A Poem for Memorial Day

Game Over 

by Eli Wright

Maybe it was our aimless idealism,

or misguided patriotism.

Maybe we just didn’t understand what we were

getting ourselves into.

Driven by the desire to serve some greater good,

or follow in the footsteps of our fathers.

Some of us needed money for college,

or wanted to see the world in a new way.

But we couldn’t find any other way to pay for it.

We wanted to prove that we were men,

So we took the oath,

then traded our Nintendo’s for M-16’s.

We started out pushing buttons,

ended up pulling triggers,

and it was like no game we had ever played before.

When we first tasted war, we became addicts.

Got hooked on bullet crack and artillery blast.

Every day one of us would overdose on sniper shot or IED.

Some of us never got sober, relapsed on 3 or 4 tours.

Wishing we could just go back

to playing video games or Cops & Robbers again.

But there was no reset button this time.

No getting back up after counting to ten.

Our eyes were sewn open,

unable to look away from horror stories

unfolding in front of us.

We came home incomplete,

with no words to describe

how our hearts are now beating us black and blue

for some of the things we had to see and do.

We all got what we asked for, in one way or another.

But maybe we bit off more than we could chew

and we’re still struggling to swallow it all.

We’re still choking on the truth that we were lied to.

And even though they said our war was over,

it sure doesn’t seem that way.

But hopefully,

one of these days,

we’ll finally make it back home.

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)

In the UK, They Banned Knives When Knife Crime Rose

As an American, it's easy to be cynical about knife crime in the United Kingdom. I'm here right now, and already I've seen multiple TV news segments about all the stabbings and threats of stabbings with knives and machetes. When I saw a BBC report with the chyron "Knives: can we end the violence?" my gut Yank instinct was to think, "Oh, England. You're adorable that you're only worried about one-on-one knife attacks. Try living every fucking day of your life damned to be in a country where mass shootings happen with a frequency approaching hourly." 

Last night, I saw the play Dismissed at the Soho Theatre, which I disliked a great deal for being didactic and over-directed and more. But it sure seemed to be relevant to the nodding audience. It's about a teacher reporting a student who brought a knife to school, and her agony and guilt over the boy's coming expulsion. Now, in the US, schools do freak out over any weapon brought to school property, even in a student's car. Hell, they freak out over Advil. But, again, I thought, "Damn, must be nice to live in a place where that knife is the worst of your worries on school grounds." 

I mean, the idea of getting knifed is fucking frightening, so I'm not trying to diminish or infantilize the amount of knife crime in the UK, which has risen since the fucking Tories have gone full austerity on things like government services, including the NHS. This is mostly a result of the utterly disastrous, laughably and obviously dumb self-inflicted wound of Brexit, which was supposed to bring a bounty of funding to the UK, especially the National Health Service. But it's a fucking failure, a pile of lies, and no one with any real power is suggesting that the nation unfuck itself, including the feckless Labour Party.

But, yes, it's true that violence with crime has risen under Conservative leadership, and, yes, the right-wingers are using it as an excuse to push for harsher punishment for knife crimes perpetrated by anyone over 16 and tactics like "Stop and Search," which is essentially "Stop and Frisk," except with a more polite British-sounding name. And, yes, that shit hasn't really done anything because the problem won't be solved until Brexit-driven inflation and Tory-driven austerity is brought under control. 

So far, pretty much like the United States except with far, far less murder (262 "sharp object" killings last year). However, one thing is very different.

See, in 2019, as a result of the rise in knife crime, the UK government, which, again, is led by the Conservative Party as it has been since 2015 (or 2010, depending on how you count a coalition), tightened a ban on "offensive weapons," as in "can be used in a criminal offense," not "they stink." Prior to the new law, you couldn't carry the banned knives in public. Now, you can't even own them. If you do, you can face up to six months in jail. The laws fully went into effect in 2021. And you know what? The level of knife crime declined. It's still higher than it was, but it's lower than it became.

Think about that. There was a rise in violent crime and they banned the weapons being used in the crime. No movement to halt the ban gained any traction because while, sure, a person with a knife is responsible for the crime, it sure is harder to hurt someone if the knife isn't available. 

One type of knife that has gotten really popular, especially with young people, is the "zombie knife," which is a supposedly cool-looking blade that resembles hunting knives in zombie movies and TV shows. And there was a loophole in the law that allowed for certain kinds of those knives to be sold online, along with machetes that aren't used for gardening. Right now, the UK Home Office is looking into closing that loophole because that's what the fuck you do. 

This shit isn't hard. In the United States, we make it hard because we pretend that the Constitution gives us the right to individually own the means to destroy ourselves. Here, that kind of thinking is seen as madness and completely antithetical to the safety of the public. Or, you know, common fucking sense.

A Brief Observation on the Verdict Declaring Donald Trump Sexually Assaulted E. Jean Carroll

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when it was just fine to sexually harass and assault women. Slapping a woman on the ass was supposed to be taken as a compliment. Discussion about women's looks and their fuckability was a constant in workplaces. And by "fuckability," I mean "rapeability" because it didn't matter if the woman wanted to be judged that way. Consent was something that was given the moment a woman agreed to be alone with a man. It was a bullshit, stupid time, and a good many men didn't buy into it. But a whole fuckin' lot of them did and not enough of those good men did enough to stop it. So there was a kind of impunity, especially since a woman who didn't "happily" accept the ass slaps and tit comments and sex propositions was seen as uptight and man-hating while a woman who didn't give in to fucking when alone with a man who wanted to fuck was seen as a cocktease and prude. And if you were a woman who was raped by a man, your entire sexual history would be questioned, as well as what you wore and what you did to make that man rape you.

This is the gendered world that both E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump came of age in. And when Carroll was alone with Trump in that dressing room at Bergdorf-Goodman, this fucked up sense of male desire being more important than female agency was overtly present. Trump (and, sorry, I'm not going to mince words because I'm not on a jury and I don't have to follow legal definitions) raped Carroll because, in his own words, he felt he could. Because not only did the unwritten rules of celebrity demand he be allowed to, but everything that Trump believed about masculinity said it was his right. And those same fucking terrible ideas about female sexuality and the treatment of rape victims affected E. Jean Carroll, which is why, despite being the wise, witty feminist that she was, she mostly stayed silent. Hell, one of her friends who she told about the incident even advised her to shut up about it because "He's got 200 lawyers. He'll bury you." It wasn't just the lawyers. It was the toxicity of Trump's ideas of masculinity and his proprietary belief about women's bodies. And that was the 1990s, for fuck's sake.

The difference, as revealed at the trial, is that Carroll evolved and Trump did not. Carroll was emboldened by the MeToo movement and contemporary ideologies of bodily autonomy. That propelled her to an act of exceeding bravery in suing Trump for her rape and for his defamation of her. Knowing the onslaught of threats and insults, of barbaric attacks on her credibility, her looks, her career, her motives, everything, she still took him on, even as it meant the end of her long career at Elle magazine, even as it placed her in a limelight she never asked for. Most of us would never be that courageous.

Meanwhile, Trump insisted that Carroll was a crazed liar. He said that she wasn't his type, implying, quite plainly, that there was a type that he would deem rape worthy. He insisted that every famous man could do what he said on the Access Hollywood tape and could get away with it, that it wasn't anything different than what's been done for "the last million years...unfortunately or fortunately." And that last word, "fortunately," is just fucking galling. Women are supposed to be grateful that a star sexually abuses them? Fuck him. Fuck him utterly and completely.

At the end of the day, it took only a couple of hours for the jury to decide that Carroll was telling the truth and that sometimes even Donald Trump has to be told, officially, that he's a fucking liar. No, they couldn't call him a "rapist" (but, again, I can and I will), but they could say he was a fucking monster. They could say that the past is fucking dead. Everything Donald Trump believes is dead. Let it fucking rot. And let's move into a future where women can name their rapists and be heard. 

No, everything is not going to change overnight. It's only changed disappointingly little since that older time. But Carroll has created a path to some kind of reckoning where evil men pay a price. We can cynically say that Trump won't change, that his voters won't give a shit, but sometimes things move forward quickly and sometimes slowly. And no matter how many troglodytes try to drag us backwards, no matter how many assholes on TikTok or Twitter try to say the old ways need to stay, they can go to hell. The movement is always forward. 

