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 shell 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.  

The Color of News

My oh my, the pro-Trump, pro-MAGA New York Post is getting haughty, isn't it?

Of course, Rupert Murdoch's editors can't bring themselves to admit that Joe Biden got nearly seven times as many hostages out alive while he was President.

You know, I'll never be able to understand how there are people who take the New York Post seriously and dismiss the weekly Amsterdam News as just another rag paper for Americans of Negro origin.  Because here's the thing.  The Amsterdam News is a black newspaper, with black copy boys, black reporters, black editors, black editorialists, a black editor-in-chief who answers to a black owner, and it covers black news stories, announces black weddings, publishes black obituaries, and it covers black stories with features about the black experiences.

Now here's the part I don't get.  The New York Post has a white owner, but its journalism is yellow, its politics is red, it favorably covers an orange dictator, its Page Six content is blue,  and its mission is to make lots of green. 

And Post readers call the Amsterdam News a "colored" paper?  😆  

Peace In Trump's Time?

It appears that the Gaza War is over, with a new peace deal having been arranged and the last of the remaining Israeli hostages released.

The peace plan brokered by Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu declares, among other things, that GAZA will be a demilitarized zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors, it will be redeveloped to benefit Gazans,  Israel will release 250 prisoners serving life sentences and 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7, 2023, including all women and children so detained,  Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty once all hostages are released, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip, the the Rafah border crossing will be opened in both directions, and the United States will establish a dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians to agree on a political horizon for peaceful and prosperous co-existence.

Those who keep up with foreign-policy developments far more than I ever could and who read this blog must be thinking, "Hey, that sounds a lot like President Biden's peace plan!  It is.  Trump and Netanyahu agreed to adopt President Biden's peace plan once Netanyahu ended the military operation against Gaza when he felt like it.  This way Trump can take credit for helping to end the Gaza conflict and possibly get nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize after having been denied the prize in 2025 because of the seven wars he claimed to end (his claim, in reality, is seven wars short).  

You think noted Arabophobe and dedicated Zionist Bari Weiss will let the truth get reported on CBS News?  Highly unlikely.  And even though I don't consider my own blog to be an objective-news site, I am reporting that fact . . . here.   

Anyway, just as Trump has a lot of damn gall decrying federal buildings that look like fertilizer factories and giant shoeboxes and calling for more classically inspired architecture in government buildings (an initiative I actually support) when he is responsible for Trump Tower in New York and some of the most garish hotels in Atlantic City (so much for making an American Monte Carlo out of Atlantic City, the Abomination of Absecon Island),  he has a lot of damn gall for demanding the Nobel Peace Prize (given this year to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan pro-democracy activist) . . .

. . . after attacking Venezuelan boats because they might be trafficking drugs. 

I hope enough people come to understand that Trump is ripping off Joe Biden to give himself credit for a peace deal that should have been adopted a year before . . . but that's not likely to happen. 

Air Qatar

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (right) and Qatari Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman al-Thani announced at the Pentagon that Qatar will build a new training facility for its air force - in the United States.  Specifically, Qatar will have its new training facility at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho.

This marks the first time a foreign country has had a military presence in the continental United States since the British maintained forts in present-day Michigan and Ohio in the twenty years following the Declaration of Independence, and the first time a foreign air force has had any presence in the continental United States.  Given that the Qataris bribed Trump with a free jet airliner and have enabled Trump to pursue his business interests in their country - a polyp-shaped sand-dune peninsula the Size of Connecticut in the Persian Gulf - this is the biggest scandal to rock America since Tuesday.

Hegseth insists that the Qatari facility is not a separate base but is merely a facility to allow Americans and Qataris to train side by side.  But Qatar has also been been identified as a supporter of terrorism, and even Trump himself, in 2017, once accused Qatar of supporting Islamist terror commando groups.  And now, with a Qatari presence in the U.S.  - perversely, an accused supporter of Islamist terrorists stationed in Christian-nationalist Idaho - terrorists no longer have to hijack planes in America to fly them into buildings.  They'll have their own air base right here!

Incoming!  

Music Video Of the Week - October 10, 2025

"Still Crazy After All These Years" by Paul Simon  (Go to the link in the upper right-hand corner.) 

Good Lovin' Gone Bad

The National Football League has chosen one Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny (though I will defer to his birth name to show my contempt for preposterous hip-hop stage names), to headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show in February.  As I understand it, it's the first time a male Hispanic musical artist has been chosen to headline this prestigious gig.

Well, he is a Hispanic male.  But a rapper and a World Wrestling Entertainment participant could hardly be called musical or an artist any more than the Super Bowl half time show could be considered prestigious.

Martínez Ocasio has been attacked by the far right for having lashed out at Trump for his immigration policy and for planning to perform in Spanish, like he usually does in his shows.  Inevitably, many re-state football fans want to know why there hasn't been a country and western performer hasn't been invited to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show for the past twenty years.  Lee Greenwood - 83 years old and known for only one song, the spectacularly unlistenable "God Bless the U.S.A.," which owes its existence to the existence of beer-commercial jingles - has been suggested as a possible substitute.   

Martínez Ocasio has remained undeterred, insulting MAGA Republicans when hosting "Saturday Night Live" in Spanish and telling his detractors to learn the language quickly if they want to know what he said.  The biggest complaint MAGA football fans have with Martínez Ocasio headlining at the Super Bowl is the fact that he is from Puerto Rico, and they are incensed at the idea of a foreigner performing at the Super Bowl.  They had no problem with Rihanna, a Barbadian, or British bands such as the Rolling Stones and Coldplay, or the Irish band U2 performing at the Super Bowl.

You know what's funny?  I'll tell you.  What's funny is that the NFL has actually had any non-American performers at Super Bowl halftime shows when American football is virtually unknown and irrelevant outside the United States.

