How Unlikely Is It That It’ll Be Trump v. Biden in ’24?

Posted on June 15, 2023 by Brian Lambert

Biden vs. Trump 2024 would be the rematch nobody wants

I believe I have previously mentioned my fanboy enthusiasm for the work of Mark Leibovich, formerly of The New York Times Magazine and now, like just about every other four star journalist/writer, at The Atlantic. Leibovich’s classic book is “This Town” a truly “inside” view of the D.C. cocktail party/power culture, where politicians, lobbyists and big name journos regularly-to-constantly schmooze, clink glasses and incestuously buff up each other’s bona fides. It was as hilarious as it was dismaying.

His most recent, “Thank You for Your Servitude”, released last fall, was all about the truly craven GOP toadies — can you say Lindsey Graham fast enough? — who have taken out triple mortgages on what little soul they ever had to defend Donald Trump on everything he’s ever said or done. Which means committing character suicide five times a day.

Anyway, Leibovich being Leibovich with his Times/Atlantic pedigree, gets all sorts of people who really should know better to talk to him. And almost all play laughable word games to lay out their imagined resolution for what we’ll call “the Trump problem.” A chaotic epoch that nearly all of them wish would end … like yesterday … no matter how much they defend him publicly.

What Leibovich leaves for his punchline conclusion is that there is actually a detectable consensus, though only a couple party pros dare say it out loud.

And that is … they wish (and hope) the guy just up and dies. Face first into a bucket of KFC wings. Whatever.

You laugh. But they’re serious. I ask you, what do you think mouldering stalactites like Mitch McConnell really think is their best way out of the constant Trump quagmire?

This all came to mind again the other day when a couple of us were talking about the last time the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were set a year and a half or more before the election? How far back do you have to go in our lifetimes? Adlai Stevenson and Ike in ’56? In every other election cycle the presumptive tickets shifted significantly over the 18 to 24 month “home stretch.”

And yet … here we are in June of 2023, 16 months before the next election and the hardened assumption is that our choices will again be Trump and Joe Biden. One guy is 81 and while competent moves like a guy who is, well, 81. Opposite him is a guy, nigh onto morbidly obese and demonstrably erratic mentally, who has just turned 77 and is under more legal pressure than John Gotti, with indictments piling up faster than tickets on an overparked delivery van in lower Manhattan. (I have personal experience with that one.)

My point here is to warn against certainty in this situation and prepare contingencies.

Trump looks strong. He is making his usual boatload of money off the Mar-a-Lago indictment. (And again, what is in anyone’s mind who writes a $50 check to a guy who says he’s a billionaire?) His poll numbers vis a vis Ron DeSantis and the other GOP munchkins remain daunting. Sixty-plus percent of Republican voters say they believe he won the 2020 election. He looks invincible, and as we all know, could campaign all next year wearing an ankle bracelet. (Hell, he could sell replicas at his MAGA merch tables.)

But … it is very hard to imagine Trump bears up physically under the stresses that are compounding by the hour. And mentally … well, he’s Trump. But as some have pointed out, a big part of his appeal to his celebrity-obsessed base is that he’s “fun” or at least “entertaining”, two, um, virtues less evident with every droning, monotonous, whiny speech, like the buzz-killer he delivered in Bedminister after this week’s indictment.

Thankfully, his main competition over in the Pissed Off White Victim bubble is De Santis who has all the charm and entertainment appeal of a medieval executioner.

And Biden … well, face it. 81 is 81 and serious things regularly happen to 81 year-olds with the best health care money can provide. What happens with even a minor stroke? Or some other age-related infirmity? Should Biden be so incapictated he’s unable to run, try imagining the Democratic scramble — even this month, much less next summer or later, to produce another unifying candidate. Kamala Harris? Mmmm, I kinda doubt it. Mayor Pete? Gavin Newsom? Bernie?

Minus Trump, how do you assess a DeSantis match up against Biden? How many “swing voters” would reflexively gravitate back to the young, smarter, more disciplined, Trumpy-but-not-Trump Republican? Would his cynical, cro-magnon policies like that six-week abortion ban and all-the-guns-you-can-eat really deter critical suburban women?

I don’t know, but because I embrace the gloom, it’s stuff I think about.

Have a nice day.

CNN’s Chris Licht, Yet Another Example of How Everything Trump Touches Dies.

Posted on June 9, 2023 by Brian Lambert

A week ago, reading Tim Alberta’s 15,000 word Atlantic piece on the tribulations of CNN exec Chris Licht, I kept shaking my head and saying, “This isn’t survivable.” In a rare moment of foresight (for me) I was quickly proven correct. Days later Licht was “let go” and CNN was “moving on.”

What made the story unsurvivable wasn’t just the reporting on CNN’s ratings problem or even Licht’s handling of the absurdly problematic town hall with Donald Trump, although that is very much connected, as much as it was the portrait of a much too generic corporate functionary in way over his head in terms of dealing with his primary resources, namely the anchors, reporters and staff at CNN. Had Licht been wheeled in to shore up the quarterly earnings statement at Road Runner Acme Explosives, Inc. he might still be in charge. But not when his mission was to sell a “reset” of journalistic tone and focus to hundreds of professionals whose primary skill set involves recognizing the pungent odor of bullshit.

Others have focused on all variety of details in the extraordinarily well reported piece, but Alberta — formerly at Politico and a guy with deep sources within what used to be your father’s Republican party — correctly placed particular focus on Licht’s determination to apply the concept of “absolute truth” to CNN’s presentation of the news. Alberta presses him several times on what … exactly … that means … “absolute truth?”

Licht had no good answer. As Generic Corporate Man, Licht was groomed and installed by David Zaslav the current head of recently reconfigured Warner Brothers-Discovery + and himself answerable to Colorado billionaire John Malone, long-serving board member and, FWIW, the second largest land owner in the United States. If you’re scoring at home, Malone — a classic old school Republican — wasn’t pleased with CNN’s persistent hyper-critical tone toward Trump, and put his energies into getting Zaslav his job with the clear instructions to restore CNN to something like partisan neutrality, which largely determind Zaslav’s choice of Licht. (I’ll leave aside for the moment that Zaslav, paid $165 million annually, is widely viewed as Voldemort in the current strike by TV writers. Generic, AI-style scripted TV being acceptable as long as those quarterly numbers hold up.)

David Zaslav Doubles Down on Theatrical Movies at CinemaCon - Variety — David Zaslav

Point being here that this generic/neutrality shtick/vision from Malone (and other board members) which begat Zaslav which begat Licht was nakedly obvious to CNN’s employees. As Alberta and others now tell the story, rebalancing objectivity wasn’t the issue for CNN’s staff. There was acceptance of the idea of dialing back the constant Trump rage. But Licht appeared clueless about how to do that given the, um, pesky journalistic, reality-based facts at hand.

The 'King of Cable' Behind a Charter-Time Warner Cable Deal - The New York Times — John Malone

What Licht couldn’t articulate to his news team was how … exactly … do you report on so prominent a public, political figure as Trump, and those who so ardently supprt him, without reporting, objectively and accurately, with a commitment to something approaching absolute truth, that he’s a fraud and a liar as well as criminally incompetent?

Go ahead. Everyone’s listening. We’ll take notes.

Absolute truth: Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump says he didn’t. One is absolutely true, the other isn’t. Are we going to pretend both are?

This was and to some extent still is a serious issue for many levels of modern journalism, but particularly those still adherring to paradigms of reporting now wildly out-paced by characters and competitors for whom truth, absolute and otherwise, is first and foremost a sales game. What’s true is whatever the people will believe.

Back in 2016 I did a piece talking to local journalism profs and pros about injecting the word “lying” into reporting on then candidate Trump. The consensus was that “lying” should be applied only as a last resort and with full confidence of (Trump’s) intent, which of course no one could ever say, so in effect you never use the word “lying.”

That standard has clearly eroded over the ensuing seven and a half years, with even The New York Times, deploying “the ‘L’ word” … judiciously. Meanwhile, CNN, cable competitors like MSNBC and untold websites applied “lie”, “lies” and “lying” much more generously. Some would say “excessively”, though still not inaccurately or unfairly in the context of Trump.

The question for Licht and now for post-CNN and other news organizations still timorous about calling Trump and his hyper-partisan acolytes what they clearly/absolutely are, is how do you assert journalistic credibility when you decline to describe accurately and in the common vernacular what is so vividly apparent? What are you protecting yourself or your audience from?

Countless norms have been broken by Trump’s rampage across the international stage. The once sagacious concept of a balanced presentation of both sides of story, essentially communicating validity in both points of view, has taken a particularly brutal battering in The Age of Trump. Most reporters and most audiences are too smart, and have access to too many other venues of information, to see neutrality as an asset.

What they see instead is timidity, and often complicity.

Libertarians and The Volcanic Horror of Majority Rule

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Brian Lambert

I sometimes wish I was a better person. But kind of like the famous Pacino line from “Godfather III” things just keep pulling me back in … to my dark, snarky place where a fundamental weakness of character allows me to be amused by the frustration and rage of others.

Like, for example, Minnesota’s Republicans fuming over all the insane legislation “triumphalist” Democrats have “rammed down our throats” this session, which ends today, thankfully for them. (IMHO) Exhibit “A” of their frustration came to my attention on the letters page of the Star Tribune yesterday. Here were a handful of clearly literate readers objecting to a column by the paper’s Op-Ed eminence grise, Doug Tice, a week earlier.

Having missed that one I dialed it up and began reading … and laughing. Now Doug is not a bad guy. In fact, a couple hundred years ago he was once my editor. But he’s very much of the old school, board room libertarian vein of cultural perspective. It’s a peculiar, rarefied academy of people who affect an above the fray, apart-from-the-madding crowd stance that is highly dependent on sustaining the status quo.

So, in a piece titled, “National Popular Vote would be popular folly” Doug commits a cardinal sin for status quo libertarians … he lets you see him sweat. This popular vote thing has set off his smoke alarms.

The topic is something I’ve written about before and one I seriously doubt more than 5% of the general public has ever heard of … the National Popular Vote Compact. At its essence its a means by which, after 247 years of “democracy” the United States would finally elect Presidents by … wait for it … the expressed will of the majority. In other words, this “folly” would neuter the Electoral College, by which if you’ve been paying attention lately, we got George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Iraq war followed soon thereafter by the Donald Trump hellscape of incompetence, fraud and insurrection.

