LET THEM FIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let. Them. Fight.

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

No Comments yet

Grifter in Chief

I've not done much posting lately on the plethora of horrors coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It's not that I haven't been aware of (at least some of) them, nor that they've been so numerous and unrelenting as to have overwhelmed my ability to comprehend—yet—it's just that I know I'm largely if not completely preaching to the choir here. At least when my uncle isn't lurking around.

Once more, I turn to our pal Craig Calcaterra to sum up what I'm trying to say but with better verbiage (emphasis mine to relate it to my own stuff as well):

Every single day something happens which reminds us that America is being torched by cruel, nihilistic bigots and ignoramuses for no reason beyond their destructive and psychotic whims. No country I can think of has ever so willingly and so deeply harmed itself like America is harming itself right now. Even countries who flung themselves into destructive wars believed, at last at the outset, that they were doing something to help themselves or advance their cause, whatever it happened to be. America, in contrast, is voluntarily maiming itself knowing full well that what it's doing will work toward its own ruin. All because we stupidly elected a Mad King who doesn't understand a goddamn thing and doesn't care that he doesn't understand a goddamn thing. And now that he's descending into acute dementia, a few dozen truly evil and hateful people who have attached themselves to him are doing whatever they want without a shred of oversight or consequence.

I try to roll with all of this awfulness most days. Some days I try to actively ignore it if I can manage to. Other days I try to find the bits of hope among the destruction or I try to focus on history and the longer view as a means of reminding myself that all things, even bad things, do eventually pass. For the past couple of days, however, I haven't been able to do any of that. For the past couple of days all I've been able to see is the bleakness and pointless pain and misery being inflicted upon millions by vile people who care about nothing and no one but themselves, their grievances, and their greed.

I really don't know what to do anymore. All I can muster right now is a bit of thankfulness that it's Friday and that I can fucking turn my brain, my computer, and my TV off for 48 hours or so and try to forget about it all for a little while.

In some ways, I think we are all Craig right now.

But yesterday was so egregiously corrupt, with essentially crickets from much of the press—the exception being Chris Hayes, who was rightly outraged/gobsmacked/incredulous on his show (see below)—so I need to vent a little bit.

President Corrupt, Cruel, Incompetent, Moron Fuckface raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and grift by hosting a contest: the 200+ largest purchasers of $TRUMP—which is an essentially valueless cryptocurrency (trading now at around $12 per "coin" after having declined from $75 around inauguration day to $8 last month) that POTUS47 makes money on via transaction fees, so any purchase or sale of any of it rings his cash register—win a dinner at Bribe-a-Lago with the grifter-in-chief, anonymously and with no reportage of the event, so trade favors and scheme safe from prying eyes, and a next-day tour of the White House with the man they bribed. The buyers of this corrupt access are largely unknown as they made their purchases under pseudonyms and/or usernames, though one admitted "winner" was Chinese crypto-bro Justin Sun, who was being prosecuted for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission until POTUS47 took office and put the kibosh on that. Because who doesn't like securities fraud? It's not a big jump to conclude that at least part of Sun's $18.5 million gratuity was thanks/payment for services rendered in dropping the legal case against him, and since most of the rest of the "donors" are anonymous, who knows what other quids were being quo'd last night.

I'll admit readily that I do not fully understand cryptocurrencies, but the nature of any currency is that it only has value to people/entities willing to accept it. National currencies (and international ones—the Euro is real) are governmentally recognized as legal tender "for all debts public and private" within a country's jurisdiction, but crypto has no such backing. If you try to spend bitcoin at the supermarket you'll find it's not worth anything to the merchant. If you try to spend $TRUMP coin, your only willing recipients will be fellow cultists. It's not currency, it's a digital trading card. No shade to card collectors, but they're a niche thing. I have a many-thousand-strong comic-book collection that is worth a fair chunk of money, but only to other collectors/enthusiasts/merchants. (Along with some junk and commons, I've got a Silver Age Superman comic for sale on eBay right now that's getting no bids among my fellow niche members; even within a niche people are fickle.) The president is grifting people with trading cards, and not good ones like Willie Mays or Honus Wagner cards, no, these are all Jeff Schaefers and Cliff Mapes.

One of the fools who copped to spending more than $100 million on presidential meme coin grift was a 27-year-old New Yorker named Vincent who has parted with far more than that amount in the service of making POTUS47 richer, as he boasted about having previously bought numerous Trump watches, Trump sneakers, Trump NFTs... Vince is the best mark there is for this regime of corruption, a cult devotee with money to burn. Sadly, he's not representative of the cult at large, members of which are just as easily suckered and might spend proportionately more when grifted, but reach a limit to their means/ability to go into debt a lot sooner. (The same people who, along with the rest of us non-multi-millionaires, would be utterly screwed if the budget House Republicans passed in the dead of night were to become law.) Vince is also a likely anomaly among the contest "winners," as most of them are thought to be foreign oligarch types and crypto-scammers looking for fewer obstacles to their own grift schemes.

This is, of course, on top of the acceptance by the US government of the "gift" of a glitzed-up Qatari 747 that the Qatari monarch no longer wanted and couldn't sell to anyone, a "gift" that us undoubtedly an attempt at a Trojan horse, a "free" gift that will cost American taxpayers on the order of a billion dollars to outfit as another Air Force One jet, a process that any sane Congress would kill dead in its tracks but might actually get rolling with these yahoos in charge.

Of course, even absent the rest of the voluminous impeachable offenses committed in just these four months, corruption on this enormous scale would get the president impeached and thrown out of office posthaste if the majority in Congress had any fidelity to their oaths of office. Sadly, Speaker Mike Johnson and the entire Republican caucus in the House, as well as most of the Republicans in the Senate, are traitors and/or cowards in the face of intimidation by the White House.

Midterms cannot come soon enough. Assuming we get them fairly; the level of election fuckery this regime will attempt is terrifying to contemplate. But we have to fight. And when those elections do come, we've got to turn out in numbers so vast that they overwhelm the cheating you know the regime will apply.

 

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Craig Calcaterra, Chris Hayes, Posted on May 23, 2025 at 4:52PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Worst. Commissioner. Ever.

The baseball commissioner is a corporate right-wing toady who doesn't give a damn about baseball

As if we needed more reasons to despise Commissioner of Baseball Robert D. Manfred Jr.—and former Commissioner Bud Selig, for that matter—he provided us with one by reinstating Pete Rose and all other permanently-banned-from-the-game individuals under the fig leaf excuse of, "well, they're dead, so let's say permanent bans end at death."

This action pulls the neat trick of both being wholly about Pete Rose and not really being about Pete Rose at all. It's about Rose because a comment about Rose was the impetus for this, it's not about Rose because of who the comment came from. It came from the cruel, corrupt, and incompetent fascist now occupying the office of President of the United States.

POTUS47 wants Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame for some reason. Why? Far as I know, POTUS47 is not particularly fond of baseball or versed in its history. But he does know the name Pete Rose, knows that Pete Rose was a supporter of his in 2016 and 2020, and he very likely knows that Pete Rose was the kind of man he likes best: selfish, criminal, and in love with his own "greatness."

I don't know if Rose and POTUS47 ever met personally or not, but since they're totally birds of a feather—well, except for one of them being a professional athlete with a standout career and the other being a failure in every business venture he ever undertook—it totally tracks that President Convicted Felon would stick his nose into this comparatively trivial matter.

