Crime and no punishment

I need to rant a bit today. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

 

 

“Washington DC is at its worst point.”

So said our authoritarian wannabe dictator, attempting to justify his Federal takeover of law enforcement and his deployment of Federal agents of various agencies and the National Guard in the nation’s capitol.

Taken in isolation, this is one of those times when the Grifter-in-Chief tells the truth while he’s lying—he’s trying to convince people that DC is a hellhole with constant citywide shooting sprees and muggings and break-ins with phrases like “crime is out of control.”

Of course, it isn’t. The rate of violent crime in DC is the lowest it’s been in decades. Yet, Washington, DC, is at its worst point and crime is out of control. In the White House. In Republican congressional offices. In the Supreme Court. The rampant criminality in dire need of law enforcement is committed on a daily—nay, hourly—basis inside our governmental buildings, not on the streets.

In declaring a state of emergency based on a made-up fantasy of terror amongst the citizenry, President Felon is trying to create terror amongst the citizenry. It’s not about crime; he cares nothing about crime except as it pertains to himself, in which case he’s all for it.

Rachel Maddow did a segment the other day that deftly illustrated how all claims of being “tough on crime” and the like out of Tyrant Don and his minions are completely without merit, but somehow, despite the obvious evidence in front of all of us, the Cult of Trumpism guzzles down the gaslighting like it’s their morning coffee, something they can’t effectively get through their days without.

Mind-blowing, isn’t it.

I had started to think that possibly, hopefully, please let it be, that the Cult was starting to wake up and see reality. Even MAGA mouthpieces like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens were openly speculating about why the regime wouldn’t release the Epstein files, why the neo-führer had thousands of agents combing those files for mentions of his own name and redacting them. What was the president trying to hide? He campaigned on releasing the Epstein files! He promised the pedophiles would be punished! Why is he now protecting them?!

I had hoped that, having been confronted with the paradox of being fed the conspiracy theories for years about pedophilia being rampant among liberals and the Epstein files would reveal so many important names as being heinous abusers of children, and then being told that there isn’t really any scandal here and that we can’t release the files because “innocent people” might “get hurt,” there might be a reaction other than drinking more metaphorical kool-aid.

The Cult messiah said that in response to a reporter’s question about why Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche spent two days meeting with Epstein’s literal partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell at the Federal prison she was being held at (before she was transferred without merit to a minimum-security “Club Fed” facility in Texas in a blatantly corrupt move): “We’d like to release everything, but we don’t want people to get hurt that shouldn’t get hurt.”

The Cult had been screaming for years, egged on by the MAGA propagandists, that innocent people had been hurt, loads of them, mostly children, and that the perpetrators must be brought to justice. Now their Dear Leader is saying people named in those incriminating files are possibly “innocent people” who “shouldn’t” be held accountable.

Was this finally the tipping point? Was this finally something that would penetrate deeply enough into the Cultists’ collective psyche to make them realize that their leader was a lying piece of shit that has expertly manipulated them by utilizing the favored tactics of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, including Accusation in a Mirror? Would they finally figure out that whenever Donnie Two Scoops and his regime levels an accusation at someone it is an admission of their own behavior? Shouldn't that be enough to make at least some of the cult fritz out in their version of "Norman, coordinate?"

It may still come to be. I remain hopeful, though less so than a week ago or two weeks ago or three weeks ago.

Distractions work. Especially a distraction like the Federal takeover of DC, which our demented head of state most likely sees as a twofer: A big story to distract the media from tying him to Epstein and a move forward on the actual agenda item of punishing Black people for existing by falsely declaring the 50% African-American city to be a hotbed of “rising violence” and one of “the most dangerous cities in the world.”

Of course, to borrow a phrase from Cliff Schecter(?), Trump always makes things worse for Trump, and this DC fiasco may well blow up in his face and cause more political trouble for Dictator Donny than he started with. And at least some reporters are refusing to let go of the Epstein mess, plus people in the White House keep threatening lawsuits about it which will simply keep the whole thing front and center no matter how many times they throw something shiny at the idiots in a press gaggle.

But eventually this will all come out. Eventually we will see evidence supporting if not outright proving that the current holder of the title President of the United States not only knew all about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking of minors, but that he participated in it. That he himself abused children, that he himself is the “innocent” person that he says “shouldn’t get hurt.”

