Fall Out Girl

When former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley announced his 2016 presidential campaign at Baltimore's Inner Harbor in May 2015, one reporter covering the event mocked and ridiculed him for being so self-assured that he could defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination and brought up, with a great deal of snark, the protesters who showed up at the event to protest the Baltimore police killing of Freddie Gray because of O'Malley's zero-tolerance policy toward crime when he was mayor of Baltimore - even though he'd left City Hall eight years prior. This reporter pretty much set the tone for mainstream press coverage - what there was of it - of O'Malley's presidential campaign in its entire eight-month lifespan. That tone doomed O'Malley's chances and made Bernie Sanders Hillary's main primary competition, and Sanders was never going to win the nomination because he is not a Democrat. This led to Hillary winning the nomination and losing to Trump, as well as the end of O'Malley's viability as a candidate for elective office. 

The reporter's name was Olivia Nuzzi.

Olivia Nuzzi, only 32 years old as of this writing - her birthday is January 6 - was a wunderkind of political journalism when she began her career as a reporter in 2014 for the Daily Beast.  Her skills, her irreverence, and, let's face it, her good looks (a must for appearing on TV-news panel discussions)  made her a favorite among readers of the latest tidbits coming out of Washington, and she soon joined New York magazine as its Washington correspondent.  For seven years in that position, beginning in 2017, Nuzzi achieved accolades for her sharp, witty writing and seemed destined for Fran Leibowitz-style greatness.

Then the roof caved in.

In September 2024, then-CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy reported in his newsletter  that Nuzzi "engaged in an inappropriate relationship" with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had sought the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden and who had been the subject of a profile story Nuzzi herself had written in November 2023.  Although the relationship was apparently platonic and mostly confined to e-mail correspondence - "emotional and digital in nature" was how an unidentified third party described it - Darcy reported that Nuzzi's relationship with Kennedy was a conflict of interest, and subsequent reports on their "digital affair" suggest that Nuzzi had given RFK Jr. advice and pointers on how to pursue his political ambitions - advice and pointers that may have been responsible for Kennedy occupying his current office.

Oliver Darcy didn't exactly stick the knife in Nuzzi the way comedian Hannibal Burris brought down Bill Cosby - it wasn't like Darcy had said, "You know she's a political courtesan, right?"  Darcy's character assassination was more detailed and more to the point of why this was affair was a problem.  Nuzzi, he wrote,  was "one of the most high-profile journalists in America, and she arguably wrote one of the most consequential pieces of the 2024 campaign, which was about what she called the conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden. And given that readers did not know that this relationship was ongoing with RFK, it raises questions about conflict of interest, because RFK has been an active participant in the 2024 campaign."

New York magazine suspended Nuzzi and reviewed her work, concluding that it had "found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias" in her published writings, but added that "had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign."  And with that, and an apology to its readers for a violation of trust, New York published a statement that it and Nuzzi had "parted ways."   In other words, she was fired.

Fifteen days later, Donald Trump was returned to power, eventually giving RFK Jr. his current job.

But the show's not over yet, this one's a double feature.  Nuzzi has a new memoir out, "American Canto," a memoir of her relationship with the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, in which she attempts to gain sympathy from readers by, according to all of the reviews, turning the story of her love for Kennedy - a man old enough to be her father - into a tale of untold passion and star-crossed love. Or, as Helen Lewis of The Atlantic put it, "The language seems tortured by Nuzzi's efforts to rewrite her life-upending crush into a mutual whirlwind of passion, to turn herself from Ophelia into Juliet." Ophelia, of course was the intended bride for Hamlet who drowned herself after the melancholy Dane drove her mad. I don't think I need to explain who Juliet is.

Anyway, weeding a one-acre Shakespeare garden is probably an easy task compared to get to understand Nuzzi's intentions and her perspective, which she attempted to explain in an interview she granted to the Bulwark's Tim Miller.  In the interview, available on YouTube, Nuzzi speaks in a confused, halting cadence.  She sidesteps questions about why she didn't warn people about RFK Jr.'s, uh, personality quirks (like his ketamine addiction), and she tries to act like a victim more like the accomplice she was.  And she goes on and on in this state of confusion for over an hour.   Once upon a time, Olivia Nuzzi was a reporter known for her sharp writing, and here, she comes across as being as sharp as a wet noodle.

