Author: Brendan Skwire

Only a couple of more days to go til the election! If you have an opportunity to canvass or phone bank, now’s the time! I’ll be out for a few hours this afternoon here in sunny Philadelphia.

We have a new episode of The Progress Pondcast to get you through the next few days.

In this, our final show before the election, we share some long-awaited schadenfreude as Rudy loses everything (even a precious and beloved family heirloom).

We also riff on the right’s new take on married women voting differently than their husbands—it’s a “disaster,” I tell ya!

Finally, Marty discusses the plot hatched by TFG and Speaker Mike Johnson to steal the election. Check it out!

We encourage your likes, follows, and subscribes wherever you get your podcasts—we’re on Spotify, Apple, Castbox, Amazon, and Iheartradio—but the best way to support our work financially is on Patreon.

Two more days, folks. Let’s win this thing.

-Brendan

Although he’s best known for writing Common Sense—exhorting the American colonies to declare independence from Britain and establish their own republic—in my opinion Thomas Paine’s greatest work is The Age of Reason. This short book provides a philosophical argument for deism, highlights the problems with organized religion, and takes a sledgehammer to the Bible. It’s an easy read, and doesn’t sound like it was written more than 225 years ago. One of my favorite quotes of all time can be found within the first few paragraphs.

[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Paine and that quote lately, especially as I watch the Republicans react to Trump’s latest indictment.

Vanity Fair:

enator Lindsey Graham responded to Donald Trump’s fourth and latest indictment Monday with a radical, extrajudicial demand: that voters—not prosecutors or juries—should decide the former president’s legal fate. “The American people can decide whether they want him to be president or not,” Graham said on Fox News after Trump was charged in a sprawling racketeering case stemming from his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory in Georgia. “This should be decided at the ballot box, not a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail.”
[…]

Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, was similarly apoplectic. “I’m pissed at these over and over and over again, if they’re indictments tonight, it’ll be the fourth indictment of Donald Trump,” the conservative lawmaker told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night. “This is disgraceful. Our country’s over 200 years old. We’ve never once indicted a former president, or a candidate, or a leading candidate for president and this is Joe Biden and this is the Democrats weaponizing the justice system because they’re afraid of the voters.”

In the lower chamber, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, claimed in a social media post that the Biden administration “has weaponized government against his leading political opponent to interfere in the 2024 election” before accusing Willis—“a radical DA in Georgia”—of following suit in the hopes of advancing her political career.

Jim Jordan, on ShXitter:

Today’s indictment is just the latest political attack in the Democrats’ WITCH HUNT against President Trump.

He did nothing wrong!

And so on and so forth. Each and every one of these people—with the possible exception of Jordan, who really isn’t all that bright—knows they are lying.

Lindsey Graham knows very well that the reason Trump is under indictment in Georgia is because he refused to let the election “be decided at the ballot box.” Heck, Lindsey was involved with the plot! Likewise, Cruz and McCarthy know that Biden isn’t behind the Trump investigations. He doesn’t have that authority:

Legal experts said President Joe Biden does not have the authority to bring criminal charges against anyone. That authority lies with federal prosecutors. In the classified documents probe, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith made the decision to indict Trump, not Biden.
[…]
The president does not have the power under the Constitution to charge anyone with a crime, according to Marc Scholl, who served as a criminal prosecutor in New York. Under federal statute, that authority is reserved for federal prosecutors, who must present evidence and convince a grand jury to move forward with an indictment.

This isn’t your standard “politician stretching the truth” stuff. For example, everyone expects politicians to take credit for things they didn’t do. This is straight-up lying to the American people or to paraphrase Paine, “prostituting the chastity of one’s mind, as to subscribe one’s professional belief to things one does not believe.”

