Author Archives: Brian Lambert

Who Would Give This Guy a Dime, Much Less $500 Million?

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High up among the questions I’d like answered about this era is how and why so many people seized on Donald Trump as The Man with the Answer? As the guy who could get “it” done? Was it really because in their minds he already got it done? As the wildly successful and glamorous businessman, like the one he played on TV?

Was it really that simple (minded)?

In a culture that regards fame as an unalloyed virtue and keeps score based on the number of gold-plated toilets seen in your publicity photos, TV-created Trump and his repeated claims that, “I’m really, really rich” seem to have played like fentanyl-laced salted caramel candy to a certain type of brain configuration.

I believe there’s testing to prove that.

But if that’s true, what do those same people think now as they watch him flounder and squeal and rant trying to cover the half billion dollar tab on his New York fraud conviction?

Yes, yes, it’s all “the Deep State picking on him” for no reason at all other than they hate freedom. But it’s just a bond. He gets the money back if he wins his latest of hundreds of time-sucking appeals. Are any of his adoring mob asking themselves, “Why doesn’t he just write a check?”

I’m absolutely certain even Trump TV hosts and pundits on Fox and NewsMax have reported his inability to convince any bank or insurance company to give him a loan. So the “money problem” is “out there”, as the kids like to say.

As of this morning Team Trump is asking the judge (uh, excuse me, “liberal, biased New York judge”) to allow him — the “really, really rich guy” with the gold-plated toilets — to pay just 20% of his tab, much like a court would allow you or me to cough up $20 to cover a $100 parking ticket.

Maybe some of the folks who confused the opening credit sequence of “The Apprentice” with reality are wondering, “Why didn’t he set aside some dough just in case he lost — at the hands of that biased, uppity, colored babe?” Or maybe take out a revolving line of credit on one of those big New York ofice buildings he says are worth billions?

Most likely the gullible fans of famous and “really, really rich” aren’t wondering much at all. This is all just another liberal attack on the “one true real American.” A tycoon who is again turning to them and pleading for their money to save his ass. Not cash for bogus college courses, knock off vodka, tough steaks or gold-plated sneakers, but to cover his legal bills, “Right now … before Monday! Before thewy get their filthy hands on Trump Tower and those toilets.”

Why anyone making south of $100k a year (and much less) would send a “really, really rich” billionaire money for anything boggles my mind. But Trump’s celebrity-struck masses have and still are, although less and less as time (and repeated appeals for more) have gone on. I mean, they gave him over $200 million to fight the “rigged election” almost all of which he pocketed in (another) naked fraud that he is not being prosecuted for by the Deep State. But they Belivers gave it and few if any complained about getting ripped off.

That PAC, his Save America gimmick, is still up and running, and he now has full control of the Republican National Committee’s fund-raising as well as his own Trump 2024 campaign income. All of money sucked in by all three could … could … go to his legal bills and not to getting him or any other Republican elected. Does the Trump herd understand that? Or care?

If I were a betting man, based on Trump’s fifty-plus years of marketing himself as vastly richer than he really is and evading America’s sclerotic legal system all along the way, I’d say he’ll skate on this one, too. Either the system will give him some pennies-on-the-dollar relief, or he’ll suddenly come in to a windfall from an undisclosed benefactor.

He may not like the look of (yet another) bankruptcy, but there’s no way he says “No” if a Russian oligarch or Saudi prince bails him out … on the down low, of course. No names on anything. Just a gift out of left field to a “friend”. A gift to a friend … with an “understanding.”

(The fine point being, as many others have pointed out, a guy desperate for money is the classic mark to be converted to an intelligence asset. Or, put simply, money from Russia makes Trump Russia’s man, even more than he already has been. And that all the while he is legally entitled to regular top security briefings as the presumptive Republican candidate. Jesus christ … ).

The mentality of the average fame-struck Trump idolator would have a much harder time with bankruptcy than a half billion dollar “gift” from an undisclosed, mysterious source. Bankruptcy looks so, mm, “shabby”. So much like drunken cousin Ted after buying that $80,000 pickup. But hundreds of millions from some unnamed source would be to them just further proof that “he’s a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy” … even if the guy in question is currently slaughtering Ukrainians by the hundreds and/or chopping up up newspaper columnists.

But “The Apprentice’s” producers never showed them any of that.

What in God’s Name Are These People Selling?

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Katie Britt calls Biden a 'diminished leader' in GOP response to the State of the Union | wtsp.com

I remember quite well rolling my eyes every time Ronnie Reagan went off on one of his “shining light on the hill” riffs. America the exceptional! A blemish-free paradise, by god! No worries ’round here other than those frumpy Rooskies! Ignore whatever’s going on with those Iranian mullahs and the guns we’re shipping to fascists in Central America. And no Gertie, AIDS is nothing you need to worry your pretty little heterosexual Christian head over.

It was platinum plated BS.

But the thing is … it worked. The guy got reelected in a goddam landslide. He was Mr. Upbeat. A doofy old dude you’d have a beer with and listen to him tell stories of fighting his way up Mt. Suribachi … the scale model one out on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. Listening to Reagan’s cheery BS made the rubes feel everything would work out and they could devote even more time to obsessing over football and cheesy TV.

So last night, allegedly decrepit and addled Joe Biden takes a page from Reagan — and even name drops ol’ Ronnie — while setting up what is clearly going to be the fundamental message competition of the coming campaign.

Not just that, “Yeah, I’m old, but my ‘predecessor’ is crazy.” But, “Where I see solutions to problems, and have already solved problems, these guys … like that f**king nut job in her MAGA hat yelling at me from the cheap seats … are about the gloomiest damn bastards I’ve ever met. Hell, no sci-fi writer could come up with dystopia grimmer than this crowd and their cult leader.”

The internet is on fire this morning with startled praise for the juice Biden brought to his speech last night. Not only did the guy look and sound vigorous, he was clearly enjoying batting Republicans (and Sam Alito’s Supreme Court) around like a cat with a yarn ball.

Simultaneously, I don’t think I’ve ever read worse reviews for a State of the Union response. We’re talking Alabama first term senator Katie Britt. Have you watched this thing? OMFG! Your way too put together, very white, super Christian, average Mom (with de rigueur crucifix necklace, gold variety) smiling … before she’s tearing … before she’s tearing again about the absolute wasteland of criminality, vice, degradation and despair … outside her homey kitchen.

It is truly beyond parody. (Betting is heavy she gets “Saturday Night Live” attention.)

But the essence of it all is simple and obvious. While Biden (and hopefully at some point his more youthful surrogates like Gretchen Whitmer, Jared Polis, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, etc.) talk up all the positives through the campaign …

Continued strong job growth.

Surprisingly improving wage growth.

Much, much lower inflation compared to what any economist much less any “Fox & Friends” host predicted.

Dropping crime rates.

… Republicans, led by Orange Jesus, are only capable of talking about what a godforsaken hellhole we’re living in. How the price of a dozen eggs is more than it was in 1985! And how no one has a spare nickel to drop on, I don’t know, a Redneck Riviera condo, a new Super Duty truck with a six-ton towing package to set up in a casino parking lot outside Vegas, a set of his and hers ATVs or concierge service at little Spider and Dewey’s summer Bible camp.

Never have so many endured so much deprivation and misery!

Purely by coincidence, I opened this morning’s e-mail from John Hinderaker and Minnesota’s own dystopian sourpusses at the American Experiment. This is the crowd that has still yet to calm themselves from “overreach” of last year’s Minnesota legislative session. You know, the one where Democrats delivered on damn near everything they campaigned on and for which voters sent them to St. Paul.

Here’s a taste of this morning’s litany of misery from our local conservative intellectuals:

Migrants (!) lining up in south Minneapolis looking for work. Horror! They’re all rapists and fentanyl dealers!

An arrest in a Dinkytown shooting. Subtext — black kids involved. Democrats are still letting black kids walk around on our streets!

$2 billion for another LRT line! When will the woke spendthrifts stop the insanity and build another four lanes on every freeway?

Welfare spending still too high. Is there a worse abuse of the public purse than using tax money to pay for housing and food for poor people? Those black kids need to learn to house and feed themselves … just like Republican intellectuals did. I mean, I think Jesus gave a speech about exactly that.

Subsidies for green energy! As everyone knows windmills cause cancer. Why are we subsidizing a clear health hazard? Far better we expand tax deductions for 6000-pound, gas-powered “work vehicles.”

And finally, Socialist activism in the “uncommited” primary vote. Quoting a piece of data from the rarely-if-ever credible Alpha News we learn that hard core lefties in Minnesota’s metro areas are practically running amuck, and unless they get a tough lesson upside the head they’ll soon be protesting on the lawn of the Lafayette Club. Something must be done! Hopefully by a reinvigorated police force. No mention though of Bob Kroll.

Bottom line: The next eight months will be defined by neo-Reaganism from … Democrats, and visions of a Cormac McCarthy hellscape from Republicans.

Wooziness is guaranteed.

Nikki Haley Has Said What She Said and Will Until She Says What She Used to Say

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Trump: Nikki Haley donors will be barred from "MAGA camp"

The Lovely Mrs and I did our duty and voted in Tuesday’s primary. “Two for Joe,” as the kids might say. It was perfunctory and quiet in the Edina gym where we scanned our ballots … after inspecting them for threads of Chinese bamboo and tell tale signs of Italian satellite mischief.

A couple hours later, home and safe from rampant, hell-hole crime, out of control inflation and the toxic embers of this once great country of ours we noted the resounding defeats of Nikki Haley everywhere but Vermont. Then, the next morning to no one’s surprise, the former South Carolina governor called it quits … without endorsing You Know Who … yet.

Prior to this, whenever the topic of Haley came up I tried to make the point that while I’d never vote for her over any Democrat I can imagine, there was no doubt that a Nikki Haley presidency would be more or less Republican business as usual. Sane, experienced, corporate tax-cutting, regulation-gutting conservatives would occupy pretty much every cabinet level office and key spots in the federal bureaucracy. She would at least make a cri de coeur for supporting Ukraine. She would explain the financial and moral/reputational cost to the United States of appeasing Vladimir Putin. In other words, despondent liberals and the country would survive to fight another day.

