multiple accusations that judges have decided against his preference out of activism, labeling them "Obama judges" or "Biden judges" to imply they decide cases as partisans.

As with many Republican criticisms, however, it's important to remember one of their most favored public relations tactics: Accuse your opponents of your own misdeeds. For as we have seen with Chief Justice John Roberts' Supreme Court, it is the Republican party and their adherents that actually employ judicial activism.

The Roberts Court has been so activist that it has upended many aspects of our society. To date, its decisions have included:

• Support of inequality by ignoring facts in gender-discrimination cases, including one that led to the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that clarified that SCOTUS' decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear was a misinterpretation of law;
• Ruling against the First Amendment principle of separation of church and state on numerous occasions, sometimes in direct contradiction to SCOTUS precedent;
• Expanding the definitions of the Second Amendment well beyond its Constitutional language in order to repeatedly strike down gun control laws in non-Federal jurisdictions;
• Curtailing the ability of government agencies to enact environmental regulations because "to impose billions of dollars in economic costs" was too severe a consequence for mitigating the actions of polluters who poison the public and the planet;
• Inconsistent rulings in gerrymandering cases, supporting those favoring Republicans and denying those favoring Democrats;
• Favoring so-called "reverse discrimination" claims by white litigants claiming racial bias against them even when such arguments were obviously suspect;
• Erosion of voting rights whenever an opportunity was presented, often attempting to legitimize unsubstantiated claims of "fraud" brought by Republican officials;
• Overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing the criminalization of abortion;
• The destruction of campaign finance regulation, declaring money to be "speech" and corporations to be "people" in a legal sense, unleashing limitless dark money into elections in Citizens United v. FEC, a ruling that Justice John Paul Stevens in dissent characterized as outright activist as it went beyond the issues of the case, saying the majority "changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law";
• Granting immunity from prosecution to the President of the United States for anything done in "an official capacity";
• Repeated guttings of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, including, but by no means limited to, yesterday's decision in Louisiana v. Calais, which "renders Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] all but a dead letter," according to Justice Kagan in dissent.

John Roberts and his fellow conservative Supreme Court Justices have chosen again and again to twist the language of legislation and the Constitution into pretzels in order to advance their ideological agenda—an agenda that is racist, sexist, classist, pseudo-Christian, partisan, business-centric, anti-environment, and with the presidential immunity ruling approaches totalitarian—regardless of the law.

If Congress was a healthy, functioning body, at least four of those Justices, including Roberts, would be impeached and convicted for betraying their duties, corruption, and perjury. Further, in light if the long tenure of abuse by this court, major reform needs to be enacted.

Franklin Roosevelt had issues with the SCOTUS of his time, running into opposition of the New Deal from Justices determined to thwart it. "We have reached the point as a nation," FDR said in 1937, "where we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself." I'd argue that Roosevelt's comment is more true now than it was then.

But what action should we take? How do we save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself? Term limits? Maybe, though I would allow for renominations when terms expire. Constitutional Amendment? Putting aside the difficulty of enacting one, what would it say? "Justices of the Supreme Court must limit themselves to working within the law and not legislate from the bench?" That's weak tea, for sure. Oversight? For sure, though it can't be left to Congress, we see today how feckless that body can be; besides, the Supreme Court is supposed to be, well, supreme. But some sort of enforceable code of conduct, clear penalties for dereliction of duty, clear restrictions on the court's ability to exceed the parameters of a case, this seems necessary... somehow.

Theoretically, this sort of thing is handled in advance by confirmation hearings and remedied by impeachments. That theory has been blown out of the water, though. Doesn't work. Congress is too vulnerable to corruption itself and too feckless to hold Justices accountable. I just don't know what remedy to propose. For the gerrymandering stuff, laws can be passed to outlaw partisan gerrymandering and require independent, non-partisan commissions to map districts. But for the rest...?

Any ideas?

Tagged Politics, SCOTUS, Republicans, Society, Posted on April 30, 2026 at 8:18PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Another trip to the vet

Another day, another trip to see Dr. S at Cats Exclusive. This time it was not overly traumatic, it was just for Zephyr's annual checkup. He was upset, tried to burrow into a corner and hide while in the exam room, but the visit was brief (maybe half an hour) and wholly positive. He's a healthy little dude.

I find in interesting how Zeph, normally an assertive cat with a fairly large personality (felinality?) becomes completely timid and inert when at the vet. His whole demeanor changes to one similar to a protester getting arrested and just going limp, not hindering nor aiding the cops hauling him away, just waiting for it to be over. Now that we're back home, I'm sure he'll be back to chasing the other cats and demanding my attention and breaking things at will in no time.

I get to go see Dr. S again on Monday, when I bring Raimei in for a follow-up on her dental surgery. Life with cats.