Every single one of these outspoken Republicans know that Trump is guilty of what he’s accused of. Many of them had a ringside seat—yet they ask Americans “who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes.” For that matter, many of our media personalities are also engaged in mental lying, and I’m not just talking about the “wretched hive of scum and villainy” we call the right-wing media universe. The Post’s Ruth Marcus, for example, came under sustained fire for arguing that the Georgia investigation might be “one case too many.” That probably shouldn’t be surprising from someone who proudly defended convicted child molester Dennis Hastert on the pages of the Washington Post, asking “What, precisely, is the federal government’s interest — the public interest — at this point in prosecution and humiliation?” However, it remains shocking—and I don’t think anyone reading this believes for a moment that if was one of Ruth Marcus’s children or grandchildren that were raped, that she would have any interest in mercy for the offender.

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, serial liar and man-who-left-his-wife-for-a-younger-model David Brooks wonders “Why America Got Mean”. I suppose a man who left his wife (and children) for a younger model would know a thing or two about that topic.

I have very little hope for our country, but it is heartening to see some consequences—at last—for the mental liars among us, who have so convinced themselves of their own morality and rectitude that they’ve decided the rules that apply to everyone else somehow don’t apply to them.

Growing up, Christmas was kind of weird in my family. We did the tree and the presents, but we were about as religious as Richard Dawkins. My mother (who was Catholic) left the church when they wouldn’t sanction her marriage to my father, who is Jewish and an atheist. We didn’t really do Midnight Mass more than once or twice, and there were no “Jesus is the reason for the season” reminders in our house. It was basically a secular holiday for us, as it is for most people I suspect.

Like most couples that have been married a long time, my mom and dad had their Lockhorns moments, and boy oh boy was Christmas a flashpoint. The minute my mom hauled out the decorations, my dad would start getting sour, and this would set off a perpetual motion machine of negative stimulus and response. My dad would make some miserable remark—my favorite was when he referred to the holiday as “a meaningless orgy of gift-giving”—and my mother would react by buying more gifts and putting up more decorations. This in turn would goad my father into making another remark, after which my mom would go out to the store to buy more shit. My dad, seeing all the new new shit, would say something annoying, and my mom would head right back out for more stuff. This went on for YEARS, until eventually, my sister and I intervened.

I actually remember the specific phone call that flipped the switch. It was sometime in the 1990s; I was going to college in Western Massachusetts, a six hour trip from my parents’ place in South Jersey. I’d called home to go over my plans—my dad answered and immediately began complaining about my mom.

“She’s mad at me—again,” he moaned. I choose that word “moaned” deliberately—I could practically see his head in his hands.

“Well, what did you do this time,” I asked, as if I couldn’t guess.

“What have I ever done to make your mom mad, other than BEING ALIVE,” he replied. I sucked up the instinct to start moaning back at him in fake commiseration, and instead let him go on. “Its Christmas, and your mom is making a big deal as usual, and it’s driving me nuts, because she knows how I feel about this stupid holiday.”

So I began asking questions. You know, like Socrates.

“Say, isn’t it true that Kate and I are coming down, and you’ll get to see your whole family for the first time in months?”

“Well, yes, but what has that go to do wi—”

“And isn’t it also true that your family is going to bring you nice gifts that you’ll enjoy, despite your objections to all the conspicuous consumption?”

“Yes, I suppose so, but—”

“And isn’t it also true that you’re going to have a really nice meal with your family? And isn’t it also true that, unlike Kate and me, you’re getting paid vacation time?”

“Um, yes…”

“Well, then I have a good idea,” I said. “Instead of driving Mom crazy by antagonizing her, why not feel grateful that your kids love you enough to drive six hours to see you even though they’re taking a financial hit, and they’re bringing you nice things? Why not just shut the fuck up, and enjoy your turkey, your family, and your paid time off from work?”

“When you put it that way, I think I can manage,” Dad replied—and that was the last time I heard him complain about Christmas.

To quote disgraced criminal and serial rapist Bill Cosby, “I told you that so I could tell you this.”

