New amendments

Having recently read through Melissa Murray's excellent The US Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, I've found myself considering the need for reforms. Post-Trump reforms, I mean, as it's been made crystal clear by the largely unchecked criminality and corruption of Felon47 and his regime that solid protections against corruption and politically-based jurisprudence don't exist. Or rather, to the extent that they do exist, they depend on a Congressional membership that is not itself corrupt and willing to throw away its collective oath of office.

Assuming we survive the current presidential term as a nation governed by the US Constitution—by no means a sure thing, and something very much dependent on the upcoming midterm elections and the integrity thereof—we need to do what we failed to do in 2021-2024 and enact reforms to safeguard against the sort of destruction and sabotage being inflicted on the United States right now by its own president, aided and abetted by a compliant Congress.

I don't know precisely what these reforms should be, but it does appear that the most effective, most ironclad way to achieve them would be amending the Constitution. That is, of course, a high bar to clear, but I think it's necessary.

So, though I remain uncertain as to what these amendments should be, I have been workshopping a couple in my head and present them here for comment and revision. What do you all think? What's missing? What's overreach? What would be better?

Here goes.

XXVIII is obviously the attempt at an anti-corruption amendment. The emoluments clause of Article II, which states that the President will be paid a salary and "shall not receive within [the term of office] any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them," of course already exists and in general has been enough from presidents one through forty-four and forty-six. But since the emoluments clause uses relatively obscure language (when's the last time you heard the word "emolument" in a context outside of the Constitution?), and since it likely would be interpreted by the Supreme Court as only applying to money coming directly from the federal or state treasuries, we now see that the clause is vastly insufficient.

Felon47 seems to have become belatedly aware of the emoluments clause with his attempted shakedown of the IRS; having been apparently convinced that him suing the IRS for $10B would not work, he pivoted to using the suit as a vehicle to create the slush fund recently announced as a "settlement" of the lawsuit (not a settlement, lawsuit is no more, this is a legally separate thing); then the slush fund had to be reconfigured to fit into an existing "settlement fund" structure with meaningless language saying Felon47 himself would not receive any money even though the loopholes around that are parsecs wide. But most of Felon47’s grift and theft and other corruption has been via the stock market, conning his supporters, cryptocurrency scams, manipulation of government contracts to suit his portfolio, and so on, things that don't come directly from the government treasury. Things that are also largely illegal already, but given that this Supreme Court has decreed that the president can commit crime at will so long as its cloaked in "official action"—and since, even absent that ruling, waiting until a president leaves office to prosecute him for crimes opens a huge window for destruction in the meantime—solidifying the prohibitions in the Constitution is more than appropriate.

XXIX is a more of a work in progress. Clearly, there needs to be some sort of enforcement mechanism for the Supreme Court as there are currently between two and six, depending on your metric, outright corrupt and/or politically driven and/or anti-Constitutional Justices on the bench. The problem is in what form that mechanism should take, and I don't have a clear idea for that. An oversight/ethical review commission seems like a good idea, but maybe it isn't? Maybe it is but isn't enough? Punitive power over the Court rests exclusively with Congress and I don't think we can change that; maybe there's a method of creating some enforcement entity that I haven't thought of, but so far I'm at a loss for anything other than an advisory commission.

I'm not sure I like the idea of imposing term limits on Justices, so I didn't include that. I don't like the concept of term limits generally, but in other cases they apply to elected officials that face being voted out at regular intervals. With the Court there's only impeachment, retirement, or death to remove a Justice. Lifetime appointments theoretically prevent Justices from being vulnerable to political pressures, which is good, but the "job security," if you will, appears, with this crowd anyway, to invite other corruptions. So I'm open to the concept, but it doesn't sit well as a solution to anything.

What's interesting to me as a starting point is the language of Article III establishing the Court, which states that "Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour." So we need a standard, or at least a barometer, for "good behavior" and a clarification that if Justices are not evidencing "good behavior" then they can no longer hold their offices.

