Month: January 2025

The Winning Continues, Jim Acosta is Gone, & Trump is Re-Naming Everything! (posted 1/29/25)

Okay, I’m not saying that all of this winning has to stop. But it’s got to slow down a little bit.  Because I am getting nothing done!

It’s been 8 days since the inauguration.  Regular readers know that I’m a working dog, not a show dog, so typically, I get more done in 8 days than 10 men of normal powers do in a month. 

For example, in that time, I would usually be saying my prayers; playing with Cassie the Wonder Dog; mansplaining a bunch of stuff to my wife (which she always appreciates); nodding along and pretending to understand some astrophysics thing that my smarty pants daughter is trying to explain to me; maintaining my rental properties; doing good deeds; setting a good example; reading some good books; helping old ladies across the street; rescuing cats from trees and toddlers from house fires; explaining to young women who are getting a little handsy that I’m both married and way too old for them; laughing at my own jokes in my columns as I’m writing them…   

(For example, that “handsy young women” thing just cracked me up.  Because as they say, “It’s funny because it’s true.”)

…and just generally being a ray of sunshine in the lives of everyone I meet.

But not these last 8 days.  Because since the 20th I have been on the computer from dawn to dusk, just getting hammered by one wave of good news after another.  Ooh, Trump has signed a boatload of executive orders: illegals out of America, dudes out of women’s sports, and women’s jails, and women’s bathrooms. 

Wait, he just yanked security clearances for the 51 Russian laptop hoaxers!

Hey, he just fired a bunch of dead-weight bureaucrats from the “resistance” movement.

Ooh, he just canceled the bald-eagle-slaughtering, heavily subsidized windmills – including the whale-killing ones off the coast.  And he re-instated all of the soldiers who’d been bullied out of the service because they wouldn’t take an experimental shot to prevent a virus – which never would have killed them – from killing them.

Wait, let me get my head above wa—

Uh oh, more executive orders: no more racist DEI crap throughout our government; the life sentences for taking selfies in the capitol on January 6th are reversed; no more funding for the United Nations’ pro-Hamas “Jewish toddler-killing munitions” program.

And the personnel upgrades!  Won’t somebody think of the personnel upgrades!

Lyin’ “Lex Luthor” Mayorkas is gone, replaced by Tom “Yippee-Ki-Yay, Mfers!” Homan, who was just on tv, frog-marching another long chain gang of illegal, face-tattooed gang members out of my country.  We just traded corrupt and oily Merrick Garland for honest, disciplined Pam Bondi (giggity). 

Look there, in the White House briefing room!  It’s hyper-competent, smart and perky new press secretary Karoline Leavitt, replacing the ginger Circle-Back Lady, and the sapphic Kewpie Doll who could only answer questions by reading verbatim from her Lying for Dummies Briefing Book™

We just upgraded from Mayor Pete – whose only qualifications for Sec Transportation (I almost said, “SecTrans,” but that’s not a thing any more!) was being gay and liking choo-choo trains as a kid, to Sean Duffy, who just got confirmed with 77 votes.

I’ll be honest: I have no idea who Sean Duffy is.  But since he didn’t bring up his sexual preference in his confirmation hearings, and he’s never overseen a disastrous, toxic train derailment, and he’s never taken weeks of maternity leave time off to recover from giving birth to an adopted baby that he obviously didn’t give birth to, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he’s going to do a better job than Mayor Pete did.   

Pete Hegseth will be a better SecDef than Lloyd “AWOL” Austin.  Mario Rubio will be a better SecState than a potted plant, which would have been a better SecState than Tony Blinken.  

And corrupt MSM leftist-bubble-dwellers are dropping like Bill Clinton’s pants in a sorority house!

Even TDS-suffering narcissist Jim Acosta is leaving!  (As Ben Shapiro used to say, “Ladies, find yourself a man who loves you as much as Jim Acosta loves him some Jim Acosta.”)  Acosta apparently lost half his audience in a car wreck shortly before Trump’s inauguration.  (All four of them were in a Prius that got stuck on train tracks when a train was coming.) 

So CNN offered him a show at midnight, opposite reruns of “Welcome Back, Kotter,” hour-long ads for My Pillow, and Korean-language broadcasts of Korean triple-A soccer games.  (Go, Busan Bandits!)

Acosta responded by telling CNN management that if they tried to shove him to midnight, they would just have to do without the services of one Abilio James Acosta!  

Annnnnddddd… he’s gone.

By the way, that’s his real name.  Since I’m a working dog – as I may have mentioned earlier – I did my research, and discovered that his parents named him “Abilio.”  Which, strangely enough, is Spanish for “a-hole.”  True story. 

I can even use it in a sentence: “Let’s put that abilio on at midnight, and dare him to quit!” 

I can hear many of you asking, as I write this, “Martin, did your extensive research turn up any more fun A-hole Acosta facts?”  And the answer is yes.  Yes, it did. 

For example, he is reportedly of mixed ancestry, a combination of English, Irish, Czech and Cuban.  But for the record, the embassies of England, Ireland and the Czech Republic have all  released official statements saying that they’re pretty sure he’s just Cuban. 

A phone call to the Cuban embassy was answered by a guy who wouldn’t give his name.  When asked about Jim Acosta allegedly being Cuban, he would only say, “Never heard of that abilio,” before hanging up.  

Trump offered Acosta a much-deserved verbal beat-down on his way out the door, in a tweet that (I swear I’m not making this up) featured the words, “one of the worst and most dishonest reporters…major sleazebag…BAD RATINGS… [and] no talent.” 

And that was the NICE part, which came before the hard sac-tap of an ending: “Jim is a major loser who will fail no matter where he ends up.  Good luck Jim!”  

Which, if my high-school Spanish hasn’t failed me, could be translated as, “No dejes que la puerta te golpee en el culo al salir.”  (But since it’s past January 20th and we don’t have to “Press 1 for English” anymore, I’ll re-translate: “Don’t let the door hit you in the abilio on your way out.”)

Even Trump’s sillier-seeming moves actually have substance behind them.  Changing the name of a mountain from Denali back to McKinley, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America are good examples.

I think it’s natural to laugh the first time you hear “Gulf of America.”  It feels cartoonishly patriotic.  I first thought of the short-lived fad of replacing “French” with “freedom” back when France was reverting to their “cheese-eating surrender monkey” form. 

It was funny to say, “For breakfast I’m having freedom toast, and for lunch my sides will be freedom fries and freedom onion soup.  And tonight, I’ll be plying my wife with freedom wine, after which I hope to be freedom kissing her as she slips off her freedom lingerie.”

But once you get past the initial reaction, you can see a more serious philosophical point beneath it.  Because naming things is a powerful expression of what a culture values.  Many American settlers named their cities and states after their original homes, which they still loved (New Amsterdam/New York, New Jersey, New England; Athens, GA; Paris, TX), or people they honored (the Carolinas, the Virginias, Williamsburg, Pittsburg, Cincinnati).

They named some towns after religious virtues (Hope, Temperance, Providence), or after religious figures (St. Paul, St. Augustine, Saints Francis and Monica – San Francisco and Santa Monica) or even “body of Christ” (Corpus Christi).  They named their colleges Holy Cross or Our Lady (Notre Dame). 

And later, when we’d produced our own civic heroes, we named towns and schools after them.  There are towns named Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln scattered across the land.  (I went to McKinley school for a few grades, and Lincoln grade school for a few more.)  We named a mountain after McKinley.

We also named many places after the Indian tribes or leaders whom – contrary to racist leftists’ slanders – we admired, and wanted to pay tribute to.  So there are counties or towns named Black Hawk, Sauk and Cherokee, and states named Illinois, Oklahoma and Minnesota, not to mention one primary Dakota, and another auxiliary Dakota.

But this trend is not just something conservatives do, as some angry lefties now suggest, as they rail against renaming mountains or gulfs.  You may have noticed that the Left has been on a name-changing spree in recent years, too. 

The small park in DC where the dozen protestors put up a guillotine on inauguration day is officially known as Meridian Hill Park, but the commie protestors renamed it “Malcolm X Park.”  As they renamed an intersection in Minnesota “George Floyd Square,” after one of their recidivist criminal heroes.  They’ve renamed many schools and parks, tossing presidents’ or generals’ names in favor of Cesar Chavez, Malcolm X, MLK and many more.

Most people approve of many of these changes, which again, reflect social changes.  While most people would balk at naming places after communists, or black criminals like Angela Davis or George Floyd, pretty much everyone is okay with various MLK sites.  And, with some caveats, most Americans are probably not too upset over removing Confederate names from various things.  (You won’t see a ton of Go-Fund-Mes with the theme, “Let’s keep the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School!”)

The point is that everyone changes names to reflect their own values. And if I had to pick a side, it’s an easy call to choose the one changing names to Gulf of America, Reagan National Airport or Mount McKinley, over those changing to George Floyd Square, Saul Alinsky Street, or Joy Reid Avenue. 

In this one rare instance, I agree with Tony Soprano’s instincts.  In one episode his son AJ came home from school spouting a bunch of leftist nonsense after reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and touting his teacher’s preference for “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” because of Columbus’ supposed villainy.

Tony was flabbergasted.  “Your teacher said that?”

AJ said, “It’s not just my teacher, it’s the truth.  It’s in my history book!” 

After wryly observing, “So you finally read a book, and it’s bullsh*t,” Tony laid down the law.  “He [Columbus] was a brave Italian explorer.  And in this house, Christopher Columbus is a hero!  End of story.”