Whether that comes to light before this human stain is dead or not depends on American journalism, so, you know, odds aren’t great. But it does still seem like this might be the thing that brings him down.

The fact that every other fucking atrocity he’s committed hasn’t already brought him down is another problem.

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Posted on August 14, 2025 at 10:08PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Strange new world order

Tom Tomorrow jabs both the current state of affairs and the tendency of Strange New Worlds to rely on gimmickry. Kudos.

 

Tagged Politics, Star Trek, Posted on August 11, 2025 at 5:33PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Navigating the new normal

Every day there's a new outrage in the news surrounding the regime occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Every. Damn. Day. It just doesn't let up, except maybe during the weekends when the wannabe king is off cheating at golf.

Whether it's relocating his buddy the convicted child sex-trafficker from a high-security facility to a cushy "Club Fed" prison, human rights abuses at his Florida concentration camp, his HHS secretary setting back vaccine research and development by decades, his open declaration that he needs states to further gerrymander their congressional districts because he feels "entitled"—seriously, he said "entitled"—to five additional Republican seats in the House from Texas, or opening up bullshit investigations into the perfectly legal activities of Democratic officeholders, every day there's more crime committed by the alleged President of the United States and his regime of sycophantic neo-Nazis.

It's overwhelming.

Once again, our friend Craig Calcaterra has put something into words that is more eloquent than what I feel like I could articulate at the moment:

I honestly think something has happened in the past six months that has prevented me from ever truly understanding and, possibly, caring about most of the nonsense afoot in this country. Like, I lack the energy to mock or critique on most days. I just stare into the middle distance and offer an accepting nod. The acceptance is not substantive, of course. It's just acceptance of the fact that, yes, this is how people are now and it's doubtful that anything is going to break the fever of insanity which has overtaken so, so many of them.

This is how I've been feeling, though I don't think "acceptance" is quite the right word. Close. Not sure what would be better.

But a significant percentage of people in this country—including, importantly, people in Congress, who could put a stop to all this tomorrow if they wanted to—embrace this "fever of insanity," as Craig put it, and the rest of us suffer for it while we watch the end of the Republic barrel along at ludicrous speed.

I'm certainly not one to advocate tuning out. We can't fight the authoritarian takeover if we're not aware of what's going down. But for personal mental health reasons, I have been allowing life outside of politics to kind of pretend things are normal and just try to enjoy things that, so far, have not collapsed into nightmare fuel.

I've been watching some good TV—"Upload," "Platonic," ST:SNW—reading Enterprise fanfiction, even getting in a little bicycling. And, naturally, baseball and softball.

I had an umpiring shift tonight, championship games, which tend to bring out the worst in people. But tonight was almost entirely positive, with only one player giving me grief for a strike call that he had no business being mouthy about. Otherwise it was good spirits all around and general fun, plus some ego boosts for me when, upon my arrival, several players from the adjacent field objected that Laz was umping their games and not me (hey, Laz is a good dude, cut him a break); players in games I did officiate went out of their way to compliment my style and declare me "best ump we've ever had," which I will take given the state of my head lately.

The other night I attended the Mariner game with my friend Dave, and clearly I had a good time talking with him throughout the game because my scorebook has a number of scribbles in it where I had to cross things out and correct because I had lost track of who was batting or whathaveyou. Too busy conversing with Dave to have a clean scorebook. (Good game, too, went from what looked like a blowout in the making to a close one at the end, with the M's prevailing.) Sunday I have both another M's game and an ump shift to look forward to, a rare Sunday night shift of three games at Cap Hill. Hopefully those will also be engaging, fun, and leave me in a good mood.

'Cause the news sure isn't going to help me.

Tagged Politics, Umping, Seattle Mariners, Posted on August 9, 2025 at 12:02AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Laugh when you can while depression abounds

Hiya, netizens. It's been a few weeks. I've had a couple of folks check in with me to see if all was well, given my brain chemistry issues, so I figured a new post was in order.

The lack of posts hasn't entirely been black-hole related, but I have been fighting the gravity a bit. Not in a really dark, can't-get-out-of-bed sort of way, more in a mild ennui kind of way. Weary. Lethargic. Spurred on by the continual descent of the country into dictatorship and the corresponding frustration and anger with all the idiots who voted Republican despite having seen the sneak preview version of this play from 2017-2021.

Anyway. I won't turn this into a political rant today, at least not yet, because coherence when thinking about it is elusive. There's too much. Which atrocity to focus on? What can be said that hasn't been said already elsewhere? So I'll save that for later.