Tagged Cats, Posted on April 30, 2026 at 5:20PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Shots fired

I wasn't aware of the hubbub at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in real time, but I saw a couple of headlines soon afterward. Like a lot of other people, I immediately thought there was something fishy going on. After all, nothing from this POTUS, this White House press room, or even the current crop of reporters assigned to that press room can be taken at face value, if trusted at all.

Once I got some more detail on what happened, though, it became clear to me that this was not a staged event. I mean, Felon47 and his coterie of criminals are sure behaving like it was—turning immediately to use it as justification for stupid shit they want to do and as a vehicle to demonize people they don't like—but if they were going to stage an(other?) assassination attempt, it would be for the cameras. The would-be gunman here didn't even get to the proper floor of the hotel, let alone the room his would-be target was in, before he was apprehended.

No, the one thing this regime understands is conning people. I have no trouble believing that they might try to stage something like this—they absolutely would do that, but the whole point would be to get it on video. Even still photos might do; they turned the shrapnel graze from Butler, PA, into a viral internet meme and capitalized on that to great success, sadly. So if they'd staged this, the would-be shooter would have been taken down in the ballroom of the Hilton, on television, maybe even after firing off a shot (or a blank) into the ceiling. And the alleged perp's manifesto would not say what this guy's statement actually said.

The guy's statement read, "I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." Even if the regime was creating a strawman assassin figure they would not refer to Felon47 or his minions as any of those things, because they're true.

The best thing to come out of the whole affair was this clip from 60 Minutes, wherein Nora O'Donnell reads that to Felon47 directly and he responds with so many tells. It's a clip destined to go down in history right alongside Nixon's "I am not a crook."

 

 

First, he calls O'Donnell (and by extension the staff of 60 Minutes) "horrible people," then he denies being a rapist (he is, a judge said so), and then—this is great—O'Donnell says, "oh, you think he was talking about YOU?" and he won't even let her say that, he interrupts her to keep denying he's a rapist and pedophile, in the exact manner and tone we've heard many times before that suggests, yeah, he is those things, this is a favored way of lying on camera. Then, unbidden, he brings up Epstein and says he was "totally exonerated" of wrongdoing which is blatantly untrue! Whether he's guilty of crimes with Epstein or not, no court anywhere has exonerated him of anything, but he just keeps saying it because of the Hitlerian/Roy Cohnian strategy of repeating the lie so often that people start to think it's true, and every time he says that it's a tell.

Then there's that weird reference to O'Donnell and her "friends on the other side of the plate." I don't know what kind of insult he meant to hurl there; other side of the aisle, maybe, implying that it's a partisan thing? But the accusation of "you and your friends" being "the ones involved with, let's say Epstein" before trialing off is another classic move from him: Accuse your opposition of your own malfeasance. It's a tell. Then capping it off with "you should be ashamed of yourself, reading that," interrupting O'Donnell clarifying that those were the would-be gunman's words, not hers, so he could call her a "disgrace" and "disgraceful."

All of it screams, "YES, I AM EXACTLY WHAT THE GUY IMPLIED I WAS, AND BY BEING HOSTILE AND DEFENSIVE AND PERFORMATIVELY OFFENDED BY A WOMAN REPORTER BRINGING IT UP I AM REVEALING DEEP INSECURITY AND FEAR THAT THE RUBES I RELY ON TO STAY IN POWER WILL FIGURE IT OUT. ALSO THAT I AM DEEPLY MISOGYNISTINC."

Also, I did note that though he objected to the reference to a "pedophile" and "rapist," he did not object to being called a traitor. Obviously, he has a lot more experience being called the other things, he's been those things for many many years, and he's only been a traitor for a relatively short time. He's not used to disputing that one. Yet.

We need Congress to step up. Since the Republicans refuse to, they need to get out of the way or get voted out so others can. Impeach, remove, and prosecute, as soon as possible.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Posted on April 28, 2026 at 6:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Status updates: Raimei, umping, and our nightmare DOD

Bits and pieces of the day...

• Raimei is doing very well after her dental surgery. For about 48 hours after she was completely stoned out of her kitty mind thanks to the time-release painkiller she was given. She's a bit more herself today and appears to be happy with the overall result, but maybe there's still some residual drugs.
• Umping has been good the past couple of weeks, and last night's three games at Cap Hill had a lot of fun moments marred only by a drop-in from the league office that, though generally inoffensive, still managed to feel disrespectful. Again, I don't think it was intentionally so, the messenger is just not that good at communicating. I did appreciate players going out of their way to tell said messenger that I was their favorite ump and by implication that I didn't need policing, but it won't mean anything to the league, I'm afraid. I've never heard a word from the league office about any feedback from players or anyone else, and I know for a fact there has been some. In that one respect they're a lousy outfit to work with—to the office we all are apparently interchangeable drones to be criticized freely but only praised begrudgingly—but as I remind myself when stuff like this happens, in a lot of other ways they're pretty good. But I do feel condescended to when I'm told of a "problem" (not a problem) and that nevertheless I seem to be doing fine when it's readily apparent that I'm the best they've got. I'm not sure how to word that without it sounding arrogant, but if you go by player feedback it's simply a fact, and seemingly reluctant "I guess you're fine" comments just leave me shaking my head.