Well in my house, we watch the Redskins play football and the Cleveland Indians play baseball.   We hope to one day climb Mount McKinley, and in the summer we like to read some Thomas Sowell at the beach, with our feet in the warm waters of the Gulf of America. 

End of story!

Opie, Pritzker, and the Leaders of Colombia & Planned Parenthood Get Whacked When Trump Settles All Family Business (posted 1/27/25)

Well, it feels like a year’s worth of action has been packed into the last seven days.  This might have to be another three-column week for me, since I can barely stay on my feet against the pressure of the firehose of good news coming out of the White House!  

But I’m going to try, so let’s start in Hollywood.

In another example of lefty artists making it hard to appreciate their art once they’ve opened their mouths to share their deep political thoughts, Ron Howard has “pulled a DeNiro.”  (I love DeNiro’s acting, Bruce Springsteen’s music, and many of Stephen King’s books, but they’ve all revealed themselves to be malevolent morons when it comes to politics, thus making it tougher to watch, listen to or read them.)

Howard was an adorable child actor, and directed a lot of good movies as an adult.  But this weekend he tweeted out a suggestion that if Trump wants to improve the Fed’s disaster responses, he should pick Chef Jose Andres to head up those efforts. 

I didn’t know much about Andres – a Venn diagram of hungry hillbilly Simpsons and a chef who serves dinners-for-two in the $1000 range would be two separate circles, a mile away from each other – but Howard notes that the chef is “not a supporter” of Trump’s.

A quick search shows that Andres was much angrier when some Palestinians were accidentally killed by Israel strikes than he was at the genocidal Hamas terrorists who intentionally murdered  Israelis.  Also, he is a hero among Democrats.  (Unexpectedly!) And he took a smiling picture with the whack job who tried to assassinate Trump at the golf course. 

To be fair to Andres, I’m assuming he took that pic before the whack job tried to murder Trump.  On the other hand, one should be able to spot that loon from a mile away, because he’s got “whack job” written all over him.

Anyway, Howard’s suggestion has all the earmarks of low-IQ Hollywood celebrity ideas: after four years of extreme-left Trump haters screwing up everything they touch, Trump really should consider appointing an extreme-left Trump hater to continue that tradition.

To quote Dr. Evil, “How about NO!”  And Ron, how about you focus on skipping rocks on a pond in Mayberry, and on making a good movie?  Because as soon as you turn to politics, you inevitably go from Opie to Dopey. 

Also, I find the first sentence of Howard’s tweet to be ironic: “Here’s a thought.”

Nope.  Here is most definitely NOT a thought.

Speaking of people for whom clear thinking is not a strong suit, how about Illinois governor J.B. “you can’t spell ‘Jumbo’ without ‘J.B.’” Pritzker, D-irigible?

His mouth is proportionately large enough for the rest of him (too bad about the brain, though), and he’s been regularly shooting it off on the subject of how he’s not going to cooperate with Trump’s enforcement of our immigration laws.  However, even he has started to tone it down a bit, now that Trump is in office.

He announced on Sunday that he has no problem with Trump deporting violent criminals, going so far as to say, “We hope they do get deported.” Which is rich, coming from him.  He’s done nothing to protect Illinois citizens from those scumbags for four years, and he’s not pledging to take action himself.  But now he’s “hoping” that the Deportation Fairy will come during the night and flit away with the predators, I guess.

But he’s not on board with deporting regular ol’ salt-of-the-earth illegal immigrants.  And this is where the Left’s mastery of dishonest language does some heavy lifting.

Because he tells sour Dana Bash that he finds it “quite disturbing” that Trump is also “going after people who are law-abiding, who are holding down jobs….”  A reasonable person might be aware that legitimate jobs require that the employee either has citizenship or legal working status (a green card or working visa).  

If the left can convince people to think of illegals as “undocumented,” their lying becomes easier to get away with.

But if we insist on using accurate language, Pritzker (#putdownthatcomicallyoversizedturkeyleg) is actually saying that we should not interfere with “law-abiding people who are here illegally and working illegally.”

Even someone with a weak and misfiring, Grandma-Squanto-level brain (#wemustneverstopmockingher) can tell that that sounds a little off. 

My favorite story of the weekend is probably yours too: the hilarious tale of the Colombia two-step. 

Since the election, I’ve been having a friendly disagreement with an extended family member about Trump’s use of tariffs.  He is afraid they will be rigid impositions that will severely damage our economy, while I am one of those nutty conservatives who thinks they are negotiating tools that Trump will use to get various foreign miscalculators’ minds right.

After Sunday, I hate to say, “I told you so.”  But how can I not?  When Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro forgot that Biden is not in office anymore, he talked tough about not taking his criminals back.  So Trump responded with immediate retaliatory tariffs, travel restrictions, and the like.

Of course, many lefties jumped on the story in a bunch of posts that aged like milk, immediately beclowning themselves in the most ridiculous ways. 

Ana Navarro panicked, “We won’t have any flowers for Valentines Day!” (To paraphrase Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, “I’ve never seen so many people worried that they won’t be able to receive roses on a romantic holiday for purely hypothetical purposes.”) 

AOC got her juicy booty (her words, not mine) spanked for shrieking that, “Trump is about to make every American pay even more for coffee,” and that, “WE pay the tariffs, not Colombia.”

These were variations on the usual Dem argument against deporting otherwise “law-abiding” illegals, because without them, we’ll have to clean our own buildings and toilets, and do our own landscaping, and pay more for strawberries. 

Because, “I don’t care if my country gets invaded, and crime increases, and our schools and emergency rooms and jails are filled with foreign criminals, and I get hit by unlicensed and uninsured foreign drivers, and my daughters get raped and killed like Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, as long as I get indentured servants to mow my lawn and feed me cheaper strawberries.”

SAID. NOBODY. EVER!

But as the Sponge Bob transition goes,

One… hour… lay-tair…

Petro said, “Oh, you were talking about THOSE criminals?  Sure, I’ll take them back.”  And then Trump silently gave him the “mug shot look” for an uncomfortably long minute.  And Petro began sweating, and said, “Um… and… I- I- I’ll pick them up… i- i- in my own presidential plane!”

And Trump gave him a small smile, and held out his hand to allow Petro to kiss his ring and swear fealty.   

I didn’t think that Trump would win so quickly, but I knew that he would win eventually.  Because common sense tells me that a small country needs trade with America a lot more than America needs that trade. 

I don’t think that means we should therefore bully small countries, just because we can.  But when they are trying to bully US?  Get out of here with that.

Even though I thought that the tariffs on Colombia would take much longer to work, I was still a fan, because of the message it would send to other nations, i.e. “pour encourager les autres” (for the encouragement of others). 

The phrase is Voltaire’s, and French, but it has a Sicilian feel to me.  And I’m here for it!      

Finally, on a more somber note, I never thought of God as a kind of Michael Corleone figure, working on a, “Today we settle all family business” kind of agenda.   And yet, it wasn’t tough to see some of those overtones on inauguration day.  (For starters, “God” is right there in “Godfather,” so how didn’t I see that coming?) 

Trump stood in the secular/civil version of a sacred space (the Capitol Rotunda) taking his vows, just like Michael took his in a church at a christening.  And while the vows were being recited, treacherous DEI bureaucrats and deep state saboteurs were getting whacked all over the countryside.  Executive orders were dropping like shotgun pellets blasting into elevators, and bullets into Moe Green’s glasses.

And on that very day, Cecile Richards – the ghoul who proudly oversaw 4 million lives cut short through her network of Planned Parenthood abortuaries – died. 

Normally, death is an event worth mourning, and one week is way too soon to discuss any silver lining in somebody’s passing.  But I think we owe it to Richards to take her worldview seriously, and assess her death in terms that someone in her line of work would wholeheartedly endorse. And none of her co-religionists who are enthusiastically carrying on her bloody work should be offended if we use their language to commemorate the event.  Therefore… 

“On January 20th, 2025, during their 271st trimester, the clump of cells known as Cecile Richards received a final act of women’s reproductive healthcare, which converted them into medical waste.  Anyone saddened by this news is probably a theocratic fascist, and certainly a misogynist, and should mind their own business.” 

Now if you’ll excuse him, Trump has to talk to Merrick Garland, whom he calls “Carlo,” for some reason. 

“You have to answer for Daniel Penny, Carlo….  Milley is out. So is Jack Smith.  Liz Cheney.  Kinzinger.  Today I settle all DOJ business.”  Garland’s lip starts quivering.  Trump puts his hand on his shoulder. 

“Don’t be afraid. (gestures over Garland’s shoulder) J.D., get him a drink.”  J.D. does, and Garland drinks it down.  Trump says, “Come on, I’m not going to make the wife of an ex-AG a widow.  No, your punishment is you never get to be on the Supreme Court.   But don’t tell me you’re innocent!”

Meanwhile, a car sits and idles outside the White House, with Tom Homan sitting in the back, behind the empty, passenger-side front seat.

And, scene.   

Trump Sprints Out of the Blocks, & the Philly Mayor Can’t Spell “Eagles”(posted 1/24/25)

It’s the first weekend of the new Trump era, and I’m in the mood to start out in Schadenfreude corner.

Tom Homan has been in charge of ICE for 4 days, and has already arrested 1400 illegals.  The vast majority of those had committed other crimes or else had had asylum requests rejected, and the remainder of them were “collateral arrests,” i.e. just plain illegals who were hanging around with the worst of the illegals when the hammer dropped.