Instead, I'll just share something that amused me greatly when watching the baseball game from last Saturday between Your Seattle Mariners and the visiting Texas Rangers. There were two outs in the inning, M's at bat, Julio Rodríguez on 2nd base. Batter Josh Naylor taps a comebacker to the pitcher, who has a brain cramp and throws to third base trying to get the lead runner out even though he had an easy play at first which would have ended the inning. The throw gets past the third baseman because he wasn't expecting to be thrown to, Julio scores the tying run, Naylor safe at first, the inning continues.

This is something I had never seen in a big-league game but see all the frickin' time as a softball umpire. It has become kind of an inside joke just for me, one that I have stated out loud on occasion to the next batter in such a softball game, that one day, sometime before the heat death of the universe, I will be umpiring a game wherein the score is tight in a late inning and the defensive team takes the easy out at first to end an inning rather than attempt to get a lead runner instead. (To be fair, teams do take the easy out now and then, but never in a tense situation.) So when seven-year Major League veteran Merrill Kelly of the Texas Rangers did it I laughed very hard.

The M's still lost, though. Oh well.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners, The Black Hole, Politics, Umping, Posted on August 5, 2025 at 8:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Attention Overload!

Wow, is there a lot going on right now. Big things, little things, consequential things, trivial things, nerd things, political things, sporty things, personal things, many combinations thereof.

Now, the personal things tend toward the nerdy and trivial. Don't want to get anyone's hopes up. But between the news, pop culture, and baseball/softball, my brain is jam-packed with musings.

Some, about the latest debasing of Major League Baseball by its own commissioner, were posted yesterday, so no need to rehash that except to just say once again—because there's never a bad time to say it—that Rob Manfred is horrible. But related to the All-Star Game are musings about the gathering I hosted here for it; I invited a bazillion people, but knowing it was for an event that has lost its luster and that started at 5:00pm on a weekday, I figured maybe seven or eight people might show. I overestimated by a few, but we had fun and I ate way too much junk food, including some oddly-made pizza from Spiro Not-Agnew's down the street and so-so store-bought guac. (Always worth it to make your own guac, dummy.) Thanks to Abe, the one person from my umping world to pop by for a while, and Mack and Erik for bringing some of the junk food. (Abe didn't know my dietary preferences, so I skipped his, but still thoughtful.)

That was Tuesday night. Last night was my softball team's final game of the year—we play a really short season, for better or worse—which was typical: We lost by a lot, only got to play a little over half a game because of the enforced mercy rule, and in my one at-bat I swung blind as the sunset was happening right behind the pitcher and tapped out 1-3 but still managed to tweak my ankle running to first. Kind of fitting, really.

Meanwhile, I went to see the new Superman film and enjoyed it. If you want a good rundown on it, I recommend Erik's review, I basically agree with everything he says there. I now want to see it a second time to better gauge my feeling abut it as it was somehow both really good and kind of a drag and I can't quite put my finger on why. It's very comic-booky, for lack of a better description, as opposed to the gritty/angsty Zach Snyder version of Superman or even the operatic Richard Donner Superman; in some ways, that's great, kind of my wheelhouse, there was a lot of funny stuff in it that required that sensibility. In other ways I thought it was maybe too fast-and-loose with conceptual reality with its "pocket universe" and off-hand inclusions of semi-intelligent "troll monkeys" (though that made for one of the biggest laughs) and an unexplained kaiju-like giant monster that was the least effective sequence for me. But on first viewing, I'd say Superman (2025) ranks below Superman (1978) and Superman Returns (2006) but way ahead of Man of Steel (2013).

Also, the long-awaited season three of Strange New Worlds premiered last night with two episodes. Both eps were good, neither was great, and there was plenty of good character stuff and smart dialogue to meet my high Trek standards.

Those all fall in the pop-culture/trivial/personal buckets. As for the big political world-affecting stuff, I find myself navigating a mix of outrage, hopefulness, hostility, schadenfreude, anxiety, callousness, and trepidation. Which is, let's face it, the new normal, but with new dimensions given the latest info:

• The MAGA civil war is fascinating as some of the cultists belatedly realize that their champion actually is a lying garbage person who gaslights them and thinks they're stupid. The fact that they see this only because they bought into a conspiracy theory he and they promulgated for years that he is now denying hasn't sunk in yet, but hey, baby steps.
• Today's publication of an article in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, that reinforces what most of us already knew—that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were two peas in a pod in their depravity and criminality—is outstanding, as it is causing the wannabe dictator and his minions to panic and dig themselves deeper into the hole they're in with the cultists. I've oft wondered what it would take to get the cult to turn on this subhuman stain when none of the prior atrocities seemed to make a dent, and it figures that the answer is apparently reneging on an implied promise to inflict cruelty on people they don't like.