You know, they say that beauty and brains are a great combination when you're seeking a relationship with a woman.  Olivia Nuzzi has beauty and brains, all right, but, ironically, her beauty got her in so much trouble that she forgot that she had brains.  Nothing demonstrates that more than her choice in men.  Not just RFK, Jr., but always men who are far too old for her, such as Keith Olbermann, who was 52 when she met the 18-year-old Nuzzi in 2001, and Ryan Lizza, who is the young'un of the trio of her lovers; he got engaged to her in 2022, when he was 48 and she was 29.  Lizza wrote pieces on his Substack about their relationship and their split in 2024.

I still remember Olivia Nuzzi as the woman who condemned Martin O'Malley to permanent also-ran status in the Democratic Party and set the pace for how thoroughly pundits could ridicule him.  I have no sympathy for her.  Period.  Stick a fork in her career; it's done.

Social Media Disease

I have to quit Instagram for awhile.

I turned my Instagram page into a repository for anti-Trump memes - two posts of anti-Trump memes with every third post a picture of a beautiful woman to provide relief from MAGA.  (Instagram pages show posts in rows of three.)  I posted pictures in threes twice, sometimes thrice a day at times, because the memes bashing Trump and MAGA were too clever to resist.  I was going overboard and spending way too much time on Instagram, but hey, it was fun.

Then two embarrassing things happened.  One was that I reposted the original post of a friend who also posts on Instagram - that is, it was an image my had created himself - and he was a tad miffed by my failure to credit him.  (I credited Go-Go's rhythm guitarist Jane Wiedlin for reposting memes on her Instagram page that she had likely not created herself, even though I don't know her from Eve, but not my friend.  Embarrassing indeed.)  The other embarrassing thing was this meme I posted not on Instagram, but on Facebook.   And I had found it on BlueSky.  

The hearing referred to above did take place, and yes, Pete Hegseth did in fact say that to Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI).  Senator Slotkin's comeback is masterful.  Except for one thing.   She didn't actually say that.   Someone I know who had seen the actual Senate hearing told me that Senator Slotkin simply replied "Oh, my God!" and rolled her eyes in response to Hegseth's inane comment.  I was already going to post this meme on Instagram, but after I found out that the Slotkin quote was made up by someone other than the senator herself, I didn't.  

And so I have decided to stop posting anything on Instagram - for the time being.  It might be a long time being.  Because, after these two faux pas, posting anti-Trump, anti-MAGA memes on Instagram - or anything else - stopped being fun.  And I don't think I was enlightening any Republican-leaning voters with my posts.  

I'm not big on social media these days.  I still go on Facebook and I'm active there because, well, that's still fun.  Instagram, Facebook's sister platform, has become a grind.  Threads is just boring.  And if not for the ability to post links to my blog on LinkedIn, Mastodon, and BlueSky, I wouldn't bother with any of those platforms.  (Yes: Meta platforms still won't let me post links to my blog there.)  So I'll just wait until I really want to post something on Instagram before I do so again.  And with all the time I save not going on platforms not named Facebook, I have more time to write blog posts here. 

Not that I will.  I need more time to enjoy being with my cats. 

Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music (1975)

All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted.  But that doesn't it's going to make anything good.

Lou Reed's 1975 album Metal Machine Music is a single composition stretched out over four sides of a double album, much like Yes's infamous 1973 release Tales From Topographic Oceans had been.  But unlike Yes's album, which at least had real instruments and vocals, Metal Machine Music is a collage of feedback, interference, white noise, and elements of static that recall what would happen when an analog television set was tuned to a channel that local stations didn't broadcast on.  You remember the TV-screen image you'd get from that - "snow."  Metal Machine Music is a snow job.

Lou Reed seemed to be responding to the modicum of commercial success he'd received with Transformer and "Walk On the Wild Side" by deliberately trying to scare away listeners in places like northern New Jersey and Long Island, two suburban locales that represented everything Reed hated about mainstream America.  He overreached.  He scared away part of his core fan base, listeners who had been with him since the days of the Velvet Underground.  Avant-garde music made with electronic backwashes had been common in the New York underground scene, to be certain, but I doubt no such experimental music has ever been less tuneful, less engaging, and less, well, musical than this.