You know what's even funnier?  MAGA complaining that Martínez Ocasio isn't American when Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and its inhabitants have been American citizens since 1917.

This, of course, is all just something for me to laugh at, as I am averse to American football and I am a rock and roll fan, thankful that rock has become too culturally and commercially irrelevant to be considered ever again for inclusion in a Super Bowl halftime show.  Because the whole all-American jock ethos represented by American football is everything I imagined rock and roll to be against.

But hip-hop - especially hip-hop performed by a WWE star named after a naughty rabbit - is a perfect fit for the vulgarity of a Super Bowl halftime show.

So, for that matter, is the sort of smarmy contemporary country music represented by Lee Greenwood. 

Idle Weiss

Diversity, equity and inclusion are essential to giving people who are not straight, white, male or Christian representation.  It's a way that non-heterosexuals, women, and Jews get a seat at the table.

But after seeing noted non-heterosexual Jewish female journalist Bari Weiss take over CBS News as editor-in-chief, even the most die-hard progressive might want to reconsider DEI.

Weiss is a smart-ass conservative opinion writer who, in addition to, ironically, opposing DEI, is against "wokeness" (formerly called common decency), is tolerant of white people appropriating cultural touchstones of racial minorities, does not believe that a credible rape accusation should be a barrier to public office, and is also a staunch Zionist, believing that the Palestinians ought to just step aside and let Israel take over the Holy Land.  Her stewardship of CBS News means more favorable coverage of the Israeli government's Gaza policy (imagine an anti-Catholic Beacon Hill WASP as editor-in-chief of the Boston Globe during the Troubles in Ulster and you get the idea), more room for incendiary commentary on programs like "Face the Nation," and a general disregard for stories that might present the country's leaders in an unfavorable light.

Weiss is best known as an opinion-editorial woman, having been an op-ed editor at both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.  She caused many a stir in the latter role, where she not only promoted her own right-leaning opinions but also defended in 2020 an op-ed column from Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) that advocated the use of military force against people protesting the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  Weiss resigned from the Times, as did her boss, op-ed editor James Bennet, brother of Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO).  Weiss then went on to found Free Press, a right-leaning online publication that, among other things, has questioned COVID lockdowns and sex-affirming health-care procedures.  A huge success after only three short years, Free Press was just recently bought by CBS owner Paramount for $150 million, making Weiss and her cofounders - her sister and her wife - rich women, and Weiss has found common cause with Paramount CEO David Ellison, himself a rich guy, to recast CBS News as they see fit.  

They will say it's not about money.  But as H.L. Mencken once said, that's exactly what people say when it is about money.

It's certainly not about relevant experience.  Weiss is taking over a news organization that involves gathering stories on current events and presenting them on television.  Weiss has no experience in either news gathering or TV,  and the sight of such a politically polarizing provocateur taking over the house that Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather built and remodeling it into a faux-opulent McMansion is enough to make real news junkies want to vomit.  At least Murrow and Cronkite aren't around to see this; Rather, at 94, isn't so lucky.

Weiss says that her mission is to restore straight reporting with minimal editorializing, keeping what editorializing there is evenly balanced between both sides - forgetting that Murrow once said that sometimes there is no other side, like in Gaza where Israel has no defense of its atrocities.   But media critics are not fooled.  "Like [Elon] Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the deal can be understood as part of a broader elite project to smudge the lenses through which many people see the world," wrote the Defector's Patrick Redford of Weiss's promotion. "By installing Weiss, the richest people in the world have taken another step toward ushering in the toothless, acquiescent future of mainstream media they've always wanted."

Which, of course, jibes nicely with the recent merger between Paramount and Skydance that the current regime in Washington approved  - and the new ombudsman's position at CBS to make sure the regime gets a - ahem - fair shake.

So far, as the 2025-26 television season is getting underway, "60 Minutes" hasn't been terribly affected by CBS News's decline, and it likely has plenty of stories filed and ready to air before Weiss puts her stamp on the network's news division.  But in the long term, I don't hold out much hope, and I am speaking as someone who has abandoned legacy broadcasting so thoroughly that "60 Minutes" is the only program I still watch on television.

Pictures of a Beautiful Instagram Page

Oh, dear, I haven't commented on this blog for three days, does that mean I have to comment on something now?  Ugh . . ..  I've been rendered senseless by Trump flooding the zone with authoritarianism, which is probably his objective, and so tonight, I think I'll offer a casual and relatively light post.  My readership has spiked of late, and so I really need to keep up this blog somehow.

Tonight I want to talk about my Instagram page.  When I first started posting on Instagram a few years ago, I had no theme or common thread I was projecting, only random posts about favorite cars, favorite bands, favorite actresses . . . you get the idea.  I remember hoping I could use my Instagram account to pressure Volkswagen to restore the base Golf to the North American market, though that idea fell by the wayside.  Soon after Trump regained power, I fell into a constant theme . . . since early March, I have put up three posts at a time on my Instagram account, the first two being anti-Trump and anti-MAGA memes and every third post a picture of a beautiful woman - sometimes an actress but usually a model - as what I call "feminine-beauty relief" from the constant posting of Trump-related and MAGA-related memes.  I post pictures of beautiful women to, as I put it, cleanse the palate of all of that MAGA stuff.

So, it turns out that I, in a sense, revived my old beautiful-women picture blog after all.  

Oh yeah, I found that flash drive with pictures of all of the models I saved from my old blog - I found it on, of all places, my bedroom floor!  I'm thinking that one of my cats must have gotten hold of it and returned it to me as a gift in lieu of a mouse (I mean the rodent, not the PC control apparatus) to drag in.  Now that I have it again,  I've found an immediate use for the pictures on it - I'm using it for most of my third posts after two MAGA-oriented ones.  I may still use the pictures for a model-themed Web site in the future, but right now, we have a battle to fight against Trump, and not much else is working, even as the Democrats seem utterly clueless as to how to deal with him.   (This is the same party that was going to elected the first black female President last year??)  So I offer one other weapon other than this blog to fight Trump MAGA - my Instagram page, with two anti-Trump, anti-MAGA memes in a row, the third some badly needed beauty in the form of stellar womanhood to help us get through the unpalatable reality of MAGA.