I don't know if this is a practical train of thought at all right now; I mean, we have to survive the current regime first, or at least retake a commanding majority of Congress, before anything like this can even be put in motion, so there may be more pressing areas to focus on. But assuming we do make it through to the other side, being ready to go with reform is a good idea. Why not work out the details now?

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Congress, Civics, Posted on May 19, 2026 at 3:57PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Lost day, online surveillance, corruption run amok, and lost Canadians

A few scattered items for this afternoon...

• Gravitational forces: The Black Hole of depression is sometimes hard to measure/identify because its effects are often gradual. One's orbit falls just slightly when you start to tire, but just a tad, it's not really noticeable. But a lower orbit means the gravity is stronger, so the next gradual shift comes a little bit faster, putting you under slightly heavier gravity again, but you still haven't really noticed, and on and on until you realize, hey, it's really hard to stand up now.

  Well, yesterday it was really hard to stand up. It was basically a lost day. Then last night/this morning I had grief dreams, my subconscious apparently looking for ways to bum me out by creating a dream-movie wherein my grandpa dies all over again and Pixel goes missing. Sometimes my subconscious is a real asshole.

  In retrospect I can see that over the last week-plus I'd been slipping in my orbit. More easily distracted, unfocused, slower to process. Much more irritable. Whether that realization means that now I can blast myself back into high orbit remains to be seen, but usually it's not so much a blast off as a hard climb. One good thing about my lost day yesterday is that I slept a lot, so maybe banking more rest will help. We'll see.

• You're being watched: There's a website called Since You Arrived that does nothing but inform you of what information is being given by your browser/computer to sites you visit online. It's interesting, might be surprising if you're not into the workings of the interwebs. Check it out, if you dare.

• Worse before better: Even the relatively utopian universe of Star Trek postulated that we as humans would have to go through some nightmares before we achieved the dream. So I'm actually hopeful that Preznitwit Felon47’s latest scheme of blatant corruption, settling a $10 billion "lawsuit" between himself and the IRS that he controls—which should be thrown out and deemed not subject to any settlement for any amount of money or "damages" (he sustained zero injury)—for over a billion dollars to be allegedly-but-not-really used in a "weaponization fund" to aid those prosecuted by the Biden DOJ (e.g. January 6 rioters, among others) and thus amount to a payment scheme for his private militia of MAGA goonsquad will be seen for what it is: the alleged President of the United States backing an armored truck up to the U.S. treasury and stealing for himself, whether he uses it to pay people to do violence for him or not. And with that recognition, tip the scales such that the career of Felon47 starts crashing down in earnest. (I mean, you'd think the illegal war and DHS murdering people would be plenty, but it wasn't enough.)

  Of course, I was also hopeful that people would see the destruction of the East Wing and the blatantly corrupt ballroom project for the scam that it is too, and the Qatari jet bribe for what it is, and the cryptocurrency frauds for what they are, and the myriad other thefts and frauds perpetrated on the American public be recognized as the actions of a criminal. So far, bupkis, so maybe people won't care about having a billion dollars-plus of their money just outright stolen from them in a literally criminal abuse of the legal system. But I think they will, I think most care about all of it, it's only Mike Johnson and his GOP caucus that don't give a damn. The question is, will it get bad enough that even some of them start to see the light or will it take defying the attempts to rig the midterms and retaking control of Congress to see any action?

  I heard some former Republican wonk on a podcast the other day say that if even a few Republican Congresspeople were smart—ha!—they'd join the Democrats to impeach Felon47 now, before the midterms, as any future in politics they want to have after he's gone will be severely damaged by their record of aiding and abetting. I doubt that will happen, though, because they aren't smart or they're so cowed that they just won't defy Dear Leader. They'd need to be inundated with communications from their constituents demanding why they are even tacitly approving of all this blatant corruption for that scenario to have even the slimmest chance of playing out.

