Lately there have been stories in the papers that Michigan (and much of the country) may be in for a literal long, hot summer, to go with the figurative one promised by the presidential campaign. Oh, how fun it’s going to be.

So vote wisely, Ohioans and Floridians and Illinoisans and whoever else I’m forgetting. And consider this: The enemy of your enemy is…well, he’s something. You can figure it out.

Another taxing Monday, so have just this one piece of bloggage, a dive into Ohio Trump country via the WashPost, where people are so dedicated they open ad hoc campaign offices, on their own dime. That should tell you something right there. This goes along with the Thomas Frank piece from last week, about trade policy. Here you go:

On a Friday a year ago, he might have been fixing a gutter. On this Friday, a day before the rally, he was setting up a phone bank in the former tanning salon in North Canton, becoming part of something that felt larger every day, more like an important, even historic, struggle.

Republican elites were flying to a fancy resort in Georgia for a strategy session on how to defeat Trump. Millions were being spent on negative ads. Former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney had just made a nationally televised speech calling Trump a bully and a con man.

It seemed to Ralph that the whole political world was mobilizing against Trump, and by extension, people like him — an everyman with an 11th-grade education, aching knees and chronic ailments requiring four prescriptions and a monthly IV infusion to keep him going.

All of it only affirmed Ralph’s instinct: that Trump was an outsider telling the truth about America’s decline. “He’s honest,” said Ralph. “And the truth hurts.”

“Hey, Ralph,” said a volunteer named Mike, arriving at the office to pick up signs. “You see what the Republicans are trying to do to us? It’s just sad. They will never get another vote from me.”

Gotta run, sorry. Have a better Tuesday than I did Monday.

Sometimes we must screw our courage to the sticking place. We must take advantage of a rainy day that promises to stay all day. We must dive into the pile of bills on the desk (and pay them) and then we must dive into the pile in the dusty shoebox on top of the bookcase and do the taxes (and pay them).

I use TurboTax, and I love it, but I often wonder if I’m making a terrible mistake, or leaving a grievous amount on the table, as they say. Love that metaphor of “the table,” which reminds me not of polished mahogany in a law-firm conference room, but the 3-by-6-foot plastic ones, with collapsible legs, an image I retained from an article I read years ago about what it’s like to sell to Walmart. No business lunches, not that there are many places to go in Bentonville, Ark., but a whole lot of windowless rooms with those tables in them. You go in, lay your goods down, and Walmart tells you what it will pay you for them. Then you outsource your labor to a sufficiently cheap third-world market to restore your profit margin, and drink your pain away at Applebee’s before flying back to wherever you came from.

Anyway, the table. All I want is to get my taxes off of it, and I’m 80 percent of the way there, with only a smallish sum to still be paid; thank you, higher-ed tax credits.

And in my world, these days, that’s what shapes up to be a fairly good weekend. Of course, it beats the alternative of going to Nancy Reagan’s funeral. Here’s one of the guests, Mr. T.:

Wearing his best outfit, as you can see.

Now. I know I am wading into treacherous waters here, that there are people out there who can make cogent and compelling cases for dressing down, as it were, but I’ve about had it up to here with them. The slobification of America may not be at a critical stage, but if this is the best you can do for the funeral of a former First Lady, you should consider staying home and sending a card. Mr. T. doesn’t stand astride a pile of money the way he once did, but surely he has one suit in his closet, and if he doesn’t, he’s famous enough to borrow one. Hell, he could rent one.

Last year we went out to dinner on our anniversary, to a nice place here in Detroit. It wasn’t nice-nice, but nice enough that I wore a dress and Alan a tie, and we fit in. I looked up halfway through the appetizer course to see two couples being seated at a nearby four-top. They were young, in their 20s, and the women looked spectacular, heels and hair and makeup and clothes, the sort of turnout that suggested at least an hour of prep work, on top of a lot of regular maintenance.

The men? Looked like boys. Sports jerseys, saggy jeans and sneakers, plus that ubiquitous young-male accessory, the baseball cap. Which they kept on throughout the meal. They sat down with women on one side of the table and men on the other, and if the girls had started holding hands and left together, I couldn’t have blamed them. They looked more like a couple than they did with their male partners.

I see this dynamic everywhere, and I don’t know where it comes from. Most of the sharp, Don Draper-level male dressers I know anymore are gay.