Human Life Is Cheap in the USA

I've been thinking about all the times that an obviously mentally-disturbed homeless man directly threatened me. There was the Black guy in Chicago who told me that he was tired, just out of prison, and ready to kill any white people who didn't listen to him. There was the tall white guy in Hoboken who yelled in my face that he was going to rape me and followed me along a crowded street for a while repeating the rape threat. I've also been thinking about all the generally upset mentally-disturbed homeless men I've been around. There was the man in an emergency room waiting room who starting yelling that he had mob friends, threw his coat on the ground, and shoved and broke the plastic partition that had been put up in front of the receptionist (this was in deepest Covid times), breaking it. The guard walked up to him and told him to calm down, asking him if he wanted something to eat. He seemed to relax and walked away with the guard. And on the subway in New York City? Man, I've lost count of the freaked out, freaking out, and desperate people who have screamed at, near, or just down from me on a train or on a platform. It never once even occurred to me to get violent with any of them. I don't think I even felt vaguely threatened, even when the dude was following me, although that one was a little weird. Mostly, I just hoped they got the help they needed.

Just a day or two ago, someone rang my doorbell. I opened the door, and it was a man looking for someone at my address who I had never heard of. The man said he had an appointment to discuss some woodwork or something. I told him he had the wrong place. He apologized and left. Twice I have had people get in my car and realize they were completely wrong, including someone who thought I was their Uber ("Not an Uber, man" was my response and we laughed before he got out). I don't know how many cars have pulled into my driveway and turned around. It never occurred to me that any of those people might be threats. You can argue that my guard was down and that's how bad shit happens. But maybe because I don't own a gun, my response isn't to think about using it. Maybe I'm just not a goddamn coward.

As we get the news of the latest horrific gun massacre in this country, as we fail to understand how anyone can think the murder of Jordan Neely on the subway was anything but a murder, as we pathetically move on from the murders of Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis, one thing has become perfectly clear in this idiot country during this sad, stupid age we're damned to live through is that human life has become cheap here. It has lost its value to too many of us. Sure, something like the strangling to death of Neely for daring to have a meltdown in public, as that's the only place an unhoused person can meltdown, that can inspire protests. But the numbers of people who truly believe that Neely's murderer, Daniel Penny, had a legitimate reason to murder him is depressing as hell. That comes form a longstanding hatred of the unhoused, with more than a little racism involved. Neely, who I'd seen dance in Washington Square Park, attracting a crowd with his Michael Jackson imitation, was dehumanized by our reaction to his circumstance, to his very existence, and once that happens, it's easier to allow for his murder to appear justified. 

We absorb horror after horror. I saw a photo from the Allen, Texas, massacre of victims of the shooter's AR-15, including a little girl with her brain splattered out. I cannot begin to fathom the depth of sociopathic depravity you have to possess in order to look at a picture like that and think, "Yeah, everything's fine with how things are going. More guns, please." I mean, if one particular gun is responsible for massacre after massacre, it's pretty clear that you need to get rid of that gun, at the very least. I mean, isn't that the most obvious, logical extension of any discussion of "what can we do"? 

But we see all around us the devaluing of human life, of any sense that we should give a damn about anyone other than ourselves and those closest to us. This is what it means to live in a nation where one in three people owns a gun, where at least 20 million of those guns are the same kind that is used in massacre after massacre. This is what it means to live in that armed country where a large percentage of us believe that we are under constant assault from people known and unknown, from migrant gangs, from marauding non-whites, from woke teenagers, from the very elected government, from forces and conspiracies that only exist in the fevered minds of those who want to believe them. And then you think a good many of those threats are armed, so you have to kill them before they kill you. Human life in general doesn't matter to you anymore. Humanity doesn't matter. You and yours, that's all that does. And your guns. 

When other countries look at the United States, they see this as madness. And it is. We have been driven mad by right-wing media and politicians who make coin and careers on exploiting the fears that right-wing media presents. I have friends in New Jersey who refuse to go into New York City because they fully believe that one of the safest places in the country is a deadly hellhole of murder. When I convince them to hang out, they are hyperalert, not thinking that everyone around them is just living their lives. No, they believe that one of them is going to rob them or take them out. And anything out of the ordinary, say, a homeless man ranting about needing food, confirms their belief that we're in a cesspool of people they should hate for existing. And then you don't have to care and think they deserve it when someone, say, chokes them to death because they think they might have a gun or might be a threat. 

If you see hurting people and you don't want to help them, if you don't want to increase funding for services or ban weapons of war, if you don't want to deal with housing the unhoused or showing compassion for migrants, if you don't want to do anything to stop the hurting, if you, in fact, want them to hurt, if you think everyday things people do, like ringing a doorbell, are threats that need deadly force, then they aren't the ones who have lost their humanity. You are. And if we keep allowing our leaders to make the country deadlier, then we aren't that far behind.

Of Course We're Fucking Gleeful Over Tucker Carlson Being Fired. Do You Blame Us?

All over Left Commentaria last week, an orgasmic yawp of glee was released, along with a good many actual orgasms, when Fox "news" announced that it had fired its biggest star, Tucker Carlson. The thrillingly ecstatic schadenfreude only grew exponentially as more details came out: Carlson and everyone outside the executive suite were caught off-guard by the firing, it was effective immediately, and his last show was on Friday, April 21, when he had promised he'd be back on Monday, with promos for whatever fuckery he was gonna do running earlier on the day he was fired. In the corporate world, this is an execution. The only reason he wasn't escorted out by security is that he wasn't in the building. But Carlson's email was cut off, and he wasn't even told why he was fired, which means he had all the job protections of a McDonald's worker, which, c'mon, that's just fuckin' funny. (Yeah, I know that a fired McDonald's worker doesn't get a huge payout, but I'm talking the actual firing.)

This reaction goes beyond just feeling great because someone awful lost their job and lost their megaphone. Generally, when we get to feel this way, it's fairly late in the career of the receiver of the boot, whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck fading into online isolation in their TV twilight (they do have big audiences, but no reach beyond the audience whatsoever) or Rush Limbaugh dying about 20 years after it would have made a difference or Megyn Kelly trying to go legit and flopping. Gratifying as all that was, it pales in comparison to Carlson's firing because none of the others had the political cache' he had at the time of the end of his current career. They may once have, but Carlson's savage ejection from the Fox "news" compound happened while he was poised to have a huge impact on the 2024 election. 

Tucker Carlson had become a uniquely powerful threat to the nation, and that was by design. His whole career since joining Fox has been centered on vengeance against those who he saw as harming and betraying him, all while gathering an audience of violent racists who saw him as their Goebbels. He mainstreamed white supremacism and Christian nationalism, all with a fraternity president's arrogance and misogyny. He gave hatemongers legitimacy and a microphone, all while coating it in a secret sauce of fake inquisitiveness ("I'm just asking questions" was his version of saying, "I'm just joking" after you've said something really shitty that you totally meant but didn't want to be seen as an obvious asshole for saying). 

Lemme put this another way: He isn't just a motherfucker. He's a motherfucker who loves fucking mothers. He gets his rocks off hurting people. He's got a bully's belief in his own power, and if there was anything Rupert Murdoch wasn't going to stand for, it was someone trying to out-bully or out-motherfucker him. 

If you don't understand what I'm saying, check out his speech at the 50th anniversary gala for the Heritage Foundation (motto: "Providing faux-intellectual cover for your cruelest impulses for a half-century"). He compares abortion to Aztec "human sacrifice." He declares Episcopalianism is "not even a Christian religion at this point." He attacks pronouns and trans people because of course he does.

And then there's this: "You look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs. If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine War, raise your hand."

You got that? The actions over the obvious execution of a Black man by a white cop, a very real pandemic that killed over a million Americans, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia are merely things you end up agreeing with because you want to stay employed. It's impossible for him to conceive of these things as the actual beliefs of "people you know." He is propagating a fantasy that involves, necessarily, calling reality a fantasy. And a lot of assholes buy into that shit wholeheartedly because it tells them that they don't have to give a shit. Giving a shit is hard; it means personal sacrifice and the effort to actually fucking solve problems. Much easier to deny they exist. 