  Because Americans en masse only seem to care about politics when their personal finances are affected, maybe the combination of a president personally stealing money from them and $6 gasoline and everything at the grocery store costing $5 or more (I just did some shopping today—bag of chips, $5; jar of mayo, $5; box of Grape Nuts, $5; tub of salsa, $5; brick of cheese, 2-for-$5; bottle of fruit juice, $5....) and the repeated playing of Felon47 saying out loud into microphones that "I don't think about Americans' financial situations, I don't think about anybody" will finally be enough. Maybe.

• Know your lineage: If the decline of the USA is getting to be too much and you want to leave, maybe look into your family tree for Canadians. The Canadian Supreme Court recently ruled that there was a flaw in that nation's citizen-by-parentage laws, so Parliament passed Bill C-3, which says that  any individuals with a documented, traceable direct ancestor who was a Canadian citizen are themselves eligible to be Canadian citizens. So far as I know, I have none in my background, at least on my mom's side—my grandfather was an amateur genealogist of sorts and traced his tree back to Civil War-era USA, and I know my mom's mom's parents came over from the UK. But if you do, and if you can prove it (government birth records should exist going back a ways), you too may be a Canuck-in-waiting.

Off now to watch baseball.

Tagged The Black Hole, Politics, The Internet, President VonClownstick, Posted on May 15, 2026 at 7:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Civics class

I am of the generation that got to experience the greatness of Schoolhouse Rock in its original run. They were short (three- or four-minute-long) cartoons that aired during the Saturday morning cartoon block, I think on CBS, but I might be misremembering the network. The Schoolhouse Rock shorts were exceptionally effective educational tools, priming American kids from coast to coast on basic math principles, the weirdness of the English language, and, most importantly, civics.

I'm reminded of those now because I've been reading The US Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, newly published. The book, by legal scholar Melissa Murray, might be called Schoolhouse Rock for grown-ups, at least as concerns American civics. Murray breaks down the text of the Constitution and gives each section an easily-digestable summary before providing historical context and analytical commentary on how the section has been applied over time and what ambiguities did at one time or still today exist.

It couldn't be a more timely publication, really. I don't know exactly what is being taught in elementary schools these days re: American civics; I asked a friend who is a Bellevue public school teacher about it a few years ago, and though she herself doesn't teach it she says others do. I can't imagine it's a very robust course, though, given how woefully ignorant most Americans appear to be on the subject. Perhaps her district, being a suburban one with decent resources, relatively speaking, does better. But I'd be curious to know what the typical elementary school—hell, even up to high school—curriculum has in the way of American government/civic education requirements. People seem to know little.

I know, it appears that people are ignoramouses because 77 million of them voted for a fascist con man (again). That skews the perceptions. But an even greater number of eligible Americans don't bother to vote at all, so maybe I'm actually underestimating how many of us are civic dunces. Hard to say.

In any event, Murray's book is highly accessible, which is helpful since the verbiage in the Constitution, having been written in the 1780s, can be both dense and, to modern eyes, oddly formed (the original text is included, complete with spellings of the day and original punctuation that would get you red-penned in English class today).

For me, having learned from "I'm Just a Bill," "The Preamble," "No More Kings," and "Shot Heard Around the World" as well as, you know, civics and history courses and just being an attentive citizen, the value of the book isn't so much in the explanations of what is in the Constitution so much as the material describing the debates of the day that led to its particular language; how it had to differ from the earlier Articles of Confederation and why, the disputes among the 13 states of the day that gave us compromises that we still live with the failings of, the oversights that required remedy shortly after ratification. Also what areas have been relevant for the Supreme Court over the decades; how clarifications have been made and, in infamous historical cases as well as under the Roberts Court of today, how the Court has sometimes twisted Constitutional language (that's my interpretation, Murray doesn't ever use language like "twisting the words of the Constitution" here) and ruled in ways contradictory to precedents they claim to respect (as with the Roberts Court's 2020 ruling that language included by Congress stipulating that the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can only be fired by the president for cause was not permissible even though in 1935 the Court upheld the law requiring the president to show cause—that is, “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”—in order to remove a member of the Federal Trade Commission, a body established by Congress in similar fashion).

