If you’ll allow me one more post about our Fort Wayne visit? Let me tell you what our walk-off gift was, courtesy of the Allen County Public Library’s world-class (and I do mean world-class) genealogy department:
The Homecoming organizers told us this was in the works, and said that if we wanted our personal family tree, to provide birth, death and cities for our parents and grandparents. I am one of those people mostly left cold by this stuff; at some point it started to strike me the way past-lives ninnies did, the ones who are always the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Henry VIII, never a guttersnipe in Victorian London or one of Cleopatra’s litter-carriers. But what the hell, why not, I thought, and coughed up the names and dates. And this is what I received in return:
Lordy. All that? Yes:
From the summation inside the front cover, this goes back five generations, to the great-greats. The last of the bunch was born in the 1830s, several in Germany or Switzerland. Some Civil War vets in there. One of my great-great grandfathers had charge of Abraham Lincoln’s bier as he lay in state in Indianapolis for 24 hours on his funerary trip back to Illinois. Another was, get this, a newspaperman.
I’m still working my way through this. Much of it is U.S. Census records, death certificates and the like, but for the first time, I’m starting to see the appeal of doing this research. I don’t carry but a few teaspoons of these old gents’ blood, but it’s fun to see what they did with the hands they were dealt, and how they were carried off. A few of cancer, stroke, some vague “illness” and the big cataclysm on my mother’s side, her father’s exit: “suicide by firearm.” I have a small medal that was his, awarded for bowling prowess:
He was a bank teller. I’m thinking I’ll have it made into a necklace.
If you want to dig up your roots, you won’t find a better place. The story was always that the only equal of Allen County’s collection was the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, and the Library of Congress. I believe it.
So. Here’s a Sopranos joke, adapted for the times: An American walks into the Oval Office with a duck under his arm, and says, “This is the pig we elected.” The president says, “That’s not a pig, that’s a duck.” The American says, “I wasn’t talking to you.”
Doubt me? Don’t:
Over the summer, we learned (weirdly, via a social-media post by Jeanine Pirro) that Trump was planning to hang a row of paintings in the walkway adjacent to the Rose Garden, which connects the Executive Residence and the West Wing. …The portraits still haven’t been hung, but on September 21, White House photographers captured a new addition to the colonnade: a mock-up of a sign that reads “The Presidential Walk of Fame” in a large golden font.
Yep, that’s the pig we elected. Of the events of recent days, I have nothing to say that could be captured here. We elected a pig, and that’s that.
Happy Wednesday, eh.
basset said on September 24, 2025 at 12:40 am
Wonder what it’d cost to get one of those done if you were paying for it?
i’ve taken a few dabbles at genealogy and sometimes mentioned em here – I guess I was just trying to feel connected to something. Didn’t always work, either.
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Deborah said on September 24, 2025 at 3:05 am
Read Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter today, about Trump’s UN speech yesterday, OMG talk about a pig. Sorry I don’t have a link. The guy is stark raving mad.
Went whale watching yesterday and saw 4 whales total, 3 humpbacks and 1 fin whale. It was absolutely spectacular.
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David C said on September 24, 2025 at 5:30 am
My patrilineal line was done and is in a book by Jane Fletcher Fiske, who I understand is a big deal in the genealogy world. We were lucky enough to have her marry into the family. So I’m listed in her book “Thomas Cooke of Rhode Island”. It goes back to something like my 16 greats grandfather in Netherbury, Dorset, England. It’s pretty dry reading except for the fact that Thomas Cooke had a brother-in-law named Preserved Fish.
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Alan Stamm said on September 24, 2025 at 7:26 am
I grin again at the vigor and vitality of your wordplay, a style classical musicians call energico.
“I don’t carry but a few teaspoons of these old gents’ blood . . .”
We’ve all got access to the same words, but how you string ’em rises above. Way to bring it, Nance.