In July 2015, my mom was diagnosed with metastasized stage 4 lung cancer—by September, she was gone, and our family was devastated. Death is never easy, but we were lucky to be at Mom’s bedside in the hospital as she passed. The day before, I managed to make her smile through the sedation, when I told her how Pope Francis—who she dearly loved, whose leadership brought her back to the Church, and whose visit to Philly she’d been excited for until the cancer put her in the hospital—had given Congress such a dressing-down that John Boehner cried his eyes out and then quit the very next day.

The next day, my mom was gone.

When December rolled around, my dad got the biggest tree he could find—but between being utterly wrecked by my mom’s death and his general disinterest in the holiday, it wound up being the saddest Christmas tree you’ve ever seen. It was only half decorated, and halfheartedly so, at that. I don’t even think there were lights on the thing, just this dead pine with a few ornaments dangling off it, shedding needles on the floor. It was probably the darkest Christmas I have experienced in my life, and that includes Christmas 2020, when everyone was locked down and “more than 65,000 confirmed and probable virus-related US deaths” were reported for the month of December.

But when Christmas 2016 rolled around, Dad was doing a lot better. He had a steady gal, who I’d introduced him to a few months before my mom was even diagnosed (that’s another long story for another time). Probably for the first time ever he was excited for the holiday.

Yet he struggled. He didn’t want to buy a tree, because he’s not a Christian. But he also didn’t want to just do NOTHING for the kids and grandkids—if anything he had MORE rug rats to think about, because his gal pal had a large family, and they were going to be dropping by.

Dad’s first thought was to celebrate Festivus, aluminum pole and all, but decided against it. “Festivus,” he reasoned, “kind of mocks other people’s beliefs, and that’s not who I am. Besides, I’m not a total Grinch.”

“I mean, to Hell with all the ‘holly jolly’ shit and the shopping,” he went on. “But I’ve always liked the holiday lights. Remember how we used to drive around the neighborhood looking for the brightest and tackiest displays? I love that stuff! They look nice—especially at the darkest time of the year.”

So Dad hemmed and hawed a bit, and after a few days he landed on a compromise. He went down to the local big box hardware store, and picked up a 10′-12′ length of PVC pipe. He painted that pipe green, and then repainted it to make sure it was a good, thick coat. Then he wrapped the pole in lights, set it in the tree stand, and plugged it in. The room lit up gaily in red, blue, green, yellow, and purple.

We have set up our holiday pole every year since. Here’s the most recent shot.

My dad’s still not good at doing Christmas. He still hates shopping, and he’s still cynical about the role of Christianity in a secular society. But he looks forward all year to putting up the holiday pole and watching the living room come to life. When I have a place of my own again, you better believe I’ll set up a holiday pole too.

By the way, the woman featured in the photo? She’s now more then Dad’s “steady gal”—she’s my stepmom.

Bob Dole has left the building. Marty, in my opinion, said pretty much everything that needed to be said about Dole back in July. 2021.

He took a gigantic smelly dump all over his entire life, career and legacy, including his sacrifices, his service, and all his accomplishments. When Dole dies, we’ll read about his long political career but we’ll also read that he backed Trump until the end, and that’s what really matters.

[…]

I no longer respect him. I hold him in utter contempt. Every other Republican clan came around eventually to the realization that the party has drifted too far out of reality. The Eisenhower kids saw enough with George W. Bush and endorsed Obama. Nancy Reagan and the Bush clan saw enough with Trump. The same is true of John McCain and his family, and Mitt Romney. Liz Cheney is bucking with her party as we speak, and will serve on the January 6 committee.

I’ll only add this: Dole launched his political career after being permanently injured while fighting Nazis, and in the end decided they’re not so bad after all.

I’ve seen Dale Watson at least three or four times, and he’s one of the best honky tonkers I’ve ever seen. On more than one occasion, I’ve watched him holler into the crowd for someone to give him a topic to sing about, and then make up a song—a GOOD song, too—right on the spot. He’s a banger of a songwriter, and a hell of a performer. He’s also a whiny-ass titty baby who refuses to own the consequences of his decision not to get vaccinated, blaming just about everyone but his own foolish self for his predicament.