Lefties call unintentionally catching those folks collateral damage, but normal people call it collateral benefits. 

You’ve probably seen the video of the handcuffed Haitian gang member with 17 prior convictions screaming out of a cop car, “F— Trump!  Biden forever, bro!  Thank Obama for everything he’s done for me!” 

He seems nice.

Man, if Trump was still running, he could slap an, “I’m Donald Trump, and I approve this message,” on the end of that and he’d have another world-class campaign ad. 

When asked about that criminal yelling, “I’m not going back to Haiti,” Homan said, “Well, he’s wrong.  He’s going back to Haiti.”  He also said that now that Trump’s in office, ICE agents have had the handcuffs taken off of them, and put onto the bad guys.

In an unrelated story, I spent the last hour looking at satellite photos of Mt. Rushmore, and I think I’ve found a good spot to begin blasting, to make room for adding Tom Homan’s big ol’ head up there. 

By the way, remember when Imhotep Pelosi – right after she tossed Biden’s desiccated corpse under the bus – said that she thought Joey Gaffes belonged on Mt. Rushmore?  HA!

Meanwhile, Scott Jennings continues to go through leftist CNN talking heads like Sherman through Georgia, leaving a scorched moonscape of ridiculous talking points and grievously wounded low IQ narcissists in his wake.

I know CNN brought him on in a desperate attempt to have at least one conservative voice on their failing network.  But I think the bubble they are in prevented them from appreciating what a bloodbath would ensue.  They probably thought, “Hey, he’ll be in a 5-against-1 situation on every segment, so how bad could it be?”

To which I would reply, “Do you know why nobody ever entered Mike Tyson at the height of his powers into a boxing tournament against an entire class of kindergartners?  Because it wouldn’t matter if there were 20 of them!  That would just increase the number of knocked-out baby teeth rattling across the floor like chiclets, you idiots!” 

Sorry for the graphic image.  But seriously.  Watch Scott Jennings taking on a panel of beta-males and sapphic scowlers, and try to keep the smile off of your face.  It can’t be done.

Speaking of CNN, you may remember their pollster, Harry Enten, who throughout the fall used lots of polls – and circled many numbers on many screens – to argue that Que Mala was likely to win in November.  He also polled Californians in the wake of the LA fires, and seemed shocked to find that the amount of computer searches for “wildfires” had soared something like 2400%, while searches for “climate change” had barely budged.

He really did that.  While Los Angelenos were surrounded by empty reservoirs, century-old power lines that were actively casting off sparks, and armies of homeless people making campfires in the midst of environmentally protected Dry Brush Sanctuaries (thanks, Gavin!), Enten couldn’t figure out why everybody wasn’t jumping on the “climate change caused the fires” bandwagon. 

Because you can’t spell “Einstein” without “Enten.” 

Well now, Harry is breathlessly reporting the shocking finding that there has been a “massive shift” among Americans in support for deporting illegals.  The bottom line is that 4 big polls found that between 55% and 64% of Americans want illegals forcibly vamoosed. 

While Harry is struggling to understand exactly why so many Americans believe that illegals contributed to climate change, I’ve got to say that those numbers seem too low.  I’ve seen a lot of polls in the last several years suggesting that over 70% of Americans want less LEGAL immigration.  If that’s true (and it seems logical), then these poll numbers today suggest that there’s less resistance to illegal immigration than there is to legal immigration!

Regardless, it’s a little surprising that even the mouth-breathers at CNN would be shocked and confused by these polls.  Regular people don’t approve of millions of people breaking our laws. DUH!

In other news, the lefties running The Daily Show might be feeling the consequences of their TDS-induced failures of late.  But instead of hiring Scott Jennings to serially pants their unfunny correspondents, they recently sent Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to mock the poor dead-enders attending the “People’s March” in Washington on Inauguration Day. 

If you haven’t seen it, you should, because it was very funny.  Highlights were when Triumph suggested that the left needs more conspiracy theories, and suggested a good one: “Jimmy Carter was doing just fine until Trump was re-elected.  Coincidence?”  Then he handed out hand-drawn “No Carter Killers!” signs.   He even came up with a chant: “GOP, stop the lies!  How did Jimmy Carter die?”

Most of the insults were silly, but a few of the shots hit closer to home.  As when he noted that nobody in this crowd was going to be breaking any windows at the capital, because “that would require upper body strength.”  And, “Looking around here, I’ve never seen so many people worried about losing the right to contraceptives for purely hypothetical reasons.”

I found the bit strangely heartening, because many of the leftists played along and laughed at the jokes at their expense.  And if the first step toward recovery is acknowledging that you have a problem, the second step has to be regaining your sense of humor.  It looks like some of them might be achieving step 2.

Now if they can just get working on that first step…

Finally, one more sobering note. 

Many people get furious when we suggest that making DEI hiring or election choices is foolish.  To counter their anger, serious conservatives can advance the hypothesis that the issue is often a simple math problem.

For example, when a terribly incompetent president – hypothetically – says that his vice presidential pick and his Supreme Court pick are both going to be black women, he has made a mistake.  Because black people are 13% of the population, and half of that number are women.  So he’s starting with an arbitrarily restricted applicant pool of only 6.5% of the population from whom he could otherwise choose.

Or, we could make a more succinct yet equally convincing argument, by showing a video of African-American female Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker leading excited residents in a cheer for the city’s football team, which has advanced to the NFC championship game.

Shouteth the mayor, “E-L-G-S-E-S!  Let’s go birds!” 

Oof!  “Eagles” is only two syllables.  It’s got six letters, and the mayor missed two of them.  Some wise guy immediately started making t-shirts with a Philly team motto printed on it: “Fly, ELGSES, Fly!”    

It’s not like the Philly mascot has an especially obscure or complicated name.  They’re not the Philadelphia Phainopepla, or the Philadelphia Common Paraque.  (Look ‘em up!)  I’m beginning to be grateful that she didn’t try to spell out “Philadelphia,” because you know she would have started with an “F.”    

And if any of you out there think that my extensive research doesn’t pay off, you’re wrong.  Because when I was looking up tough-to-spell bird names to make my hilarious point about the bonehead Philly mayor, I came across the Plain Chachalaca (rhymes with “Boom Shakalaka!”).  Which I’m sure Parker couldn’t spell, but could definitely chant. 

And no one in their right mind would prefer, “Eagles! Eagles! Let’s go birds!” to “Philly, Philly!  Plain Chachalaca!!”

By the way, the last Republican mayor of Philadelphia left office 73 years ago. Democrat voters outnumber Republicans 7-to-1, and they elected brainiac Cherelle Parker to lead them. 

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Inauguration Reactions (posted 1/22/25)

I know that many of you, like me, are likely in your refractory period after what had to be the best MLK Day/Inauguration Day ever! 

I don’t know if this is truly the beginning of a new golden age.  But I do feel like I can see what can be, unBidened by what has been!  (Hat tip to some anonymous memester.)  And that is pretty sweet!

Of course, Biden left the stage while littering DC with a flurry of blatantly corrupt, last-minute pardons for many of his co-conspirators.  Which is a perfect way for him to exit, because it leaves a bad taste in everybody’s mouth, and really hamstrings the Democrats who had been getting ready to mount their high horses and proclaim how evil blanket pardons are, as Trump prepared to pardon the J6ers.

The fact that all of the pardons not given to hard-core murderers already in prison are “pre-emptive” pardons is unprecedented, too.  I think it was unlikely that Trump would have prosecuted many of the pardoned people, if any.  Just as he made a big deal out of threatening to jail Hillary in the ’16 campaign and didn’t do it after he won, he might have decided to spend his time and political capital on getting his agenda done, rather than fighting those old battles. 

But as the Bible says, “The wicked flee when none pursueth.”  (Some translations have it “the guilty flee” or “the evil flee.”  All would apply to Biden’s sleazy henchmen, IMHO.)  

That’s not to say that at least investigating the Biden family, the J6 star chamber, and Fauci, Milley et al wouldn’t have been fully justified.  It might have brought justice to some bad actors, and also served as a deterrent to others tempted to follow their corrupt path. And after everything that the left establishment has done to misuse the law to go after their political enemies, it would be delicious indeed to see them get some of their own medicine, especially since they richly deserve it.

Either way, though, our spokespeople – official and unofficial – need to keep Biden’s pardons holstered and ready, and make sure that the public is fully aware of the way the corrupt Dems acted.  We should hang these pardons around the necks of Schumer and Schiff and the whole rotten lot of them. 

One odd pardon I didn’t hear about until later: Leonard Peltier, whom the MSM calls “a longtime jailed Native American activist” who was America’s “longest serving political prisoner.”  Other people – without a set of political blinders on so thick and large that they could fit on Hillary “Clydesdale Ankles” Clinton with a simple cinching device – call him the Indian double-murderer of two FBI agents.  (And this was back when FBI agents weren’t the kind of corrupt pervs who rummage through Melania’s underwear drawer and raid little old Catholic ladies who pray outside of abortion clinics.)

I’ll bet Lizzie Warren insisted on Peltier’s pardon, just out of good ol’ fashioned Indian solidarity.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher) 

In addition to all of the good things that happened, I also enjoyed the “driving our enemies before us and listening to the lamentations of their people who use she/her pronouns” part, too.

