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."

Music Video Of the Week - September 19, 2025

"To the Last Whale . . ." by David Crosby and Graham Nash  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.) 

The Decline and Fall of America

I'm not going to talk about Charlie Kirk anymore, because I don't want to lose my passport and be denied the opportunity to leave the country based on anything I say getting misconstrued.  There's a bill in Congress that could allow that to happen.  Suffice to say, Kim Alexis restored her Instagram account and removed her Kirk-related Instagram post since I last wrote a post here.  Suffice also to say that I've said enough about Charlie Kirk when I said I condemned his murder even as, as I must say now, his hateful rhetoric led to the hateful action that killed him.

Since I do not give money or support to any terrorist organization, I don't think I'll end up being forbidden to travel outside the country again.  I may get fired from my job, but I can handle that.  Why would I get fired for that?  Because former (former!) MSNBC commentator Matthew Dowd lost his job for saying the exact . . . same . . . thing.

Meanwhile, the Vice President has announced that the administration will seek to shut down liberal-activist groups, and the Attorney General is planning to prosecute hate speech, which is defined as any speech that offends the right - like, say, advocating for more public transit. Trump is planning to sue anyone who questions his finances and his businessman acumen - shut them down to shut them up.  

And if that doesn't work . . . 

 

Oh, Mama, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law . . . hangman is coming down from the gallows and I don't have very long . . ..

I know that today, the anniversary day of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, is an inappropriate time to say this, but I'll say it once again anyway - it's time for the United States to break up into separate countries and one of the Democratic states must take the initiative to get the process going by seceding from the Union and starting a chain reaction that will lead to the dissolution of the country, much like Lithuania's secession from the U.S.S.R. led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  It's time to admit that America is finished.  And we have to finish America before America finishes us. 

Trump the Shark

Since Kamala Harris had her political career abruptly terminated last year, so many people I admired, from celebrities to strangers I thought were my friends (to cop a phrase from Bob Seger), have let me down by bending their knees to Donald Trump and MAGA.  Mika Brzezinski, Kristen Welker, Bill Maher, Kasie Hunt, Jake Tapper - the list is endless, made more infinite by people who embraced MAGA before Trump forced Harris into early retirement, such as James Howard Kunstler and Elon Musk.  So you can imagine how tested I was when I found a testimonial post for the late Charlie Kirk on the Instagram page of one of my favorite fashion models from the 1980s, Kim Alexis.

Kim (I call her by her first name because not only do I follow her on Facebook, I am one of her personal friends on Facebook, and remember, I have met her in person) expressed her sorrow over Kirk's death, and she also extended her condolences to Kirk's family.  The reason Kim voiced  sympathies for Kirk is because she had actually met him and found him to be a personable and likeable guy.  Black women - including Beverly Johnson, whom Kim has worked with (and the results of their work together are stunning, of course) - would likely beg to differ, given Kirk's questionable questioning of black women's brain power, and so would I, except for a few things.

Remember, just because Charlie Kirk was a rhymes-with-glass-pole doesn't mean he couldn't be charming and engaging in a one-on-one engagement.  After all, Harry Truman, upon meeting Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Potsdam conference, took a liking to him, and actor Jack Lemmon, upon meeting Fidel Castro at a film festival in Havana, said that the Cuban leader had charm "right down to his toenails."  I'm sure Kim was charmed greatly by Kirk when their respective paths crossed.   I'm sure Kirk - who was young enough to be my son - would have charmed me.  And Kirk, to be honest, could exude charm in a public setting.  One video of Kirk engaging with a transsexual person making a transition from male to female caught him saying that he personally hated the idea of injecting sex-altering drugs into anyone to change their sex and telling the individual that he/she should look inward and determine through introspection what sort of body he/she felt comfortable in.  He said he was confident that he/she would make the right decision for himself/herself.

Of course, Kirk probably hoped that he/she would stay a he, but he grasped that that was not a decision for anyone other than the individual to make.