Dale Watson announced via Facebook on Thursday (December 2) that he will not be performing on the upcoming Outlaw Cruise because of his unwillingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Watson had been scheduled to perform on the country cruiseship event, which docks from Miami and runs from February 25 to March 3. He is no longer listed on the website for the Outlaw Cruise, which features at least nine other Austin artists like Shinyribs, Bill Kirchin, Asleep at the Wheel, and Jesse Dayton.

The Austin Chronicle excerpts a long and self-pitying rant Watson posted on Instagram, and it’s well worth posting in its entirety, if only so those of you who don’t use Insta can have the opportunity to point and laugh.

So, I post this to let fans know why I may or may not be on a cruise , festival or show. I’m a man of beliefs and conviction and they are my own. I will not be on the Outlaw Cruise because of them. I also , I’m sure , will not be allowed in many venues because of them. I will stay strong in the mainstream ridicule. Even when “ friends” would eagerly say “ just do it”. It’s sad.

Actually, what’s sad is watching a successful musician kneecap himself, and what’s more put himself at a much higher risk of dying prematurely, because the omicron variant is no joke.

A past coronavirus infection appears to give little immunity to the new Omicron variant rippling across the globe, South African scientists warned on Thursday, potentially tearing away one layer of defense that humanity has won slowly and at immense cost.

[…]

“Population-level evidence suggests that the Omicron variant is associated with substantial ability to evade immunity from prior infection,” the authors of the unpublished study wrote.

In an online briefing held by the World Health Organization’s regional office for Africa, South African scientists presented a blunter version of the same conclusion, simply based on the country’s raw numbers: About 40 percent of the population has had the coronavirus and about 30 percent has been at least partially vaccinated (though there is no doubt some overlap), and yet the number of new cases is soaring.

“We believe that previous infection does not provide them protection from infection due to Omicron,” said Anne von Gottberg, a microbiologist at the communicable disease institute.

Now, I’m the kind of person that tends to trust my doctor, as well as experts in the field of epidemiology and virology. However, I am not a guitar player and singer, so what do I know? Take it away, Dale!

I’m a man that has complete natural (and better , according to most real studies) immunity, but that is never considered because there is no money to be made in Natural immunity. My beliefs. It does not have to be yours.

Actually, there’s a lot of money to be made on so-called “natural immunity,” as a quick visit to any quack medicine website (or Joe Rogan‘s show) demonstrates. Meanwhile, the cemeteries are filled with the “naturally immune,” because a virus doesn’t give a shit about your precious feelings and beliefs. Also, too, the vaccine is free, although perhaps Mr. Watson is engaged in a critique of capitalism more generally, and will stop charging a cover at his shows? Also, what are these “real studies” Watson refers to? He never says!

I will take a test before every gig to insure everyone’s peace of mind , but that is not enough for this administration.

While Watson sets up Joe Biden as some sort of boogeyman, the Austin Chronicle blows his story out of the water. “It is in fact the cruise company that requires vaccinations aboard its vessels,” the Chronicle reports. “This summer, Norwegian Cruise Line’s owner sued Florida’s surgeon general over the state’s law forbidding businesses to require vaccinations from employees and customers,” which makes sense, because who wants a ship filled with plague rats?

This will not be a place for back and forth FU’s on each other’s opinion on my post. Any name calling I will delete. May even block. I’m just informing my friends and fans of the predicament I’ve been put in and my choice of dealing with it. Your beliefs are yours. Gods speed to you. But mine are mine.

Now, Watson’s instrument is the guitar, but I could swear I’m hearing the world’s tiniest fiddle playing a sad, sad song. “I’m just informing my friends and fans of the predicament I’ve been put in.” That’s some pretty weak sauce. No one put Mr. Watson in this predicament except himself. He’s not mandated to take a vaccine, anymore than my local 7-11 mandates that I wear a shirt and shoes in their store, or than my local bar mandates that I drive my car after I’ve spent the afternoon chugging enough Lone Star to knock a horse on its ass. Rather than owning his bad decision and accepting the consequences that follow from it, Mr. Watson is instead flailing around to find someone to blame—because apparently, it’s everyone’s fault but his own. No, really!