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Suzanne said on September 24, 2025 at 8:03 am
A number of years ago, my husband & I visited New York. A friend who lives there arranged a private tour of the UN by her neighbor, who was a UN translator. It was marvelous! I even got to stand at the podium where Dear Leader Don fawned all over himself yesterday. During the tour, this translator regaled us with an insider’s view of life at the UN including the Qaddafi UN speech disaster which rivaled our dear leader’s speech; unhinged, fact free, peppered with narcissism and vitriol.
I guess we can all agree that American exceptionalism is now swimming with the fishes.
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Jeff Gill said on September 24, 2025 at 8:28 am
Don’s aside about how he bid on the reno job and didn’t get it, mocking the terrazzo and wall coverings: classic Trump. I continue to be fascinated by his drowsy monotone when he’s reading a script or prompter, and the gear shift into a buzzier energy which is obvious when he’s “weaving.” Let alone the erratic pauses and phrasing that make it pretty clear he doesn’t give his speech text more than a quick skim before he gets up to deliver one, even in front of the United Nations.
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Mark P said on September 24, 2025 at 10:15 am
I did two of the DNA companies. I found ancestors back a few greats, and I keep getting emails about how they found a new DNA relative, but I kind of gave up on it. The most interesting thing I found was a small percentage of DNA consistent with a sub-Saharan African ancestor about six generations back. A tiny bit of Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, too. I might have mentioned that before. There is family lore on my mother’s side about a not-too-distant ancestor owning a huge farm in South Georgia. I think we all know what that means. I have an ancestor who was a slave owner, and another who was a slave. I’m the poster boy for white-ass redneck, with red hair (ok, mostly white now), freckles, and skin that burns but never tans, but it’s interesting to know that somewhere I have black relatives.
Did you see the press conference where Trump was trying to pronounce acetaminophen? What an embarrassment he would be if there were any embarrassment left in the embarrassment warehouse.
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Jeff Borden said on September 24, 2025 at 10:35 am
I wonder if theso-called ‘American Era” wasn’t killed yesterday. He’s betting on 19th century principles as the rest of the world races into the future. How will the U.S. ever catch up? Or, maybe, tRump prefers to be a second-rate power?
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Dexter Friend said on September 24, 2025 at 10:54 am
Preserved Fish is my gangster name. (take on that elderly comedian, Andy, who shows up on my feed daily).
Mom, Berne Switzerland…Dad, London, England…Great great uncle killed by cannonball at Chickamauga, 1700 era Friends, fought General George Washington during The Whiskey Rebellion, and the first Friend here was a Merchant Marine sailor who crashed in a storm at Tom’s River, New Jersey. Also, a great uncle died in the 1918 flu epidemic during army training in New Jersey, his body shipped home in a boxcar full of bodies. And great great grandfather Michael Friend told this story, recanted to me by my grandpa, “If any sonofabitch ever calls me a German again, I’ll knock his head off.”
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Deborah said on September 24, 2025 at 12:11 pm
The Mayflower which everyone and their pet cat likes to claim having an ancestor come over on, actually landed in Province Town not Plymouth Rock. You can see Plymouth when you come over on the ferry from Boston. So much history around here.
My ancestors on my dad’s side go back to 1590 in Virginia from England, my mom’s side only goes back to her grandparents who came over from Germany with my grandfather and his sister when he was 2 years old.
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Scout said on September 24, 2025 at 12:18 pm
In a totally unrelated aside, I had the pleasure of enjoying the company of Dorothy and Mike yesterday as they passed through Phoenix on the final day of their Arizona adventure. Mere words cannot express what wonderful people they are. Naturally, we spoke of the marvel of finding like minded friends on a platform like this and how grateful we are to Nancy for providing the meeting space. If you’re on Facebook and friends with either Dorothy or me, you can see a couple of pictures of our visit.
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alex said on September 24, 2025 at 12:40 pm
I did my Ancestry DNA and my family tree just keeps on building itself and now goes all the way back to my fifth great grandparents on both sides.. So far I’ve found no discrepancies in the history that was known to me already; the women weren’t knocked up by anyone other than their husbands. What’s nifty about Ancestry is that other people are doing all the work and contributing photos and news clippings and so on. Still, the monthly fee is kind of steep.