My Instagram page is here. 

Eric, We Hardly Knew Ya

New York City Mayor Eric Adams withdrew from the New York mayoral campaign.

Adams, only the city's second black mayor, started out with great promise when he took over as mayor of the nation's largest city in January 2022.  A former police officer, he ran on making the city safer and seemed to have more of a purpose than the well-meaning but rudderless Bill DeBlasio.  But Adams got bogged down in personal and public scandals that led him to make many a devil's bargain with Trump in order to evade prosecution for federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.  The deal between Trump and Adams essentially allowed Trump to have more leeway over New York in his plan to detain undocumented immigrants.   

Somehow, everyone had forgotten that cops can be crooked too.

Adams, who hoped to be elected to a second term as mayor, saw the writing on the wall and realized that Zohran Mamdani is clearly on the path to becoming the city's 111th mayor (unless Andrew Cuomo can find a way to short-circuit him, which seems unlikely at the moment).  He bowed out  but his name will still be on the ballot, a circumstance of embarrassment not just for Adams but or anyone who votes for him.  Even if he never goes to prison for his alleged crimes (and he will remain presumed innocent, because once the charges were dropped, he no longer had to worry about being proven guilty), he's already paid his debt to society by surrendering his credibility and his political career.   

Music Video Of the Week - October 3, 2025

"Squeeze Box" by the Who  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Quantico

"Quantico," a corruption of a Doeg Indian word of unknown meaning, may take on the same sort of meeting for modern ears as "Nuremberg" has.

It was in Quantico, Virginia, the home of a large marine Corps base, that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth addressed the top brass of the Armed Forces and declared that a new era had begun in what Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, now calls the War Department.  Hegseth said that the department had strayed from its military missions and had become too soft - too "woke" and was now planning to turn the service into a lean, mean, fighting machine.  He proclaimed  that "anyone wearing the uniform, " including generals and admirals, would have to take a  take  a physical training test twice a year, and pass not only weight requirements but height requirements as well, so determined is the obscenely tattooed Hegseth to create a superhuman military from the lowest buck private right to the the Chiefs of Staff.

In a move that would have amused Ulysses S. Grant, Hegseth said that beards for flag officers such as generals and admirals would be banned.

However, mustaches are acceptable.

 

Hegseth has made a "warrior ethos" central to his idea of what the military should be, telling the military commanders that their purpose would exclusively be "war fighting," adding: "To ensure peace, we must prepare for war," without having to underline just how Orwellian that is.

Trump, though not expected to speak at a meeting Hegseth called at his own discretion, showed up anyway for no reason other than to hear himself talk - and give the primary reason they had all been  called them all to Quantico on that day, and it was not to reveal the solution to a mystery, like who's in the Epstein files.  Trump announced that the military had a new enemy, an "enemy from within," defined largely as anyone who opposes Trump.  He pledged to have troops in the streets of America's major cities to bring criminals to heel and use such dangerous cities to train the military to fight.

Gee, I feel safer already.

Thankfully, the flag officers gave Trump and Hegseth no more than polite, muted applause.  They clapped their fingers.  They were expected to obey Trump, but given how they love and honor the Constitution, I suspect that the first thing these generals and admirals do when Trump gives any one of them an illegal order is to march into the White House and arrest the bastard.  Then they can dissolve Congress and hold new presidential and congressional elections.  

Or, they could simply, dissolve the Union.  Me, I know I want a divorce.

I assume Trump was speaking off the cuff, as usual.  Oh, by the way, I need to make a clarification/correction regarding his United Nations speech  The TelePrompTer went out before he started speaking, not during his speech, so he ended up winging all of it.  Even more embarrassing than I thought. 

I Support a Palestinian State

What's going to happen regarding a possible government shutdown?  I don't give a twit.  As far as I'm concerned, the government shut down once Elon Musk got control of it back in January.  Let the government shut down.  It will hasten the breakup of the United States, and hopefully a few of the ten or twelve countries that emerge from the dissolution of the Union will recognize a Palestinian state.

In an effort to end the nearly eighty-year old conflict in the Middle East once and for all, over 150 countries have recognized the right of the nation of Palestine to have a state.  But, as is so often, when it comes to the nations of the world achieving virtual unanimity on an issue, the United States remains an outlier.  Having rejected the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the International Criminal Court, and several climate-change agreements, the United States will not support the rights of the Palestinian people - whom Newt Gingrich once called an "invented people" - to have a country of their own, living side by side with Israel. Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Indonesia, Ireland - Ireland - Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, and the United Kingdom - the British! - all recognize a state for the Palestinian people. But the United States, a nation born out of colonialism and freed from the rule of a global empire, refuses to do so.

This has nothing to do with Trump.  This has everything to do with the influence of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and the Christian right.  AIPAC promotes Zionism, the belief that the Jews are entitled to as much land as deemed necessary for a Jewish state and the justification for the displacement of Palestinians from their homes and the right of Jewish settlers to create new Israeli towns on Palestinian land, while the Christian right views the Jewish state as a necessary prelude to the Second Coming, in which the predominantly majority Palestinians are not welcome to witness unless they accept Christ, less they be condemned with unrepentant Jews.

I support and recognize a Palestinian state.