• One topic of conversation during the umpire shift last night was the weird play in Wednesday's game between Your Seattle Mariners and the Future-Las-Vegas-But-Only-If-Nothing-Goes-Horribly-Wrong-And-I'll-Believe-It-When-I-See-It Athletics. In that game's first inning, a batter for the A's lined a pitch back up the middle that managed to get caught inside pitcher Logan Gilbert's jersey. In the video, you can see the home-plate umpire knew immediately how to call it and pointed to first base, but literally no one else in the ballpark knew what was supposed to happen. Is it a catch? It seems like a catch—the defender has possession of the ball and it never touches the ground or a fence. On the other hand, defenders are not allowed to use non-glove equipment (e.g. caps, catcher's masks) to assist in catching a ball and the penalty for doing so is three bases to the batter. That kind of thing would be intentional, though, which doesn't count here. So...what? In the end, the umpires agreed with the HP ump, it's treated like a batted ball hitting an umpire in the infield: ball is dead, batter gets a base hit, other runners if any stay put. (Similar to the situation I had in softball a while back, but in this case there was no runner at first base to complicate things.) It's a fair ruling, but it seems to me like it had to be made up on the fly, as it were, as I doubt a scenario like this had ever been contemplated.

• Chaos in Felon47’s regime just keeps on keeping on, as the Secretary of the Navy is the latest official to be fired. When you oust the head of the Navy in the middle of a largely Naval military engagement, there's either a serious problem with the Navy or a serious problem with the president and the defense department overall. Or, you know what, with this crop of clowns there's no reason there can't be serious problems with both. Near as I can tell, Navy Secretary John Phelan was fired by Defense Secretary Drunk Nazi Pete for two reasons: new ships, including something called "Trump-class battleships"—a term that conjures up images of huge, ostentatiously gold-leafed boats made on the cheap falling part and catching fire in the open sea when trying to gun down small fishing boats captained by brown people—weren't being built fast enough for his taste; and Phelan wouldn't defy a court ruling prohibiting the DOD from prosecuting Sen. Mark Kelly (retired Navy Captain) for making a video citing the requirement of soldiers and officers to obey the law even if ordered not to. NOT because, as someone appointed to the job with zero experience with or knowledge of the Navy, he wasn't competent to oversee things like shipbuilding or blockades, nor because he was an associate of rapist and sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (that last part is possibly what got him the gig in the first place, after all). Just the latest in the line of officials fired or made to resign from the regime for the wrong reasons. We're all glad Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem and now-ex-Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer are out, they were completely unqualified and inappropriate nominations that should never have been confirmed in the first place, but they're not gone because of the horrible things they did or the outrageous way they conducted themselves on the job, they're gone because they weren't cruel enough for Felon47’s standard and/or were embarrassing to him. Then there are the other military folks who were cashiered for bad/no reasons, like they had too much melanin or too many ovaries. Not to mention all the federal workers fired because Elon Musk and his brigade of incompetent tech children were allowed to torch and pillage any agency they could lay hands on. This regime can't come to an end fast enough—it's unconscionable that it's been allowed to go on as long as it has.
• Seems like I had something else in mind when I started this post, but it eludes me now so I'll stop here. More for later, I guess.

Posted on April 24, 2026 at 6:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

A feline trauma day

Kuro-Raimei had a tough day today. She was unceremoniously scooped up and put into her carrier at 7:00 in the morning, which was scary enough, but then taken into the car.

Somehow this "car" thing is a portal between dimensions or something, because when next the car door opened there was a cacophony of noise—she couldn't see what was causing it, but it was as if great careening beasts were roaring back and forth just meters away from her. Then she was carried into The Scary Building.

At least the noise had stopped then, but when she was let out of her carrier it was in what the humans have called the "exam room," where she was made to stand on this thing that displayed numbers. Then she was put back into the carrier and taken away from her human.

HUMAN! DO NOT LEAVE ME IN THE SCARY PLACE! The shouting was to no avail.

She was taken to a larger room, again removed from her comfy carrier, and placed in a cage. What was going on?! Had she misbehaved? Why was she here? I WANT TO GO HOME!

Then, the torture began. First a needle, which these strange lady humans used to extract blood. They made what were intended to be comforting noises, but these were strange humans that smelled weird. She generally doesn't like humans she doesn't know and she especially didn't like these humans, no matter what noises they made. Then back in the cage for a while, then out and onto a big table for another needle. This one didn't take any blood out, though, this one put something in. WHAT THE FUCK, HOO-MAHNS?! WHERE IS MY HUMAN? WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HIM?