I hope the world wakes up from this brainwash but I will not hold my breath.

I guess my friend Steve’s death in early 2020, from Covid-19 was a hoax. Any day now, John Prine‘s gonna announce a surprise concert. Those nearly 777,000+ Americans who are dead from Covid-19 are all playing along in the greatest gaslighting of all time!

I’ll keep picking and grinning. Until they figure how my livestreams spread covid I guess I’ll be doing that toward the end, after I’m outlawed to play in public. Does that sound extreme? I hope it does to all of you , but I’m afraid there are many that think it does not.

No, it sounds like a man drowning himself in self-pity because he doesn’t want to protect himself, his fans, and the employees of the venues he plays from an exceedingly contagious and deadly disease.

At the end of the day , I love you my fans.

If you did, you’d get the vaccine, for their sake.

I’ll be touring. I’ll be live-streaming. I hope you keep supporting my music. My music is made for you to escape this crazy upside down world. If only in the hour or so you hear me mess up on the guitar or crack trying to reach that Ray Price or Elvis note. I’ll be here. I hope you’re there. Truly written in love and gratitude to all who support my Music And for those who disagree with my stance , be an adult , and keep scrolling. I’m not against you, I want everyone to have the right to their opinion. Just be kind , move on. This is me, Movin On.

I actually WILL keep supporting Mr. Watson’s music, because he’s a great performer who puts on an amazing show. But I will do so while worrying about the 59-year old performer’s health—his age puts him at higher risk, as does a livelihood that puts you in front of hundreds of strangers on any given night.

But if Mr. Watson is upset about not being able to play certain shows and tours—and despite his bravado, he sure sounds like a 5 year old throwing a tantrum—he should look in the mirror and consider the choices he’s made.

This moron is going to jail. It is too bad the moron who inspired him will probably skate like he always does.

Jacob Chansley, whose brightly painted face, tattooed torso and horned cap became a visual icon of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was sentenced Wednesday to 41 months in prison by a federal judge in Washington. His lawyer had asked the judge to impose a sentence of time already served, basically the entire 10 months since the insurrection, during which Chansley attracted more attention for demanding an organic diet while in jail and giving an interview to “60 Minutes.”

[…]

Chansley, 34, was photographed parading shirtless through the halls of the Capitol with a six-foot spear, howling through a bullhorn and then sitting in the vice president’s chair in the Senate. He became known as the “QAnon Shaman” because of his appearances at gatherings of the “QAnon” conspiracy theorists and his Shamanic religious beliefs.

Glad he’s going to jail, but give me a fucking break with this “shamanic religious beliefs” bullshit, Washington Post. He’s no more a “shaman” than I’m the Pope. In fact, having paid the fee to be ordained by the Universal Life Church, an organization that seems to tacitly admit it only exists so lay people can officiate at their friends’ weddings, I have more religious bona fides than that Chansley schmuck.

Not that the word shaman means anything anymore, other than “well-to-do white people running around in the woods hallucinating on ayahuasca and banging on bongoes while appropriating someone else’s religious beliefs, until the next big white people trend comes along”—Chansley’s just an idiot wearing a fur hat. He has no religious training, didn’t even manage to complete community college, and got his ass booted from the Navy for refusing an anthrax vaccine. In the two years he served, he never made it past the second-lowest rank in the branch. So he’s as lazy as he is stupid. Oh, and he’s also an anti-semite, as the Post subtly reminds us.

Prosecutors quoted Chansley offering a prayer while sitting at the dais of the Senate, thanking God for “filling this chamber with patriots that love you. … Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”

“Globalists,” of course, is code for Jews, although Chansley’s probably too stupid to realize that. His lawyers, naturally, tried to say he was crazy.