I’m not against casual dressing; I do it all the time. I’m for appropriate dressing, and again – the funeral of an important public figure, carried on national television in a beautiful setting, requires at the very least a business-level turnout, dark suit and tie for men and dark suit or dress for women, although some more vivid colors are fine if they have some connection to the guest of honor; Mrs. Reagan was known for her fondness for red, so sure, wear red if you like. I’ve heard of funerals where the deceased actually asked, in his or her advance directives, that guests dress a certain way, in Hawaiian shirts or Lilly Pulitzer or the colors of his or her favorite sports team. OK, fine – I’m not a hard-liner on this.

But surely you can do better than camo and a flag do-rag. Even if you are “colorful.” It’s not about you, dude.

Rant over. Speaking of baseball caps, here’s one I saw Saturday night:

Ha ha. I’m about reaching Peak Trump myself, especially after Friday night’s events in Chicago. But here’s another one, with a certain THANKS OBAMA theme to it. It’s about Trump’s bottomless need for affirmation:

Donald J. Trump arrived at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in April 2011, reveling in the moment as he mingled with the political luminaries who gathered at the Washington Hilton. He made his way to his seat beside his host, Lally Weymouth, the journalist and socialite daughter of Katharine Graham, longtime publisher of The Washington Post.

A short while later, the humiliation started.

The annual dinner features a lighthearted speech from the president; that year, President Obama chose Mr. Trump, then flirting with his own presidential bid, as a punch line.

He lampooned Mr. Trump’s gaudy taste in décor. He ridiculed his fixation on false rumors that the president had been born in Kenya. He belittled his reality show, “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Mr. Trump at first offered a drawn smile, then a game wave of the hand. But as the president’s mocking of him continued and people at other tables craned their necks to gauge his reaction, Mr. Trump hunched forward with a frozen grimace.

After the dinner ended, Mr. Trump quickly left, appearing bruised. He was “incredibly gracious and engaged on the way in,” recalled Marcus Brauchli, then the executive editor of The Washington Post, but departed “with maximum efficiency.”

Kind of a meh story about a meh topic – how Ben Carson came to endorse Trump – contains this delicious detail that I can’t get out of my head:

On several occasions, Trump and his wife Melania hosted Carson and his wife Candy for dinner at (Mar-a-Lago).

Mercy. Imagine the sparkling conversation at that table.

A little less levity, then? Josh Marshall on the violence at Trump rallies, with a warning.

One thing the Flint disaster may lead to is the end of the “let’s run government like a business” stuff, because as we know all too well, it doesn’t always work out.

And that wraps it up for me. Tip your waitresses and enjoy your week.

Up dark and late working/studying, up bright and early to head out to Macomb County — I’m moderating their monthly “political hot topics” breakfast. Just flyin’ the flag for Bridge.

So this is really all I have. I was struck by the obvious symmetries in this photo at first glance — the colors, the pose, the height of the two men, all of it, down to the smallest details (each has a flag pin and a visible wedding band) — but with a second look my only question is, “So younger men are wearing three-piece suits again?”

A photo posted by The New York Times (@nytimes) on Mar 10, 2016 at 9:02am PST

Obama was his usual witty self at the state dinner.

Enjoy your weekend.

I try not to get too upset over politics in…what, March of a presidential election year. Lots and lots and lots can change in the next few months. So we’ll stipulate all that.

But that said, Wednesday was the first day I woke up and really-really realized that at this time next year, the first-light radio could be murmuring at me about President Trump. I once felt this was merely a high-wire joke. But the odds have dropped from 500-to-1 to 100-to-1, maybe lower.

Admittedly, the Thomas Frank piece I linked to in yesterday’s comments had something to do with it. He could clinch the nomination and do what all candidates do – move to the center – but do it in a way that soft-pedals the racism and increases the populism. Hillary has the world’s hardest job: To transform her eminently qualified self into something more…likable. Which, as any woman who has to be simultaneously tough and kind and smart but not-too-smart and honest but a Clinton can tell you is, well, it’s a tall order.

Maybe I’m panicking. Someone talk me down.

A second day at the office this week. We moved from the place closer to the center of town, which was informally called “the FEMA office” for its charmlessness, which admittedly, we did little to mitigate. But we were there little enough that we decided it wasn’t worth the money, so we relocated to a co-working space a few miles up the road – New Center, for you Detroiters.