None of this, of course, excuses Kirk for being a racist, homophobic, misogynistic Christian nationalist.  But none of his character deficiencies apply to Kim Alexis.  Kim is a Christian, but she is not a die-hard fundamentalist.  She's not a Christian nationalist.  Good grief, her husband is Jewish.  And I know she's not racist - not because she has black friends, but because she has white friends (some of whom I know, like her fellow models) who would not be friends with Kim if they had reason to believe she was a bigot.  In short, she is not MAGA.  As a Christian, she was showing charity on Instagram toward a fellow human being who was needlessly shot to death in a country with too many guns and too many people who have no qualms about using them.  

And that Instagram post?  Well, that's what I was slowly getting to.  It's not there anymore.  Kim took down the post?  She did more than that.  She took down her whole Instagram account.  When I first saw the Kirk post, I did not leave a comment because I, quite frankly, didn't know what to say.  I tried to go back to her post to see what other people were saying in response, and that's when I saw that her account was no longer available.  It may remain unavailable for along time.  (Her Facebook accounts, where she did not mention Kirk, are still up.)

Even though Kim did not provoke the same visceral reaction in me that made me stop watching "Morning Joe" (and the rest of MSNBC as well) when Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski confessed their pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago two weeks after the election - I didn't unfriend her on social media - she certainly hit many a raw nerve.  So did Lisa MacKenzie (née Moberg), a Swedish veteran model living in the U.S. who also expressed sorrow about Charlie Kirk's death.  I'm friends with her on Facebook as well, and a lot of her other Facebook friends excoriated her for her thoughts and prayers, and I had to explain to her that Americans aren't as nice to each other as Swedes are. 

Kim's and Lisa's sentiments were clearly meant to be above politics, but this is a time when nothing is above politics, so it helps to be able to tell when someone is genuinely trying to express sorrow for a fellow human being's death and and when an extremist is martyring a fellow extremist.  I did not find their comments worthy of me needing to cancel them.  But long before Kirk was killed, I had to cancel a lot of people who expressed strong support for MAGA or bent their knees to it, be they people I knew personally or famous people I admired.  And that brings my post full circle.  I'm sorry to say that Kim and Lisa - both of whom I featured on my beautiful-women picture blog - are among the few exceptions to the rule that anyone who expresses conciliatory or complimentary comments about MAGA figures ought to be canceled.

Speaking of my beautiful-women picture blog . . . It's been three months and change since I terminated it, and given how many of the women I featured turned out to lack inner beauty - most of them corporate-media reporters who coddle Trump when they should know better - I don't regret my decision one iota.

Charlie Kirk Is Dead

There are many reasons not to sentimentally eulogize Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist I knew little about and cared about even less.  

There are, in fact too many of them to list here.  I'd probably need an entirely new blog to list them. 

But among them are his observation that black women lack the brain power for high-level jobs, that Dr. Martin Luther King doesn't deserve to be honored and that the civil rights legislation was a mistake, and that Taylor Swift sucks.   But the biggest reason not to sentimentally eulogize him - and here's something to ponder when you hear an Aretha Franklin song on the radio if it follows a cut from the brain-power-derived Toto ("all chops and no brains" - Dave Marsh) - is that he said the Second Amendment was worth the price of a few school shootings every now and then.

Bear in mind that Charlie Kirk was not only shot to death in Utah, but it happened on a university campus.  A school. 

Having said all that, I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk for the same reason I don't want to see Tyler Robinson, the guy who shot him, get the death penalty for it - and also for the same reason I personally oppose abortion as a Catholic . . . because only God decides who lives and dies, and killing in all forms is wrong.  That includes war deaths, because even though killing outside the rules of military engagement is referred to as "war crimes," the truth is, as I've said here before, that war crimes are a redundancy.  All war is a crime. 

None of this is good enough for Donald Trump, who has sought to make Kirk's assassination a cause célèbre among the right-wingers who support him to portray Kirk's opponents - who are also MAGA's opponents - as the enemy, and as an enemy that must be obliterated.  Making Kirk a martyr is part of Trump's effort to squelch dissent against his dictatorship by any means available, at least until he can make dissent a capital offense.  And even though Trump and his Trumpettes tried to bang the drum of derision against liberals by suggesting that a person of color or a non-heterosexual pulled the trigger, it turned out that the assassin was a white male member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - the original iteration of Christian nationalism in America - who shot Kirk because Kirk wasn't far to the right enough.  