There are a lot of horrible things among the autocratic agenda of the present administration, many of them shared by the Republican party as a whole, many of which have been on display over the past couple of weeks, many of which deserve far more attention than they're getting. But one of the underlying foundational elements of the POTUS47 mindset is not just racism and misogyny, but their corollary: glorification of despicable behavior by white dudes.

POTUS47 is himself a despicable white dude guilty of some of the worst behavior humanity has to offer, so he needs society to approve of other despicable white dudes guilty of terrible behavior so he doesn't stand out as the festering boil on America's face that he is. So all the January 6 insurrectionists get pardons (and perhaps get called upon to be thugs for him again), Jeffrey Epstein was "a terrific guy," Pete Hegseth gets to be Secretary of Defense, neo-Nazis are "very fine people," RFK Jr. and Elon Musk are "genius" level specimens, and Pete Rose should be idolized on and off the field.

Pete Rose was banned form baseball in 1989 by then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti (otherwise known as the last commissioner worth the title, apologies to Fay Vincent who let himself get steamrolled by Selig and company). Not for general assholishness (or for being a statutory rapist or for tax crimes, both of which were still not widely known about), but for specific affronts to the integrity of the game by way of gambling. Rose denied at the time but later admitted that he not only bet on big-league baseball games regularly, but that he also bet on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, for whom he was player-manager. This violated baseball's Rule 21(d), misconduct through gambling, which mandates a year's suspension for betting on games the bettor has no part in and a permanent ban for betting on games he participates in.

There have been arguments ever since over whether or not Rose's punishment was appropriate; of late, the arguments favoring his reinstatement center around how gambling has become normalized to the point of offensiveness, with sponsorships galore from gambling enterprises throughout the game. There have also been debates about others that are now, thanks to Rob Manfred's capitulation to one of the most heinous people on Earth, also re-eligible for the Hall, particularly Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was swept up in the Black Sox scandal of 1919 that ended up creating the position of commissioner in the first place (those unfamiliar should immediately go see the fine John Sayles film Eight Men Out). At first I sided with the pro-reinstate Jackson crowd, but upon reflection I will instead side with Bart Giamatti.

Giamatti was asked about reinstating Jackson shortly before he died later in ’89, and his reply was that the 1919 Series "and its aftermath cannot be recreated . . . I, for one, do not wish to play God with history. The Jackson case is now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a present-day review with an eye to reinstatement." In other words, applying present-day judgments to events that occurred within their own historical contexts will inevitably miss key nuances and/or taint or sanitize history in ways that can't be predicted.

I would apply the same to Pete Rose now, particularly since we now know about some of his other gross behavior. I expect Giamatti would too, despite the idiotic remark by the guy who previously held the title of Worst Commissioner Ever, Bud Selig, who said, "I believe Bart would understand and respect the decision [to reinstate Rose] as well." Fuck you, Bud, Giamatti said he would only consider reinstating Rose if Rose worked toward living "a redirected, reconfigured, rehabilitated life," which he never did; Rose was unrepentant until the day he died last September. As Stephanie Apstein wrote in Sports Illustrated, "It’s hard to imagine a less savory character to whom to extend this grace. Rose agreed to the ban in the first place, then spent the rest of his life insisting he'd been wronged. He lied about betting on baseball until it became profitable to tell the truth."

Manfred, of course, isn't fit to lick Giamatti's loafers. The Rob Manfred era has been a nightmare of rule fuckery and greed and labor strife and greed and scandals and greed and, yes, more greed. Integrity of the game doesn't even make the top 20 in Manfred's list of priorities, all he wants to do is make more and more surfaces available for ad space (we now have ads on uniforms, ads on pitcher's mounds, ads on the grass in foul ground...), bully TV providers, and, yes, mingle with gamblers. When asked about Rose and gambling and the changes in baseball's attitude, Manfred tried to defend his office's relationship with gambling by saying "we sell data and/or sponsorships, which is essentially all we do, to sports betting enterprises." I leave it to the reader to decide if he meant, "we don't do any betting, we just encourage others to bet," or if he meant, "my job is first and foremost to sell data and ads to gambling outfits." No reason it can't be both, I guess.

But his job also, apparently, includes kowtowing to wannabe autocrats. I've seen one take that actually reflects well on Manfred, relatively speaking—that he reinstated Pete Rose as a sop to POTUS47 in hopes that it would get MLB some goodwill when it comes to immigration/deportations/renditioning of foreigners, that Major and minor-league ballplayers would be spared from ICE and HSI gestapo goons kidnapping them off the street or arresting them at airports. Maybe. I kind of doubt it, though. Even if that was the calculus it just means Manfred is as stupid as we all think he is, since you cannot appease the Bully-in-Chief, if you give him an inch he will take a parsec. Just ask Columbia U or the law firm of Paul, Weiss.

Pete Rose may or may not be bad for the Hall, depending on your metrics, but Rob Manfred is surely bad for baseball. Just as POTUS47 is bad for America and the world. All three deserve plaques in the Hall of Human Stains and Horrors.

 

Tagged Baseball, Politics, President VonClownstick, Rob Manfred, Posted on May 15, 2025 at 9:31PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Dispatches from the American hellscape

A few quotes and links for your Interwebs perusal...

 

•  From our buddy Craig Calcaterra:

Stephen Miller, the Trump Regime official who I feel is most likely to be torn limb-from-limb by angry mobs once the public learns who did what during this time, said this when talking about education:

"Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding ... we're gonna make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology."

I don't agree with Stephen Miller about a lot, but I agree with him to some extent here. I never wanted my kids' school to teach them about communism. They'd surely have gotten it wrong! That's why I made a point to teach my kids about communism at home, where they could get the straight dope. It's the responsible thing to do.

Anyway, I'm now gonna return to daydreaming about those mobs getting their hands on this Temu Roy Cohn over here and doing what mobs do.

 

•  From Will Bunch at the Philly Inquirer:

Most voters forgot, or never heard, the 2003 argument by some advocates that the creation of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the new Department of Homeland Security] to more aggressively hunt down undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil would create a 'monster' agency that would warp the entire national conversation around refugees. While it’s certainly and sadly true that waves of anti-immigration fervor are as American as cherry pie, from the anti-Irish 'Know Nothings' of the 1850s through the KKK resurgence of the 1920s and beyond, the 'national security' lens of ICE has taken us to a new low. ... Twenty-two years later, those 'monster' predictions feel understated. There’s no quick fix for the human rights nightmare of ICE and its sister agencies, because this warped experiment has gone off the rails in so many different ways.

 

•  From Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker:

This country was founded on the idea of habeas corpus. It’s a fancy legal term that, in plain words, means no government has a right to arbitrarily take your freedom away from you. Preserving habeas corpus is not some fever dream of the left wing echo chamber, it’s a fundamental concept of justice that people have fought and died for dating back to the Middle Ages. It was in the Magna Carta. It was considered by our nation’s founders to be so vital to our liberty that they wrote it right into the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson called it the essential principle of government. Benjamin Franklin opined that those who would give up habeas corpus for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security. And Alexander Hamilton wrote that the practice of arbitrary imprisonments has been in all the ages the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton. Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the most effective campaign slogan in history. It’s the OG of political messaging. So I mean, what do we think that Colonel Stark was talking about, if not this, when he said, 'Live Free or Die'?

Today it’s an immigrant with a tattoo. Tomorrow, it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Donald Trump.

