Madonna - GHV2 (2001)

Second verse.  Same as the first.  Her second greatest-hits product is not worse than her previous one - and the pose she strikes on the cover has her (dyed) hair obscuring her face enough so that it doesn't repulse us - but, considering how atrocious her first greatest-hits compilation was, there was really no way that her nineties output could be any worse.

(Those are my record reviews for 2025.  See you in 2026.)

When (and When Not) To Secede

It was 165 years ago today, Thursday, December 20, 1860, that South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union in response to Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency.

". . . that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'The United States of America,' is hereby dissolved."

Today I am advocating for New Jersey - or California, Massachusetts, New York, or one of the other heavily Democratic states adversely affected by Donald Trump - to take the first step of secession in the hope of triggering a mass withdrawal from the Union that will necessitate the breakup of the United States and a new arrangement for the fifty states that will result in new republics and possibly some of the states becoming provinces of Canada. 

The reasons for secession are quite clear - abuse of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents, illegal disruptions and contractions of government services, suppression of individual and civil liberties, crimes against humanity . . . I could go on.  To respond to those who say that secession is unconstitutional, I would argue that Trump's unconstitutional actions and the failure of the other branches of government to check him render that annoying inconvenience moot.  Again: If what Trump does is not unconstitutional, nothing is unconstitutional.  Not even secession. I admit that the chances of any state seceding are slim, but I would argue that states have plenty of reasons to secede today . . . though they have fewer reasons to secede that the slave states of 1860 and 1861 had not to secede.

Empty threats are a leitmotif of American politics (though I would argue that not all of Trump's threats are empty), and the governors of the slave states of the lower South repeatedly threatened to secede throughout the summer and autumn of 1860 if Abraham Lincoln were to be elected President.  Then Lincoln was elected.  And then nothing happened for six weeks.  The slave states suddenly found themselves having to consider whether they should actually make good on their threats to secede, and President James Buchanan urged all fifteen of the slave states to wait and see what Lincoln would do once he took office in March 1861.  In the meantime, the Southern states weighed their options.  There were already plenty of reasons for them to remain in the Union.

First of all, Lincoln, though he won a majority in the Electoral College and won the most popular votes of any of the four - yes, four - major candidates of the 1860 presidential election, was very much a minority President, having won only 39 percent of the popular vote.  As with Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972, more than six out of ten voters thought Lincoln was too dangerous and radical to occupy the White House, but thanks to a four-way campaign - the Democrats fielded two nominees,  U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas from the North and Vice President John C. Breckinridge from the South, and there was also John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party - Lincoln was able to squeak through.  Lincoln's position was so precarious that he barely defeated Douglas in New York; had he lost that state, he would have been denied an electoral majority and Congress would have to select the next President and Vice President.

Second, throughout the 1860 campaign and after the election, Lincoln promised that he would not try to abolish slavery where it already existed; he did not have the constitutional authority or the political support to do that.  He only promised to stop the spread of slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.  Therefore, Southern politicians should have been reassured that slavery could remain legal in their own states.  

Third, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which guaranteed slaves as property under the terms of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, was the law of the land.  The President of the United States could not and cannot change a Supreme Court decision.

Fourth, even though the Democrats were badly divided over slavery - hence two 1860 Democratic presidential candidates, one from the free North and one from the slaveholding South - they had nonetheless elected majorities to both houses of the 37th Congress that would convene in the first half of Lincoln's term as President.  The majorities, based largely in the South, could block any legislation or presidential initiative that the Southern states opposed.

Despite these reasons for not seceding, however, the slave states of the lower South saw Lincoln's election as the first shot across their bow from a purely northern party, the Republican Party, that represented the fastest growing regions in the country - the Northeast and the Midwest - which would soon overwhelm the Southern states in the House with their greater populations and in the Senate with the likely ban on slavery in territories waiting to be admitted into the Union.  The even balance of free and slave states had been upset in 1850 with the admission of California as a free state; the subsequent admissions of Minnesota in 1858, Oregon in 1859, and, in 1861 prior to President Lincoln's inauguration, Kansas as free states meant that, theoretically at least, the slave states would be outvoted in the Senate.  The states of the lower South decided that, if they didn't leave the Union immediately, they would never have the chance to do so again and would forever remain subservient to the North.   Fatuous reasoning, to be sure, but that's how Southerners felt at the time.  So, just before Christmas 1860, South Carolina, which had attempted to nullify a tariff law in 1832 because of its dependence on foreign trade and had caused a disunity crisis for President Andrew Jackson to confront, naturally became the first state to secede from the Union.