She began to get groggy and loopy, then fell asleep. But not the good sleep with dreams of stalking birds and putting that punk Zephyr in his place, this had no dreams at all. It was scary.

When she woke up, she was back in the cage again. She couldn't see clearly and her brain wasn't working right. She had a bald spot on her foot and was sore in that foot and, especially, in her mouth. What foul horrors had she been subjected to?

The pain in her mouth was dull and her mind wasn't processing it with any clarity, but it seemed like...yes, she had fewer teeth in there. Where are my teeth?! She couldn't ponder it for long, though, as sleep came again. Not the same kind of scary sleep, but not the regular dreams-of-climbing-window-screens sleep either.

She woke again to being prodded and examined by another human. This one was vaguely familiar, she was pretty sure she had smelled this one before, but it was impossible to place in her groggy state. She was put back in the cage and went back to sleep.

Finally she was taken out of the cage for the last time, put back into her carrier, and taken to a big room with big windows where she was handed off to someone else. This time—MY HUMAN! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? She tried to convey the traumas she'd been experiencing, but her brain was still jumbled and the only sounds she could make were warbles at low volume. She was still frightened, but at least her human had returned. He brought her into the car again, and soon the car door opened and she was lifted back into familiar surroundings. When the carrier was opened, she walked out onto her own floor atop her stairs. This was an enormous relief.

Still, she wished her human had opened her carrier at the bottom of the stairs rather than the top, because she had to immediately go down them to go to the poop box. And since her mobility was somehow impaired, perhaps by the same thing that was causing her scrambled thinking, the process of using the box was sloppy and undignified. She had to leave the box with some of the smelly refuse stuck to her fur and was in no state to tidy herself up. Holy moly, how embarrassing. She made her way back to the top of the stairs and her human cleaned her up, which was both welcome and humiliating.

Her human brought her into the room with the big screens and the clickity-clackity thing she usually liked to walk across and placed her on the carpeted shelf that was a favored perch, but she didn't want to be there. NO, she said, and unsteadily teetered as she hopped down to the floor and stumbled back to the stairs. Just one step down, she thought, I can make that easy enough. The stair was good—it was narrow enough to preclude the other cats from crowding her if they chose to try and it provided a corner she could lean into for support. It was also away from any windows or lights, and for whatever reason her eyes had been super sensitive ever since waking up in the cage.

She didn't know what the hell had happened to her this day. It was all so scary and strange. But she was now home again, her human was there, even Zephyr and Mizuki were there and not bothering her, and she could relax.

Mostly.

But she'd be very grateful when this groggy mind-scrambling wore off and she felt normal again.

Meanwhile, she'd have to get used to having fewer teeth.

Tagged Cats, Posted on April 21, 2026 at 5:13PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

2 Comments

He's not sundowning

I spend what is likely an unhealthy amount of time listening to political podcasts and reading political newsletters and such (some better than others). In so doing I have heard/read a lot of comments about Felon47 becoming more and more demented, about how he's clearly less sane now than he was in his first term, how so much of what he's done of late can be correlated with what happens with dementia patients of various kinds.

I don't dispute the insanity of what the guy does—he is unquestionably, to use Jeff Tiedrich's term, "bugfuck nuts." He is a deranged, narcissistic loon that has no interest in facts or reality and has cultivated a fantasyland to impose on the public that is only now, with his insipid war figuratively blowing up in his face (if only it was literal), breaking down among his MAGA cultists.

But I do emphatically dispute the idea that any of his behavior is new and different than it was the first time around. It's not.

He was just as deranged, just as imbecilic, just as unconcerned with reality, just as cruel, just as corrupt and evil in his first term. There are differences, but they are not in his behavior or demeanor. The differences are in his staffing and in his quite justifiable takeaways from the events of the four years between his terms: That he can get away with almost anything.

He had people in his administration the first time around that would tell him no. That would run interference around him. That had some modicum of competence at their jobs (even the horrible William Barr compares very favorably with Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche as Attorney General). This time, everyone in the cabinet, everyone in the executive, everyone in his advisory circle is an obsequious toady and if someone crosses him in any way they get fired—even if the president has no legal authority to fire them, because Congress is almost completely feckless under the Republicans.

He was just this bad before, he was just being mitigated to a degree.

In the four years he was out of office, the Senate refused to convict him in his impeachment for trying to overthrow the government, the Supreme Court unconscionably gave him immunity from prosecution, his handpicked judge in Florida made his crimes under the Espionage Act go away, he suffered no real damage from his felony convictions in the election-interference/obstruction of justice Stormy Daniels matter, no indictments were brought by the Jack Smith investigation thanks to a timid Merrick Garland Justice Department and a successful run-out-the-clock strategy, and he convinced even more willfully ignorant dupes and marks to vote for him on the basis of outright lies and appeals to racism and misogyny.  Why would he not, especially as a narcissist, then believe he could get away with anything?