I have a feeling co-working is the next great sitcom opportunity, but it isn’t widespread enough for the population at large to get it. Everybody goes to one space? But hardly anyone works together? But they do? And there are man-buns and anxieties over noise and courtesy? And there are popups in the common kitchen? And the usual office stuff about who makes the next pot of coffee?

Yes, there are all these things. We have only begun to explore the possibilities. Yesterday I moved between four or maybe six different seats. I felt like Goldilocks, looking for the one that had just the right combination of light, back support and noise level, but I’m figuring it out. And I’m enough of an extrovert that just being around people who are working — even if they’re working quietly, murmuring into the inline microphones on their phones and tap-tap-tapping on their Mac keyboards — invigorating.

And today’s popup was sublime:

I had the tacos and the carrot salad. Clashing flavor profiles for sure, but I needed the vegetables. And both were wonderful. Of course I spilled one on my shirt, but missed my silk scarf, so #winning.

Just a little bloggage:

My friend and former Knight-Wallace Fellow Yavuz Bandar sounded enough of an alarm to wake me from my Trump preoccupation with this. Did you know what’s happening to journalism in Turkey? I didn’t. I need to keep up better.

Roy, as usual, has a great take on the conservatives’ reaction to Tuesday’s elections.

And with that, I’ll bid you a pleasant Thursday.

I always think that if you survive Monday, you’re a third of the way through the week. Psychologically, anyway. This week I think I’m going to have to go all the way through Thursday before I feel like it’s Tuesday.

If that makes any sense.

Waiting for returns to come in here in the Mitten. It was a perfect day for voting — high 60s most of the day, when it wasn’t 70. The mild winter is back for its final days, which can be a glorious thing, but can also be disastrous. The fruit trees will start to bud after a few days of this, and if we get another cold snap? No apples, no cherries, no glorious fruit from Michigan this year.

So, fingers crossed.

I voted, of course. There was only the presidential question on the ballot, which made it fast work. And I got there on my bicycle, which made it something of a miracle.

And now I’m exhausted.

At this very, very early hour, Bernie is doing better than I’d ever have thought — he’s got 10 points on Hillary right now, but it’s only 16 percent reporting now. And Kasich is coming in second for the GOP. You know what they say: Second is the new win-if-it-weren’t-for-Trump.

Wouldn’t it be an upset if the Bern takes Michigan? I doubt it’ll happen, but I think I’ll post this right away, in case it does.

In the meantime, any bloggage? Maybe this, yet another data analysis proving Obamacare is a success.

But right now, I think I need to go to bed.

In Detroit, the business known simply as the Schvitz has rather a scandalous reputation, not because of its daytime life as a traditional (built c. 1930) Russian baths for the old men who still believe in that sort of thing, but for its weekend incarnation as a swingers’ club. Google a little and you’ll find multiple stories about it, but John Carlisle’s piece from 2009 is comprehensive, covering both sides of the place, which in shorthand is basically a bit of old Detroit that hasn’t yet been corrupted by new Detroit. (Although it’s surely coming. I hear schvitzing is popular among the paleo crowd.)

It’s a men’s club in its day job and a swinger’s club on the weekends, and as I have neither a penis nor the inclination to have public sex with strangers, I figured I’d never see the inside of the place. Until I recently learned that a woman I know on a sort of tertiary basis — she used to own a restaurant I enjoyed — was hosting a public, women-only brunch there, on the first Sunday of every month. Bring a dish to share, a bottle if you like, plus $25, and you too can sit on the same steam-room benches the Purple Gang once occupied. Of course I went.

I tried to get some friends to go, but one was busy and the other said she was too hungover.

“Are you kidding me?” I replied. “That’s what schvitzing was INVENTED for.” The Russians spend half their time swilling vodka, and the other half moaning and sweating it out in steam rooms. But it was a barfy kind of hangover, so she got a pass. I ended up making vague plans to touch base with a woman I met three days ago. Nothing like being naked in a steam room to get acquainted with a new friend.

I packed a bag with a robe, towel and my shower stuff from my swimming bag, and considered whether to bring a bathing suit. Finally decided nope. Saunas and steam were meant to be experienced in one’s birthday suit, and I am too old to be shy about my body. I bought a cold bottle of champagne and got on the freeway.