There are plenty of people in this country who hold opinions that I find abhorrent, but my faith and our constitution dictate that I fight for their freedoms as loudly as I defend my own. And as a Ukrainian-American Jew who built a Holocaust Museum, whose family immigrated here as refugees from the Russian pogroms, let me say this to Donald Trump: Stop tearing down the Constitution in the name of my ancestors.

Do not claim that your authoritarian power grabs are about combating antisemitism. When you destroy social justice, you are disparaging the very foundation of Judaism. When the pendulum swings back, and it always does, you will have contributed to the climate of retribution that will inevitably follow.

...

We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools.

We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit.

We have an attorney general who hates the constitution.

We have a secretary of state—the son of naturalized citizens, a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both,

We have a head of the 'department of government efficiency'—an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself.

And we have a president who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them losers and suckers and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers.

...

If it sounds like I’m becoming contemptuous of Donald Trump and the people that he has elevated. It’s because I am. You should be too. They’re an affront to every value this country was founded upon.

...

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.

They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.

 

•  From the great satirist Andy Borowitz:

ROME—A man who fell asleep during Pope Francis’s funeral was “already going to Hell,” God clarified on Sunday.

Although snoozing during the pontiff’s funeral was “beyond rude,” the Almighty said that the man clinched his place in the netherworld “decades ago.”

“If I hadn’t already made up My mind, the last hundred days would have made him a slam dunk for eternal damnation,” He said. “I mean, deporting a two-year-old? Come on.”

The Heavenly Father said the man’s decision to wear a blue suit at the funeral “wasn’t a factor” in his going to Hell, but was nevertheless “incredibly assholic.”

In another observation from the funeral, God noted, “Interestingly, Sleepy Joe Biden managed to stay awake.”

 

•  From, of all people, former POTUS45 National Security Adviser and longtime pre-Trump-Republican extremist John Bolton:

To be a fascist, you have to think at some conceptual level, which Trump never does. It's too far above Trump’s capabilities. He has no philosophy. He has, in the national security space, no grand strategy, and doesn’t do policy as we conventionally understand that term. It was difficult for me to accept. … There are plenty of people around him with problematic philosophies, people who do have the ability to think at a more conceptual level. What they say may ultimately be reflected in certain Trump decisions, but it’s not because he shares their worldview or anything like that.

 

•  And, finally, from POTUS47 himself, to ABC News reporter Terry Moran in an interview in the Oval Office, who had the temerity to ask him about the Supreme Court's order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador and about his discussions with Vladimir Putin:

You're doing the interview. I picked you because frankly I never heard of you. But that's okay. But I picked you, Terry, but you're not being very nice. ... I don’t trust you. I don’t trust a lot of people. I don’t trust you. Look at you. You’re so happy to do the interview, and then you start hitting me with these fake questions.

I'd like to know how a question can be a "fake question"; the implication of a question could be dishonest, which POTUS47 knows all too well from his own practices, or the subject of a question could be whether or not something is fake (e.g., "Mr. President, do you think Neil Armstrong actually went to the moon or was that merely a propaganda op?"), but a question is a question, it's neutral.

Actually, I don't care about that bit of semantics here, it's just telling to see that whenever our president (barf) is presented with reality instead of obsequious bootlicking he will immediately resort to condescending attacks and some sort of Pee Wee Herman impression with a version of "I know you are, but what am I?"

 

Good times, right?

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on May 2, 2025 at 4:37PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Life problems on the micro and macro scales

I spent much of the past week feeling sick. I mean that in a literal, there-were-germs-and-a-rhinovirus-involved kind of sick, not in a I'm-nauseated-by-our-fascist-convicted-felon-president kind of sick, although that type is ever-present these days.

This may or may not have something to do with my umpiring 6½ hours in steady rain a week ago Sunday. Can't say, really. But it was the sort of thing that is mostly annoying, saps your energy and fills your head with copious amounts of mucus. Not that big a deal, though it did force me to bail on more than a couple hundred dollars' worth of ump shifts over the weekend. I was listed as day-to-day, as it were, on the ump's injured list, but I thought I was OK to go last night so I reported to the field for three games at Capitol Hill.

Probably not a good idea. I mean, I got through it and wasn't any worse for wear, but I was seriously off my game. A congested, foggy-headed, cold-medicine-addled, slow-witted umpire is not exactly the ideal circumstance. It was a playoff night, too, so everyone except me was extra-amped up, and all three games were close, I couldn't even just coast through a blowout.

One team, the oh-so-cleverly named Sons of Pitches, was quite pissed with me after their game, as three bang-bang calls went against them, including one that ended the game. Not only were some of them yelling at me directly, but I overheard their captain and others badmouthing me in the dugout, and you know, (a) I had zero patience for any of that last night, but (b) they might well have a real beef, because aside from the last one (which I have no doubts about) I have no idea if those close calls were correct or not. Honestly, I didn't even see one of them, I was out of position and looking into the setting sun. Usually, if I blow a call or am even unsure of it, I'll own it on the spot. I'll even ask players what their view was. Nine times out of ten there's no going back on it, but I feel like it's better for everyone if we just say, "yup, that was a brain fart, let's do better" and move on. But I wasn't having any of that yesterday, all I wanted to do was get through the damn shift. SoPs was the only one of the six teams I had last night that didn't know me very well; I'd done maybe two games with them before, whereas everyone else has been around for years and I'm on a first-name basis with half of each squad and they all cut me a little slack. Oh well, I can live with not being one team's favorite umpire.

The other two games were without any acrimony, but they dragged on and I was completely gassed by the time we finally wrapped up about 25 minutes behind schedule. Fortunately, when I got home my neighbor Sean offered me a late-night homemade mac-and-cheese dinner that I didn't have to prepare myself, which lifted my spirits a bit. Thanks, Sean!

I'd have been better off trying to negotiate a trade of last night for tonight or tomorrow's shift, but as we say on Earth, c'est la vie.

 

Meanwhile, in the greater world, POTUS47 and the White House staff are now lying through their teeth about Supreme Court rulings while defying judges and going full-on fascist and yet Republicans in Congress remain silent feckless toadies when they could end this nightmare right now.

Nazi Stephen Miller, who if you can believe it is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy—he's the Josh Lyman of this group of totalitarian fuckers—was both caught on mic in the Oval Office and deliberately went on television to say the the Supreme Court's 9-0 ruling affirming a lower court's order that the administration must facilitate and effectuate the return of the mistakenly-deported Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, from the El Salvadoran gulag DHS and ICE abducted him to, was actually a 9-0 ruling that no judge can tell the administration to do anything about Mr. Abrego Garcia. Pure fiction, 180 degrees—well, thanks to John Roberts and his predilection for obfuscation, say 170 degrees—from the truth, and for good measure also claimed that when several officials admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake that those officials were the ones in error and Abrego Garcia was picked up intentionally! If anything, that would make this whole matter even worse, as Abrego Garcia had a prior court order in good standing specifying he could not be sent to El Salvador as that was the country he was seeking asylum from, meaning if we take Miller at his word (as if) then the administration is willfully defying a wholly different court order in addition to the one he is lying about the contents of.

It irks me greatly that this malevolent speck of a man, this evil creature, has the same name as one of my friends from high school, but what can you do. The guy's name is the least of his problems.

The regime has made it clear yesterday and today that it has no intention of complying with the court's order to retrieve Mr. Abrego Garcia and even intends to widen the net of DHS abductions, with President Convicted Felon telling the El Salvadoran dictator that he needs to build more gulags for all the "criminals" he intends to send there.