This is why he was such a dangerous bacterial infection in the pisshole of the American soul. He told you that it was not only okay to lack any fucks to give about your fellow humans, but that you were a stronger, better person if you didn't give a fuck about them. In fact, the only humans you were supposed to give a fuck about were the ones that Carlson told you to give a fuck about, the ones like him, and, of course, himself. We on the left do throw around the Nazi comparisons a little loosely, and I'm not simply calling Tucker Carlson a Nazi. I'm going farther. I'm saying that the original Nazis would find a lot to love in Tucker Carlson's show. In fact, our current version of the Nazis sure do love him. And why not? He talks about people in terms of weak and strong, filthy and clean, them and us. We're getting really close to "May as well round them up and put them in camps" followed by that squeaky clown eunuch laugh of his.

Carlson's ejection from the biggest audience he could get is an objective good for the country. He's a sexist, racist attack poodle who put on working-class drag to hide his patrician airs, and he was not only willing to wallow in the foulest shit pools of American fuckery, but he discovered that he liked to swim in shit, that swimming in shit was his truest self, a hateful troll with a god complex.  And it showed too clearly, getting more intense as time went by. To use the epithet he apparently was a little too free with around too many people and in too many emails, Tucker Carlson was fired because he's a cunt. I mean, when you're too much of a cunt for Rupert Murdoch, you're an absolute cunt to your cuntish core.

So, yeah, we're thrilled to see him disappear for a while, even if he's promising to come back. It will take time for him to build the kind of influence he had, where he could make demands of political leaders and give airtime to candidates he supported, boosting their election chances. The bonus? Tucker Carlson's a vindictive little prick, and he'll be trying to settle scores with Fox "news." Until then, enjoy the Tucker-free era, however long it lasts.

The Pleasure of Watching Ron DeSantis Implode

There was never a chance in heaven or hell that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who looks like a 1980s shop teacher who gets off on breaking the birdhouses the kids make to prove "you can't build shit, you little pussy," was going to win the Republican nomination for president. I mean, put aside that Donald Trump owns the GOP no matter how much a few feckless fucks fail to pry it away from his tiny hands. DeSantis has all the personality of an angry Starbucks manager and all the charm of the least charming dung beetle. If you bottled DeSantis's vibe as a scent, it would be "old scrotum and expired Axe body spray." I mean, in Vegas terms, DeSantis is pissed off that the drunks at the buffet at the Tropicana aren't enjoying his terrible magic show while Trump is Siegfried and Roy rolled into one sparkly orange suit.

Beyond personality, though, DeSantis has been repeatedly stepping on his dick, misreading this moment in American history. The retro right in this country think that it's time to turn back the clock on everything, on abortion rights, on multiculturalism, on gender identity, on our understanding of history. With a complicit legislature, DeSantis has embraced this as his agenda, and he preens and prances around the country, pretending that he's some great warrior when, really, he's just "that prick, you know, that prick from Florida."

You can't go around saying stupid shit like "We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die" like DeSantis did in South Carolina this week, a variation on shit he's been saying for months. It's one thing to use the garbage word "woke" to describe everything you don't like. It's something completely different to stand there and pretend that you are some mighty warrior against...who exactly? School teachers? Writers? Cultural theorists? It's one thing to be a simpering little bitch about racism or drag queens. It's another thing altogether when you steal the language that Winston Churchill used in rallying people to fight the Nazis, you know, the ones who actually threatened to bomb and kill their way to conquering England, and use it to show that you are so tough that you'll pass a law that bans books about same sex penguins from classrooms. It's not remotely comparable and you just look like a pussy-ass tool for implying it.

In everything that DeSantis does, he has paths laid out for him: the rational, walk away, sweep it under the rug, everyone will forget about it path or the biggest fucking asshole in the world path. DeSantis has never seen an issue where he doesn't walk that asshole path. He could have just let it go when the Disney corporation criticized the "Don't Say Gay" bill that prevented any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity from K-3 classrooms. Nope. Motherfucker decided it was time to take a stand and attack Disney, one of the biggest employers in the state and, you know, fucking Disney. When Disney outmaneuvered DeSantis on the board that oversees the district Disney World is in, when DeSantis got pimp-slapped by a fucking cartoon mouse (with billions of dollars and the best legal team those billions can buy behind it), he didn't say, "Fuck it" and take the L. Nope again. He expanded "Don't Say 'Gay'" through 12th grade and threatened to do desperate shit like open a prison next to Disney. It's the kind of thing that can get other Republicans to say, "What the fuck are you doing?" to the governor, who got fucking married at Disney.

On abortion, on book bans, on concealed weapons, on academic free speech, and more, DeSantis is, yes, doing what he campaigned on, but it's fucking exhausting the Republicans in the state. The nation, especially young voters, look at Florida as if all you'll retch from the stink of sargassum, the seaweed that's smells like rotten eggs when it bakes in the sun, as it will when a giant patch of it lands on Florida's beaches soon. This is not to mention that Donald Trump is smacking around DeSantis with the sadistic glee of an abusive father whose son isn't wearing a suit to a baseball game. Jesus, that must be harsh, considering that DeSantis used his kids in a 2018 ad talking about how vigorously he sucked Trump's dick. And we oddly don't talk anymore about DeSantis kidnapping a bunch of migrants in Texas and flying them to Martha's Vineyard at taxpayer expense. He's just a fucking repulsive pit of pig shit. 

Meanwhile, Florida is fucked. It's fucked in so many ways beyond the seaweed swamp headed its way. Because the state is somewhere between "totally underwater" and "on the way to being totally underwater"on the climate change timeline, every big storm is going to be a fucktastrophe of flooding and fear. That fear, fed by shortages of gasoline and panic buying, which led to more shortages, is only going to get worse and shootier in a state with, you know, all those fucking concealed guns. And this has led to a property insurance crisis that oddly can't be solved by forcing teachers to subject their 1st-grade classroom libraries to an approval committee. It's true. You can't mitigate a 40% hike in your homeowners insurance by not telling kids about Rosa Parks.

Florida is one of a dozen states that haven't taken advantage of expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and the crisis that's going to cause is coming soon, along with the nursing shortage that is especially going to hit a state with a large elderly population. DeSantis likes to brag about Florida's supposed great reaction to Covid, but that relies on the short-term memory loss of Floridians. Shit got bad there, really bad, and it's not prepared if it gets bad again.

And yet he could have gotten past all of this if he wasn't such a proud cunt about everything. He's a void of charisma, so lacking in personality that he could say, "Florida is where charm goes to die" and you couldn't argue with him. So, no, he's not getting elected to anything outside of his increasingly dumb and deranged and dirty state. 

One of the great pleasures of this filthy, fucked age we're damned to exist in is watching the implosion of political figures who the posh pundits praise. We've gotten to see the collapse of Rudy Giuliani, the deflation of Chris Christie, and now the utter humiliation of Ron DeSantis. The best part is he's such a smug bastard that he'll stay on this damned path, snarling into oblivion. We can all eat our pudding cups with a spoon as we enjoy the crash.

A Note to Breathless Conservatives: Bill Clinton Was Almost Indicted in 2001, But He Cut a Deal

Lemme lay some history on you conservative motherfuckers now that you're losing your shit over Donald Trump's indictment on a shit-ton of felonies for financial chicanery. I mean, beyond the furious masturbatory screams of "election interference" and "unprecedented" and "partisan politics" and other things that simply aren't assertions of Trump's innocence, just about the stupidest fucking thing you're saying is that "If they can do it to Trump, what will you do when they try to indict a Democratic president?" 

I mean, you've got the whine squad turned up to full air raid horn. Smarmy cockmite Jesse Watters urged future prosecutions of Democratic former presidents when (if, really) a Republican is in the White House again. Rep. James "Abortions for Women I Impregnate, But None for You" Comer claimed that prosecutors in Tennessee and Kentucky want to go after Joe Biden and that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg "opened up a can of worms; they’ve set precedents now we can’t go back on." The Wall Street Journal (motto: "Hard news shell around a soft toxic waste dump of commentary") declared, "If there was ever a case that opens Pandora’s box, the first indictment of a former President in U.S. history is it," a hyperbolic response that was echoed by other screechy dicks. Of course, Tucker Carlson tuckered carlsonly, saying that Trump wouldn't be indicted if he wasn't running for president. Dumbest of all, Charlie "Forehead of doom" Kirk tweeted, "I bet Bill Clinton is a little nervous he's now fair game." 