Never minding that the United States is a, um, somewhat different place than it was in 1787 when the Electoral College was adapted to protect the rights of all those … landed, primarily white male … farmers, Tice launches his piece with the line about “triumphalist DFLers running the show” here in otherwise common-sense Minnesota and sustains a steady slide of frustration from there on out.

Among my favorites in the “letting them see you sweat” category are cracks about:

… “a scheme to alter the US Constitution” (echoes of Sam Alito on that one),

… DFLers “indulging nearly every iconoclastic impulse” and engaging in “volcanic progressivism”, (or put another way, “delivering what they told voters they would do”/elections matter)

… the Compact being “a fashionable liberal enthusiasm,” (a bit like conservatives reaching back to 16th century Europe to fortify an “originalist” interpretation of said Constitution)

… and how under this crazy, volcanic scheme the Compact would “introduce unprecedented instability and uncertainty into America’s basic political process” … unlike say the Supreme Court stepping in to hand the election to a guy by a partisan-line one-vote margin, or 70,000 votes across six states delivering unto us and the beloved Constitution a reality TV jackass who later suggested voiding that same Constitution to remain power … after coming up seven million short in the popular vote?

Common sense says you gotta preserve that kind of stability.

Tice goes on at great lengths to describe scenarios where, gasp! candidates might campaign hardest in places with … the most voters … and how Minnesota (and by extension, Wyoming and Kansas and Oklahoma) might not get as much attention as say, (insert hissing noises) California and New York.

As I say, knowing Doug a bit and following this Compact idea and the horror it inspires in conservatives who are well aware of their precarious hold on to minority rule in this country, I kept shaking my head and laughing. The candidate with the most votes wins? Insane! The (exclusively white, property-owning male) Fathers would never have agreed to such a thing!

In the end — for this session anyway — volcanic DFLers have delivered on dozens of promises they’ve made to Minnesota voters for decades, but until 2023 have been thwarted by Republicans. A crew who, if you look close, are currently operating with few if any credible policy goals — other than status-quo preserving obstruction.

But libertarians, with their dog-earred copies of Ayn Rand still tucked into their pilling cardigan pockets can take heart a while longer … the “real insurrection” of majority rule in the form of the National Popular Vote Compact needs several more state legislatures before it would take effect.

Tucker Cost Fox More Than He Was Worth

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Brian Lambert

Comic: Claytoonz: Tucker Carlson canceled

I concede up front that what follows may well be a classic of the, “No duh” genre of punditry. But here goes, anyway.

Regarding Fox firing Tucker Carlson: Some way, some how this is mainly about money. We are after all talking Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp, a media empire that for 40-plus years has demonstrated no — as in zero — concern about reputational damage from spewing reckless sleaze, bigotry and flagrant disinformation. Carlson wasn’t fired because he embarrassed Fox.

His deep dives and happy wallows in all of his trademark racist and sexist ugliness could hardly have concerned Fox to the point that it would fire … it’s most profitable prime time host. He was, after all, following the implicit direction of the company’s business strategy.

Now, that said, the other edge of the sword with a “star” who has trafficked in gross transgressions against common social decency is that the bills for such behavior really do start to add up. As you may have followed in the wake of Fox’s $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Services, NewsCorp will be able to deduct a fat chunk of those damages on it’s taxes. (I know, I know. Like me, you’re wondering how Rupert Murdoch hasn’t long ago reduced his U.S. tax obligations to nothing.) But then — after the damages — there’s the premiums Fox will have to pay for the production insurance that covers some if not all of the Dominion settlement.

I haven’t been able to find anyone estimating what kind of increases we might be talking about here. But if I were the CFO of whatever company covers Fox, and I were forced to write a check for … hundreds of millions … to cover damages that should have been mitigated if not avoided entirely if the customer had effective management, I know my next move would be to hand them a premium increase worth five or ten times Carlson’s $20 million annual salary. Especially when you consider Smartmatic and all the other lawsuits queued up for pretty much the same corporate behavior.

Based on reporting from last night and this morning, there are suggestions that Carlson’s snarky shots at Fox managers like CEO Suzanne Scott, (who is, excuse me, fully culpable in everything that has gone on), is a factor in Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch souring on Carlson. But please, the guy was a major profit center. Who really cares if he slags his boss-in-name-only once in a while?

Personally, I’m more inclined to suspect that the Carlson redacted in those … hilarious … Fox internal e-mails/texts is more damaging than we can currently imagine. (See link above.) So damaging that Fox knows Smartmatic’s lawyers, who can use the Dominion depositions as a starting point, already have them boxed into a corner for a settlement larger than Dominion’s … with another thud of insurance premium increases to follow. Not to mention shareholder lawsuits.

There seems to be little doubt that Carlson had few fans within Fox corporate or its newsroom. The guy was out free ranging thanks to the cash he was bringing in from the audience of 3 million he guaranteed D-list advertisers night after night. But, as with Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly before him, at some point all the impunity big ratings buys you isn’t enough.

I never cease to love reminding people that Bill O’Reilly, once thought as untouchable as Carlson, paid one woman … $32 million out of his own pocket to settle her claims against him, claims that included, “repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her.” And she, for the record, was one of six women Fox and O’Reilly paid off.

Point being that a sense of titanic impunity quite often leads to deeply squalid misbehavior, of a kind that creates very large bills for both aggressors and their employers.

With that in mind, I give you this from the suit Carlson’s former producer Abby Grossberg has filed against Fox.

Who replaces Carlson is a topic for another rant. But Fox’ business dilemma is clear and fascinating. Those three million loyal viewers, hungry for anything Fox tells them will not be satisfied with some old school Republican nattering on about capital gains and marginal tax rates. That crowd tunes in for the hysterical hellfire … a shtick that appears to be costing Fox/NewsCorp more and more money with every passing year and superstar host.

Lights! Camera! Places! The Trial of the Century!

Posted on April 15, 2023 by Brian Lambert

How the Fox News hosts show up in the Dominion lawsuit documents

With apologies to Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Gwyneth Paltrow and O.J. Simpson, the trial of the century, or the past 100 years begins Monday in Delaware. That’s when FoxNews, the prime purveyor of misinformation into our modern marketplace of ideas, has to explain why it was OK or “newsworthy” to defame Dominion Voting Systems in order to keep its ratings and revenue up.

I am not the only great legal mind baffled by the lack of a settlement in this case. Given the astonishing disclosures in the deposition/pre-trial phase, with popular Fox hosts chattering about how they “hate” Donald Trump, how “insane” the idea of a stolen election is, and how they have to keep up the dense screen of smoking bullshit to mollify their (none too bright?) viewers, how does anything get better in a court room when all the redactions are lifted and Sean Hannity … Sean Hannity … is put under cross examination?

I heard someone compare this trial — which may or may not be televised – more on that in a moment — to the 1925 Scopes/Monkey trial, where the legal system had to make a seismic judgment on the validity of evolution. (I can only imagine Hannity’s thinking on something as woke and science-y as that.) It’s a fair comparison.

There’s always a danger in over-blowing the importance of any legal event. But whether Fox is found guilty of recklessly and deeply cynically promoting a storyline lacking any evidence whatsoever — and certainly amplified the kind of rabid thinking that led to a deadly riot on the U.S, Capitol is, you know, kind of a bigger deal than if Johnny Depp was a drugged-out bastard or Gwyneth failed to get out of the way of a dude on a ski slope. This case is a bona fide cultural moment.

Theories and histories and courses are already being written and taught on the role Fox and other forums of right-wing transgressive entertainment have had on American culture. This trial, with Fox dealing from a very weak hand, has the potential to fully expose the shameless, naked cynicism of a wildly lucrative and influential enterprise … to those who choose to hear it.

As of today, Saturday, no decision has been made on media requests for the trial to be televised, a la Depp v Heard, or the People v O.J. or Derek Chauvin. It will be a startling decision if the request is denied.

I mean, could the people involved, from Rupert Murdoch on down through Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo and … Sean Hannity … be any more prominent public figures inspiring any greater legitimate public interest in how they defend what they presented … on television … to millions of credulous viewers? The answer is “no.”

The presiding judge has already made things more difficult for Fox by declaring that they can not argue that the near hourly infusion of steaming offal was “newsworthy” and therefore a legitimate journalistic effort on their part. (You know, let’s hear from both sides. You first and foremost, Rudy Giuliani.) The judge has also registered displeasure with Fox playing cute about Rupert’s role as some kind of out of touch figurehead of the operation with no day to day authority over what went on. (The judge has also ruled that the prosecution can’t draw lines from Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the Kraken lady, and what happened on January 6.)

As part of my prep work, reading up and listening to (abundant) punditry on the trial, I can offer the following.

1: It is likely it is Dominion, not Fox, who is refusing to settle, on the grounds that this case is so strong and that actual malice is so clearly evident. “You want to negotiate, Rupert? Our number remains a firm $1.6 billion, plus an on-air apology from Tucker Carlson.”)

2: If Fox loses this case, it will almost certainly keep on appealing, all the way to … wait for it … Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of the Supreme Court. The thinking being that this so clearly a defining, precedent-setting moment in First Amendment litigation and the privileges of journalism that it requires full and final judgment from … the highest and most incorruptible court in the land. (Expect Sam Alito to quote something from the Code of Hammurabi.)

3: Just as Fox is saying almost nothing about Clarence Thomas’ sleazy relationship with a billionaire, expect that the name of Bill Kennard will come up often, in court and on Fox’ prime time entertainment shows. Kennard is partner in the private equity crew that owns a majority share of Dominion Voting Systems, along with being a former Ambassador under Barack Obama, a contributor to both Obama and Bill Clinton as well as a board member for AT&T and a couple other mega corporations. Fox will not be able to resist trying to sell the idea that Kennard’s presence exposes just another woke, deep state, radical socialist, George Soros-inspired, ultra liberal attack on hard working truth tellers.

4: If Rupert Murdoch can’t get himself out of testifying based on his age and fragile health he’ll be key to dropping the guillotine blade on … others. I mean, the poor guy. He’s got to still be emotionally drained after e-mailing wife #3 that their marriage was over and dumping potential bride #4 for her religious zealotry. A guy like that can get on a private jet, hell, does Delaware even have a cement runway? But if he testifies, he will almost certainly spin the argument that those “others”, namely Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs actually believed the stuff he’s called “crazy” in conversations with Fox execs. How much do you figure those three are spendiong in legal fees these days?

5: Sans settlement, the trial could last several weeks. Weeks that the Fox audience will see precious little relating to the shameless perfidy of it’s most popular hosts, and plenty about how the justice system is rigged against free speech. Various scattered pundits, desperate for a contrarian angle on the progress of the trial, will clutch pearls and fret about the precedent this sets. Wild lawsuits against honest operations who try as best they can to get the story right, report accurately and quickly apologize for any inadvertent errors!

Ignore them. Those people are fools.

What makes the Fox – Dominion suit so fundamental and profound is that no other major television news corporation in history has gone so rogue with the journalism basics of truth telling as Fox News. They are a stark and colossal outlier to fair-mindedness and good faith.

If you’re in the news game, the only precedent you need to observe is not acting with malice in pursuit of making a buck, or a billion and a half bucks …annually … for years. … from an audience that doesn’t care if you’re lying to them.

The Very Big Difference Between Nixon and Trump.

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Brian Lambert

In the wake of the decades-overdue indictment of Donald J. Trump there’s been a lot of talk about my previous favorite Republican criminal president, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The obvious comparison being that A: Both at one point were looking at possible jail time for their behavior, and B: Cases were/are being made that indictment and jailing would be a bad, banana republic look for the USA.

A month after Nixon resigned Gerald Ford, the epitome of your dull, institutional D.C., no-wake team player, pardoned Nixon to put an end to “our long national nightmare”. Never mind that vengeance-crazed twerps like myself and 70-80 million others were popping corn in anticipation of Dick’s televised trial. (Ford’s approval rating dropped 25% in one day as a result.)

There’s a line of thought that Nixon and Trump are comparable on the scale of malfeasance, criminality and their rot-from-within threat to democracy, and should be treated similarly. I don’t see it that way.

Without diminishing the illegal and barbaric bombing campaign Nixon ordered to deliver a “victory” in Vietnam — long, long past the point when it was obvious the North Vietnamese weren’t going to submit to anything we did — Nixon’s Watergate fiasco was very small beer compared to what Trump has engaged in. And by that I’ll let it go at, A: kowtowing to a homicidal dictator like Vladimir Putin in general, B: withholding duly-appropriated weapons to Ukraine in a mob-style shakedown to force them to invent a scandal around his election opponent and … oh yeah … C: inciting a riot to overthrow the government based on a lie about an election he plainly lost.

For all his deeply ingrained psychological failings and insecurities, Nixon was a familiar enough institutional actor. We’d seen his type before, going back to the likes of Warren G. Harding and other flagrant abusers of legal niceties. Additionally, Nixon, who was intelligent and disciplined enough to carry out the basics of the job did interact with Congress well enough to produce and handful of commendable legislation.

Not so with Trump … ever. As we’ve seen in shockingly explicit relief during his now eight year rampage through our consciousness, Trump has neither the interest or the ability to focus on legislation or anything that doesn’t primarily benefit him. Unlike Nixon and every other corrupt politician who achieved the grand stage, Trump was and is solely … a personality. A creation of pop culture, with no footing at all in serious “public service”, however you take that to mean.

As many have long said, Trump is a manifestation of a deeply anti-intellectual strain in American culture, something that has always existed, but never before at this scale or volume, thanks to the virulence of our media/social media entertainment culture. (The irony for me always being that where most think of entertainment as providing pleasure via laughter, escapist adventure or titillation, the entertainment culture that has produced Trump and the Trumpists infecting Congress, delivers instead regular, reliable doses of outrage and greivance. Good times! Bon appetit!)

The salient point here is that where it was possible to agree with Gerald Ford that enough was enough and it was time to move on, because Nixon was, well, just a standard-size politician who got a bit out over his skis, Trump is something more sinister and worrisome.

Unlike Nixon, Trump inspires a clearly violent cult of irrational partisans. Unlike Nixon, Trump still enjoys a near lockstep (public) support of fellow Republicans. (Never mind 90% are privately wishing he’d die and be gone tomorrow.) And unlike Nixon, Trump’s career-long strategy is to never concede defeat, while ignoring and disrespecting every process that tries to contain his criminality. And — this is important — unlike Nixon, Trump has already demonstrated the willingness and ability to summon mob violence to “defend” him.

Historian Jon Meacham was on TV again this morning making the point that part of any nation’s maturing process is recognizing when history doesn’t apply. That is to say recognizing unprecedented threat and responding in unprecedented ways.

The response to presidential criminality 50 years ago probably doesn’t meet the broader, louder, more violent demands of today’s conflict. So right now, that means dropping every appropriate legal hammer on a character who has shamelessly, unrepentantly abused the values of this country, no matter how much howling and mayhem he sets off.

No doubt something bad will happen … somewhere. But the country/culture will be far better off for facing up and defending its values, as opposed to begging off in the vain hope of ending this latest long, long national nightmare.

Another Morning Celebrating Freedoms and Rights in America

Posted on March 28, 2023 by Brian Lambert

As I write this we’re up to 131 mass shootings since the first of the year. If like me you’re bad at math, that’s 131 in 87 days. … and it’s not even 10 am, so that number will likely go up before I finish this rant … which is part of that same sick ritual.

Of all the daily rituals of American life is there one sicker and sadder than the post-mass shooting reaction cycle? The answer is, “no.”

We all know the basics. There’s overwhelming public support for the very … very … basics. Like the “red flag” laws to take handguns, rifles, bazookas, whatever away from the guy in your neighborhood out naked in the street screaming at squirrels. And for background checks before the sketchy dude at your local “gun show” hands over a machine gun to an 18 year-old who can’t spell his own name. Basic stuff.

But nothing changes. Or I should say nothing changes that might mitigate the constant slaughter. In fact, the only real change is in states with deeply craven, insecure Republican politicians who feel obligated to produce new and less restrictive “gun rights” every legislative session. That naked guy waving a gun at squirrels? Let’s enhance his Second Amendment right to tote his machine gun into the Dollar General and sue anyone who says he can’t. That folks is “freedom.”

Christmas card of Andy Ogles — obviously Republican — congressman for the Nashville district where yesterday’s school slaughter took place. His statement on yeasterday’s killings. “My family and I are devastated by the tragedy that took place at The Covenant School in Nashville this morning. We are sending our **thoughts and prayers** to the families of those lost. As a father of three, I am utterly heartbroken by this senseless act of of violence.” Classy.

Republicans, less terrified these days of the imploded-by-their-own-scandals NRA than they are of their gun obsessed “base”, most if not all of whom are MAGA-nauts, ritually claim “there’s nothing we can do”. And with more guns floating around the country than people, they have something of a point. The only thing that would truly reduce the slaughter(s)-of-the-day is confiscating, mmm, 330 to 340 million guns, which is never going to happen.

But … I have always had my “to do” list for at least obstructing the ever-increasing rate of these obscenities.

A: Federal legislation overriding any and all state laws — here’s looking at you Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginny, etc — requiring permitting, licensing and proof of insurance for all firearms in your possession. If the day ever comes when the USA gets Minnesota-like liberal control of the White House and Congress … this should be Job #1.

B: Market-based insurance for every type of gun. Let State Farm and Liberty Mutual assess the risk of naked squirrel guy owning an AR-15. Likewise the slightly twitchy, macho “hunter” dude regaling his bar buddes about the 28 guns he’s got prepped and ready back at his trailer. An annual $1000 bill for every Glock he packs to the church picnic might slow him down … a bit.

C: A federal tax on ammunition. There’s plenty wrong everywhere, but when some numbskull teenager working part time at Taco Bell can afford 3000 rounds of ammo for his combat rifle, we’ve moved deep into “whacked”-land. How does $10 a bullet sound?

D: Constant cultural ridicule of the gun obsessed. I don’t know about you but in my conversations with (clearly single issue) gun “enthusiasts”, the sexual over-compensation of their gun ownership/brandishing positively oozes from their pores. The guys (95% being male, with easily 30% checking the all the markers for incel status) stockpiling weapons and ammo and living in a perpetual bubble of “threat assessment” have plainly lost control over a fundamental facet of human psychology. Their guns have replaced something they’ve lost, or can’t get up any longer.

If they weren’t armed and dangerous I’d let it slide. But given their personal armory and their influence over chickenshit Republican politicians, they are the richest, ripest targets for masculinity-lacerating ridicule — from late night comics, bloggers, Twitter obsessives and (god forbid!) mainstream editorial writers,. Lay it on. Thick and heavy. And keep it coming. Identify them as the impotent fools they are. Deprive them of the macho high they get from “open carry.”

Being a former Catholic I’m a big believer in the power of shame, and America’s gun-obsessed don’t get near enough of it.

“Succession”, A GOAT of the Modern Zeitgeist

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Brian Lambert

Modern media, valued most for holding eyeballs and generating clicks, loves quick-hit lists. Ten Best this and Greatest of All Time that. Never anything too serious you know, the crowds want to be entertained, not made to feel all gloomy and what not.

So bear that in mind as I suggest that HBO’s “Succession”, which returns for its final season tomorrow night, should be ranked among TV’s finest achievements, up there with “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad” and, ummm, “Veep”, with which it shares a lot of DNA. The soon-to-culminate saga of the gilded and truly wretched Roy family, principal owner-operators of Ameerica’s most influential mad dog conservative “news” network, is so completely locked in to the zeitgeist of this era it could pass as a documentary.

The fact that “Succession” returns at the precise moment that the Murdoch family on which it is unapologetically modeled is fighting off not one but two multi-billion dollar defamation suits for hosting and nurturing outright lies about the 2020 election is too delicious for words. (Even though I may find a few in the next couple paragraphs.)

If you haven’t watched any of the previous three seasons, I can’t help you much, other than to say the Rupert-like paterfamilias, Logan, played by Brian Cox, is currently at war with his four craven, despicable children over who gets the reins of ATN (their FoxNews-like network/money machine) when he passes on to his great reward. Needless to say none of the children trusts anyone else and all are running side scams to gut the others.

Rupert Murdoch to step back at Fox, hand off CEO title to son James - Los Angeles Times — Daddy Rupert and his boys.

It’s a thing of goddam beauty I tell you. And it very much recalls “Veep’s” farewell in the spring of 2019, two years into the Trump “administration” maelstrom of fraud, incompetence and rampant, spinning bullshit. At the time the show’s star, Julia-Louis Dreyfus made several talk show stops joking and shaking her head at the painfully obvious fact that “Veep’s” writers simply couldn’t keep up with the level of actual cowardice and lunacy playing out in the real White House.

Team Trump had trumped the most absurd satire anyone could imagine.

I have no idea if “Succession’s” show-runner, Jesse Armstrong, a former “Veep” writer, has been able to work the Dominion and SmartMatic defamation suits — with all the astonishing, incriminating texts from Fox’s wretched/ethically debauched news “stars” — into this final season. But the dramatic-to-farcical possibilities of Fox’s current predicaments are endless.

Consider Murdoch/FoxNews’ current predicament. They are currently waiting for the presiding judge to decide on a summary judgment, a complete “Get Out of Jail Free” card on the basis of the First Amendment … or some mobius-like legal convolution. Should that fail they will almost certainly have to try to settle. But at what price?

It is inconceivable that Fox would take their case to trial. Not with what has already gone public and internationally viral in the the intra-company communications that haven’t been redacted.

So it would seem that Dominion and SmartMatic are in a, um, strong position to demand ample compensation, which even at 50% of what they’re demanding could easily push $2 billion. A penalty that would almost certainly and deservedly enrage Fox/NewsCorp shareholders into a massive class action suit. Which is not to mention encouraging all sorts of other characters — cops and guards injured in the Jan. 6 riot, staffers subjected to the usual FoxNews in-house misogyny and coercions — to file their own suits.

This already colossal clusterf**k has set off speculation that — very much like “Succession’s” Roy family — someone else must be sacrificed for the good of the next quarterly earnings. (And no, I don’t pity Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.)

“Succession” is of course very much a bubble entity. Just as Fox has mentioned next to nothing about all the texts of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and others calling Trump an idiot and inferring that their devoted fans are clueless goobers hooked on bullshit. (I laughed so hard I wept at the e-mail from Carlson’s producer referring to their audience as a bunch “cousin f**kers.” That is so … so … “Succession”.)

The appeal, the dead-on, of-the-moment satire of the show is lost on MAGA nation. It simply doesn’t exist in their bubble. But that too is so of-this-moment. Two completely separate information/entertainment silos, with one capable of savoring a brilliant satire of a diseased reality and the other continuing to eagerly feed at a trough of prion-infused sewage.

I’ll have extra butter on my popcorn, thank you.

Ok, He Paid Off a Porn Star. But Where’s Some Justice for Being a Sociopath About COVID?

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Brian Lambert

I swear to whatever god you send money to and the continued health of my dog Sam, the world’s scariest beast, that I wake up every day committed to not giving Donald Trump another square millimeter of space in my brain. Enough was enough six goddam years ago.

But still. If and when he actually is indicted — for paying off the porn babe, inciting a riot to overthrow the government or anything in between — we’ll soon all be back in The Psycho Cheeto’s unstable orbit. Even now, his (never very bright) team is spitballing ideas on how to maximize/monetize the spectacle of his arrest. To cuff or not to cuff? To march in the front door or enter via the Waste Management garbage dock? To make a grand “Braveheart” speech (i.e. plea for another riot and more “legal defense funds”) or simply hustle back into the SUV with a brave, “tormented-by-the-libs” wave?

Amid all the hysteria of the past few days, as Manhattan authorities hardened the defenses around the court house, and the usual MAGA invertebrates threatened … something … against the DA, and it was revealed that Trump pulled in another $1.5 million just for claiming he was going to be perp-walked, I couldn’t help but notice a small, back-pages item on the internets.

Maybe you too caught The [Failing] New York Times piece a couple days ago describing the scene inside the CDC as the virulence and scope of the COVID virus was becoming clear?

If you live inside the reality bubble none of it was surprising. Basically, the Trump administration threatened CDC administrators and scientists to playdown/ignore/outright dismiss trending data — woke science-y stuff, y’know — that this thing was going to be big. All while, as we know from Bob Woodward’s recordings of Trump, the sociopath knew how serious it was, but preferred to do … nothing.

Now, inciting a riot to overthrow the government is to my mind a fairly serious offense. But being deliberately, consciously indifferent to a coming plague that was already shown to be lethal is psychopathic incompetence on a far grander scale. (I love the part where CDC employees were sent to airports around the U.S. to screen passengers arriving from China … but not to wear masks in order not to “alarm” bystanders.)

Says the piece, ” … many of their reports — including ones on when the virus arrived in the United States, guidance for meatpacking plants and religious services and on the risks to children — were suppressed or altered beyond recognition by the Trump administration, several said. (The House select subcommittee on the pandemic concluded that the Trump administration had meddled in or blocked at least 19 reports.)

“Morale plunged after a May 2020 report estimated that imposing social distancing measures one week earlier in March 2020 would have saved 36,000 lives.”

36,000 for that week. Think about that. Or consider other estimates that Trump/Jared/Mike Pence’s incompetence — that is to say the astonishingly inadequate logistical preparation by the government of the most technologically advanced nation on earth —- could very well have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths over the longer run of COVD. (Some of the deceased obviously being MAGA cultists who gave serious thought to drinking bleach instead of listening to woke lib doctors.)

Yet this atrocity will likely never be adjudicated anywhere by anyone. Perhaps it would be different if a porn star had died somewhere … . I don’t know. But in that great mythical, sane world somewhere out there we would have had a full-scale 9/11 style commission, with public hearings and CDC witnesses and depositions of The Cheeto, Jared, Pence and all the other gross incompetents muzzling scientists … in their self-serving effort to avoid responsibility for a disaster that might impact their reelection campaign.

So yeah, I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with an indictment over a porn babe pay-off. A small beer arrest that will set off yet another freak show spectacle wherein Trump the Victim raises millions off MAGA shut ins, gun nuts and anti-wokers and likely gooses his poll numbers with that same crowd.

It ain’t much. It ceretainly isn’t justice for the 35,00-100,000+ dead from a combination of gross mendacity and incompetence. But it’s what we’ve got.

Please Tell Me “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is Not Going to Sweep the Oscars.

Posted on March 10, 2023 by Brian Lambert

The Academy Awards are on for Sunday night, and this year I truly believe I’m losing it. Or someone’s losing it. Or one of those comic book multi-verses has wobbled off its galactic plane (or whatever) and distorted reality as we used to know it.

I am perversely proud of the thousands of hours I’ve spent at the movies. It’s a love affair I owe almost entirely to my mother, who hauled me along to see “The Creature from Black Lagoon” when I was four. Never mind I spent most of that evening on the floor, terror-stricken, and barely slept for a week afterward. I had found true love. A door opened for my tender imagination.

Naturally, as so often happens with life’s early passions, critical thinking, raised by time, comparisons and other judgments got applied to such love and I realized all movies were not made equally, or equally well-made I should say.

I remember a very hot summer evening when I was 13, watching a black and white WWI movie on TV and realizing I was mesmerized by the story that was unfolding. “Paths of Glory” I realized was having much, much more impact on my half-formed imagination than any C-grade western shown at the Hollywood Theater down on Main Street Montevideo, Mn. Something in that movie was working on me in ways others didn’t. I went searching for more.

This is all welling up because I’m nearly finished screening all of the 10 films nominated for this year’s Best Picture. (I still haven’t caught up with the new ”Avatar”, “Elvis” or “Women Talking.” I’ll eventually see the first and last, but have no interest in “Elvis.”) But the primary motivation here today is my reaction to “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, the odds-on favorite to “sweep” the Oscars, and which I watched … and watched … and watched last night.

If someone was in the room clocking it and told me “EEAAO” was six hours long, I’d have believed them. Lord, what a slog. My wife, The Lovely Mrs., was off at some high brow Louise Erdrich event. So she didn’t have to listen to me ranting, “What the f**k?”, “Oh good god! Just stop already!”, “Please, please … enough is enough! ” as well as asking no one and anyone, “Is there a purpose to this anywhere in here?”

I have seen a lot of genuinely excellent films, stories told with artfulness and visual panache. And I’ve seen way too many that I can only file under, “utterly hapless.” But there are very few … Oscar front runners … that I found to be insufferably chaotic, visually grubby, thematically trite and just generally annoying as a nine year-old’s prolonged tantrum. But that was my reaction to “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

But why? What am I not connecting to? The movie has won every imaginable award and 19 out of every 20 critics have been ecstatic about it.

I quote:

“The most brilliantly bananas movie of 2022 absolutely lives up to its title. Michelle Yeoh kicks all types of butt as a time-traveling laundromat manager in a multiverse of madness.”

“Raising an ecstatic hot dog middle finger to the negativity of modern times, ‘EEAAO’ urges us to free our minds and accept that it’s OK to be strange.”

“A wonderfully weird, exhilaratingly all-over-the-place absurdist comedy, led by great performances and a screenplay that is as funny as it is moving.”

With a 95% approval on Rotten Tomatoes the very few dissenters are in a distinct minority.

“Some seem to believe this movie is a philosophical masterpiece because characters reach conclusions such as: ‘nothing matters’. If this were the case, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody would also qualify for the title. The problem is that philosophy involves working through a line of argument, but the Daniels [the film has two directors, both 35 years-old and both named Daniel] have been content to hit us with a succession of propositions and hope we are too dazzled to think about any of them deeply. Chief among them is the multiverse, which is now a feature of every second superhero movie, but never seems much more than an excuse for lavish indulgences in CGI.”

“… the filmmakers take the most complicated path to something very simple about overly busy lives and the possible versions of ourselves that might exist with different choices along the way. It’s visually restless, thematically redundant and the rare movie to be both overwhelming and underwhelming. After only a little while, you’ll desperately long to be simply whelmed.”

“There’s an undergraduate philosophy-level ponderousness to this thematizing that isn’t helped by the filmmakers’ quintessentially millennial seriocomic affectations … .”

So yes, I’m very much in the 5% camp. I am way out of step. But why? I have a handful of theories.

Theory #1: I really am old and in no way plugged in anymore to current fashion. I’m with the great Martin Scorsese when it comes to super hero/comic book/multi-verse movies. They’re not movies. Certainly not as I grew up thinking of movies. The Marvel Universe and all that it describes are essentially shareholder-value focused amusement park thrill rides. All about ADHD pacing, spectacle and clamor with nothing at all to say about human life other than there are good guys and bad guys. The “Daniels” are couple millennials steeped in video games and, being Hollywood players, the sweet, juicy nexus of gaming and feature film commerce. The canny, Oscar-bait sweet spot here being an Asian cast, a gay romance and a “family affirming” denouement.

Theory #2: The Oscars, with its roughly 10,000 voting members, is no less susceptible to groupthink and virtue signaling than any other sub-culture. The old line about, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union”, applies as much to the Academy’s sense of itself as an influential international public entity as any tortured, amateurish screenplay. There are endless examples of the Oscars voting up films that primarily deliver an expression of the movie industry’s collective support of racial minority rights, gay rights, remembrance of the atrocities of slavery, the Holocaust, name your physical/mental affliction and “lifetime achievement”.

Which isn’t to say such expressions aren’t noble and valuable, only that they aren’t necessarily artful. They don’t really have anything to do with “Best” or the past year’s most notable achievement in the craft of filmmaking in any given year.

Put another way, quite often the Oscar winners have much less to do with artful achievement than they do with checking socio-political boxes that undergird the Academy voters’ projection of their own personal values. In the case of “Everything Everywhere … “ my guess is that given the persistent criticism of #OscarsSoWhite, #SoLackingIn Women, etc. the opportunity to award a film based in Asian culture becomes socially and reputationally irresistible, overriding any disparaging opinions about the film’s pedestrian narrative and visual histrionics.

Theory #3: So do I have some kind of anti-Asian bias? Not that I’m aware of course. Although I freely confess I’ve never had any interest in kung fu movies, Hong Kong/Jackie Chan “action” movies, etc. Wong Kar-Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” is much more my thing. Or Bong Joon-Ho’s “Parasite”, for a recent example of where Oscar voters got it right. (Although in 2019 I would have voted for Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” … but that is like … my opinion … man.)

To me the cartoonish spectacle of kung fu – and there are at least a half dozen too many chaotic kung fu interludes in “Everything Everywhere … “ – is just a pulp variation on some lunk-headed, bullet-spewing Rambo flick. There’s no suspense to anything you’re seeing. You’re just meant to savor the mayhem.

The question I have for all the critics and Oscar voters exalting over “Everything Everywhere … “ is whether they have consciously or unconsciously overvalued the film’s Asian/much ignored minority component in a desire to “send a message” that they and Hollywood concede a need to correct a long-standing wrong … and thereby reaffirm their progressive bona fides. Which, I repeat, is fine … but has nothing to do with “art” if that’s what’s being judged. (It isn’t, but it’s supposed to be.)

Personal tastes are – sort of – everything in matters like this, and in that context I confess that were I an Academy member I’d have voted a straight “Tar” ticket. (Here are Variety’s 2023 Oscar predictions … please note what they believe “should win.”) I’ve seen it three times now and it keeps getting better. If the craft of filmmaking – the marriage of narrative/story with dialogue, performance, production design – cinematography, sound and editing – is what builds and constitutes art, “Tar” is heads and shoulders above anything else I’ve seen in the past three years. It’s a mesmerizing amalgamation of all the skills of filmmaking. (Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” being the most recent competition in that regard.)

The betting odds currently suggest “Tar” won’t win anything.

Resistance to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Futile. Because It Delivers Comfort, Status and Cash.

Posted on February 28, 2023 by Brian Lambert

On the same day that Elon Musk, an allegedly busy, future-oriented industrial magnate, found time to weigh in in support of a racist cartoonist, I came across a new piece by one of my favorite bona fide Smart People.

In The New York Times, columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein writes, “In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.

” ‘I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism’, Chiang told me. ‘And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two’. …

“Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

“One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation.”

“Regulation” of course is a hotter-than-usual topic because of the MAGA-hyped train wreck in Ohio. (By the way, is anyone else laughing at old school, Reagan-loving de-regulators like Joe Scarborough now fulminating about too much de-regulation?)

But Klein — and sci-fi writer Chiang’s — point about capitalism, i.e. profit-making and shareholder value being the true driving force behind the inevitable and (very) fast approaching world of Artificial Intelligence can’t be over-stated. His piece gets into the recent bungles by Microsoft and Google introducing their competing larval-stage AI-driven search/chatbot features.

You may have followed the simultaneously comical and eery conversation between a human reporter and Microsoft’s HAL-9000-style creation “Bing” in which … well, here’s how Klein describes it: “Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince [reporter Kevin] Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.”

“No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.“

Google and Microsoft will correct their embarrassing spring training mistakes and soldier on, injecting AI into every aspect of privacy-invading/personal data mining and monetizing any sci fi writer could ever imagine. Reaping, as they mature, even vaster fortunes with which to buy off regulatory legislation and invest in the next AI levels up. And who can argue it will play out otherwise? At this point in our evolution capitalism is the vastly predominant engine of human endeavour.

The truly unsettling concept within Klein and Chiang’s critic (one shared by others too numerous to mention) is that resistance to unimpeded AI is for all intents and purposes futile. Why? Because capitalism’s foundational design is to give us what we want, or at least — with the benefit of knowing everything about us on a deep individual level — give us what we believe we want.

Whatever intrusions or controls AI might inflict on us will be assuaged by some new mre sophisticated/cooler/status-lending level of AI-derived convenience, comfort, entertainment … or cost savings. It will be irresistible, in other words.

It’d be different if AI were presented to us as some kind of Bond villain. Were that the case we’d all press the delete key and rally ’round anyone who could nuke the psychopath’s lair. But what is far … far … more likely to happen given the sophistication of advertising and marketing on a user base capitalist systems know at a granular level, is that AI will make so many things so much easier. “Hey! Look! I just got a notification for a condo rental in Cabo! That’s wild. I was just telling to my sister how much I wanted to go there!”

I haven’t taken a survey but I have to think we’re down into single digits in terms of people who are going to rally against convenience … and cash in pocket.

Mayor Pete and A Year Later in Russia.

Posted on February 24, 2023 by Brian Lambert

Before saying something about the Russian war in Ukraine after a long year, can we all look upon the hyperbole and invective surrounding the train derailment in Ohio and admit that it is pretty damned obvious who Republican politicians and right-wing entertainment “stars” fear most among Democrats in the near term? That would be Pete Buttigieg.

If some semi-anomymous chump along the lines of Trump-era grifters like Scott Atlas, or Peter Navarro or Ryan Zinke was parked in the Transportation Secretary’s office the usual echo chamber suspects wouldn’t be excoriating them by name and demanding hour after primetime hour they show up for a goddam train wreck.

Mayor Pete’s a smart dude. My guess is he understands the “outrage” is a clear tell of the right-wing’s fear of his political potency and therefore an ironic badge of credibility. (Just for kicks, I’d pay to see a Buttigieg-Ron DeSantis debate.)

But on the anniversary of the Russian invasion, lord knows no one needs another armchair general, especially one bunkered under ten feet of snow in a Minnesota suburb. But … despite not even playing a general on TV, I have consumed a lot of news reports, editorials and BBC, London Times Radio, German and Russian YouTube over the past year and feel confident enough to offer the following as a kind of digest.

1: In terms of Vladimir Putin’s successor: Well, there is none. By Putin’s design. But Russia’s military and economic situation is so perilous it is not unimaginable — “experts” believe — that he could be replaced. Not easily or peacefully. But replaced, nevertheless. But not, by my unscientific survey, by anyone less antagonistic to the West and Ukraine. In fact, I have yet to hear anyone on the topic suggest anything other than that the first move, succession-wise at the Kremlin, will be to install someone more hard-line, more vicious and more committed to total victory. Point being, no one that I’ve heard sees a popular uprising sweeping out Putin and that ghoulish, all-white collection of sycophants attending his “state of the union” address and replacing them with a 2023 version of Vaclev Havel.

2: Putin will not use nukes. At least not until his situation is desperate, and by that the pros always specify, his situation, not Russia’s. But the nuclear option comes with a handful of serious existential risks. Not the least of which is that given the corruption within his military, and the current brawling between the head of the Wagner group and the Defense Ministry, Putin can not be certain entirely anyone will follow his order to use nukes. A nuclear mutiny if you will would be a kind of final dagger to his hold over the country. Additionally and tactically, various generals and intelligence experts interviewed are certain that Putin and his current military leaders have been explicitly warned that nukes would result in an immediate, near full-scale NATO response, initially on what remains of his Black Sea fleet and any/all suplly depots and points of access into Ukraine. Finally there’s also the issue of what target to use a nuke on? Flattening Kyiv might seem obvious, but again, any Russian general can imagine NATO’s (and China’s) response. Alternately, radiating a hundred square miles of Ukrainian countryside serves very little tactical purpose.

3: Russia’s economic situation is far, far worse than standard news reports are showing. One of the more interesting characters making regular comment on the Russian economy is Jeffery Sonnenfeld, professor and senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management. He’s a garrulous guy with a torrent of opinions on Western sanctions, Russia’s myriad industrial predicaments and the hypocrisy of dozens of big name Western/international corporations — Heineken beer, Benetton, Carls Jr.(!), Emirates Airlines, Guess, Hard Rock Cafe, Iridium, Kawasaki, LaCoste, Mitsubishi, Patreon, Qatar Airways, Sbarro Pizza, Sherwin Williams, TGIFriday’s, Tom Ford, Tupperware and Yamaha and a couple hundred others — who have not ceased all operations in Putin’s Russia.

Sonnenfeld regularly argues that reports by the IMF and otherwise credible agencies reporting on the Russian economy are not disclosing that the startling rosy numbers showing only modest declines in GDP, etc. are in fact served up to them by … Kremlin bureaucrats. This in an economy where foreign traders cannot/will not deal in rubles, where the volumes of oil and gas, (40% of the Russuian economy) being sold are not being confirmed by reputable outside agencies and where unemployment statistics in Russia are equally suspect. He also reminds his audience that Europe has done a frankly amazing job of transitioning from Russian fossil fuels, a transition that it will likely never reverse … to Russia’s eternal disadvantage.

At the risk of misrepresenting his bottom line argument, Sonnenfeld says it is Russia and not the easily distracted, restless-with-commitment West that is living on borrowed time.

Porn Star Pay Offs, Inciting Insurrection, Sexual Assaults, Bank Fraud, Election Conspiracy and FoxNews v. Dominion. But Still … Not Even an Indictment.

Posted on February 17, 2023 by Brian Lambert

Can I see a show of hands on the question, “Do you believe no one is above the law in America?” Please. Hands? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

Of all the lofty assertions of our exceptional nature, the claim that be they poor or be they rich and connected, everyone faces the same justice in this country is arguably the most transparently false. It’s a nice aspirational goal, but utterly without basis as we can all see day after day in the American legal system.

In the news today we have the grand jury in Georgia releasing an abbreviated, redacted version of its investigation into Trumpist meddling/fraud in the 2020 election. This plays with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s range of investigations into Trump’s hidden trove of documents at Mar-A-Lago, his incitement of a riot on the U.S. Capitol and other, um, lesser matters. Then there’s everything going on in New York, with very, very long-running investigations into Trump’s tax and banking frauds, his assaults on various women, his hush-money pay-off of a porn star. And elsewhere, but related, FoxNews’ battle with Dominion Voting Systems, and the revelation yesterday that all of its prime time hosts concurred that guests regularly booked on their shows were not only touting flagrant lies about Dominion rigging the vote for Joe Biden but were saying stuff that was, “mind-blowingly nuts.”