The entire White House communications apparatus—or, perhaps more appropriately, the propaganda division—has been twisting the words that Roberts added into the Court's ruling away from their obvious meaning and into a pretzel that claims they mean something completely different. "Facilitate" simply means, according to the White House, an update to immigration status. Roberts included other language—"The intended scope of the term 'effectuate' in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs"—that has been seized upon by Miller and the rest of the White House fascist regime to mean whatever they want it to mean, that "deference" is functionally the same as "absolute deference" and that "may exceed" is the same as "massive overreach," not to mention that the word "effectuate" is not at all in need of clarification. What John Roberts did there is find a way that he could throw the regime a bone while still not completely blowing up his credibility as an adherent to the Constitution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor felt the need to append Roberts' order with her own statement that lays out the egregiousness of this case. Her statement reads, in part:

The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.... Because every factor governing requests for equitable relief manifestly weighs against the Government, I would have declined to intervene in this litigation and denied the application in full. Nevertheless, I agree with the Court’s order that the proper remedy is to provide Abrego Garcia with all the process to which he would have been entitled had he not been unlawfully removed to El Salvador. That means the Government must comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with “due process of law,” including notice and an opportunity to be heard, in any future proceedings. It must also comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture. ... In the proceedings on remand, the District Court should continue to ensure that the Government lives up to its obligations to follow the law.

It's that first line that should make every Congressperson call for immediate impeachment of POTUS47 right this second. "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene." The White House's statements and inactions since this ruling make clear that it is no mere implication, that is precisely what this regime wants to do.

Tagged Softball, Umping, Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on April 15, 2025 at 6:04PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Free radicals

I've been having a pretty good week, which is unusual for post-January 20, 2025. I think the huge turnout at the protests last Saturday (I went to a small suburban one for a short while) and the apparent impact they're having in DC has helped a lot, and my general attitude has been more free and easy, as it were.

I'm also buoyed somewhat by the actual good-if-not-ideal news out of the Roberts Court today—the ruling that Secretary Noem, DHS, and ICE must "facilitate the release" of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the El Salvadoran torture prison he was rendered to by ICE without even the patina of due process of law. It remains to be seen if President Convicted Felon's regime will obey that court order, which has to go back to the originating court for "clarification" of the term "effectuate," as that court's order called on the government to "facilitate and effectuate" Garcia's release and return to the United States. That seems like a stupid delay tactic on Roberts' part, but fine, OK.

This should have been a foregone conclusion, but then it also should have been so obvious a call that the Supreme Court should have opted to not even hear the argument and say the prior order stands well and good. It's also on the heels of Roberts and company declaring that class actions against ICE for their illegal and extrajudicial kidnappings of people off the street are not allowed and that each of the kidnappees can have their due process only if they each get a lawyer (from detention/foreign prison?!) and file a habeus petition within the local jurisdiction that they were abducted in. So you can't predict how far the Roberts Court will go to protect the man they already granted immunity for "official acts" or criminality and his staff of thugs and goons.

Anyway, I bring up the Garcia case mostly because I kind of hope my uncle is reading this. You may have noticed that he left a comment on my post about the Dodgers tarnishing their reputation by visiting the White House.

Bob, I know that your comment was at least partly tongue-in-cheek, and I do take it in that fashion (though it's often difficult to parse MAGA attempts at humor, there's always an element of cruelty in them) but really, man, I do hope you poke your head up from the right-wing propaganda bubble and see what's really going on every now and then.

Anyone who thinks opposing this POTUS47 regime is something "radical" needs a remedial vocabulary lesson:

Radical (rad•i•cal): A person advocating thorough or complete political or social reform; a member of a political party or bloc that pursues such aims.

We are living under a regime now that is literally criminal. The president himself is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist and fraudster, has admitted to being a tax cheat, has gotten away with violations of the espionage act only because he has a corrupt Florida judge in his pocket, has a history—which may well include this week—of securities fraud, and uses extortion as a primary means of "negotiating." His cabinet of corrupt incompetents is also a mass of humanity steeped in moral, ethical, and intellectual deficiencies.

And that's just the criminal aspect. Then there's the un-American aspect. The despotic aspect. 

The Department of Justice is being reorganized to be, essentially, a base for the Joker's henchmen to operate from. Congress is a thing to be circumvented. Treaties are for suckers.

In a mere three months—not even, in fact—this criminal regime has not only done the typical Republican stuff of trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and make middle-class and poor folks pay more taxes so the filthy rich can hoard more money; demonizing immigrants and making policy based in racism and misogyny; and rhapsodizing about how government is by its nature bad. They've also gone out of their way to decimate public health infrastructure—on the heels of a global pandemic!!—and utterly destroy the United States' standing and reputation in the world, alienating (former?) allies and perhaps intentionally wrecking the global economy. 

All of it—ALL OF IT—illegally.

On this matter in isolation, my position is conservative while the regime's position—and that of the Republican party writ large, at least so far—is radical. A radical attempt to fundamentally alter the nature of the United States, to take it from a representative democracy revering freedom and the rule of law to an autocratic dictatorship ruled by a small cadre of oligarchs and the whims of one idiotic pathological liar.

I support retaining the societal adherence to equal justice under the law and the protections of the U.S. Constitution. The regime supports decimating the rule of law and trampling the Constitution.

There are other areas where you might call me radical, depending on your interpretation of normal. For instance, I support national health insurance (e.g. Medicare for All), strict gun control measures, a return to an 80+% marginal tax rate, and substantial reforms to our election laws that ban the unfettered influence corporate wealth. Personally, I think that's pretty mainstream and I think polling would back me up, but I can see were even a 20th-century version of a rightward Republican would consider those things somewhat radical. But none of those things defy the basic tenets of American society. President Convicted Felon's regime defies those tenets multiple times every day.

Regarding the Dodgers and their contributions to normalizing this in-progress fascist takeover, I can make some allowances for many of the guys that made the trip. Because (a) they are largely quite young men, (b) living the lives of professional athletes and thus paying scant if any attention to any news outside the sports press, and (c) the duration thus far of this administration has been while they were busy with Spring Training and concerned about making the team and traveling to Tokyo. Plus, (d) they travel in their own bubble of protection and do not have to worry about the harassment and other dangers the general public—especially brown-skinned and non-English speaking members of the public, like many of the Dodgers—does now when traveling in this country. So there is an ignorance that can be assumed. Non-players, though, should know better. Including manager Dave Roberts, who has studied history and is smarter than this. Owner Fred Wilpon is filthy rich and probably hasn't figured out yet that the leopards will eventually eat his face too, but there are plenty of people involved in the decision to go to the White House and shake the hand of the man who let Los Angeles burn not so long ago and who would happily rendition a bunch of them to a Salvadoran gulag who knew better.

Opposing this regime is not radical. It's at its core what this country was founded upon.

Tagged Politics, Baseball, President VonClownstick, Posted on April 10, 2025 at 11:58PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Odds and ends

Cory Booker, giving his party a 25-hour kick in the ass

Just a post to catch up on a few disparate things over the past week or two. I'm a bit scatterbrained, have been for a few days, and am having some trouble keeping a train of thought going long enough for a coherent topic-focused post. Usually this sort of foggy-brain stuff is an indication of a Black Hole episode looming or in progress, but by 2025 standards—read: in the midst of existential dread from the fascist takeover of the government—it's been relatively OK of late. Still, being aware of this is sometimes half the battle, so I'm on my guard.