To say I highly recommend this is underselling it. Anyone interested in American ideals of democracy and government; the principles behind the concept of checks and balances; why we have two houses of Congress instead of just one; the historical reasons we have, for example, an Electoral College; how and why states are engaging in redistricting mania now and how come the Supreme Court allows it; how we are still today saddled with legal flaws in our system that are rooted in slavery; really, anyone curious about how the government works in any way would find this book useful. (If nothing else, reading the details of Constitutional principles and requirements should help you understand how so very many of Felon47’s actions as president have been unconstitutional violations of the separation of powers.)

Check it out. The eBook version is only $15.

Tagged Politics, Civics, Schoolhouse Rock, Posted on May 11, 2026 at 1:16AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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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   |     |  

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No Kings, rainouts, and roboumps

I went to my local No Kings protest rally on Saturday. Like last time, I opted for the one just a couple of blocks from my house rather than go to the big one downtown, for good or ill. I was on my own, so it wasn't a social thing. Anyway, the turnout was pretty decent for an ancillary/satellite event and I'm glad to have participated. I threw together a quick-and-dirty (by my standard) sign and walked the length of the several blocks long designated area a few times, then across the street, then back again, for a couple of hours. Chatted with a few fellow protesters, mostly about the Mariners but also about our shared outrage at the modern Republican party, which is now basically the new American Bund.

Below are some of the signs people had at my local event.

Then yesterday I had a four-game umpiring shift that only lasted two games; the rains came and the infield became muddy and slippery, so I called the other two off and they'll be rescheduled. Hopefully for a warmer, sunnier day.

Meanwhile, baseball's opening weekend had some good games and also saw the introduction of ABS, the "automated ball-strike system," colloquially known as the "roboumps." In its present form, I actually kind of like ABS. How it works is, if the pitcher, catcher, or batter disagrees with an umpire's call of a pitch, he can tap his helmet and say "challenge." Then the technology which just recorded the pitch on camera replays it through it's computerized wizardry and notes where the pitch crossed the vertical plane matching the front of home plate. If by the system's boundaries—which are calibrated for each individual batter based on his height—it even nicks the edge of the strike zone, it is a strike, otherwise a ball, regardless of what the umpire said it was. Each team gets two failed challenges per game, after which they can't ask for any more.

The fact that it's limited to two unsuccessful challenges per team gives the system an element of strategy to it—do you challenge one early in the game? If it's an obvious miss, sure, but if it's close do you risk it? So I like that. Also, when you've been unlucky enough to draw C.B. Bucknor as your home-plate ump, at least you know you'll have an opportunity to show him he was wrong a few times. But when I really like it is when the challenges fail. That's obviously my bias as a rec league umpire, but I quite enjoyed when in Friday evening's Mariners/Guardians game, HP ump Will Little was proven right all four times he was challenged and the system was off the table for the rest of the game. Little's been one of the better umps for a while now and here's real evidence to back it up.

But I fear the current version of ABS will be short-lived. Things in the early going are trending more toward the C.B. Bucknor side of things than to the Will Little side, with the majority of challenges being successful. The great sportswriter Joe Posnanski has also opined that the day is coming soon when every pitch will be called by cameras and computer tech and the home-plate ump will be essentially just like the other base umpires, there for safe/out calls and random weirdnesses. That I won't appreciate. I like human frailties. I like having to know who your umpire is going to be so you can plan accordingly. I like that some umpires have a tight zone and some a more generous one. Ideally, they wouldn't be inconsistent with it, and that's where guys like Bucknor and Hunter Wendelstedt become frustrating.

One more positive hope I have is that with the challenge system, TV broadcasts will stop overlaying the approximate strike zone onto the camera shot for live pitches. It's become normal over the past several years, and I don't like it. I do like it on replays, but live I want to see the pitch unencumbered by overlays and distractions. On the close pitches especially.

I'll be at the game tonight live and in person, so no video overlays to worry about there. Temps in the low 40s, so I'll be layered up. Go M's.