The best I can say about Metal Machine Music is that listening to it in 2025 beats anything currently on the pop charts, until I realize that some of its worst moments might have inspired rap, a form that relies on computerized and mechanical sounds supporting angry recitations of lyrics about the 'hood.  Because, believe it or else, Metal Machine Music, though it did not chart (it may be in competition with Bloodstone's soundtrack album for their movie Train Ride To Hollywood as the worst-selling LP of 1975), created a cult following among fans who explain it as some sort of bold experimentation that was ahead of its time.  Not that they have necessarily listened to the album from start to finish; Reed's liner notes explain that it's not meant to be.  This of course files in the face of the large-scale compositions the British prog bands of the day were indulging themselves in, which are supposed to be listened to from beginning to end, and perhaps Reed, cynical New Yorker that he was, was parodying art rock the way the Ramones parodied the mainstream rock stars of the day.  Except that with Metal Machine Music, Reed parodied himself.

I actually did listen to the whole thing from start to finish.  How did I manage that?  Simple - it was so awful, I laughed at its awfulness.  The are records from lousy bands like Journey, Toto, and Uriah Heep, as well as any Rainbow album with Graham Bonnet on lead vocals, that make you lunge for the "off" switch on your stereo, but Metal Machine Music is not that type of record.  The noises are so outrageous, you can't help but laugh - at the sound, at the concept, at the idea the RCA would even put this out.  I was tidying up my house while listening to Metal Machine Music.  I ran the vacuum cleaner; it was like singing along.  In harmony.  I was inspired to listen to all of Metal Machine Music because, in their book "The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time," Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell suggested that Bob Ludwig, the album's engineer, is the only person without a history of substance abuse who has listened to all four sides of it.  I accepted the challenge.  And I prevailed.  

Without even a single gummy.

Guterman and O'Donnell also declared Metal Machine Music to be the most unlistenable album ever recorded - including anything from Kenny Rogers.  The reference to Rogers was in fact quite appropriate.  Metal Machine Music, to describe the album in one sentence, is Lou Reed just dropping in to see what condition his condition was in.

Megyn Kelly Is a Sadist

Megyn Kelly was always a jerk, ads noted by the pretentious Welsh spelling her parents used for her first name.   But recent comments from the inexplicably popular conservative talk show host reveal that she may have a brain worm far worse than what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dealt with.

Kelly, who recently signed with Sirius XM to launch a show on one of its talk channels, got herself in hot water almost as soon as she began her show, Last month, she created a firestorm of a backlash for comments she made about Jeffrey Epstein, in which she suggested he was technically not a pedophile  because he preferred fifteen-year-old girls over third-graders, and that fifteen-year-old girls are close enough to maturity - "the barely legal type."  No, they're not.  They weren't close enough to maturity in 1980, when Brooke Shields was that age and made those suggestively suggestive Calvin Klein jeans ads, and they're not close enough to maturity now.

And as if that weren't bad enough, Kelly, talking on her show to fellow discredited media personality Mark Halperin, said she wanted to see the alleged drug dealers on the Venezuelan boats that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have been blowing out of the water die slow and painful deaths for a crime they likely  did not commit - namely, running drugs.

"So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water," Kelly said to Halperin, "whether they're on the boat or in the water, but I'd really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little."

Why do I get the feeling that Kelly knows tortures that were banned during the Spanish Inquisition?

I used to think Kelly was just a mean bitch, but even female Rottweilers are kinder and gentler than this bottle-blonde harridan.  She is happy to defend pedophilia and try to redefine it to make the late Jeffrey Epstein - and, by association - Donald Trump - look like they're being railroaded (well, she is a attorney), and she's also happy to suggest death-camp justice to Spanish-speaking mariners accused of drug running without even a fair trial or adherence to international law in sentencing the guilty parties.  I'm trying to think of a female political commentator on the left who are as mean-spirited and as morally bankrupt as Kelly.  Of course, I can't think of any as morally bankrupt as she is.  Mean-spiritedness?  A couple of ladies on the left, including Jennifer Welch ("We're not fand of the Catholics"), occasionally get close, but once female liberal commentators reach a certain level of viciousness (as when Joy Reid tried to gay-shame Charlie Crist and then denied it despite the evidence), they usually just stary there.  Megyn Kelly, like her spiritual benefactor Donald Trump, moves heaven and earth to get  progressively worse.  If you think this is as bad as Megyn Kelly can get, you don't know Megyn Kelly.