Anyway, onward with a hodgepodge of stuff:

• Hats off to Cory Booker. His marathon speech, disrupting the usual business of the Senate for over 25 hours, was something all prior filibuster-like holding-the-floor events were not: completely substantive. And while holding the floor for 25 hours plus—on his feet, no breaks, no food, talking continuously except for brief periods colleagues asked questions—was undeniably difficult, coming up with 25 hours' worth of substantive material to speak on was not, because this speech was about the abuses and corruption and illegality and treachery of the POTUS47 regime. There was no recitation of "Green Eggs and Ham" (Ted Cruz) or apple pie recipes (the fictional Howard Stackhouse) or aloud readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (Strom Thurmond). No need, the litany of POTUS47 crimes and destruction could fill twice that time or more.

  Naysayers have downplayed Booker's speech as meaningless, wholly performative, and a "stunt," but they're wrong. I mean, yes, it was a stunt, but stunts are cool, that's why we have action movies. In this case, the stunt was meaningful and the performance purposeful—it served to galvanize Booker's Democratic colleagues into actually doing shit.

  It's been just over ten weeks since President Convicted Felon took office again, which to be fair, is usually about how long DC pols take to move on anything, but in this case we all knew before those ten weeks even began that a clusterfuck was coming and staunch opposition was required. Thus, for ten weeks plus, we the greater public have been pleading for Congress to act and instead the Republican majority of both houses chose to abdicate their authority and suck up to the fascists while the Democratic leadership, while outraged, did very little.

  That's changing now. Is that all thanks to Booker's stunt? No, not entirely, but Booker has spurred his fellow Dems on by commanding attention. The reaction to Booker, added to the increasing action in the streets with the Tesla Takedown protests and the large turnout in special elections, has seemingly done more than all the letters constituents have sent to their representatives put together in prompting action. Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego have declared they'll be throwing as much sand in the gears as they can to block destructive nominees to the Justice department and Veterans Administration. Schiff and Jamie Raskin are convening "shadow hearings"—with Republicans in the majority, these aren't official Congressional hearings that come with subpoena power, but they'll still serve to get information and put it on the record and in front of the public—regarding the decimation of the Justice Department.

  It's not impeachment, but it's a start.

• I sure am glad I converted all my meager investments in the stock market to a simple money market account last month, because look what happened today. Again, this was predictable. In fact, it was predicted. Repeatedly. All through the 2024 election campaign. But the American voter is, in the aggregate, willfully ignorant and so here we are.

  It is truly astonishing that the Republican party is not only allowing this to happen but championing it. This is the party that supposedly supports free markets and free enterprise and yet here they are taking a blowtorch to the global economy. Why? Because their leader is an imbecile that does not know and cannot be bothered to learn that a tariff is not what he thinks it is, that "trade deficit" is a term of art and not actual debt, that recklessly pissing off every nation in the world except Russia and North Korea is not a sign of strength, that making it impossible to import raw materials does not in fact help American manufacturing, and that driving inflation through the roof is actually a political loser. And they support their leader no matter how stupid and destructive and treasonous he is.

  Here's how our old friend Craig Calcaterra put it using clearer phrasing than I did: "Trump did this because he's a big stupid fucking idiot who doesn't know anything and because he has surrounded himself with cowards and idiots who are afraid to tell him anything he doesn't want to hear and who refuse to exercise their considerable power to rein him in."

• Yet, the economic catastrophe isn't the worst thing in the news. It's not even close. Jockeying for the top spot in the ranks of Worst Thing Happening Right Now is the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE has always been a problematic agency, but now, under this regime, it is essentially the Gestapo. Not a joke, as our former president (the good and decent one of just three months ago) might say. ICE, sometimes identified as such and sometimes not, is kidnapping people off the street and sometimes interning them at for-profit domestic detention hellholes and sometimes rendering them to a Salvadoran hellhole, all with no due process whatsoever (or, as of today, interrupted due process). This is being done under the pretense of an "invasion" of the U.S. by a Venezuelan gang and the separate pretense of removing anti-Semitic troublemakers.

  Via Mary Trump, at least six people rendered to the El Salvador gulag have been definitively identified as having no ties to any gang, Venezuelan or otherwise, and that doesn't count the Maryland resident that ICE admits it sent to El Salvador due to "an administrative error" but has no intention of bringing back. It's not just brown people with tattoos or hijabs being swept up, either. This chaos even puts Canadians at risk of abuse and disappearance.

  This cannot stand. President Convicted Felon's American Gestapo must be stopped, and god bless the courts for doing their job in trying to right these wrongs, but without support from Congress I fear that isn't going to matter.

• Let's move on from the disasters sweeping the nation and by extension the world and talk baseball.

  Despite opening the season against the better-than-you-think-but-still-not-very-good formerly-Oakland A's, Your Seattle Mariners are just 3-4 after a week of play. Sadly, their performance thus far, even in the wins, resembles early 2024 far more than it does late 2024—good starting pitching, but anemic hitting and a whole lot of striking out. On the other hand, the sac fly rate is already double what it was under Scott Servais last year, so there's that. Anyway, early days, one week is hardly an adequate sample size to draw any conclusions from. I mean, the Padres are 7-0 and I figure they're going to end up around .500; Atlanta is 0-7 and they'll be in the thick of things.

  Some observations: The M's now have an ad on their sleeves, which sucks but isn't a surprise. Aesthetically it looks worse than the ads on some other teams' sleeves because it's bright orange. Come on, you couldn't get [video game company] to agree to use a navy or silver background, it has to be orange? On the other hand, the terrible uniforms from last year are history and the jerseys are much more professional looking again, with actual silver instead of dull gray and more standard lettering on the nameplates and heavy enough that you can't see what's being worn underneath.

• Softball has continued for me as an umpire and is approaching as a player, with my Smiling Potatoes of Death team readying to start a season next month. This is in two different leagues, obviously, and there are loads of differences between them. I much prefer the rules and setup of the league I ump for to the one I play in, I can't think of a single thing the latter does better than the former. I got drafted into a co-captain role with the Spuds this year, so I was on the conference call with the league and other team reps earlier this week talking about rules and such, and I was disappointed to learn that a lot of what I don't like is mandated by the organization the parks department contracts with so there's not much room for variation: it's mandatory to start with a 1-1 count, it's mandatory to have that stupid-ass no plays at the plate rule. Where there was argument over things we do have a say in was in roster and lineup construction, something again my umpiring league does much better than the other one, but at least there's small positive change there—we'll no longer have the alternating one-lineup-for-men, one-lineup-for-women thing in the city league, which wasn't exactly smooth.

  This week's ump shifts didn't provide much in the way of good stories to tell, I'd say six of the eight games I did were pretty standard. Though Sunday was a five-gamer, and those are brutal. By the time the fourth game is going I'm ready for it all to be over with and I've got no patience left for any tomfoolery. Fortunately, the fifth game was drama-free and ended early. Still, I had to do three more the next night and I wasn't in the mood for it. Plus, the first game on that schedule was between teams that have a history of, let's call it antagonism, so I was going in thinking more about how to deal with potential trouble than keeping my head in the game itself and it showed. There was some trouble to deal with, but it was minimal and came rather late; before that I was off my game a bit but really only made one mistake (prematurely calling a foul pop out of play that turned out not to be, and sadly when one of the few people on that team that annoys me sometimes was up so I got lip from him about it and a later call that properly went against him). Still, it wasn't fun and I was glad when that game ended and those teams—whom I usually quite enjoy when they aren't playing each other—got the hell off the field. Fortunately, the night ended with a palate cleanser game played by people with mostly excellent attitudes and good cheer.