Now, No Kings signage from Saturday:

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Baseball, Umping, Posted on March 30, 2026 at 4:36PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Analogies to Doug Fister and Lucille Bluth

A couple of topics today, starting with last night's umpiring.

As on Monday, we were joined at the field by Alfred the amateur photographer and former Army medic. Unlike on Monday, we had no need for his medic experience, though it was a close thing. This time I was the one that went down in a heap.

About midway through our first game of the night, a batter for the team that calls themselves...I want to say Pushing Bunts, but I think that's wrong; they're a new team and their name isn't on the official documentation yet. Anyway, their batter took a cut at a fat pitch right down the middle and juuust got under it a smidge and fouled it straight back. At speed. At me. I instinctively began to turn and duck away, but I was nevertheless struck flush on the temple. I hit the turf and stayed there for maybe 10 or 15 seconds, during which time half the players on both teams were rushing toward home plate. I got up with a painful impact reminder above my ear, but otherwise none the worse for wear. I was good to go after a minute or two and thankfully didn't need to prevail upon Alfred's Army expertise. But it wasn't fun, and I felt it a bit more painfully later in the night well after I'd gone home. I took a couple Tylenol caps and I could ignore it again. Today it's pretty much fine, though I can still feel a phantom sting.

In retrospect, this was not a bad thing for my ego. Because all those players were concerned and one of them—I don't know who, I was still down on the turf, but it was a guy—said, "shit, dude, you can't get hurt, you're the good ump." Anyway, the rest of the night when several of the players came to bat they checked in. "You still OK, man? Only one pitch coming in at a time, right?" I waved them off. "I'm good, no worries. Occupational hazzard." Which is true, but I may be losing a step, because even though I've taken several errant pitches or foul balls to the shins or the sternum, I'd until now always been quick enough to get out of the way of anything at my head. But I think it must have looked pretty bad from the perspective of, well, everyone else, because there seemed to be real concern that we'd have to stop the games. I was reminded of either a World Series or playoff game several years back wherein pitcher Doug Fister of the Detroit Tigers was hit on the side of his head with a line drive back through the box. Everyone was rightly worried, but Fister just waived off the training staff and his manager, or tried to anyway, and shrugged it off like it was nothing and went back to pitching. He seemed annoyed by the attention. Of course, I also thought of Billy Wagner getting similarly tagged with a hard liner to the side of the head and he had to be carried off the field on a stretcher, so...yeah, there's a range of possibilities. At least (a) this is softball, where the ball isn't so dense and the speeds it travels aren't extreme; and (b) this was a foul tip with no extra velocity added to it by the swing of the bat. Really, the time a pissed off soccer player kicked a soccer ball at me was worse.

So we moved on and finished out the games without much other drama. The second game featured less experienced teams, which meant more errors, more weird plays, and, interestingly, a walkoff comeback victory by the team I figured would lose handily at the outset. I had to explain both the infield fly and obstruction rules to newbies, but nothing outlandish.

Alfred again shared some of his photos with me, so I'm including some here. Sadly, he did not get any shots of my close encounter with a foul ball.

Stephen and Colin celebrate finally throwing different options in rock-paper-scissors to determine which would be the home team. I think it took five tries?

 

I don't recall what this was about, but I'm probably saying something like, “yeah, it's an out, what do you want me to do?"

 

Here is when I and one of her teammates had to explain to the inexperienced first-basewoman why I called obstruction on her and ruled a runner who appeared to have been forced out to be safe at second base.

 

This and the next are actually from Monday, but I like them in sequence because this one shows my usual move of running with the batter toward first base in order to be in better position to both see a play at first and hear the pop of the ball being caught...

 

...and this shows my usual move when Joel is batting; I know he's not only going to be safe at first, but if there's a play to be made on him it will be at third, so I'm hurrying there instead. Typically I can get there by the time Joel's around second. He's not Barry Allen, but he is faster than most.

 

Onward to topic number two, our demented president.