It is for these transgressions of intelligence and taste on her Sirius XM show that has led many Sirius XM subscribers to cancel their subscriptions in protest, as there are no signs that Kelly's days at Sirius XM are numbered.  That is a brave thing to do, as Sirius XM has no competition in satellite radio, and so-called terrestrial radio is virtually unlistenable.  It is for those reasons - but for the latter reason, especially - that I remain a Sirius XM subscriber despite Kelly's presence on it.  Because I don't listen to political commentary on Sirius XM.  I subscribe strictly for the music channels, and I listen to it in my car more than I do on my laptop.  I consider my car to be my refuge, as I consider music to be a refuge, and so I want to get away from politics when I'm driving.  I listen to my favorite rock Sirius XM channels - which play records going back sixty years - while on the road.  If I still listened to regular FM radio and tried to find a station that still played music made before Jimmy Carter left the White House, I wouldn't have much luck.  And thanks to an oligarchical communications law passed nearly thirty years ago, I'd have to deal with stations owned by politically connected conglomerates such as iHeart Radio, which has done more damage to American radio than payola.

I even listen to the jazz and classical channels on Sirius XM instead of the local public classical and jazz stations on the FM dial, mainly because the reception of these stations is so bad that I get interference on my receiver; the classical station gets cut out by a rock station from Scranton - over a hundred miles from where I live - that broadcasts on the same frequency.  And sometimes I like to listen to Sirius XM's contemporary jazz (derided by its detractors as "smooth jazz") channel, Watercolors.  I can't listen to the FM contemporary-jazz station in New York because it went off the air seventeen years ago. 

It's all good and fine to stop subscribing to Sirius XM to protest Megyn Kelly's presence on it, but such a boycott is highly impractical when FM and AM radio are particularly awful these days and Sirius XM is the only place to go to listen to the sort of music you can't hear on the FM dial anymore and haven't been able to hear on the AM dial since at least the late 1980s.  My advice to Sirius XM subscribers is simply not to listen to Megyn Kelly's show rather than quit the service.  Sirius XM will likely still get the message that way.  Why do you think 50s on 5 and 60s on 6 were moved from channels 5 and 6 to farther down the dial and renamed "50s Gold and "60s Gold"?  Because Sirius XM found that it could get many more listeners on its channels at the top of the dial if there were more "current" music stations on channels 5 and 6.  And I don't think it was in response to canceled subscriptions.  It's because Sirius XM was responding to what its customers liked more as opposed to what they didn't like as much.   And sticking it out and ignoring Megyn Kelly could possibly be more effective in not just pushing her show down the dial but getting it canceled entirely than just quitting the whole damn company.

Get that sadistic excuse for a human being out of your mind, tune in to Watercolors, and chill out. 

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 5, 2025

"White Christmas" by the Drifters  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Aftyn The Lovin'

Winning by losing?

Democrats are actually celebrating the results of the special U.S. House election in Tennessee's Seventh Congressional District, in which Democratic candidate Aftyn Behn, below, lost - yes, lost - by about eight percentage points to her MAGA Republican opponent Matt Van Epps.

Aftyn Behn - whose name sounds like a Philadelphia suburb in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania - is a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives who ran for the vacant U.S. House seat in her district and campaigned on affordability, which is an issue even in a low-tax, no-services Southern state.  While she lost by eight points, Donald Trump had carried the district by twenty-two points in 2024.  Democrats are celebrating this as a moral victory because it means that maybe, just maybe, in other districts that are more competitive,  the Democrats can swing the vote by as many percentage points and overwhelm and defeat their Republican opponents.

That's as may be, she still lost.

And she lost in a state that is best known for producing moderate Democratic U.S. Representatives like Harold Ford, Jr., Jim Cooper, and, before he went to the Senate, Albert Gore (who remains the last Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from Tennessee - in 1990).  Behn is clearly a progressive - so progressive that she can't stand country music despite living in Nashville.

Which is why there won't be a rematch between her and Van Epps in November 2026.  Democrats don't get second chances when they lose, and they're not allowed to make comebacks.  If you disagree, I have a "Dukakis in '92" campaign button to sell you.