The contrast to a deeply demented Trump 2.0 was and is stark.

But like a lot of people, I always regarded Haley as as craven as she was intensely ambitious. Following her career from a distance I couldn’t recall her ever taking a political risk in pursuit of a higher ethical standard. She was a parody of The Weathervane Politician. Everyone points to her “courageous” decision to … finally … take the Confederate flag down off the top of the goddam state capitol. But precious few point out that she only did that in the aftermath of a racist lunatic murdering nine people at a Bible study meeting in Charleston.

Now I grant you, yanking the Stars and Bars is more than Mitch McConnell or any Republican dared do after Sandy Hook. But still … good lord, what does it take to make a stand against … the Confederacy?

The pundit class I respect gives Haley credit for finally finding her voice in the past three months and at long, long last saying what is obvious to everyone outside the Trump cult. This is much the same way they credit hapless Mike Pence for doing one honorable thing, on January 6. It took Haley too damn long to get where she finally got, and she may yet spin another 180, but she finally did it and said it. Which is more than you can say for … well the list is hundreds of pages long.

One assumption is that she’s playing a long game, gambling that if Trump loses and takes the House and Senate down with him, she’ll be regarded in 2028 as the Prophet and the torch-bearer for the resurrection of a Reagan-Bush-style Republican party. A countervailing assumption is that Trumpism has so thoroughly captured and controlled the white, rural base Nikki Haley will be quickly forgotten as post-Trump the mob shifts towards, who knows, Tucker Carlson? Don Jr.? Josh Hawley? Jeanine Pirro?

The major irony in this, as I see it, is that I strongly suspect Nikki Haley, or any Republican capable of putting two coherent paragraphs of thought together AND courageous enough to say into a microphone that Donald Trump is exactly what we all see he is, namely, an incompetent vulgar fraud, would crush Joe Biden in November. There are that many people, women in particular, nigh on to desperate for anything new.

But the GOP is now so far gone with white rural grievance and delusional evangelicism that Haley or whoever is going to need a completely new party.

That said, I say she endorses Trump by Labor Day.

Their “Biden Crime Family” Case Implodes in Their Faces After Years of Hype. Hannity and the Usual Suspects Ignore it.

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Robert Reich

If you get your news from almost anywhere other than Falun Gong’s Epoch Times or Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews you are aware of the arrest a few days ago, (in Las Vegas FWIW), of Alexander Smirnov, the key informant in the constantly, aggresively and loudly hyped “investigation” into Hunter and Joe Biden. You may also then be aware that MAGA Republicans’ case against Joe Biden has essentially exploded in their faces in a putrid, cringey mist.

The collapse of this case is so total you’d be embarrassed for someone — looking at you Sean Hannity — if they weren’t so completely insulated from embarrassment and shame.

(BTW — 50 Dickens Points for Smirnov’s name. Can’t make it up. Have a double, Sean.)

There are dozen different ways to examine this story, but for some reason the face of a guy I used to work for kept popping up in my head. He ran a small media operation here in Minnesota and was constantly struggling to walk what is known as the “false equivalency” tight rope, a style of footwork that required him to regularly tut-tut “the extremes” of modern media, to be specific the FoxNews and MSNBCs/CNNs of the world.

As he tried to sell it to his staff of quasi-journalists, the two ends of the spectrum (as he saw the spectrum) were equally reckless and irresponsible. The proper (i.e. safer) course was right there square in the middle where you never developed or argued an opinion on anything that mattered, other than maybe how yummy the brioche was at some new restaurant/possible advertiser.

Having a few Jewish friends and some familarity with street level Yiddish, every time I saw this guy the word, “Putz!” flashed before my eyes. And I wonder what (if anything) he’s thinking today watching Fox, with its latest long-running act of reckless hysteria-mongering, faceplant on the sidewalk like a career drunk?

On a matter more specific to journalistic integrity, there’s the as-stark-as-you-can-get issue of honesty in the way the two “extremes” are currently handling this story.

As Media Matters, The Washington Post, USA Today, the Department of Justice, Slate and others have all reported — (none of whom are funded by a looney Asian religious cult or a company that just got done paying almost $800 million in damages for its last long-running carnival of lies and bullshit) — the “FBI informant”, Mr. Smirnov, arrested by the Trump-appointed special counsel, is an almost cartoonish joke. He’s so farcical any respectable journalist could check him out in an hour. No news organization with any respect for facts would have tolerated him as the foundation for so much coverage. Not for an hour, much less for years.

But such is the seal of the bubble around America’s MAGA conservatives today. Almost nothing intrudes on what they so desperately want to hear and believe. They offer the Epoch Times, the FoxNews/Hannitys/Jesee Watters/Lauta Ingrahams of the world their embittered credulity and those “sources” exploit it.

Biden is a weak, frail, cognitive mess: Sean Hannity #biden - YouTube

But despite the demise of any basis of fact with the arrest of Mr. Smirnov, The MAGA Credulous are not getting anything remotely like an apology or a correction from their most trusted purveyors of truth.

My apologies if you’ve already heard this:

From The Washington Post … “… no one on Fox News invested more heavily in the ‘Biden bribe’ story than Hannity. An analysis from Media Matters determined that he has covered the allegation in at least 85 segments since it first emerged in May 2023. On Thursday night, he had nothing to say about the new development. Instead, he began by focusing, once again, on [Atlanta DA Fani] Willis. Viewers who tuned in at 7 p.m. had, by 9:30, gotten an hour and 40 minutes of commercial-interspersed discussion of the hearing involving the Georgia official.”

Said Media Matters, ” … Hannity alone aired 85 segments promoting the claim, including 28 monologues. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump estimates that Fox News mentioned the claim about 2,600 times in the last 12 months.”

Two thousand six hundred mentions — including 43 on camera, primetime interviews with MAGA’s beknighted committee chairman, James Comer — about assertions, that Fox and Hannity knew were just assertions, but they nevertheless presented as “bombshell” facts. Assertions, (the official-sounding “1023s” Hannity referenced so often are in fact just that, a statement of as yet uninvestigated assertions), in no way, shape or form verified.

James Comer Pretty Sure Biden Did Something Illegal; Maybe - MeidasTouch Network

And to date this morning, three days post arrest and implosion, there has not been a peep of remorse or apology from anyone at FoxNews. Not that any of us in this “extreme” bubble are surprised, of course. Reckless assertions and the unapologetic peddling of … well, lies … is built into the Fox business model. We expect no more. And much less.

My point here is the contrast. The contrast a value-free “putz” and anyone on America’s new MAGA right refuses to make between the two allegedly equivalent “extremes”. The Fox/Epoch/Mark Levin/name your favorite MAGA mouthpiece and, the CNN and MSNBC “extreme.” For simplicity sake think of it as a Sean Hannity v. Rachel Maddow battle of “extremes.” (Lord, I’d love to watch a debate between those two. At The Sphere in Vegas. $500 a pop!)

Had either CNN or MSNBC engaged in anything as high-profile, bombastic, persistent and egregiously fallacious as what Hannity and FoxNews have done they’d be fired on the spot and faced with reputational ruin. At best they’d be a laughingstock.

But you and I know the Hannity engine — from the basement of his Palm Beach mansion – will plow on without the slightest wound of consequence.

Immunity from shame may be the biggest benefit of operating within that “extreme” bubble.

You Gotta Let It Hang Out, Joe. At This Point Perception is Far Worse Than Reality.

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Joe Biden Is Old. Get Over It.

After the Special Counsel report gratuitously describing him as “an elderly man with a poor memory” the clear consensus is that Joe Biden has to come out of his protective shell, say “f*ck it”, (as he is wont to say) and let it all hang out. Just as with “crooked Hillary” and “her e-mails” back in 2016 the meme has settled in that he, Joe Biden, an honest operator with 50 years of government experience is a bigger risk than a 77 year-old failed casino operator campaigning as the fool he is proud to be.

Sunday’s Super Bowl may have been the single most-watched telecast … in history … and Biden passed on an interview with CBS. Not with a self-serving gasbag like Bill O’Reilly or a smirking frat boy like Jesse Watters or some other right-wing stooge, but with an intellectually honest network’s interviewer. Someone with a professional allegiance to facts and respectful decorum. That was a big mistake.

Especially … especially … when you factor in that the game’s enormous audience was likely fueled by an unprecedented inflow of women primarily interested in the whole Taylor Swift side show. With women voters showing a 22% preference for Biden over a guy a lot of them likely regard as the epitome of a shit boyfriend/worse husband; an undisciplined, vulgar blowhard facing 91 criminal counts and officially judged a “rapist” for his assault on a woman in a department store dressing room, Biden failing to immediately recall the name of the president of Egypt could hardly be deemed perilous to their view of who is the wiser choice.

Both of these guys, Biden and Trump, are what they are. Both are old. One has five decades of experience with national and international crises. He understands climate and infrastructure policy. The other played a real estate mogul on a TV show, bankrupted a casino, lost more money than any other person in the United States over nine years, has never said a cross word about the Joseph Stalin of our era and has been regularly described as, “a fucking moron” by people he hired to work in his first administration.

So given the fact that barring some deus ex machina event that removes him from the nomination, Biden (i.e. his team of strategists) has to push him out for unscripted interviews. Not with MAGA fools like Watters, etc. But with people like, say, Jonathan Swan, now with The New York Times. Or Maggie Haberman of the Times. Chris Wallace at CNN. Jonathan Lemire of Politico. Hell, I see value in an hour-long chat with a bona fide conservative like Bill Kristol.

Let the public decide if his (lifelong) stutter or his occasionally lengthy reaches for a specific name or date is disqualifying early onset dementia or just an older guy whose head is full of names and dates. (Among the facts conveniently ignored amid the frenzy over Biden’s “gaffes” are all the times George W. Bush, 30 years younger, mangled names, dates and spewed out bizarre salads of incongruence.)

Neither of these guys is Bill Clinton or Barack Obama when it comes to slickness on the impromptu stage. But one is sane, sincere and qualified. The other is … well, we all know … . I don’t have to repeat myself.