“Mr. Chansley is in dire need of mental health treatment,” Watkins wrote in his sentencing memo. He said that a psychological evaluation earlier this year found that Chansley suffered from schizotypal personality disorder, anxiety and depression.

“Mr. Chansley is in dire need of mental health treatment cult deprogramming” is more like it, given his enthusiastic embrace of the ludicrous QAnon conspiracy.

There are only two only sad things about the example being made of Chansley. One is that that Washington Post never identifies him specifically as a domestic terrorist, which is exactly what he is.

The second is that the piece of shit who inspired him isn’t going to jail himself, and probably never will.

I predict he won’t do too well in prison.

After a brief victory lap in the wake of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia win, and a week of Democratic hand wringing and finger pointing, it looks like the Republicans are back to bickering, backstabbing and infighting, this time over 13 defections on Biden’s infrastructure bill. That’s because they’ve put themselves in the same “no-to-everything” position they put themselves in during the Obama years, defining themselves by the oft-mentioned “Cleek’s Law,” thus leaving the few remaining sane Republicans at loggerheads with the wackos who dominate the party.

Republicans are increasingly divided over the bipartisan infrastructure bill that will soon become law, with tensions rising among GOP members over whether the party should remain united against all aspects of President Biden’s agenda or strike deals in the rare instances when there is common ground.

You can almost imagine this playing out on a split screen. One one side, we see Mitch McConnell saying he was “delighted” by the bill; on the other, we see the monkeys in the House Republicans are flinging poo and masturbating in public.

The tensions are highest in the House where some members who voted for the bill have been the subject of heated criticism from colleagues — led by Trump loyalists Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) — and who have received menacing and threatening messages at their offices.

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) — a moderate who voted for the infrastructure package — said during an interview Monday evening on CNN that a caller left a message with his office that was filled with expletives and called him a traitor. “I hope you die,” the caller said, adding that he hoped everybody in his family died as well…

Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) defended his vote for the bill Tuesday, saying it will help improve the “atrocious state of our infrastructure” while noting his office has received a “substantial amount of troubling phone calls.”

Katko tries a tactic that sex columnist Dan Savage once described as “How’d THAT happen,” bemoaning the incivility of it all.

“Ronald Reagan cut deals all the time with Democrats for the good of the country. That is what we’re supposed to do. This isn’t a zero-sum game,” he said Tuesday in an interview with Spectrum News. “There’s always going to be people in the cheap seats who are going to be naysayers, but that’s the nature of the business. But the bottom line is, we got to move this country forward.”

Mr. Katko seems to be confused—the Republicans have approached politics as a “zero-sum game,” playing “heads I win/tails you lose,” for decades. Maybe someone should remind him that’s he’s a member of a party that claims the Democrats are running a Satanic pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, that they’re baby-killing communists, socialists, and liberal fascists perpetrating the coronavirus “hoax” in a plot to destroy America and apple pie, and ultimately kill God. Once you’ve worked that hard to characterize your opponent as an existential threat to your entire way of life—and possibly to God’s Creation—how can you possibly work across the aisle with them, why would you be surprised by the backlash from your more maniacal colleagues, who seem to truly believe all that horseshit? HOW’D THAT HAPPEN?

Anyway, you will not be surprised to learn that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has nothing to say about his members being attacked by his radicals—and really, what COULD he say anyway? He knows who runs the party, and sure as hell isn’t Kevin McCarthy.

Former president Donald Trump has led the call to trash the bill while deriding Republicans who voted for the measure, saying they should be “ashamed of themselves” for “helping the Democrats.”

[…]

Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said in interview on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room”podcast Tuesday that all 13 members should “absolutely” be stripped of their committee assignments by House leadership in the coming days.