Not to mention an "Al Gore in '04" bumper sticker. 

Sorry, Aftyn.  Nice try.  You failed.  But at least you still have your House seat in Nashville.  Look to work your way up in the Tennessee House, because you will never get to Washington.

War Crimes Against Humanity

I once noted that I thought that the idea of a war crime is a redundancy because all war is a crime.  But what happened three months ago today is not only a crime, it would be inexcusable if it were a war exercise.  The fact that it was likely perpetrated to provoke a war also makes it a crime.

On September 2, 2025, Secretary of War (or Defense) Pete Hegseth ordered a U.S. Navy strike on a Venezuelan boat that his office says was a drug-running boat bringing fentanyl to American shores.  The boat was nowhere near Florida, the northern Gulf Coast, or Texas but in the Caribbean Sea, just north of Venezuela - a long way to bring a bunch of crates full of pills.  Two survivors managed to emerge from the explosion, and Hegseth made it clear that both must be taken out.  They were.

That isn't a military operation; it's murder.  Hegseth (above, at work) violated several U.S. laws and violated the Geneva Convention, making the United States susceptible to international prosecution.  Trump is standing by Hegseth, and Hegseth is standing by Mitch Bradley, the admiral who gave the order to kill the two survivors of the attack.  But he's also devolving much of the responsibility to Admiral Bradley, thus absolving himself of all blame and leaving Bradley holding the bag. 

That way Hegseth can hold . . . his booze.   

Hegseth can't drink his way out of this one.  He cannot deflect blame for the murder of the two survivors to Admiral Bradley and all the boys back in the drink.  The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired  by Roger Wicker (R-MS) with Jack Reed (D-RI) as the ranking minority member,  issued a statement vowing to conduct what they call "vigorous oversight" on the strikes in the Caribbean on  . . . well, they likely weren't drug runners.  They were more likely fishing boats, struck on orders from Hegseth with approval from Trump mainly to . . . provoke a war against Venezuela to get to its vast oil reserves?

I need a drink.

There's plenty of bipartisan disgust with Hegseth over this, but he does have his defenders . . . notably Megyn Kelly, who, having offered a quasi-defense of Jeffrey Epstein having sex with females who are almost women - that is, girls, spoke to Mark Halperin on her talk show and said that she would like nothing better than to see the survivors of the boar attack not just killed but tortured in the process so they can feel severe pain as punishment for running fentanyl to Americans, even though she has no more of an idea than anyone else as to whether or not these sailors were drug runners.  (I'll deal with Kelly more thoroughly later.)

With Kelly a prominent voice in the media and with Hegseth having an outsized role over civilian administration of the military, the rest of the world is pretty much convinced that America has descended into lawlessness and cruelty and sees no reason to trust again for a long, long time, even after Trump and his minions are gone.  And that is yet another reason why I keep advocating for the United States to be broken up into separate countries. 

And by the way, forget Canada, which has a lot less oil than Venezuela . . . I think Trump wants Venezuela to be the fifty-first state.  But, given Trump's record, I'll bet a lot of Venezuelans, given the choice would prefer to stick with Nicolas Maduro.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono: Unfinished Music No. 1 - Two Virgins (1968)

Everyone made such a big deal out of the cover of the first long player in John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music trilogy showing them naked as jaybirds that no one thought much to comment on the contents of said long player. 

Probably because there isn't much to comment about about.

My issue with Two Virgins is not that it's an album of collages of random sound.  My issue is that it's a dull album of collages of random sound.  John and Yoko spent their first night together as lovers making silly noises and playing instruments rudimentarily into a tape recorder before, well, doing it, and the reticence they had prior to their first intimate act showed in the aimlessness of the contents of the tapes.  All right, I'll cut to the chase - this record is boring.  

Paul McCartney, who was actually the first Beatle to explore collages of sound, gave Lennon and Ono his support with the quote, "When two Saints meet it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a Saint" - prominently displayed on the bottom of the album cover (though not as prominently displayed as what's in the cover photo).  But even though John found a partner he needed more than Paul, he still needed some pointers from Paul on how to make an interesting sound collage, whether with Yoko or with anyone, really.  Two Virgins has lots of weird sounds, alright, but it has nothing that makes you prick up your ears and pay closer attention.  It's not so much musique concrète as it is Muzak concrète, an avant-garde din.