A Brief History of Things I Do Not Understand

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GM's Hands-Free Driving With Super Cruise Just Got A Lot Better | CarBuzz

I’m tempted to say that as the years accumulate I understand less and less. But as anyone who knows me will tell you, I’ve never understood all that much. That said, lately I’ve found myself building a list of stuff happening today that I simply do not get. And being committed to public service I’m offering it to you now.

1: Hands free driving. If you watch football you’ve no doubt seen the commercial of your standard issue, cookie cutter, commercial male “average guy” actor — forty-ish, eight-day growth of beard, outdoorsy attire — behind the wheel of his gleaming new Chevy truck (estimated retail cost $80,000). But that’s all he is … behind the wheel. Never mind he’s heading downhill off a mountain with a truckload of buddies pulling a trailer carrying four ATVs. (Boys gotta have toys.) He’s got his hands in his lap letting his shiny rig drive itself. Total weight of this set up? Six tons. I don’t get it. Is steering that exhausting? More to the point, how nervous are your buddies at this scene? Also, what’s State Farm’s payout when a deer jumps in front of all this and you pile yourself, your pals and all that gear into a rock face … because you weren’t steering 12,000 pounds (minimum) down a damn mountain road?

2: Intuit Turbo Tax (or H&R Block … ). Another heavily hyped-during-football “service.” The only reason millions of us pay out $80 for TurboTax software or $300 to a tax accountant is because the likes of Intuit have so heavily lobbied our congress critters to prevent the government/IRS from offering this same service (or a better one) for free. Don’t believe me? Watch this illuminating report from The New York Times.

Let me put this bluntly … we are chumps for allowing this to happen. The Biden administration did put money into the IRS to begin addressing this stupidity, but of course … oh, you already knew … House Speaker Mike Johnson and his MAGA puppetmasters are railing against it on the grounds that, yeah yeah, jack-booted IRS thugs are going to knock in your trailer door and confiscate your guns to settle back taxes. FFS!

3: Cussing. Speaking of speaking bluntly. Politico had a story last week of Biden, who, you know, is so addled he’s repeatedly telling people Obama is still president and that woke Democrats are going to change the name of Pennsylvania (oh sorry, that’s the other guy), cussing out Orange Jesus in private conversations. Echoing former Secretary of State and Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson and countless others employed by Trump would said exssentially the same thing Biden reportedly called the failed casino operator/spiritual leader of modern Republicans a “sick fuck” and “a fucking asshole.” The context being, according to Politico, Trump’s constant indifference and cruelty to people far, far below him on the economic ladder.

Now personally, being an occasional potty mouth myself and a very big fan of The Dude, I found this to be pretty funny. Largely because it expresses so precisely and in such a succinct, common street level language way what at least 80-plus million voters are thinking … every day. Public figures generally try to avoid sounding like Joe Pesci in “Casino” when they’re out campaigning or handshaking moms at some pre-school opening. Spot on cussing is not, you know, “dignified” or “statesman-like.” But my guess has long been that wonky grey Democrats in partiucular would do well to adopt a vernacular more in tune with actual Americans. People find something relaxing and something akin to cathartic and humanizing about a leader who looks on vulgar cancer like Trump and says, “Jesus, what a sick fuck!”

4: Awards season. I like movies. I like music. But I am truly way too old and have seen too much to get excited about Oscars and Grammys and CMAs and BAFTAs and Guilds-this and that. These “contests” have almost nothing to do with objectively evaluating artistic merit … as though anything could or should. They’re virtue-signaling, trend-obsessed popularity contests heavily … and I do mean heavily … tilted in favor of who sold the most tickets and who marketed themselves to the right people in the right ways. Maybe something like the London Film Critics comes close to applauding artistic merit. But the Oscars and Grammys and the rest are first and foremost about putting on a show! About selling ads on a TV celebrity-choked extravaganza with a giant audience. Put another way, nobody wants to watch a collection of paunchy yobs you’ve never heard of natter on about some dorky film no cool kid has seen on Tik Tok.

So yeah, I don’t get awards shows either.

And finally … get off my lawn.

“They” Have Good Reason to Fear Taylor Swift

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The 'Taylor Swift Psyop' Freaks Need to Go Outside | National Review

I don’t think it’s my imagination. I really don’t. Not when every day it gets tougher and tougher to believe today’s Republicans have an ounce of respect for the intelligence of the average rube. Their average rubes. Not when in the course of a single week we had …

1: A dozen Colorado Republican congressional candidates — including “Beetlejuice” groper Lauren Boebert — being asked how many of them had ever been arrested? And half of them proudly shot up their hands … to the delight of the crowd that commenced hootin’ and hollerin’ in delight … at the sight of, you know, such bona fide maverick Wild West independence … or something.

2: Minnesota’s 8th District Congressman “Coach Pete” Stauber, a guy sent to D.C. solely because he can talk hockey to the marginally literate of the far north, boasting to his fellow puckheads about how he “advocated” for the billion dollars of federal money to rebuild the giant Blatnik Bridge to Superior. When in fact he … oh damn, you already knew the punchline … he caved to MAGA group think and voted against all those high-paying construction jobs.

And 3: And now, a whole host of once-upon-a-time Republican presidential candidates, (pseudo-intellectual/inflamed hemorrhoid Vivek Ramaswamy), Fox, NewsMax and OAN anchors and pundits plus … plus! … the guy who did so well selling the story of Hillary Clinton eating babies in the basement of a pizza parlor … that has no basement … freaking out about Taylor Swift rigging the the Super Bowl and the next election.

I freely concede I live in a bubble where this kind of stuff strikes me as … mmmm, what’s the word I’m looking for? … well how about “stupid” until I can come up with something better? (“Batshit” has been worn thin describing this crowd.)

But the Swift thing, besides so vividly demonstrating how afraid the MAGA-nauts are of one cute, fabulously wealthy young lady, is interesting because her influence over her fans, most of them young to young-ish women is both extraordinary and immense. Any of us who have followed pop culture for decades have to admit we’ve seen nothing — nothing — like her Eras tour or the devotion her fans have to her.

The still on-going tour has been a campaign across the globe that made her a billionaire because in large measure she was selling joyful community via high professional standards. (Ok, and high prices, too.) Point being, all her songs about relationships gone wrong withstanding, her affect is of someone who respects her audience and holds herself to standards respectful of truth (sometimes hard truths) and decency towards others. Fans may shriek and sing along and wave their flashing Swiftie bracelets without giving a lot of explicit thought to such virtues, but they feel it … and in Swift’s case, based on what we and the MAGA crowd can see, she lives the virtues she sings about.

Including the virtue of not being a sap for the bastards of the world.

Therein lies the fear she strikes into the (mmmmm, gotta come up with a new word) cynical thought leaders as they contemplate what she might be able to do with a political endorsement later this year.

Being a (very) shrewd businesswoman, Swift no doubt calculates the impact of “coming out” for say Joe Biden might have on her remarkably unblemished celebrity. Sure, there’s a percentage of her fan base that would react negatively. Certainly to an overt endorsement. But what percentage would you put that at? 10%? 15%?

She has 534 million social media followers. She can lose 50 million and still be a goddam force of political nature … if she wants to be.

The sense she’s giving at the moment is less about doing something as heavy-handed as popping up on the Jumbotron at the Super Bowl and telling all Swifties everywhere to “Vote for Joe”. It’s more — and this is savvy and wise in so many ways — simply making the persistent case to, “Vote and vote for the right thing. Vote for racial justice, gender justice, honesty and intelligence and respect for everyone, including yourself.” Presented that way, the average Swiftie — a lot of them smart young ladies — has very little difficulty discerning who of the two strange old geezers running for The Big Job embodies those virtues best.

Ms. Swift is an unprecedented phenomonon, in no small part due to her masterful manipulation of social media. She gets her message across. Instantly. And by virtue of her … well, professional virtues … her message has startling credibility with her millions of fans, (unlike, say Ted Nugent or Kid Rock), a large portion of whom may never have voted before and wouldn’t now other than she — their gold standard for fun and decency — says it’s important.

And for that reason Sean Hannity and the usual collection of incel folk heroes are rightfully terrified of her.

Heh.

Who Doesn’t Love a Hot Mess?

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Democrats Demand House GOP Reprimand Marjorie Taylor Greene for Showing Hunter Biden Nudes

Let’s be honest, shall we? We all love a hot mess. Not that you want to be related to one (or two) or live next door to one or work for one, but from a distance hot messes supply a certain ghoulish sense of superiority-inducing reassurance. “I may be a mess,” you say to yourself, or spouse, “but I’m not nearly as hot a mess as [insert object of current fascination.]”

This deep insight came to mind yesterday watching the surprise appearance of Hunter Biden at the MAGA-led House Oversight Committee hearing into you know … Hunter Biden. It was a surpise because as everyone with more than two functioning neurons knows that very same commitee has been howling and puffing ad nauseum for over two years now demanding Biden show up and answer all their questions about how he scammed $2 billion from the Saudis to A: buy a new laptop, B: buy a new pickup truck, or C: take more d*ck pics on his cell phone.

(Oh, sorry. That bona fide/actually happened $2 billion scam was pulled off by a different relative, a guy actually in a government job, and not Hunter Biden, who did however get a roughly $6000 loan from his old man to cover the payments on his new truck.)

The issue of course is that Biden, who is to be honest more than a bit of a hot mess himself, has repeatedly said he is only willing to testify … in public. With cameras rolling. (The nefarious, tricky bastard! What’s he tring to pull?) So what happens when the Oversight MAGA crew spots Hunter right there in their hearing room? They demand — demand, by all that is MAGA and God-like — he be arrested on the spot and jailed and soon thereafter voted to hold him in contempt … for … for … showing up and being willing to answer their questions?

Nancy Mace and the scarlet 'A' - The Washington Post

One perpetually camera-ready MAGA congresswoman sniped at Biden that he didn’t have “the balls” to … to … mmm … I’m not sure what. And minutes later the biggest MAGA-naut of all, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Atlanta suburbanite carpetbagging over in Georgia’s Cracker Holler First District was holding up … yup, you gussed it … the same d*ck pics of Hunter Biden she’s flashed in other super serious MAGA hearings. (She’s flashed these pix so often I think it’s fair to ask if she has them Velcroed to the ceiling over her bed.)