I find Ancestry useful not so much for doing my own family research, however, but for historical research in general. It also gives me free access to newspapers.com, and what a fun rabbit hole that is. I love reading Fort Wayne newspapers from the 19th century and the florid language used to describe the arrests of prostitutes and drunks and thieves, which are spun out as a series of little tales. I suspect that editing for space hadn’t become a thing yet.
I can’t believe it’s almost 1:00 PM and I’ve been glued to my computer screen since 6-something.
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nancy said on September 24, 2025 at 12:53 pm
I’ve read too many horror stories about DNA databases to entrust my own to it. There’s a very wealthy family here in Michigan, and the rumor goes that a 23andMe search turned up a half-sister in a distant state, unbeknownst to anyone in the family, the product of a college fling. Nothing like having to lay an extra place at a zillionaire’s table. Of course, for her it was probably as good as a lottery ticket.
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ROGirl said on September 24, 2025 at 1:13 pm
A first cousin did 23 and me, and someone contacted him who had been adopted at birth. His father was related, he had contacted his birth mother but I believe she was dead and didn’t tell him the identity of his birth father. My cousin and I went through all the possible candidates in the family and came up with the most likely one. The guy never contacted my cousin again. I did the Ancestry test, and there were no surprises in my results.
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Dave said on September 24, 2025 at 2:46 pm
That’s beautiful, Nancy, I would love having something like that. We’ve both done some family research and learned that we both had Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers in our lineage but also learned that my father, no matter how many times he claimed it, we most like have no connection to the Mayflower. My great-great grandfather, a Union Army member, came home in 1863 with a foot injury and we’ve no idea what happened to his foot.
My grandmother was very close-mouthed about her family and it wasn’t until she was long gone that we learned of her real origins, in part, thanks to Ancestry. Her mother had two children out of wedlock, as it was referred to, my grandmother and her older sister, before marrying a different man and having several more children. We know her father’s name now and believe he never had any other children, although records show him being married to someone else for many years. We’ve no one to ask.
We’ve done DNA and other than getting a large list of distant cousins and the like, there were no real surprises. I did discover I was distantly related to someone who worked where I did, on my mother’s side, but neither of us were ever able to pin down the ancestor we have in common.
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Dexter Friend said on September 24, 2025 at 4:10 pm
I have been web-friends for 25 years with a Native-American woman, adopted by a US Airman and his English bride 58 years ago. 20 years ago, from Florida, she tracked down her birth family, in a wealthy tribe. After positive identity, she was welcomed into her family, and must have gotten a swollen wad of greenbacks, because she quit her K-Mart job in Florida, became a full-time student, amassing several degrees, and with her husband has been a world traveler and cruise-ship addict all these 20 years. Her grandkids are army brats, and the grandparents have been to Hawaii and to Germany a few times, visiting. They bought a nice cottage with a pond and huge acreage in New York, drive new cars every 2 years, and she posts photos daily from nice restaurants. I guess she picked the right tribe. They must have showered her with benjamins.
Alex…In the defunct Waterloo (Indiana) Press, I found an account of a man arrested for murdering his neighbor’s horse. Murdering was the word, as I recall, from around 1911.
I just returned from the Fort Wayne cobbler shop, Chuck’s Foot Support. To repair and replace a shoe sole, a mere $83.
Well…the shoes cost twice that so I paid, peeling off the 20s like a goddam gangster in 1920. The shoes? Drew is the brand and they are the best damn shoes I ever have had.
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Julie Robinson said on September 24, 2025 at 5:28 pm
Chuck’s was our repair place when we lived in the Fort; he does good work. The price seems high, but we just took some shoes in here and it cost a lot here, too. But they were quality and worth the investment, and otherwise would have been tossed.
I did genetic testing to help a cousin find her parentage, only I didn’t know she was my cousin and thought she could well be a half-sister. She discovered us through one of those ancestry services after knowing very little, only the location of the adoption agency. Her bio mom, my aunt, died of cancer just a couple of years later, and she’s still searching for her bio dad.