Once the news broke that the suspect was in custody, Trump basked in the the triumph of the moment, and Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel took a victory lap.  Except that family members turned in the assailant.  Patel couldn't recognize a gunman even if you spotted the g, the m, the a, and both n's and let him buy a vowel. 

And yet the demonization of Trump's opponents continues, if only because Trump is now blaming the atmosphere of disgust toward disgusting people who advocate for an exclusionary, reactionary society in America on his opposition.  He's blaming liberals, democratic socialists, congressional Democrats, all other Democrats and who knows whom for Kirk's death by promoting their "radical" and "un-American" ideas and ideals in the public square . . . not that much different than when the Reverend Jerry Falwell opined that feminism and homosexuality were to blame for God removing His blessings from the United States and allowing 9/11 to happen. 

This is a dangerous situation, where anyone who speaks up risks retribution and anyone who doesn't speak up risks being taken away when there's no one left to speak up for anyone else.  All I have to say after all that is, I'm doubling down.  I am for the secession of Democratic "blue" states.  I believe that to remain in the Union isn't worth the violence that's coming.  I believe that it's time for the blue states to get out.

Music Video Of the Week - September 12, 2025

"Wish You Were Here' by Pink Floyd  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Succession and Secession

Trump's disappearance a couple of weeks ago left many Americans contemplating what would happened if he died.  He has since re-emerged and proven that reports about not his death but his mere illness were greatly exaggerated.  But Washington Republicans are fearful that Trump, once considered more vigorous and fit the Biden despite his advanced dementia and his advanced weight, are fearful that his death in office would send the MAGA movement and the GOP into their own death spirals.  Or so it's been said.

"Republicans are scrambling to figure out what to do if he croaks," one Facebook user wrote of Trump.  "If he doesn’t die right in front of us - while racist rambling at a rally - they will try to pretend he is alive until the next election. J.D. Vance has zero following within the Trump cult. The cult will revolt. Project 2025 will go to pot as they need compliance to complete their most diabolical plan."

Yeah, well, I got news for you.  One thing Vance is is smart, not stupid like Trump.  That makes him more dangerous than Trump. A year ago this time, with Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee, we were trying to keep hope alive.  Now we have to keep Trump alive.  Because if Vance gets in, he will use all of the newly discovered presidential powers the Supreme Court has unearthed (like its latest ruling, that ICE has the right to roam the streets of our cities and apprehend suspect illegal immigrants at will) to make himself so powerful that MAGA will have no choice but to follow him.  To get an idea of how lawless a Vance Presidency would be like, I need only point out that, after the U.S. bombed a fishing boat in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela and claimed the boat was piloted by a drug gang headed for the U.S. - ludicrous on its face, as it was heading in the direction of Trinidad - Vance dismissed those (including libertarian senator Rand Paul) who said that that operation was a violation of international law . . . a war crime.  Vance said he didn't give a twit (he actually used a rhyming word for "twit") what it was called.

And the rest of the line of succession isn't any better.  If Trump dies and Vance is, say, lynched by a panicked mob, House Speaker and MAGA toady Mike Johnson becomes President.  After him comes Senate president pro tempore Charles Grassley, who is so old he can call Joe Biden "Sonny."  After that comes the misfits and miscreants of the Trump-Vance Cabinet, starting with the Secretary of State.

Trump's death in office, were it to occur, would be the ideal time for those of us who advocate dissolution of the Union to strike.  Instead of letting the line of succession play out, we should find a way to suspend the government and begin negotiations for a badly needed national divorce.  We would need a plan in advance before Trump were to breathe his last.  But, failing that, Democratic states should immediately begin the process of withdrawing from the Union.  Vance is only Vice President because of his political backer, tech magnate Peter Thiel, whose opposition to democracy and belief in a global system of technology oligarchs running the show makes him the most dangerous German to walk the earth since Adolf Hitler.  For Democratic states to remain in the Union and "resist" MAGA if Vance were to become President isn't my idea of resistance; it's more like suicide.

