And just like that, the four-day downtown festival I worked is over. I slept in my own bed last night, not the RenCen Marriott, although there’s something to be said for awakening to a view of the Detroit River in dawn’s early light, the sign from Caesars Windsor reflected in the water, looking like spilled…blood, I guess. Appropriate for a gambling house, wagers being responsible for gallons, tankers of blood-spill through the ages.
In the Canadian fashion, that casino is non-smoking. Progress.
And for now, I plan to rest for two days, then turn my attention to another project. I hope that by Christmas, my workload will finally ease.
I’d forgotten what it’s like to be so busy you can’t pay attention to the news. Thursday night is about when I checked out, although being in a hotel room with cable, I was able to watch much of CNN’s interview when they replayed it through the weekend. It was amazingly dumb. The questions were all about prompting reactions to stupid shit various GOP blockheads have said. Why should Kamala Harris have to dignify Trump’s racist comments? Why should Tim Walz have to answer expressed ignorance about his own child? Fuck every last one of them.
As they say on the internet: WhY wOn’T ShE TaLK aBouT PoLiCy?
Fortunately, my room also had Netflix. So I could put on early “Sex and the City” and just let ’em roll as I dozed off.
Today, I have to clean-clean-clean the house before Alan’s sister arrives for a visit. So short shrift again, but I’m hoping things will settle down, soon.
The view from my window for four days:
Back in about 48 hours.
Suzanne said on September 3, 2024 at 11:33 am
Nick Offerman hits it out of the park.
https://x.com/nick_offerman/status/1828570906341617812?s=61&t=YOnjsG5n5GNlEz7X-ugsGA
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tajalli said on September 3, 2024 at 12:55 pm
Thank you, Suzanne. Offerman’s song is hilarious and so in character with his Ron Swanson role in Recreation and Parks. That mid-western stoic practicality.
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Julie Robinson said on September 3, 2024 at 8:00 pm
Five days of unread emails, zero TV, so a news blackout for me too. But here we are on the plane to London!
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brian stouder said on September 3, 2024 at 9:23 pm
Julie – sounds marvelous! Here’s wishing you and yours smooth sailing/flying/riding/etc!
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Sherri said on September 3, 2024 at 10:24 pm
A primary race for Commissioner of Public Lands triggered a hand recount here, because the candidates for the final spot in the general were separated by only 51 votes. King County isn’t completely finished, but right now, the difference is 53 votes. Pretty impressive.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/wa-lands-commissioner-recount-results-democrat-upthegrove-poised-to-advance-to-general/
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Jeff Borden said on September 4, 2024 at 10:33 am
There’s an excellent story in today’s NYT about what immigration has done for –and to– the struggling Ohio city of Springfield.
Springfield was a dying town. Major employers had shuttered the plants. The population dwindled as opportunities disappeared. The trajectory was pointed straight down. Then, city boosters created a plan to sell the town as a low-cost place to do business, with affordable housing and a ready workforce. The plan worked and several businesses moved there. But, there was a hitch. As these companies expanded, they ran out of workers. Enter the immigrants…in this case Haitians. Some 20,000 moved to the area and the city began an upward swing with even more new investments in business and housing. This, in turn, drove up the cost of housing as demand met supply.
But the locals weren’t happy and when an immigrant was found responsible for crashing into a school bus and killing an 11-year-old student, the match was lit. Enter Sen. JD Vance, who fanned the flames of resentment and pointed to Springfield as an example of the “foreign invasion” the right-wing says is occurring. Locals are up in arms and screaming bloody murder. The school system is struggling to hire French/Creole speakers to help with the influx of Haitian kids in the classroom. The health clinic is overwhelmed.
So, the dilemma. The newcomers are jump-starting the local economy. They are buying homes and spending their money at Walmart. The population of Springfield is on the upswing again. But. . .they are black. They don’t speak English as a first language. Their religious customs are different. They are “those people.”
tRump, Vance and the QOP want immigrants like this to go away. Liberals argue the immigrants will –like countless waves before them– assimilate and ultimately be an asset, even after a rough start, as did the Irish, Italians, Jews, Greeks, Germans, Hungarians, Mexicans, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc.
The irony is so bitter. Immigrants could transform so many forgotten communities –the ones we see every week on the news– if given the chance. Will we?