Simultaneous with all this, MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson, the forelocked Bible study savant from Lousiana’s Cracker Holler Fourth District, was getting the word from some of the same people irate about Hunter Biden showing up to answer questions that his days are numbered. Why? For agreeing to a deal with Democrats to fund the government, avoid another MAGA-driven shutdown, supply bullets to fight off a Russian invasion in Europe, and keep Israel in the business of driving every Palestinian into the Sinai desert.

And with all that, I won’t even bore you with the story about the lawyer for Orange Jesus, the Supreme Leader of the Cult of MAGA, arguing in court and with what I presume was a straight face that his client — the very large, weirdly groomed fellow to his right — had the absolute immunity to murder a political rival if he woke up one day and felt like it.

And folks, that was pretty much 36 hours in the Fevered Hot Mess that is MAGA-verse 2024.

So okay, maybe the only way to “love” a mess as hot as these Real Ding-A-Lings of DC is to take a step back to a safe distance from the dumpster and just savor that fleeting sense of superiority. A moment that reassures you that no matter what indisputably stupid thing you may have said or done in your life, you at least stopped short of doing it live in public, on an official record and on camera for the entire world to see.

All this is a long wind up to encourage you to take 15 minutes out of your day and watch the two videos I’m linking here.

Since the war in Ukraine war began I’ve been watching the daily, Moscow man-on-the-street interviews conducted by a young guy named Daniil Orain for his 1420 YouTube site. Shot mainly in Moscow — which truly a world apart from everything beyond its city limits — the interviews are a revealing assessment of what ordinary Russians think and dare to say in public, in front of a camera beaming out to the entire world.

For the most part, older Russians habituated to state TV (think FoxNews Rooskie style) believe Ukraine is full of LGBT-loving fascist Nazis and Glorious Leader Vladimir Vladimirovich is the only man to protect the empire and stop NATO from overruning the Motherland. Younger people, when they’re not reluctant to “talk politics”, seem to understand what’s really going down but are helpless to do anything about it, lest they get hauled before some hot mess Kremlin tribunal and forced to explain what they saw on the internet.

1420 by Daniil Orain - YouTube

Then there’s the two people in these videos. One, an 83 year-old woman, a “babushka” in Russian terms, absolutely unloading on Putin, authoritarian bullshit, the astonishing sheep-like cowardice she sees all around her.

1420 by Daniil Orain - YouTube

And second, a 30-something construction worker/remodeler with the wit and affect of a stand up comic walking his interviewer through the facts of life in Russia 2024.

I’d enjoy seeing both of them live on camera at a MAGA House Oversight hearing.

Fearfully Fearless Predictions for 2024

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Voici les prédictions 2023 apocalyptiques de la célèbre "Nostradamus des Balkans"

Having reached the point where I can say conclusively that I’ve been around for a while, I’m here today to say that I do not recall anytime in my many years that so many people I know or read have expressed so much apprehension for the coming of a new year.

Everyone is expecting the worst.

It comes up in conversation — ok, mostly with my lefty, Trump-despising cronies — but also in blogs, in comments, in asides from strangers. With “Jesus, this one going to be sick … “, being — in para-phrased form — a common refrain. Maybe you do, but I don’t remember this as the calendar turned from say, 2013 to 2014. Or even 1967 to ’68, and ’68 was a seriously bad year anyway anyone looks at it.

For a while I was thinking of doing a semi-facetious list of the ways 2024 is really going to jump the rails of common sense, decency, legality, etc. This list would have included predictions like:

1: Thanks to a ruling of the Supreme Court, with Clarence Thomas refusing to recuse, Donald Trump will be declared the winner of the 2024 election despite again losing the popular vote by millions. Legal battles in Ohio, Michigan and Arizona will result in the Court certifying contested Electoral College electors mere days before the inauguration.

2: Violent protests will erupt across the country and in D.C. as a result, suspending the inauguration and forcing Trump to take the oath indoors under heavy security.

3: An “October surprise” — a startlingly realistic AI-generated deep fake — will so badly damage Joe Biden, much as the Comey letter eroded Hillary Clinton’s support days before the election in 2016, that it will shave tens of thousands of votes in key states, putting a Court decision about the Electoral College in complete control of asserting the winner.

And so on …

But, good lord! What a bummer, right? Who wants to think about this stuff, even if — guessing here — millions already are?

While I continue to doubt both Biden and Trump will make the 2024 ballot, neither has any serious impediment — other than age — in this first week of the new year. I can not imagine the Supreme Court, its dogmatic allegiance to “originalism” withstanding, will do anything to complicate Trump’s myriad legal fights. It certainly won’t uphold Colorado’s 14th amendment decision, no doubt resting its decision on an argument Sam Alito intuits from a Spanish Inquisition case from 1503.

Likewise, in my morose stupor of the moment, I predict the same Court will strategize a way to avoid making any definitive decision on Jack Smith’s request for a ruling on Trump’s total immunity from prosecution on anything; parking tickets, exploiting illegal immigrant labor, stiffing contractors, raping women in department store dressing rooms, inciting a riot to overthrow the government, you name it. The Alito-Thomas bloc will devise a plan effectively exonerating Trump, certainly until after he’s reelected, at which point he can (and will) pardon himself.

I had a couple dozen more like this penciled in for added emphasis, but, damn man! It’s just too dystopian, even for me, a guy who can’t wait for the “Mad Max: Fury Road” sequel.

One thing that constantly rattles through my alleged brain though is how much of the over-arching chaos of this moment, and the looming chaos of 2024 (and beyond), rests at the feet of two people: Trump and Vladimir Putin, two guys who are not exactly unfamiliar or uninvested in each other.

Putin is obviously the key element in the war in Ukraine, and the powerful suspicion is that he is also a primary figure behind Iran’s support of Hamas and Hezbollah, on the grounds that any and all chaos that absorbs and consumes western democracies serves his long term interests.

It seems smart to bet that Putin’s long-standing support for Trump — via internet troll farms and social media disinformation — will, as I suggest with that “October surprise” business — only accelerate and become much more sophisticated this year, since a Trump defeat could likely seal Putin’s fate as well among the Russian elites.

Anyway, I promise I’m scouring the web for more uplifting topics to rant on about in the months to come. Maybe even something about Taylor Swift! Please stay tuned.

The Best and Brightest Don’t Dare Say, “That’s Wrong.”

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Rep. Stefanik: Harvard, Other Universities 'Enabling' Antisemitism | EpochTV

I certainly am not the only one hearing echoes of last winter’s Hamline University “image of the Prophet” fiasco in the cringy mumbo-jumbo coming out of the mouths of the presidents of MIT, Harvard and U Penn. And as much as everyone can see that the three Ivy League presidents were baited into it by congressional actors of rancid bad faith, the fact none of them could summon anything other than legalized corporatese to answer basic questions like whether students ranting about “intifada” is hate speech, equivalent to fat-shaming and misusing pronouns is smack-worthy of the gob-most.

I’ve avoided adding my .05 to the howling and posturing over the attack/war in Gaza, because it is very difficult to come up with anything that hasn’t been said a million times before over the past 2000 years. Additionally, my only “expertise” on the Israel/Palestine question comes from a winter and spring on a kibbutz in 1973, a time as a callow youth that I spent mostly as a hippie vagrant volunteer planting and picking grapefruit and chasing cute Long Island Jewish girls away from mom and dad for the first time. Not exactly deep academic endeavours.

If there is a foundational floor for any commentary here, on Ivy League quads or from extraordinarily well-bred presidents before Congress it should be that:

1: The October 7 attack was a checks-all-boxes terrorist atrocity … with an option to add that it was carried out by fanatical religious fundamentalists dedicated to the death of Jews anywhere.

2: The Israeli response while legitimate to a point, is far too broad to achieve its stated goal of destroying said terrorists “once and for all.”

Beyond that we can then satisfy ourselves with a discussion of the 800-pound nuance of Israel incinerating its moral standing with a civilian pulverizing operation designed primarily to — I’m just sayin’ it — keep Benjamin Netanyhu’s deeply corrupt, arch right-wing administration in power. An administration undergirded by … fanatical religious fundamentalists dedicated to sustaining a dehumanizing existence for Palestinians.

Point being that somewhere in there is an option for public verbiage more compelling than saying, it is “a context-dependent decision”, when asked if calling for genocide against Jews is hate speech on an Ivy League campus. As the kids like to say, “Oh, for f*ck sake!”

Hamline had to suffer international embarrassment before learning, there is a point where defering to any complaining interest group is counter-effective to insuring free speech for all. The cruel lesson being that at some point the adults in charge have to swallow deep, step up to the microphone and say, “No. That is not right. You are wrong.”

But we — and as we see they, meaning college administrators — live in a world that places proficiency with tortured legalese among the key criteria for prominent public positions. Never mind the way board room gobbledygook looks and sounds when it gets pushed out into public view and the conflict-addicted internet.

And it’s not that I don’t have some level of sympathy for an administrator’s position. Stroking the egos of donors is a full time job. But in the case of the three Ivy Leaguers who resisted admonishing anti-Jewish speech prior to their Congressional debasement, had they jumped in, mid-protest and told the demonstrators on their campuses that they were engaging in intolerable hate speech … they would then have been in the position of having to … you know … do something. As in punishment, or sanctions, or … something.

Go ahead and imagine where they’d be if they called in the campus cops to put an end to the “intifada” rallies.

“The Golden Bachelor” Meets Orange Jesus.

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How to watch 'The Golden Bachelor' premiere — now streaming

In a previous life I wrote about television for a local newspaper. A recurring source of conflict with my supervisors was so-called “reality TV” which had recently, um, blossomed, across all the networks. Being a cranky, disputatious bastard I thought the stuff was junk, plainly stage-managed and therefore worthy of derisive coverage, if any at all. The bosses thought differently. They loved it. And they were convinced “our readers” as they called them, loved it too. Especially the dating shows, and they resented my resistance to succumbing to abject fandom.