Two actual songs, "Together" and "Hushabye Hushabye," actually made it on this album.  In fact, they were playing on a radio in the background when John pressed Play on the tape recorded.  They're a distraction, not so much for the listener as for the artistes, who clearly made things up as they went along.  The two lovebirds eventually figured out what makes a sound collage work, as evidenced by the careful construction of "Revolution 9" when they and George Harrison created that epic track for the Beatles' White Album a month after this was recorded.  Say what you will about "Revolution 9," it was interesting . . . as were several tracks off John and Yoko's second Unfinished Music album, Life With the Lions, from 1969.  If John and Yoko wanted to try out making unfinished music together, fine.  But Two Virgins sounds like like what the title suggests: two people trying to make abstract music who don't know what they're doing.  Conclusion:  Wait for John's and Paul's 1967 piece "Carnival of Light" to come out instead.  

(Yes, I'm writing record reviews again, but not for long.  I just want to write a couple of quickie reviews and at least one more developed review before 2025 is out.  I hop to come up with more substantial record review in 2026.)

Climate Clownishness

When it became apparent that either President Biden was likely to lose the 2024 presidential election or the Democrats would never be able to overcome the sluggish economy and keep the White House with a different nominee, John Kerry, President Biden's special envoy for climate-change issues, was on the PBS NewsHour explaining why a future Republican President, whom most people assumed would not be Donald Trump, would honor the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Biden had had the United States rejoin in 2021 after Trump had pulled the U.S. out of it.  Kerry explained that the business sector would advise such a hypothetical Republican President to remain in the climate accord because it was good for business and good for the economy.

Fast forward to 2025.  Trump returned to power, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement ten minutes after taking office to the thunderously vocalized approval of F-150-owning MAGA cultists present, and a good deal of the business sector capitulated to Trump's entire economic agenda.  (And I no longer watch the PBS NewsHour.) This became apparent - no, blatantly obvious - when former Volkswagen of America president Scott Keogh, now heading up Volkswagen's Scout SUV subsidiary, announced that Scout would instead develop gasoline/electric hybrid systems rather than the electric-only vehicles Scout had been created to develop.  And, while only a year ago, clean energy sources like solar power and wind power were the wave of the future, the major energy policy upheaval Trump perpetrated as soon as Biden (and Harris) was gone now envisions a future of more oil and gas - which only satisfies "public" utilities overcharging its customers for electricity and gas, Vladimir Putin, Russian energy oligarchs, American legacy oil and gas companies, and startup oil and gas companies like Phoenix Energy, which just went public and has been insufferably running ads on YouTube - which, thankfully, can be skipped. 

It is in the milieu of this brutal reality that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the EC's new policy toward climate change.

Von Der Leyen announced that the European Commission would focus on controlling and fighting carbon emissions from fossil fuels rather than going after fossil fuels themselves.  This is like conservatives on a local school board who believe that rap is a detriment to America's musical heritage (and it is) deciding to censor rap by banning it from student events and school campuses rather than spending more money on music education.     

When it comes to trying to heal the planet, the Europeans are America's superiors, just as they are in cinema, urban planning, social welfare, and intellectualism, but von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners seem resigned to the idea that anything they attempt to do to combat climate change that is more than what they're  doing right now is going to be canceled out by Trump.  The United States is already the biggest polluter on earth, except when in some years it's China, and Trump's commitment to more carbon pollution - which he took pride in during is incoherently improvised speech to the United Nations this past September - is only going to make that worse.

To be fair, many American companies such as General Motors and Pepsico, along with even a couple of oil companies like Occidental Petroleum, are defying Trump and working with foreign governments and various NGOs to do something about climate change, recognizing, as John Kerry predicted, the positive business opportunities that dealing with climate change offers.  Many of them were active in the COP30 climate change summit in Brazil, as was California governor Gavin Newsom, who as the chief executive of the world's fourth-largest economy, is a de facto world leader. But - and you knew I was coming to a "but" - the mission statement COP30 issued was as substantial as milquetoast. and the participants who vowed vocally to continue the fight against climate change spoke with the roar of a tiger but offered the bite of a kitten. 