Maybe 30 women were already there when I arrived, and maybe 30 more came after, making for a nice take for the Schvitz on what would be a dead day. Everybody was already in a robe, pouring mimosas and gabbing around the food. I dropped off my contribution (the rest of the pumpkin muffins I made for breakfast), put the wine on the bar table and got undressed. The thought of filling up on eggs before a steam sounded nauseating, so I popped the cork and poured a glass of bubbly, then headed downstairs in my robe.

What a place. The word “dank” applies, but then you realize dank is sort of the point. The Schvitz dates from an era when daily bathing wasn’t a custom, and communal bathing was an important part of social life. No one was worried about waffle-knit spa robes or essential oils; the idea was to open the pores with steam, close them with a plunge into the cold pool, repeat as needed. It’s dimly lit, probably as clean as a place 85 years old can be, and it gets the damn job done.

I never did make it all the way into the cold pool, just a little splashing. The water was 54 degrees. Maybe next time.

The old Russian guys who run the place have seen every incarnation of the human form that it’s possible to see (especially on swingers’ night), but still, when the steam-room door opened and one walked through to the laundry room, eyes averted, the conversation stopped briefly. Even the women in bikinis seemed a bit taken aback, but it’s hard to imagine a less sexy place than this; I honestly don’t see how the swingers manage, but maybe the atmosphere is part of the taboo.

This happened a couple of times — the walkthrough, always with eyes turned to the wall without the benches. I relaxed into the heat even more, until I realized two glasses of champagne were going directly to my head

I went upstairs and found a crock pot with Italian wedding soup in it. I had a bowl, had a muffin and two big glasses of water, then headed back down to the steam. By now, almost every bench was full, maybe 40 women in there, almost all at least topless, a fair number nude, yakking up a storm, everybody having a great time. The door opened, and the Russian guy came in again. This time he saw the hostess on the bench and walked right over to ask her something, then turned away to throw some cold water on the stones for more steam. There was some squealing, and he threw in another bucket before turning to ask if that was enough. One guy, 80 tits, everybody pouring sweat, cheering for steam.

I’ve felt less safe in doctors offices. What a great way spend an afternoon. As I left, I told the other Russian guy, Dosvidanya. Most people think it simply means “goodbye,” but it literally translates to “until we meet again.” We will. This is going on my calendar for the rest of the year.

Now it’s Sunday afternoon and I have to Truth-Squad the Democratic debate tonight. This means I’m missing my Sunday-night cable shows, but that’s why God sent us streaming. And since I no longer have cable, that means I have to find it online, and that, too, is why God sent us streaming.

So, mellow as I am post-steam, I have little to add in the way of bloggage. Or maybe not; let’s see what I can scrounge up…

This is a few days old, and serves as an answer to last weekend’s “Trump is all Obama’s fault,” which went around for a couple of days, but ran out of air fast, mainly because it was preposterous. I’m always tickled by Matt Taibbi’s turns of phrase:

(Karl) Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood movies left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked at paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming to steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer bond is was villainous).

Gotta love a good reference to the Nakatomi building.

Nancy Reagan is dead. I wasn’t a fan, but not a hater, either. Like many people I once found irritating, she grew on me after she left the spotlight. I’d look at her in her later years and think, frail. She was a truly birdlike woman, so thin she looked like she’d blow away in a stiff breeze. Ah, well — we’re all going to the same place, so let’s let her mourners mourn.

Finally, a companion headline to the one I posted Friday. I just love it:

Have a great week, all.

So last night the likely nominee for the GOP’s presidential ticket reassured a worried nation:

We are doomed.

I think Jeb Lund (my new favorite columnist) has it exactly right here, reporting the debate from the debate-watching ballroom at the CPAC conference:

Fox even demanded that Trump explain how his own absurd tax-cut giveaway to the wealthy is going to correct the federal debt, as well as account for how his prescription drug plan will save taxpayers money while covering all Americans who qualify.

That’s just how far these people have gone on beyond zebra. After a quarter century of allowing any Republican candidate to generate any trillion-dollar figure by throwing 13 dice in the air and counting whatever numbers appeared — after allowing eight years of “repeal and replace Obamacare” without giving a tinker’s damn about what the “replace” part looked like (if it even existed at all) — a conservative outlet demanded that a conservative explain how supply-side economics works, do something that looked like math and provide a plan that makes sense.