I mention this because of last night’s the much-touted finale of “The Golden Bachelor”, a variation on the usual hunky/sexy twenty-somethings, in which viewers are presented hunky/sexy seventy-somethings cooing and trilling in hot tubs in search of, you know, real true love. Ratings for the variant have been through the roof, so we can expect a lot more of what this is all about.

This morning’s Star Tribune features what looks like the eighth update on “The Golden Bachelor” and its Minnesota bachelorette, the [correction: ex-wife] of a well-known local restaurateur. The story gives all-in, misty-eyed fans everything they want. The fashion choices, the heart break, a touch of recrimination. So much, you know, reality.

Everythihg real except the reality part, as reported in excruciating detail by the show biz trade paper, The Hollywood Reporter, the day before. That piece essentially vivisected the hunky golden widower bachelor, revealing him to be, while still hunky and dreamy, quite a bit the fraud, at least compared to how he was being packaged and sold on TV, and a bit of cad, as well.

Some key bits from that (actual) reporting:

“The idea that this guileless man was reawakening before our eyes to contemporary life — ‘I mean, I haven’t dated in 45 years’, he told Entertainment Tonight — made him a hugely compelling character. He seemed so wholesome and almost preacherly that, on The Daily Show, comedian Lewis Black joked, ‘This guy is like if the word ‘Gee Willikers’ became a person’. But even in this Golden variation, this is, at bottom, a reality show, a genre mostly known for its frequent disconnection with reality.”

And … “The Hollywood Reporter has discovered several inconsistencies regarding both his work history and recent romantic entanglements that contradict the received narrative.  Whether [the producers] never learned about these discrepancies or ignored them to sell a buffed-up, shinier storyline for greater impact, producers presented an incomplete and misleading image of [bachelor Gerry] Turner, which the bachelor helped perpetuate in personal remarks.

“He’s identified in chyrons throughout the show as a ‘retired restaurateur’, which is a fancy way to say he owns or owned a restaurant, with all of its attendant fun and glamour. But according to his profile on LinkedIn, Gerry last owned a restaurant in 1985, when he sold his Mr. Quick hamburger drive-in franchise in Iowa, where he’d worked his way up from high school.”

And … ” … he would come to know a woman (we’ll call her Carolyn) with whom he would go on to have a nearly three-year relationship, beginning innocently enough a month after his wife’s death.”

And … ” … his amorous activity certainly didn’t align with how he regularly yanked viewers’ heartstrings with on-air announcements about his lack of a love life since his wife died.”

And … ” … [a friend of the girlfriend] recalled watching the show and hearing Gerry say that line about not having been kissed in six years. ‘And I’m like, what? He’s got to know that people are paying attention to this show. I’m just flabbergasted’. (ABC and Turner declined to comment for this article.) At first, Carolyn [the girlfriend] tried to laugh it off. But then The Golden Bachelor became a ratings bonanza. The show was suddenly the talk of pop culture, considered a breakthrough for its positive portrayal of sexually active seniors. It bothered Carolyn that her ex was foisting lines and moves on the bachelorettes that he had used to seduce her.”

The story goes on to talk about the hunk finally talked Carolyn into quitting her job and moving five hous away from her home to his lake house, only to then present her with half the tab for his place’s monthly expenses, telling her he wasn’t going to take her to his high school reunion because she’d gained weight and then soon after that telling she had to be out by the first of the year, and making her stay at hotel the last two weeks before she moved.

My god, what a smoothy! What a heart throb! What woman’s heart wouldn’t go pitter patter for a real loving hunk like that?

Anyway, you can read the whole story, none … none … of which was mentioned in the Strib’s coverage. And maybe … perhaps … you and I and mainstream editors who should know better can reflect on how easy and irresponsible it is to give gullible audiences the story they want to believe as opposed to a story that is believable.

This though, being a blog for political ranting and raving, allow me to point out the stark parallels to the low information, gullible audiences who were sold Donald Trump as the infallible titan of finance on “The Apprentice.”

The heavily stage-managed “reality TV” Trump was for many viewers the first and certainly the most potent introduction to Trump, and no credible political analyst discounts the impact that that perception — of an astute, tough-minded, fabulously rich, more-cunning-than-the-other-rascals rascal — had on propelling him ahead of the hapless stiffs in the 2016 Republican primary and on into the White House, (thanks to the electoral college.) Never mind Trump’s “Apprentice” board room was a TV set and no producer ever mentioned his decades as a cartoonish fraud shunned by real titans of finance, swindling business partners, contractors and laborers.

Given “The Golden Bachelor’s” boffo box office, ABC will without a doubt spin this shtick ad nauseum. And that’s show biz.

But the so-called professional press has an obligation different than playing fan boy/girl to satisfy the most infantile and credulous yearnings of their readers.

WTF, Dean?

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Minnesota's Phillips sees 'exhausted majority' as his path to the White House | MPR News

There’s the story we have and then there’s the story we still haven’t heard. And that’s where we are in The Curious Case of Dean Phillips. A few days ago the Strib ran a piece about Phillips’ not all that surprising (to me) decision to bail on this grimey Congress thing. The usual officialese was transcribed and published. But for everyone following this bizarre adventure the essential question still remaining is, “WTF, Dean?”

I don’t live in Phillips’ district, but literally across the road, so I’ve been to a couple of his small group meet-ups and had two brief conversations with the guy. Astute judge of political talent that I am I assessed that he was, A: Upright, mobile and bathed regularly, B: Could form consecutive coherent paragraphs in the king’s English, C: Was solicitous and patient with the elderly and common folk, D: Was a good-looking dude and, E: Was rich.

In other words a character dispatched from Central Casting for modern American politics.

And then, after barely five years as a reasonably diligent backbencher he decides … he’s the guy to take a primary fight to the sitting President of his own party.

Oooooookay.

I have no disagreement with his stated reasons for painting a bus and road-tripping to New Hampshire. Joe Biden puts both the party and the country in a precarious situation vis a vis Donald Trump in 2024. But .. you … Dean Phillips? You’re the message bearer? You’re the alternative? Even you don’t think you could win this. So what are you really thinking when you run around torching not just your reputation as a sane adult but your relationships with the DFL/Democratic political machinery?

Missing from the Strib piece, and other local outlets covering Phillips, were quotes from DFL wisemen/women. On or off record I’d be fascinated to hear their assessments of Phillips as a person and what Phillips thinks he’s doing. Either way, having paid enough attention to politics over the years I can speculate without fear that personable, good-looking and rich Mr. Phillips has received several-to-a-lot of scorching phone calls from his soon-to-be-former-colleagues, party financiers and advisors, etc. and etc. some more. To the point I strongly suspect he’s now persona non grata with those who matter in the Democratic politics.

Oh, they’ll smile and say bland niceties in public, but he’s not getting invited to the main table for Christmas dinner.

If I had to spout off a psychologically-based explanation for Phillips I’d tie most of it to his wealth. (He was adopted into the Phillips liquor fortune.) Unlike the average Congressperson, he doesn’t need the job. While high profile and with some perks, the downside of being in Congress is the amount of precious life hours/days/months wasted in the churning wake of deeply stupid-to-manifestly corrupt “colleagues.” (Phillips said as much in the Strib story, leaving out the “deeply stupid” and “manifestly corrupt” parts.)

Being as wealthy as he is, he doesn’t have to spend hours every week demeaning himself on the phone begging for reelection money from occasionally sketchy supporters. But being as wealthy as he is also builds and sustains an attitude that, “I’m better than this”, an attitude he could sell if it weren’t for what now looks and feels like an act of adolescent hubris.

To date the “Phillips for President” campaign has been an almost farcical disaster, yet in his reasonable-sounding, good-looking and rich way he insists he’s going to carry on … you know, for the good of the party and the country.

It’s all so sad I cringe every time I hear his name.

    JFK 60 Years Later. The Story Remains the Same.

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    So now 60 years have passed since JFK was killed in Dallas. And because “the media” (whatever that means today) loves anniversaries we’re getting a fresh flow of interviews, articles, fascinating algorithmically created animations and podcasts on the subject of the assassination … and, you know, “what really happened.”

    As someone who remembers 11/22/63 vividly and has followed the various investigations and reporting on the killing extensively (some say “obsessively”) for six decades, one of the recent interviews stands out. “JFK: What the Doctors Saw”, a documentary now on Paramount+ gathers the surviving team of doctors who were present when Kennedy was wheeled into the Parkland Hospital emergency room.

    What I find interesting here is that nothing these gentlemen say has changed since that day. Nothing.

    In fact, if you too are an obsessive, you can dial up any number of YouTube videos of these very same doctors over the years, usually separately, saying exactly what they’re saying now. Namely … (trigger warning alert for all you who believe America is so exceptional conspiracies never happen here) … wherever else shots might have been fired from, Kennedy was hit twice from the front. Once through the throat, a wound that was quickly obliterated for a tracheotomy incision, and then, most critically the enormous head wound that blew out a large part of the back of his skull.

    Allow me to repeat: these are exactly the same wounds these same doctors described that day, in the immediate aftermath and ever since. Nothing they say has changed, even though hype around this documentary suggests some kind of new understanding. In other words, this “news”, while forever relevant is very, very old.

    What I finally had to accept — as part of growing up and acknowledging the world as it is, not as it should be — is that, A: There will never be a definitive judgment on JFK’s assassination, in part because B: The case long ago became such a toxic stew of official and lunatic speculation that credible political leaders and professional reporters, people whose reputations might otherwise move public opinion toward acceptance of what the Parkland doctors have always said, edged further and further away from contact with the story. They too eacknowledging as I did that this will never be settled and that public association with anything but the (deeply compromised) Warren Commission conclusion is, you know, just bad career mojo.

    I could go on ad nauseum, and I have. But today’s takeaway is … what it has always been.

    The Parkland doctors have always described the throat entrance wound and the massive exit wound on the rear of Kennedy’s head in the same way. In other words … as result of shots from in front of the motorcade. If you want to get into the pretzel logic of how Lee Harvey Oswald — the sad, lone commie malcontent recently encamped in Dallas, the most rabidly right-wing big city in the USA, while simltaneously interacting with an improbable collection of mobbed-up spooks — pulled off two shots from the front while perched 100 yards behind JFK, well you’ve always had the Warren Commision to buck you up.