It was satisfying to watch Biden have to sit there and listen to Trump roast him.  And after all of Biden’s scandalous actions, record low poll numbers, and the triumph of his most hated rival, I’m sure that the entire Biden family is grateful that they got most of their wish, that Joe didn’t live to see this.     

I loved Carrie Underwood’s acapella rendition of “America the Beautiful.”  Especially with the comedic enhancement of watching Biden “singing” in the background, his eyes blank and his mouth barely moving.  You just know he was singing, “The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round,” or “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” or something like that.

It was also great to see Kamala there, a pained expression on her face and cheap box wine on her breath.   

But it was also nice to hear about those who skipped the festivities.  AOC wouldn’t attend because “I don’t celebrate rapists.”  (Except for Biden with Tara Reade, or Slick Willy with Juanita Brodderick, etc., not to mention woman harassers and beaters like Doug Emhoff, and even woman killers, like Ted Kennedy and a bunch of the convicts whose sentences Biden just commuted).

Nancy Pelosi didn’t attend because she was busy in the subterranean crypt beneath her pyramid –surrounded by her organs arrayed about her in their individual canopic jars – working on rehabbing her recently broken hip.  

Michelle Obama didn’t attend because she didn’t want to miss linebacker practice for the AFC championship game. 

Even though the leftist foot-soldier protestors weren’t out in the kind of force they achieved in the female-genitalia-hat rally in 2017, although they made up for their small numbers with impotent, imbecilic rage.  Or at least they tried.

An Al Jazeera story told the sad tale: “Dozens of people gathered at a park near central Washington, DC to protest a wide range of issues, from the environment to Pro-Palestinian rights, as Donald Trump was sworn into offices.”  (Dozens!)

Yes, it was a bingo card of delusions, fringe causes, lost causes, bad causes, and bad faith.  If you had “don’t deport illegal criminals,” “more partial-birth abortions,” “fight the sun monster!” “kill all the Jews,” “workers of the world unite,” “regular sex is icky,” and “Boo, Orange Hitler” … that’s a bingo! 

Some of the peace-loving weirdos even set up their own fake guillotine. 

You may remember that when Trump supporters put up a fake gallows, that was an insurrection and an attack on democracy meriting many years in jail.  But when Holocaust enthusiasts and communists put up a fake guillotine, that’s just righteous civil disobedience.

Remember when Sarte said, “Hell is other people?” 

These are the people he was talking about.  

But so many good things were happening, too.  The executive orders were great: reversing all of Biden’s EOs; marshalling forces to close the border and start deportations; offering reinstatement and back pay for soldiers expelled over the vax mandate; yanking security clearance from the 51 liars who pretended that Hunter’s laptop was Putin’s; killing DEI, just to name a few.

And after using dozens of pens to sign those beautiful bits of legislative goodness, a commentator noted that Trump started tossing pens to the crowd like rock stars tossing guitar picks. 

(Speaking of which, my wife happens to have two picks from Rick Nielsen after a great Cheap Trick concert in the early 80s.  I suspect that she might not have been available for me to sweep off her feet in 1986 if Robin Zander would have had the good sense to make a play for her back then.  His loss was my gain.)

It was also good to see Melania (giggity giggity), who looked amazing.  (Unexpectedly!)  That hat shouldn’t work, but it did.  If you had asked me on January 19th, “Martin, would you like your first lady to look like a femme fatale spy/gangster whose eyes you could never see?”  I would not have been enthusiastic.

But now I am extremely enthusiastic. 

Also, watching the Prez doing his goofy YMCA dance with that sword?  Say what you will about Trump, but that guy is confident in his masculinity.

Because anyone who can pick the gayest song of all time – “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” doesn’t count, because c’mon – and appear on stage while the Village People gyrate to that anthem, and then later dance to that song while wielding an actual sword?   (And you don’t have to be Bob Freud – grandson of Sigmund – to appreciate the work that that sword is doing there.)

THAT’s a man who is comfortable in his own heterosexual skin.  (I was going to say “a man comfortable in his own foreskin,” but I’m too highbrow for that kind of juvenile humor.) 

On a personal note, a funny thing happened here at stately Simpson manor on inauguration day.  Our house is within half a mile of the Swamp – the good one, where the Gators play – and when we’re not at the games, we can hear the game being called, and Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down” being played at the end of the third quarter.

(By the way, if I can be forgiven a little hometown pride, Gators are well-represented in Trump circles.  New AG Pam Bondi, new SecState Marco Rubio, and new Florida Senator (taking Rubio’s place) Ashley Moody are all UF grads.  You’re welcome, nation.)

But we’re also on a tree-lined, dead-end three block street, with the houses on our block all owned by regular adults and families, rather than rented by college students. So our neighborhood is generally pretty quiet.  But there are rentals one block behind us, and all day Monday there was a huge party going on in the backyard of a house two doors down.  Judging from the loud music and the soft roar of conversation, around several hundred college kids were there.

I was almost getting annoyed – or as annoyed as I could get on that day of days – until I heard the song that turned it around for me.  You guessed it: YMCA. 

The kids are all right, CO nation.  Or at least some of them.   (I can’t speak for FSU students, many of whom probably would have behaved similarly, except that they can’t spell “YMCA.”) (Also, I’m pretty sure Liz Warren claims to be a Seminole.)

#neverstop

Merry Inauguration Eve! (posted 1/20/25)

I’m writing this on Sunday night, so I haven’t basked in Trump’s inauguration yet.  But I do have plenty to write about, mostly celebrating the departure of the outgoing wretched hive of scum and villainy one more time, in preparation for the dawn of a new day.  So let’s just jump in.

It would have been extremely disorienting if Biden and the Dems would have become rational and conciliatory during the last days of Biden’s maladministration (half malady, half administration).  However, we didn’t have to deal with that disorientation, since none of the Dems (except for Strokey McFetterman) have learned a thing from their beautiful electoral beat down, and Biden is staggering right through the tape in full jackass mode. 

He tried to sell off the border wall, pardoned his derelict son (and many other undeserving felons as well), gave medals to a series of mostly ne’er-do-wells and rarely-do-wells – When will George Soros do well?  Ne’er! – and claimed that “the red states have really screwed up their economies.”

Which is why there are wagon trains of U-Hauls fleeing blue states to red ones, all bunched up like they were going through hostile, Warren country (#wemustneverstopmockingher), watching behind them for any greedy Dem tax authorities (thinly disguised as vultures) following along, hoping to prey on any stragglers who fall behind. 

But perhaps the best example of Biden’s toxic combination of hubris and cognitive rot was his pompous declaration that the ERA is now the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. 

That bit of absurdity launched a thousand memes.  Comparisons were made to Michael Scott stepping into the middle of the office and hollering, “I declare BANKRUPTCY!”  J.D. Vance took a hilarious shot, to the effect of, “As long as we’re just declaring sh*t, I declare that Pete Rose is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

A roomful of partisan fools cheered wildly for Biden’s faux declaration, but it obviously had as much real-world effect as if he’d put out a statement on White House stationery declaring, “1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a thumb war!”

I will still feel some suspense until Trump takes the oath, expecting that Biden will drop one more tranche of unjustified pardons, these to cover Liz Cheney and the other masterminds behind the J6 show trial, and God knows who else. 

One thing I don’t feel any suspense about?  Biden announcing the cure for cancer that he promised.  Because he may have beaten Medicaid, but he certainly didn’t beat cancer. 

Or dementia.  To which he lost a unanimous decision sometime in 2021.

Having said all that, Biden did accomplish one thing that I’d have not thought possible.  He’s made the nation even happier that Trump is taking over.

On a more somber note, we lost the great Bob Uecker last week.  Since I was already trying to fight back my giddiness amidst the euphoria of the run-up to Monday, I watched Major League again this weekend, as my own fond tribute to the Uke.

My favorite part of re-watching the movie was seeing all of the fans dressed up in their Lizzie Warren costumes, with headdresses and rubber tomahawks and banging on tribal drums and all the rest.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  It was a bittersweet reminder of a time when common sense was way more common, and most people had a sense of humor.

Just seeing that goofy Cleveland emblem again, with the cartoon Indian smiling broadly, did my heart good.  I hope that the good people of Cleveland – in what is now a reliably red state – will rise up at some point during the next four years, and ditch their idiotic, woke mascot of the “Guardians” and reclaim the Indians!

Also, I’m sick of so many people in our nation’s capital thinking that they’re our commanders.  The Washington football team will always be the Redskins to me.  (Or possibly – after a few shots of Scotch or Bourbon – the Fightin’ Warrens.) (#neverstop)

Finally, I don’t know if you saw the nauseating video of terrible Attorney General Merrick Garland leaving his building for the last time on Friday.  But if you haven’t, you should.

He stepped out of the elevator into a marble hallway, which was lined on both sides with applauding sycophants, cheering his awful tenure.  And this display went on and on, as he got handshakes and fist bumps as he moved along.  (Tragically, nobody faked a fist bump, then slipped a pair of handcuffs on him.)

There were young people and old in that crowd.  Some were taking video.  One older lady was in a wheelchair, and some staffers brought their kids.  (I’m guessing these are the types who have fought hard to make sure those kids have easy access to child porn in their school libraries.  So maybe it’s a good thing that they took them out of school to come to work with mom or dad and cheer for the corrupt old guy who – thank God! – will at least never be on the Supreme Court.)