He feared consequences in his first term, at least early on. He was reported to say that the Mueller investigation would mean the end of his presidency; even he didn't think he could squash it as well as it was ultimately squashed with the help of the rest of the corrupt Republican party. Now he doesn't even consider the possibility of consequences unless they're consequences to his image.

He's outraged that his war backfired on him. He's desperate to get himself out of that self-dug hole, but only because he can't seem to make people believe he didn't fuck up. He is unfathomably insecure, he needs affirmation that people like him even as he steps on their necks. He doesn't think about legal ramifications of what he does because he thinks he's stacked the deck sufficiently in his favor with the courts and what used to be the Department of Justice; he does think about "his" people turning on him and the potential revelation to the MAGA cult that he (correctly) thinks they're suckers and fools.

But because he's such an idiot himself, one who cannot think ahead, one who cannot conceive of other people not being self-obsessed grievance factories, one who has no grounding in the lifestyles of non-filthy-rich Americans, he will keep saying and doing things to undermine himself. He will continue on unfiltered by rational actors, keep committing atrocities, keep destroying the reputation of the United States, keep spouting nonsense, keep lying about anything he thinks is important and revealing what he thinks is unimportant by not lying about it (i.e. telling a reporter that gasoline isn't really expensive and its cost will probably keep going up for the foreseeable future).

It's not new. It's not recent-onset dementia. His cheese is not sliding further off his cracker, for it was never on his cracker to begin with.

And it angers me that the press, the podcasters, the commentators, the media figures, et. al, essentially validate what came before by ascribing the second-term outrages to diminished capacity. HE'S THE SAME. Thanks in large part to that same press, he learned that he can surround himself with toadies without significant pushback and that he need not fear legal consequences for anything he does this time. THAT'S why it's worse. (There's some chance that his physical health might be worse, but since COVID didn't kill him it's hard to imagine that he'll finally eat one Big Mac too many before his term is up. I mean, we can hope, but....) 

Press coverage, reportage, public opinion: that's what has to change to reflect reality. That's what will get us a Congress that will act. It's moving in the right direction, but it's not enough, and I fear it won't ever be enough if the regime's actions and behavior are excused—even if the excuse is "dementia."

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Posted on April 20, 2026 at 7:41PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

42

I have a couple of posts in the hopper about deep thoughts, about things like male psyche and ego trips that combine to make some dudes do horrible things (looking at you, Swalwell); another examining, of course, Felon47 and all the talk we hear about how he's losing his marbles; yet another that isn't especially deep but just about umping. But I find myself pressed for time and generally unfocused at the moment, so for now I will just say the following on this, the 15th day of April:

Happy Jackie Robinson Day to those who celebrate. Wear your No. 42 jerseys with pride. And happy Jackie Robinson Day to those who don't celebrate, too, but only those who don't because they're unfamiliar with it. As for the rest—if you're in Felon47’s regime or are pissed about Abigail Spanberger putting an end to taxpayer subsidies for the United Daughters of the Confederacy—then I wish you a day of thoughtful recriminations about the bad choices you've made in life and hope that the next time you are in dire need of help from someone the only people available are black.

Also, happy Tax Day and sympathies to those who didn't get around to filing before today. And congrats to my friend the accountant for making it through the season. Usually, I recognize taxes as what we pay to have a civilized society, but it's hard to keep that perspective this year since so much of what we're contributing on our 1040 forms is being misspent on things that are the antithesis of civilized. In some parallel universe the President Harris administration is using our tax money for good rather than evil, but as I read on a T-shirt the other night while umpiring, "we live in the darkest timeline."

Posted on April 15, 2026 at 6:11PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

Artemis II, Congressional backbone, and a no-drama ump shift

I could do separate posts on separate topics tonight, but I'm not feeling really coherent about any of them so I'm just gonna wing it with a hodgepodge.

• ITEM: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Haven't We Put Anyone on the Moon Since 1972?

  Well, we're on our way to rectifying that with the success of Artemis II, which has been quite impressive and which has been a needed reminder in this age of chaos and idiocy that is the early 21st Century that we as a species and as a culture can achieve great things for the common good if we just choose to. The Artemis II mission went off without a hitch, with the Integrity spacecraft successfully testing and evaluating the launch infrastructure and vessel components as well as navigation to the moon and back. Thus providing key information on what needs to be tweaked and improved for the scheduled Artemis III mission next year—for orbital tests of new lunar landing craft—and Artemis IV in 2028, which will be a crewed lunar landing. Of course, I can't help but be somewhat skeptical of those schedules because the landing craft are to be provided by SpaceX. Any outfit owned and run by Elon Musk can't really be trusted, can it? So for that Artemis III mission I expect problems. We'll see.