You remember what I said a couple of years ago - that as a Catholic and as an American of Irish origin, I believe that the Irish Catholic diaspora in the United States should support the Palestinians because of Ulster.  But not just because of those six imprisoned counties that have been under British colonial domination and separated from the Irish homeland for over a hundred years.  It is also because of English domination of Ireland that began with the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1171 and gradually led to total Irish capitulation to the English in 1542 and to 380 years of oppression.  Any American of Irish origin would and should agree that the plight of the Palestinians under Israel is no different.  Imagine a country so rich and powerful that it is able to take the land of another people and force said people to live in squalor and poverty and deny them dignity, condemn their culture, ridicule their religious allegiances, and occupy their land for the benefit of themselves and not for any of its rightful people . . . and cause them to starve and suffer without regret because it can.

That is not fair.

That is the Palestinian people under Israel since 1948.  That was the Irish people under England and then Great Britain until 1922.  Too many Republicans and Democrats - many of them Irish!  - have acquiesced in Israel's control over the West bank and Gaza, and too many American leaders on both sides of the aisle have paid little if any more than lip service to the need to alleviate the suffering in Gaza and have not done a thing to stop Israeli attacks on the Gazan people.  

Again . . . that is not fair.

When Irish President Michael Higgins speaks out against genocide of the Palestinians at at Holocaust remembrance ceremony, he is reminding the Israelis and the Jewish diaspora to show charity toward the Palestinian people and to protest the Israeli government's savage war against a people.  And he is branded an anti-Semite.  Why is President Higgins so vocal about this?  Consider the Irish.  Remember the suffering of Ireland throughout its history.  The Irish do.  The Irish diaspora, especially its American contingent, should.  And just as I hope that one day the occupied territories of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone, the six counties of British-ruled Ulster, will be reunited with Ireland . . .

. . . I hope that one day the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza will become an independent Palestine.

What's going to happen with the federal government?  Again, I don't give a twit.

A Hanging Matter

Very soon.

Trump just issued an executive order calling Antifa a terrorist organization.  

There's just one thing - Antifa is not a terrorist organization.  It's not even an organization.  It is a movement, like the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, but it's not an organization.  "Antifa" is just shorthand for "anti-fascist," which refers tot someone - anyone, really - who opposes Trump.  

You know how apologists for overrated and overexposed pop divas that go by single names and play up what there is of their sexuality explain that they are feminists in their own way by being themselves and that feminism is anything you want it to be?  The decree Trump signed pretty much defines Antifa as anything he wants it to be.   He defines Antifa as anyone who expresses statements that are, among other things, anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian (Allahu akbar!), anti-family values (will Trump arrest himself?), and, well, anti-Trump.  There's hardly anyone left outside MAGA who would be considered innocent.  Trump is using this extremely broad definition of Antifa terrorism to go after liberal activist groups . . . and James Comey.

The former FBI director was indicted for perjury, even though the circumstances of Comey's comments to a congressional committee that produced the indictment offered no proof or suggestion that he lied.  I could explain the situation, but it would only make my head hurt.  The bottom line is that the only smoke from this situation is not from a fire but from Trump's own bottom, which he blows out on a regular basis.  After the U.S. Attorney with the authority to investigate Comey's congressional testimony - a Trump appointee - told Trump there was no reason to indict Comey, Trump fired him and replaced him with a shyster dame who has never tried a case of any consequence and whose distinction is having been a local beauty queen from Colorado who placed third in the Miss Colorado pageant.    

Whether Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, above, was appointed for her hair, her teeth, her neckline, or her vague resemblance to a lead actress in a late-seventies/early-eighties TV action-drama series (she does seem to come across as a cool, polished variation of Heather Thomas), is secondary to the primary reason Trump appointed her - he needed someone to indict Comey.  He needed someone so willing to do what Trump wanted her to do that if he asked her to walk ten paces toward Constitution Avenue on the South Lawn of the White House, turn to the right, throw a Matchbox car over her shoulder, and squirt whipped cream in a Secret Service agent's face, she'd do it without even thinking of asking why.  Her telegenic appearance, however, is her only asset.

There will be a trial, and Comey will win his case easily.  So will any liberal-activist group Trump goes after, especially the appropriately named People for the American Way.  Individuals not famous enough to be played by Jeff Daniels in a TV movie, however, might not get off so easily.  Trump only needs to brand any man or woman on the street - taking part in a street-corner anti-Trump protest - Antifa, which to many Middle Americans sound vaguely Arabic, like al-Qaeda or Queen Antifah or something like that (I'm surprised Trump doesn't include black female celebrities called "Queen" by their fans as an example of someone who's anti-American, because this is a republic - or because Melania is the queen, he's the king, and don't you ever forget it!).  Once he does that, you're an enemy of the state.  You will be arrested as a terrorist and tried for treason . . . a capital offense.

And don't be surprised if the prosecuting attorney reminds you of Heather Thomas.

Seceding From Seceding

The weekly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA protest was today, just like every Sunday before, and after having gone for months except for when I was Europe and a couple of other schedule conflicts, I stayed home today.

I had to clean my bathroom.

Actually, it was because I was getting tired of it.

Though I did have to clean my bathroom.

The truth is, my secession campaign wasn't gaining traction or supporters.  I would bring a sign saying "NJ MUST SECEDE!" and copies of my sample state ordinance spelling out the reasons for New Jersey to leave the Union.  I would read my sample ordinance out loud.  But there were few who took copies of my proposed ordinance, and most people seemed to to ignore me.  Don't get me wrong, I'm still for breaking up the Union and having one state - not necessarily New Jersey - taking the first step with secession.  But keeping up the protesting for such a long-shot idea doesn't seem worth it, at least for now.

And besides, there's another reason.  If the Republicans get in to the governor's office next year, New Jersey obviously won't leave the Union.  it will likely, however, leave the northeastern states health cooperative and join Vermont and New Hampshire (both with Republican governors) as the only eastern states north of the Mason-Dixon line taking vaccine advice from RFK Jr.