  One thing about that Monday night, though—if I'd had a Capitol Hill Softball bingo card it would have been pretty full. Lots of, let's say, environmental color. I'm there again on Sunday, we'll see if I can get a bingo then.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Softball, Umping, Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Posted on April 3, 2025 at 6:49PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

Schumer II: The Wrath of Dems

Following up on my post from yesterday, I had some thoughts after listening to Chris Hayes interview Chuck Schumer this evening.

First off, Hayes was outstanding in pushing for better answers and bringing the things Schumer seemed to be missing to the fore. As a journalist, he did a great job here and I'm embedding the segment below, please to enjoy.

My takeaways from the conversation are that:

1. In isolation, considering only the situation of the moment last Friday, I've come to agree with Schumer that the vote to allow the so-called Continuing Resolution to pass was the better of the two unacceptable options, mostly because of the effect a shutdown would have had on courts. I don't fault him for that vote or for lobbying others to his position in isolation at that point.
2. I do very much fault him for his lack of foresight in the weeks leading up to last Friday. That Hobson's Choice of a vote came to be without Schumer having any plan, contingency, bigger-picture strategem, anything at all in mind surrounding the issue. It was entirely predictable that the CR would arrive in the Senate and have Republican support to pass, yet Schumer was caught flatfooted and unprepared. His plan seemed to be "Hakeem gets the House to vote it down and it won't get here."
3. My position that Schumer should step aside as leader was reinforced by the second half of this interview segment. Not only was he caught with his metaphorical pants down on the CR, he has articulated that we have not reached crisis point yet (boy howdy, is that wrong) and his strategy going forward relies on politics-as-usual that no longer applies.
4. The 47 regime is defying court orders now, is kidnapping legal U.S. residents and paying another country to abuse them as prison labor, but Schumer is waiting for the regime to defy a Supreme Court order before he will consider us in crisis. He is relying on public opinion and approval ratings to catch up to reality in advance of his taking any real action. He does not appear to realize that POTUS47 does not care about polling because he does not intend to allow fair elections. He further does not seem to recognize—and this is, sadly, a common problem with my party—that as a U.S. Senator (party leader, at that) he needs to lead public opinion, not follow it.

As Hayes points out in the interview, this stance might be fine if we were dealing with President Mitt Romney. But we're not. Schumer is emphatic (for him) when he indicates he knows this is a far different situation, yet there's a disconnect there. We can't wait until the midterms because we can't depend on there being midterms. We have to fight tooth and nail to make sure they happen and that they're legitimate.

Chuck is failing as leader. He'd better step aside or get a clue right fucking now.

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on March 19, 2025 at 12:24AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

The Schumer problem

Senator Chuck Schumer counts down the seconds left in his political career

For those of you that have checked out of current events (like my veterinarian, whom I saw the other day with Zephyr and who told me she just can't handle awareness of the news since January), let me bring you up to speed on the latest round of Democrats Fighting Themselves When They Need to Have a United Front. Last Friday there was a key vote in the Senate, whether or not to invoke cloture—that is, end debate and proceed to a vote—on what has somewhat euphemistically been termed a Continuing Resolution to fund the government in lieu of an actual budget bill. Without approval of this resolution, the government would run out of money and go in to shutdown at midnight of that day.

Cloture is not a commonly used word outside of the DC beltway, but you might be familiar with a correlating term, "filibuster." The modern use of a filibuster in the Senate is not the Jimmy Stewart version, or even the Howard Stackhouse version from The West Wing, which requires a Senator to hold the floor indefinitely to prevent a vote from taking place. Nowadays it's much simpler and all that needs to happen is to oppose cloture—if fewer than 60 Senators vote for cloture, either debate continues or the bill is shelved or abandoned and thus "filibustered."

This bill is not really a Continuing Resolution—a real CR simply continues the existing budgetary framework for a predetermined time (six months in this case) as a stopgap. This bill has radical changes to the budget and is only "continuing" for some things—it cuts funding to myriad programs already approved by Congress; gives Elon Musk clear avenues for corruption with more government contracts; devastates DC's municipal budget; and, not to be overlooked, slashes funding for election security measures. And that's just for starters. It's really bad.

So, Senate Democrats were faced with a Hobson's Choice of allowing this so-called CR to go to a vote and thus pass, because Republicans had 52 declared votes in favor already, or filibustering it and thus creating a government shutdown, which is bad under normal circumstances and could be devastatingly chaotic under this current regime. Either option is unacceptable yet one will happen; so the real choice boiled down to accepting horribleness that is spelled out and predictably nasty, or not accepting it and venturing into unknown territory that may or may not be worse.

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, decided the known horrors would be better than the chaos of the unknown and got nine other Democrats to agree with him and cloture passed with 62 votes. Other Dems, both in the Senate and out—including very vocal members of the House—are understandably outraged at what is seen as capitulation to the regime at a time when no quarter should be given and are calling for Schumer to either step down as minority leader or resign from the Senate altogether.

I tend to side with the outraged Dems, because we are in the second American Civil War—it's a cold war for the moment, thankfully, but make no mistake, the insurrectionists are in the White House and the administration is staffed with traitors to the Constitution—and putting up a fight is thus required.

That said, I don't entirely fault Schumer's logic on this particular decision. There are legitimate concerns about what the regime would do under a shutdown, real dangers that can't be ignored. But I do fault his leadership and am among those calling for him to step aside. He was adamant about opposing this CR at all costs, then completely switched gears once it passed the House; there was clearly no forethought to what to do if the bill failed even though that was the stated goal earlier on, and his behavior throughout this sequence of events suggests he does not understand the gravity of the moment. There has always been a milquetoast quality to Schumer's speeches, he seems to think that if we just wait things out that Republicans will come back to respecting their oaths of office all by themselves somehow, and he appears to be operating as if this is still normal U.S. politics.

We can't have weak leadership right now. The caucus cannot be led by Neville Chamberlain. I don't know if we have someone in the Senate who could fill a Churchill or FDR role instead, but we damn well gotta try.

Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Sheldon Whitehouse, or Tammy Duckworth would each bring fight to the leadership position in their own ways and would be leaps and bounds better than Schumer. I don't like it when we're battling amongst ourselves, especially now, but we need a change and it better be soon so we can get to that united front and so we can have a leader that leads rather than one who waits for public opinion to catch up to reality.

For the moment, anyway, this is still a representative democracy, which means we vote for officials to be our agents in DC. They are there to do the work that we don't necessarily have the time or inclination to do ourselves, they need to be more informed and more discerning about governing than the public at large, and thus should be leading and shaping public opinion as much as they can rather than following it. Republicans figured that out a long time ago, but Democrats by and large have been squeamish about it. It's why the election wasn't a blowout in favor of Kamala Harris—old-school consultants preached playing things safe, toning down attacks, and courting Republicans instead of getting in people's faces about what the stakes were.

Chuck Schumer went with the path of least resistance this time and while I can't say for certain he was wrong in this specific instance, he cannot even appear to be capitulating to the regime and claim to be a leader. In the absence of a few Republicans growing a spine and supporting impeachment, the job of Democratic leaders, particularly in Congress, is to get us to next year's midterms in a way that we can actually hold those midterm elections fairly. That's going to require fights, it will require support for the courts, it will require pushback on many, many things that have not been adequately pushed back on thus far.