First, fuck yeah, indict presidents. Presidents should be scared of committing crimes. As just about everyone sane has said, if we had prosecuted Nixon, if we had prosecuted Reagan, if we had prosecuted W. Bush, this shit might not be happening. We pretend to be this grand and glorious nation of laws but we want to act like a president is a fucking king except for the inconvenience of elections. Absolutely indict criminals. And people who committed crimes that they're hiding shouldn't run for president because that's just dumb. Or Trump. It's hard to separate those two words.

You'll notice I left Bill Clinton out of that list of prosecution-worthy presidents. It's not because I think he shouldn't have been indicted for perjury. He obviously committed it. It's because everyone has fucking forgotten one fact:

They were about to indict Clinton in 2001 when he cut a deal to avoid it. 

You got that? When Bill Clinton was at the very end of his presidency, as a result of the Whitewater investigation, the independent counsel, who was then Robert Ray after Kenneth Starr finally got the fuck out, was looking to indict Clinton for perjury about that blow job from Monica Lewinsky. If it had gone forward, Bill Clinton would have been an ex-president when he was indicted. If he had raged and blustered about it being untrue and told everyone to go fuck themselves with their perjury, he would have been indicted. As an ex-president. Trump could have cut a deal a long time ago, but he didn't go the Clinton route because he refuses to ever say he's wrong because he's a tiny-pricked ego monster.

See, Clinton gave up his law license in Arkansas for five years and paid a $25,000 fine, and he admitted he made false statements about the blow job. And then the whole investigation was closed with a report that pissed off a lot Clinton haters, but that pointed out how much Clinton was actually punished, including an $850k settlement with Paula Jones (google her - I don't feel like going into all that) and a $90,000 fine for contempt of court. 

It's also worth noting that the entire Whitewater matter started over a failed real estate deal prior to Clinton's presidency. Google that, too, if you want to sit there and think, "What the fuck?" and "Really?" for a few hours. The fellatio perjury was just something that got folded into it because reasons (mostly that there actually was a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get the Clintons, but, again, google is your friend here, not me).

So, yeah, hysterical right-wingers and Fox "news" liars, maybe shut the fuck up about the "damage" that Trump's indictment will do to democracy. Democracy needs this shit to happen to be stronger. As one editorial board noted, our leaders "should be indicted, upholding the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law." Strong words. You know who said that? The fucking Wall Street Journal back in January 2001. 

Pandora's box, my ass.

Republicans Don't Fucking Care About Your Children Dying

It's pretty fucking simple: If you won't do anything at all about the number one cause of deaths in children and teenagers in this stupid country, you don't get to say you care about children. It really is that easy. No matter what policies you support, good or shitty, you are a fucking fraud if you won't step up on the number of and easy access to firearms, especially high-powered weapons with large magazines. If your house is on fire but you're ignoring that because you want to spackle a hole in the wall, then your minor repair is worthless. That wall's gonna burn, too.

After another shooting at another school, this time in Nashville, with 3 kids and 3 adults murdered by a shooter who had bought their guns legally, Republicans practically lined up to tell parents everywhere that they don't fucking care if your children die. Senator John Cornyn from Texas, who was a Republican co-sponsor of the mild gun legislation that was signed into law in 2022, said, "I would say we’ve gone about as far as we can go" on any additional gun control laws. Profiles in chickenshit.

Then there was the kind of motherfuckering that you only expect from a motherfucker who thinks he can fuck mothers with abandon and still get reelected. Rep. Tim Burchett from east Tennessee (so not Nashville) actually said, "We're not gonna fix it. Criminals are going to be criminals."And when asked to clarify, he actually doubled down, saying, If you think Washington is going to fix this problem, you’re wrong. They’re not going to fix this problem. They are the problem." Prior to admitting that he won't do shit to prevent your children from dying, he actually said, "We need a real revival in this country. Let’s call on our Christian ministers and our people of faith." And whenever one of these nutzoid Jesus humpers talk about faith being the solution to gun crimes, someone needs to remind them of how many fucking houses of worship have been the sites of gun massacres. Were the people there not faithful enough?

But what Burchett, who looks like what you get if a neo-Nazi incel fucked a Confederate general statue, said is revealing: Guns are more important than your children's blood. Guns are more important than feeling safe sending your kids to school. And no matter how many kids die, we Republicans aren't gonna lift a goddamn finger to do something about the number one cause of childhood death.

Oh, except two things. 

First, they're gonna pass more pro-gun laws in places like, well, looky fuckin' here, Tennessee. Yeah, the General Assembly is well on its way to lowering the age to carry a gun to 18. It's also gonna legalize open carry, although there is actually a debate on whether or not to allow you to open-carry an AR-15, which, these days, almost counts as moderate. All over, apathetic assholes are passing "constitutional carry" laws, which allows for concealed carry of a firearm without a permit. So, in other words, I could walk past the governor of one of those states while holding a gun, and no one can do shit about it. But if I threaten the governor with my words, I can be arrested. Which amendment is first again? (Note: I'm cool with limiting speech when it comes to threats, even though the First Amendment doesn't require shit to be "well-regulated.")

The idea that more guns will solve the gun problem - whether it's a gun-purchasing free-for-all or arming teachers - is madness and should be treated like it's madness. If you take a Christmas photo with your family holding rifles, it's madness and should be treated like it's madness. If you own seven guns, like the Nashville shooter did, or more, as lots of Americans do, it's madness and should be treated as madness.  We are far too fucking polite with the gun worshippers. They're fucking crazy. Just because something is allowed doesn't mean that you can't do it to an insane extent. If you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and keep stuffing your face until you vomit, no one's going to say, "Well, look at the sign." They're gonna tell you to stop eating, you dumb fuck.

The other thing that right-wing fucknuts are doing is blaming trans people in general because the shooter was apparently a trans man. We don't know a single motive, but it's sure as fuck easier to blame everything else except, you know, the actual weapons. Fox "news" and all of Murdochia is losing its shit over the idea that a trans person could commit mass murder, as if nearly every other mass shooting wasn't committed by a cis white male. 

Anything, anything, anything except to accept blame for all the blood spilled, all the dead children, all the schools ruined. "Oh, I care about the children," you might say, you oh-so-fucking-brave-Republican, "but I want to stop child trafficking. I don't want doctors to mutilate children in the name of gender madness. See how much I care?" Except your solution to child trafficking is to not do anything to actually stop it except to attack people who aren't involved in it, like drag queens. And doctors aren't mutilating kids. They're providing gender-affirming care that actually saves lives. 

No matter what, you're still not doing a thing about, again, the number one killer of kids. And if you're not going to do it, if you're going to pretend it's unsolvable despite the fact that nearly every single other country has solved it, if you're going to walk away from any responsibility, then have the decency to get the fuck out of the way and let others handle it. Otherwise, you're an accessory to slaughter.

A Film in Stormy Daniels' Career That Makes a Whole Lot of Sense Now (with a Lengthy Side Note About Her Financial Prowess)

In 2007, Stormy Daniels starred with Randy Spear in the porn film Black Widow (sorry, not a porn parody of the Marvel film, although, yeah, those exist. Look up The Assvengers). It was one of the first films she made after she had sex with Donald Trump one time in 2006. And, in context, I gotta tell you: there’s a dissertation that could be written about this confluence of fucked-up history and fuck film. 

Lemme set this up for you: Stormy plays Peyton, a poor young women from an abusive mother and a cruel, neglectful father, and she grew up in south Louisiana (like me). The movie takes place after Stormy/Peyton is grown up. She has decided that the way to get anywhere is to find a sugar daddy, marry him, and then murder him. When the movie starts, we know that Peyton is married to Randy Spear or “Charles,” a wealthy corporate lawyer with a heart of gold. She’s 20 and he’s 56. She says, “He was just attractive enough to fuck…He was quiet, gentle, and suffered from chronic depression.” Nothing like hearing about mental illness in the midst of jacking off to porn.