And yes, I think Jack still has a shot.  Hey, why fib?  Because even though polls that show the GOP within striking distance of winning this campaign are Republican-leaning and thus can't be trusted enough people might trust them enough to stay home on Election Day.   And yes, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who called out such polls, thinks that the polls showing the Democrats still ahead are more accurate, but this is the same Simon Rosenberg who kept saying of the Democrats in 2024, "I'd rather be us than them." 

Besides, I'm not going to make America a better place by protesting a leader who has too many supporters to just quit his job.  I have to do a job of a different sort.  I already do such a job.  I've committed myself to continue to work on maintaining the community park and improving it when the situation demands so, such as with plantings and the like.  So, I'm serving my community,  I'm helping the environment, and I'm providing a public amenity - three things Trump is against. The best form of protest for me is to continue keeping the park up to par.

When I'm not cleaning my bathroom.

Garden State Mess

The election for governor of New Jersey was supposed to an easy win for the Democratic candidate, U.S. Representative Mikie Sherrill, against Republican former state Assemblyman and 2021 Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli.  But you may recall that I noted that Ciattarelli is a lifelong New Jersey and an Italian-American - two qualities that are potent assets in a state populated by lifelong residents who wear their Jerseyness on their sleeves and heavily populated by Italians, who have largely defined what it means to be from New Jersey.  Sherrill is neither of those things, and on top of all that, she represents a party that still hasn't gotten its act together on issues such as law enforcement and immigration while still - still - relying on consultants and party elders on how to deal with the economy, despite the fact that these consultants and party elders are usually wrong.

Now Jack is turning on the heat with a relentless campaign attacking Sherrill on pursuing policies in Washington that inhibit affordability in the cost of living while being supportive of outgoing Democratic governor Phil Murphy's more unpopular policies on energy and the like.  Sherrill, despite her reputation in Washington as a bad-ass, is acting less like the Jersey girl she isn't and more like the nice lady that she appears to be.  That's not what you want in hardball New Jersey politics, which as rough and tumble as local politics can possibly get except for out on Long Island.  Also, she lives in Montclair, a genteel suburb known for its restaurants and its performing arts festivals, while Jack - as I shall refer to him because I'm part Italian and I'm trying to forget he's Italian - comes from Raritan, a working-class town so tough, its local hero, Marine Corps Sergeant John Basilone, who took on a numerically superior Japanese force in the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II and survived (he perished at Iwo Jima), has a bridge named after him.  A bridge over the Raritan River?  No - a bridge over a traffic circle!  Now that's tough! 

And Jack is showing his mettle.  He's pretty much running the sort of campaign that Trump has run, and Trump most likely taught him everything he knows.  Sherrill has been coming across as a lackluster candidate, drawing comparisons to the lackluster presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris, and we all know how that turned out!

Even Sherrill's attempt to play up her status as a Naval Air Force veteran has fallen flat, with too many people complaining about how she spends too much time talking up her military service and not enough time on the state's current issues - and when she does talk about the issues, it's in the same milquetoast manner of recent one-hit-wonder and fly-by-night failed Democratic candidates for office ("I'm working on my to-do list!" - Kamala Harris).  Jack is running as a change candidate after an eight-year Democratic administration in an effort - which, from all accounts, is working - to neutralize Sherrill's efforts to tie Jack to Trump.  That may explain why Jack's internal polling and an Emerson College poll show the campaign to be a dead heat.

However, things just got messy.  As if to undermine Sherrill's military service and turn an asset into a liability, the Trump regime has released U.S. Naval Academy records showing that Sherrill was not allowed to take part in the graduation ceremony for the class of 1994 at the U.S. Naval Academy because she knew that some of her classmates cheated on final examinations and did not report them.  Sherrill supporters are quick to point out that she herself didn't cheat and showed honor by not reporting, or "ratting on," her peers.  Huh?  It's the U.S. Naval Academy, not a Mafia organization like the Nassau County Republican Committee!  As someone who is expected to be true to the virtues of honesty and integrity, she had every right and every obligation to report her peers for something that could get one court-martialed in the service. 

But get this.  Jack and Trump also doled out personal information about Sherrill, including her home address, her Social Security number, her parents, her life insurance policy, and possibly her dental records, her car payments, her credit card number, and maybe even secret, classified evidence that she and Olympic swimming icon Janet Evans are twins separated at birth.

And just to underscore how vicious this campaign is getting, New Jersey MAGA voters are beginning to refer to Sherrill as "Rebecca Hedberg," Rebecca being her given name (she gets her nickname from her middle name, Michelle) and Hedberg being her husband's surname, the suggestion being that Mikie Sherrill is an inauthentic character being played by one Rebecca Hedberg.  (There is a Rebecca Hedberg on Instagram, but it has nothing to do with my congresswoman.  This Rebecca Hedberg is a mom in Sweden.)   And on top of that, American Principles Project, a conservative political action committee, American Principles Project, is going to flood our airwaves with an ad to scare voters about transsexuals.

The Sherrill campaign is also trying to fight back against Jack for his comments about the need to desegregate New Jersey public schools during their debate last weekend, in which he said we're only debating desegregation because black-majority schools are faring worse than white-majority schools and we would not be having this conversation were it the other way around. Jack could have stopped there, but he went on to say that if you desegregated Newark schools tomorrow, the Newark district's test scores wouldn't go up.  Well, he's right about that, mainly because there are no white kids in Newark to integrate with the black kids in the first place.  And sadly, those quips might help him more than hurt him.  Nothing scares white New Jersey voters - not even transsexuals - except for the prospect of racially integrating schools.  Why do you think white folks moved out of Newark to begin with?