  Seth Masket wrote this in his newsletter today and it resonated with me:

  One thing that really stood out is that this is really NASA at its finest. Not that this is the most important mission they ever pulled off, but they did this in a competent way that celebrated the achievements and kept the crew and the science at the forefront of the project. This wasn’t some billionaire throwing celebrities or cars into orbit as a vanity project—this was a collective effort to send experts in to do a job and come home safely. We don’t see that sort of thing much these days. I’m guessing few people would describe many government agencies as inspiring, but this one counts for me.

  Plus, the photos from Integrity are fantastic:

  

  

• ITEM: We Finally Have an Answer!

  Having asked the question for over a year now, we know the answer to "what has to happen before people in Congress call for impeachment?!!" What had to happen, evidently, is for the alleged president of the United States to threaten genocide. Good, yes, this is a war crime and undeniably an impeachable offense, but we all saw some version of this coming the whole way. It's not even his first war crime. But, OK, let's not get hung up on why you were late to the party and just be glad you finally got here. There are now dozens of Congressional Democrats calling for impeachment (or the invocation of the 25th Amendment, but (a) 25A isn't going to happen with this VP and cabinet, and (b) if it did happen it wouldn't work, though the chaos it would instigate would be interesting). I doubt any are under the impression it will go anywhere so long as Mike Johnson remains Speaker, but it's absolutely necessary for Congresspeople and Senators to be calling for the removal of Felon47, loudly and frequently, lest the public fall victim to the wider corporate media's repeated implications that this is all normal and acceptable behavior from any public official let alone a President. Calls for impeachment need to be in the news each and every time Felon47 does or says something criminal, stupid, corrupt, and insanely dangerous, which is basically every day. And the calls should be varied in their presentation—some should be emphasizing the utter stupidity and madness of his war, others the flagrant corruption of the entire regime, still others the abuses of ICE and DHS, still others the rampant racism and misogyny exhibited in all of the various atrocities the regime commits.

  As columnist Will Bunch put it: "We must stop the killing and the crime spree—not 33 months from now, as Trump’s mental health continues to deteriorate before our eyes, but today. The indisputable truth that the president took America into an undeclared and illegal war for no reason, and lost that war in barely a month, should be the wake-up call for everyone still in denial."

  Now, the remaining question is what has to happen before Republicans figure out he needs to be removed?

   

• ITEM: Still No Bingo!

  I had a three-game umpire shift at Capitol Hill last night, which had very little in the way of drama or oddities. Except that it was a championship series, and usually I have prizes to give out to the winning team at the end of such things. Certificates good for credit at a sponsor bar and a discount on future league fees, typically, sometimes along with a token like championship wristbands or T-shirts. Actually, we haven't had T-shirts since pre-COVID. Those might never come back, I don't know. Anyway, last night I had nothing. No prizes to be had. I presume this was an oversight, because some of the other, regular game stuff was also not present in my provided batch of gear, so I merely noted it in my report and assume that the winning teams will be given their prizes at a later date. Meantime, the Bingo card remains un-bingoed:

  

• ITEM: For All Mankind is Back!

  The brilliant alternate-history series For All Mankind is three episodes into its fifth season on Apple TV+ and it is, as usual, awesome. It's changed a lot since its first season, but that's by design—the show begins in 1969, when the Soviet Union is the first nation to land a person on the moon and thus history as we know it begins to diverge and the space race continues on in a much different fashion, with the US feeling the need to one-up the Soviets and vice-versa. (Technically, the point of historical divergence, according to showrunner/creator Ronald D. Moore, was in 1966, when Sergei Korolev survived a routine surgery rather than died from its complications; Korolev was the prime force behind the Soviet moon mission in both "our" reality and in the FAM history, where he was able to continue on.) Each new season begins with a time jump of about nine years, each season premiere showing a brief retrospective on what has happened in the world in the interim, where we not only see things like new technological advances borne of the continued space race, but what became of President Ted Kennedy (who due to the Soviet moon landing fallout canceled his trip to Chappaquiddick in 1969 and defeated Richard Nixon in 1972) and his razor-thin loss to Reagan in 1976; how the astronaut program forges support for the ERA, which is ratified in 1974; how the Camp David Accord meetings end in failure under President Reagan; how John Lennon survived an assassination attempt in 1980 and reunited the Beatles for a concert tour in 1987; that Blockbuster Video opens its first store on the moon in 2007; and so on. All that stuff is just background, though, the show is really about a cast of astronaut/cosmonaut characters and their support people and families, a few of whom appear in all five seasons (spanning forty-some years). Some of my faves aren't in season 5, but maybe they'll make appearances later on even though they'd be pushing 80. As the series goes on, life in space becomes more and more prevalent—by season two there is a permanent moon presence, by season three we have space tourism, season four establishes permanence of a sort on Mars, and here in season 5 we have a proto-Mars colony complete with refugee immigrants. It's more and more sci-fi as we get further and further from 1969, but the show is still, well, grounded in realism and logical politics and is just damn well written with compelling human dramas. It's an awesome show and you should watch it.