But think about it… think about it...The reason that Stormy Daniels let Donald Trump fuck her was because he was making promises about getting her on Celebrity Apprentice and helping her go mainstream. Except he ended up failing on that promise. So, in real life, she had sex with an unattractive, mentally ill man because she thought she’d get something out of it. 

Back to Black Widow: In order to get what she thinks she deserves, Peyton decides she’s going to poison Charles and take his fortune. She even finds a small book on assisted suicide she uses as a guide to see what to give Charles to kill him. 

Now, I suppose you’re wondering, “Wait, isn’t this porn?” Well, sure. And, just like Stormy with Trump, Peyton has sex with Charles, although I'm sure this was a lot more athletic. There’s a bunch of cocksucking and pussy-eating before some condom covered dick-in-vag action. But the whole thing is scored to some minor key strings, like a bunch of evil shit is happening. It’s like Charles is jizzing on Peyton’s face while saying, “That’s fucking awesome, yeah, yeah” while on the soundtrack isn’t the usual "bang-chicka-wah-wah." No, it’s like a horror movie with dissonant violins screeching.

Which, again, if you think about it, must have been what was going through Stormy Daniels’ mind while Donald Trump lumbered on top of her and thrust his mushroom dick into her without a condom for a couple of seconds before heaving off her and saying how awesome it was. Can you blame her for saying, “Oh, fuck, yeah, you’re paying me for silence” when they offered it to her?

And, by the way, Daniels (or, you know, Stephanie Clifford) is no slouch in the business acumen department. Indeed, you could teach a seminar in supply and demand with her autobiography cum business guide, Full Disclosure. Check out this look at the capitalistic give and take of the strip club:

“If you walked in at ten p.m., you were going in cold, trying to get the attention of guys when you were one of many to choose from. But that’s where the money was. There were three set shifts: 3 to 11, 8:30 - 2, and 10 - 2. Dancers had to pay a house fee for the two later shifts, with the last shift asking the highest house fee for the shortest time. A house fee is the ‘rent’ you pay the club as a contractor occupying their space to offer your services. The same way hairstylists will often pay for their space at a salon. There was no fee if you came in at opening, because no girl wants to be there when it’s three guys.”

Now, here is where Daniels reveals herself to be far wiser than you’d think. She says, “I wanted to avoid the house fee but wanted to maximize profit, so for the first five months, I worked the 3 to 11 shift, clocking out just as many girls were getting there. Then I got smarter and I would work a double, starting at three in the afternoon and not leaving until two in the morning. I could skip the house fee, establish my guys, and stay with them when the later girls rolled in.” 

Am I wrong, economics nerds, that this is an example of market optimization, maximizing profits based on your marketing efforts? I think so. Contrast that with Donald Trump, who saturated the market with his own gaudy, debt-heavy casinos that ultimately went bankrupt because of a fundamental misreading of the market. 

Later, Daniels offers a lesson in long-term investment strategy through her regular customer who she called “Bear” because “his white hair and beard gave him the look of a polar bear.” She writes, “He was definitely a creature of habit, coming in every night at midnight after finishing his job as the nighttime manager of a car wash and taking his usual spot to stay the last couple of hours. Once I saw he came in every night, I always made a point of dancing for him. Bear was never a big spender. He would tip a five onstage, and he only got table dances if it was a two-for-one, which they did every hour. Table dances were only ten dollars, but he always gave a twenty and he always closed out the night with me. That meant Bear was good for between twenty-five and fifty dollars a night. But late on a Friday or Saturday night, there’s always a guy who wants to go into a VIP room and you can get six or seven hundred dollars, so the girls would ignore Bear to make that money. Not me - I would always give Bear the last dance of the night. Girls would be like, ‘This guy wants to give you a hundred dollars for a table dance.

“‘No, I only dance for Bear.’

“‘What’s wrong with you?’ was the constant refrain.

“‘He’s twenty dollars every night,’ I said. ‘Every week. Every month. Do the math.’

“He was sensitive about things, and why be rude to him one night to get two or three hundred dollars off this guy who I’m never gonna see again? It’s the long game, and Bear taught me it.”

Here, Daniels evinced an ethos based on self-control, on customer retention, rather than short-term gain. Customer loyalty allowed Daniels to get through times when there was a reduced market in general. 

When Daniels started doing pornographic films, she acted in dozens before she started to write and direct them. She became recognized as one of the best directors for actors, never demanding they do more than what they had agreed to do. Women especially like to work for her. That's a hell of a great reputation. 

She is currently worth over $2 million and she says that she carries zero debt. By some of the most pessimistic (or optimistic, depending on your bent) estimates, Donald Trump holds at least 1.1 billion dollars in debt. And some other estimates put his assets at around 600 million dollars. That means that there is at least a small chance that Stephanie Clifford - Stormy Daniels - is worth more than Donald Trump.

In other words, being a respectable porn artist and stripper is better for your portfolio than being a wildly irrational real estate speculator and brand operator. To put it another way, Stormy Daniels dealt in less fantasy than The Art of the Deal. And if Donald Trump is indicted and arrested this week, we can thank Daniels for taking advantage of Trump's weaknesses, like a good capitalist.

What You Think You Know About Colleges and Universities Is Wrong

(This was originally published over on my Patreon page. I'm posting it here for two reasons. First, DeSantis continues to be a belligerent, anti-education jerk, including blaming the Silicon Valley Bank failure on diversity. And, second, well, to get you to subscribe to the Patreon.)

To listen to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other politicians attack the curricula of colleges and universities in their states and in the country as a whole, one could come away with the clear impression that a college student in the United States is subject to a nonstop barrage of critical race theory; enforced diversity, equity, and inclusion; and indoctrination into a liberal ideology that says white, straight males are evil and need to be repressed in favor of gender-noncomforming people of color. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, all you need to do is spend five minutes watching a conservative news network or listening to right-wing podcasts, and you’ll hear that left-wing professors are the doom and damnation of the American dream. 

Speaking as a tenured liberal with over 30 years of experience in higher education who is a current  department chair, I can tell you that this version of university classroom life is a perverse fantasy. It has very little to do with the experiences of the overwhelming number of students at the overwhelming number of colleges and universities in this country. Simply put, what the right-wing fabulists want their viewers, listeners, and readers to think is a lie. 

Most schools are not Harvard or Oberlin. Most are like mine, which is part of the City University of New York and which teaches about 10,000 mostly working and middle-class students, most of whom have jobs and families, and many of whom are the first in their families to go to college. Yes, all the students start with similar general education courses. For example, before they get to their major, students are required to take two courses in composition, where they learn to write at a college-level, including how to argue using researched evidence. The topics vary from professor to professor. The students take multiple math, science, and foreign language courses, along with a selection of basic social science and a couple of humanities classes. 

We do require that students take courses within these requirements that cover Pluralism and Diversity as a category, as well as Contemporary World. That sounds scary to the conservative overseers of the curriculum who must think this is where the forced CRT and cis-gender confessions happen, but, again, the reality of it is far different. The choices for P&D include classes like The Japanese Economy or Modern Art in Latin America or The History of Education in the United States. Yes, there are courses like Islam: Religion and Culture, as well as Gender and Sexuality. But no single topic is required. And while a student is completing this General Education curriculum, they move on to majors and minors, and most will never have their hair mussed by Queer Theory or African American Studies. 

To put it plainly, this is how it is at virtually every college and university. Of course, there are exceptions, generally at private schools. But even at the college that has become Gov. DeSantis’s bete noire, the New College of Florida, the current curriculum simply doesn’t support all the allegations made against it. DeSantis said, “The mission has been, I think, more into the DEI, CRT, the gender ideology rather than what a liberal arts education should be.”

But the catalog of the New College clearly shows that its mission is to give students a broad education along with the specialization of their majors. Out of ten classes in distribution areas in the Chart Your Course general education curriculum, one is in “Diverse Perspectives.” Within majors like Economics and Chemistry, no course that might be considered “woke” is included. Within majors like English and Political Science, of course, students can choose courses in the literature of “Globalized Gentrification” or “Freedom and Slavery in Political Thought.” But they can also take courses in ancient Greek literature or the U.S. Constitution. In addition, by Florida law, all students have to take a course or pass a test that demonstrates Civic Literacy, and NCF offers several paths to accomplish that requirement. 