Jack is the latest in a series of New Jersey goombah politicians who use race as a weapon to mobilize white voters and general and white ethnic voters in particular.  It was the modus operandi of Anthony Imperiale, a Newark councilman and state legislator, who ran a vigilante group in the North Ward of Newark and urged white residents to arm themselves to protect their homes from blacks.  Imperiale famously led the fight against a black-oriented affordable-housing project in the city and had many a tumble with black activist Amiri Baraka, the father of the current mayor, over it.  (It was quashed but Mayor Ras Baraka revived the plan.)  More recent Republican governors have had their own embarrassments over race - Christine Todd Whitman,  the whitest governor New Jersey has had in the past thirty years, was once photographed patting down a black man in a photo opportunity during a police arrest - but Jack is a MAGA Republican, a Republican who would allow Trump to send state militiamen from Southern states to patrol New Jersey's black-and-brown-majority cities to restore "law and order" (one of Imperiale's slogans), a Republican who would restrict abortion access (like his fellow New Jersey paysan Sam Alito), and a Republican who would likely get rid of DEI programs in this, one of the most diverse states in the Union.  The trouble is, too many white folks in New jersey like what he's selling.

But maybe not enough of them.  It turns out that that Emerson College poll has skewed rightward over the years, and Sherrill has consistently led Jack in polling averages.  The caveat is that Jack was way behind Governor Murphy when he ran against him in 2021 and ended up almost defeating him.  Also, in Jack's favor, neither party has won at least three gubernatorial elections in a row in New Jersey since the 1960s.  Up to now, the campaign has been uncharacteristically civil in a state known for expressions like, "Fuhgeddaboutdit!" and "If ya not from the ghetto, stay the f**k outta the ghetto!"  But with recent developments - yo, the gloves are really off now.

Ugh.

Music Video Of the Week - September 26, 2025

"Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Tell Donald To Shut Up!

As Black Entertainment Television famously tweeted when they saw Madonna disembowel two Prince songs at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards after Prince died . . . regarding Trump's speech to the United Nations . . . yes, I saw that!

Trump gave a speech at the United Nations this past Tuesday that was a slew of braggadocio, personal grievances, and an incoherent lecture to other countries the only way to run a country is the American way - though evidence to the contrary has mounted not just over the past eight months but over the past eight decades.  Had his TelePrompTer not malfunctioned (courtesy of a screwup made by Trump's advance team, through Trump blamed it on anti-American sabotage by UN staffers), his speech most likely would have been merely appalling.  His decision to forge ahead and improvise an address resembled a kid telling a joke that he's making up as he goes.

Trump had a few basic ideas of what he wanted to say in his address - he had a concept of a plan of what he wanted to say - and he ended up spewing more hot words out of his mouth than he would have if he'd been throwing up alphabet soup.  He talked about how wonderful the United States has been doing since he regained power and bitched about what a total loser Joe Biden was. Concentrating on his domestic agenda more than on anything else, Trump appeared to be making a State of the Union address without realizing that he was delivering his remarks to the wrong audience.  Then he insulted the rest of the world by talking about how good he was at restoring greatness to his country while "your countries are going to hell."

And why were these countries going to hell?  Because they were embracing renewable energy.  Trump - famous for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord twice - exalted the magic of fossil fuels and needled other countries for putting up and relying on ugly windmills without considering how to produce and generate energy on calm days (actually, they did . . . two words: "battery storage").  He did make one cogent statement - that all nations have to protect and maintain their borders.  Then he reverted to form and chastised other countries for letting in too many people from other cultures, other religions, with their own traditions . . . does that remind you of one country in particular?   He also lamented how each country on the planet was becoming less unique.  Well, of course, seeing as you can't go anywhere in the world without seeing a McDonald's, which is Trump's favorite restaurant to dine at whenever he's abroad.

Trump didn't have to work hard (he never does) to make clear his disdain for the United Nations.  In addition to blaming the UN for the TelePrompTer debacle and also a defective escalator leading to the podium (the malfunctioning of which was caused by a Trump videographer), he talked about how the UN turned down his bid to remodel its headquarters (too bad, he could have given the UN a discount on gold leaf!), and he once again bragged about how he ended seven wars without getting any credit from the UN (the actual number of wars he ended is seven fewer), leading to his hope that, yes, he gets the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Not even if he offers to remodel the Nobel Academy headquarters.

This speech was an embarrassment to the United States and was abominable even by the standards of crazy dictators.  Even Adolf Hitler wouldn't have given a speech as self-absorbed and as incoherent at the League of Nations, though he wouldn't given a speech at the League of Nations, as he withdrew Germany from the League as soon as he got into power (though not as fast as Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accord).  But at least Trump didn't give a speech before the United Nations as bad as the one he gave at Charlie Kirk's memorial event this past Sunday, in which he declared his loathing for his opponents even as he praised Kirk as a bulwark of Christian values.  And turning the other cheek was not what Stephen Miller had in mind when he assailed Trump's political opponents as having done nothing and having been nothing in the American continuum and vowed that opponents of Trump would be punished severely for their sins. 

The fire next time.

And yet, in spite of everything, Trump still holds a great deal of power.  Gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia that were considered easy wins for the Democrats are tightening, and one poll in New Jersey shows that campaign tightening so much there's no daylight between the opposing candidates (and I'll have more to say about that later, if Trump can only stop making news long enough for me to turn my attention to it).  And in Washington, the Democrats are trying to save subsidized health insurance from Republican cuts to avoid a government shutdown next week but don't have any leaders with the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Trump about it.

Trump has successfully dismantled the government to the point where he holds all the cards.  When he talks, people listen.  Even when they have no idea what he's talking about.

Trump's comments at both the United Nations and the Kirk memorial have convinced me even more that its' time for the U.S. to break up into separate countries.  There is no need for foreign nations to take America seriously anymore, and there's no reason for Americans to expect anything serious from their own government.  Because Trump is the government.  Democratic officeholders in Washington simply haven't noticed that yet.  When they do, I hope the cries for secession among Democratic states will get louder.