I still say that Democratic states should secede.  I also say that we shouldn't wait for President Vance.  We should get out now . . . before it's too late.

It's a Wonderful Presidency

Donald Trump has turned the White House into a Mar-a-Lago-type club for MAGA politicians - no Democrats allowed.  (This is a precursor to him banning the Democrats and all third parties so that future elections never have any opposition on the ballot.)  He's already going ahead with renaming the Defense Department the War Department, saying that the name change shows pride in out victories in World War I, World War II, and every war in between.  (There were no wars in between.)  And the invasion of Chicago is still on the planning table.

I think we're in an alternate It's a Wonderful Life world. What really happened is that a black woman other than Kamala Harris was elected the first black female President in 2024, defeating Trump in a landslide and allowing Jack Smith to bring him to trial and lock him up for good. But early in her Presidency, she was faced with twin crises that threatened world peace and the global economy,

As a result, Speaker Mike Johnson submitted a resolution for the President's impeachment and Trump, operating from prison, made sure that there were enough votes in the Senate to convict her. At this point, the President went out tried to jump in the Potomac but an angel stopped her, and then, she wished she'd never been born. The angel granted her her wish, and for now, we're living in a world without her so she can see what it's like without her.

As soon she decides she's seen enough and wants to live again, we'll be fine after we rally around her.  Hurry, Madam President.

Music Video Of the Week - September 5, 2025

"Domino" by Van Morrison  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

The Democrats Have Never Nominated a Woman for President

The Democrats have never nominated a woman for President. 

I'll say it again: The Democrats have never nominated a woman for President!

I repeat!  The Democrats have never nominated a woman for President!

So what about Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris?  What, you actually think rank-and-file Democratic primary voters chose them?  You're kidding, right?

Harris's nomination is easy to explain.  When President Biden decided in July 2024 not to stand for re-election - a decision he should have made in March 2023 - the Democrats needed a new candidate and Kamala Harris was the obvious choice, she being the Vice President and all.  She won the nomination on the first ballot at the convention, all right - which was pretty easy for her since she had no opposition on that ballot - but she became the first Democratic presidential candidate since Hubert Humphrey to win it without having competed in a single primary.  And she suffered Humphrey's fate in the general election.

As for Hillary Clinton . . . well - need I remind you that she had the Democratic establishment so much behind her that the Democratic National Committee protected her from challengers like Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders by setting up debate schedules and rules of engagement that tipped the scales in her favor, although Bernie Sanders came close to defeating her at times?  As with Harris eight years later, Hillary Clinton wasn't so much nominated as she was selected.  Everything was fixed for her from the start, and it gave some credence to Donald Trump's complaints that the system of choosing a President is rigged . . . which he now feels gives him carte blanche to rig it in his own favor.  Now there's irony for you.

Truth be told, the Democrats have always done better when they have a candidate who is not a establishmentarian choice but is instead the product of a grass-roots movement.  Just look at John F. Kennedy in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Barack Obama in 2008.   The conventional wisdom is that Joe Biden was nominated in a fair and open contest without any input from the DNC once he gained traction in South Carolina in the 2020 primaries and wrapped things up just in time before the COVID pandemic set in.  It's more complicated than that, as I've explained before, but if the result was that Biden was able to defeat Trump and give us four years of government for the people, I'm not going to re-litigate it.  Suffice it to say that neither Hillary Clinton nor Kamala Harris could ever be President because they were chosen by a select group of party insiders who underestimated the Republican opposition.  If we see a female President in our lifetimes, she will be a Democrat, but she has to be a candidate who defeats the party establishment like Kennedy, Carter and Obama did.  She has to be a woman of the people.