The point here is not to reduce the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as ideas that benefit students who will have to work in a diverse world. Even the evangelical Christian Liberty University has an Office of Equity and Inclusion. It has a Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President of Equity and Inclusion because the school recognizes the benefit of these kinds of programs. It’s strange that conservative colleges and universities like Liberty or Pepperdine aren’t condemned for their DEI efforts. Meanwhile, DeSantis demanded that all the public schools of higher education in Florida outline their spending on these kinds of programs. It amounted to less than 1 percent for almost all the schools. 

But it’s simply a lie-filled attack on higher education in the United States to proclaim that all the students are being inundated with left-wing ideology. A small percentage of students at a small percentage of schools are exposed to anything remotely controversial. Those who condemn “censorship” or other perceived thought crimes concentrate on obvious examples of over-reach, like the Islamic art incident at Hamline University.

Students have to seek out classes where anything approaching critical race theory is being taught, classes like mine, to be honest. When I dove into the subject while discussing Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman in an American Drama class, the students were fascinated. Several said they had never thought about American culture or the legal system from that perspective and it was eye-opening. I didn’t demand that they had to believe what I was presenting, which were mostly facts about racism in their country. 

I simply told them the historical background to the play, history that I’m sure a few students already knew. Perhaps, though, the ones that didn’t know had their perspective changed or at least had new information to consider. Isn’t that one of the things a college education is supposed to do? Challenge students? Expand what they know and maybe what they think?

That’s at least part of what DeSantis and, for lack of a better phrase, the anti-woke forces really want to stop.

(If you want more rudeness, join up for my Patreon, starting at a buck a month. You can even pay a year at once. It's a great community of people trying to make sense of a nation gone mad. Usually, there's a lot more cussin'.) 

 

What You Haven't Heard About: Biden's Gonna Veto an Anti-ESG Bill

Back in December, I warned that the next round of fuckery the right was going to pull had to do with ESG investing. While it's a way more complex thing than I have the ability to explain, lemme give it a shot: investing in well-governed companies that give a shit about the environment and social issues. There you go. E=Environment, S=Social, G=Governance. So, like, it's investing in a corporation that isn't run by shitbags, and instead by those who think climate change is gonna fuck us if we don't do anything and who don't treat their workers like garbage. It's not new, but it's taken off in the last couple of years, and now "ESG accounted for $1 of every $8 in all U.S. assets under professional management."

Doesn't that seem like a good thing? Like, wouldn't you want to invest in companies that don't have completely skeevy motherfuckers in charge? That take things like carbon emissions and the effects of rising seas into account in how they do business? That pay fairly and offer benefits that keep workers happy and productive? I mean, how is any of this bad? In fact, wouldn't it be doing due diligence to see if a company is taking into account, say, droughts and flooding when determining where to build a factory? Or if it isn't, say, hiring migrant children to clean the kill floor of their slaughterhouse?

Well, it is bad because we live in the age of the sentient asshole, and it's a problem because of course it is. See, this is apparently making capitalism "woke," and we can't have that. We can't even have that as a consideration.

The administration of Joe Biden decided to undo a Trump administration rule that said the only thing you could consider in retirement fund investments was "financial factors." In other words, it doesn't matter if Mafia-run Amalgamated Sewage Dumping is pouring shit into the water supply and will likely face future fines and maybe even more enforcement. As long as it's making money now, your retirement plan can put tons of money into it (or a fund that contains it in its portfolio). 

The Biden rule change said, simply, if a retirement fund wants to invest primarily on ESG factors, it totally can. That's it. It didn't mandate it. Trump's rule mandated something. Biden's just says, "Hey, your call." Or, to put it another way, "The rule simply makes sure that retirement plan fiduciaries must engage in a risk and return analysis of their investment decisions and recognizes that these factors can be relevant to that analysis." But it doesn't force investment one way or another like the Trump rule did.

Put another way: Trump said, "You must be shitty." Biden said, "You can be shitty if you want, but you can also not be shitty."

But ESG is ready to be exploited by the shitmongers of the right, like CRT and other abbreviations of the damned. So away we go. 

In Republican states like Texas, Indiana, and, of fucking course, Florida, the cockflea legislatures, encouraged by their dickweed governors, are starting to pass anti-ESG bills that prevent state retirement funds, among other things (like municipal bonds), from being invested with any firms that use ESG as a factor. Florida pulled $2 billion out of Blackrock because it used ESG factors. Governor Ron DeSantis, who always looks like he's gonna giddily evict an orphanage for a single late mortgage payment, has proposed legislation that he says will prevent "financial institutions from discriminating against customers for their religious, political, or social beliefs — like owning a firearm, securing the border or increasing our energy independence." 

By the way, another word for the government controlling the financial sector is "socialism." 

Of course, of course, it shouldn't need to be said that, at the end of the day, the word "douche" is in "fiduciary," and those motherfuckers aren't going to put money in anything that isn't going to make money. And ESG investing is making money. Yeah, companies that are moving away from oil and coal, that are diversifying their boards, that are acting as semi-decent citizens in an indecent economic system are doing well. Why wouldn't you invest in success? In fact, states that prevent such investment are essentially setting money on fire.

Which brings us to Biden's first veto threat. Republicans in the Senate, with the help of fossil fuel Democrats Joe Manchin and Jon Tester, passed a bill to prevent enforcement of Biden's rule. The House passed it on pretty much party lines. And Biden said, "Yeah, go fuck yourselves" and has said he will veto the bill. 

Obviously, Republicans were hysterical pricks while discussing the bill. Sen. John Bearasshole or whatever from Wyoming (motto: "It's fucking hilarious that we have the same number of senators as California") said, "The Biden administration wants retirement plan managers to invest people’s retirement funds based not on the best return for the money — nope — based on woke ideology" and added that it was part of Biden's "radical left" agenda." 

But you know who says the senator from Wyoming should sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up? The Republican-controlled legislature of North Dakota. Yeah, they shit on an anti-ESG bill, going down 90-3 in the House, because the fucking bankers told them it was nonsense. "Our biggest concern is the idea of somebody telling our banks who to do business with or who not to do business with," said the head of the North Dakota Bankers Association. "We believe our banks should be allowed to do business with customers they know, the people they know and to make those decisions." Damn, that's some folksy shit right there in service of both crass capitalism and freedom of association and speech.

The screaming propagandists of the right are going to try to make ESG into the next boogeyman. It'll be interesting to see how far they get.

It Pisses Them Off That We Were Right About Regulations and That We Actually Do Give a Shit About East Palestine

Two things can be true at once. We can believe that the people in East Palestine, Ohio, are a bunch of fucking idiots who vote against their own interests repeatedly, electing horrible motherfuckers who don't give a happy monkey fuck about their health or safety, but, man, they sure hate Black people and migrants, so they got your vote. And we can also believe that they should get all the help they desperately need to recover from the toxic chemicals that were spilled and burned when a Norfolk Southern train derailed in their town. 

You can hear the nematodes of the right spout off about how Democrats and the "left" ignored the disaster because, as Fox "news" Tucker "You can tell I'm lying because I'm breathing" Carlson put it on February 15, "East Palestine is a poor, white town that voted for Trump. So honestly, who cares? No one in the Biden administration did care and that's an atrocity." And you can wonder, "The fuck are they talking about?" It's a fucking lie. The train derailed on February 3. By February 4, the National Transportation Safety Board was already investigating it. By early morning on February 4, the Environmental Protection Agency was already there to monitor air and water and help where it could. (Seriously: the derailment happened at 9 p.m. on the 3rd. By 2 a.m., the EPA was there.) The Department of Transportation was there, and FEMA was in contact with Ohio officials about what it could offer. 

Now, I'm no big-time professional con artist pretending to be a journalist, but I'm pretty sure that both the NTSB and the EPA are part of the Biden administration. I'm pretty sure the DOT and FEMA are, too. I'm pretty sure that means the Biden administration did care and that no atrocity occurred. No, President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg didn't rush there, but that's not really an accurate measure of the care the area received.