Who Cares?

The Who - or what's left of them - are on the farewell tour that was supposed to have taken place 43 years ago.

After Keith Moon died in 1978, the remaining members of the Who, Roger Daltrey (left, above), Pete Townshend (right, above) and John Entwistle decided to move forward with former Faces drummer Kenney Jones replacing Moon and, in addition to a tour in 1979 (the one that included to the infamously fatal stampede at the Riverfront Coliseum that December), the band cut Face Dances in 1981 to meh reviews.  Townshend, recognizing that the Who just didn't sound the same as it had before, when Moon was in the drummer's chair, but not yet realizing that Moon's absence was the sole reason for that, started writing new songs for another album, and a year later, It's Hard was released.  Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed it their best album since Who's Next, but the magazine was alone in that assessment, as even its best, most early-seventies-Who-evocative cuts, "Athena and "Eminence Front," couldn't redeem it.  At that point, Townshend decided that the Who's 1982 tour would be its last, and in 1984, he confirmed that the Who had broken up and wouldn't even be a studio band as had originally been envisioned.

That should have been the end of it, bar one last set at the London Live Aid concert in 1985.  But in 1989, Townshend, Daltrey and Entwistle reunited to tour again (Jones had wisely moved on) and to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the release of their rock opera Tommy, rather than do the simple thing and remaster the original album for a new CD issue.  (Would the three surviving Beatles have toured in 1987 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper?)  As Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell later wrote, the remaining members of the Who got a whole ensemble of backup musicians to compensate for Keith Moon's absence, and they didn't even come close.  The Who would tour again throughout the nineties and into the new century, even after the 2002 death of John Entwistle - which occurred in the middle of a Who tour - as well as continuing to perform Tommy on occasion even though the stage musical should have been enough.  (Their current tour coincidentally - noncoincidentally? - intersects with the fiftieth anniversary of the Tommy movie directed by Ken Russell.)  In the forty-odd years since they said they broke up, the Who have recorded only one studio album - 2006's Endless Wire, which got a modicum of attention before Who fans in Whoville returned to listening to Who Are You.  Apart from Endless Wire, and solo albums, the Who have created no new music since their last album as a quartet.

Why is this so upsetting for me, as you can clearly tell by my tone?  Because the Who's refusal to call it a day and step aside until Daltrey and Townshend became octogenarians is indicative of what rock and roll has become since the mid-eighties, which is precisely the time that rap and dance-diva pop began to take over the charts.  The early 1980s found record sales in a depression and many veteran rock and roll acts getting long in the tooth, but a few newer artists still managed to break through and score a few hits, from traditional AOR performers like Billy Squier to spritely pop rockers like Men at Work to the Stray Cats, who seemed poised to bring back rockabilly the way the Rolling Stones brought back the blues.  Heck, the Clash finally broke through on American radio and in the Billboard singles chart.  The Clash opened for the Who on that 1982 tour, and Pete Townshend confided to Joe Strummer that he hoped the Clash would carry the torch that the Who were passing.

For various reasons (*cough cough*, MTV, *cough cough*, Russell Simmons, *cough cough*, radio conglomerates, *cough cough*), the 1980s rock and roll renewal that was supposed to mirror the earlier rock and roll renewal sparked by the British Invasion and the blues revival of the 1960s never happened, as veteran rock acts refused to step aside while younger acts strove to get attention even as rappers and pop divas started sucking up all the oxygen.  Virtually the only signs of life in rock in the 1980s were the success of hair bands and pop-metal acts spewing out recycled riffs and lyrical clichés.  U2, a postpunk band with a jagged sound no one had ever experienced before, were an exception.  Pete Townshend even said that when he heard Dave "The Edge" Evans play guitar, he wanted to give up.

But he didn't.  Rather than make a living editing books or writing avant-garde musicals, Townshend reunited the Who and turned them into an oldies act.

The Who are hardly the only veteran or "legacy" rock band to stick around or come back long after they promised to or should have hit the showers, and for younger rockers striving to get attention beyond college-indie radio play, that is unfortunate, but the Who are easily the worst offenders.  We Who fans never considered them to be as good as the Rolling Stones.  We considered them to be better than the Stones.  Better.  They were better instrumentalists, Roger Daltrey was (and still is) a better singer than Mick Jagger, and they were more innovative and experimental.  And Pete Townshend's and John Entwistle's songs were more imaginative and multifaceted than Jagger's and Keith Richards' songs celebrating pride and joy and greed and sex ("Sha-dooby!"), and even when the Who themselves wrote songs celebrating pride and joy and greed and sex, such as the Entwistle composition "Trick of the Light" from Who Are You, they were more literary about it.  The Who's reunion of its partial lineup for purely nostalgic reasons tarnishes the legacy and the accomplishments of the great band they used to be.

It would have been perfectly fine for Daltrey, Townshend, and Entwistle to continue recording solo albums and eventually fading away as new rockers took their place.  However, their refusal to exit stage left at a time when rock, being overwhelmed by Madonna, rappers, and assorted Jackson family members, was starved for new talent that did not waste their time checking out their jumper-cable hair in the mirror or write tunes making Kiss songs sound like Cole Porter tunes by comparison was one of the reasons rock declined and fell like the Roman Empire.  Note this: When the remainder of the Who's lineup regrouped in 1989, only one rock act - the insufferable Mötley Crüe - managed to have a number-one LP on the Billboard album chart.  A year later, no rock act managed that.

Remember when I said that Townshend in 1982 expected the Clash to carry the torch of rock and roll going forward?  In 1985, the same year the Who did what was supposed to be a one-shot reunion for Live Aid, the Clash, having fired Mick Jones, released a new album with two new members, Cut the Crap, and the title was so descriptive of the crap they had cut that the Clash broke up immediately thereafter.  And who is opening for the Who on this final tour?  The Joe Perry Project.  Led by the same Joe Perry who played guitar for Aerosmith for the previous fifty years.  Hardly a vote of confidence in rock and roll's future.  