And while there are many states other than California who still want to be in the Paris Agreement and commit to its goals, Trump is already working on ways to prevent that, and in, for example, my home state of New Jersey, where Trump canceled federal support for a wind farm designed to reduce energy costs, Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill has her work cut out for her. Given that there is more commitment to the Paris Agreement in more Democratic regions of the United States than in Republican regions, and given that the U.S. is too divided to return to the Paris Agreement if a Democrat ever holds the Presidency again - not that we'll be welcomed back in, given that a future Republican President probably would pull us back out and cause a perpetual whiplash when it comes to American climate policy - well, bearing all that in mind, this is just another perfect argument for breaking up the United States in separate countries.     

The California Republic will join the Paris Agreement and stay in.  So will the United Republic of New England and whatever republic New Jersey ends up in.  The Confederate States will reject the Paris Agreement and keep out. 

Bye bye, Florida. 

Music Video Of the Week - November 28, 2025

"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Thanksgiving 2025

 

Mikie Makes a Move

Gavin Newsom has floated the idea of California withholding tax payments to the federal government as a way of protesting Trump's regime.  Now it looks like New Jersey's incoming governor might beat Newsom to the punch.

Politico has reported that Mikie Sherrill is seriously looking into having New Jersey withholding federal tax dollars from Washington, telling native New Jerseyan Jon Stewart on his podcast that she has thought about it all time, calling it a "great idea. "If they’re not gonna run the programs, then what are we paying them for?" she said. "It’s like, you know, 'you’re paying us for a service,' and they're not delivering. So let's stop paying for it."

You know whom they are delivering services for with New Jersey's - and California's - federal tax dollars?  Republican states like Louisiana, Arkansas, Montana, and Nebraska, among others, as well as Wyoming, North Dakota - you know, the states Jimmy Stewart once called "the rectangular ones."  

The Democratic states are repeatedly paying for services poorer, more conservative states get more of, and they have to raise state taxes to provide the programs and amenities their constituents expect with less and less help from the federal government - and no state and local tax (SALT) deductions anymore, thanks to Trump.  Sherrill - and, hopefully, Newsom - are ready to rub SALT deductions in Trump's wounds.

Upon hearing of Governor-elect Sherrill's commetns, a White House spokesperson repsonded,"Wow, a Democrat encouraging lawbreaking. What else is new?"

She who refuses to submit federal taxes to a national administration run by a megalomaniacal tyrant violates no laws.

And this could be the first act of New Jersey seceding from the Union.  Theoretically speaking, of course.  😉  

I can't wait to see what Virginia's new incoming female govenror, Abigail Spanberger, does when she takes office.  And is she wants to take her state out of the Union - hey, the state's motto is Sic semper tyrannis - she can always dust off Virginia's 1861 ordinance of secession.

Of course, the Virginia legislature will have to rewrite and amend the part about the federal government "having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States."

Ryan's Fall

As a Democratic U.S. Representative from Ohio who challenged the Democratic gerontocracy by going against Nancy Pelosi for the post of House Minority Leader in late 2016, Tim Ryan was not only fiercely ambitious, he was ahead of his time.  Now, at 52, with Democrats old enough to be his parents retiring left and right, Ryan's own time is up.

Having been smacked down by James David Vance for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio in 2022, Ryan looked to return to public office some time in the future, and when Vance became Vice President,  another attempt at the Senate seat Vance had held for two years served seemed logical.  That is, until former U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, 73, decided to go for that seat after he lost Ohio's other Senate seat to Bernie Moreno.  Ryan, in fact, looked toward running for governor of Ohio in 2026, until former Ohio Health Department Director Amy Acton, a confidante of Brown's, decided to seek the governorship.  Knowing that challenging her would mean an expensive primary campaign that could split the party and destroy the eventual nominee before next November, Ryan decided not to seek the Ohio governorship after all.  