    Entertainment and Retribution. A Very Tough Act to Beat.

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    We’ve all got little moments, seemingly innocuous at the time, but that stick in memory nevertheless. Like this, for example.

    October 2016 and I’m sitting in a hotel bar in West Yellowstone, Montana with a couple friends and a dozen or so guys out on a hunting trip or early season snowmobiling. The TV is carrying one of the debates between Hillary Clinton, who everyone assumes will win and Donald Trump, who is trying to recover from that pussy grabbin’ business.

    At one point, Trump makes the crack about how Clinton should be in jail … and half the hunter-snowmobilers guffaw in unison. They are amused. This Trump dude is, you know, “just sayin’ it”, and they find it entertaining.

    That’s the moment. Nothing more. I didn’t take names and follow up to see who they eventually voted for. Although one guy, figuring me for a Clinton voter, followed me out to lobby to register his moral outrage at the way Bill Clinton “defiled the people’s house”, with the Monica Lewinsky escapade.

    The takeaway that has haunted me ever since is not just that Trump won — the electoral college — largely because he was a pop culture entertainment star who spoke in a common man’s vernacular. But that despite the seven years since, the 30,000 documented lies, the gross mismanagement of an epidemic that killed over a million Americans, the constant insults to allies, bona fide meritorious Americans and, you know, inciting a riot to overthrow the elected government, his followers, at their essence a deeply ignorant mob, still find him both entertaining and a better steward of their future than … well, just about anyone, but certainly Joe Biden.

    All this was in mind when I read that recent New York Times/Siena College Poll that had Trump beating Biden in key battleground states. (Key and battleground because the fate of constitutional democracy is once again in the hands of … the electoral college.)

    Among the facets of this coming campaign that are clear is that Trump’s voters, the MAGA crowd, most certainly does see him as their “retribution”, and this next election as their best and perhaps last chance to correct a terrible wrong and set the country back on a path that serves them, (and only them.)

    Point being, the MAGA mob is 100% certain to come out with even more zealotry than they showed in 2016, since revenge and retribution have been added to the entertainment appeal of their leader.

    The same can not and will never be said for Joe Biden. Tucked away in the Times/Siena poll was 25% of younger voters interested in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with options like Cornel West and Jill Stein still in play. (We of course hope Stein, to plump up her independent bona fides, can cadge another dinner invitation to Moscow with Vladimir Putin and Gen. Mike Flynn.)

    A normal presidential campaign features all sorts of “critical issues.” This next campaign has only one: keeping Donald Trump, his praetorian guard of renegade legal experts, election denying state officials and his self-pitying red hat mob away from even a scent of government authority. That’s it. Nothing else matters.

    This will not be an election that turns on policy. The deciding factor is not tax equality, climate change, or police reform. One side is afire and firmly set on on cult-like retribution, while a critical faction of the other is lost in self-absorbed silliness.

    Which brings us to why Joe Biden, regardless of the legitimacy he’s restored to the White House, the legislation he’s delivered and the wisdom he’s applied to Ukraine and now Israel/Hamas, is simply too precarious a vehicle to risk in another match up with Trump.

    Given the electoral college — vigorously defended with inverted, Mobius strip logic by greybeard Libertarians — the indifference to Biden of a couple hundred thousand Millenials, Gen Z’ers and blacks identified in the Times/Siena poll — restores to Trump to the White House. That’s how precarious the situation is … today. And a restoration of Trump incompetence, fraud and pop authoritarianism is simply too calamitous to imagine.

    The presumption among the political cognoscenti is that we are far past the point of no return in terms of Biden-Trump. Biden is in it to stay.

    That said, all of them that I follow go on to fret openly about the instantaneous death spiral of the Biden campaign given one “health episode” on Biden’s part, one mumble-mouth response in a debate, or another uptick in the price of gas.

    Trump Vermin | claytoonz

    Trump’s addled buffoonery has never deterred his voters. Nor will his dive deeper and deeper into truly ugly Himmler-Goebbels-speak. The MAGA mob either doesn’t get the historical references of “blood poison”, “rooting out vermin” and setting up “camps” for immigrants, or doesn’t care. Either way they’re still entertained, Trump is their retribution, and revenge is a very powerful human motivation.

    By contrast, one Mitch McConnell-like “freeze up” and Biden is toast.

    I know I’ve warned against catastrophic thinking, but I did say that some matters before us are “worrisome.”

    This is the biggest. Biden can’t make the mistake Ruth Bader Ginsburg made. Voters, especially young voters, want to be “excited” about a candidate. Sad but true. Political leadership is a form of entertainment. Joe Biden can never give them that.

    Their response then is to stay home or vote for some third party vanity act. And the consequence of that is the Trump restoration.

    I repeat what I’ve said before. Biden has done an excellent job. But the realities of 21st century politics powerfully suggest he should step aside and let a fresher face give critical voters the dopamine hit they need to feel entertained.

    Dear Liberal Cronies: Leave Catastrophic Thinking to the MAGA-nauts.

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    Vision of the Apocalypse - Inferno, 1595, 170×120 cm by Herry Meter de Bles: History, Analysis & Facts | Arthive

    It seems like a million years ago now, but back in 2009 I drove up to a sports bar in Big Lake, Minnesota to do a story off a night of speechifying by Republican fire breathers. The event was headlined by none other than Michele Bachmann, at the time — and I repeat, at the time — the most flagrant, batshit grifter on Minnesota’s landscape and arguably that of the whole country.

    I took a couple important things away from evening … before I was thrown out of the place.

    A: Until that night, it hadn’t quite centered itself in my mind how much the alleged thinking of Bachmann and her “base” revolved around notions of impending doom, catastrophe and apocalypse. As the night began I was at a table with a dozen normal enough looking … ardent Bachmann supporters. And as we chatted, I sensed the theme of … God’s righteous punishment, a complete collapse of the American system and the destruction even of life as we know it … all due to … that’s right folks … liberals and their heinous liberal ideas.

    Why, some of those libtards were even questioning Ms. Bachmann’s husband’s “pray way the gay” therapy cult!

    But the idea du jour that motivated several at the table to come out that night was … you’re sitting down right? … train service.

    As in a railroad train. Carrying people.

    Speaker after speaker, including Bachmann and Tom Emmer (who — and this revelation #2 — otherwise came off as the adult in the room), fired up the doomers with menacing visions of what would happen to them and their children right there in far exurban all-white Big Lake if legislative liberals, Met Council liberals and god knows what other mongrel cult of liberals funded a passenger train link that would let — them — get on a train Chicago, (Chicago!!!), and ride all the way to Big Lake.

    Everyone understood what Bachmann, Emmer and the rest meant by “Chicago.”

    Black folks! Hookers and pimps! Drug addicts and pushers! Gangbangers and shoot-outs on Main Street Big Lake! In other words: apocalypse, societal collapse and catastrophe. What liberals always want!

    As I say, someone figured I out that I was, shall we say, “unsympathetic” to the idea that liberals were conniving to pollute the Big Lake bloodline with Chicago pimps and addicts, and I was asked … no, told to leave. Which I did, processing on the drive home the near universal appeal to and acceptance of catastrophic thinking. “Christ, what a bunch of whack-os. How do they ever dare leave their houses?,” said I … in 2009.

    This all comes back in our current moment as I listen to so many liberal friends expressing their own variation of apocalyptic, catastrophic thinking based on their sense of life in 2023 USA. Obviously, over 14 years, eight of them choked with mind-breaking Trumpism, we’ve grown to accept the paranoid, fundamentally racist fantasies of what was once the far right but is now mainstream Republican-ism.

    We’ve listened — ad nauseum — to manifest fools bleat on about the decay of American values, a country “going in the wrong direction”, (at least every time a Democrat walks into the Oval Office) and the persecution of people like them who make this country what it is, meaning the not all that well educated, contentedly ill-informed and very white.

    But now, with the combined impacts of climate change, spiraling violence in the Middle East, polls showing young voters and blacks so unhappy that Joe Biden hasn’t met all their needs, solved all their problems and given them a free pony, they may sit out the next election, even if it means electing the Quadrophonically Indicted Human Cheeto … again, the apocalypse seems nigh, for liberals.

    My first reaction to the Big Lake crowd — and maybe the reason I was tossed out — was to blurt out something to the effect of, “Oh for fuck sake, maybe you should calm down and not take this shit so seriously.”

    My instinct is to say the same to my liberal cronies and fellow travelers today.

    Yes, everything you’re worried about is … mmm … worrisome. But merely worrying, palpitating and as the political pros like to say, “bed-wetting” fails not only to achieve anything positive, it reinforces, i.e. thickens the pall of catastrophic fever in the air just generally.

    I realize that the worst thing you can ever say to someone expressing apocalyptic phobias and high anxiety is, “Calm down.” But really, how about we all — and by “all” I mean those of us not mainlining speed balls of Russian disinformation, Mark Levin, Hannity and Steve Bannon — just get a grip?

    We’re a long — long — ways from election day 2024. 70-75% of the voting population isn’t paying any attention, much less any serious attention to what’s going on and the media mills make their quarterly nut selling you the sweet, sweet rage and terror that keeps you tuning back for more.

    If you really think a battle royale is coming — and it may be — a deep reserve of rationality and clear thinking is the best offense.

    So much for today’s sermon.

    Will We Ever Be Delivered from the Plague of Unserious People?

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    Lauren Boebert groped 'Beetlejuice' date in heavy-petting session before getting tossed out

    The current betting line is that this next Republican-driven government shut down, the one likely to begin at midnight on the 30th, will last three weeks. That anyway is what I’m picking up from the smart kids in the know.

    But … those kids have no idea what it will take to actually end it. The fundamental problem being that the — take your pick here — “Clown Caucus”, “idiots”, “MAGA dead-enders” leading the revolt simply don’t care what damage they wreak. Put another way, they aren’t really serious about spending, (all this cynical/moron-level grandstanding is over 1.9% of the federal budget). We all know that what it’s really about is the value to their personal fund-raising, which only increases the longer their tantrum.