Ladies and gentlemen, the two old blokes you see on the stage today are not the Who.  The Who as you originally knew them died forty years ago.  Leave them to rest in peace.  The two old blokes on stage now are a couple of music hall performers who occasionally put on a skit about a deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure plays the mean pinball.  Compare that to Illinois indie rocker Stace England and his concept band Screen Syndicate, who performed their song cycle about B-movie actress Roberta Collins once - in 2014 - and didn't even reproduce it for disc in the studio until 2022.

Now that's rock and roll.

ABC Folds

It actually happened.

ABC and Disney caved - not to Trump, but to public pressure.  After people started canceling subscriptions to Disney+ and Disney-owned Hulu or stopped watching the network's programs, the alphabet network allowed Jimmy Kimmel to return to work as the host of its late-night talk show.  He returns tomorrow night.

So the people do have the power, after all.

This is a great victory for Kimmel, his fans, and free speech in general, but it's a personal loss for me - I already deleted recorded but unwatched first-season episodes of Tim Allen's sitcom "Shifting Gears," and now if I tune into his show at the start of the second season, I won't know what's going on unless I seek out the first-season episodes I haven't seen - i.e., most of them - and pay to binge-watch them.  Ahh, I was never a fan of Kat Dennings anyway.

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel didn't deserve what happened to him.

What Kimmel said on his ABC late-night talk show was perfectly accurate.  In lamenting Charlie Kirk's assassination, Kimmel said that MAGA supporters were doing all they could to deflect blame for Kirk's killing to others even as the murderer - who is now believed to have shot Kirk for his transphobic comments at a time when the murderer was falling in love with a woman making a transition from the male sex - came from a pro-gun, pro-MAGA family.   But Kimmel likely wasn't suspended from his show for saying that.  More likely, ABC suspended him for joking about Trump's nonchalant response to Kirk's death, pivoting from that topic to the subject of the obscene White House ballroom, the construction of which is getting underway.

When Kimmel made fun of Trump, Trump and his minions overreacted accordingly.  TV station owners Sinclair and Nexstar, right-wing media companies that own many ABC affiliates between them, demanded that ABC pay for Kimmel's arrogance, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr let Disney, which owns ABC, know that their ABC affiliates were ready to revolt and hold ABC accountable for Kimmel.  This was because Sinclair and Nexstar were discussing a merger and Carr planned raise the limits on the number of stations a single company can own in so many markets to allow the merger to happen.  And Sinclair and Nexstar didn't want ABC to nix this deal.

Disney chairman Bob Iger could have stood up to the threats from the ABC-affiliate owners and to Carr.  Now in his seventies, Iger doesn't even have to be in charge of Disney.  He has a comfortable life, lots of money, and a beautiful wife - former model Willow Bay, a one-time spokesmodel for Estée Lauder (did I happen to mention that the Lauder family is part of the American conservative establishment?) and a journalist who is now the dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.  Iger, as one of the most innovative and most respected entertainment moguls of the past fifty years, cemented his legacy when he retired a few years ago but just had to come back to run Disney again because he missed the power.  So, instead of standing up to Uncle Charlie (the old truckers' term for the FCC) and doing the right thing, Iger went ahead and suspended Kimmel.  Kimmel is on indefinite leave and, given that the owners of the ABC affiliates are trying to force him into an apology for what he said about Kirk (he said nothing about Kirk) and making a donation to Kirk's organization (though it would make far more sense for them to make Kimmel donate to Trump's ballroom, which would make him one of several donors, I'm led to understand), he will likely be fired altogether.

If you wondered when the right to free speech would be nullified, we've reached that point - at least in broadcast media, anyway.  The only question now is when all free speech will be curtailed and when Trump will make dissent against his regime a capital crime.

In the meantime, people are already expressing their displeasure with Kimmel's suspension-cum-dismissal with their wallets.  Folks are canceling their subscriptions to Disney-owned Hulu and Disney+.  They've already stopped watching ABC programs like "The View," so even if Whoopi Goldberg says anything critical of Trump, no one will ever hear it because no one will be tuning in.  Me?  I actually found a present-day sitcom I actually like - "Shifting Gears," starring Tim Allen, which, like previous Allen sitcoms, airs on ABC.  Tim Allen is an American comedic icon, not unlike Jimmy Kimmel, but I can't watch his new sitcom now, because it's on ABC, and it kills me to have to do this to Allen.  (Allen himself is reported to be pro-Trump, but I have a feeling that his support for Trump may be lukewarm at best.)   By the way, with Jeff Bezos kissing Trump's' posterior more frequently, I have to cancel my subscription to Amazon Prime, especially when I can't think of anything else I want that I can't find anywhere else.

And then there's CBS, which bent the knee to Trump to allow its parent company Paramount to merge with Skydance.  The network's news division, the TV news department that gave us Murrow, Cronkite, Moyers, Rather and Kuralt, now has an ombudsman to make sure that nothing that offends Trump gets on the airwaves.  Meanwhile, the fifty-eighth season of "60 Minutes" begins soon.  Will I tune in?  If I do, it will be the only CBS show I watch.  I'll keep an open mind about "60 Minutes," the season premiere of which airs a week from tomorrow, but if, after a couple of weeks, it turns out that it's all celebrity interviews and Anderson Cooper travelogues, that will likely be it for me.

P.S.  Please note that I never said anything derogatory about Charlie Kirk in this post.  (Yes, I heard what Vance said about going after people who disparage Kirk's memory.)

P.P.S.  I posted the following comment on Willow Bay's Instagram page: "Your husband is a coward.  There, I said it."