Only trouble is, there are no obvious female candidates for 2028, assuming the Democratic Party is not banned under martial law (coming to a city near you!) by then.  Elizabeth Warren is too old, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too young, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger first have to win their respective gubernatorial elections (and I have doubts about Sherrill, for reasons I will revisit on this blog soon), Kirsten Gillibrand, a Generation X elder like myself, is too self-righteous, and Gretchen Whitmer is too busy hiding her face in a binder when Trump is around.  (She should consider joining ICE after she leaves the Michigan governorship if she wants to stay masked and anonymous.)

As the old Mary Poppins song goes, she must be kind, she must be witty, very sweet, and yes, very pretty - a female Gavin Newsom, a polished and attractive politician who looks like an anchorwoman on the local TV news, so long as it isn't Kirsten Gillibrand.  She must be able to relate to people and connect with voters, as well as talk in plain, simple and direct English - and, if she's fluent in it, plain, simple and direct Spanish, when she's campaigning in Hispanic areas.  

And there's one other quality she must share with her male competition - she must be white and Protestant.  After the debacle of trying to elect a half-black, half-South Asian woman married to a Jew, just electing a woman who's more of a so-called "real American" is going to be a heavy lift.

The Most Dangerous Man In America

It's not Donald Trump.

It's his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose tenure in that post shows him to be incapable of delivering either.

You might have heard about the brouhaha in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, which is out of control.   The director of the CDC was forced out over a dispute over medical science - namely, her recognition of its existence.  This led to mass resignations at the CDC, and HHS employees back in Washington are calling for their boss to resign.

The chaos comes from Kennedy's vaccine recommendations, which themselves are chaotic.  On the particular question of COVID vaccines, Kennedy has declared that priority will be given to Americans 65 and over and those under 65 with underlying conditions.  And, as feared, it appears that any Americans who do not qualify for a free COVID shot under the guidelines will not be allowed to get one even if they're willing to pay out of pocket.  They are not available to anyone who doesn't qualify.  You'll have more luck trying to buy the bones of John Merrick, the Elephant Man, from the London Hospital Medical College, as Michael Jackson (a psychopath like RFK Jr.) had tried to do, even doubling his bid for them.  But, as he found out then and as those of us who want COVID shots but don't qualify under RFK Jr.'s rules are likely to find out, some things don't have a price.  (Ironically, Trump believes otherwise.)   

I have it on good authority that even now, if you try to make an online appointment for a COVID shot at certain pharmacy chains and are under 65 and have no underlying medical conditions, you'll be turned down automatically.  Kennedy, meanwhile, is likely to - just as automatically - fill his recently depleted vaccine advisory board with anti-vax wackos like himself.  This could mean no vaccines for anything being readily available (if available at all) in 2026.  Meanwhile, in Florida, state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who is black and is thus clearly a DEI hire, is ending vaccine mandates for children, comparing mandatory vaccinations to slavery.

But Dr. Ladapo, slavery taught American Negroes vital work skills!  Just ask the Caucasian who gave you your job, Florida governor Ron DeSantis - who has been trying to make that part of the state's standard school curriculum!  (Sarcasm.)

You know, that's another reason for me to hope that the 2028 Olympics get moved out of the U.S.  The war on medical science, which medical science is clearly losing, is going to lead to a lot of Americans with severe respiratory diseases, some of whom could possibly attend Olympic events in Los Angeles while being asymptomatic and cause a mass contagion among foreign athletes and spectators.  The Super Bowl, the most insufferably American of all sporting events, which takes place in the middle of winter, could also be an annual super-spreader event for COVID, the flu, and other nasty diseases.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been dismissed for his lack of medical expertise - he is, after all, an environmental lawyer.  But that alone is not a detriment in running the Department of Health and Human Services.  Xavier Becerra, his predecessor under President Biden, is also a lawyer, and he used his legal knowledge to cut through red tape and get COVID vaccines out as quickly as possible.  If anything, being an environmental lawyer is an asset; who better than an environmental lawyer to understand how toxins and pollutants in the air and in our soil affects our health?  But while Kennedy is best known for being an environmental lawyer, his reputation in the field of environmental law is based largely on easy-peasy cases he merely signed his name to, including cases that any shyster with a law degree from a correspondence course could have won. RFK Jr., who has campaigned for years against injecting kids with drugs, is, ironically, best known for something else; he's a recovered heroin addict.   And he's a recovered heroin addict who ignores the basics of medical science and whose anti-medical-science policies are going to get us all sick and cause a lot of us to die needless deaths. 