I swear to you, one guy in the line was banging on a cowbell as Garland took what should have been his walk of shame.  I’m not making that up.  A cowbell!

To paraphrase the great Bruce Dickinson (as played by Christopher Walken) – He puts his pants on one leg at a time.  But once his pants are on, he makes gold records! – we all have a fever, and the only prescription is no freakin’ cowbell! 

Because just like there should be no crying in baseball, there should be NO cowbell in DC send-offs for corrupt politicians.  It’s a cliché because it’s true.

Many smart folks on X tagged the video with the same message: get this video to Trump, so he can make sure that every person in this video is fired by Monday night.  I might go even farther.  I think everyone in the video should be taken to the local police precinct and subjected to extensive interrogation, with an eye toward some kind of charges.

All of them.  Roll grammy in her wheelchair right into the interrogation room with the one-way mirror.  Split up the couples into separate rooms, so they can’t get their stories straight ahead of time.  Put the kids in juvie, just until they can be cleared. 

And throw cowbell boy into solitary for at least 60 days before you start his interrogation!

Not a joke.  I’m being serious here.  And guess what?  Here’s the deal.  End of quote. (That was my Biden impression.  Admit it: you threw up a bit in the back of your mouth.  That’s how good my impressions are.)  There will be plenty of open cells to hold those Garland co-conspirators, as soon as all of the jailed non-violent January 6th protestors are pardoned by close of business on Monday.    

Remember people, JOY cometh in the morning.

And finally, today, on the third Monday of January in the year of our Lord 2025…it’s THIS morning!

The Entertaining Confirmation Clown Show, & a Guy Caught For Child Porn is Exactly Who You’d Expect (posted 1/17/25)

I’m hoping that at least a few of you in CO nation, as you’ve been watching the confirmation hearings this week, have thought to yourself, “Wow, I hope Martin is watching this, because they are giving him a target-rich environment of mock-worthy shenanigans.” 

And holy cats, is that an understatement!  This has been a “can’t-stop-watching-it” disaster epic like I haven’t seen since Joe Biden visibly decomposed in that debate.  It’s got everything you want in a classic freak show.  The bearded lady.  (I’m not specifying which.)  The Amazing Neckless Senator.  The white Indian.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  The chinless wonder.  The Incredible Oblivious Man.  The Strong (smelling) Man.  (Proofreading note: confirm that Swalwell was in the room before I go with this one.)

With this number of eyeballs on a telegenic 100-clown-car pile-up, I think potential advertisers who didn’t arrange to sponsor it left big money on the table. How did Big Methadone not pay for the tv rights to this?!

I picture a big banner at the back of the room, and chirons on the bottom of tv screens: “The 2025 Nomination Hearing/Witch Hunt Extravaganza.  Brought to you by Methadone.  “When Heroin is No Longer working, but You’re Not Ready for Sobriety Yet.  Methadone!”

Of course it wouldn’t be a high-profile DC event without far-left weirdos interrupting the proceedings.  But every time one of them starts hollering incoherently like the homeless cat lady on the Simpsons, I find myself asking the obvious question: Are tasers broken? 

If not, and if you must allow emotionally unstable people in, just position a security guy behind each of them, with a taser out and hovering about six inches from the back of their necks.  And as soon as they start the gibberish, see which security guy can get his assignee to do the best “salmon jumping upstream to spawn” impression.  Monetary awards to the winners.

And it’s not like the protestors are hard to spot, guys.  We all know the tell-tale signs:

Crazy eyes

Wild, fly-away Bernie Sanders hair

General dishevelment

A terrorist dishrag (you say “keffiyeh,” I say “terrorist dish rag”) around their necks

Carrying a small cardboard sign riddled with misspellings and out-of-place exclamation marks

Odd pink clothing that suggests either someone in an impoverished Third-World traveling circus who couldn’t afford traditional clown costumes, or the gayest Nazi you’ve ever seen in your life. 

If anybody comes in who checks three or more of those boxes, pre-position the security crew’s taser squad, and prepare to light them up!  And if they accidentally tase Bernie Sanders – hey, he checked the first three boxes – I think we can all live with that. 

Because the Democrat senators are generally only half a standard deviation less crazy than the protestors.

It’s hard to even pick which senator put in the worst performance.  Grandma Squanto and Kirsten Gillibrand were over-the-top annoying, as were many others.  But if pushed, I’d say that the three who were definitely on the medal stand (in the Horse’s Arse floor event) were Schiff, Hirono and Blumenthal.  Hegseth and Bondi made all three of them look ridiculous.  

The visuals alone, when Crazy Mazie was interrogating Pam Bondi, were brutal.  Bondi looks like Pam Bondi, while Hirono looks like a troll who found some talking points under a bridge and shambled up to a microphone to read them.   

One highlight was when Hirono bizarrely asked Bondi if she had ever “made any unwanted sexual advances” to anyone.  (I yelled the line she should have used at my tv: “UNWANTED?  No.”)

She and Hegseth both ran circles around Dick “nobody calls him Richard” Durbin and Richard “everybody secretly calls him Dick” Blumenthal.  The latter is a particular enigma to me, because for years he falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam, and yet he eagerly launched one thinly disguised attack after another at Hegseth, an actual combat veteran.  (Schiff did something similar, brushing it off when Bondi nailed him about how he’d been censured for making the same kind of dishonest statements he was throwing at her.)   

Which brings up a fundamental question of human psychology: How can some reasonably functional people be either completely oblivious or so lacking in shame that they can blithely expose themselves in ways that would humiliate a normal person?

I think I’m pretty normal.  ([engage Moe Howard voice] Quiet, you!) And as a normie, I share most people’s tendency to remember negative feedback and criticism more than compliments.  As a professor,  I’d generally get very high ratings from students, with lots of comments like “This is the funniest professor I’ve ever had” and, “If it wasn’t for our age difference, I’d throw myself at him shamelessly.” 

But all of those blur together, while the relative handful of negative comments stick in my mind.  For example, from November of 2006: “I agree with People Magazine that George Clooney deserved to narrowly beat out Dr. Simpson for “Sexiest Man Alive.” 

That was 18 years ago, and it still stings.

But these people can stand up in front of God and everyone and say the most self-mortifying things.  Blumenthal should be ashamed to show his face in public within a mile of a veteran.  Schiff and Hirono should hide their faces everywhere, on general principle. 

Meanwhile, Democrats outside the hearings were making themselves look just as bad.  Biden gave a truly pathetic goodbye address, filled with lies from beginning to end, stitched together with self-pity.  But the pouting didn’t stop there, as “Dr.” Jill bad-mouthed Nancy Pelosi, and KJP gave one final petulant press briefing.

Also, there’s bad news for those of you who wanted a bulky, run-stopping presence in the middle during the inauguration: Michelle Obama has announced that she won’t attend, because she’s “not a phony.” 

Which is a nice touch, since her phony husband will be attending.  (I’d guess that Barry would be pretty upset about that, and might even stand up to her.  Until he thinks about whether he really wants her to beat his scrawny, hypocritical arse and grind his bones, like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk.)

Also, Imhotep Pelosi isn’t going, either.  She did make it to Trump’s 2017 inauguration, wearing some tasteful burial wrappings and that frozen Botox half-scowl of hers.  Sources say that this will be the first inauguration she will miss since she started her attendance streak at the deification ceremony of Cheops the Unsteady in the Valley of the Kings in 2563 BC.  

One of my favorite examples of leftists gnashing their teeth has to be the press’ reaction to the shake-up in the White House press room, moving the terrible MSM outlets toward the back of the room, and the “new media” up front.  I don’t think that move would have been necessary if the MSM had just been hostile to Trump, because a skeptical and questioning media is necessary in a democratic republic.

But they haven’t been that.  They’ve been instinctively and thoroughly dishonest and biased, which is not tolerable in a free country’s media.  They’ve been supine boot-lickers for leftists, selling one big lie after another (Joe Biden is super compos mentis, the laptop is Russian disinfo, etc.), and deranged slanderers of everybody with an R beside their name.  (While only 55% of them deserve it!)

A secondary, but still great reason for the reshuffling: the whole point of a press corps is to get information out to the public.  So it’s illogical to give prime press room real estate to the legacy media, whose plummeting viewership and readership means that the info they spin and distribute will go largely unseen. 

Plus there’s the schadenfreude-tastic optics of watching the arrogant MSMers being marched to a back corner, from where they have to jump and wave their hands and yell, in the usually vain hope of being called on. 

If I were Trump I’d double-down and troll them even harder.  I’d try to make the back of the room look as much like a musty, far corner of a basement as I could.  I’d install a wheezy old boiler, and dump off a bunch of used sports equipment and damp bags of pesticides, and have White House aides spread fresh dust around every morning. 

And spiders.  Lots of spiders. 

Finally, I’ll close with one more story from Schadenfreude Corner:

Darrin Bell is a far-left cartoonist who produces tired, lame and lazy cartoons.  Many of them communicate the wildly creative and original implication that Republicans are Nazis, and that Trump is a Nazi.  For that kind of brilliance, he was awarded a Pulitzer prize, and an NAACP Image Award (he’s black) in 2024.

At least two of his cartoons had mocked the GOP contention that sexually grooming children is happening, and that it’s bad.  One had an elephant opening his trenchcoat in front of toddlers, labeling him as a groomer.  But what he revealed to the kids was a sign around his neck reading “bigotry.” Get it?  Conservative bigotry is the real threat to children.