Get out of the way, Chuck.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on March 17, 2025 at 11:05PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet

Living through history

History is upon us.

Well, duh, obviously. History is the past, and every moment is history by the time the next moment arrives. But right now, this year, this time, this is history happening in the sense of "university courses will be taught about this time in history" the way courses are taught about The Great Depression or the Vietnam war or Japan's Taisho era.

I first took a university level American history course in 1987. It was a survey course, covering everything from colonial times through basically Watergate. The history I was living through in that present, the waning days of Reagan's term in office, was, unbeknownst to us all at the time as it almost always is unbeknownst in the moment, a pivotal era. The Reagan administration had begun a movement in U.S. politics and government that in many ways brought us to our current nightmare scenario. Reagan showed the conservative political machine that you can inflict gigantic levels of pain on the American public, but as long as you do it while telling them how wonderful life is, a large percentage of them will not only take the abuse but thank you for it and ask for more.

But the damage done in the 1980s was (comparatively) subtle. Slow-moving. Certain segments of the populace were hugely impacted in the short term, but in the aggregate things deteriorated over years. Even when that decline was temporarily arrested with Democratic governance, influence of the Reagan years persisted and prevented any real reversals (though Joe Biden did a valiant job in trying).

The damage occurring now is not subtle. It's careening along at breakneck speeds. This time, 2025, is such an obvious inflection point that we do know in the moment that we're witnessing, and participating in, critical history.

The current President of the United States has been in office just 43 days, and in that time he has:

• Abdicated the United States' status as leader of the free world;
• Effectively abandoned 80-year-old international alliances;
• Eliminated countless humanitarian and soft-power functions of the U.S. government;
• Engaged in an almost wholly lawless decimation of the federal workforce, crippling important agencies at all levels including the IRS, NOAA, Air Traffic Control, NIH, CDC, FDA, and is threatening to cripple USPS;
• Given an unelected, unvetted, corrupt billionaire access to every American's personal information;
• Assembled a Cabinet of fools, traitors, neo-Nazis, rapists, and idiotic cosplayers that appear to have been put in place to sabotage their departments and ensure no attempt to invoke the 25th Amendment would succeed;
• Begun tanking the domestic economy;
• Begun selling off/opening for destruction our national forests and public lands

And that's just off the top of my head.

Then last night he went on national television to tell the American public that he was some sort of messiah while spewing a breathtaking number of lies and droning on incoherently for 99 minutes.

 

 

After that debacle of a speech last night, Congress would have convened an emergency session this morning and removed this man from office today by overwhelming votes to impeach and convict if we lived in a sane and healthy America. Instead, we live in this time of utter corruption and stochastic terrorism and blackmail and stupidity, and when we come out on the other side—for those of us who do, because not everyone will—it's anyone's guess what the world will look like.

Some people, it seems, are beginning to see the light. Some of the dupes who voted Republican last November are regretting it. Pushback from constituents to Congresspeople has been largely on the side of righteous outrage. But the people who could stop this madness right now are not listening. Party leadership has told Republicans in Congress to stop holding town halls and meeting with constituents. That's their solution—just don't listen to them.

A not-insignificant portion of the Republican caucus is batshit crazy and/or cruel misanthropes and therefore unreachable—your MTGs and Boeberts and Jordans and Holy Mike Johnsons and that-other-John-Kennedys—but others are reachable. Some via appeals to their self-interest; the corrupt always look out for themselves. Others know they're on the wrong side but stay there out of fear. Fear of the mob, fear of the unofficial militia of pardoned insurrectionists, fear of the weaponized Justice department, fear of Presidentially sanctioned thuggery.

I have no doubt that among the boxes of documents POTUS45 stole when he left office and that as POTUS47 he has again taken to his home in Florida are records and FBI files and such on Senators and members of Congress. I have no doubt that he is using mob tactics to pressure Senators to confirm his nominees, to threaten Congressmen, to do whatever he can to put the metaphorical boot on the neck of anyone he thinks he has leverage over. It's these people that are going to have to wake up to the big-picture reality that their cowardice is enabling the Fall of America. That their willingness to be terrorized means they are traitors to the nation.

Because they are. Right now the President of the United States is a Russian operative, whether he is fully cognizant of it or not (that's a 50/50 bet, I think). He is also so staggeringly corrupt that he has no problem bankrupting the country for his personal gain and the gain of his donors and "friends." He is also, without question, the dumbest person to ever run for that office (and I include Jill Stein and Joe Exotic in the list) and contemptuous of the Constitution itself. Yet instead of doing their duty as elected officials and just representatives of humanity, those Republicans in Congress are instead huddled in a corner begging "please don't hurt me." Putting whatever personal scandals or threats to their bodily safety above the lives of countless people all over the world who are already dying due to this president's actions and will continue to as war in Europe rolls on and poverty rises at home and thuggery of all sorts gets a free pass.

This is a pivotal year.

If we can, while political forces still matter, convince the cowards and malleable part of the Republican caucus to do their jobs; if we can, while law-enforcement remains at least tacitly an instrument of public protection, bring the atrocities being committed by this administration to the notice of the apolitical checked-out masses; if we can, while courts remain faithful to the Constitution and the rule of law, arrest the runaway train of treason out of the Oval Office ... then we mark 2025 as a turning point that begins reforms to strengthen democracy and civil rights and free society and protect against the future elevation of tyrants. If we don't ... then we have years of steady descent into catastrophe and possibly that war Captain Pike told us about.

We're living through history.

The Trump Voter's Lament, from the band Talking Heads

And you may ask yourself / What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself / Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself / My God!...What have I done?!

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Posted on March 5, 2025 at 9:04PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

1 Comment

Speak your mind

Yesterday I sent yet another letter to my Senators and my representative in the House. It's super simple to do, you just follow this link and put in your address and that links you to your three Congresspeople. Paste in your letter and send. Easy-peasy.

You, too, can speak your mind to power. I recommend it. Especially now, especially if you live in a red district or state.

Not sure what to say? Feel free to adapt mine. Here it is.

Dear Senator Murray / Senator Cantwell / Representative Jayapal,

 

Friday's Oval Office meeting between Ukrainian president Zelenskyy and Donald Trump & JD Vance displayed horrific, outrageous, and thoroughly unacceptable behavior from the United States government.

It was, of course, just one of many examples of horrific policy and behavior from the Trump administration. The sheer volume of lawlessness and cruelty and overt corruption present every single day from this administration is enough to warrant removal from office.

But today the president and vice-president of the United States insulted an ally fighting for his nation's very survival, lied repeatedly both to him and to the American public, bullied President Zelenskyy, and behaved like petulant children—all in the service of an attempt to extort Ukraine.

Trump is an embarrassment and profoundly dangerous. It's barely been one month since his inauguration and he's shown his contempt for the United States Constitution, his profound ignorance of international relations, and a corrupt agenda intended to cripple the government and enrich himself and his billionaire cronies. Today he destroyed the United States' standing as leader of the free world and made clear his intent to abandon Western alliances.

If this is what he's done in a month, what will he do in a year, two years, four years?

Trump is a criminal, an idiot, and a tyrant.

I realize the current state of Congress doesn't offer much hope for a successful impeachment. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying. What are you waiting for? How bad do things have to get before impeachment becomes a consideration?