The house was divided.

Mississippi was the second state to secede and the first to secede in the new year of 1861.  Ironically, one of its two U.S. Senators, Jefferson Davis, had proposed that the slave states could remain in the Union and form a self-governing dominion within the American commonwealth.  But when his state left the Union, he resigned his Senate seat and returned home from Washington.  Then the rest of the lower South followed, in this order: Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, at the beginning of February, Texas.  The seven new republics weren't independent for long; they soon formed the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as its President.  Eight slave states took President Buchanan's advice and waited to see what Lincoln would do as President.  Then, after Fort Sumter was fired upon, President Lincoln called for 75,000 Army volunteers to put down the rebellion.  Angered at the call for military action, Virginia left the Union, followed by Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.  They too joined the Confederacy, and the Civil War was on. 

I don't advocate a second civil war to break up the United States when I call for my state of New Jersey to secede.  I call for enough states to secede in order to facilitate a conference not unlike the one that was held in Washington in February 1861 to avert civil war, and, this time, agree to a national divorce and not use military action to dissolve the Union.  Because when Fort Sumter in Charleston was attacked by the Confederacy, it led to a bloody conflict, and no one recalled what President Jackson had said during the 1832 Nullification Crisis: "Disunion by armed force is treason.  Are you ready to incur its guilt?"   

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 19, 2025

"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" by Andy Williams  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

Surrender

So many things are happening faster than I can comment on them, I figure I'd rather wait until next week just before Christmas and wrap up what will have happened up to and including Christmas Eve, because everything is turning against Trump in an accelerated fashion.  (I wanted to comment on the failure of Congress to renew Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it turns out that that story isn't over quite yet.)   And even that may not be sufficient, as Trump will likely continue committing atrocities right up to the moment the ball drops in Times Square on New Year's Eve and start committing new atrocities in 2026 without missing a beat or taking a break.  

But in the meantime, there are a few stories and topics that I must address before then.  Like the issue involving the band Cheap Trick.  

Cheap Trick played Kiss's "Rock and Roll All Nite" at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony for Kennedy Center 2025 honorees Kiss (whom they mentioned in their signature song "Surrender"), the ceremony to be broadcast on CBS (CBS, of course!) this coming Tuesday.  Given Donald Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center from serving as the center's board president to being the master of ceremonies at the honors ceremony, a backlash naturally ensued among Cheap Trick's more socially conscious fans, and the band quickly put out a statement on their social media accounts to explain that their appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony had nothing to do with support for Trump.

"We were asked to perform at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony to pay tribute to our lifelong brothers in Kiss, and to support artists and the arts," the band explained in a message posted on Cheap Trick’s X social-media accounts. "We agreed to do it for those reasons, and no others."

I am not one of those people who will never listen to Cheap Trick again or who will boycott their shows to protest their appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, as I take them at their word.  But this flap just proves how wrong it is for the Kennedy Center to award honors to rock bands, and this of course is an issue that predates either of Trump's two nonconsecutive terms.  Rock and roll has long been about sticking it to the Man with the proverbial finger, and as an establishmentarian institution meant to support mainstream and highbrow performing art, the Kennedy Center is the Man in all his grandiose glory.  The fact that not only Kiss got a Kennedy Center honor but also several other rock acts in the past - including Led Zeppelin, who weren't even American - shows how respectable rock has become in the recent past.  Because Led Zeppelin, though regarded as the founding fathers of heavy metal, were based in American blues and also added touches of English folk and Jamaican reggae to their music, the Kennedy Center was able to provide an explanation - a tenuous explanation at best, but still an explanation - for why they were being honored for their contributions to the arts.   There is no obvious explanation or excuse to give a Kennedy Center honor to a band known for distorted, flamboyant noise, singing about the overt sexiness of young women (sample lyric from "Rock and Roll All Nite": "You show us everything you got / Ooh baby baby, that's quite a lot"), and generally being loud and stupid.