• With all that creating chaos for the White House, official spokesmodel Karoline Leavitt told the press corps that our wannabe-dictator has health issues—which, again, duh—that she plays down as minor but actually might well prevent him from finishing his term of office.

  The demented occupant of the Oval Office has Chronic Venous Insufficiency, which in and of itself is not a big deal. Lots of senior citizens deal with it. But the patient in question is not "lots of senior citizens," he's an obese rage factory who doesn't believe in exercise and maintains a fast-food diet. And this has progressed enough to include Stage 5 or 6 elements, e.g. venous ulcers (evident from photos of POTUS47’s hand and the lie from his press secretary that he was bruised from aspirin and an overabundance of handshakes). Whether the hand wound is from the CVI directly, a complication of it, or from something else, it indicates something more serious than swollen ankles. Add to this the daily evidence of cognitive decline and one has to wonder if the CVI is severe enough to have hindered blood not just to the extremities but to the brain.

  What makes this especially hinky is that the White House—in the first term and in this one—never reveals anything about Dear Leader's health. They give bogus doctor notes from their very own Dr. Nick that say he's the healthiest person that ever lived. We got no information when he had COVID. We got no information after he was mildly wounded when someone took a shot at him last summer. They never reveal anything about his health, yet today Leavitt said he has CVI, probably the most innocuous explanation for the photo of his swollen ankles.

  It's probably true as far as the CVI goes, but what's not being said? Is he looking at heart failure? What about vascular dementia? Has he had a stroke? It sure fits the observable circumstantial evidence that long-standing CVI (pun not intended) correlated with lack of circulation to the brain begetting vascular dementia accounts for a lot of his nonsensical rants and wandering tangents and inappropriate dozing off. (Then again, this is the laziest, stupidest, most emotionally stunted public figure in the world, so all that crap might have nothing to do with his blood flow.)

  Might this health admission be the first step in a soft coup by the oligarchs that want JD Vance to be emperor? Might it be a first move in a fallback contingency should the Epstein mess actually catch up with him—he could resign for health reasons, get pardoned by Vance, and completely avoid any accountability for anything?

  And why am I conflicted about the prospect of PseudoPresident Convicted Felon dying of heart failure soon? Frankly, that's a better scenario than a pardon.

Oh, and CBS canceled Colbert because they need to not piss off the regime in order to get FCC approval on their corporate merger with SkyDance. That's just lovely. (Skip the below video to about the two minute mark for more context.)

 

Tagged Politics, Movies, Star Trek, President VonClownstick, Baseball, Softball, Posted on July 17, 2025 at 9:02PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

The Neverending Battle

I haven't seen the new Superman film yet, but I will later tonight. I have avoided spoilers on the film itself, wanting to go in cold; will it be good? Could be, I have faith in director James Gunn to treat the character well. But maybe not, I mean, the recent history with DC comics properties on film has been a mixed bag, to put it charitably.

But I am amused by the prerelease backlash the movie has gotten from right-wing blowhards. Republicans, evidently, hate Superman. Not the movie—though they claim to hate that without even seeing it—the character.

Most of the nonsense I've seen relates to the fact that Gunn apparently (again, I have yet to see the movie) celebrates the fact that Superman is an immigrant to America. Immigrants Good! is sure to make 21st Century Republicans blow their tops. Right-wing actor Dean Cain, who once played Superman himself in the 1990s ABC TV series "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," reacted to a comment from Gunn about Superman being an immigrant and the character and film embodying "basic human kindness" by spouting off with incredulity, "How woke is Hollywood going to make this character?"

Putting aside the fact that "woke" is a term originally referring to awareness of one's surroundings and a measure of empathy for others and therefore those railing against it by definition mark themselves as preferring unconsciousness and disdain for others, it's remarkable that even someone like Dean Cain goes immediately to outrage over someone championing kindness.