As far as getting a COVID shot is concerned, I propose that if you are under 65 and you want one badly enough - and who with a brain wouldn't?  - the safest course of action is to tell your local pharmacist that you do in fact have an underlying condition.  And trust me, you won't be lying.

The underlying condition we Americans have, whether or not we're 65 or older, is that Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. is the nation's Health and Human Services Secretary.    

Olympics Letter Update

This is a tale of two swimmers.

Janet Evans (left), America's distance-swimming sweetheart of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Kirsty Coventry, the Zimbabwean swimming champion who was born and raised there when the place was still called Rhodesia, are directly connected to the 2028 Olympiad and its fate.  Evans is the chief athletic officer of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and Coventry is now the president of the International Olympic Committee.  And this past Labor Day weekend, I got around to writing both of them, as I wanted to, to share my thoughts about the 2028 Olympics.  (I finally found the postal address for the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.)  I told Evans that I wanted to see the Olympics moved to a city outside the United States because of Trump and his fascist regime, and I asked Coventry to make that happen.

In my latter to Janet Evans, I told her how much I revered her and asked her to bear that in mind as I said rather bluntly that I did not want to see the Los Angeles Games take place because of the militarization of Los Angeles earlier this year and how Trump wants to use his power to bring California to heel.  I also mentioned how he might rough up athletes and spectators from other countries at the Games.  At one point, I even deigned to address her by her first name, even though I don't know her from Eve (although I have fantasized about knowing her, and knowing her intimately, but I didn't tell her that!).  This was different from the open letters I wrote to her on this blog, which were mostly my own brand of punditry in the form of letters to a friend.  This was brutal, personal honesty.  No sugar coating whatsoever.  

As for my letter to IOC President Coventry, I repeated the same points I had made in my February 2025 letter to her predecessor, Thomas Bach, that Trump is a threat to world peace and security and a danger to multilateralism, and I also mentioned how a Bach spokesman blew me off in his reply.  But then I made the added points of how Trump has made things worse for America and the world since then.  I especially stressed the recent militarization of Los Angeles and how Trump's immigration policy violates human rights.  (Although I didn't mention it, this might spur Coventry's memories of living in Zimbabwe under the repressive regime of Robert Mugabe.)  

And yes, in both letters, I cited Adolf Hitler and the 1936 Berlin Olympics - like the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, awarded to the city before anyone knew who would be ruling the host city's country.  Coventry, of course, grew up in fascist-racist white-minority-rule Rhodesia, and Evans is a lifelong resident of Orange County, California, and I don't need to say any more about that.  Let's just say I expect both of them to Get It.      

I mailed both letters today.  It will be very interesting to see how both women reply.  Especially Evans, who, as anyone who has read this blog before might know, has always placed herself above politics but has inevitably gotten sucked into them. 

They Made Her Squeal

The importance of being Ernst is no more.

Republican U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, who was first elected to the Senate from Iowa in 2014 who likened cutting pork-barrel spending to castrating pigs on her family farm and who won a second term in 2020 despite knowing precious little about other forms of farming, reportedly will not seek a third term next year.  She is bowing out in part because of her reasoning for supporting Trump's Medicaid cuts (because sooner or later we're all going to die) but also because she was reluctant to support Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Defense Secretary because of his misogyny and her own experiences in the military.  Although Ernst did end up supporting after arm was twisted - literally, I assume - her initial reticence angered Trump and his cronies.  

It's appropriate that she grew up on a farm that raised pigs.  Because she's dead meat.