Because of that search we learned that my great great grandma was African-Canadian and found our hidden family. I’m all for finding more family, and if there some wolves among the sheep, doesn’t that just prove our humanity.
We took a trip to the Orlando Wetlands this morning with a special tour by a woman we know who volunteers there. After the Orlando wastewater has its initial treatment, it goes there to be filtered through a series of ponds over about a month. The upside of this is a huge park and wildlife preserve, where we saw hundreds of different species and so much beauty. Nature has such incredible healing power and I love that it’s being used here. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.
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FDChief said on September 24, 2025 at 5:32 pm
The “walk of fame” thing…WTF? I mean, it’s pretty obviously a Felony Fats “look at all my golf trophies” piece of I-love-me nonsense, but…why?
As for the rest of the week, it’s hard to pick which was worse; the bizarre UN rant or the bizarre Tylenol presser. Either one would have been enough to bring out the full-throated press and Congressional flying monkeys (let alone the usual wingnut suspects) if anyone but Tubby had been the whacko-in-chief. Instead, it’s just Tuesday.
We are so utterly fucked.
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Jeff Gill said on September 24, 2025 at 7:01 pm
I’m perversely proud of the first Gill to set foot in North America being one John Gill who arrived with the British Army from Leeds by way of Canada, deserted at the Battle of Saratoga, then joins a Pennsylvania line regiment in time for winter at Valley Forge, and with his veteran settlement, settles near Warriors Mark, marries a Scotswoman, moves to near Pittsburgh where he had family, is caught up in the Whiskey Rebellion, listed for arrest but never apprehended, then heads up in the hills west of Altoona to live out his life with his son James as blacksmiths on Gill Hollow Road.
But I can’t trace back in ye auld sod. An inquiry did get the classic reply about John’s British records: “destroyed by enemy action” due to World War II bombing & fires. But too many John Gills in that West Yorkshire neighborhood to pin down readily. Even knowing his birth year as 1754 (give or take a digit) doesn’t pare us down to less than six or seven of ’em.
As to the White House, the amount of spackle the West Wing is going to need when the worm turns…
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Colleen said on September 24, 2025 at 11:19 pm
I did an ancestry DNA test and it came back exactly what I thought…50% Irish, 50% Hungarian. The Hungarian side of the family arrived in the early 1900s. The Irish side has been here longer, but I don’t know exactly when they arrived.
If Ancestry wasn’t so pricey I’d join…I could spend hours poking around looking at documents. It’s the history major in me, I guess. I like to know people’s stories.
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alex said on September 24, 2025 at 11:25 pm
I was expecting my dad’s Hungarian ancestry to be difficult to trace, but it’s surprisingly well documented, and it turns out that I have quite a number of distant cousins in the U.S. who have mapped it all out already. From a DNA standpoint, what I found most interesting is that I have Western Chinese DNA from my dad in addition to DNA from people of the Balkans and the expected Central and Eastern Europe. For a while it had been disputed whether modern Hungarians had any connection to the Huns, who originated in Mongolia, but genetic science has proven it.
Today I had a DNA blood draw for medical purposes and I’m eager to learn what this will reveal.
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David C said on September 25, 2025 at 5:32 am
My paternal grandmother’s Irish ancestry has proven just about impossible to trace back any further than my great-great grandparents. We know they immigrated to the US from Ireland, but nobody has been able to find anything of them in Ireland.
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basset said on September 25, 2025 at 7:36 am
So how did the Allen County library come to be such an enormous repository of genealogical information?
Meanwhile, my attempt to make pottery similar to what my ancestors made in the late 19th-early 20th centuries is now over, without success. Even went down to South Carolina and brought back clay from their area, never got competent at the wheel… have quit the crafts co-op where I was turning and firing, picking up my last two pieces from the kiln today. Made some little stuff but never could throw a full-sized jug.
Gotta find some other family tradition to follow, alcohol abuse and egregious random violence seem to be the most obvious.
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Jeff Gill said on September 25, 2025 at 8:25 am
Ceramics & cirrhosis! A proud heritage for the Scots-Irish.