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alex said on September 4, 2024 at 12:48 pm
Ah, Springfield.
In the 1970s, one of Fort Wayne’s largest employers — International Harvester — packed up and moved its operations to Springfield, Ohio, and thousands of employees relocated there to keep their jobs.
Subsequently GM opened a plant Fort Wayne and brought with it large waves of workers from places like Kenosha and Flint where it had closed down other factories.
I hadn’t thought much about Springfield in years. IH went there basically to bust the union in Fort Wayne but it sounds like the place has a whole different set of labor problems.
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Deborah said on September 4, 2024 at 7:40 pm
Here we go again with thoughts and prayers. How does a 14 year old have access to a gun on a school day morning? How do parents not lock up their guns so their 14 year old doesn’t have access to them to shoot 2 teachers and 2 students and injure 9 others? Also did the parents ever get the kid therapy that he obviously needed?
I read online something I hadn’t heard before but is perfectly apt: Republicans made the decision to protect guns over children. So absolutely true. Shame.
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Sherri said on September 4, 2024 at 7:57 pm
But Georgia’s going to try the 14 year old as an adult. I’m sure that will deter the next 14 year old school shooter.
Republicans hate kids. They don’t love fetuses, either, they just hate women more.
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David C said on September 4, 2024 at 8:07 pm
I used to work with a guy who kept a loaded shotgun in his bedroom closet. He had teens at the time and he solved the problem of kids with access to a loaded gun by telling them not to touch it. Fucking brilliant, huh?
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Mark P said on September 4, 2024 at 9:26 pm
Guess who carried the county where the shooting took place by around 75%.
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Jeff Gill said on September 5, 2024 at 6:53 am
Apologies if I said this recently, but the biggest change (well, after the number of grandparents raising kids we see) between 2006 and today in my juvenile court work is that when I started, our multi-county detention center was filled with 16 & 17 year olds. Today, it’s usually half 14 & 15 year olds. And our school threat cases have been in that bracket this fall, all 9th graders.
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Suzanne said on September 5, 2024 at 8:23 am
According to this WaPo story, GA has some of the weakest gun laws in the country.
Kemp identifies as prolife, I’m sure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/04/georgia-shooting-apalachee-high-school/
“During his term as governor, Kemp has expanded gun rights, including signing a 2022 bill that allows residents to carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit. When Giffords delivered Georgia its failing grade, Kemp replied: “I’ll wear this ‘F’ as a badge of honor.””
Honor in hell Mr Kemp.
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Mark P said on September 5, 2024 at 9:06 am
When Kemp first ran for governor he had an ad where he sat with a gun across his lap and threatened to shoot a boy who wanted to date his daughter.
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Dave said on September 5, 2024 at 9:58 am
Wow. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/05/02/brian-kemp-pointing-gun-teen-daughters.hln
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MarkH said on September 5, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Then there’s this shit from Texas’ criminal AG which will surprise no one here.
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/08/29/texas-state-fair-gun-ban-court-challenge-paxton/
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Brandon said on September 5, 2024 at 4:08 pm
South Park to skip the election, will return in 2025.
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Dexter Friend said on September 5, 2024 at 4:58 pm
https://www.journalgazette.net/living/july-15-1983-international-harvester-truck-plant-closes/article_a0aeb4cc-58a6-57a3-8177-14c2f6232fe5.html
I was spared all the agony the IH workers suffered as I rejected my call-up to work there after a man named Ambrose Thrush counselled me one night at work at Dana-Auburn. He simply said Dana was a better , more stable place to work.
It was July , 1983 when production stopped. I knew a few men who were trapped, and had to quit or move to Springfield. I became close friends with one man from Waterloo who told me in detail how it went there, how Fort Wayne men’s cars were vandalized at work, how they were treated like shit by some management people, how they rented old trailers and drove home on weekends when O.T. wasn’t available, and how a bunch of NE Indiana men bought an old intercity bus and drove to Springfield every day…imagine!
Archie McCardell launched the end of production in Fort Wayne…the hatred that man attracted had no limit.
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brian stouder said on September 5, 2024 at 6:09 pm
Dex – thanks for the link; excellent article. I grew up near McMillan Park, and many of the neighbors worked at ‘the Harvester’, or at Fruehauf Trailers, or at Rea Wire. Thinking back, you’d see fellows each morning walking with their lunch boxes to the house of whoever’s turn it was to drive, and walking back after their shift was over. And – I remember the daily wail of the horn (shift end?) from Fruehauf (I think). Must be gettin’ old!