In another, a rage-distorted, split-faced white male – MAGA hat wearer on the left, Nazi on the right – screams “Groomer,” presumably at the sane, moral lefties who just want to include child porn books in school libraries.  As healthy, salt-of-the-earth types do, I guess.

Well, on Wednesday the 15th, Darrin was arrested for… wait for it…possessing and distributing over 100 videos of child pornography.  UNEXPECTEDLY!

Providing yet more proof of two time-worn adages: 

1. Every accusation is a confession, and

2. It’s always the ones you most suspect.

Put the champagne on ice, because Monday is coming, people!

Lessons from LA in How Leftists Distort Language (posted 1/15/25)

The fire story has brought attention to many issues that conservatives have been warning about for years – the dangers of catering to an extremist environmentalist fringe, incompetent leftist government – as well as some I’d never heard of, such as the “expanding bullseye effect” that CO posted about yesterday.

While there are obviously many contributing factors to the disaster, one that has deservedly gotten a lot of attention in the last several years is getting even more now: the DEI priorities that led to so many incompetent people ending up in crucial positions in the LAFD.  

Thankfully, amongst all of the green flags popping up in the late, flailing stage of the Biden/Harris administration that culminated in Trump’s re-election, most people now seem to be decisively rejecting DEI.  But it’s a shame that it took this long, or that it’s necessary even now to explain to some people what’s wrong with DEI.

I think it’s hung around so long partly because leftists are experts at using language to obscure painful realities.  Sometimes euphemistic language arises out of good intentions, and in limited circumstances, it may even be helpful.  If calling someone “retarded” sounds harsh or insulting, then substituting “mentally challenged” and eventually “special needs” is compassionate.  Moving from “crippled” to “handicapped” was probably good. 

But even in those cases, there’s a tendency to go too far and try to deceive yourself and others by eschewing clearer language in favor of comforting euphemisms.  When some advocates tried to move on from “handicapped” to “handi-capable,” it didn’t take, because it was too obviously an absurdly positive spin that edged into deception.

When I was a young miscreant in the 1970s, many schools made a terminology switch from calling underperforming kids “slow learners” or “remedial students” to those who “progress at their own speed.”  It was a nice gesture, but it didn’t change the reality.

And because kids are semi-feral a-holes in need of civilizing, six minutes after the new term was rolled out, playgrounds were ringing with taunts of, “Ha ha!  Billy progresses at his own speed!”

In politicians’ hands, such euphemisms quickly degenerate from well-intentioned to deceitful.  If you can get people to think of illegal aliens as “undocumented workers” and then “undocumented Americans,” you have deceived them. 

If you can transform “vagrants” “winos” and “bums” into “the homeless” and then “the unhoused,” you can squeeze billions out of naïve leftist voters for your pet causes. 

The same phenomenon happened in the mid-1960s, when a plan for “compensatory” or “remediating” discrimination soon became known as “affirmative action.”  “Discrimination” sounds bad, but taking “affirmative action” sounds bold, and forward-thinking.  It’s got “affirm” right there in the name!

It was initially sold as a tiny bit of favoritism, used only in the rarest of circumstances, to break what was essentially a tie between two nearly identical candidates for a job or a scholarship.  In reality, it pretty quickly became a huge thumb on the scale which required draconian quotas and giving some groups a multiple-standard-deviation boost in test scores or GPAs over the general population.

And the word “quota?”  No bueno.  Supporters soon were forced into verbal gymnastics, insisting, “We don’t have any quotas.  Only goals and targets.”

Fast-forward a few decades, and the detrimental results of affirmative action had become so obvious and the program so unpopular that it could no longer be sustained. So the lefty elite said, “Okay, we had good intentions, and we tried, but our plan is a failure.  So we’re learning from our mistakes, admitting error, and dropping it.”

HA!  I kid. 

They actually flew their private jets to a hidden mountain lair near Davos (Because: climate change, shmimate change.) and engaged in a two-week brainstorming and re-branding retreat.

And then came out with… you knew where this was going… Diversity, Inclusion and Equity!

Then someone pointed out that that spelled “DIE.” 

And George Soros said, “Schiff!”  And had several subordinates killed, and all of the posters re-printed and the web sites edited.

And DEI was born. 

Annnnddddd… the president of Harvard is a dimwitted plagiarist, a dude who dressed like Captain Kangaroo’s homely wife is Assistant Health Secretary, Kamala is VP, and LA is burning to the ground.     

Just like affirmative action before it, DEI is a lose-lose-lose proposition. Those being discriminated against obviously lose, but so do the “beneficiaries” of the discrimination, who are stigmatized with the suspicion that they didn’t earn their position, even if they did.  Also, when they get artificially boosted into a position for which they are not qualified, they fail.

And the larger society loses, because it ends up with less qualified people in government, academia and some businesses.  Sometimes the effects are just aggravating, as when mediocre professors get tenure, or when you get terrible service at the DMV.  But sometimes you get petite firefighteresses who can’t carry a Pomeranian puppy out of a burning building, and people die.     

For 30 years, my dad worked with twenty guys on street crews for the Northern Illinois Gas Company.  Everybody there worked in two-man teams in which partners rotated every 2-3 weeks or so.  Everybody was trained and periodically tested on their various tasks, and if job applicants failed welding or equipment operating tests, they didn’t get hired, or else were let go.

Responding to an affirmative-action push, the company hired two women to join the street crews.  Both women were stronger and more sturdily built than most women, and both were pleasant people and did their best.  One was better at welding and machinery operating than the other, but in those areas, both were roughly equivalent to at least the lower half of the guys. The most physically taxing part of his job was jackhammering.   

But neither of them had the body mass or upper body strength to work a jackhammer. The two-man teams would split the jackhammering duties, and generally, the younger or stronger of each pair would do a little more than half.  But whenever a guy was paired with one of the women, he knew that for the next 2-3 weeks, he’d do all of the jackhammering.  Toward the end of my dad’s career, he’d had a few back injuries, and he dreaded the rotations with a female partner.

He ended up retiring a couple of years before he wanted to – with a lower pension than he would otherwise have had – because he couldn’t get medically cleared to work on a street crew anymore.  I can’t say for sure that that was partly due to the company’s affirmative action/DEI hiring policy.  But the fact that it’s even a possibility illustrates the problem.         

In his documentary with Dennis Prager called “No Safe Spaces,” the great Adam Carolla told a story about his experience as a would-be LA firefighter.  (I taught that documentary as part of my “Analyzing Propaganda” course in the last two years of my teaching career, and it was always gratifying to see that most students found the doc persuasive, even though many of them were little libs.)

Right after high school, Carolla applied to be a firefighter, and he was told that there was a long wait for white male applicants to get an appointment to take the required exam.  He went to work on construction sites, and SEVEN YEARS later, got a letter inviting him to come in and take the exam. When he was waiting in line, there was a short, petite female of color next to him. 

He asked her when she had applied, and she said, “Wednesday.”

Carolla makes the point that he would have been a great firefighter.  He was young and strong, and had the kind of physical courage edging into foolhardiness typical of many young men. 

Carolla never got the chance to be a firefighter, but he has done very well for himself in the intervening years. But the citizens of LA lost a very qualified firefighter – and many other hundreds or thousands like him – because their political leaders valued identity politics and DEI double standards over the lives and property of Californians.

Hopefully, after these fires are put out, they will have learned their lesson, and will vote accordingly. 

If they STILL don’t wise up, they’ll once again get what they’ve been voting for, good and hard. And hot. 

Looking Forward to Monday, & Praying for LA (posted 1/13/25)

As we enter the last week of Joe Biden’s interminable presidency, he’s providing more and more reasons to celebrate his departure.  Between pardoning scores of criminals, selling as much of the border wall as he can, and giving temporary amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegals whom the American people just voted to deport, he’s adding salt to the gaping, infected wound that is his presidency. 

When he was called upon last week to say some comforting words to the people of LA who are suffering through the most devastating wildfires in many decades, this is the closest he could come: “The good news is… I’m a great grandfather, as of today!”

Good lord!  The man’s narcissism is thicker than the smoke hanging over LA.  I’m surprised that he didn’t say, “My heart goes to all Californians who have lost a loved one in the fires.  You know, I lost my son Beau in a devastating wildfire, too.  Let me spend the next hour telling you about my pain.”  

But his life isn’t the only thing on Biden’s mind lately.  A CNN story last week detailed that Biden and some of his aides are worried that Trump won’t give him a state funeral when he dies.

Which confused me, because unless I’m mistaken, he had his state funeral last week.  I remember that flags were at half mast, and there were eulogies and everything.  I thought the mortician did a pretty good job, because Biden looked about as lifelike as he has during his presidency.  Not good enough to go with the open casket, in my opinion, but I’m not the one who makes these decis—

Wait, my crack researchers just handed me a bulletin.  Apparently that was Jimmy Carter.  According to this, he was the oldest ex-president in US history, dying at 100.  But I guess he’ll lose that title when Biden becomes an ex-president next Monday, at the age of 118.

But Carter still looked better than Biden last week.  So he’s got that going for him. 

Speaking of Carter, I thought I was the only one who thought it was weird that John Lennon’s “Imagine” was played at his funeral, until I saw a lot of commentary about it. 