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ROGirl said on September 25, 2025 at 9:06 am
There’s a Jewish genealogy database where I was able to find some information about my paternal grandparents, including when and where they got married (Kielce, Poland in 1896). I started trying to search for my maternal grandparents, but I need to do some more digging. They were from the Vitebsk region in Belarus. No drunks, but both grandfathers beat their children (and probably their wives), and my mother’s father was a bootlegger in Worcester Mass.
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Suzanne said on September 25, 2025 at 9:52 am
I had some medical genetic testing done related to cancer but nothing odd was found, which means my cancer is not inheritable which is good news for our kids. I have toyed with the idea of doing a genealogy DNA test but never have. I am pretty sure it would show nothing but German DNA in me.
There was a prominent family in the small rural town near our former home that through DNA testing discovered a sibling that none of them knew about. Apparently Mom & Dad had birthed a baby when they were teens and unmarried, gave it up for adoption, later married and had a bunch of kids (8 or 10). None of the kids knew any of this and by the time they found this out, the parents were dead. It was a bit of a small town scandal.
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Jenine said on September 25, 2025 at 9:56 am
@Julie: so nice to hear about your wetland visit. Every scrap of wetland restoration brings so much life, in every ecosystem. If I had pots of money that’s where I’d put it.
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Julie Robinson said on September 25, 2025 at 11:01 am
Jenine, I only recently learned about how the mangrove trees in the Keys also work to filter waste. An artist friend who lives on Pine Island painted a 30 foot watercolor inscribed with a poem about interconnectedness. Beautiful.
basset, if it makes you feel any better, I also failed at pottery. I took a summer school class in high school (along with typing, the real reason for enrollment). So everyday for eight weeks, I played in the clay and produced one ugly vase made of coils. On the wheel, nothing even made it to firing stage. The wheel, she is hard.
In the 50’s/60’s and Allen County librarian was looking to build the collection, so on vacation he drove around in his station wagon buying used books. Of course he visited libraries along the way and learned that most had only a single copy in disrepair of their genealogy books and materials. What he lacked in book buying budget, he made up for in technology of the day: a high-quality xerox machine. He convinced the libraries to send their materials back with him, where he would make two bound copies, one for them and one for ACPL. Voila! A collection!
At least that’s the lore from ACPL orientation tours.
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Scout said on September 25, 2025 at 12:49 pm
A different, but probably not unusual, DNA testing story: My mother’s first cousin got pregnant and was sent to an unwed mothers home back in the 60s. Last spring another of my mom’s cousins contacted her to ask her if Jane (not her real name) had ever had another baby because he was contacted (god knows why him) by the daughter of the child Jane gave birth to. Nobody still alive in the family except my mom knew about this. My mom had to be the one to call Jane and let her know about the granddaughter and Jane completely fell apart as that was a chapter in her life she slammed shut. At this point she is devastated to have it all come up again and has refused contact.
I am fascinated by DNA technology, but with the way data is being abused in this country, I’m glad I never did any of the testing. I do have a relative (yet another of my mom’s cousins) who has researched our whole family and we know quite a bit from all of her work tracing back to 19th century. One interesting tidbit is that we thought that since my grandfather’s family emigrated from Germany, he was 100% German, only to find out that while they indeed emigrated from Germany, they had first emigrated to Germany from Italy. I thought it was cool to find out I have some Italiano in me!
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alex said on September 25, 2025 at 1:03 pm
One of my friends just learned she has a niece she didn’t know about. She was grade school age in the early 1970s when her older sister was in high school. The sister went away for a while to stay with relatives in California, or so she was told at the time. Anyway, the niece reached out to my friend, who then had to break the news to family. My friend’s older sister is severely disabled after suffering a couple of strokes and she lives with their mother who is in her 90s, and my friend looks after both. Anyway, that’s quite a shit show she’s navigating right now.