Ryan's decision ends one of the most self-destructive political careers in American history, a career marked by a fall to the bottom that, ironically, was fueled by his desire to rise to the top.  He constantly sought higher office at the exact same times that the deck was clearly stacked against him.  It took a lot of guts to challenge Pelosi for the leadership position over House Democrats after the party suffered an ignominious loss to Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in 2016 (since eclipsed by an even more ignominious loss to Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in 2024), but it also showed no brains.  Pelosi was still popular among the Democratic base, and distrust of entrenched, aging elitists had not yet set in.  But, as I have made clear several times on this blog, Ryan's grab for power condemned him to the point where he would not gain a leadership position as long as Pelosi had something to say about it.  A presidential run in 2019 showed even less intelligence, as he never made it to 2020, a year where no Democratic newcomer proved the equal to Joe Biden.  (Even Kamala Harris outlasted Ryan in her presidential bid that year.)  With no future in the House, Ryan aimed for the Senate in 2022, only for fate to deal him another blow; his Republican opponent, Vance, had tech oligarch Peter Thiel backing him, and Ryan faced a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that couldn't be bothered to have his back.

Avery Kreemer of the Dayton Daily News, in what was clearly a subtle sliver of snark, noted that Ryan "has had a political career marked by lofty goals, from an attempt to unseat U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California as Democrats’ House minority leader in 2016, to launching a long-shot 2020 presidential bid, to mounting a U.S. Senate contest in 2022, [which he] narrowly lost."  The inference was clear; though marked by lofty goals, Ryan's political career was marked by little if anything else.  

And this is borne out by those who would argue that it was not a vindictive Nancy Pelosi or an impudent pro-Pelosi Democratic-friendly commentariat that ruined his political career.  "Come to northeastern Ohio," a Threads member tweeted to me when I suggested Pelosi's role in undermining Ryan, "and see all the closed factories [and] vacant homes and then ask who ruined his career.  He wants to just be a politician [but] not in it to help his constituents."

Ryan's anticipated bid for statewide office was doomed when it became apparent that the deck was once again stacked against him.  As soon as Amy Acton announced her candidacy, she immediately became the favorite just by being a woman.  (Hey, the future is female!)  Sherrod Brown's decision to make a bid for a comeback was also fatal, as Brown was less inclined to support Ryan's gubernatorial ambitions given his disagreement with Ryan over cryptocurrency regulation - Brown is for it.  Meanwhile, in addition to lobbying for natural gas companies, Ryan also lobbies for cryptocurrency interests, having made as a result more money in a month than his former constituents in the Mahoning Valley make in a year.   

That sudden cryptocurrency market crash was so unfortunate.

I suppose Ryan could run for the Senate again in 2028 if Brown loses the 2026 special election for that seat, or maybe run for Bernie Moreno's seat in 2030.  Not likely. Ryan announced his non-candidacy for governor of Ohio "after careful consideration, much prayer and reflection, and after long conversations with my family, my closest friends and advisers." Of course he prayed.  Given his efforts to to go from back-bench congressman to higher office and left with nothing after three strikes and being out, the Lord said unto him, "Tim . . . take a hint."

I Give Up

I kept saying throughout the 2024 presidential campaign that Trump would make dissent a capital offense if returned to power.  This past week, he moved to do just that.  

Six congressional Democrats - Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Representative Chris DeLuzio, New Hampshire Representative Maggie Goodlander, Pennsylvania Representative Chrissy Houlahan and Colorado Representative Jason Crow - posted a video on social media, directly addressing the country’s current military and intelligence officers and urging them to refuse to obey an illegal order.

They ended the video by using that old motto from the War of 1812 - "Don't Give Up the Ship."

Sure enough, Stephen Miller called their comments "seditious" and Donald Trump suggested that the six Democrats could be tried and executed for treason.  

Treason, by the way, is currently defined as any comment that offends Donald Trump.  I'm willing to bet that, at this point, someone could make fun of Trump's hair on Monday and be sent to the executioner on Wednesday.  Tuesday would be for the trail.  Because everyone accused of treason will be given a fair trial.

And their families will get free passes to the hanging.

Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has apparently committed treason by demanding the release of the Epstein files and standing firm with the women who were sexually abused by Epstein.  Trump has responded by calling her a traitor.  As if doing so would inoculate her from being condemned to die, Greene just showed how serious she is at being disillusioned and disgusted by a man she once championed by resigning her seat in the House, effective January 5, 2026.

But, given her history, her motives are not above suspicion.

Don't give up the ship?  No, no, no.  We have met the enemy and he is us.

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, because rap isn't art, 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 a 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 being haters of 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 got 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 thin 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 can 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 . . ..