    The “serious” business has been lodged in my brain lately thanks to the now infamous Lauren Boebert vaping/heavy petting session at that Denver theater and a fascinating story in the UK’s Daily Mail about South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, often touted as “veep” material for a second Trump term.

    Because it was both comically salacious and her hypocrisy/lying was validated by the videotape, we all know about Boebert, the epically nitwit Congressperson/former escort (or maybe not) from western Colorado. But the Noem story has received far less traction, possibly because The Daily Mail, Britain’s highest circulation paper, doesn’t exactly compare with the New York Times in terms of, you know, journalistic credibility.

    Still … with your gimlet eyes at full focus, I encourage you to read what the Mail dug up on Noem, who, keep in mind, is the sitting governor of an American state, albeit “Prairie ‘Bama” as I’m obliged to call it.

    The very short version is this: Noem is still carrying on a not particularly down low affair with ex-Trump “advisor” Corey Lewandowski. That’d be one thing I couldn’t give a damn about, other than the usual rich irony that she’s still selling herself — successfully — to rock-ribbed Prairie ‘Bama Republicans as a model mother and wife.

    Governor Kristi Noem, “God-Fearing” Family Woman, and Corey Lewandowski, Trump Creep, Reportedly Had “Yearslong” Affair | Vanity Fair

    But, as the story strongly suggests, the amount of time and state money she’s spending on far flung adventures to burnish her, mmm, conservative bona fides and get regularly advised by Lewandowski, is kind of, well, scandalous, not that anyone over there seems to care all that much.

    Noem of course is very much modeling her governing after the likes of Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Tim Pawlenty here in Minnesota, two dudes who thought nothing of contorting their management obligations to, first and foremost, advancing their laughable presidential ambitions. Although in Walker and Pawlenty’s defense their cynical manipulation of state government never approached ignoring a deadly pandemic that at one point in November 2020 had Noem’s Live Free or Die fiefdom #1 in the world in terms of deaths per capita. (But hey, most of those were Indians and migrant workers at slaughterhouses.)

    By contrast to all this manifest unseriousness, and the Matt Gaetz-Marjorie Taylor Greene clown caucus about to grind the gears of the country to a halt … again … (by now this is a Republican tradition), it’s worth a moment to compare all of that crew’s self-serving chaos to a very little noticed event hosted by MAGA bete noir, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, aka AOC.

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells climate marchers to be 'too big and too radical to ignore' – as it happened | Climate crisis | The Guardian

    While Boebert was checking her date for pocket change and Noem was racking up frequent flyer perks with Lewandowski, AOC, one of the most frightening figures on the landscape to the MAGA echo chamber was leading a thousands-strong awareness/protest march in New York City against fossil fuels and for green energy. Green energy! The horror! The stuff that you don’t choke on at stoplights behind that 7000 pound Duramax diesel. Pollution-free, job-creating renewable energy being an idea that Boebert/Noem/Gaetz/Greene Unserious Subcaucus rails against nearly as much as … as … well, I don’t know, as … books in libraries.

    Lauren Boebert, Far-Right Firebrand, Wins Re-election After Recount - The New York Times
    Kristi Noem's on a Political Rocket Ship. But Don't Rule Out a Crash. - POLITICO

    The contrast couldn’t be more stark. Yet one crew has the ability to bring government to dead stop … again … while the other, AOC, is treated like a Bond villain by the MAGA intellectuals on the set of “Fox & friends.”

    I apologize for not having a solution to the existence of nitwits and charlatans like Boebert, Noem, etc. All I’ve got is the same question I — and perhaps you — have asked for years now, namely, “What do voters see in these people? What do they imagine politicians like this will or are doing for them? How are their lives better with the likes of Lauren Boebert in charge?” I mean, beyond, “sticking it to the libs?”

    Personally, I return to brain science and ask what structure or gland or cluster of neurons is so excited by the sight of MAGA-speaking women in tight dresses and/or tight jeans … and can it be treated with drugs? Perhaps even via vape pen?

    Since He Obviously Can’t, Someone Has to Get a Grip on Elon Musk

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    Bill Gates says Elon Musk was 'super mean to me' after Tesla stock feud | Fox Business

    For what it’s worth, I would never count as a fan boy of Elon Musk. Even before this past year of reckless behavior — business and social media-wise — the guy was too much of a preening gadfly for my tastes. That said there is no question — none — that in terms of what he has created he is one of the most consequential characters of our era, and in a way that is unequivocally beneficial to human progress.

    But good god man, get some help.

    Not that he’s ever out of the news, (like The Great Orange Carbunkle Musk needs hourly affirmation that he still is everything he thinks he is), but with the new book from venerable biographer Walter Isaacson the chattering classes are again talking Elon with a vengeance. In particular, long time tech reporter-turned-podcaster, Kara Swisher, who has known Musk for several decades, interviewed him often and now with her typical bulldozer-like bluntness is declaring Musk a deplorable train wreck of a human being, and more critically, one the government urgently needs to get a grip on.

    The first news out of the Isaacson book was that Musk ‘”turned off” his Starlink low-orbit internet satellite network over Crimea out of concern that Ukraine might use it to coordinate missile attacks on Russian facilities … and thereby set off… WWIII. That news was semi-voided when Isaacson corrected himself, saying he misunderstood a “nuance” of the story, namely that Musk simply didn’t turn it on. (The technical term for turning the system on and off is called “geo-fencing”, which acts kind of like those invisible dog barriers people dig around their yards.)

    Whether he turned it off or didn’t turn it on, the very serious point is that this is one un-elected, demonstrably erratic billionaire with an endless number of financial conflicts of interest with outright American enemies (Russia) and serious rivals (China) deciding — on his own — how to fight naked aggression.

    That ain’t right folks, and the story could get far more calamitous if China, where Musk’s Tesla car operation has both an enormous facility and consumer market, decides to invade Taiwan.

    Swisher and her podcast partner, Scott Galloway, freely concede Musk’s entrepreneurial genius. Unlike say, the aforementioned Orange Carbunkle, who has never created anything of universal social value — thinking Trump University, Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump ties or Trump mugshot t-shirts here — the electric car revolution, SpaceX and Starlink — are bona fide Henry Ford-level leaps forward in substantive human endeavors.

    Unfortunately, with virulent anti-Semite Henry Ford in mind, Swisher and Galloway and others make the complaint about Isaacson’s book, (which I have not read), that while genius-level entrepreneurial functioning is often wrapped up in mercurial personalities, that is no reason to excuse the truly ugly, shameless descent Musk has taken in MAGA-like posturing.

    If you missed his recent insinuation that the Anti-Defamation League was responsible for the shocking decline in X/Twitter’s stock valuation, it was rancid and straight from every crackpot anti-semitic fever swamp you can think of.

    Those Jews, y’know, always jacking with the honest, hard-workin’ Aryans.

    The action item to this rant is that clearly Congress has to get full control of Musk vis a vis his numerous defense contracts. Serious professionals with serious oversight need to make military decisions, not a guy who has no qualms about acting out like a raging 15 year-old at the slightest imagined provocation.

    The other point Swisher and Galloway got in to on the same recent podcast was the overall tenor of Isaacson’s book — which Swisher had read and panned with a “meh.” Their point being that Isaacson, a genial, avuncular character with an impressive pedigree in professional journalism, never dares make a call — the call — on Musk.

    To which Galloway correctly sniffs, “It all feels like upscale access journalism.” Adding that if Isaacson — who wrote the most prominent biography of Apple’s Steve Jobs, (a genius who was often an asshole but never a public racist) — did drop the hammer on Musk, his chances of access to his next high-profile subject would evaporate in an instant.

    He spent months with Musk and Musk’s friends, family and foes and still, Swisher complains, the book left her — a very tough interviewer with a long history with Musk — demanding to know, “Ok, Walter, what do YOU actually think of this guy. Your opinion has value. What is it?”

    Isaacson BTW is booked as a guest on an upcoming Swisher podcast.

    Taylor, Barbie and Another Rough Summer for Boys

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    So what exactly makes Taylor Swift so great? – Harvard Gazette

    The mind tends to wander in the face of something as grim, dystopian and toxic as last week’s Republican “debate” in Milwaukee. I mean, even at this point in the collapse of Ye Grande Olde Party into a shreiking variation of The Real Housewives of The Villages, you expect something a tad more uplifting than, “This country is in decline” and “We are in a dark moment” from the same brand that perpetrated doddering ol’ Ronnie Reagan on us.

    Jesus, what a collection of bummers.

    Ron DeSantis' Key West anti-migrant missions raised pilot safety concerns

    But as I endured the polished ravings of far right wing America’s flavor-of-the-month, Vivek Ramaswamy, the pious nattering of Mike Pence, the cruelty-is-the-point jeremiads of Ron DeSantis and so on, I kept toggling back to … Taylor Swift and “Barbie.” And who young men in 2023 America have to take their culture cues from.

    Whatever else this summer will be known most for, the truly remarkable tour of Ms. Swift across the country, filling gigantic football stadiums with adoring legions of (mostly) young women paired with the billion dollar success of “Barbie”, again mostly thanks to the delight it inspired in young women, makes a case that 2023 has been The Summer of Babs and Taylor.

    Being just a wee bit of a curmudgeon I can make a modest case that the overwhelming appeal of Ms. Swift and “Barbie” is not without some concern.

    For example, there’s something a bit mercenary in Swift’s incessant extraction of disposable income from her fans. Never mind the sky high ticket prices, how about the re-re-release of her various albums in … different colors of vinyl … at $30+ a pop? And the vast array of “Taylor approved” merch? And … . Well it goes on and on in ways that I’m sure Mick Jagger kicks himself for never thinking of back in the early ’70s.

    Beyond that, on an artistic level, I do wonder what Ms. Swift’s pervasive indulgence in personal relationship melodrama signals to impressionable young women? What lovelorn 16 year-old doesn’t listen to any of 50 of Swift’s songs and presume that that cute guy she’s developed a crush on is in fact a rat bastard? (Which of course they could well be.)

    Similarly, fans of “Barbie”, and I’m one on a clever filmmaking level, argue that it’s real message is how both genders are locked into counterproductive stereotypes, not just all the doofus Kens strutting around. I guess I can see that, given some reflection. But I seriously doubt the majority of “Barbie’s” fans register much beyond, “Wow! Are boys dumb.”