Tagged Umping, Politics, Space, TV, Posted on April 11, 2026 at 12:50AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Positive imagery

I thought about writing another political screed tonight, another exercise in venting my frustrations and outrage and dread over the collapse of America because the entire Republican party has switched sides and become fascist. But really, I've done that before. Repeatedly. It makes me feel better in the sense of having an outlet to vent my rage, but it also doesn't in the sense that it doesn't make any difference.

So I won't be doing that right now.

Instead, here are a few of photos that show the parts of my day not involving fretting over the state of the world. A microcosm of calm to the macrocosm of chaos, if you will.

Pre-dusk from an overlook at Boeing Creek Park (everything has a damn sponsor name these days), where I went for a lengthy walk today and was reminded just how out of shape I really am.

The front door of my place had somehow accumulated four doorbells for two units using the door. I spent some time disconnecting two of them and doing quick-and-dirty coverup of the mess left behind. Eventually it'll have to be spiffed up with matching paint. So now there's one bell for me and one of those creepy camera-doorbell things mounted at an angle above it for my neighbors.

Zephyr vies for attention as I'm trying to watch the ballgame. He will not be ignored.

Long-distance shot of Mizuki in her comfy hammock. The pic doesn't blow up very well, but I thought she was cute there. She and Zeph both like the hammock.

Posted on April 8, 2026 at 9:12PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Screaming into the void

As the outrages continue—as the military misadventures further destabilize the world, as the criminality rolls on mostly unchecked, as Felon47 demonstrates more and more insanity—I figured it was time for another letter to Congress.

It's not exactly a rewarding exercise. I've got the best representation in the House and pretty decent representation in the Senate, so I'm expressing my frustration to people who already share it. But what else can we do?

Anyway, here's my latest missive. If you are inclined to send one off as well, there's a link in the sidebar that makes it super easy. It might not help. But it can't hurt. Particularly if you have less principled or more malleable people representing you than those of us in WA-7.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Congress, Posted on April 6, 2026 at 11:19PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Once in a while, even I have to look up a rule

Thursday night I had a three-game umpiring shift at Cap Hill. All three games were blowouts and all involved teams I generally like to draw on my schedule. Nevertheless, by the time we got into the third game I wasn't in the mood to be there anymore for whatever reason. It wasn't especially cold, wasn't raining, I hadn't skipped lunch, I wasn't on short sleep, nothing like that, it was just one of those things. Might have had something to do with getting some lip from a few different players about ball/strike calls. Or it might not. I don't know.

The questioned strike calls I actually have some sympathy for because they came on pitches that I absolutely hate to face myself as a batter. Both pitchers in the third game were partial to very high arc pitches, ones that scrape 12 feet off the ground before dropping back down. I hate these. They always, always look like they're going to be high. And sometimes they drop right into the strike zone.

After doing the ump thing for several years, I've gotten better at ignoring the high arc when calling the pitch. It's hard, though. You've got to focus as much as your attention as you can on watching just the strike zone and see if the ball crosses it or not, but you can't totally ignore what happens before that because an arc can be too high (or too low) to be legal and you've got to call that too.

As a batter I've gotten a number of strikes called on me from such pitches that I (internally) groused about, but mostly because I just hate them. I mean, yeah, in my playing league we sometimes get Seattle Parks & Rec's answer to C.B. Bucknor as our umpire and I'm less likely to give him the benefit of the doubt, but when I'm grousing it's not about the call so much as the super-high-arc pitch being legal. But it is, so you live with it.

Anyway, I called two batters out on strikes on such pitches. One, someone I see a lot of in this league, was cool about it even though she disagreed. We had a nice conversation about it when she came back out to catch the next inning and agreed that high-arc pitches suck. The other one was not cool about it and tried to start an argument. "How can that be a strike?!" I stopped short of being snarky and replying with, "well, you see, there's this thing called the 'strike zone,' and when the pitch crosses it..." and instead just said, in what I hope was a subdued manner, "really?" And she was ready to get into it until her teammates corralled her back to the dugout. (It's usually dudes that get in my face if anyone does, but hey, feminism.)

But those weren't the odd thing about that shift. The oddity came when, in a bases-loaded, two-out situation, the runner going from first to second base was hit by a batted ball; weird in and of itself because it was a high bouncer that took a few seconds to reach the basepaths, but she was still hit in the foot. By the time she was, though, the runner from third had already scored with time to spare. So, the runner is out for being hit, it's the third out so the inning is over, but does the run count? I did not know and just decided on the spot that it would. (It was a blowout, the run wasn't going to matter, and I had to decide, so...) But should it have?

