Bob Uecker passed away today. He’s one of very few people about whom I can say that I never saw or thought about without smiling. Here’s a fun fact about his baseball career. He played in the big leagues from 1962-1967 and had a .200 lifetime batting average, but he somehow hit .429 against Sandy Koufax who was the most dominant pitcher of that era. For me, who was born in 1969, I only knew his as a broadcaster, ad pitchman, and late night show guest. But he shared my complete love of the national pastime and had an inspiring outlook on life. If he’s up in heaven, he’ll be yelling down at the umpires, “He missed the tag! He missed the tag!”

I watched the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearing on Tuesday and it was every bit as distressing and dispiriting as you’d expect. On Wednesday I felt better about the hearing for Pam Bondi for Attorney General, John Ratcliffe for CIA director and Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. There was a huge contrast in terms of the seriousness and substance of the respective hearings. Ratcliffe clearly matured during his time as Director of National Intelligence and is at least prepared to take a demotion to the head the CIA. Bondi was arrogant and provided many extremely concerning answers and non-answers, but she does understand the job she’s applying for and the big issues she’ll be tackling once confirmed. And Rubio demonstrated an expansive knowledge of issues and will have no problem stepping into the top job at the State Department. He has a conservative take on many things with which I strongly disagree, but he isn’t operating in some fantasy land cooked up by right-wing media. So, that’s all encouraging.

The problem for the latter three is primarily who they’ll be taking their orders from and their probable unwillingness to resist illegal orders. At least in Ratliffe and Rubio’s cases, I think they’ll try to advise saner courses. I have no confidence that Bondi will do so, and Hegseth will not only be completely over his head at the Pentagon, but his priority will be committing insane and unethical acts. As a prominent supporter of war crimes, there is no prospect that he’ll be a voice of restraint or reason.

I am happy that it looks like there may be a cease fire in Gaza. I suspect the Israeli cabinet refused to ratify the agreement on Thursday morning at the request of Trump. Trump wants a repeat of the Carter-Reagan pattern where the hostages are released on Inauguration Day, or in any case not before he is sworn in. He wants to take all the credit, which can also be seen in this social media posts since the agreement was announced.

Things would probably go better for Rudy Giuliani if he actually showed up in court when required.

Our database here at Progress Pond was corrupted irreparably a couple days after the election. We don’t have a way to no know if this was malicious but it was suspicious. We’ve had to rebuild it from scratch, which is a giant job for which I had no budget. Longtime user here, Chris, has volunteered countless hours to do this, and he’s made a lot of progress. We are still working through functionality and theme issues, but you should be able to sign in now with your saved passwords. And if you need a new password, the email system should work. If you no longer use the email you used to sign up here, you can email me and ask me to reset your password. This is particularly vital for subscribers who have lost their passwords. We will restored the Froggy Bottom Cafe soon, and then work though cosmetic stuff. I apologize for the last couple of months of disruption and also for the current state of the site, but we’ve done the best we can under the circumstances.

We’ll be having Driftglass and BlueGal on as guests for our next Pondcast, so you’ll definitely want to tune into that.

Finally, “Fuck Trump.”