The point here being that we are now … years … after the fact in all of these cases (except the documents) and — exactly like Wall Street’s gamed-out trading of 2008 — no one of any significant status has suffered any consequence for outrageously obvious crimes. The kind for which you or I would have been indicted, tried, bankrupted and sentenced within months.

This point is emphasized/hammered on by Elie Honig in his new book, “Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It.” A former assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, Honig is IMHO, one the better/least hyperbolic/more reliably credible cable news pundits. I caught him recently on Charlie Sykes’ daily Bulwark podcast.

(I can’t recommend Sykes’ show highly enough. Once the Jason Lewis of Wisconsin, Sykes looked at the Republican embrace of Donald Trump and essentially said, “These people are out of their f**king minds”, bailed on the party, has done multiple mea culpas for his role in enabling anti-constitutional idiocy to run rampant and now leads daily, consistently clear-eyed, rational discussions of where cult-think has led us.)

In short, Honig’s view of the likelihood of conviction in any of these cases is not encouraging. He firmly believes Attorney General Merrick Garland has lost his window for effective prosecution and is desperately looking for any way to avoid indicting Trump … on anything … preferring someone else, like Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta do the deed first and take him off the hook. Jack Smith may have a more “aggressive” attitude toward Trump, but he answers to Garland.

Furthermore, and this is where the rubber really doesn’t hit the road, is the matter of securing convictions. Good luck, says Honig, getting a unanimous verdict in New York, much less Georgia on any case where 30% of the possible jury pool remains convinced Donald Trump is not only innocent of anything and everything but sent from God on high to save them from woke liberalism. Point being, says Honig, no “buck stops here” prosecutor, like Garland, wants/dares a (super) high profile acquittal on their record.

But sadly, there is no “sure thing” in American court rooms, other than you know some black kid caught selling dope on a street corner.

Honig didn’t get into the Fox-Dominion case on Sykes show, but here’s tech’s Grand Inquisitor Kara Swisher on her podcast, (Also highly recommended.)

The takeaway there being that Rupert Murdoch has the resources and legal firepower to whittle Dominion’s $1.6 billion claim down to a rounding error for Fox, maybe even with the standard legalese of “admits no wrong-doing” in its final settlement. A settlement that will get no play on Fox and quickly disappear from public memory, much like Bill O’Reilly’s $32 million pay-out to one woman for whatever he did to her. (The “non-consensual sex” and gay porn angles are always worth a headslap.)

This stark, relentlessy reaffirmed double standard for American justice has no obvious resolution. (Honig argues for Garland to try the case against Trump for the basic Constititional demonstration that acts so egregious and historical must be publicly adjudcated, lone MAGA juror be damned.)

My only suggestion would be for pundits and legal experts to at least do us the courtesy of A: stop asserting that “no one is above the law” in this country and/or B: disclaim that assertion whenever someone else “wonders” if that is the case.

Biden’s “Junk Fee” Fight Should Include Broder’s Deli as Well as Las Vegas

Posted on February 3, 2023 by Brian Lambert

Currently lost in all the excitement about Chinese spy balloons and Marjorie Taylor Greene discovering that the feds sent $5 billion to one Illinois elementary school to teach kids that being white is a bad thing is the announcement yesterday that Joe Biden is going after … junk fees … or zombie fees if you’re into the whole “Last of Us” thing.

I couldn’t say, “amen” any louder if I had Metallica’s sound system. There’s no end of things that can annoy the living bejesus out of you (if you let them), but this pervasive and ever-growing gaming of otherwise straightforward retail pricing is truly out of control. The Biden gang says specifically they’re after …

excessive online concert, sporting event and entertainment ticket fees
airline fees for families sitting together on flights
exorbitant early termination fees for TV, phone and internet services
surprise resort and destination fees

This is the kind of populist-oriented legislation you’d think would rally the masses and engender wide bi-partisan support. But I’m not going to get carried away with reckless hope. Lobbying pressure from the likes of Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Delta and United et al, Comcast and Las Vegas will likely convince those lawmakers perpetually giving lip service to “hard working Americans” that this idea will only suppress our great and wonderful entrepreneurial spirit, not to mention negatively impact shareholder value.

Simultaneous with reading about what they’re calling the Junk Fee Protection Act my wife was following a blow up on Next Door, the local community site usually overrun with stories of feral cats, porch pirates and baroque theories of gross mismanagement if not outright corruption by city administrators … in Edina, in our case. The kerfuffle was over mandatory, ill-defined fees creeping into the tabs at local restaurants. In other words, the zombie virus-like spread of “service fees” slapped on top of the cost of whatever you eat and drink … plus tip.

In our cozy corner of the world a restaurant/deli operation called Broders announced it was instituting a 15% “service and equity fee” on top of everyone’s order while still … you gotta love this … allowing patrons to tip another 15%, 18% or 25%. The Next Door trolls were not happy. And rightfully so.

However Broders and other venues want to ‘splain it, it’s tacky price gaming no different than that Vegas hotel you booked for $150 a night plus tax hitting you with a 30% “resort fee” as you hit the check out button. Or, to use another current example, Live Nation/Ticketmaster collecting an extra $20, $30, $40 in “service fees” on top of the $150 they’ve already charged you for booking that Kid Rock concert … via a computer.

What makes it all even more annoyingly laughable is the constant refrain that this fee-upon-fee-upon-tip scam is something they’re doing to benefit their overworked, underpaid staff in the back of the house. Because, you know, actually paying the busboys, salad choppers and dishwashers $18 – $20 an hour is an obligation that must fall upon the customer, not the restaurant’s owners.

And which it would under any rational, gaming-free system, where a business meets its cost of doing business, including compensation for employees, by … dare we say it out loud? … raising prices to cover all costs and show a profit. It’s an insane concept I concede. Likely a radical socialist conspiracy if Marjorie Taylor Greene gets wind of it. But until the private equity boys and hard-driving Type A business school grads picked and tossed their chump customers into the deep end of “fee world” pool it worked just fine.

Capitalism. Insane, I know.

Want a room in Vegas? Well, based on demand that’ll now cost you $180 a night. Don’t want to pay that? Fine. Stay out in Primm and drive in to catch the animatronic Grand Funk Railroad Tribute Band at the Sahara. Want a pound of prosciutto from Broder’s for your next elegant soiree? Well, based on the rising cost of hiring competent staff and everything, that’ll now cost you $16 instead of the $13 it was last year. If you want to tip the kid that wrapped it and rang you up another couple bucks, knock yourself out.

Just stop with the word salad explanations and the pretense that bullshit price gaming is the only fair way to sustain your business. And by that I mean gibberish like this from the owner of Broder’s: “We’re trying to create a compensation structure that looks different than it did before the pandemic … and strive for pay equity between front-of-house and back-of-house service members.”

To which I say, “No you’re not. You’re simply attaching yourself to an obnoxious trend that others have successfully got away with … until now.”

What Does Hamline Not Understand About Academic Freedom?

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Brian Lambert

There are several people in my immediate orbit with ties to Hamline University and I can safely say none of them are pleased with the school’s response to an adjunct professor showing an image of the Prophet Mohammed in an art history class. In the recent history of self-inflicted wounds, this one — by an otherwise respectable liberal arts college — is a doozy.

The story burst to light via a New York Times story following a vigorous complaint by PEN America, the free expression advocate shortly before Christmas. (Why no local news outlet caught wind of so provocative a story as this or followed up on it is interesting in itself.)

The details are now well known. But in essence, the young adjunct — teaching an art history class, mind you — carefully and by all accounts respectfully warned her students that an image of Mohammed would be shown and that they were free to look away in the brief time it was being displayed.

But … at least one Muslim student did not, and quickly registered her offense with Hamline’s administrators who quickly caved, apologized to the student, fired the adjunct and released a gob-smacking statement saying among other, um, provocative things that, respect for Muslim students, “should have superseded academic freedom.”

Excuse me, what?

At the moment, Hamline’s knee-jerk “superseding” response is the target of most of the outrage. And yes, we live in a time when outrage is a staple of public conversation. Unfortunately we seem also to live in a time when administrators not of some insulated, fundamentalist religious school, but an American liberal arts university in a distinctly liberal-minded metropolitan area seized up in terror at the possibility of being internationally branded as “Islamaphobic.”

Had Hamline’s adult leaders sought full advice and education on the incident they might have heard something like this from the Muslim Public Affairs Council:

“As a Muslim organization, we recognize the validity and ubiquity of an Islamic viewpoint that discourages or forbids any depictions of the Prophet, especially if done in a distasteful or disrespectful manner. However, we also recognize the historical reality that other viewpoints have existed and that there have been some Muslims, including and especially Shīʿī Muslims, who have felt no qualms in pictorially representing the Prophet (although often veiling his face out of respect). All this is a testament to the great internal diversity within the Islamic tradition, which should be celebrated. … The painting was not Islamophobic. In fact, it was commissioned by a fourteenth-century Muslim king in order to honor the Prophet, depicting the first Quranic revelation from the angel Gabriel.”

Or maybe they did seek counsel and chose to ignore it. Whatever, again at this moment, it is Hamline’s administrators looking at career-shredding public ignominy and not the young adjunct.

But there’s a lot to provoke in this episode.

Shall we perhaps discuss the student who complained after multiple advisories from her professor? Do we regard her intentions in tuning in regardless, getting “triggered” and summoning the wrath of nervous administrators as entirely honorable? I’ve got a few questions there.

Or how about the PR calculations Hamline’s administrators ran?

Ignoring or underplaying the student’s complaint risked … well, pretty much the indignant reaction they’re getting, only in 180 degree reverse. Instead of fundamentalist Muslims from here to Riyadh screaming “Islamaphobia!”, by shouting Islamaphobia first and Hamline’s seers have triggered and angered the kind of good, check-writing alumni liberals who they presumably once educated to believe that … wait for it, academic freedom supersedes religious superstition. (“Superstition” being my word.)

And then, perhaps above all, we have the fascinating discussion of when and where exactly some one’s religious “beliefs” take a back seat to science or full, bona fide scholarship/academic freedom?

During the COVID pandemic it made no scientific (or ethical) sense to excuse critical personnel from vaccine treatment on the grounds that the shots violated their “beliefs”. Believe whatever you want in your own home, but if you’re in a position to spread a demonstrably fatal virus, you either get the shots or … stay in your home and massage your beliefs.