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Sherri said on September 5, 2024 at 10:16 pm
When I went to junior high and high school, way back in the dark ages, there were no shortage of troubled boys. There were lots of kids, the schools were overcrowded, there were racial tensions. There were fights, a lot of alcohol, and there were drugs, but guns just weren’t an issue. There were rural kids who owned guns, but those were for hunting. Maybe some of the kids from the “projects” had guns, but gun violence was not an issue at school. Not during the day, not at football games, or anywhere else. Kids at my school died, but it was from car wrecks.
I don’t think kids today are different than kids in my day. I think that had guns been so widely and easily available back then, then gun violence would have been a problem.
Nobody owned a weapon like an AR-15 back then. Nobody needs a weapon like an AR-15 today. The idea that the 2nd amendment protects the ownership of such a weapon is ludicrous. The Federalist Society and their handpicked Court has decided that we should all live in a third world war zone.
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Sherri said on September 5, 2024 at 10:37 pm
Evidently the shooter’s father bought the kid the AR-15 as a holiday present.
Again, when I was growing up, the wildly inappropriate thing young teenage boys were given was a motorbike, and and at least then, they could generally only harm themselves.
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Deborah said on September 6, 2024 at 4:07 am
Who buys their 14 year old kid an AR-15? First of all aren’t they expensive? I mean I get buying your kid a laptop or something like that. Plus the aunt said the kid had been troubled for a long time, the parents had previous “contact” with child services. I hope the dad gets arrested too, He lived with his dad.
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Deborah said on September 6, 2024 at 5:08 am
I see now that the dad has been arrested. Good.
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Jeff Gill said on September 6, 2024 at 6:31 am
A baseline AR system will run you about $800. I’m sure you can pick up a stripped down used one for $500 or so.
Yet another execrable thing Vance just said: the real problem is that “our schools are soft targets.” The change from 2004 to 2024 in what it takes to enter a school building is night and day, in terms of the broad sweep of U.S. schools. We have ten school districts in my county, from very rural to moderately urban, and every last building has a door camera and buzzer, single point of entry, front desk badges for visitors, etc. Most of them have SROs who wear body armor and carry sidearms at all times. Soft targets which need to be hardened? You don’t even know what you’re talking about. To further harden school buildings today means a security apparatus akin to airport security for all students, and the change in atmosphere and culture that would come with that. Like TSA, we may find ourselves doing all that, but I have contempt for someone who can casually say on the stump that the real problem is how our schools are soft targets.
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Suzanne said on September 6, 2024 at 7:22 am
Have we all noticed (how could we not!) that conservatives, the GOP as the party of personal responsibility never takes responsibility? A school shooting is the fault of the school because they don’t have enough gun toting guards. A rape is the fault of the woman for dressing provocatively. Child care issues are the fault of families not having grandma watch the kids. A lost election is the fault of the vote counters cheating.
It’s never their fault. Ever.
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alex said on September 6, 2024 at 8:25 am
The father of the Georgia shooter has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and cruelty to children.
The only thing more amazing than the recklessness of parents who would give children unsupervised access to guns is that our legal system has only just begun holding such parents accountable. Really this should be standard everywhere and it will be the best deterrent ever imposed.
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Jeff Borden said on September 6, 2024 at 9:24 am
When I was in high school, two guys interested in the same girl had a fist fight in the parking. One guy lost the fight…and a tooth. Today, I guess they’d pull out Glocks and start shooting.
When an empty husk like JD Vance says gunfire in our schools is “a fact of life,” he’s incorrect. It’s a fact of AMERICAN life. No other developed nation regularly sees its children slaughtered in their schools. Only us.
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Dexter Friend said on September 6, 2024 at 10:12 am
These comments reflected me to Bruce Springsteen’s classic “My Hometown”.