“These people voted for Joe Biden, for an infrastructure bill that will clear the way for more socialist spending that will, quite frankly, gives Joe Biden a win,” Meadows said. “I don’t know how you can send a clearer message than saying, ‘Listen, obviously you’re not on our team. We’re going to give that leadership position to somebody else.’ ”

[…]

Trump has since amplified the suggestion to punish the 13 Republicans who defected, a rallying cry that started among the former president’s “America First” supporters in the House over the weekend.

It’s quite a public crack-up, with Republicans hitting social media to blast their colleagues and call for their punishment—there’s that unity I’ve come to really appreciate about the party. All this just a week after their “big romp.”

I have little more to add to this story, other than pointing and laughing. Is it too much to hope that the clowns driving this car crash and burn in 2022?

I saw this joke on Reddit, and it not only made me laugh, it focused my thinking.

The President invites the Pope to lunch on a boat. The Pope accepted and during lunch, a puff of wind blew the pontiff’s hat off, right into the water. It floated off about 50 feet, then the wind died down and it just floated in place.

The crew and the Secret Service were scrambling to launch a boat to go get it, when Biden waved them off, saying, “Never mind boys, I’ll get it.”

Then Joe climbed over the side of the yacht, walked on the water to the hat, picked it up, walked back on the water, climbed into the yacht, and handed the Pope his hat.

The crew was speechless. The security team and the Pope’s entourage were speechless. No one knew what to say, not even the Pope.

But that afternoon, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS reported:

“BIDEN CAN’T SWIM”

Like a lot of us, I suspect, I made a conscious choice not to watch the news and what passes for “analysis” after the November 2 off-year elections, and the loss in Virginia. I saw a few headlines—”DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY!” “BIDEN AGENDA SINKING!!!” “COLLAPSE OF BIDEN PRESIDENCY IMMINENT!!1!”—and muttered to myself, “not today, Satan.”

I don’t want to be some kind of Pollyanna, and I’m sure Martin or Nancy will drop by later with some sobering exploration of what happened/what’s happening, but as for me, I’m sick of the knee-jerk, boneheaded hot takes that have prematurely declared Biden’s presidency a failure ever since he announced his candidacy in 2016. As I remember it, Biden was NEVER going to beat Bernie Sanders, according to the loudest voices with the biggest platforms. And then I remember he was NEVER going to beat Trump, according to those same people. He was going to disappoint progressives by siding with centrists: oops (don’t get me started on the media blaming progressives for the impasse on Biden’s Build Back Better plan—it’s TWO assholes holding it up, and it ain’t progressives). And so on and so forth.

Look, I get it. Even our better legacy media outlets—and that’s using the word “better” VERY loosely—are center-right. They’ve been stuck in the “Democrats are weak” narrative since 1980. From what I read on the daily, very few of the people reporting and analyzing have any apprehension of how our government works, or even basic knowledge and understanding of history and political science, lending credence to the advice Tucker Carlson’s dad once gave him: “You should consider journalism, they’ll take anybody.” I wonder if Chris Cillizza, Chuck Todd, Kasie Hunt, and the rest of the babbling cadavers received the same suggestion from their exasperated parents.

Speaking of exasperation, I received several emails and texts yesterday which expressed exactly that frustration with what passes as reporting. “So the Dems held onto the NJ gov in an off year for the first time since 1977 and didn’t exactly get crushed in VA. So why is the media hysterical?” wrote my friend Paul, a blue collar guy who works at my hometown’s water department. “Such a bullshit double standard. It seems the exact opposite narrative is true. The GOP should be fucking shitting their depends.”

“Can I just say the Washington Post can fuck right off with its breathless, ever-panicked horse race analysis? Their landing page is a disgrace,” added my friend Tim, a former journalist at Thompson-Reuters. “I know Youngkin beat McCauliffe, and the Blue firing squad is going at it full charge, but Virginia is an awful, awful place and we still hung onto New Jersey.”