And if the motherfuckers in conservative media and in politics want to racialize this, let's fuckin' go.  You know what Tucker Carlson didn't berate the government about? The Flint water crisis, but Black people were the main victims, so fuck 'em, right? You know what they don't talk about on Fox "news" or, indeed, much of anywhere? The continuing effects of toxic chemicals in places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, which is such a fucking tragedy of high cancer rates in a region of primarily Black Americans that the United Nations has declared it "environmental racism." 

Or how about this: In November 2019,  there was a huge explosion at a petrochemical plant in Port Neches, Texas. It was one of several such events at chemical plants in the area in 2019. This one caused an evacuation of a half-mile radius and the force of the explosion blew out windows on residences, with others downwind of the place told to shelter in place (and close their windows, if they still had windows). It was one week after the Trump administration had shitcanned a rule on warning people when there were toxic chemicals being stored near them. The rollbacks of a bunch of regulations almost immediately affected the health of people living near these facilities, especially in Texas. Not a fucking peep out of right-wing media because it was all Black and brown people who were affected. 

What? You want train derailments? How about the one near Barstow, Georgia, in 2019, where hydrochloric acid was spilled? It's a majority Black town and needed evacuating, but no one demanded that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao or President Trump visit to comfort people. 

Yeah, so, sure, please racialize these things.

Let's acknowledge a few things, too. The Obama administration could have supported tougher rules on what's labeled as hazardous on trains. The Trump administration shouldn't have repealed an Obama-era regulation on updating brake systems on trains carrying hazardous materials. In fact, the East Palestine fucking over might have been averted only if both of those sentences were in effect because the train wasn't labeled "hazardous," so it didn't need the updated brakes. Even as the pathetic hate junkies of the right try to spin political gold out of this environmental disaster hay, they are being cornered into admitting that maybe some fucking regulations are necessary.

What really pisses them off is that the Biden administration, and, indeed, most Democrats and people on the left do give a fuck about the people of East Palestine. It's like they can't comprehend that idea that we might fucking hate their politics but still not want them to be poisoned to death. Left-wing media (real left-wing media, not what the right bullshits about being liberal) has been all over the story, including Mother Jones and Democracy Now!. The right-wing nutzoids can't get their tiny little brains to believe that the federal government might actually be doing what it's supposed to do because it's being led by a Democrat and thus must be degraded no matter how competent it might be. Are there people on the left being total dicks about this (and not just semi-dicks, like me)? Sure. There always will be.

What also complicates shit is that the Republican governor of Ohio and man who looks like he's spent too much time staring through a hole in the guest shower at the mansion, Mike DeWine, as well as all the Republican officials in the state, are declaring that the air and water are fine, just like the EPA. But I suppose they'll just be called "RINOs" or some such shit because they don't toe the Tucker line.

Here's the thing, though, fellow aghast and amused libs. We should do our best to welcome the right-wingers who have newly discovered that we need, you know, government to protect people when it comes to shit like this. Welcome to the party, motherfuckers.

By the way, about a third of the people in Columbiana County, where East Palestine is, are on Medicaid, including a bunch on there because Ohio accepted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, you know, Obamacare. 

If you're in the area and feeling sick and getting medical attention that you need because you're covered, thank a Democrat, not Tucker Carlson.

(Note: I'm gonna bet they almost all vote for Trump or DeSantis or whoever in 2024, no matter if the Biden administration gets them all new houses, new jobs, and all the pussy or dick they could want.)

Pregnancy Is Used as a Form of Legal Torture in Parts of the United States

There's a level of cruelty built into the anti-choice laws passed just prior to and then in the wake of the corrupt Supreme Court majority shit-canning the Roe v. Wade decision. I mean, proponents of the savage legislation behave as if this is some kind of benign law, that women will either travel somewhere to get an abortion (thus allowing, say, Louisianians to wash their hands of the whole procedure) or that women will suck it up and give birth and everything will be peachy fuckin' keen the entire time. 

But we know, we fucking well know, with the experience of the entirety of human history, that pregnancy is not a smooth trip from fucking to birth. It's absurd to even have state that. It's fucking absurd to have to say that pregnant people's bodies change in ways that are often permanent, and that's if everything goes fine. It's fucking absurd to have to say that even a minor issue with a pregnancy can cause all kinds of permanent shit to the pregnant person, starting with an episiotomy or bladder issues and moving up through death. And a c-section is fucking surgery. Going through that when you want the pregnancy is one thing. Going through it when you don't? What kind of fucking monsters would do that to someone? But obvious shit apparently has to be said all the goddamn time now because the only way you can pass the laws outlawing nearly all abortions at 15 weeks or 6 weeks or any time. You either have to ignore the obvious shit or you get off on torturing pregnant people. And I'm seriously thinking it's the latter in Florida and Texas and all the other states that pretend to give a fuck about the fetus. 

And I'm saying "pretend to give a fuck about the fetus" because you can't say you care about the fetus when it's going to die horribly within a couple of hours of being born after suffering in the womb. That's the case for Deborah Dorbert, whose fetus is suffering from Potter syndrome, which leads to multiple underdeveloped organs: "Babies with Potter syndrome often die before they are born when their umbilical cords become trapped between their bodies and the wall of their mother’s uterus. Those that survive the birth process typically suffocate within minutes or a matter of hours." Fucking nightmare, right? At 24 weeks, the Dorberts decided they wanted to go through with an abortion because they didn't want the fetus to suffer. But Dorbert is in Florida, and there's an almost total ban after 15 weeks and Deborah's doctors, all of whom have given the same diagnosis, are afraid they will run afoul of the harshly punitive law that could destroy their careers or put them in prison. And the Dorberts can't afford to go to another state, which would mean South or North Carolina at this point, to get the procedure done. Instead, Deborah is going to have to carry her fetus to term and give birth to a child that will desperately gasp for air for a little while and die. 

If you think your god wants that to happen, your god is a dick and no one should give a shit what you or your god wants.

On and on the cases go. Amanda Eid in Texas almost died because she couldn't get an abortion for a fetus when her water broke at 18 weeks until she was too sick to function. The same thing happened to Texan Elizabeth Weller. In Idaho, Carmen Broesder documented on TikTok how a hospital's ER rejected helping her remove the fetus that she was miscarrying over the course of 19 days. She also nearly died. In Ohio, Beth Long's fetus had its organs growing outside its body, but because she works for the state and Ohio bars the state health insurance from covering abortions with just a few exceptions, she would need to pay for the complicated termination of her pregnancy. It took the Longs weeks to make arrangements to go out of state for a less expensive procedure, which made the abortion that much more difficult. Anabely Lopes, a woman from Florida denied an abortion even though her fetus was going to die, was Debbie Wasserman Schultz's guest at the State of the Union, where President Biden should have said a hell of a lot more about this horror show Republicans have brought on. But on and on it still goes.

The trauma that these pregnant people already suffer is magnified because the medical system and the doctors they trust are unable to give them the care they know is needed. It's fucking horrific. The state is adding trauma on top of trauma. And that's for pregnancies that are wanted, that are planned, where families are preparing for a new child.  It's another kind of torture.

And the assholes who passed the laws that are destroying pregnant people body and mind are the ones who should be prosecuted, not the caregivers trying to help patients while being forced to watch their backs and certainly not the pregnant people, whether they want to be pregnant or not. Abortion isn't cruel. Stopping people who want or need an abortion is cruel. And it's become a tool of torture and control for the savage anti-choicers.

(Note: I used "women" at the beginning because that's the binary way those who wrote the laws view procreation. But trans men and nonbinary people can get pregnant, too, as can young girls. So, yeah, "pregnant people" is way more accurate unless talking about a specific person.)

Republicans Are Utterly Devoid of Ideas (Except the Ones They Take from Democrats)

This one ends with a twist, one I'll admit I didn't see coming until I did like 15 seconds of research.