    Which, again, they most certainly are. Especially if you pay attention to modern American politics and watched even 10 minutes of last week’s debate.

    There’s a new book out titled, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling” by a Brit named Richard Reeves.

    It’s received a middling amount of attention for its thesis — backed up by abundant data — that today’s males are fairing quite badly in comparison to their female counterparts. The fact that 57% of college degrees are now being awarded to women tells you something about how significantly young men in particular are falling behind in terms of higher education. After that you get into truly grim trend lines on addiction, various other forms of self-abusive behavior and suicide. Point being the picture isn’t encouraging … for men … and us, when you consider how all this anti-intellectual, overly-aggressive, self destructive behavior affects society at large.

    You can see where I’m going with this.

    Niggles aside, the over-arching cultural message from Taylor Swift and “Barbie” is something positive, community-enhancing based in a deeply enriching sense of gender pride and possibility. By the starkest of contrasts you listen to … Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron De Santis and of course He Who’s Name I’m Trying Damn Hard Not to Say for Fear of Spoiling My Lunch … and your reaction is basically the same as if confronted by a rabid carnivore in a dark alley. Lacking an escape route you want to find something with which to beat it over the head. It’s so goddam ugly.

    It seems to me there’s an indisputable direct line from the self-pitying, sullen, greivance-soaked animosities discussed by Reeves in his book and on various podcasts and the predominately under-educated male’s identification with The Orange God King and all those — Ramaswamy — shamelessly trying to out-dystopia him. (Gotta love the Dickensian name on that dude, btw. An obnoxious peddler of magical, mystical thinking: Rama – swami. Can’t make it up.)

    Young women can look on Taylor Swfit and think how wonderful and fun it would be to be her. But let’s imagine young men this summer — or over the past long eight years — looking at DeSantis, Ramaswamy and Him. What is their takeaway from the behavior they see there?

    My hope is that one takeaway from this moment is that young men in particular, males who took their culutural dominance for granted as some kind of god-given biological right, come to understand that they have genuinely failed to keep pace with the Summer of Sunny Girls and the 21st century.

    And The Odds Biden Pardons Trump Are What?

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    Florida Man Arrested: Trump Mug Shot

    Now that we’ve all had a good, hard-earned laugh at the mug shot of Fulton County perp #P01135809, we should probably turn to a discussion of the unlikelihood that convicted or not that glowering fool will never see the inside of a prison cell. If you’ve followed the game of scandal-mired high-profile politicians you know as well as I do that there’s an industry around them to prevent them from enduring the indignities of justice that would befall you, me and any platinum-selling rap star.

    But nefarious scheming withstanding, its possible to foresee a scenario where Joe Biden might agree to pardon Trump, for the simple reason of finally and fully excising a festering tumor from the public corpus.

    Sounds crazy, I know. But hear me out.

    I couldn’t bear to watch more than five minutes of Trump’s Twitter/X interview with Tucker Carlson. (Someone tell me if Carlson ever reminded Trump to his face how much he hated him.) But the snippet I endured showed me a tired, flabby, addled old man with no coherent thought in his head other than mewling — on and on — about how unfair everything and everyone has been to him. “Standard Trump”, you say. But the fatigue in his face and posture was what was striking. The guy is exhausted.

    As many have said, Trump is running again purely to return to the Oval Office and pardon himself. He’s never had any policy goals, other than wreaking havoc on his enemies, so why assume now that he’s got some big “to do” list, you know “infrastructure week 7.0” or “repealing Obamacare” or … oh, hell, why even bother … he doesn’t care about anything other than self-preservation. And by that I mean not sharing cell bunk with Big Louie or some MS 13 gangster.

    This then is where “The Art of the Deal”, to borrow a phrase, steps in. Given his unpardonable exposure in Georgia, Trump’s only true all-purpose Get Out of Jail Free card is a grand, overarching plea deal with … the Biden administration. A deal that pardons him for all his federal crimes, criminal and civil accrued to date and in the future, plus … plus … a coordinated arrangement with Fulton County/Georgia to waive detention in that case. All in exchange for dropping out of the 2024 race, never again running for public office and just basically shutting the f*ck up, under penalty of voiding the deal and reinstituting every sentence he faces if he screws up.

    In other words, “Go back to one of your goddam golf clubs and disappear. And by that we mean don’t stick your jowly orange mug up over the privet hedges ever again.”

    The viability in this idea rests in Trump taking seriously his attorneys’ counsel that he stands a near 100% likelihood of being convicted on at least one of the 91 counts against him. (Jesus Christ, man! 91!)

    Conviction on something, and maybe a lot of somethings, is nigh on as likely as the sun rising tomorrow over ex-wife Ivanka’s unmowed grave. And conviction is far more likely and certain than him winning another election against Joe Biden.

    No one seems to doubt Trump’s had the idea of a plea deal presented to him by one or more of the semi-legitimate lawyers who have passed through his gilded office doors.

    But, you ask, “Why would Biden do this? His chances of reelection are far better facing Trump than just about anyone else currently in the race.”

    And that’s true, if you accept conventional wisdom, which I do. Obviously, as a gift to the country, a deal that removes Trump and all his relentless bullshit from the media marketplace with the stroke of pen, is an unalloyed public good. But politics are politics. So the strategizing from Biden and the government is how and when to float the deal that best minimizes the ability of the Republicans to prop up an effective alternative.

    That moment is certainly not now or any time before next spring’s primary season has run its course. But what about — just spitballing here — right after the Republicans anoint him anew in Milwaukee next summer?

    More sage heads than mine will argue that the “excitement” of a new, fresh GOP nominee — perhaps an annoying, jabbering tech bro, a woman who is more weather vane than serious administrator, or a pious ex-talk show host-turned-veep who they tried to lynch a couple years ago, take your pick — would push anyone of them over the top against “Sleepy Joe” and his “crippling inflation” and “crime infested blue cities”. For that kind of thinking, the risk is too high.

    But what percentage of the MAGA cult, deprived of their 6’3″ 215, Muhammed Ali-in-his-prime thought leader, might simply stay home? Would their evaporation out balance the “normie” suburban Republicans who’d come flowing back, relieved not to have to vote for an exhausting fat fraud/rapist/coup leader?

    No one knows. But $50 says both camps, Trump’s and Biden’s have given thought to how to make this happen.

    Hollywood, On the Front Lines of the Fight with AI

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    Marilyn Monroe Desktop 4K resolution High-definition television High-definition video, marilyn monroe, celebrities, computer, girl png | PNGWing

    While it may not look like it ,I really am trying to reduce the amount of time I waste thinking about You Know Who and his cult of white nationalist paranoiacs. It’s summer in America and there are so many other villains worthy of my interest.

    Take for example the on-going-and-now-getting-truly-serious strike(s) in Hollywood. Yesterday the TV industry announced the four million awards it will give out at the Emmys, a show which might not even happen because of the current writers strike. Then, last night, the Screen Actors Guild announced it too is prepared to strike, as early as today, which means that everything in movies will shut down. The two Guilds have never before gone on strike simultaneously, so it is, as Ron Burgundy likes to say, kind of a big deal.

    There are all sorts of issues that are arcane and eye-glazing, many dealing with giving writers — aka the people who thought up and produced the idea for the show/movie — a fair cut of the dough that the movie makes as the years roll on. But, as everyone following the conflict knows quite well, the single issue that is most motivating writers, and now actors, is the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence. No bullshit /journalist podcaster Kara Swisher has plenty to say about the movie industry predicament re: AI, and of course Ezra Klein at The New York Times has been on a tear about AI in general for months.

    Never mind that AI is very real, very much here already and increasing in sophistication practically by the hour. With Donald Trump and his MAGA morons sponging up 90% of the country’s attention, few are giving it the focus it needs.

    But … Hollywood is. TV and movie writers, some of whom are successful and rich and many who are not, recognize the ease with which they can be replaced by computer programs, as long as the mission of the big company in charge of production, be it Disney or Amazon or Apple, is satisfied with what I’ll politely call “familiar” or “traditional” storytelling. AI, as it exists today, quite masterfully collects and collates themes, types of characters and styles of dialogue into scripts unrecognizable from what humans produce. So, “Why bother with all these pissy, whiney, expensive writers?” you might say if you’re the CEO of Amazon or Disney.

    The hard irony here is that there is a logic to the boss’s argument, as long as all you want to fill your program schedule is the 2000th variation on “Two Broke Girls”, another re-re-boot of “Lord of the Rings”, the next “Star Wars” step child or any rom-com you can think of. All the elements for that, um, “familiar” type of programming is in the computer hard drive and ready for instant replication — with strategic variations — by, you know, Amazon or Netflix’ on board HAL 9000 computer.

    Things are much different, and tough for AI if you tell it to produce a story with dialogue and ideas no one has ever heard before. (I wonder if AI could ever produce something like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror.) But, folks, it’s show biz. Giving the people what they want is just another way of saying, “Give them what they’ve already seen and liked before.”

    So yeah, the writers are in a tough place.

    But actors too are quickly realizing that they are replaceable as well. Imagine, for example, ChatGPT 9 in 2031, or whatever, commanded to collect, scour and digest every film and every interview Marilyn Monroe gave in her career and reproduce her in near perfect detail in an entirely new production, maybe opposite, say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the supporting cast? Are you prepared to say something like that could never happen?

    In my more macabre imaginings I think of Oliver Stone, or one of his acolytes, re-staging Dallas 11/22/63 with perfect AI-created doubles of JFK, Jackie, LBJ and the whole cast of historical characters, to the point the camera/audience is in the limo rolling through Dealey Plaza. Point being, AI will be able to create almost anything that can be imagined … and without a human actor or screenwriter to be paid $20 million per film plus residuals.

    I have no idea how the Hollywood strikes will end. (Swisher’s Pivot podcast partner Scott Galloway believes the unions have been badly misled and lack and serious leverage.)

    But as with several other vital cultural issues over the past century — anti-semitism, racism, gay rights, etc. — El Lay is at the tip of the spear fighting something that’s coming, one way or another, for all of us.