Carter was a lifelong Baptist, and his mourners were serenaded with an atheist song?  I wrote about that song early in my CO columns; I think it’s a lovely tune, but the message is half-baked commie/utopian crap.  (Everyone “living for today,” with “no possessions” leading to “all the people sharing all the world?”  That’s been tried all over the world, and it always works out the same way: a few thug party bosses become billionaires, and the rest of the people end up in misery, gulags and graves.)

I can’t think of anything more dispiriting at the funeral of someone who at least considered himself a Christian.  There’d be as much dignity in back-to-back renditions of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and “Who Let the Dogs Out?” 

And if they were going to pick a Beatles’ song, wouldn’t “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” have been just as good? 

I hesitate to write about the main story in the news right now – the LA fires – because they are still going on, and the loss of life and property is unutterably sad.  With strong winds predicted to pick up again tomorrow, the death toll and staggering losses will surely increase. 

If anyone reading this has loved ones directly affected by the fires, please stop reading this.  I don’t want to inadvertently add to anyone’s pain while this disaster is ongoing.  But it’s weighing on my mind, as it is on most people’s.

In one sense, seasonal fires in California are examples of the kind of natural threats that all regions face.  Northern states have brutal and sometimes fatal winters, the Midwest and other regions have tornadoes, the South and part of the Atlantic seaboard have hurricanes.  Earthquakes and droughts and floods affect many areas at one time or another. 

But there’s also no denying that good or bad governance can have either mitigating or exacerbating effects on all of these.  Ron DeSantis has been a great blessing to Florida, handling the frequent hurricanes masterfully.  He has picked great personnel, and leads from the front, preparing for the storms ahead of time and overseeing fast, coordinated restoration and relief efforts afterwards.  (And he never goes to Ghana during hurricane season.)

The politicians in New Orleans have offered an opposite example.  Riven by corruption and incompetence, they’ve diverted federal money intended for flood control measures into their own and their friends’ pockets for decades.  When a storm is on the horizon – with almost a week’s notice of its arrival – they bumble around, stepping on one rake after another, and their residents pay the price.

Ray “School Bus” Nagin (D-isorganized) earned his nickname during Hurricane Katrina, when he had a citizenry that included many thousands of poor and infirm people trapped in the path of the storm, and also a fleet of hundreds of school buses – sitting in below-sea-level New Orleans parking lots – at his disposal. 

Naturally, he connected those dots, added up 2 and 2… and got 427.  He twiddled his thumbs for days as the storm approached and then hit New Orleans.  When the storm was over, hundreds of residents had died, many thousands had been trapped in their homes and endangered, and the school buses ended up under water and ruined.

But when it comes to incompetent a-holery, Nagin had nothing on Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the woke leadership of LA’s Dem establishment.  Many fire victims are already pointing fingers, but a full accounting won’t be possible until after the fires are put out and the extent of the damage has been assessed.     

But it’s already clear that foolish policy choices have turned what might otherwise have been a few typical fires into this epic disaster.  Newsom celebrated the removal of at least four dams holding water that could be used in fire prevention, in service of questionable environmental concerns.  The closest reservoir to the Palisades had been drained before the fire started.  Traditionally common forest management practices (regularly clearing away dead vegetation, clear cutting areas to provide firebreaks, etc.) have been discontinued in recent decades.

CA residents have also voted based on priorities that most of the country – even many California Democrats – have now started to reject.  Hiring based on identity politics, and valuing DEI goals over competence has produced painful results.

The LA fire chief was hired two years ago with glowing praise for her genitalia and gender preference, and she quickly said that one of her top priorities would be hiring more female firefighters.  One of her senior assistants – and head of a DEI Bureau – is also a gay female, and she is the one who said that people want cops and firefighters who “look like them.”  She also shrugged off concerns that a female firefighter might not be able to pull someone from a burning building. 

But even when mostly blue Californians voted reasonably, their leftist politicians betrayed them. Residents voted for a $7.5 billion water infrastructure act in 2014; $2.7 billion of that was supposed to build water storage reservoirs.  Ten years later, nothing has been built, and the city is on fire.

Meanwhile, LA Mayor Karen Bass is another winner.  Last week she was hard at work, making sure that the fire didn’t jump the Rocky Mountains, spread across North America, jump the Atlantic Ocean, and then start burning up the lush forests of Ghana. 

Before you bad mouth her, I will point out that there are no reported fires in Ghana right now.  So, yeah.    

Other CA Dems have done no better.  Newsom is smart enough to say that he’ll streamline building permits and curb his state’s famously tortuous regulations to allow rebuilding (I’ll believe it when I see it), but dumb enough to blame Trump, and local officials, and climate change, and probably Russian disinformation.      

I saw a brief video of Maxine Waters, and was about to send thoughts and prayers, assuming that she must have been caught in the fires.  But then I remembered that that’s just how she looks.  (She’s not called “Melting Face Maxine” for nothing.) (Okay, so far I’m the only one who’s been calling her “Melting Face Maxine.”  Which I think is just more evidence that I’m ahead of the curve.)

She made a statement which began with, “I’m not into the blame game,” before she began blaming people.  The primary culprit, according to the Wigged Wonder?  The evil 1% of rich people, who don’t pay their share of taxes, and thus deprive California of the money they need to prevent wildfires. 

By the way, this year’s California budget is $297.9 billion.  With a “B.”  Which is enough to provide billions to illegal aliens, and billions for mentally ill and/or addicted homeless people, and billions for a high-speed rail project that so far has not actually laid a single rail.  And tens of thousands of dollars for Gavin Newsom’s hair gel and featureless-Ken-doll-crotch-moisturizing ointment (don’t ask.) 

But not enough to keep LA from burning to the ground.      

One meme summed up the idiotic policy preferences in a nutshell – LA County: 72 genders, 0 working fire hydrants. 

One final fun fact: Karen Bass – whom nearly 100,000 Californians have now signed a petition to recall – was reportedly one of the top three contenders for Biden’s VP pick in 2020.  Once he’d promised to pick a black female, the three prime candidates were Susan Rice, Karen Bass and Que Mala. 

Rice was tainted by her previous selling of various failed Obama policies, so much so that she had to withdraw herself from consideration for SecState after Hillary left.  Karen Bass is Karen Bass. 

So Que Mala got the nod. 

In retrospecticus (obscure Simpson’s reference for the win), Biden should have picked Bass, for several reasons: 

1. She couldn’t have done any worse than Que Mala. 

2. She couldn’t have enabled the LA fires if she was in the White House.  (Most of the buildings in DC are stone monuments, which are very hard to burn down, no matter how incompetent you are at fire stuff.) 

3. He could have sent her to Ghana a lot, and that would have pleased everybody but the Ghanians. 

Lesson learned.

Okay, one week left.  Pray for LA.

Lefties Aren’t Giving Up, But They’re Not Winning – Especially in Florida (posted 1/10/25)

Well, it’s only 10 days until this madness ends, and the comic buffoonery just keeps coming at us.

Grandma Squanto, for example, is riding scout on some of Trump’s cabinet nominees, especially Pete Hegseth.  She got out front with a 33-page letter detailing all of her many objections to him.  For example, she’s really freaked out by his scary Christian tattoo, taking her cue from some nitwit who associated the tat with “right-wing extremism.”  Which, I’m pretty sure, is just another word for “Christian” in her mind. 

She wrote, “We cannot have a [SecDef] whose fellow servicemembers feel concerned enough about to report as a potential insider threat.”  Got that?  One quivering, low-T military desk-rider got his/her gender non-binary onesie over its head because of Pete’s icky tattoo, and now he can’t be in the defense department.

I’ve heard of a “heckler’s veto” before, but this is the first time I’ve seen a “hysteric’s veto.”  That’s not the way you run a military, Liz.

I get it, though.  The defense department is very triggering for her.  (Or I guess in her case, very “bow-stringing”?) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  After all, her ancestral people have a pretty lousy win-loss record against the US military. 

I mean sure, they won at the Little Big Horn, but other than that…

Warren also has her deerskin panties in a bunch (#neverstop) because of Hegseth’s criticism of DEI idiocy in the military.  “I think we all know that the Founding Fathers wanted above all that we should judge each other by the color of our skin.  Which, as you can clearly see in my case, is a glorious, deep red.”  (#nevernevernever)

Okay, I made that quote up.  But I think I accurately conveyed the gist of her ridiculous argument.

Meanwhile, the used-to-be-funny Jon Stewart has tacitly admitted what terrible candidates Brandon and Que Mala were, but he still felt obligated to praise how virtuous she was when she presided over the Ceremonial Stating of the Obvious, i.e. the certification of Trump’s victory. 

Steward couldn’t resist taking a shot at Trump in the process, saying how smoothly democracy can work when “you don’t act like a little bitch when you lose.” 

Um, Hillary Clinton and Stacy Abrams are probably watching, Jon.  As well as the dozens of Democrat congresscreeps who protested and came out against certifying that Trump had won in 2016.  Have a little empathy for crying bitches everywhere, why don’t you?

On the anny-tray front (I’m still not sure that the FB “fact-checkers” have really been disbanded), I’ve got two stories, one from California and one from Florida.  And the ending of these stories tells you a lot about why people have been moving from the former to the latter.

California first.  The firefighting policies and personnel in LA have received a lot of attention this week, since the city appears to be burning to the ground.  You’ve probably already heard about the head of the LAFD – a sapphic gal named Kristen Crowley – on account of the glowing press she received for becoming the first LGBTQ person to hold her position.  You won’t be shocked to learn that she’s a big fan of DEI.

