What self-gratifying pomposity. If you need to go back to X and find my account to be assured that I didn't find a political voice just now or even on Trump's political emergence but well prior, perhaps that might help you deflate some. Or watch Plot Against America. Or fuck all the way off. Cheers.

Yes, I'm known for my scrupulous indifference to systemic misrule and institutional failure in this country. I mostly follow baseball, watch old movies and write light froth for a good living. Thanks for your piercing insights about what I didn't see as bad. Bless your righteous heart.

What part of "utterly" and "to the core" eluded? How did the entire preamble about American citizenship ALWAYS being a flawed, compromised struggle not land? This current misrule is geometrically worse. Can we say so without folks rushing to assert an earlier awareness than the rest of us?

Living there so hard that when my teenaged daughter sees me grab the remote and watches the television screen go grainy black-and-white she goes to straight profanity.

Yup. I've made a career out of scrupulously avoiding any narration of institutional processes and systemic misrule in America and instead attending to vibes, imagery and hot takes. It paid okay. And based only on this piercing insight of yours, Freida, there might be a career for you as well.

Here's why I find this credible: It's a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia. Of all the coordinates in Christendom at which to materialize, his ass lands there. When a mook tells you they are the reincarnated spirit of Eleanor of Aquitaine, fuck no. A bean farmer from Odessa, Texas? I'm listening.

This is a tale that had to be told. Kate Crane could not allow it to be otherwise and she has wrestled long and hard with the past and emerged with a beautiful and honest book. Buy it. www.yahoo.com/entertainmen...

"Get me a Diet Coke and Laura Loomer."

The post to which you responded was careful in its words: "Utterly...to the core..." No one asserted that they weren't ashamed at past misrule, and certainly Trump's first term was abysmal. But the first year of this term has geometrically done more to damage and debase America and induce shame.

That self-absorbed shitheel couldn't find a clitoris with a gynecologist strapped to each arm.

Does.... does Trump think the Strait is the Clitoris? Like, for the planet? The way he phrased that tweet makes his 34 felony convictions for sexual assault sound far more credible than they already were.

This utter shitheel of a broken human is doing all he can to get a rock 'n' roll singer from New Jersey a Nobel Prize. At which point, we can all watch Trump eat his own liver. Come on, Norway. Bring us to the land of hopes and dreams.

At points, and this is true, I've taken to using Bluesky or, previously, Twitter, to apologize for our shameful misrule and then naming a nearby pub or shabeen where I will be buying rounds to extend the apology. When I've done so, good people end up buying just as many pints to comfort me.

For every American rube who ever argued that instead of statesmen, we should allow a businessman from outside the political sphere to helm our government, here is the internet posting that should make you shut the fuck up and bathe alone in your submoronic ignorance until you wrinkle and die.

As an American, there are always disappointments to register and arguments to engage; amid the chaos of our battered, monied attempt at self-governance, dissent is constant. But this feeling of being utterly ashamed of America and embarrassed to the core by its president is new, raw and unnerving.

Pam Bondi needed to be more corrupt. That's an astonishing critique. But it's the one that gets her shitcanned. She wasn't able to tear down enough of the Justice Department to please Donald Trump.

Nail him up, drag him down, toss him in a cave. If he rolls away the stone and drives off in a golf cart, I'll accept Donald Trump as Lord and Savior. But I'm still voting a straight Democratic ticket in November.

With regard to our berobed and beshitted Justice Alito: If the Founders had no capacity to conceive of illegal immigration, then they also had not the imagination to conceptualize automatic weapons. Originalism is and always was a pathetic, desperate lie of miserable, ideological shitheels.

The current state of American experiment in self-governance is such that I am not going to go anywhere the fuck near April Fools Day. Just no.

Go O's.

The unsubtle clue here is "fragments." Wherein conspiratorists run right past the actual boundaries of ballistics and proceed directly to all manner of the-truth-is-out-there horseshit.

"...recovered two kilograms of raw cocaine, street value $140,000, six handguns and 150 rounds of high-caliber ammunition. Seven suspects will face a possible total of 340 years for possession with intent and gun charges." We are winning the drug war. Because Dope On The Table.