The Hamline situation is not physical life or death. But the ability of any lone student to raise their hand and shut down a thoughtful, scholarly college course and get the instructor fired by fretful administrators is a frightening virus of another kind for freedoms of curiosity, research and dialogue in a so-called democracy

I’m tempted to go all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins here and rant on about I’ve about how I’ve had it with religion, and religious fundamentalism in particular, getting its pious hands around the throats of public institutions.

I won’t. But I think we can agree that Hamline is getting a well-deserved acid bath in what not to do when one person — quite possibly acting in a variation of bad faith — asserts victimhood and religious persecution.

Hey, Senate DFLers, Don’t Forget The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Brian Lambert

As thoroughly satisfying as it is to watch Republicans bury the schadenfreude needle with their public humiliation of Kevin McCarthy, (who couldn’t deserve it more), there’s been a fascinating and telling split-screen on display these past few days as Democrats took over full control of Minnesota government.

One one side we had hapless, spineless McCarthy, a man of no detectable policy interests, suffering his ordeal in the public stocks. On the other we had our local Democrats — i.e. “radical socialists” if you drink the MAGA Kool-Aid — gleefully reminding constituents of the very long list of laws and programs they intend to pass with their new and (likely) transitory majority.

Armchair cynics invariably roll their eyes every time some liberal runs down their legislative “to-do” list. The end credits for a Hollywood super-hero blockbuster are shorter than what liberals vow to do — by god — if they ever get full control of the gears of gummint.

But, lo and behold! That is pretty well what Democrats find themselves being able to do here in Minnesota, at least until the end of the 2024 session of the legislature.

Given both control and an eye-watering surplus, every wish on the DFL’s long list is within reach, presuming the absence of a local version of Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema.

High on that list is certifying abortion rights, and shoring up family leave and voting processes, followed closely-to-simultaneously by bills to address climate change, making prescription drugs affordable, reducing gun violence, boosting education resources, controlling rent costs, filling potholes, re-building bridges, building out broadband and … and … well you get the idea.

Essentially everything that rational taxpayers expect government to do is suddenly possible … for the next two years.

But, as Peter Falk’s Columbo so often mumbled as he exited a scene, “There’s just one thing … .”

To me and a few others the juvenile McCarthy v. Matt Gaetz et al farce in D.C. is a vivid testament to the sewer we’re all forced to live in under minority rule. And there are few better systemic cures to blunting minority rule and the the institutionalized anarchy of modern conservatism than doing away with or at least neutering the Electoral College.

In 2019 the DFL-controlled Minnesota House signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. You can read all the clauses of the compact, but basically it really is this simple : It is “an interstate compact to award member states’ presidential electors to the candidate that receives the most votes nationwide. The NPVIC would go into effect if states representing at least 270 electoral college votes adopt the legislation.”

In other words, for all those “originalists” sentimental about the Electoral College, which in recent years has given us George W. Bush and the epic disaster of the Iraq War, followed by Donald Trump’s start-to-finish dumpster fire, the College would remain. But states signing on to the compact would agree to assign all their electoral votesa to whoever won the popular vote … nationwide.

This thing has been winding its way through legislatures for years and at present has 15 (all blue) states and D.C., representing 195 of the 270 votes needed to give it authority.

Did I mention that the Republican-controlled Senate stifled the vote here in Minnesota four years ago?

If Minnesota’s new DFL Senate majority gets on board, the national number rises to 205, leaving a pathway to 21st century election fairness and actual majority rule in the hands of states like Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), and Virginia (13).

I hold little hope for Ohio these days, but the idea may have some possibilities in Arizona and Georgia.

Obviously, Republicans with their cro-magnon view of originalism and the glorious Founders’ affinity for … minority rule (!?) … will fight the Compact with everything they’ve got.

Why? Well, because they, like you and I, know that without the tortured, anachronistic conventions of the Electoral College, Al Gore would have presided over the 9/11 response and very likely not have gone rampaging into a country that had nothing to do with the attack. And likewise, Hillary Clinton would have steered the ship of state from 2017 until at least 2021. That would have meant, among so much else, a coherent, coordinated, science-based early response to COVID and a leadership that would not have persistently pandered to white nationalist fever dreams and incited a mob to attack the Capitol.

Politics, I’m told, is a game played incrementally and opportunistically. So all I’m suggesting is Minnesota’s Senate Democrats take advantage of the rare opportunity they have and move the ball of actual democratic majority rule another couple yards down field by voting “yea” on the NPVIC.

Looking at the McCarthy farce I think we can all agree that everything would be better off with fewer fools and frauds steering the ship.

Low Expectations and Dark Hopes for the New Year

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Brian Lambert

The arrival of a new year always brings a heightened level of giddiness, accelerated by blind hope and a largely fact-free belief that things will be better this time around. It’s part of the stories we tell ourselves to get out of bed in the morning and … go out and do exactly the same things we’ve done every previous year.

For Catholics it’s a bit like the “confessional effect” where we go in and tell the priest all the miserable things we’ve done, said or thought, get exonerated and set free in the wild to start all over again.

That said, on this the third day of the new year I’m enjoying my coffee and watching the D.C. press horde scurrying after the Capitol’s new power brokers … Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and, um, Kevin McCarthy. They are the center of attention. Because they are now, for the moment at least, the critical characters in the present (and future) Congressional drama. Put another way good friends, the United States really is reduced to caring what Lauren Boebert has to say about … anything.

No one knows how this election for Speaker of the House will play out, but what is abundantly clear is that the delusional mass psychosis that is Trumpism has not yet been expelled from the Republican party. It’s at least one more cycle of defeat and chaos from exhaustion.

The great natural cycle of rebirth has delivered the same mutant baby. For this moment and likely for the next two years, MAGA narcissism and all the dysfunction and corruption that it engenders will have it’s hands around the throat of the House of Representatives.

But — and here comes the “hope” part — all this chaos points to where 2023 could likely take the Grand Old Party.

For all the accusations people of my ilk hurl at conservatives for their nihilism, their willingness to torch the whole damn ranch in pursuit of some undefined “total victory”, a nihilistic denouement is clearly where “the crazies” are going in this McCarthy/Speaker fiasco.

Related and more significant in the realm of gross nihilism, their intellectual leader, the Orange Former Guy, holed up in Mar a Lago has been hinting broadly that if professional Republicans don’t stop blaming him for the election disaster of last November and being nicer to him, he’ll run as an independent in 2024.

I see a lot of Trumpian logic in that.

Being notoriously lazy and undisciplined, Trump has to regard a campaign free of all the bureaucratic exertions, rules and formalities of a party nomination as immensely appealing. Money wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, he grifted a quarter of a billion off his MAGA congregation for a bogus legal defense fund. If he confined himself to occasional airport rallies, daily Truth Social videos, and all the free airtime Newsmax and Mike Lindell TV will feed to his forever fervent, deeply retrograde “base” he’d easily match the return all that icky, sweaty, expensive hand-shaking people like Mike Pence would have to do to get 1/100 the attention.

Of course Trump couldn’t win election to the White House. But his (currently) assured support from even 20% of Republican voters would seriously confound the strategies of other candidates, to the point they, like McCarthy with his “crazies”, would have to offer him undigestible, self-defeating concessions to preclude him from attacking them. He’d “win” by maki ng them lose. In other words, a narcissistic nihilist’s fever dream.

So, my apologies for the semi-bummer here so early in this new year. But irrational exuberance just ain’t my thing.

Pop Quiz: “How Many People Actually Know What’s Going On?”

Posted on December 14, 2022 by Brian Lambert

It was another of those “convergence moments.” I’m out having breakfast at my local supermarket restaurant, which is kind of a Rick’s Cafe for beautiful Edina. Everyone goes there.

And as I waited for my Denver omelette, doomscrolling through the news, three old geezers at the next table, two dressed in matching Elmer Fudd-red plaid flannel got going on politics. And in that same moment I came across the story of freshly-elected Minnesota state representative Walter Hudson, holding court at some local MAGA-naut Republican meet-up.

I’d never heard of the guy but listening to him speak I immediately consigned him to the over-stocked Rush Limbaugh wannabe hall of infamy. Basso profundo. Theatrical pauses. Repetitive phrasing. Yadda yadda. All the stuff that convinces the dull-witted you’re a serious guy in the know. (So corny … yet, after all these years, still effective.)

Alongside a dais of head-bobbers Hudson told the room, “You are equivalent to a plantation owner who enslaved Black people and forced them to work for you if you, today, as a medical professional or just a member of the populace, demand that your neighbor take a vaccination to keep you safe.”

Incoming GOP lawmaker compares medical professionals to slave owners - KSTP.com Eyewitness News

A million-plus extra deaths later and these deep thinking, attention-hungry libertarians are still flogging the “tyranny” of … vaccines. Otherwise known as life-saving medicine. Talk about a stale playbook.

(Predictably, Hudson has a … talk radio show … “Closing Argument with Walter Hudson.” I haven’t seen the ratings. But I’m kind of imagining Robert DeNiro as Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy”, cos-playing a Johnny Carson-like star in his home basement studio.)

Meanwhile, the geezers, each nursing a lonely cup of coffee, were getting worked up. The most talkative and putatively most “informed” was well into a riff/lecture on the “out of control” crime problem … in Edina, presumably (it’s a free-fire zone, I gotta tell ya) … and how Democrats are responsible because of the way they “restrain” the cops. I can’t be certain because of the ambient clatter from other patrons, but I thought I heard him spout out a “50%” increase over the last few years.

The element that glued this together in my alleged brain was a passing exchange in a recent podcast between a bunch of political pundits. I think it was David Axelrod/Mike Murphy’s “Hacks on Tap”, but it might have been Charlie Sykes’ “Bulwark” show. I was driving and drinking coffee and eating a donut at the time so I couldn’t write it down.

The context was the latest example of cluelessness on the part of some too well known politician, which led to the question, “What would you say is the percentage of people who actually know what is going on? I mean really know and aren’t just best-guessing it?”

They were talking politics, but I instantly applied this to myself and my life experience and came up with the number, “Five percent.” Tops. Of people who truly know who is zooming who and why, and how all the thread stretched between pins on a wall actually connect.

The pundits more or less agreed on “20%” … of characters they knew and interacted with practicing or reporting on the political game.

Being pros, they would know better than me, but I still put 20% in the category of “that’s generous, kids.”

I won’t belabor this, but whether the conversation is football, art, street cleaning, fashion, cooking, dog training or bar stool philosophizing I am forever amused at people prattling on on topics they clearly understand in only the broadest and usually most cliched terms.