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nancy said on September 25, 2025 at 2:21 pm
Basset, Julie’s story is the one that’s usually told about how they got the collection, as well as many items in the rare book room. I always thought it was a testimony to the power of one great leader. It helped that he was so devoted to the job that he spent summers driving around with a U-Haul on the back of his car, scouring used book stores and other venues. That’s how he picked up a complete set of Edward Sheriff Curtis’ “The North American Indian” folios, probably worth more than a million today. Astoundingly, it was out on the public stacks until someone nicked a volume and tried to sell it several states away. The dealer knew of the theft, kept the book and it was returned. Never heard what happened to the thief.
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Dorothy said on September 25, 2025 at 2:24 pm
Ditto what Scout said @11 upscreen. It was so great to meet another friend that I made because of this site! I’ve met Jeff Gill and basset. I wish I could meet more of you – nothing makes the world seem less huge and scary than meeting people who you already know have their heads screwed on right, and share the same values that you do. Mike and I had a very nice visit and if it could have gone longer we would not have minded.
I emailed two pictures to Nancy so she is free to share them with all of you in a future post. In other good news, we FINALLY got the correct codes delivered to Medicare to schedule his PET scan, and they had an opening tomorrow at 9 AM! So off we’ll go – and he meets with his new oncologist a week from today. It finally feels like we’re moving in the right direction instead of stagnating and not moving forward.
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Scout said on September 25, 2025 at 2:44 pm
That is great news, Dorothy! Sending all the healing love to Mike. What a sweetheart he is!
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Julie Robinson said on September 25, 2025 at 4:22 pm
Dorothy, that’s great. I’ve learned you really have to be on top of every single detail about every single appointment. To be brutally honest, my mom and husband would be lost without me organizing all of this, their insurance, and their meds. And let me also say, nothing like a trip to the podiatrist to make you feel able-bodied. Mom just gets her toenails trimmed, but what I saw going in and out that reception room fills me with gratitude that my issues aren’t so bad.
There were a lot of other library stories about that particular head librarian, but I think enough time has passed we can give them a rest. All except this one: his cat didn’t live with him, but in one of the library sub-basements. Library and bookstore cats are not uncommon, but this poor thing never saw the light of day.
One more thought on genealogy: my husband’s family has traced their lineage back to some minor English nobility in the 1100’s, thanks to a niece who worked for the Mormoms while in school in Salt Lake City. My riposte to that is always that I come from a long line of peasant farmers.
What I take from tracing your ancestors is the stories of perseverance, of bettering themselves, of generations on both sides who believed in educating their daughters. I don’t give a hoot about joining the DAR as a couple of my SILs have done. Honor your ancestors by learning the lessons of their lives, rather than placing your self or them on a pedestal.
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Jeff Gill said on September 25, 2025 at 4:34 pm
But Julie, as Judge Smails says, “Some people simply do not belong.”
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Jessica W said on September 25, 2025 at 5:37 pm
I haven’t submitted my spit to Ancestry as yet, but I’ve had a lot of fun doing research using their resources. Unless an unlikely surprise is coming, I’m ¾ standard Ashkenazi Ukraine and Austria. The other ¼ is Sephardic from Yanina (now Greece but Turkey when my grandmother and her family emigrated). Various interesting facts from Ancestry, including a whole slew of different spellings for my grandfather’s name before he finally settled on Isaac Kahan. His marriage license lists him as Isidore Cahn. My other grandfather went back and forth between “Weissman” and “Weisman”, finally settling on Weissman.
The Old Fulton History site indexes lots of older newspapers – where I found such fun things as my uncles as preteen checkers hustlers at summer camp and all four of my good-time-girl great aunt’s marriages. Plus what will forever be a mystery: a one-paragraph report of my grandmother as a passenger in a car accident at 4:30am in Flushing…with a person I have no knowledge of.
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Sherri said on September 25, 2025 at 8:35 pm
I’ve been thinking about the pundits like Ezra Klein whose reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder was to focus on his going to colleges to debate people who disagreed with him. First off, let’s be clear, Kirk was not engaging in debate; he controlled the microphone and was the moderator, such as there was one, so he wasn’t interested in debating ideas, he wanted to collect viral video clips.
But it also strikes me that those pundits calling for more debate have never really spent any time in situations where you really have to bring a bunch of people with different ideas together and make a decision. In other words, where there are stakes, as opposed to a panel discussion at some conference.
