The GOP Platform: Protect the fetus; starve the child. Honor the soldier; abandon the veteran. Enrich the corporation; fleece the worker. Quote the Bible; ignore the verses.

(THREAD) Let me reframe this. Blue states FUND red states as red states say that it is BLUE STATES that live off others. Blue states adhere to the CONSTITUTION as red states CLAIM to love it but undermine it at every turn. Red states adore the CONFEDERACY but lecture the rest of us on patriotism.

I can’t excerpt, every word is perfect

If I’m not evolved enough to understand it, then why did they have to steal my writing to train it?

I am in receipt of a check for $5.81 from Apprentice House, annual royalties for my two little books, “The Old Editor Says” and “Bad Advice.” To anyone who bought either in the past year I will raise a glass this afternoon.

#Iran #TrumpMustGo #KingOfTreason #RepublicansDidThis #NoRepublicansEverAgain #USPol

You got something against Emily Wilson?

Heating up today, but it has been cool and pleasant this morning as I sat on the porch with my coffee, watching people drive off to work.

Prosecco on the porch, with a light spring repast.

I’m tempted to adopt a bumper sticker I saw on a car yesterday: Baltimore doesn’t like you either.

Unless I have lost my faculties, I just heard the Rev. Al Sharpton say on MSNOW that Andrew Johnson appointed Roger Taney chief justice of the United States. And he mispronounced Taney’s name. I would be better off watching a rerun of “Law and Order.”

The number you have called ...

Jamie Raskin says restoring what Trump has destroyed at the DOJ will take a generation, not months. He's calling for sweeping "de-Trumpification" while urging Democrats to skip impeachment theater and focus on winning back power first.

Father & son

Grrrrr. Just grrrrr.

The locust trees are blooming, the surest indication of spring’s actual arrival, and so must they be perfuming the air on the other side of the Alleghenies. Forgive a native Kentuckian who thinks they smell sweeter there.

I wonder what the mallard in the creek down the hill is pondering.

In which he reveals himself to be a traitor to his craft.

Prosecco on the porch (improvised)

If I represented the Atlantic, I’d lock in the earliest deposition date on the calendar. Call Patel’s bluff. He has zero interest in putting any of this under oath.

Have I gone too far?

Perhaps we could sustain ourselves in these difficult times with Adam Smith’s comforting observation that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

Just a little piece of advice, a helpful hint.

No one says it better than @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

The United States Senate, decorative but ineffective, conducts its pointless sessions, much as the Roman Senate did under its Caligula.

Kathleen and I marked Easter with a dinner of lamb chops at the Helmand. One of the best dinners in Baltimore.

O beautiful for specious lies

Television is turned off and I’m reading Volker Ullrich’s history of the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

It's April Fools' Day because, particularly in the Republic, we have more than one fool.

This feels like August of 1914, but dumber

Our national birthday parties have not always been the happiest occasions.

Saw a mallard on my walk down to the creek this afternoon.

Zen West day drinkers doing our part for the Republic.

I'm looking forward to the day Bari Weiss is removed from her position at CBS so she can become the new leader of Moms for Liberty. 🥳

Three warm days in a row, and the star magnolias at the back of the house are blooming. The Sun is still shining, but the barometer is falling. March, that inconstant and unreliable month, is about to subject us to two more weeks of chill, dammit.

I said it before, and I say it again.

It has come to this.

Things You Absolutely Have to Get Right, No Discussion Howards End Finnegans Wake Katharine Hepburn Barbra Streisand Edgar Allan Poe and of course Florodora

Quoted in a post on the importance of editing.

Your mileage may vary.

A National Grammar Day idyll.

This is a supposedly edited book, and I’m sitting here—I’M SITTING HERE—reading about a character arriving at “4:00 p.m. in the afternoon.” Blessed Henry Watson Fowler, is there no one out there paying any attention?

A small personal matter: Yesterday a surgeon removed my cancerous prostate in what he described as a clean excision with “nothing funky.” I expect to be released from the hospital sometime this afternoon to return home for a leisurely convalescence.

A loss chronicled.

He himself has said it ...

Yes, I am seventy-five today.

The far-right hates liberalism in part because liberalism empowered women socially, politically, and economically, and so made them less dependent on settling for a mediocre man to provide for them. So they want to destroy liberalism to return women to a state of powerlessness and dependence.

Why Trump might be reluctant to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell: Once she cannot be prosecuted for the crimes for which she was pardoned, the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination will not apply and she can be compelled to testify about them.

Preparing myself to ignore my sixtieth Super Bowl.

It’s just racism. There’s no immigration problem