I had to look it up later. And what I found in the rules was not helpful. Rule 5.09(b)(7): A runner is out when "touched by a fair [batted] ball in fair territory before the ball has gone by an infielder (other than the pitcher) and no other infielder has a chance to make a play on the ball. The ball is dead and no runner may score, nor runners advance, except runners forced to advance." (Italics mine)

The bases were loaded, so on a bouncer all runners were forced to try to advance. However, the runner from first was the one out when hit by the batted ball. In other circumstances, that runner being out (the third out) before reaching second base negates anything accomplished by other runners, but in runner-hit-by-fair-ball cases the batter is awarded a base hit rather than reaching on a fielder's choice, meaning s/he didn't hit into a force play. How does that come into play, if at all? Also, the rule says no runners may score except those forced to advance, and if we're using the any-other-circumstances force theory then in any case of a runner being hit by a batted ball there could never be a runner forced to advance. So why would the rule include that exception? Is it a convoluted way to say, well, if there are runners at first and second and the runner from second is hit by the batted ball, then obviously the runner from first gets second base because the batter gets a base hit and you can't have two runners at first? I guess that technically tracks, but it still isn't clear to me that "forced to advance" doesn't refer to where runners are at the start of the play, and the fact that the batter is not recorded as hitting into any kind of forceout but credited with a hit further screws it up.

If it happens again, I think I will rule differently—that such a run does not count and if not the third out then the runner must go back to third base (and runner going from second to third back to second) because the force would have been removed when the runner from first was declared out and therefore the runner from third isn't forced to advance.

But I still don't know if that's right or not.

Then there was something in tonight's game between Your Seattle Mariners and the Los Angeles Angels of Orange County Which Isn't Technically Los Angeles. Angel right fielder Jo Adell—who had already, by the way, robbed the M's of two homers—leaped into the right field seats to catch a fly ball that would otherwise be a home run. Adell went over the fence, tumbling into the first few rows of seats but did catch the ball. Still, he's off the field by that time. Is it a catch? I knew that it would be once Adell returned to the field never having lost or surrendered control of the ball, but since he took his sweet time doing so, and since there was a second or two that he was out of view of all cameras, it was questionable enough that the Mariners challenged the ruling of fair catch. In a search of the rules I didn't find any mention of catches by a fielder leaving the playing field other than as pertains to the dugouts, but I know from past occurrences that a fielder that makes a catch while one or both feet are on or directly above the field of play and falls into the seating area or a bullpen or whatnot has to maintain control of the ball and return to the field before the out is official, and since Adell stood there reveling in his catch for a bit before jumping back into right field it was a little murky. Or maybe the M's challenged on the chance that Adell only caught the ball after his whole body was past the field boundary?

In any case, the catch was ruled legal and thus Adell had accomplished the rare feat of catching three would-be home runs in one game. Incredible.

Tagged Baseball, Umping, Posted on April 4, 2026 at 10:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Art imitating life imitating art

After listening to some recap analysis of Felon47’s pointless address to the nation last night—no, I didn't watch the thing itself, that clearly wasn't going to be useful—I decided to switch gears into some comic-book inspired escapism and watch the latest two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again. But it turned out not to be much in the way of escapism.

The series reimagines a more-than-a-decade-old Marvel Comics storyline wherein Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin of Crime, becomes mayor of New York City. It's good, well-done in a way that's true to the characters and compelling to watch (though brutally violent in spots), but also depressing because the parallels between Fisk's governance of New York and Felon47’s governance of the United States are a bit too on the nose.

Not intentionally, of course. The source material predates even the administration of Fraudster45, and the scripts for the series were being written before the 2024 election campaign. But how could it not parallel?

The premise of placing a career criminal in a position of massive political power demands plotlines and story tropes that show staggering corruption, manipulation of the press, mob-tactic intimidation, shocking levels of cruelty, even an extra-legal "police force" terrorizing the public. So it's really inevitable that the real-life career criminal given a position of massive political power mirrors the fictional one.

Thankfully, the real-life analog of Wilson Fisk is not nearly as smart. Fisk is a cruel, psychologically broken, utterly corrupt narcissist, but he has intelligence enough to be truly terrifying. Our alleged president is, by contrast, one of the stupidest people on Earth. Which is its own kind of terrifying, to be sure, but does set him apart.

Fisk is opposed by our hero, Matt Murdock aka Daredevil, a lawyer by trade and, despite his tactics of masked vigilantism, believer in the rule of law ultimately taking down Fisk and his corrupt empire. Also on the side of good is internet journalist BB Urich, who by day produces videos that show New Yorkers supporting Fisk's outwardly keeping-us-safe policies while by night making subversive videos that mock Fisk as "Mayor Kingpin," exposing what she can of Fisk's corrupt and violent underbelly. We don't have Daredevil to oppose Felon47, but we do have rule of law, at least for now. We don't have a BB Urich either, and we could use one; but there are journalists outside the mainstream that keep digging for evidence of criminality that might finally take the regime down.

As the series approaches resolution, we know Fisk will be deposed and receive some sort of comeuppance; sadly, we don't have the same surety for his real-life analog. But it does give me a weird sort of hope.

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Daredevil, TV, Comics, Posted on April 2, 2026 at 4:56PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet