Music Video Of the Week - November 21, 2025

"Good Enough" by Bonnie Raitt  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Trump Is a Dead Duck

It happened.

House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson was finally forced to swear in newly elected Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was the 218th signatory to the discharge petition to release the Epstein files. With that, the House had a vote on the issue, and, to everyone's surprise, the vote to release the Epstein files did not get 218 votes.

It got 427 votes.  Of the eight House members who didn't vote for it, seven of them didn't vote.  The only one who voted no was Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA), about as MAGA as MAGA gets. 

With that overwhelming vote in favor of releasing the files, the Senate consented unanimously to have the files released.  Trump - who suddenly said he wanted the Epstein files released - signed the bill authorizing their release.  He vetoed it not because he has nothing to hide and wants to prove it after being harassed over the files for so long but because the vote in favor of releasing the files was so overwhelming that he didn't want to be humiliated by being overridden.

Now, just about everyone in the media is calling Trump a lame-duck President.  I won't call him that, because to do so would grant that I should call him a President.  But I do agree that he's living on borrowed time, and hopefully, the lease is up soon.  Not on January 20, 2029 or on November 4 2026, but much, much sooner.  Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows an entire presidential administration to be removed for . . . treason.

Feeling like a dead duck . . . spitting out pieces of his broken luck . . . 

And what proof could be used to remove the entire Trump regime for treason?  How much time do you have? His dealings with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia are only the latest in a series of blatant examples.

And after we remove the Trump regime - which is going to take awhile, because Attorney General Pam Bondi is going to find every possible way to slow-walk the release of the Epstein files - we can get onto working to bring the United States to an end and break it up into separate countries.

Aqualung, my friend!

Kiss of Death

I was never comfortable with rock and roll performers getting Kennedy Center honors, because the honors bestowed by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts - which was only named for John F. Kennedy, who found symphonies boring and preferred show tunes - because the honors were mostly (if not completely) meant for high art.  For music, that would mean classical music or other musical forms that aspire to high art, like jazz.  Rock and roll is not high art, and when it tries to be, the results can be pretty pretentious, as Emerson, Lake and Palmer proved trying to cover Mussorgsky or Copland.   I remember when Led Zeppelin got Kennedy Center honors, which made no sense at all because they were British, and the award was meant for contributions to the American arts - which, of course, means no rap, but rappers have gotten Kennedy Center honors too.   Someone like Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, who was also honored . . . well, he and his brothers were more pop than rock, and he's sort of a de facto American, having lived in Miami for fifty years . . . that would be a coin toss.

A lot of Kennedy Center honors went to performers who didn't deserve it before Trump returned to power, but now that he's back and he's made himself chairman of the board of trustees and appointed noted patrons of the arts such as Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo (this just in - she still can't talk), Usha Vance, Lee Greenwood, Dan Scavino, Susie Wiles, and Susie Wiles' stepmother . . . well, the choices for Kennedy Center honors for 2025 were expected to be very plebian.  And in that respect, the board of trustees did not disappoint, choosing to give Kennedy Center honors this year to no greater than five artistes, the main headliner being . . . Kiss!

Kiss!

Kiss, the infamous heavy-metal band famous for their painted masks (which they hid behind for nearly a decade), their loud, piercing riffs, their stupid misogynistic lyrics, and even the odd disco song! 

I can't of anyone less deserving than these talentless clowns to be given a Kennedy Center honor, and remember, rappers have gotten them.  The honoring of band whose songwriting never caused John Lennon and Paul McCartney or Elton John and Bernie Taupin to fret over their reputations as composers and whose entire stage act would have crumbled into a million pieces without their special effects because of their lack of genuine charisma is a slap in the face to everyone who worked for a national performing arts center to serve as a showcase for the best and greatest of the American performing arts.

And that's precisely the point.  The people on the board who supported Kiss are, in addition to hating  symphonies and operas, likely the same snotnose teenage boys who bought all their records back in the 1970s - even the solo albums - and want to get revenge on the "woke" honorees of years past as well as the previous trustees who quite smartly turned up their noses at their favorite performers.  I was a tween back then - the girls in the Kiss Army were even more insufferable.

Also getting an honor is Sylvester Stallone, whose fame rests entirely on his roles as Rocky Balboa and John Rambo.  Okay, Stallone isn't as bad an actor as people think, and he actually some good reviews for Cop Land and reprising his role as Rocky Balboa in the Creed movies.  But name another picture other than the Rocky and Rambo movies that garnered a lot of attention - Paradise Alley is not acceptable - and you'll see that his contributions to cinema, be it as an actor or director, are as thing as porridge.  

Oh yeah, there was Death Race 2000, the dystopian road-race B-movie that gave Stallone and Fred Grandy a path to mainstream success but not Roberta Collins, who should have graduated to A-list movies and, had she done so, would have given the sort of performances in serious films that could have gotten her a Kennedy Center honor had she lived (she would have been 81 today).  

As for the others . . . there's country singer George Strait, for the MAGA redneck types to don't like heavy metal. a performer described as the King of Country (actually, Johnny Cash was the King of Country, but let that pass), and actor Michael Crawford - a Brit? - primarily for him originating the lead role in The Phantom of the Opera, one of those schlocky Andrew Lloyd Webber works that Trump himself likes.  Okay, I can take or leave those guys, and Crawford deserves points for his role in the anti-war black comedy  How I Won the War, which also starred John Lennon (although that movie, as much as I enjoyed it, was thoroughly British).  But I cannot, for the life of me, understand the honor disco singer Gloria Gaynor, best known for her hit "I Will Survive" and her hit cover of the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye."  That's it.  Make those two songs a double A-side, and you instantly have Gloria Gaynor's greatest-hits compilation.  As she is a black woman, I can only guess that she's a DEI honoree, brought to you by the folks who brought you anti-DEI policies.

No, Kiss remain the biggest insult to the idea of of honoring the best and the most accomplished of those in the performing arts, as they are all performance and no art.  Kind of like Trump.  But at this point, it's worth remembering that the Kennedy Center has long been a venue primarily for light-pop entertainment and touring stage companies.  The National Symphony Orchestra doesn't pack them in like the usual acts at the venue, and Washington isn't exactly known for having prestigious dance or opera companies that are the envy of America.  Honoring modern-dance choreographers or cellists at the Kennedy Center embodies who we want to be.  Honoring a heavy-metal band known for a fire-breathing, blood-drooling bass player and for song titles like "Lick It Up" shows us who we really are.

The Ballad of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein

The Democrats, it turns put, agreed to re-opening the government at the perfect time. The media have moved on to . . . e-mails from the late Jeffrey Epstein.

I've heard so many minute details about these e-mails to the point where my brain hurts.  So let me boil it down for you:

Epstein had a cozier friendship with Donald Trump than Trump has let on.  And it seems that Trump may have gotten a little too cozy with the underage girls that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sexually abused.  Epstein even mentioned to Maxwell - in 2011 - that Trump had spent hours with one of his own girls in Epstein's own house but said nothing about it afterwards - a dog that "has not barked." Maxwell herself had tried to distance the two men form each other to help Trump, but now to no avail, thanks to these e-mails released.  And Epstein said that he personally found Trump to be more vile and dirty than anyone - even Epstein himself - could possibly imagine.

These are just highlights, and I don't think I can do justice to the details..  So, to get a more substantial understanding of this story, I suggest you watch this Lincoln Square video hosted by Rick Wilson.

 

Imaginary Friends

In Marion, Ohio in 1967, two teenagers who had just graduated from high school were hanging out and listening to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, enraptured by the groundbreaking arrangements in the band's latest work.  The teenage boys, Robert Sims and Kevin McClaine, had been in a high school rock and roll band and had played numerous school dances and events before the band broke up in advance of taking their senior finals and graduating.  Now, that summer, they had few prospects of their own.  "Robbie," as Sims was called by his friends, was less academically accomplished than his two younger sisters, and his father, frustrated by Robbie's middling grades, wanted him to work in his walk-up insurance office downtown on West Center Street, and Kevin had no immediate plans for college.  Sims, who played guitar and sang, and McClaine, who played guitar and bass and also sang, were working at part-time jobs wondering what to do next.  The more they listened to Sgt. Pepper - and, when released in the U.S. later that year, Jimi Hendrix's debut album, Are You Experienced? - the more they were convinced that they should form a new band.  Inspired by the new "power trio" concept epitomized by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, they found Eric Martin, a local drummer, and got him to join them.  Soon they were headed for Cleveland to take part in the burgeoning rock scene that would eventually include the James Gang and the Raspberries.

Sims had been influenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and folk and country music, while McClaine had drawn inspiration from the Rolling Stones, Motown, and bluesmen like Howlin' Wolf.  "Kevin introduced me to the blues," Sims later recalled, "and listening to guys like Muddy Waters and Mississippi Fred McDowell shaped and inspired me as a guitarist."  Eventually, they settled on a permanent name, the Streamers - "it was the only available name we could think of that we all hated the least," McClaine said - and with an expanded lineup that included keyboardist/vocalist Joe Wood (below) and second guitarist Tim Wright, they released their self-titled debut album on a small label in the spring of 1971.

The Streamers' first album sold poorly, and Rolling Stone dismissed it as "the debut from a pop band from Ohio that think they're the Byrds but are really more like the Partridge Family."  But with grit, determination, and a desire to improve, the Streamers secured a recording contract with Capitol, the home of their heroes the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and released A Whole New Tradition, their second album, at the end of 1971.  With a Top Ten single, "All Of Her Love," spurring sales, the Streamers forged ahead and came out with one classic album after another throughout the seventies.  Buckeye Country, a more roots-oriented rock record, came out in 1972 ("We listened to Stephen Stills' first Manassas album and essentially told our producer, 'We want to make a record like this!'," Sims said), followed by their ambitious 1973 concept album about life on the road, Playing Tonight, which generated their haunting single "Turn Down the Volume." (The Playing Tonight sessions and a concert at the Petrillo Bandshell in Chicago's Grant Park yielded a documentary movie, Playing On Film, considered to be one of the finest rock and roll documentaries ever produced.)

The Streamers soldiered on thorough the decade, recording their first album in their own studio in Cleveland, 1976's Welcome to Cleveland, as a double set, with Glyn Johns producing; "You Won't Get Very Far" was the album's big hit single.  It was a real coup to get Johns to work with them in the States, especially in Ohio, the heart of the Rust Belt.  The burgeoning punk scene in Ohio, which included Pere Ubu, a band Sims and McClaine respected, inspired them to strive for artistic boldness while maintaining commercial relevance.  Life With the Mannequins, released in 1978, was a shock to listeners who thought that the Streamers had drifted into unchallenging AOR fodder, but it was a hit just the same; the follow up, 1979's Screen Test, surpassed Life With the Mannequins in popularity, with critics declaring it their best work ever.

Not surprisingly, however, the band drifted toward decline.  Derailer, from 1980, contained many fine songs, but Sims had been drinking more and become more insolent due to a nasty breakup with his girlfriend, and often he was absent from the studio; when he was there, he and McClaine would have bitter arguments.  When Sims was away, McClaine and Wright had to play guitar parts in his stead.  Sims quit drinking and entered Alcoholics Anonymous, and he and his girlfriend reconciled and married, but the Streamers as a band had peaked.  Recognizing the freshness of new bands on MTV such as the Go-Go's and Men at Work, the Streamers concluded that a breakup was necessary.  Their final album, 1983's After Geography (a title considered by the Beatles for what became Revolver) was supported by a farewell tour.  Sims went on to a moderately successful solo career.  For twelve years, the Streamers had hit all sorts of highs and lows, befriending many of their contemporaries along the way; they counted Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Peter Frampton, the black rock band Bloodstone, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono among their friends.  It had been quite a ride.   

So how come you never heard of this band?  Because I made it all up.  (And the picture of "Joe Wood" is in fact a picture of an anonymous actor from an old Coca-Cola commercial who looks like what I would imagine "Joe Wood" to look like.)

 *

What you just read is an elaborate outline of a novel I've been wanting to write for years -  decades, even.  It's about a fictional seventies rock band from Ohio that uses real people as supporting characters and would be constructed to read as if I were writing about a real rock and roll group.  The idea is that the book, while purely a work of fiction, could be picked up and read by someone a hundred years from now and mistaken for a legitimate biography, with interview quotes and all that.  To make it seem even more like an actual work of nonfiction, I'd even have an index and a (fake) bibliography.

I bring this up because, while I am obsessed enough with this fictional band from the Midwest enough to write their story, at least I know they are fictional . . . and then there is the case of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who constantly refers to a couple who lives out on Long Island that Schumer says embodies the typical centrist suburban voters that Democrats must appeal to if they want to win elections as he has.  The couple, Joe and Eileen Bailey of Massapequa, are an insurance salesman and a doctor's-office staffer, respectively, who make about $75,000 a year between them.  They're typical suburbanites who enjoy watching TV and going for walks like any other couple.  They rarely go out for dinner but always go to the local Chinese restaurant when they do, and there they always order kung pao chicken.  They're patriotic - Joe likes to remove his hat and sing the national anthem when he's watching the start of a New York Islanders hockey game - and they have had concerns like Eileen's father's battle with prostate cancer.  They're socially liberal but fiscally conservative.  Despite being swing voters, the Baileys both voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024, and while Eileen voted for Biden in 2020, Joe cast his ballot that year for Trump "with misgivings."

And, like the Streamers, they don't actually exist.
Schumer completely made up these two constituents to represent the type of voters who are prevalent in the Long Island suburbs and elsewhere for his 2007 book "Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time," which was meant to be a lesson in how Democrats could remain competitive with swing voters who lean more Republican than Democratic.  Schumer mentioned the Baileys 265 times in 264 pages - one mention a page, with at least one page mentioning them twice.  

It is not uncommon for politicians to use fictional, generic people that fit a demographic study to make their case on what the voters want and expect from their public servants.  Some politicians have even cited real people.  At least two onetime Republican U.S. Senators, Phil Gramm of Texas and John McCain of Arizona, would cite, respectively, Dickey Flatt, a professional printer from Mexia, Texas, and an Ohio plumber named Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher (Joseph was Wurzelbacher's middle name).  But for Schumer to make up a couple with an entire backstory and also make up their children as well as their own details - and let's not forget Eileen's dad - is only acceptable behavior if you're a novelist.  Personally, I think Schumer missed his calling and should have chosen a career in literature instead of politics.  Or he could have been a TV writer and invented bios for the writing staffs of sitcoms to follow to preserve continuity (and don't you just hate it when a sitcom character's offscreen wife suddenly has a different name or when his late mother is revived to appear in a later episode - probably played by Joyce Bulifant?) 

Schumer (pictured above) isn't completely insane.  He never claimed that the Baileys were ever real and said that they're only a composite of the typical suburban voter he says Democrats should pursue.  But Schumer has also said that he takes guidance from them, as if he were talking to them - and he even admitted that he is. “I have conversations with them," he once said, apparently not speaking metaphorically.  "One of my staffers once said I had imaginary friends to the press, got me in some trouble."

This is the most powerful Democrat in Washington?

Schumer's obsession with a composite couple representing a specific demographic is screwed up for reasons other than speaking of them as if they were real human beings.  First, the type of centrist white swing voter the Baileys represent is an exclusive, insular demographic that excludes elements of the increasingly diverse American electorate - blacks, Hispanics, urban residents, the working poor, progressives . . . and some Americans are in any or all five of these groups.  Second, Schumer would rather rely on a dated and particular voter profile from the George Walker Bush administration than find out for himself who today's voters are and what they think.  If Schumer were like that one-shot character in a 1981 "Taxi" episode, the childless, unmarried business executive whom Elaine Nardo briefly works as a secretary for, who keeps on his desk a picture of models posing as a family that came with the frame (because guys in the executive suite who have no families of their own get talked about), he would be harmless.  Pathetic, but harmless.  A man so clueless about his constituents as to invent them isn't just pathetic; he's dangerous.

Anyway, the tipoff that the Baileys don't really exist is because no one with an Anglo-Saxon surname  like Bailey likely lives in Massapequa. Everyone from Massapequa seems to be either Jewish or Italian - or, thanks to intermarriage, both. The place is known as "Matzo-Pizza."  Bailey is one of those all-American names associated with all-American towns like the fictional Bedford Falls.

Or even Marion, Ohio.

It's time Schumer stopped relying on the Baileys to "guide" his decision-making, because his composite prototypical couple - like Schumer himself - are now in their seventies, and they're not so relevant.  As for my fictional five-man classic rock band, they would all be in their seventies now and the type they represent hasn't been relevant since the seventies, so if I actually want to write their story, I'd better do it now.  It was always my intention to have all five of them still alive at the end, which would be the present day.  Of course, you have to live before you die, and like Schumer's fictional couple, they never did, but even fictional characters grounded in reality have to face the actuarial tables, and I'd rather not have my characters die at my hand.

And if Schumer doesn't want to kill off the Baileys, perhaps he should do the sane thing and retire from the Senate.  Then he can move to Bedford Falls and have a wonderful life. 

Music Video Of the Week - November 14, 2025

"Fox On the Run" by Sweet  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

MS Now? MS No!

As you may have heard ,the spinoff of MSNBC from NBC News and COmcast is just about complete, and what used to be called MSNBC for merely thirty years is to be known as MS NOW.

MS NOW is to operate as a news channel with no support from or synergy with NBC News, and Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O'Donnell will be among the on-air talent migrating to the "new" channel.  And, I assume, Joe and Mika too.  Who cares?  I've been done with cable TV news since Joe and Mika want to Mar-a-Lago to pay tribute to the leader of der Amerikanisches Reich.  And because the channel is separating itself form NBC News, which became the most prestigious network news division in the country after Bari Weiss put a gun up against CBS News and pulled the trigger, it will have to create a staff of reporters from scratch, and it still won't be as accomplished as the reporting staff of, say, NewsNation.  

MS Now?  Nah, not now.  Maybe later . . . 

A Golden Farewell

Born in 1940 to an Italian family in Baltimore, moved to California, developed incredible skills to convey a statement . . .What can I say?  This American original is one of the most influential people of the past century.

But enough about Frank Zappa . . .

Nancy Pelosi was also born 85 years ago in Baltimore, too! 

Yeah, Nancy Pelosi just announced her retirement from the U.S. House of Representatives at the end of her current term.  And while I know lots and lots of pundits are toasting her as she prepares to cap her career and cement her legacy as the first female Speaker of the House, I come to bury, not praise, Pelosi for not having stepped aside a decade earlier - 2016, the same year Ohio congressman Tim Ryan tried to win the position of House Democratic leader from her only to fail to realize just how much power she still had despite being the minority leader at the time.  And, of course, Ryan's political career never recovered.  (What's he doing these days?  I'll get to him later.)

Once Pelosi got the Affordable Care Act passed, she should have prepared the next generation of House Democrats for leadership, but like her ex-friend Joe Biden, she held onto power too long, freezing out House Democrats young enough to be her children (and when one of them, Mikie Sherrill - my congresswoman, now governor-elect of New Jersey - was first sworn into the House, she voted for another House Democrat to be Speaker).  Her lieutenants were also oldsters, James Clyburn of South Carolina and Steny Hoyer of her native Maryland - hardly an indication of trust in the younger generations.  Her handling of Joe Biden's plans to stand for re-election to the Presidency in 2024 - refusing to take his yeses for an answer when he answered the question as to whether he was staying in the campaign - may have been justified when it became apparent that Biden would have to step down, but that doesn't excuse her ungraceful method of getting to change his mind, which was about as subtle as a pie in the face.

Her last great act came in 2024, after she stepped down as leader of the House Democrats when she used her power to deny Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York the chance to serve as ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee after Trump was returned to power and instead pushed (successfully) for Gerry Connelly of Virginia, who was 74 and dying of esophageal cancer, because it was "his turn."  (A few months later, the Grim Reaper also decided it was Connelly's turn.)   Pelosi remained adamant against a generational change not on her terms to the very end, deciding her successor and leaving the keys to her fiefdom to Hakeem Jeffries, the one guy from Brooklyn that's as feckless and as malleable as Chuck Schumer.

Anyway, I hope Nancy enjoys the winter of her life when she goes into retirement.  Just one tip, Madam Speaker Emerita - watch out where those Huskies go, and don't you eat the yellow snow! 😝   

Book Review: "107 Days" by Kamala Harris

The title of former Vice President and former future President Kamala Harris's new campaign memoir about her bid for the Presidency in 2024 refers to the length of her campaign, but it could just as easily be a reference to how long it takes - or seemingly takes - to read it.

There are three revelatory facts in "107 Days" that most people didn't know before this book was published.  The first is that she came to the realization that President Biden shouldn't have sought a second term.  "In retrospect, I think it was recklessness," Harris wrote. "The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision."  The second is that her first choice for a running mate was Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg but she thought it would be too much to ask voters averse to identity politics to elect a ticket headed by a half-black, half-South Asian woman (with a Jewish husband) whose running mate was gay.  She deemed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, her second choice,  "unrealistic expectation" for the role of the Vice President and thought his Jewishness and his support for Israel may have been a turnoff for voters.   And the third revelation is that Biden White House staffers seemed to have little interest in defending her record against attacks from Republican ideologues.  But you don't need to read this book to learn all of that.  The media already reported on it.

I was going to say that the reader wouldn't learn anything beyond what I've already noted, but apparently that is not true.  I, for one, learned that Vice President Hubert Humphrey wouldn't count the votes in and certify the 1968 presidential election, in which Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, when the electoral votes were tallied in Congress, so he let the Senate president pro tempore do it.  But did I have to hack my way through a book as revealing as a burqa just to learn that?

I'll come right out and say it: This is the most boring campaign memoir I've ever read.  It induces the worst sort of tedium - enough to make your eyes glaze over, but not enough to cure insomnia.  Harris's writing style is the sort of style you'd expect from a lawyer - emotionless - and her picayune descriptions of life on the campaign trail - her accounts of the hotels she stayed in, taking hot baths, relaxing with a chamomile tea - actually brought to mind that hilarious episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in which Ted Baxter tries to write his autobiography and documents every minute thing that happens to him or is said to him.     And then there are irrelevant personal stories the story of her mother, a medical researcher, complaining about a male co-worker walking around the lab with an obscene cell sample in a Petri dish that's one of those stories I could have done without hearing.

Kamala Harris tries to make the case for her one-hit wonder of a presidential campaign as a pretext for a possible third try (counting her failed 2019 presidential campaign which sputtered out before the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses began in earnest) in 2028.  Like Hillary Clinton before her, Harris deflects most if not all of the blame for her loss to Donald Trump on others.  Unlike Hillary Clinton, not everything that went wrong was her fault - after all, she inherited a Biden campaign staff more loyal to the President than to anyone else, and yes, racism and misogyny are to blame (in part) for her loss - but she still bears some responsibility, such as not directly addressing issues concerning the voters (like inflation), and her perky, cutesy-pie turns of phrases that she thought would endear herself to voters ("Trump has an enemies list, I have a to-do list.").  Plus, she kept playing that horrible Beyoncé song at her rallies (which is not worth expanding on in yet another parenthetical clause). If this book is meant for Harris to make her presidential ambitions for 2028 take off, it crashes without ever getting off the ground.

As always, the best reporting on the most recent presidential campaign, which is thus the most riveting reading, is Jonathan Martin's and Amie Parnes' "Fight" about the Harris-Trump election.  If Kamala Harris wanted a solo account of her campaign without a male perspective, she should have let Doris Kearns Goodwin produce a book about the 2024 presidential campaign.  Harris is only good at making history - not writing it. 

Eight Turncoats

Things were going well for the Democrats.  The federal  shutdown was grinding on.  Trump and the MAGA Republicans were getting all the blame for it.  The Democrats in the U.S. Senate initiated a filibuster against debate and a vote on a stopgap spending plan that would give the Republicans everything they want and give the Democrats little if anything - and certainly not extensions of Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies - in return.  And as long as the senators in the Democrats remained firm and did not budge Republicans could do nothing about it.

Then eight of them caved.

Late last night, seven Democratic U.S. Senators and one independent voted with all of the Republican U.S. Senators on debating and voting on a deal to end the shutdown  and fund the government until Friday, January 30, 2026. in exchange for the promise on a vote on ACA subsidies some time in the New Year.  The eight turncoats were Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both of New Hampshire, independent Angus King of Maine, Tim Kaine of Virginia, the increasingly unreliable and untrustworthy John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Richard Durbin of Illinois.  Six of these senators hold seats not up for election in 2026, and the other two, Shaheen and Durbin, are not running for re-election next year.

In other words, there's no way for the rest of the party - or the voters - to get back at any of them right now.

Because what these senators did was not just vote to end the shutdown.  They voted to give the Republicans and Trump a big win by removing a heavy load from their backs . . . and for only the promise of a vote on extending ACA subsidies.  Expecting Republicans to keep and honor their promises is like trying to eat a piece of pie without disturbing the crust underneath.  (Lenin may never have actually said it, but promises are made to be broken like pie crusts.  At least that's certainly the case in Washington.)  A couple of senators said that they did it to reinstate fired federal workers with back pay, but the workers were fired illegally. 

Now the GOP won't have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortunes and use the proverbial club these eight senators just handed them to bash Democrats in the head.  The other Democrats refused to budge.  But now that the block on a Senate vote is lifted, that hardly matters.  

For many people, there is a ninth U.S. Senator of dishonorable mention, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer is behind this.   Although Schumer himself voted against a vote on the deal to reopen the government along with the overwhelming majority, he, as the leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, could have asked those eight senators not to agree to the deal, and that obviously never happened.  Some folks even think that Schumer asked these eight senators to vote yes on the deal so he could vote no and keep his hands clean. "He's such a coward," a BlueSky account holder wrote of Schumer on that social-media page, "that he folded and won't even own it."

The government won't reopen just yet.  The deal still has to be voted on and amended, and Democrats get to offer amendments.  Then it goes to the House of Representatives for a final vote, where Democrats are united in opposition to a deal - including House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries - but have no mechanism to block a bill they do not like because they are in the minority. Speaker Mike Johnson will shepherd it through with little trouble at all, and Trump will happily sign it.  It's obvious that the Senate Democrats need new leadership and Schumer must go.

Promises are like pie crusts . . . made to be broken . . . preferably in Chuck Schumer's face. 😡😝  

You got pie in your face . . . ya big disgrace . . . dripping whipped cream all over the place . . ..

No, No, Norah

I am so glad I ended my beautiful-women picture blog.

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I ran that blog was including TV newswomen among my subjects - not just because I was prioritizing them for their looks as well as for their skills (which is why I excluded Fox News personalities, as if that made it any better), but because the same TV newswomen I featured whom I thought had professional scruples turned out to be sellouts to Trump.  First, Kaitlan Collins.  Then Kristen Welker.  Last Sunday, on CBS's "60 Minutes," Norah O'Donnell's number got called.

I touched on this earlier this month,  but I have to return to this issue.  Norah O'Donnell interviewed Trump for "60 Minutes," and the interview was pared down to fill two of the program's three main blocks between commercials.  (The name of the program is a gross misnomer; anyone who records it and watches it later will zip through the commercials and can watch "60 Minutes" in 45.)   Thus, the Trump interview took up the bulk of last week's broadcast.  In all of that time, O'Donnell neither asked Trump softball questions or asked tougher questions that he provided fudged answers to without any pushback or challenge.  That is, based on what I read and heard about the interview.  I didn't have the stomach to actually watch it.

It gets worse.  In going over the full transcript of the interview, voting-rights attorney and  activist Marc Elias found that O'Donnell had not only failed to challenge Trump in the footage that was actually broadcast, she had not challenged Trump in the parts of the interview that weren't included in the on-air version. "When I read the full transcript of the interview," Elias wrote on his own Web site Democracy Docket, "I realized there had been no pushback, no corrections, no challenging follow-ups. The entire interview had been an open-ended opportunity for Trump to tell rambling lies, only to have them cleaned up into a more polished product."

The decision was made to conduct an interview that didn't so much resemble Mike Wallace's hard-hitting one-on-one talks with national and world leaders as it resembled MTV interviews of the early eighties, in which the on-camera hosts would ask rock stars perfunctory questions about irrelevant topics (like the time Elton John discussed his role as a co-owner of the Watford soccer team - hardly anything to do with his music or anything most of his fans didn't know about).  O'Donnell, in interviewing Trump, seemed to have more in common with MTV host Martha Quinn than with ABC journalist Martha Raddatz.  But the decision on how to conduct the interview wasn't made by O'Donnell, or "60 Minutes" producer Tanya Simon.  It was made by new CBS News chief Bari Weiss, whose conservative politics jibe nicely with Trump's reactionary agenda, and whose motto for CBS News  - "Do the fucking news" - suggests that all she's doing is the fucking of the news.  Which is news in and of itself.

I don't think I can watch "60 Minutes" anymore.  Not even the arts and entertainment pieces, like Lesley Stahl's engaging story of Rob Reiner's long-awaited sequel to This Is Spinal Tap earlier this season, because those stories will likely skew more toward entertainers whose work has no value and who prosper largely for being good at self-promotion or savvy enough to do what it takes to stay hip.  In other words, people like Trump.  As for Norah O'Donnell, she has forfeited any right to be mentioned in the same sentence among pioneering CBS newswomen like Nancy Dickerson and Marlene Sanders.

And to think she might get rewarded for this MTV-style sham interview by being returned to the CBS Evening News anchor desk.

I Am Still a Secessionist

A lot of pundits are hailing Tuesday's election results - in which the Republicans got slaughtered - as a sign that America has bottomed out and advocates of democracy are fighting back.  Well, that's as may be.  I still say that the United States should be broken up into smaller countries.

Why?

Well, for one thing, this guy is still President.

This guy, the same guy who stood silently by like a mannequin during a Health and Human Services Department event in the Oval Office when a man collapsed and a gaggle of folks at the event - including Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Medicare and Medicaid administrator, who is in fact a medical doctor - rushed over to help him.  We are still being "led" by a psychopathic sociopath who has about as much empathy as a stuffed lion.   

And even if the military overthrew Trump and his gang of MAGA morons tomorrow, too much damage has already been done.  The United States is the most distrusted and most despised nation in the world because of Trump's foreign policy - USAID gone, NATO weakened, deference to Putin - and the U.S. would not be welcome if it ever tries to re-enter the Paris Agreement or the World Health Organization.  At home, he has eviscerated social services and destroyed the the law enforcement and national security apparatuses, and these systems will take generations to rebuild - if they can be rebuilt.  And what Trump and Project 2025 didn't decimate, the ongoing government shutdown did.  Heck, since the government is shut down with no hope of reopening it, why don't we just terminate it right now by dissolving the damn Union?

What has been done to this country is irreparable.  The 2026 midterms aren't for another year, yet it is already too late to undo the damage that's been done.  It is all in smoldering ruins.  Which is why I still believe it is time to break up the U.S. into separate countries.

And, again, here's my map of what I think a post-Union central North America should look like. 
 

I am serious about this.  You might say I'm dead serious.

Music Video Of the Week - November 7, 2025

"Why Can't We Be Friends?" by War  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Trump Trumped

Abigail Spanberger, as expected, won the Virginia governorship by a comfortable margin.  Zohran Mandami was easily (again, as expected) elected the first Muslim mayor of New York City, defeating Andrew Cuomo decisively.

But the biggest surprise was - you guessed it - Mikie Sherrill winning the governorship of New Jersey. 

By thirteen percentage points.

Wow, how did she do it?

I mean, seriously, the pundits agreed that Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor, ran a campaign that was lackluster, and her Republican opponent was everything a Jersey guy is supposed to be, while she, just as assuredly, was nothing a Jersey girl is supposed to be.  Her opponent was in no danger of being unable to attract the typical New Jersey voter with big hair and gold chains.

Not to mention their girlfriends and wives.

I really thought Sherrill was going to lose because the polls were so close and the polls showing her ahead by an average of 5.5 points probably underestimated the number of voters casting ballots for her Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli.  What happened?  My guess is that pollsters and pundits were basing their polling and projections, respectively, on the New Jersey electorate in 2021, in which Ciattarelli was far behind Governor Phil Murphy in the polls but ended up losing by only three points.  Also, Sherrill was a woman and a Democrat.  But the electorate in this state today is not the one that existed four years ago, and the 2021 election didn't have the specter of Donald Trump hanging over it like the sword of Damocles. 

And no, I don't regret not joining her campaign.  I mean, she clearly didn't need me except for my vote. 

Meanwhile, California voters endorsed Proposition 50, allowing the state to redistrict U.S. House seats to counteract redistricting in other states (*cough cough*, Texas, *cough cough*) to give a partisan advantage to one side (*cough cough*, the GOP, *cough cough*) and possibly saving the 2026 midterm elections for Democrats.  Two Democrats were elected to the state public utilities commission in Georgia.  Three liberal state Supreme Court justices were retained in Pennsylvania, and conservatives lost ground significantly.  The right-wing white ring of Stepford Wives Moms For Liberty, also known as Klan Karenhood, targeted 31 local elections in the country; they won all but 31 of them. 😆

Donald Trump is ticked off.  His hope of expanding his power through, say, a Ciattarelli administration in New Jersey or a more conservative Pennsylvania Supreme Court has been dashed, and his efforts to retard Democratic progress toward taking back the House have itself been stymied.  Right now he's thinking anew about how to dissolve the Constitution and outlaw the Democratic Party so he can make sure that the Republicans can win the 2026 elections simply by having no opposition on the ballots.  Because whenever the voters reject Trump, Trump rejects them.    

Oh yeah, in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill is the first gubernatorial candidate to win a third straight election for her party since 1961, when the biggest sports story was Roger Maris breaking Babe Ruth's season home run record.  Her victory, and several electoral victories this past Tuesday, have made it clear that the old guard in American politics, still trying to practice politics as usual, is on borrowed time.

And may I make an observation regarding Andrew Cuomo and his quixotic effort at a comeback in the New York City mayoral campaign?

Can anyone imagine a man so desperate for a political comeback that, not only does he run to be chief executive of five counties in New York - the five boroughs of NYC - when he had previously been a chief executive of all of the 62 counties of New York, he has to resort to Islamophobia against his opponent, even though his own father had to deal with virulent anti-Italian prejudice? This gentleman needs an enema.

Election Day

I never put in any work for the Mikie Sherrill gubernatorial campaign here in New Jersey.  I never knocked on doors for her, did phone banks for her, or even stuffed envelopes for her, and I never even made the coffee at campaign headquarters.  All I did was vote for her.  Perhaps I should have joined the campaign, as it turns out she needed all of the help she could get.  It's appropriate that she, my congresswoman, is a lawyer by trade, because her campaign for governor of New Jersey has been as exciting as a deposition.  It's been the standard boilerplate campaign of Democratic issues and talking points, apparently based on the strategy that all the moderate Sherrill has to do is repeat the same Democratic bromides to look more progressive than she is in comparison to her MAGA Republican opponent.

But like I said, I was preoccupied with other things, most notably my life.  While the Sherrill campaign was gearing up over the summer for the autumn season, I was in Paris, Berlin and Munich on my first European trip ever.  When the Sherrill campaign got underway in earnest after Labor Day, I was walking through my neighborhood, going cycling once in awhile, and playing with my cats - but mostly taking care of my house.  And as it entered the home stretch, I continued removing burning bushes from the community park in my neighborhood and preparing the park for spring.  And now, with still more cuttings that need to be thrown out and collected this coming Thursday . . . there is the threat of a windstorm that could blow my garbage cans across town if I try to put the bush branches out that morning.  Among other things.

I hope Mikie Sherrill wins tonight.  But I've already been trying to condition myself to receive the news that her MAGA Republican opponent ekes out a victory.  And my sixtieth birthday is tomorrow.  Bummer . . . I took John Mellencamp's advice back in the day and tried to hold on to sixteen as long as I could, but I was only able to hold onto that age for a year.

And if our life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone, you must be in a terminal coma.

Right.  As Sherrill could lose her bid for the New Jersey governorship tonight and I could lose my electricity tomorrow night, I'd better be prepared for anything.   I'll be back later.

Let It Go

As noted back in June, the 57th governor of New Jersey will be someone who prefers to go by a nickname.  Tomorrow we find out which person that is - Rebecca Michelle "Mikie" Sherrill or Giacchino Michael "Jack" Ciattarelli.

Yeah, I voted last week - for Mikie Sherrill, of course, but the New Jersey gubernational campaign has been the most nerve-racking and most depressing one this year.  The MAGA Republican Ciattarelli has a shot, as I've noted before, and Sherrill, as a moderate Democrat, can't even get respect from her own supporters, who wish a more progressive nominee could have won the June primary.

So Jack, despite the consistent leads Mikie has had in the polls, could still win tomorrow.  I don't really care now.  Let it go.  I'm going to turn sixty this week, and I have much more personal concerns to think about at a time when America has run off the rails.  And it has, big time.  While people who need food assistance have been snapped off SNAP by the shutdown, Trump had a "Roaring Twenties"-themed party at Mar-a-Lago with free-flowing booze and free-flowing women.  To ensure that people on food stamps can't get around their benefits, the government has forbidden grocers who participate in the SNAP program to offer food to beneficiaries at a discount.  (They think of everything, don't they?)  And after having given CBS's "60 Minutes" a chance in the first weeks of its fifty-eighth season, I checked the on-air program guide last night to find that last night's episode had an "exclusive" interview with Trump.  Having seen excerpts of the "interview" that Norah O'Donnell conducted with the White House squatter, I came away feeling like I'd seen the sort of pseudo-interviews MTV would have back in the early eighties with rock stars, who would give perfunctory answers to equally perfunctory questions.  O'Donnell seemed to have more in common with Martha Quinn than with Martha Raddatz.  (You have to be of a certain age to get that reference.)

Again, I don't care.  It is what it is, and not only that, it ain't what it ain't.  I no longer want to take part in changing America - I haven't wanted to for awhile, really - I prefer to change my own little corner of it.   That's why I continue to clear-cut an invasive bush from the community park in my neighborhood, with hopes of getting new trees planted there in the spring.  It's why I plan to add other features to the park in 2026.  And I'm also taking more care of myself and my cats than taking care of what I can do for my country.  Because quite frankly, I will ask not what I can do for my country, as the answer is . . . nothing.  I need to tend to routine medical examinations, one of which I'm slightly overdue for, and I have to take care of the house and get someone to clear the snow this coming winter.  I may even have to get a landscaper if I can't even keep up with my own gardening.

My mother always told me not to worry about things I can't control, which, had I listened, would have made me the most worry-free person in America.  Now that there are things I have control over, I want to focus on those concerns and nothing else.

Who will be the next governor of New Jersey?  At this point, why should I care?

Music Video Of the Week - October 31, 2025

"Train Ride" by Bloodstone  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Democratic Disarray - October 2025 Edition

Kamala Harris announced that she might run for President again in 2028.

The party is thrilled.

The Republican Party, that is.

Kamala Harris ran the best campaign she could have run in 107 days, but her best wasn't good enough.  That's because she wasn't good enough as a candidate.  Voters and donors had made that clear during her first presidential campaign in 2019.  (She didn't make it to 2020.)  She likely wouldn't have been the nominee had Joe Biden announced his withdrawal as a candidate for re-election sixteen months earlier than she did, and, as Steve Schmidt recently pointed out, she saw Joe Biden up close and personal and should have intervened to get him to acknowledge his fragility and his decline before he set out to run again.  

Again: Harris should not have been Vice President.  She should have been Attorney General, not Merrick Garland.  She would have been more aggressive in going after Trump than Garland was.

And just to show you how screwed up the Democrats are overall, consider their genius in fighting gerrymandered redistricting in Texas.

You might recall that, this past summer, Texas Democrats in the state legislature took buses to Chicago (the Chicago bus station is show above) and holed out there during the effort to pass a redistricting plan in order to deny the Republicans a quorum.  After only a couple of weeks in Chicago, the legislators returned to Austin because they had made their case and let the plan pass, vowing to challenged the new district maps in court.

Wait, what?

Texas Democratic legislators would hve had to stay in Chicago until early December to force the Republicans to withdraw the plan and attempt to reintroduce it in 2026.  One Texas Democrat explained that the legislators would have had to make numerous sacrifices to stay in Chicago that long, and it would have been impossible for them to be away from their families for so long.

Right.

You know, if these people had been involved in the Western Front campaign in the Second World War, we'd all be speaking German.  "We can't stay in the Bastogne to fight the Nazis in December; we have to be home for Christmas!  And Junior is in big basketball game the Monday before!"

These are the Democrats?

Nuts.

Turning Inward

As I write this, New Jersey is one week away from choosing its fifty-seventh governor.   I went ahead and voted for Mikie Sherrill, my congresswoman, over Jack Ciattarelli, but the polls are scaring the crap out of me.  Jack could very well be New Jersey's next governor, which means that MAGA values - now predominant nationally - will take over at the state level as well if that happens.  I'm ready to concede that Mikie Sherrill has been a lackluster candidate, and lackluster Democrats usually don't win elections unless they have a far, far worse opponent - so long as it isn't Donald Trump.  Jack's not quite at that level of awfulness anyway.  He's awful, but not so awful that Mikie Sherrill could get elected governor just because she has a "D" next to her name.

I've gone past the point of caring.  I'm going to turn sixty next week, and I'm turning inward toward taking care of my house, my cats, and my immediate surroundings - such as the community park I've taken more of a responsibility in taking care of, seeing ass no one else seems to have the time or the desire to do so.  Waverly Park, as the park is known (it got its name from an adjacent side street), is pretty much my only interest in the public realm.  I don't belong to the Waverly Park Conservancy.  I am the Waverly Park Conservancy.

My latest project is a bold and ambitious one.  Waverly Park was - the operative word here is "was" - distinguished by the large number of burning bushes growing in its natural, more wild side.  (The park has a landscaped side on the western bank of the brook that runs through it; the wilderness side is on the eastern bank.)  My late mother could see the bushes from a window in our house and enjoyed looking at the red and orange colors of the leaves of the bushes in autumn.   Well, they won't be there for much longer.  I have since found out that burning bushes are an invasive species from China and don't belong in a wilderness setting anywhere in North America.  Inspired by what zoologist Jane Goodall, who just died recently, said about how each of us ought to help make the world a better place and how each of us has the ability to do so, I chose to cut them all down after a lot of thought about it.

It's hardly an easy task.  The burning bushes are expansive and extensive, and they have these fibrous, dense, membrane-like root systems that make it difficult to dig into the ground and plant something different, and the stumps of the bushes are impossible to remove.   I have to put plastic tarps over the stumps (in some cases, there are clusters of stumps in one spot), cover the tarps with leaves, and leave them there for . . . a year.  Given all of the leaves that will inevitably fall from the trees above, I have to mark the stump locations with stakes so that I don't forget where the stumps are when it's time to remove the tarps.  The picture above shows only the beginning of the undertaking of this project.  

I'm moving into the most ambitious phase of taking care of the park as I look toward 2026.  I put wood filler in the picnic table I donated to the park and hope to re-stain the wood in the spring.  I am also looking to plant flowers in a more regimented fashion, as I saw in gardens in Paris and Munich this past summer, and I am planning to install a birdbath in a small lawn area where the park meets the street.  I want this park to be the best and the most gratifying community park in the region.  Also, I hope to get trees planted to replace the burning bushes - in fact, the town, which owns the land, might plant some trees for me.  Which m=sounds like a good idea, considering the impenetrable soil.  I didn't realize how few trees there actually are in this part of the park until I began removing the burning bushes. 

I no longer have any interest in an better, happier America.  In fact, I still hope for a national breakup into separate countries.  I also don't care about how my state could be a better place.  I can't control or even help to control either of those things.  But I can do something about this park.    

"Chuckles Bites the Dust" - Fifty Years

I don't know if I can say anything about the funniest "Mary Tyler Moore Show" episode of all time that hasn't already been said.  It takes based on the silliest idea - a clown dressed as peanut dies at a circus parade because an elephant tries to shell him - and runs with it, stepping on the gas from the start and not letting up until the very end and making you laugh about death all the way through.

And because I can't say any more about this episode, which first aired on CBS fifty years ago today, I am simply going to post it here. 

 

Enjoy.

Music Video Of the Week - October 24, 2025

"Downtown Flyers" by Streetwalkers  (Go to the left in the upper-right-hand corner.)

The Sun Sets In the East

America's democratic and architectural heritage died with Trump's latest "remodeling" of the White House.

We all knew that he was going to add a ballroom to the White House, and that was bad enough.  Obscenely bad.  But we didn't know that Trump would be demolishing the White House's East Wing - where the First lady had her office and where tourists entered the building for tours.  Trump has made it plain that presidential spouses should no longer matter (since they're all destined to remain women) and that "the people" don't belong in the people's house.   The East Wing will strictly be a corridor to access the ballroom - which is not to be for public functions. 

Unless, of course, tech moguls are considered "the public." 

This is not going well with anyone.  The East Wing was built in 1902, but the colonnades were installed by President Thomas Jefferson a century earlier.  With two stories, it was practically a building onto itself, and it provided a stylish complement to the main building.  It may have even been classier than its western counterpart, which is mostly office space and the site of the press briefing room.

And people are really, really mad at Trump for tearing down the East Wing. 😁

Pundits such as Steve Schmidt and Al Hunt are hoping that the East Wing as it existed before this week will be restored and the ballroom will be demolished.  No.  As with Adolf Hitler's expansion of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the entire White House will have to be demolished because Trump will have done too much "remodeling" to it for it to ever be returned to its former state.  And by the way, I'm still advocating for the United States to become, like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, a former state - or what we stamp collectors would call a "dead country."  It's time for the United States to break up into several counties, for the Union to be dissolved.  Washington, D.C., whether it remains a city or an urban Maryland county of smaller cities - yes, I'm for breaking up the District of Freakin' Columbia! - still will have a few government buildings that will be worth repurposing, of course, but even if it survives as a city, it should never again be the capital of anything or any place.

Garden State Mess - The Sequel

Democrat Mikie Sherrill appeared to be buckling to fierce competition from Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the New jersey gubernatorial campaign, but Ciattarelli may have given her an issue.  Donald Trump flat-out canceled funding for the in-progress Gateway project connecting New York and New Jersey with a new and badly needed rail tunnel.  Despite pledging his support for Gateway, Ciattarelli has been complacent toward Trump throughout the campaign, and his support for Trump has hurt him with regard to Gateway.

The only trouble is, the campaign is still close and Jack's still got a shot.

How is this possible?  Because even though many commuters in northern New Jersey rely on passenger rail to get to Manhattan, many more drive cars on the area's multi-lane highways.  And obviously, this issue doesn't affect anyone in southern New Jersey, where Sherrill needs to shore up support in an area where Jack has a lot of backing.  Even if many people's jobs are affected by the termination of the funding for Gateway, it has no relevance to the bulk of New Jersey voters. 

Sherrill still has leads ranging from five to eight percentage points in polls, but some private polls forecast a much closer outcome - which should surprise no one, given that Jack almost unseated Governor Phil Murphy in 2021.   Many Democrats, particularly minority voters, have doubts about Mikie's bona fides as a leader because of her centrist positions, and some Hispanics are interested in what Jack has to say.  To be fair and honest, not every poll should be taken seriously, such as a poll from KAC showing Sherrill barely ahead of Ciattarelli - by two or three points.  That's KAC - K (as in Kelly) A (as in anne) C (as in Conway).  That's right, it's a polling firm founded and run by Kellyanne Conway, the New Jerseyan who got Trump elected to the White House in 2016.  

Speaking of Trump, Sherrill has made him, or tried to make him, an issue in this gubernatorial campaign.  The only problem with that is that Trump doesn't have as big an effect on New Jerseyans' lives as one might think.  He certainly has an effect on New Jerseyans' ability to afford food and shelter, thanks to his tariffs, but Ciattarelli has been pounding away on the affordability issue as something that has nothing to do with Trump - smart, considering that affordability has been a problem in New Jersey for years, during Democratic presidential administrations and Republican presidential administrations, and a problem that Governor Murphy, like any of his recent predecessors, hasn't been able to solve.  As for Trump's various desecrations of the White House or his bombing of fishing boats in the Caribbean, none of that has an effect on property taxes in this state.

This election will be decided for good in two weeks.  As a Republican, Ciattarelli has been persistent in his desire to be governor.  This is his third try, a testament to the GOP's tolerance for its failed candidates to try again if they want to, and the third time may be the charm.  But if he wins, we lose.  He'll take New Jersey out of the northeastern states' health cooperative, he'll end clean-energy programs, and he could make New Jersey the first state to ban same-sex marriages since they became legal nationwide in 2013.  If Mikie Sherrill wins, she'll do none of that, and she'll concentrate on expanding educational opportunities for children and meet the crisis of unaffordable electrical power head-on.  But don't expect her to make another try for the governorship in 2029 if she loses two weeks from today.  Democrats, as noted here repeatedly, don't let losing nominees get a second try, and not only will she be denied another try for the New Jersey governorship - she'll likely be primaried in June or defeated next November if she stands for a fifth term for the U.S. House of Representatives.   She'll politically be a dead woman walking.  I'm not one of those people who will, if she loses to Jack, look on the so-called bright side by saying she'll still be my congresswoman.  In this political climate, there is no bright side to losing.

Again - New Jersey will lose if Sherrill does.  Vote for her on November 4 - or during early voting, which starts this Saturday, October 25.

No Kings. No Media.

The No Kings rallies across the country this past Saturday - were the biggest protests in American history since and except for environmentalist demonstrations on the first Earth Day in 1970.

They were also a resounding failure.

Why were they a failure?  Because Trump is still uninhibited and undeterred.  He demonstrated that in a childish, ninth-grade way by releasing an AI video of himself flying a jet fighter that bombed protestors with feces.  It was his way of tweaking his detractors: "Look, I'm scared, I'm scared!" 

Oh, and one other thing: The media either covered the protests insufficiently or not at all.  I didn't see any reporters or TV crews at the protest I took part in.  The New York Times featured a couple of pictures on the front page with an explanatory caption that noted an article about the protests on . . . page 23.

Page . . . 23.

As Neil Diamond sang back in the early eighties, it ain't a front page story, and it some cases, it didn't make the papers.  Losing democracy ain't new.

Except when . . . it happens . . . to you.

Oh yeah, don't expect the military to save us by staging a coup d'etat against their Commander-in-Chief.  The military strikes on those fishing boats in the Caribbean keep happening, and although one Navy admiral resigned in protest, no one remaining in the military will even so much as challenge Trump's orders.

In semi-related news, former future President Kamala Harris celebrates her sixty-first birthday today, her first birthday as a retired private citizen. 

Don't Cry For Argentina

Several months ago, Ian Bremmer, the host of PBS's "GZero World," a political talk show, hosted Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, to discuss his radical economic policies that were meant to give a shock to the system.  Milei had every reason to feel good about himself, as when Bremmer talked to him via satellite, the Argentine economy was improving tremendously and his policies of making deep cuts in government services - hence his offering of a chain saw to Elon Musk at the 2025 National Conservative Political Action Conference  - deregulation, and a minarchical approach to business seemed to be working.

The economic recovery from 200 percent inflation when Milei took office in 2023 was short-lived, though, and now the Argentine economy is an freefall.  Trump ans Scott Bessent, his Treasury Secretary, pledged $20 billion to bail out Argentina.  They have since doubled that pledge with private donations from many of America's plutocrats.  And I'm sure Trump would be doing this even if Bessent didn't hve friends with financial interest in Argentina.

Argentina is getting this $40 billion bailout even as Milei has come upon a little geopolitical luck.  Thanks to Trump's tariff war with China, Argentina has inked a deal with the Chinese to sell them soybeans - a commodity that American farmers had a monopoly over with the Chinese before Trump intervened.  This adds insult to injury, as the government remains shut down and the expired Affordable Care Act subsidies are not reinstated, and taxpayer money is being sent to Argentina - and not to Americans who need help, especially American soybean farmers who just lost their livelihoods to Argentine soybean farmers.  

Maybe American soybean farmers - many if not most of whom voted for Trump - should take Michael Dukakis's 37-year-old advice and plant Belgian endives.

One U.S. House member has become an ardent critic of Trump's Argentina policy, decrying the fact that billions of dollars are being funneled all the way down to Tierra del Fuego and not being spent to aid Americans with medical insurance made possible by the Affordable Care Act.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?  Pramila Jayapal?  Jim McGovern?  My own congresswoman,  New Jersey's Mikie Sherrill, who needs every issue she can to fend off a tough gubernatorial election opponent like Jack Ciattarelli (and so far seems to be holding him off enough to win the governorship of New Jersey)? No - Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Marjorie . . . Taylor . . . Greene.

Dude, when Trump has lost Marjorie Taylor Greene, he's lost MAGA, which may as well now stand for "Make Argentina Great Again."

And if Trump is forced to go into exile as a result of today's No Kings protests and any No Kings protests to come in 2026, I'm sure he will be welcome in Buenos Aires - like other Nazi war criminals.

I haven't watched Ian Bremmer's PBS show since Trump returned to power.  I haven't really felt like watching it.  I probably won't start watching it again.  Trump may hve lost Marjorie Taylor Greene, but Bremmer, having hosted and toasted Javier Milei, has lost his credibility.

Music Video Of the Week - October 17, 2025

"Love Is the Drug" by Roxy Music  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Electrical Failure

Oh, of course, we should have seen this coming.

General Motors is expected to lose $1.6 billion on its electric vehicles as a result of falling sales and the end of government subsidies and tax credits in favor of Trump's policy encouraging greater production and sales of gasoline-powered vehicles.  And it's not just GM that's suffering.  Sales of all EV models in These States, like the 2026 Chevrolet Equinox EV (pictured above), could end up going down by 50 percent as a result of the factors suddenly working against them.

The truth is, though, that even if Kamala Harris had been elected President (I know, a ridiculous idea) or if former President Biden had been elected to a second term (an idea even more ridiculous than the previous one), electric-vehicle sales still would have ended up in the toilet.  Elon Musk was drawing unfavorable attention to Tesla even before Trump got back in power, EVs are still too expensive with few places at which to charge them, and efforts to attract nontraditional customers as with the Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck have failed.  And,, as I noted before - when I pointed out that it took a hundred years for the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, to be implemented - Americans traditionally are stubbornly resistant to change.

It's probably for the best, at least for now, as many if not most EVs are lacking in quality and reliability.  I have been reading horror stories about the dependability of Volkswagen's ID.3 hatchback (pictured above - my own photo, taken in Munich! 😁), which was developed in a contentious period at Volkswagen under the leadership of Herbert Diess, who was trying to get Volkswagen to embrace the streamlined development process that Tesla uses to create electric vehicles.  The EV-platform program that did get developed missed the mark, as it were, and the resulting product recalled the teething problems that the original Volkswagen Golf (marketed as the Rabbit in North America) faced after its debut in Europe in 1974 and in North America in 1975.  At that time, Volkswagen's experience in making watercooled, front-engine, front-wheel-drive cars was limited to whatever expertise was gained in having purchased NSU and Auto Union nearly a decade before.  VW had even less expertise with electric vehicles when it started developing them, so maybe no one should be surprised that the ID.3 - and the ID.4 crossover, for that matter - has had a lot of problems.

But you have to walk before you run, and Trump's anti-EV policies will ensure that GM's and Ford's EV programs don't even make it out of the starting gate - not to mention cause Volkswagen's Tennessee factory to produce fewer ID.4s and more Atlases.  As for EVs imported from elsewhere, well, the tariffs will likely stop them from gaining traction.  Meanwhile, GM has to figure out how to go forward into the future while dealing with a presidential administration that is hostile to the future.  How it does that is, like how Democrats win back power in Washington, anyone's guess.