I don't ask that rhetorically, I am genuinely curious as to whether or not a strategy has been discussed. Does it depend on congressional Republicans? They are not going to move on their own, they've shown themselves to be feckless toadies and/or MAGA zealots; they will only come around if they feel pressure from outside. Pressure them. Find out what's making them betray their oaths by supporting this anti-American administration. If they are bowing to terrorists, call them out.

Republican, Democrat, or other, everyone in congress is supposed to be an American. Americans, those who support our constitution and history and ideals surrounding a more perfect union, would remove this president as soon as possible, before the level of destruction at home and damage abroad becomes catastrophic.

If not the immediate introduction of articles of impeachment, then work to lobby and whip support for such must be happening right now. The longer Trump is allowed to hold office the greater the chance that this country ceases to exist as we know it.

 

Sincerely,

Tim Harrison,

Seattle, WA

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Congress, Posted on March 1, 2025 at 8:43PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

2 Comments

Catching Up With the Chaos and Catastrophe

I've been trying to stay current on the news, despite the arguably ill effect that has on my psyche, but it's been so much so fast that I'd fallen behind. I'm nearly up to date now, though there's probably something horrendous that happened late today that has escaped my notice thus far. (UPDATE: There is.)

Here are the trying-not-to-panic-about-it-yet topics from recent days that we should all be shouting to our Congresspeople about:

• The Senate confirmed yet another disastrous cabinet officer, one that in a sane world would have gotten zero votes. No, let me clarify: The Republican senators confirmed yet another disastrous cabinet officer that should have gotten zero votes. The final tally for Kash Patel to be director of the FBI was 51 Republicans in favor, 47 Democrats and two Republicans against (those two being Lisa Murkowski, who occasionally starts looking like she'd be better off switching parties before she says or does something horrible, and Susan Collins, who almost never acts on her supposed "deep concerns" but did on this occasion). Patel is a MAGA zealot who perjured himself multiple times in his conformation hearings and has made it crystal clear that he intends to use his new position as a mob boss might, not to investigate crimes and espionage but to weaponize the FBI to punish opponents of POTUS47’s agenda. The FBI director has a ten-year term, so, you know, cool-cool-cool.

  "My Senate Republican colleagues are willfully ignoring myriad red flags about Mr. Patel," said Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, "especially his recurring instinct to threaten retribution against his perceived enemies." Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was more overtly outraged, telling his Republican colleagues that they "will own the consequences of Kash Patel's misbehavior. ... Unlike any FBI director before, this guy is a vitriolic partisan.... He is a completely sycophantic suck-up when it comes to Donald Trump. He wrote children's books in which 'King Donald' rules and his loyal little functionary 'Kash' brings 'justice' to him, pursuing the slugs of the FBI. Do you think that when the FBI is asked to investigate corruption in Trumpworld, do you think Kash Patel will rise to the occasion or do you think he'll participate in a coverup? This is not Democrats saying this, what we're doing is relating what he has said and what he has done." Even a few old-style Republicans joined in the warnings. "If Kash Patel becomes director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as President Trump has suggested he should, he will be the poster child of vindictiveness." That was Paul Rozenweig, a Homeland Security official under George W. Bush.

  Patel joins recent additions to the Bizarro Cabinet Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., making a triumvirate of Worst People that will vie for most dangerous cabinet officer in an ever-alternating pennant race of calamity.

  Mr. Patel’s confirmation is even more appalling given disturbing reports about his foreign ties, conflicts of interest, and alleged involvement in recent FBI firings. The Senate’s failure to collectively demand a real investigation prior to his confirmation represents a gross abdication of their constitutional advice and consent responsibility. As the Senate continues to consider the president’s nominees, we demand that senators take this responsibility seriously and do better for their constituents and our country. As it stands, today’s disgraceful confirmation jeopardizes the integrity and independence of our nation’s top law enforcement agency. Our communities, our rights, and our democracy deserve better.

  —Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

  
  
  

• POTUS47 wants to destroy the Post Office. His plan, apparently, is to somehow reorganize the Postal Service as an arm of the Commerce Department under yet another dangerous chaos agent cabinet secretary, Howard Lutnik. Naturally, like all POTUS47 priorities, this would be manifestly illegal. I didn't know this before, but the Post Office has only been an independent agency since 1970; before that Postmasters General were appointed as cabinet officers. Now the U.S. Postal Service, the 1970 law removed the Post Office from the cabinet and reorganized it as an independent agency specifically in order to shield it from political fuckery. The law was prompted by a postal workers' strike over poor treatment that Nixon called out the National Guard to break; pre-reorg, postal workers were barred from unionizing and the new structure guaranteed them collective-bargaining rights. The introductory section of the law on the books reads:

  The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.

  The law further specifies the new agency's independence and non-partisanship, mandating that the Postal board of governors be Senate-confirmed and that no more than five of the eleven members may affiliate with any one political party, that the Postmaster General be selected by and answerable to the board, and specifically reserves to Congress the power to amend or change the law in any way.

  I don't think it far-fetched in the slightest to assume that this is a priority for the administration for two reasons: 1) As a means of voter suppression—in their ongoing march to destroy democracy, a Republican tenet has always been to make voting as difficult as possible, and mail-in voting, as we have statewide here in Washington and as is an optional feature in most other states, makes it just too convenient for citizens to exercise their franchise and oppose the wannabe dictator currently occupying the White House (or, as I heard it referred to on a podcast recently, "Casa de Idiota"); 2) As a means of shifting more public money into the hands of oligarchs—mail delivery would be contracted out to private operators, contracts for which would be overseen not only by POTUS47, but people like Phony Stark and the Cabinet of Billionaires.
  
  

• POTUS47 is whining about his airplane. The specially modified Boeing 747s that function as Air Force One have been in service for a few decades now, and our whiny spoiled brat diaper-baby president thinks he deserves the newest and best planes, not 30-year-old vehicles with the cootie-stank of Clinton and Obama and Biden in them. Boeing has been building new ones—as a matter of course when these things age they get replaced—but not fast enough for 47’s liking. So he has, according to the New York Times, "empowered Elon Musk to explore drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for some who work on the presidential planes." Which, sure, that sounds super smart—especially since Phony Stark's vehicles tend to catch fire and blow up—but the Times piece goes on to say this, which gets at the heart of 47’s grievance: “[The] administration has even discussed whether a luxury jet could be acquired and refitted during the wait, according to five people with knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe closely held deliberations.” Our president wants a luxury jet, instead of Air Force One, and even took a look at a plane owned until recently by the Qatari royal family as a replacement. The Times didn't specify whether the Qatari plane had enough gold-plated toilets in it to meet 47’s standard.

  I saw this piece and, with the recent troubles Boeing has had with its planes losing doors and missing bolts and such in mind, had some less-than-generous whimsical thoughts about it that I intended to post. But once again our pal Craig Calcaterra was thinking along the same lines and used better words:

  Even I have to acknowledge when President Trump is right about something. And folks, he's right about this. Boeing must deliver these jets with great haste! I thus offer my full-throated endorsement of the relaxation of whatever safety and security concerns typically apply to the delivery of aircraft and heartily agree with the idea of putting the man behind the safety and performance record of Tesla vehicles and SpaceX rockets in charge of President Trump's planes. God bless America.

  It's a comforting image, isn't it?

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on February 21, 2025 at 10:05PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

No Comments yet