Right-wing podcasters jumped on the immigrant angle to claim that Gunn's use of this very basic element to the character's origins and almost-90-year history would deter people from seeing the movie. “[Gunn]'s not going to get any more viewers saying this, and he might chase some people away," said podcaster Christian Toto while stoking his anti-immigrant fires. Podcaster Ben Shapiro is offended that, in his view, Gunn has tried to "separate Superman off from America" while podcaster Tim Pool went the other way and said Superman would be "denied birthright citizenship" as an illegal alien.

Fox TV personality Jesse Waters said that, because the phrase "truth, justice, and the American way"—something used only in radio and 1950s TV incarnations of Superman during and after World War II until said satirically in the 1978 Superman film, wherein Lois Lane responds to it by telling Superman "you're going to end up fighting every elected official in this country"—is not used in this movie that therefore Gunn's Superman "fights for truth, justice, and your preferred pronouns," as if everything has to come back to picking on trans folks. Not satisfied with that, Waters went on to say "You know what it says on his cape? 'MS-13.'"

Yes, Jesse Waters equates not overtly espousing support for "The American Way" to being a member of a violent criminal gang of bogeymen.

On the same show as Waters, everyone's favorite advocate for "alternative facts," Kellyanne Conway, complained of the film that, "We don't go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us." No, people go to Fox News for that, obviously. Kellyanne is jealous that someone might be working her corner on the throwing ideology front.

All of this I find entertaining, because it illustrates how threatened the modern Republican party is by anything in popular culture that doesn't reflect their brand of cruelty, preferably wrapped in jingoism. Oh no, people like this thing that shows value in empathy and tolerance and decency! We must demonize it immediately so those same people come to think it's all some sort of psy-op. But not like our propaganda ops, never reveal those.

As for the folks who made the movie, they've responded to the backlash properly. "Somebody needs a hug," said actor Nathon Fillion, who appears in the film. When asked what he thought of the right-wing critics, Gunn himself was succinct: "Screw ’em."

Our pal Craig Calcaterra mentioned this in his newsletter too, and he pointed out how much these modern Republicans would relate to the villains in Superman movies. Noting the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, Craig says, "The first one featured a scheme to nuke California as part of a real estate play; the second one centered on the desecration of the White House and the destruction of the American way of life by an evil whack job who constantly demands fealty from others; and the third one featured a bad guy billionaire fixated on financial domination via technology and the final boss of the movie was some insane, sentient A.I. computer monster thing. The shit's relatable."

Superman, of course, foiled all of those villainous schemes. "No wonder Republicans hate him."

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Superman, Culture, Posted on July 12, 2025 at 8:12PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Order in the time of chaos

The new basis for law and order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Comments

Saturday rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that leaves Congress.

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

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

This Supreme Court has already:

• Ruled that women have no say in their reproductive health
• Ruled that Presidents can commit crime so long as it's "official" crime
• Declared that racial gerrymandering is fine so long as it can be masked as "partisan"
• Ruled that altering semiautomatic rifles to be automatic ones is perfectly fine despite acknowledging the intent of law to ban them
• Ruled that bribery is fine so long as its after the fact
• Allowed a purely speculative case with no standing and no potential redress from harm that sought to proactively allow a business to discriminate against homosexuals to gut a state public accommodations law
• Illegally took a case it had no right to hear as it was brought by entities with no standing in order to overturn a law passed by Congress regarding student loan policy, purely for ideological purposes
• Allowed municipalities to criminalize homelessness
• Ruled that the department of Health and Human Services may ignore the section of law that allows Medicaid recipients to choose their healthcare provider from "any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required" in order to penalize providers it disapproves of
• Ruled that the Executive Branch may, in effect, deport people without proper notice or due process so long as they do so before a lawsuit is filed
• Ruled that no court may issue injunctions against patently illegal actions by the Executive (or, presumably, anyone else) except as relates to the specific litigant bringing suit, meaning anyone's rights may be infringed at will unless and until one sues in court, and then only that litigant will be granted any redress should they prevail in court

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

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

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

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

 

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

No Comments yet

Patriot Day: Protests and baseball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Truly inspired to use "Schoolhouse Rock" here.

No notes. 100%.

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

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

No Comments yet

Extortion of the press

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

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

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

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

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

Costas approached the close of his speech with this:

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

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

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

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

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

No Comments yet

This must not stand

Well, the news cycle sure took a turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Comment

Sunday activity

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Comments yet