Rusty Foster: “If Trump Season One was a galvanizing historical threat to the Republic, so far Season Two is a re-tread with a lot of the same tropes but more D-list celebrity cameos and a much less coherent plot.”
The coup has failed
The Coup Has Failed. Also: The Democratic Brand Has Tanked. Trump Is Doing the Same to the Republican Party. And: James Carville says the Trump administration will collapse within 30 days. Democrats just need to “play possum,” Carville says. All may be true; but Trump has more lives than a cat. He repeatedly teeters on the verge of destruction and bounces back stronger than ever.
I’m not counseling despair — Trump and his movement are beatable. But don’t take anything for granted.
Looks like Dave Winer is doing valuable work on Wordland, a simple, web-based front end for Wordpress. It appears to be an implementation of the WordPress for One idea he talked about last year. No Mastodon or BlueSky integration, just RSS. I love seeing more simple, easy-to-use blogging platforms.
News that got my attention today
Conservatives won the German elections but the far-right AfD doubled support.
What is Long Covid: A beginner’s guide. By Julia Doubleday.
Your kink is health care? Good luck, babe: When Chappell Roan spoke out to ask the music industry to offer health benefits to struggling musicians, the industry struck back to shut her up to protect their oligopoly. In the music industry, a few big companies dominate everything — recording, distribution, publicity and performance. Musicians and fans have no freedom to take their business elsewhere." [For] a capitalist society to function, there has to be competition. And if everything’s connected and all the interests are shared on one side, there’s no way to compete,” Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney said.
The New Antitrust Consensus: The Trump administration is maintaining the merger guidelines that Lina Khan co-authored, and big business is angry.
Hamilton Nolan: Don’t look for a governing philosophy in the White House and Republican Party — Donald Trump is a crime boss. “The goal of all this is not ‘remaking the government in a conservative image’—it is ‘if you want anything, you have to ask me for it.’ The rules that governed how the government works are tossed out and replaced with ‘Trump’s will.’ That’s how mob bosses rule.”
Sources: The Guardian First Thing, Pluralistic
Something I saw while walking the dog: This “Blessing Box” in front of a church, stocked with small food donations
Today's news and links that got my attention
Pope Francis is in critical condition after a respiratory crisis
Measles outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico sickened nearly 100 people, with the number of cases is expected to rise. Only five of the victims are known to be vaccinated.
A Democratic trustee at Chula Vista Elementary School District in San Diego ran for a different seat on the school board in order to unseat another Democrat, who the first trustee and a board ally opposed. This set off events that led to a Republican being appointed to the board, changing a 4-1 Democratic majority on the board to 3-2. The county Democratic Party is not happy. This whole thing is more complicated than a season of “Slow Horses.”
A self-described American Christian missionary, Daniel Martindale, went undercover in Ukraine to spy for Moscow. He’s part of a growing ultraconservative American embrace of Russia and rejection of the US.
Six things E.R. doctors wish you’d avoid: Don’t wear crocs in ice and snow. “Don’t trust trampolines.” “Don’t ignore sudden symptoms … If you experience something like severe chest pain or paralysis of a body part, come to the E.R. immediately….” “Don’t pet strange dogs.” Fuck that last one; I am absolutely petting every dog I can.
In 2011, Ray Richmond, his brother and sister discreetly deposited their mother’s ashes (her “cremains”) in Clifton’s, a Los Angeles cafeteria. This short essay has one surprise after another.
The perfect girl next door: How do you live your mediocre life in the shadow of a hipster goddess?
Man, it was so great to be horrible, back when I was young and pretty! In fact, I want to urge every young and youngish woman out there to take advantage of their hotness for as long as possible, because it’s fun and it’s good for you and everyone should literally be punished by how amazing you look. You need to grind their faces into the shag carpet of what an unbearable smoke show you are. Because so many complete dolts are going to make you pay for so many stupid reasons moving forward — for being interesting, for having a brain in your skull, for being bored by them because they are objectively boring, for growing into a mature adult with firm boundaries and clear expectations. So smear your raw hotness all over their dumb-dog faces for as long as you possibly can.
I did not note the byline so I had to read the whole thing to get to the tagline at the end, which told me the writer is the talented Heather Havrilesky.
More from Heather on the perfect girl next door:
Being stubborn about trivial things is sometimes a way of protecting yourself from acknowledging far more important things that you want but can’t admit to wanting. If I had more compassion for myself, I would’ve figured out that what I wanted very badly was to be understood, to be seen clearly, to be recognized as a loving person in spite of my resting bitch face. But I didn’t respect my own core needs – I was raised to ignore and ridicule my core needs, quite honestly; that’s just how my people do it – so I couldn’t stop inflating the importance of absolutely trivial irritations and superficial obstacles.
Additional source: The New York Times Today’s Headlines
News that got my attention today
Trump dismissed four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the joint chiefs of staff, a fighter pilot, and replaced him with a retired white three-star general loyal to Trump, passing over the usual chain of command. The chief of staff traditionally spans administrations. The change included a purge of six Pentagon officials, including a woman, and furthers the Republican white supremacist, anti-women, sexist, authoritarian agenda.
Protesters confronted California Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, of Santee, Calif., who is pandering to white supremacy and xenophobia by restricting California’s so-called “sanctuary city” law.
School shooter Brenda Spencer, 62, was denied parole for the sixth time. She opened fire on a San Diego elementary school in 1979, killing two and injuring nine others, and later explained her reason: “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” The shooting became the inspiration for a song, “I Don’t Like Mondays," by the Boomtown Rats, an Irish band, written by Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers. It is a lovely piano ballad. The video is a perfect capsule of cheap, cheesy 1979 music videos. Geldof later said he regretted writing the song because it made Spencer famous.
Also:
An 87-year-old widower went viral for hand-delivering party invitations door to door that read “4 pm unitl the cops arrive.”
A 94-year-old woman reunited with a toddler she saved from drowing 64 years ago. He’s now 66 years old.
Authorities seized 303 cocaine-filled ceramic bananas.
9.3% of US adults identified as LGBTQ+ last year, up from 7.6% in 20230. This is the kind of thing that means TRUMP-DOGEism will have a short shelf-life. Trump came into office with the slimmest of margins; only about a third of eligible voters supported him. Those LGBTQ+ people make up a big part of the population, and they have plenty of friends, families and allies in the cisgender-heterosexual community (like me). Trump-DOGEism will continue to lose popularity as their stupid and dangerous policies harm more and more people.
Additional source: 1440
Do you read books on your phone? Do you prefer it?
I’m planning my first international travel in more than five years. I just bought a couple of power banks for the trip, and for emergency preparedness here at home. I may have overdone it.
I can now fly five times around the world nonstop and binge-watch Law & Order the entire time.