Daughter, 15, is home from school today with a stomach bug. Mid-day attempt to rise from bed, shower, dress, and cover some homework for class tomorrow. And then the following:

A previous Secretary of Defense/War, previously engaged in a previous misadventure in the Middle East warned us about unknown knowns, or was it known unknowns, or unknowing fucking gnomes given authority over life, death and the dignity and honor of a nation. I can't quite recall the exact quote.

Brian Lowry finds someone willing to vent on the topic of having had two industries shot out from under him in a single lifetime. If there is a third, he promises a lot more profanity.

She's different and kinda weird, and definitely "begging" me to ask her to dance, which she should totally do because it's not like other guys will, and she has zero chance otherwise, but she's not saying yes. WRONG!! She better get serious, because if she won't dance with me it won't be pretty!

When I was embarking on my first book of narrative non-fiction, I wrote a proposal for publishers that cited three examples of the form that I thought beautiful and flawless. Two were "Soul of A New Machine" and "Among School Children." Tracy Kidder was a gentle, graceful master of the form.

Yo, Mike. Strange to read this 7 years later. Twitter/X has mutated into a fully corrupted platform purposed on disinformation and sociopolitical destruction. You and I were chatting quaintly about a medium that gave not a fuck about sifting out frauds and libels. Now, it is in service of such.

With apologies to Thoreau, our president is leading a life of noisy masturbation. And the enablers who surround him supply the porn in two-minute increments so as not to tax his limited capacities. Meanwhile, the Iranians have porn of their own: bsky.app/profile/agon... Dunning-Kruger warmaking.

Yup. Donald Trump's private army. S.A. brown-shirts redux.

Copyright on file. But these are hard times and all permissions granted. It is the people's internet credo. It belongs to the people. Send the trolls, ideologues and shitheels to digital oblivion. Spare women and children and the genuinely confused.

Bus, meet Mr. Hegseth.

Interesting. The immediate supposition is that someone in Mississippi law enforcement is a racist piece of shit. And that could well be. Could also be these were saved by a police intelligence unit monitoring the KKK, or even used in a past or present effort to infiltrate the group. Gotta know more.

Trying to conjure what manner of mayhem ICE might plausibly undertake that makes the airport fiasco geometrically worse and I think I have the definitive answer: An ICE agent shoots the only Air Traffic Controller on duty.

Reminded today of how fleeting even the veneer of immortality is for all of us. Years ago, I stood at the grave of Yeats in County Sligo. An American tourist family was present; Dad, trying to describe the poet. Son, maybe 12: "He died before I was born so I don't care." Horseman pass by, indeed.

You are relentless, sir.

Many folk inquiring today as to how I find things on the far shore, or to nick a phrase, the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns. Be advised: There is no Coke Zero here. Only Diet Coke. I have lodged a complaint with management. Awaiting response.

After meeting with Trump, he's saying today it;s on the table -- --- that they may well take up TSA funding and marry it to elements of the SAVE legislation. He is publicly saying that, not me. Take up your confident critique of what is or isn't doomerism with Senator Thune, perhaps.

Thune is starting to buckle. Reconciliation back on table. Get ready for a 15-20 percent decline in voter participation in November. Get ready for hundreds of thousands of legit voters denied the ballot at the polls. The American experiment in self-governance hangs by a fucking thread.

Lose their fucking luggage and have the flight attendants throw Bloody Mary mix in their laps.

Make no mistake. Trump always gets paid.

Spoken by a fellow who as Defense Secretary in Trump's first term slept partially dressed for fear that the idiotic sociopath who was his President might stop rage tweeting and attempt to undertake a nuclear strike in the middle of the night. No, seriously. No hype on that.

Not knowing immediately how many controllers were on duty is even worse. In itself, it's an admission that things are utterly fucked.

Put 'em in the empty control towers. What could go wrong?

Sure, bring back all the marble for that great soul. Just because he whipped his slaves when they tried to run away, then rubbed brine in their wounds to make sure they got the message is no reason not to admire the man.

Better to be feared than admired, I say. Also, generally, I think it's better not to be dead.

As Steve Earle has repeatedly cautioned, when traveling with the instrument it is best not to tell TSA that the case in your hand contains a bouzouki. Just say a "mandolin."

Disproportionate stock purchases yesterday, to be followed by disproportionate stock dumping on Friday. "War is a racket," -- Smedley Butler