Numerous Iowa Democrats are already lining up for the U.S. Senate primary in the state next year, but while i have no idea who will be the Democratic nominee for Ernst's seat, I can tell you who won't be - Theresa Greenfield, who ran against Ernst in 2020.  Even though she was more knowledgeable than Ernst regarding agricultural issues, the simple fact is, she still lost to Ernst.  As I always like to note, Democrats don't let failed nominees try again for the same office - they shoot their wounded.  Though, in Iowa, they likely opt for castration.

Make 'em squeal.

Canceled

We're on the verge of becoming the Third Reich of the twenty-first century, and Democrats and progressives are more interested in banishing people than reforming them.

Anthony Scaramucci (above) worked for Donald Trump for eleven days in 2017 and had known him casually for many years before.  Having seen Trump and his modus operandi up close and personal, he has made it his life's work to warn people about Trump and help anyone opposed to him - including Kamala Harris, whom he helped prepare for her first and only debate with Trump.   But Democrats made it clear to Harris that they didn't want Scaramucci in the campaign because he had once worked for Trump.

Incredible.

Democrats in general and progressive Democrats in particular don't take seriously or acknowledge at all anyone who has worked for Trump and has since "seen the light" and started speaking out against him.  Indeed, they ridicule anyone's insistence that they have "seen the light" and prefer that the anti-Trump resistance movement be populated only by those who were against Trump from the start.  Cancel culture, once confined to historical figures and artistic media (Thomas Jefferson, prog rock) that women and people of color deem offensive, has now been extended to living people who misjudged Trump and paid a heavy price for it.

Michael Cohen, Scaramucci's fellow Long Islander and Trump's most devoted sycophant in his pre-presidential years, helped Trump ruin a lot of careers and maybe even a few lives, but he has been repenting every day for it ever since he did time in prison, warning people about Trump.  Many progressives don't want to bother with him, either.  But who better to warn us about Trump than someone who was there with him and witnessed him firsthand?  Heck, I liked the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie when I saw it in the theaters as a kid - loved it, in fact - but I've since come to see how it misrepresented the Beatles' songs and legacy and how trying to make a rock opera out of so many disparate Beatles tunes was a fool's errand (and I couldn't have picked a bigger fool than Robert Stigwood to prove it), and now I warn neophyte Beatles fans not to see it.  Would fellow Beatles fans cancel me for having liked the movie so much that I even collected the bubble gum cards from it?  No, of course not.  (They did cancel Peter Frampton for being in the movie, and it took him decades to recover from that career misstep, but that's another post.) 

Progressives in the Democratic Party, of course, are so smug and self-righteous that they would have rejected Ebenezer Scrooge after he tried to embrace Christmas.  (Paradoxically, these are usually the same white progressives who demonstrate solidarity with their black counterparts by celebrating Kwanzaa with them in December.)  Many rank-and-file MAGA voters have dug in their heels in response to the refusal of many progressives to at least hear MAGA's grievances, many of which are legitimate, like the hollowing-out of every other industrial town in Ohio.  Bernie Sanders gets it.  He's been reaching out to MAGA voters for years, trying to gain their trust and support and make them see the errors of their ways.  But most progressives would rather refuse support from famous people burned by Trump like Scaramucci and Cohen and also refuse support from not-so-famous people who voted for Trump and got burned by him as well.  Triple Trumpers - those who voted for Trump thrice in each of the general elections in which he was a presidential candidate - are lost forever, and they should obviously be ostracized to the fullest extent.  But progressives would obviously ostracize anyone who voted for Trump even once.

Remember earlier this week, when I disparaged Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan for their hostility toward Roman Catholics as well their hostility against men of both Alpha and Beta leanings - that is, all men in general?  (They both sound like the aging high-school football head cheerleader who never stopped thinking of men as studs or nerds.)  To paraphrase Nick the bartender in the nightmarish segment of It's a Wonderful Life where Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville . . . you know, that's another reason for me not to like them.  Welch and Sullivan recently dismissed Scaramucci and Cohen for being late arrivals to the anti-Trump resistance and went so far as to mock them for saying they had "seen the light."  If those two Okies have such a self-righteous attitude, then they're just as insufferable as the most smug East Coast progressives.   Which is why I canceled them from my YouTube feed.