My friend went on, “It’s like Jerry Springer or the ghost of Morton Downey Jr. is running the WaPo news thrust, bottomless barrels of proverbial gasoline at the ready. Dan Sinker nailed it today with this tweet: ‘I like that Trump got four years to wreak absolute havoc every single day but Biden’s cooked after 11 months because a governor lost in Virginia.'”

So while I’m not blind to the perils Democrats face, I know I’m not the only one simultaneously bored and yet deeply annoyed by the poor quality of coverage in the small sample I read yesterday. Same old predictions of failure. Same old stereotypes. Same old obfuscation. Same old shallow horse-race reporting. Same old conventional wisdom. “This is great news for John McCain.” YAWN.

John Prine really nailed it when he sang about blowing up the TV and throwing away your paper—which is probably owned by Gannett anyway, and thus not serving its community as anything more than an envelope for the grocery store’s weekly circular.

Think my headline sounds hysterical? If only…

Hundreds of Staten Island residents holding anti-vaccine signs and waving American flags gathered on Sunday across the street from where New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) was scheduled to speak at a campaign event for local Democrats. The crowd was angry about New York City’s vaccine mandate for municipal workers, which takes full effect on Monday.

But one attendee had another worry — that the city, like the state of California, will force children to get the coronavirus vaccine. So he offered an unnerving warning.

“If they’re going to push this on the kids … I can guarantee you one thing: Town halls and schools will be f—ing burned to the ground,” the man said in a video posted by freelance journalist Oliya Scootercaster.

The crowd clapped, cheered, banged on drums and raised their American flags.

The anti-vaxxers love children so much, they’re threatening to light schools on fire! Brings a whole new dimension to “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” eh? But it gets even better more dangerously insane.

More than 300 people attended Sunday’s rally, according to SILive. Many held signs that disparaged President Biden, and some attendees wore yellow Stars of David, an antisemitic symbol co-opted by anti-vaccine advocates who equate getting the shot to tragedies inflicted on Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Always with the Holocaust cosplaying—although these unstable, violent idiots are indeed wiping themselves out at an alarmingly efficient rate. But I digress—let’s see and hear what the anti-vaccin e crowd is all about!

Scootercaster’s video from Sunday’s rally, which had over 126,000 views on Twitter as of early Monday, shows a man wearing a blue shirt, a black vest, sunglasses and a red, white and blue hat that said “I pee in pools” surrounded by the crowd of demonstrators.

That’s an ADULT wearing that hat, by the way—and in public. I’m sure he’s popular with the ladies. It’s almost enough to make you laugh derisively, but then Peepee-Boy says

“In 1776 … nobody went to court. Anyone grabbed a gun, and they f—ing shot at each other!” he yelled.

“Yeah!” people in the crowd shouted back.

“And again, I do not condone violence and hope we don’t get there. I hope we don’t get there,” he continued. “But just understand that there are plenty of people that are ready to go there.”

“I do not condone violence, but I’m ready to get violent,” says the man who proudly (and presumably deliberately) wets his own pants as he imagines reliving the Rwandan Genocide here in the United States.

I’m making fun of these morons, but let’s face it: they are sick in the head and likely in the body, as they’ve refused to get vaccinated against deadly and highly contagious illness that can kill people. But the fact is, it’s not funny. These are dangerous lunatics—domestic terrorists, if we’re being honest—who have announced their intent to resort to violence. They will eventually have to be dealt with, hopefully before one of them murders a bunch of children by burning down a school. Sadly, I think it’s only a matter of time—especially when so many police and firefighters are on their side.

Then when it happens, the police—and the media—will collectively cry “Who could have predicted?”

Marty’s feeling under the weather, Nancy’s still nursing a broken wrist, and I spent all day taking the first of two tests I need to pass to be certified as a high school teacher. There’s no heavy lifting going on here today, so instead how’s about some Halloween videos. Y’all already know the Monster Mash, so we’ll start there and then hit a few others you might not have heard.

That’s about enough for me and my poor weary brain. I’m sure y’all have more to add (as if you’re home on a Friday night). Thanks for bearing with us as we take a much needed self-care day.