The Republican response to President Biden's quite sane and unexpectedly lively State of the Union speech was honestly just fucking odd, and not just because it was delivered by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a tone best described as "a Little Rock barista's worst nightmare." What was legit fucking strange is how utterly devoid of ideas it was. I mean, sure, yeah, all these speeches, the State of the Union and the response, are at best fantasies where the speakers list a bunch of shit that will almost surely never happen. But, at the bare minimum, we can say that they are aspirational. There were almost no aspirations to do a goddamned thing in Sanders' 14-minute whine about shit that, truly, has nothing to do with making people's lives better.

Half the response was basically a Libs of TikTok reply thread on Twitter: "The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left, the choice is between normal or crazy. It is time for a new generation of Republican leadership. Upon taking office just a few weeks ago, I signed executive orders to ban CRT, racism and indoctrination in our schools. Eliminate the use of derogatory term Latinx in our government, repealed COVID orders and said never again to authoritarian mandates and shutdowns." Somehow, banning critical race theory (which she never says is "CRT," thus demonstrating that she's only speaking to right-wing fucknuts) never put food on someone's table or helped children out of poverty.

The other half was another blow job for Donald Trump, who was Sanders' boss for a couple of years. Apparently, everything was just chocolate and orgasms before Joe Biden came along: "President Biden inherited the fastest economic recovery on record. The most secured border in history, cheap abundant homegrown energy, fast rising wages, a rebuilt military and a world that was stable and at peace. But over the last two years, Democrats destroyed it all." I mean, I'm not sure what the measures of any of these things are, but, you know, shit was fucked up when Trump left office. And Trump inherited Obama's economy, which was doing just fine. That's how this shit works. 

You will not be surprised that Sanders ended with a version of a Trump "Dear Sir" story, with a trip where members of the military in Iraq lost their shit and cheered when Trump walked in on a surprise visit. And then a soldier gave her one of his patches because "you have a tough job."  By the way, Biden recently signed the biggest military budget in U.S. history, and while that's ridiculous and harmful to other needs in this country, it sure as fuck doesn't seem to indicate that Democrats are "destroying" the military.

In every facet of their alleged leadership, Republicans fail to offer anything in the way of ideas or bills to actually help Americans. This void of an agenda continued last week with the utterly buffoonish hearings on the "weaponization of government" and on the Twitter files. No, really, they had hearings about this dumb shit that no one outside of Tucker Carlson's fever-brained hatemongers and Elon Musk's taint cleaners gives the remotest fuck about. Seriously, it's like complaining that someone has taken their dick out on the top of Mt. Everest and we better pass laws against dicks and mountains because of it. Actually, that would have more of a purpose than these hearings did.

Of course, Democrats spanked Republicans' voluminous asses red. Of course, none of it mattered. Sure, you can look at Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat from California, absolutely incinerate Republican goat eater Marjorie Taylor Greene, and get a little cream in your jeans from it. But that's all it's good for. No one in the conservative fascist bubble will hear about it on Newsmax or Fox. They'll hear that Hunter Biden was accused of evil shit. They'll hear that Twitter execs who were fired by Weird Elon are pedophiles. Nothing pierces the dome of fucknuttery.

But I promised you a twist, so lemme give it to you. It means we gotta go back to Sarah Sanders. 

Yeah, her speech was basically Truth Social posts strung together into another American Carnage rant. But there was one policy proposal in it. Sanders huckabeed, "Tomorrow, I will unveil an education package that will be the most far reaching, bold, conservative education reform in the country. My plan empowers parents with real choices, improves literacy and career readiness, and helps put a good teacher in every classroom by increasing their starting salary from one of the lowest to one of the highest in the nation."

When Sanders did reveal her plan for education, it included the usual harmful bullshit on what teachers can teach and an expansion of funding vouchers for students to use state funds to pay for private schools (or, you know, "school choice"). But Sanders is also proposing to raise the starting salary for public school teachers by around a third, to $50,000 a year. What's fascinating about this is that just last year, Republicans in the Arkansas legislature refused to even allow a vote on a raise to $42,000, which Democrats were trying to get passed. Then, even more recently, a Democratic legislator tried to get a pay hike to $50k passed as a stand alone bill, but Sanders wanted it as part of a bigger education package. So Sanders' big idea comes from Democrats in her state.

And Sanders' plan goes even further: there's student loan forgiveness and 12 weeks paid maternity leave in there for teachers, as well as performance bonuses. It includes an expansion of literacy programs and a grant to parents to hire tutors for their kids. I'm not totally praising Sanders here - Republican governors have been pushing for higher pay for teachers as a way to get educators to stop protesting and to triangulate on a popular issue and take it away from Democrats (even if their Republican legislatures refuse to go along). Teachers aren't stupid: they know their silence is being bought, but, goddamn, it might be nice not to have to sell plasma to get by. And, certainly, it's kind of ludicrous that Sanders wants to pour money into public education while allowing for money to be taken away from the same schools through the bullshit "school choice" vouchers. 

Actual governing requires more than simply making sure you get that next Tucker hit or praise from Ben fuckin' Shapiro. Letting the lies flow freely keeps the rubes donating. But the real work of improving the lives of your constituents? That shit take effort. Sanders could have filled her speech with stuff from her education plan. Instead, it was easier just to call Democrats anti-American indoctrinators and pretend that's leadership. It's certainly all House Republicans have to offer.

C'mon, Drag Queens, Let's Go Fuck With Some Churches

Tell you what: I wanna gather a whole buncha drag queens from different places around the country, from Tennessee and Oklahoma and Florida and Kansas and every state where knuckle-dragging Nazi and Christian extremist fucknuts are shutting down events and protesting them and getting shit canceled, all because someone in drag is involved. And while the fucknuts say they are protecting children, it doesn't even matter anymore if the events allow children to be present. They're after the drag performers because they say drag is grooming kids for...I don't fuckin' know, man...fabulousness? The fucknuts say that this is about sexualizing children and confusing them and making them gay or some such bullshit that really comes down to "I'm an ignoramus and everyone should listen to me because I'm too stupid to learn different shit."

All the drag performers should protest outside places of worship where a church leader has actually been arrested for sex crimes. Because, lemme tell you, there are a fuckton more child-fucking and rapist preachers and priests and pastors than drag queens. But the Proud Boys and the Jesus Fellaters don't get on the sidewalk outside those churches and scream about grooming and God hating them. Or maybe it's just not really about the sexual assault and pedophilia and it's just about hating LGBTQ people. (It's totally just about the hate.)

You wanna go on this, you masturbation-denying freaks who are so backed up with jizz that you can't see straight? Then let's go:

C'mon, drag queens. Let's go fuck with the Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Fairfield, Illinois. Yeah, their former pastor, the uncomfortably-named Garrett Biggerstaff, was arrested last month on two counts of grooming children for sexual activity. He'd been at it for a while, literally an alleged groomer.  So let's line up outside with signs that say, "Wake up! This is child abuse!" and "Groomers" with a big red X through it. (Real signs outside drag events, in case you were wondering.)

Or maybe we should head to Jamestown, North Dakota, where a Catholic priest, Neil Pfifer, has been arrested for sexually assaulting someone he was supposedly providing mental health services for. Oh, and "an investigation uncovered accusations of crimes in other jurisdictions." Yup. Another priest just moved around because he kept raping his parishioners. Every single person who ever attended a service led by Pfifer was safer with a group of drag queens, as we all would be all the time. So let's show up in our best bustiers and heels and Spanx and ask everyone who goes in if they're ok having given money to house and feed a rapist. 

We could go all around the country doing this, a tour of strong motherfuckers in drag daring the liars and fanatics and fascists to tell us we're wrong. If they confront us, we'll ask them if they're ok with the middle school teacher at the First Apostolic Church in Maryville, Tennessee, who was arrested for sexually assaulting a minor; or with the youth pastor at Harbor Baptist Church in Hainesville, NJ, who pretended to be a teenage girl online in order to get young teen boys to send sexual photos of themselves; or the pastor at Ridge Church in Black Mountain, North Carolina; or the pastor in Florida; or the one in Ohio; or just about anywhere in the country. The list is fucking endless and awful.

Yeah, c'mon, bad ass drag queens. You wanna really highlight who is harming the kids? Who is raping and sexually assaulting and molesting and grooming? Let's fuck shit up outside all these houses of worship and then sashay away.