But, even the best rock and roll is inappropriate for a stage designed for "serious" musical performances, be it the National Symphony Orchestra's concerts or an opera, the stage being massive enough to, as  Paul Fussell wrote, support a production of Verdi's Aida with "immense heroic processions and herds of real elephants and camels, with everyone speaking - nay, singing - the best possible Italian."  Then again, maybe rock and roll isn't inappropriate for the Kennedy Center; as I've noted before, and as Fussell noted long before I did, the Kennedy Center mostly stages lowbrow entertainments, to the point where the Aida you'll see on its stage is not the Verdi opera but the Elton John-Tim Rice Broadway musical based on it.  (And, given the political correctness that permeates our culture these days, the only acceptable Continental language in this country is Spanish, the language of Latin jazz, mariachi and salsa - all of which I happen to like, by the way - whereas Italian opera is the stuff that DWEAMs - dead white European and American males - are made of.  French?  Nah, that's for pompous twits!)  Implicit in the choice of rock and rollers for Kennedy Center honors is that all art, even subversive lower-middle-class art meant as a revolt against the classical, intellectual music of the educated and overeducated classes, is worthy of equal recognition, even if the lowbrow music honored, like Kiss, is crass and vulgar, or even if the highbrow music honored is pretentious and empty.  The performing arts in general and music in particular are all democratically created in America, and thus democratically honored . . . and democratically dismal.

And it's going to get worse at the Kennedy Center if a Democrat is ever President again.  A Democratic administration will overcorrect Trump's Kennedy Center honor choices of metal meatheads and action-movie actors by honoring pop singers whom the Democratic Party's hip progressive base listens to - mostly disco divas who go by single names - and more hip-hop stars who both rap and act.  Like the rapper legally known as Dana Owens, who got a Kennedy Center honor a couple of years ago.   (Aside:  I think Owens' CBS show, the "Equalizer" reboot, got canceled because, in the age of Trump, airing an action series that shows a heavy-set black woman beating up white guys in rapid succession - at least that's what my mother said the show basically was - could get you in trouble with MAGA.  And right after that, CBS happily welcomed Bari Weiss to run its news department.)

But I need to return to my original point - it is totally and completely inappropriate to honor rock and roll at the Kennedy Center when rock and roll was and remains a street rebellion against the highbrow conventions of serious music.  But reversing course and honoring only cellists and classical pianists, especially East Asian child prodigies, is decades too late.  Hey, Bob Dylan received a Kennedy Center honor despite having famously sung that "even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked." 

Dylan got the honor in 1997, the first year of President Bill Clinton's second term and the year before the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Yeah . . . 

Donald Trump, Evil Meathead

I wanted to write in this space about actor and director Rob Reiner and how, as a director, he made some of the most heartfelt and engaging films of the past forty years, such as Stand By Me and When Harry Met Sally . . . , as well as some of the funniest, like the legendary rock documentary parody This Is Spinal Tap, and how catchphrases from his movies - "Turn it up to 11!" - "You can't handle the truth!" - "Going to Paris is on my bucket list!" - have entered our popular-culture lexicon.  I also wanted to write how horrible it was that he and his own wife were killed this past Sunday, most likely by their own son.  

Well, having said all that, I guess I have so written.  But now I have to deal with the sick, disgusting, vengeful diatribe Donald Trump wrote yesterday in the aftermath of Reiner's and his wife Michele's deaths on Trump's famously misnomered Truth Social social-media platform.

Trump started out okay enough.  

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood.

Not surprisingly,  things went downhill almost immediately: 

Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.

He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace! 

In other words, Trump was saying that Reiner and his wife were killed because Reiner's persistent criticism of Trump drove his son to madness and caused Reiner and his wife to meet their grizzly end.

Trump is saying that karma came back to destroy the Reiners just as harm and misfortune always come to people who cross him.  This shows just what a sick mind he has. Trump's corpulent body is big enough for the world to revolve around, and so he apparently has convinced himself that it in fact does.  The world in general and America in particular, as far as the current White House occupant is concerned, has benefitted magnificently because of and due to being molded by and to the genius of Donald J. Trump, and anyone who questions his motives and his leadership will pay for not recognizing what a great leader he is.

If anyone had doubts at Trump being as self-obsessed as Hitler or Mussolini, or perhaps Mao or Mohammed bin Salman, those doubts, like Rob and Michele Reiner, have been laid to rest.