Naturally, she hired an Assistant Fire Chief (and, I’m not making this up, head of the DEI Bureau) who is a rotund African-American woman named Kristine Larson.  In a recent video, she stated one of the common, patronizing tropes of DEI enthusiasts: that when people call for a firefighter (or cop, or presidential candidate), they “want someone that looks like you.” 

Does anyone really believe that? What if you’re a wheelchair-bound Indonesian octogenarian lady and your house is burning down?  Are you hoping to see a wrinkly firefighter roll up and over your threshold in her wheelchair, completely out of breath, so that you can both have a nice chat about pronouns while you burn to death in your wheelchairs together?

I know what you’re thinking.  “Martin, she could not possibly say anything stupider than that!” 

Au contraire, mon frere.  Because Larson then said, “Hold my nasal cannula, and watch this.”

And she raised the obvious objection that any sentient mammal would have when faced with someone advocating choosing firefighters not because they are physically capable of fighting fires, but because of the color of their skin and the nature of their genitalia.

She imagines a citizen saying, “Is she strong enough to do this, or you couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire?”  In a sane world, she’d pause for a minute, then began to sweat and blush, and say, “Holy crap.  That’s a great question!  My position on this has been embarrassingly stupid.  I hereby resign from my job.”

But this isn’t a sane world.  It’s Los Angeles.  So what Kristine Larson really said was, “To which my response is, ‘He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.’”

That’s a real thing that she said.  If people are trapped in fires, the Assistant Fire Chief thinks that they’ve gotten themselves into the wrong place.  And she’s very disappointed in them. 

I have no words.   Except, “Idiot!”  And, “Moron!”

And, “Great job, Democrat voters of LA and California!” 

So LA has hired and given power to this woman, and her similarly wokified boss, and who knows how many others like her.  And LA is now the World’s Biggest Dumpster Fire™. 

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Meanwhile, in Florida, an equally gender confused oddball posted an obnoxiously creepy celebratory video about how he had tricked the evil state of Florida into giving him a driver’s license that listed his sex as female.  He explains that he “lost” his driver’s license, and then took in his passport that identifies him as a woman, thus forcing them to give a replacement license that says he’s a woman.

Just from watching the video, you know the kind of rich fantasy life this guy has, because he also becomes giddy at the thought that Ron DeSantis must be running around in a rage and defecating on himself because his will has been thwarted by this stalwart gender warrior.

First, that’s Joe Biden you’re thinking of, and he’s going to be gone in 10 days!

Second, the state of Florida’s reaction was 24-karat gold!  When some people in Florida’s DMV saw this guy’s video, they quickly sent him a letter thanking him for bringing to their attention the loophole he had exploited, and notifying him that his incorrect license had been invalidated.  They pointed out that they are now investigating other such cases, and will ensure that nobody else is able to follow his example.  The letter also hinted that he might be looking at charges, since falsely claiming that you’ve lost your license in order to get a fraudulently altered replacement would be considered a felony.

The envelope also contained his new, valid driver’s license, which correctly identifies him as a male.  To which any compassionate person can only have one reaction.  Which is… HA! HAHA! HAHAHAHA!

Actually, since it’s a new year, and one of my resolutions is to become a kinder and gentler Martin, I will honestly say that we should pray for confused people like this guy.  If he’s got actual gender dysmorphia, that’s got to be a horrible illness, and we should hope that he gets the treatment that he needs. 

Even if he’s just following some kind of social contagion, he still has to be deeply unhappy, as anyone who dedicates his life to fighting against reality is bound to be.  His obnoxious and disturbing behavior aside, it’s pitiable that he’s placed so much emphasis on getting official documents that wrongly label him, as if that has any effect on the reality of who he is. 

Really.  Can you imagine getting giddy with childish excitement when you temporarily trick some state agency into confirming your dishonest statement about yourself on a document?  That would be like a childless man ordering a “World’s Greatest Dad” mug from Amazon, and then shrieking and running around like he just won the lottery when he unwrapped it beside his mailbox. 

So as much as I might initially enjoy watching his celebratory video, followed quickly by learning his getting a karmic beat-down, I feel bad for the poor, deluded guy.  Because I’ve got news for him: getting bitch-slapped by conservative reality doesn’t make you a woman. 

Just ask Tim Walz, Jon Stewart, Robert DeNiro, Michael Moore, Rob Reiner, or Justin Trudeau.

Okay.  Justin Trudeau might be the exception that proves the rule. 

10 days left, people!

More Good News, Plus a Throwback to January of 2021 (posted 1/8/25)

I wasn’t planning to write another column today, until Mark Zuckerberg made his amazing about-face yesterday, admitting that content moderation on Facebook had “gone too far” and announcing that he’s going to “restore free expression” on the site.

First I pinched myself, to prove that I wasn’t dreaming.  Then I checked the calendar, to confirm that it’s not April Fool’s Day.  Then I re-read his statement, specifically the part where he says that he’s getting rid of his armies of blatantly biased “fact checkers.”

Then I went outside and crouched down low, scanning the skies above me to be sure that there were no flying pigs swooping low enough to collide with me.   

But no.  I wasn’t dreaming, it’s not April first, and there were no porcine aviators darkening the skies over our great country.   A famous and influential censor has apparently seen the error of his ways, and is repenting.

I don’t know whether Zuckerberg has actually learned from experience and had a change of heart, or is only tactically retreating in the face of a free speech ascendancy that’s been energized since November 5th.  (I’m generally cynical about lefties who gain a “newfound respect” for free speech.) 

But the beautiful thing is that it doesn’t really matter.  The end result is more free speech, and that’s a very good thing for our nation, and even better for conservatives.  Because our ideas are better than leftist ones, and when both are allowed space in the public square, ours thrive and theirs wither. 

This also comes at a particularly good time for me, because as regular readers may know, after an eight-year run on the CO site with no Facebook warnings, in the last month I’ve gotten two “offensive speech” warnings, and had two of my columns pulled from this site.

In addition, several of my columns were slapped with ridiculous FB critiques.  For example, when I discussed the fact that “climate change” isn’t going to roast or freeze us all to death within the next 18 months, FB kindly put a text box at the bottom of the column – and on every response and comment! – saying something like, “To learn the truth about climate change, go to climatechangewillkillusall!.gov.”    

But those joke-blockers were as ham-handed as any know-nothing Soviet apparatchiks, and I assume that anyone with an above-AOC-level IQ knows that such “corrections” are absurd. 

And as far as the hate speech strikes and possible banning, the vaunted FB algorithms have proved no match for the brilliant subterfuge of my cunning plan to use… wait for it… pig Latin!  (It’s like the way the US Army used Navajo code-talkers in WWII, only more juvenile.)

Thus, my comments on “ranny-tays” have flown under the radar.  (And no, no matter how many times I’ve been tempted, I haven’t had to deploy the “o-gay uck-fay ourself-yay” yet.  Because I’m a gentleman.)  

Anyway, Zuck’s retreat is good news, and another green flag that things are turning around.  He specifically said that he’s going to end the fact-checking “completely,” replacing it with a “Community Notes” model that Elon uses on Twitter/X. 

Which is another win for me, because I expect that my columns will be getting a mountain of community notes, along the following lines: “This guy is always right!” And, “How does he do it?” and, “We should probably sell all that we have, give it to the poor, and follow him.” 

So with the 20th only 12 days away, we may end up testing Trump’s prediction that we will get tired of winning, saying, “Please, please, it’s too much winning!” 

Finally, since people seemed to enjoy yesterday’s throw-back excerpt from one of my columns from the dark days of January 2021 – new readers apparently weren’t aware that I can write the hell out of an inaugural poem, for example – I decided to close with another blast from the past.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out my WordPress site (Martinsimpsonwriting.com), you should give it a look.   If you click “subscribe” there (it’s free), you’ll get an email letting you know when I’ve posted a new column.  It also includes archives of my old stuff, which means you can go back and re-live the ecstasy of January 2017 or the agony of January ’21.    

Many people say that the entire collection is an example of wisdom literature.  Like the book of Proverbs, or the Analects of Confucious, or the Kama Sutra.

Well, not the Kama Sutra.  If you’re getting THAT out of it, you are really reading it wrong!  

Anyway, here’s another throwback excerpt from 1/12/21, when I was desperately seeking any silver lining in the dark cloud of the impending Biden administration:

“The Dems are such horrific politicians that they are going to over-reach and alienate all but their hard-core base, and to the extent that we can have even fair-ish congressional elections in the future, they should be sailing into a serious repudiation in the mid-terms, a la Obama’s 56-seat House bloodbath in 2010.

Biden has one orthopedic shoe in the grave, and Kamala is a human toothache, and all of the faces of the national Democrat party look like the Elephant Man’s family reunion, morally speaking.  They are not going to wear well.

If they were even room-temperature smart, they could do much more damage by posing as unifiers and throwing a few, pitiful bones to the spineless GOP members who always seem happy for even the most meager of scraps.  Instead, they are so driven by their own malice that they can’t help themselves: they’re going to double-down on their frothing hatreds, and pursue their “enemies” (i.e. half of the country).  Anyone who is not a completely lost cause is going to be repelled by that.”

Okay, so I missed the optimistic mid-term projection.  The only red wave we had was in Florida and (oddly enough) New York.  But as for the rest of my predictions?

I think I can say, as Willie Brown said after he “interviewed” Que Mala for her first job in politics…

Nailed it!

12 days and counting, people…