The felonious moron occupying the White House held one of his mock Cabinet meetings today, wherein nothing of consequence was discussed. In fact, Felon47 was so uninterested in discussing substance that at one point he meandered off into one of his stupid "sir" stories. You know, a story he tells in which some other person addresses him reverently as "sir," which is a sure tell that it never happened. This one was about, I kid you not, Sharpie pens.

Of all the many many things this pathetic excuse for a human being says and does that are horrifying and imbecilic, this rates near or at the bottom of the list, but it still sticks in my craw because what he did with this story was have a Lucille Bluth moment on camera.

Apropos of nothing, he complained that the pens presidents have generally used in signing ceremonies, the ceremonial pens that are then typically given away as souvenirs to people attending the signing, are "thousand dollar pens" and "don't write very well" and that he really prefers the Sharpies. So he found himself talking to someone at the Sharpie company (sure, Donny) and said he'd prefer to use the Sharpie for these things but couldn't possibly use a commercially branded pen in front of the press and so on (sure, Donny), so the imaginary Sharpie guy told him they could make special Sharpies just for him, ones that say "the White House" and even have his signature on them, and that he could have them free of charge. Ever magnanimous, Felon47 insisted on paying for them (I mean, it's not his money, right, it's our money, who gives a damn about our money?) and that he used his "art of the deal" skills to buy them for five dollars a pen. "Five dollars instead of a thousand dollars, and the pens are better."

OK, two things: The ceremonial pens were nice pens, probably a couple hundred bucks a pop, but not a grand per pen. That's one of the fictitious numbers he pulls out of nowhere like when he says there are 15 points in his peace plan (that has zero points because it doesn't exist). And, the retail price of a Sharpie pen, when bought in a box of 36, is sixty-four cents. Even if we factor in the custom branding of "The White House" and all that, you can buy them retail—as I'm sure some White House staffer actually did—for a little more than a dollar apiece if bought in bulk. Good deal-making skills, you idiot. It's no wonder you don't care about inflation and the affordability of goods to American consumers, you've never pumped gas or bought groceries.

Of course, the interaction never really occurred, which means that even in his made-up fantasies about his alleged great deal-making he still fucks up and doesn't know it.

 

 

Topic three: Opening Day!

I did not get tickets to this year's opening day game, but will be at the park in person to see your Seattle Mariners on Monday night. Tonight I watched on TV, and for the first time in years did it without having to resort to skirting the system. We now have a local streaming option for the M's, and it's not all that pricey given the nature of inflation and the current economy. Of course, one could argue that the current economy means you don't add new expenses no  matter how reasonable, but the difference between the MLB.TV package I'd been using for years and that plus the new Mariner streaming product is basically the cost of one in-person game. So I put my tickets for tomorrow night on StubHub and assuming they sell will pay for it with the proceeds. It's going to be cold out there tomorrow night anyway and everyone I asked to go with me either said no immediately or bailed later, so this seemed a good option.

Meantime, the M's did play tonight and lost to the Cleveland Guardians. Because the only way the Mariners could score tonight was to hit solo home runs. Jesus, guys, I thought we'd been over this already: There are other ways to score in baseball. Put runners on base and move them along. To be fair, none of the four homers hit by the M's appeared to be "on purpose," it wasn't a case of swinging for the fences, just happy accidents on well-struck liners. But they also struck out 14 times, and the combo of four solo shots and 14 Ks and nothing else (their only other hits were two-out doubles, and not in the same frame) is not a promising way to begin the season.

Well, there's time to turn it around. 161 more to go, after all.

Tagged Umping, Baseball, President VonClownstick, Politics, Softball, Posted on March 27, 2026 at 1:41AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Link of the day

As I get set to bug out for the evening, allow me to heartily recommend today's Jeff Tiedrich column to all y'all. It sums things up rather nicely vis-à-vis the news of the day: https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/lets-all-watch-a-french-general-tell...

Not unrelatedly, I'm glad I'm not planning to fly anywhere anytime soon and would urge everyone to delay any flight plans they may have in or out of American airports.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Jeff Tiedrich, Posted on March 23, 2026 at 5:36PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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