As always with Trump, it could have been worse.  Trump could played up a couple of Reiner's less-well-received movies left unmentioned in Reiner's obituaries, such as 1994's North - which Roger Ebert famously began his review of with the sentence, "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it."  Trump could have brought North up to show what a true failure Reiner was and how Reiner's attacks on him were expressions of jealousy of real greatness.  I'm surprised he didn't, actually, because one of Trump's most devastatingly unique talents is to diminish an individual's stellar reputation by highlighting the egregious mistakes of said individual.

(Aside I must include:  After offering up what many critics still consider one of the worst movies of all time with North, Reiner quickly rebounded in 1995 with The American President, an enjoyable comedy-drama starring Michael Douglas in the title role with Annette Bening as his leading lady.  It was a hit with both the press and the public, proving that esteemed artists can be human and make mistakes that can quickly besmirch their reputations but can recover from those mistakes just as quickly, something Trump never seems to understand.  I now return to my blog post, still in progress.)

Trump is, ever more so than before, the by-product of a nation whose mass-media popular culture celebrates the outrageous at the expense of the tasteful and the subtle.  I have cited before on this blog the (very) disturbing parallels between Donald Trump and Madonna, from their rise to fame and fortune in the terminally vapid 1980s based on showmanship and scam artistry to their rabid fan bases intolerant of criticism of their idols.  Another parallel is their common narcissism.  For decades, pop-culture pundits and consumers had long found the self-absorption of these two individuals to be entertaining and even charming, even when their self-absorption reached toxic levels.  And like Trump, Madonna has been no stranger to making someone else's death about her.  When Gianni Versace - whom Madge modeled for in print ads (what's this about her career being all about music again?) - was murdered in 1997, she wrote for Time magazine (which just so happened to be owned by the same media conglomerate that distributed her record label) an remembrance of the Italian fashion designer that contained no fewer than 35 references to herself.  When Aretha Franklin - best known for her cover of Otis Redding's "Respect" - died in 2018 on the same day Madge turned sixty, Madge eulogized Franklin with a story about "respect" that had nothing to do with Franklin or with Redding's song and everything to do with . . . Madge.  (It was about an audition she had before she became famous.)

To those who think Trump's post about Rob Reiner is an example of narcissism . . . no, no, no, no, no.  Madonna's "eulogies" of Gianni Versace and Aretha Franklin are examples of narcissism.  Trump's post about Rob Reiner is an example of self-loving, self-aggrandizing viciousness and of hostility against the common decencies.  And worse.  As for Madge, her only saving grace (if it can be called that) is this.  When Whitney Houston - who beat out Madge for the lead female role in the 1992 movie The Bodyguard and whose acting Madge trashed uncharitably - died in 2012, Madge could have made a cold, heartless remark about a woman she clearly considered a rival in the pop-diva sweepstakes.  But thankfully, she remembered the rule not to say anything about the deceased if she couldn't say anything nice.  

Trump, on the other hand, follows no such restraint.  Ever.  And that's what makes him more infinitely evil than any other human being.  And I consider Madge to be infinitely evil as well.  

"[Rob Reiner died] reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME . . .."  So . . . who's the meathead now? 

Hostility To Free Speech

This business deal in the media is so convoluted - most likely by design - that I had to consult AI to understand it.

The bottom line is this: Paramount, which recently merged with Skydance with the blessing of federal non-regulators and owns CBS, is pursuing a hostile, all-cash bid in December 2025 to buy all of Warner Brothers-Discovery (WBD), for $30 per share, to prevent Netflix's offer for WBD's studio and streaming assets.  The deal not only has the support of Donald Trump but also his son-in-law Jared Kushner; the Plastic Man is providing funding for the possible Paramount/Skydance deal from interests in the Middle East, as well as support from MBS - I don't mean the Mutual Broadcasting System, which went off the air over a quarter century ago.   

Paramount claims that the acquisition of  WBD would mean "more content, better linear networks (CBS and CNN), and significant cost savings," while a Netflix takeover of WBD would mostly focus on streaming.  Paramount, by contrast, is apparently promising miracles.

When a media conglomerate promises miracles, just remember - Jesus is the only person who can promise a miracle and deliver.