“In ’65 tension was running high
At my high school
There was a lot of fights
Between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night
In the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come
To my hometown…”
In 1965 I, being the exact age as Bruce (5 days apart) was a junior in a small town school. No kid gunplay, but the seniors were marched to a yard in town to search for bullet casings from a murder-shooting. Like Jeff, I witnessed a few fights, and I was threatened and once beaten when I challenged a big tough kid over something he had said about me, but man, we had a hair-pulling scratching girl-fight for the ages. It was over the basketball star, 2 years older, and he had been seriously playing with both of them and it came to a head one afternoon. Scratching, biting, punching, shrieking…and for what? The jock dumped them both for a cheerleader from a neighboring town. That kid got more ass than a toilet seat.
New word/phrase: sanewashing…new to me that is…Trump’s goons take his rambling nonsense like his Economics Club speech yesterday and re-format it to sort of make sense. I just heard about this. And sonofabitch, he NEEDED this for yesterday’s comments how his new tariffs will pay for nationwide childcare: “…childcare is childcare” the dumb ass said when he had no goddam idea what childcare problems are meaning to people with children. Tariffs just significantly increase our retail costs, all around, for us consumers.
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Mark P said on September 6, 2024 at 10:13 am
I’ll say the same old thing I always say: whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. You can’t argue with a madman.
It appears that Georgia law requires the kid to be charged as an adult, although a former prosecutor said it’s possible he could be sent back to juvenile court. He doesn’t expect that. It also sounds like it might be hard to make the current charges against the father stick.
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Sherri said on September 6, 2024 at 1:12 pm
The WaPo has an article that says some found Harris a difficult boss, which can probably be written about anyone. What stood out to me were the anonymous quotes about how it was “stressful” to brief Harris because she had read and annotated the material and had questions about it, even down to footnotes.
Where I come from, that was a good boss. A bad boss did that and cursed you out and called you an idiot.
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David C said on September 6, 2024 at 1:28 pm
I guess a good boss is one you have to dumb everything down to cartoons for and doesn’t read it anyway. He throws in into a banker’s box along with his soiled drawers, and sells it to whatever dictator kisses his ass the hardest.
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Jeff Borden said on September 6, 2024 at 3:41 pm
tRump is so clearly mentally ill, but mainstream media keep cleaning up after him. Read the transcripts of his “speech” to the Economic Club of New York. Gibberish. Or of today’s press conference, where he didn’t take a single question. More gibberish. His cheese has slid off his cracker.
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Sherri said on September 6, 2024 at 5:05 pm
This kind of thing makes me crazy: Judge Marchan is postponing sentencing in Trump’s case so as not to impact the election, thereby impacting the election.
As we remind ourselves in our house, not to decide is to decide.
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ROGirl said on September 6, 2024 at 6:09 pm
This is not a headline from the Onion: Dick Cheney is voting for Kamala Harris.
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Deborah said on September 6, 2024 at 10:03 pm
When is W going to come out for Kamala? The dominoes need to fall. And fast.
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Dorothy said on September 7, 2024 at 2:16 pm
If Judge Marchan had sentenced him before the election, and when (not IF) the Orange Turd loses the election, he can’t claim that the sentence is why he lost the election. He’s going to lose fair and square and then he’s going to be sentenced to jail time. And then all of the other trials are going to happen. I can’t see it happening any other way.
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Julie Robinson said on September 7, 2024 at 7:45 pm
Trying to follow the news has been a struggle, but I’ve read enough to be horrified. I wept reading about the dysfunction in the shooter’s family and yet Dad thought giving him a gun was a good idea.
Anyway, we’ve been on the go constantly and I’ve only had wifi at night when we collapse in bed. My quick report is that the sights have been marvelous, the plays were marvelous, even the shopping marvelous. The London air is less than marvelous. The pollution and number of people smoking or vaping have me reaching for my inhaler numerous times a day, even though I’m wearing masks. I think I’ve used it twice this entire year and only tossed it in the suitcase on a whim. I feel very badly for people who have to breathe this dirty air everyday.
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brian stouder said on September 7, 2024 at 8:23 pm
Julie – Marvelous update!; and, here’s to continued pleasant travels for you and yours
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LAMary said on September 8, 2024 at 11:41 am
Julie, roadie son Pete just got back from two weeks in London. He was very impressed with the National Museum of Natural History. He visited twice and wished he had more time to go again. Sadly, he had to actually work while in London, cutting into his museum exploration time.
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Brandon said on September 9, 2024 at 12:44 am
When is W going to come out for Kamala?
He’s not.
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