I served on nonprofit boards, school district committees, city commissions, and other organizations where a group of people with different ideas and wants and needs had to make a decision. It ain’t easy.
The first thing to resolve is how the decision will be made. Is it consensus? Majority vote? Are people willing to disagree and commit? In my experience, most people are so allergic to conflict, they always so they want consensus. Then, when conflict inevitably arises, there’s a problem.
Like I said, most people are really allergic to conflict, and another way that shows up is that decisions are never really final. They keep being revisited because people just go along in the moment, but they’re unhappy, so it comes up again even though you thought it was resolved.
It’s not impossible to get productive conflict going in a group, but it requires a lot of groundwork ahead of time. You’ve got to build a safe environment for the conflict, and build strong relationships among the group, so that there’s enough trust for the conflict to happen. The group will resist this and regard it as a waste of time, eager to get to the substance of why they’re there, but it saves time in the long run.
If political pundits spent just a little time going to city council meetings or school board meetings, maybe they’d learn something about the challenges of resolving competing values.
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alex said on September 25, 2025 at 10:20 pm
Charlie Kirk wasn’t debating other people; he was just baiting other people. He also wasn’t the boy wonder prodigy the right wants us to believe he was. He was platformed by billionaires and was coached by the likes of Ginny Thomas to spew misinformation authoritatively and play head games on college students who didn’t know what they were walking into. If I have any sympathy for him, it’s that he was being exploited by assholes who were tasking him with the formidable assignment of building a new Nazi Youth Corps, although they certainly made it worth his while financially. Ezra Klein lost all of my respect when he claimed that Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way. I would abandon the left it resorted to the tactics that made Charlie Kirk who he was.
There isn’t much room for debate at present because the right has normalized the game of making bullshit arguments in bad faith and views compromise and consensus as surrender. I don’t know how we’ll ever work our way out of this mess unless we call bullshit what it is and refuse to engage with its practitioners.
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Jeff Borden said on September 26, 2025 at 11:33 am
In an opinion column in today’s NYT, Frank Bruni assesses tRump’s past week by noting, ” The U.S. has gone from Manifest Destiny to Manifest Vanity.” FDChief is correct. We’re fucked.
Meanwhile, the Border Patrol brought several boats here to cruise the Chicago River with as many as seven fascists with long guns aboard. What a charade. And what, exactly, are taxpayers shelling out for these publicity stunts?
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Mark P said on September 26, 2025 at 11:41 am
Drunk Hegseth has summoned all senior officers, generals and admirals, to Washington. Is it a purge? Will they be forced to sign loyalty oaths? Preparation for war? I don’t know, but there can be no good reason.
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Dexter Friend said on September 26, 2025 at 2:22 pm
There was a kid at Waterloo, Indiana, HS , from the class of 1968 at the brand new DeKalb HS, Dave Gill. He was a sandy-haired , stocky , tall kid…probably 6’2″ and 245.
Anybody like that in your lineage, Jeff Gill?
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Sherri said on September 26, 2025 at 9:01 pm
I never knew kitchen cabinets were essential to national security, but that’s the justification for the tariff Trump just announced on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities.
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Deborah said on September 26, 2025 at 11:00 pm
We’re in Boston tonight and boy do we ever know the Red Sox won.
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Jeff Gill said on September 27, 2025 at 8:24 am
Dexter, not that I could trace. There’s a Dave Gill auto dealership in Columbus who people ask me about often, but I do not get free Chevys from him. He’s related to a bunch of Gills who trace to the area south of Kirkersville, north of Baltimore (just north of Lancaster), and there’s a cemetery full of Gill markers on Blacklick Road around Fletcher Chapel Methodist. Your Dave Gill may well be related to them . . . mine skipped over Ohio going from central PA around 1910 to Iowa, all but one cousin whose kids are still up in those hills, the part of the state Carville called “Alabama in between” referring to Philly & the ‘Burgh politically, but the middle something else altogether. Which I like to think is part of why my paternal ancestors left.
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