Paramount doesn't want to control WBD to provide more and better content.  It wants to take over as many media outlets and make them as Trump-friendly as possible.  Larry Ellison, who runs Paramount, and his son David want to turn CNN into a mouthpiece for Trump (although, to be honest, many CNN anchors appear to be auditioning to be Trump mouthpieces already) and do to CNN what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS News - make it an outlet for government-friendly spin, lightweight features, and whatever Weiss calls "the fucking news."  Now she might get to perform the act of fucking CNN.  And with so many broadcast and entertainment media under one umbrella, the Ellison family can and would make sure that nothing that could actually inform or enlighten folks gets through.

The good news is that there is still freedom of the press in These States.  The bad news is that the corporate media - already vacuous and intellectually bankrupt - is seeing to it that only a handful of rich people actually own the press.  Freedom of speech?   You can speak out, good luck if anyone hears you.  Heck, you can write a letter to the editor of whatever newspapers and magazines are still putting out print editions, but that doesn't mean it will be published.  And if you speak out against the Saudis through a possible Ellison-owned media establishment - well, goo luck, you're going to need it. 

Knowyour rights in These States/  just be extremely careful how to use them.

Madonna - The Immaculate Collection (1990)

The title is as it is blasphemous as is inaccurate, and you know it's Madonna because the title is blasphemous.  It's not a collection, it's a pile of steaming sewage, and there's nothing immaculate about it.  I've been consciously reviewing the most unlistenable records I could think of in these last weeks of 2025, the better to illustrate what an awful year this has been for America, and what better - or worse - way to emphasize the awfulness of this year than to review the worst greatest-hits compilation of all time, recorded by the worst singer America has ever produced?

This teeming piece of crud documents all of Madge's hit singles from the 1980s - you know the titles, I won't repeat them - that made that decade far worse than it already was.  They all have the same distinguishing characteristics that make them so unlistenable - overdone synthesizers, asinine lyrics, occasional parodies of the Roman Catholic Church's lexicon, and annoying, electronically treated, squealing vocals.  Nearly forty years after these singles first appalled us, we scratch our heads wondering how they could have possibly made their perpetrator the female performer to, as of 1990, compile more consecutive top-five hits than any other female recording artist in history - until we remember the shamelessly sleazy promotional videos, those churlish, kinky vignettes she concocted to get people to pay attention to her instead of musicians and singers with real talent.  There are also two bonus tracks, one of them the single with the promotional video that was too X-rated for MTV; you know the title, and I won't repeat that one either.  

Everything you remember about the 1980s is encapsulated in this spoiled crap cake - vapidity, style over substance, empty glitz and glitter, and big hair.  It's a victory lap for the performer, celebrating her unexpected longevity in popular music and avoiding the fate that befell far better eighties recording artists like the Go-Go's and Men at Work - only having three or four hits that might show up on a various-performers anthology using the eighties as a theme.  That she had fifteen hits in the eighties (not counting the two bonus tracks, one of which was also a hit) was proof that something went horribly wrong with popular music in that decade, and what was even worse is that she would have enough hits in the following decade to warrant a second greatest-hits compilation at the turn of the millennium.

Oh yeah, I ought to tell you about the special edition of this record, The Royal Box, which featured not only the record but also a one-hour video compilation of her offensive promo clips, a two-by-three foot poster (in color!) and an assortment of picture postcards featuring the performer herself.  All for a hefty increase in the retail price that parents in 1990 were willing to pay to give their teenage daughters something to hug and kiss them for on Christmas morning (doesn't that want to make you throw up?).  Those teenage girls today are in their fifties and are now dealing with their own daughters' obsession with Taylor Swift.  Only their daughters probably have better taste in pop than they ever did.  And if Steely Dan hadn't used the title first, this box set could have been called The Royal Scam. 

Madge got to where she is largely on slick self-promotion and cheap showbiz theatrics.  In that way, she's much like Donald Trump, as I noted before on this blog.  And as with Trump, no one in the press, least of all those who knew better (in Madge's case, music critics), ever bothered to call out her scams and her lightweight work as a recording "artist," preferring instead to document and praise her every move because they knew it sold newspapers or attracted eyeballs to the TV set.  Far worse, like Trump, Madge represented and still represents today the phony opulence, the most shallow elements of popular culture, and, yes, the greed and avarice that defined the eighties and led to everything rotten with America now.  If you believed her when she said that her "career" was "all about the music," you're just as stupid as MAGA cultists.

I wrote and published this review on the day before a colonoscopy, which involves drinking awful laxative solutions, abstaining from real food, and crapping one's guts out.  But doing all of that is preferable to listening to this fetid compilation album even once.