Now, The Dude once wisely said, “Well, that’s just like your opinion, man.”

It’d be nice if all opinions rested on a solid foundation of facts — “information literacy” if you will — but no one expects that. You think the sun rises in the west, or Donald Trump is one big hunka hunka burning love … fine. Opinion.

The bafflement, for me, sets in when guys and gals like Hudson, the House Freedom Caucus, Kari Lake, geezer pundits, more than a few film critics I read, financial experts and major investors in FTX, paranoid neighbors and so on insist they’re dealing with facts. Not opinions. Facts! Horrible, terrible indisputable facts! Facts that place themselves (and usually they alone) at the center of the axis of veracity and authority.

Obviously, as a blogger supremely proud of my opinion and bizarre transmutation of facts, I have to place myself among the 95% you and yours should carefully vet before accepting anything I say as … mmm … bona fide.

But in my defense, out of sympathy and respect for my usually bored and annoyed audience, I try … try … to qualify my gas-bagging and separate what I know and what I only think I know.

Sinister Skullduggery Needed for Sinema

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Brian Lambert

Up in my ever-expanding pantheon of Rogues and Reprobates I reserve a podium for those of Lesser-Though-Still-Extraordinarily-Annoying Vices … like Gross Self-Absorbedness, Negligible Ethics and First-in-Class Twittery. So it comes as no surprise that Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is stepping up and taking a place alongside the usual suspects … The Former Guy, Valdimir Putin, Mexican cartel leaders, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and so on.

As others before me have already said, Sinema deciding to go “Independent” and leave-but-not-really-leave the Democrats is so “on-brand” for her it’s amazing no one saw this one coming. I mean, there were several actual days there after Herschel Walker got tackled just short of the goal line that Sinema was both out of the headlines and written off as anything of consequence in a 51-49 Senate.

Her fun was over!

So … she had to do something to make all those dull, serious people in dull-colored clothing look at her again.

Kyrsten Sinema is 'Senator Madonna' because of her dress? Get over it

Early punditry sees Sinema’s move as a hedge to stop any other Democrat from running against her in the 2024 primaries, (central Phoenix-area) Cong. Ruben Gallego being the most likely challenger. By re-branding herself as an Independent, she is putting Arizona Democrats in the position of either continuing to put up with her constant antics or nominate someone else … which would very much risk splitting the (oh-so) thin Arizona majority Democrats have down there and handing an easy win to pretty much any Republican lunatic who wants the job.

Can you say “Kari Lake 2024”?

The thing is, that same scenario means Sinema also loses, since she’s at the point where she has few if any friends among committed Democrats and only a few among Republicans. Given her voting record — the most conservative of any Democrat — the truly honest thing for her to have done was flip entirely over to the Republicans.

But it’s possible abject batshit, Arizona-style Republicanism may be a fashion even the gaudy Ms.. Sinema can’t stomach.

Kyrsten Sinema gets her make-or-break moment with Republicans - POLITICO

But my interest at the moment is the move allegedly sinister, Deep State, Soros-funded national Democrats make to render Sen Non-Binary I/Me/Mine Sinema irrelevant. I mean, if that cabal really exists I expect them to gather in their latter-day Bohemian Grove and skulldug a plot to … well … destroy her.

Is that too harsh?

We’re not talking physical harm here. Not even something so traumatic as setting fire to her wardrobe. Just a humiliating departure from all future news cycles. Ok … it doesn’t even have to be humiliating (ruin my fun), just … you know … conclusive.

How Kyrsten Sinema Sold Out | The Nation

Because I so love twisted, cynical thrillers soaked in the mendacity of the 1%-ers, I’m letting my imagination run all possible storylines involving the (figurative!) knee-capping of a U.S. Senator. So far I’ve got nothing, or “nil” as soccer fans always say.

This will take some creativity. It’s tough to rid ourselves of louses.

We truly have reached a depth where no scandal, no vice or perversity is ugly or hypocritical enough to preclude the nomination of any Republican. We know that. I mean if Herschel Walker’s punch card of three abortions (that we know of) meant … nothing … to white evangelicals what is that crowd ever going to get upset about?

Sinema could walk out in Old Town Scottsdale, shoot a flour-sack white tourist from Minneapolis, and Republicans at least would still vote for her.

But from what I know from following AZ politics, committed policy-focused Democrats despise the woman. And what “independents” really think of her is a true curiosity, since pretty much everyone knows her blitherings about “everyday Arizonans” is eye-rolling bullshit.

No one who cares has forgotten the shameless, naked way she stood up for … hedge fund/private equity tax advantages … while jacking around with Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, a stunt that earned her well over $1 million in Wall Street contributions.

The Republicans have a Mormon Choir-sized pantheon of frauds and embarrassments. The Democrats’ is quite a bit smaller. But largely-unproductive Sinema is basically daring her “colleagues” to punish her for what by 2024 will be six years of narcissistic theatrics.

Don’t tell me people crueller and more dastardly than me aren’t thinking about how to do it.

Prada socialist' turned centrist wields power over Biden's agenda | Financial Times

This Just in from Twitter/ Sarah Palin

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Brian Lambert

@ICanStillSeeRussiaPalin

Lovers of Freedom, Big Honkin’ Firearms and Anyone Who Ever Played Football! Keep the faith! Radical Socialists have stolen another election from us! Terrible, pizza-eating pedophiles have seized offices meant for people like myself (mainly) but also other pretty much smokin’ hot gals like Kari Lake, who is so obviously way better looking than that frumpy liberal whose name I forget.

“Stolen”, I say! From qualified, tireless public servants. People who know how to apply mascara, have a keen hunter’s nose for where the camera is and always look hot in tight skirts whatever their age.

Right now, fake news stooges like The Wall Street Journal and that elitist socialist rag, The New York Post, are trying to convince you that this latest stolen, rigged election where so many people were allowed to vote for Democrats was all because of Donald Trump.

This is moosepucky, as we say when we’re out in the bush hunting grizzlies here in Wasilla. We owe everything we are today to Donald! Everything! (Although, you know, I did come first. Just sayin’.)

Which is why, while I wait for the recount here in the state that’s bigger than Texas, I am twitting today and urging every freedom-loving, concealin’ and carryin’, snow-machine ridin’ American to open their hearts and their checkbooks for the man who has brought the Republican party to the Mt. McKinley kinda heights we have achieved.

(BTW, I have launched a new Super PAC, called Grizzlies for Freedom. And with two simple clicks on your Google thingie you can send 20% or 30% of your Social Security check automatically to me each month, after which I’ll pass quite a bit of it on to President Trump to protect you and me from those awakey or wokey or whatever liberals. It’s so easy to give! And fun, too! (I have a limited number of autographed pictures of myself … with Todd cut out. So the first 200 of you who donate $100 or more can have one for only $20.)

But, back to President Trump, (the only legitimate President we’ve had since that old actor guy way back before I got my first L-Oreal Makeup Kit … which BTW is still available on Amazon for $99.99, just enter Gobs-O-Shadow/GrizMom-’24 for 5% off.)

Midterms elections 2022: Sarah Palin's last chance | USA | EL PAÍS English Edition

Down at his beautiful home in Florida tomorrow, (which I visited once and have several pieces of silverware to prove it), President Trump will announce he is willing to return again to the White House, in Washington D.C., to finish up all the important work we started six short years ago.

It’s so easy to forget all that he accomplished (with NO HELP FROM LIBERALS!) what with all that’s going on in the world. You know like the next episode of “The Masked Singer”, or who’ll be on “Dancing With the Stars” next, and what those crazy cute Kardashian girls are doing today … oh! and “The Real Housewives” of wherever — let’s not forget that! Even though they should have a “Housewives of Wasilla'” show, if you know what I mean. Hint, hint.)

But people! Remember The Wall? And how beautiful it is? Well, we need just a few more thousand miles of it and no one will ever get in OUR country again. No one! And by “OUR” I mean yours and mine! Real Americans who don’t run leaf blowers at 7 in the morning! President Trump will complete the wall and we’ll all finally be safe from those scary, MDX-28 rappers with all those tattoos (ick!).

Oh, and how about that crazy COVID stuff? Under President Trump it was over by Easter so we could all go on vacation back down to Florida without those stupid “science” rules and not have to wear those liberal face diapers that Todd hated so much, not that I even think about Todd anymore.

And this whole Russia-YouCrane thing. It’s totally confusing. I know, because I live practically across the street from Russia, which is actually a lot like Alaska only with even less scary black gang people.

These people fighting President Putin are so weird. He’s very strong, y’know. (He even still looks pretty OK without his shirt on, although not as good as Todd before he let himself go … after I dumped him.) President Trump will stop all those crazy U-Crainians, or whatever you call them, from being so mean to the Russians. I mean remember how much they did for freedom right here in America by supporting President Trump in the two elections he actually won, (but one was stolen from him, don’t ever forget.)

Oh, oh and one more thing. Judges! Judges that will do what needs to be done to protect you and me. Think of it. Courts that’ll allow us to arm our kindergartners and grade school kids so we don’t have another of those Sandy Crook things — which I know, might have been fake, but … well … never mind. Judges in courts that’ll let us sue anyone who gives us a stink eye … and boy did I get one from some frumpy liberal-looking bitch (in sweat pants and no makeup at 9 in the morning!) when I was gassing up the F-350 Super Duty today.

More President Trump will mean more Super Top Notch judges on the Supremest Court!

And yes, I know what you’re thinking. I am available to serve. In fact you contribute now to my other SuperPAC, “RealJusticeInTightSkirts”. At the $50 a month level you get a souvenir tote bag from the 2008 campaign I did with that crabby old guy who was never nice to any of us, including Todd, who if you really want to know kind of deserved it after he drank all that tequila and said that stuff about Arizona women and their leathery neck wattles.

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Mayor Pete and A Year Later in Russia.

Porn Star Pay Offs, Inciting Insurrection, Sexual Assaults, Bank Fraud, Election Conspiracy and FoxNews v. Dominion. But Still … Not Even an Indictment.

Biden’s “Junk Fee” Fight Should Include Broder’s Deli as Well as Las Vegas

What Does Hamline Not Understand About Academic Freedom?

Hey, Senate DFLers, Don’t Forget The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!

Low Expectations and Dark Hopes for the New Year

Pop Quiz: “How Many People Actually Know What’s Going On?”

Sinister Skullduggery Needed for Sinema

This Just in from Twitter/ Sarah Palin

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