They Got Pics

The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released pictures of Epstein and his clients.

Not Brian Epstein with the Beatles, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and Cilla Black.  Jeffrey Epstein with some of the most powerful and/or revered men in the world.

Among the chaps in Epstein's company are, clockwise from top right, Bill Gates, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (whom King Charles III demoted by rescinding his royal titles), Alan Dershowitz, Woody Allen (not really surprising, given Allen's own scandals involving girls and young women, but still saddening), Richard Branson, a guy who looks like Richard Benjamin (but isn't, because if Richard Benjamin had had anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, his wife Paula Prentiss would have left him by now), and Epstein himself.

Oh yeah, and pictures of Bill Clinton too.

And of course, pictures of one Donald J. Trump.

The Epstein estate honored subpoenas by the House Democrats to produce such material related to the ongoing investigation into the late financier and pedophile.  Unlike Trump, Epstein's survivors and lawyers actually obey the law.  Out of 95,000 pictures provided to the House Democrats, they released 19.

Isn't nineteen thousand pictures a lot go through, you might ask?   Yes.  But they didn't released nineteen thousand pictures.  They released nineteen pictures.

Clearly, the Democrats don't want to flood the zone, as it were, to embarrass Trump or anyone else caught up in the Epstein scandal.  They want to release photos bit by bit, to make Trump in particular sweat as much as possible.  They need the as-yet unreleased pictures as leverage to get the Epstein files released.

In the meantime, they can laugh at the reaction one picture is likely getting - that of Steve Bannon (yeah, him too!) talking with Woody Allen.  What could be more embarrassing to the maestro of MAGA than to be seen talking with the one American filmmaker who has taken his cinematic cues from the French - and, artistically speaking as much more in common with Jean Renoir than John Ford? 

Christmas Music Video Of the Week - December 12, 2025

"Mistletoe and Holly" by Frank Sinatra   (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Political Football

When Donald Trump received the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize (relax, I'll get to the absurdity of that moment in a couple of paragraphs), he said something logical to the assembled audience.  No, really.

Noting how FIFA is the international governing body of soccer, the sport the rest of the world calls "football," Trump said that it doesn't make sense why we call that game the NFL governs football, when soccer is really football, a game where the players move the ball with their feet.  He has a point.  American football, by contrast, isn't a game where you advance the ball with your feet.  You only kick the ball to score an extra point after a touchdown or a field goal.  Apart from the kickoff, the players advance the ball holding it in an arm, because the ball's odd, pistachio-like shape makes impossible to kick without a tee.

That out of the way, I am happy to declare that the FIFA Peace Prize - which FIFA president Gianni Infantino created to curry favor with Trump after the Nobel Prize went not to Trump but to a Venezuelan activist - is the biggest crock and the greatest con job ever created in the history of sports.  If Trump had actually done something to promote peace, this naked display of butt-kissing would at least have the veneer of plausibility. Instead, he's bombing Venezuelan boats, sending ICE agents and National Guard units to patrol cities, and giving Putin the green light to take land from Ukraine and possibly annex the Baltics.  It's all about stroking his ego.

And that mean be a problem for Infantino.  Newsweek reports that the human rights group FairSquare is requesting that FIFA's executive committee investigate Infantino for a breech of the association's ethics code by so blatantly kissing it to Trump. 

"FIFA's credibility hinges on its commitment to political neutrality, a principle designed to keep global soccer free from partisan influence," Newsweek's Daniel Orton wrote.  "If its president is found to have breached this rule by honoring a sitting U.S. president, it could undermine trust in the organization's independence and raise questions about whether FIFA's leadership is susceptible to political favoritism."

The U.S. games in next year's North America World Cup are going to be an absolute disaster, with foreign visitors shunning the matches out of fear of being arrested by ICE and with the U.S. men's national team being booed on American soil - by American fans.  It will be a dark moment in international sports, the darkest at least until the 2028 Olympics open in Los Angeles. 

P.S.  You know those letters I wrote to 2028 Olympic official Janet Evans and International Olympic Committee president Kirsty Coventry saying that the 2028 Games ought to be held in some other country?  Neither swimming champion has responded to me. 

One good thing has come from this prize.  At least an American male won something from FIFA.

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 listening to 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, as 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 fans 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 stay 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 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.