You know the instruments of the right are losing when they have to move left to correct themselves.

My publication, Bridge, runs a fact-checking feature during election seasons, the Michigan Truth Squad, similar to Politifact or any of the many other similar services provided by staid, sober, responsible news outlets. We all pick up a little of the work, and while it’s not my favorite part of my job, sometimes it brings you up close and personal with some truly vile campaign materials, and at least some readers seem to appreciate it. But when I look at things like this sad little AP fact-check of last night’s debate in Detroit — no, I didn’t go — I can’t help but think we have missed the Getting It train by not minutes, not hours, but by days, years, eras, epochs. I can imagine being the poor AP sap tasked with that literally thankless duty. It’d be like writing the copy that goes around the naked pictures in Penthouse; seriously, who is going to read this?

I’d read a fact-check of the penis thing. Maybe someone could get an ex or two on the record.

The thing is, even if by some turn of events Trump doesn’t get the nomination, or if he does and Hillary shellacks him in November, the damage has already been done. An oaf, a buffoon, has stood on what is allegedly a “debate” stage, in a contest for president of the United States, and bragged about his dick. And like Lund points out, people are eating it up:

And yet Trump won them over, time and again. Rubio had made jokes about his penis over the last week, and Trump just said, “It’s never been a problem,” and the entire room nearly whooped like a daytime talk show audience. Cruz burned him, and he burned back, and they cheered. Rubio came after him, and they cheered.

…If Trump could win points there, just imagine what happened among the people who have no fealty to movement conservatism, who have nurtured a sustained rage at being betrayed or ignored by its bromides, who have been told that conservatism is good for them even as they have seen the middle class begin to crater around them like a suburban Florida neighborhood pockmarking with sinkholes during a long drought.

This is what we’ve sunk to.

We’re doomed. Have a nice weekend. I plan to drink.

More proofing to be done tonight, but hey — it’s Wednesday, i already got a lot done this week, and once Thursday starts the weekend is more or less under way. At least to my mind.

As you might imagine, I’ve been reading about Iceland between chores. Of course the Derringers will be visiting the Icelandic Phallological Museum, i.e., the penis museum. Which is? A collection of more than 200 penises from the animal kingdom, from whales to elves, and no, I’m not sure how the elf deal works. “I want to see the elf weiners!” Alan chirped. This marvel is only blocks from our apartment, so yeah — on the list.

I’m also looking forward to swimming there, as it’s apparently a big-deal national pastime, with wonderful public pools in every town, and each includes at least a couple of hot pots, for after-lap soaking. The oldest one in the country is steps from our apartment, and this amazing complex is a mile or two away. All the guides go into great detail explaining the scrupulous scrubbing one is expected to give oneself before dipping so much as a toe into the pools. It’s a very clean country, and I intend to abide by local customs.

Beyond that, I’m thinking lots of skyr, lamb, local beers, steam, walking and birdwatching at midnight.

Super Tuesday turned out pretty much as advertised. I’m trying to be aware that I’m living through history, and I should pay attention and take good notes, but I keep getting distracted by a) terror; and b) the need to laugh uproariously from time to time. That look on Christie’s face is one for the ages.

But now we have a little time before the next primary (it’s Michigan’s, although the mood here is not exactly outward-looking, as the Flint disaster is still the story everyone talks about), so let’s look at some different topics today.

Remember when Hamtramck, the little city within the big city (Detroit), elected the first majority-Muslim city council in the country? The local alt-weekly did a story about how they’re getting along, now that everyone’s settled into office now. The answer? There’s plenty of conflict, but not the kind you might expect:

One weekday afternoon I sit down at Aladdin Sweets, a popular Bangladeshi restaurant, with Kamal Rahman.

He’s with the Bangladeshi-American Public Affairs Committee, and he’s here to help set me straight on the history of immigrants from Bangladesh. A thin, well-educated 47-year-old with a slight accent, he tells me that people have come to Detroit from Bangladesh since the 1920s, although it’s been just a trickle compared to the flow of immigrants from, say, Lebanon or Iraq.

Rahman’s duties as cultural emissary have included documenting the way Islamic culture has blossomed in the Detroit area, and have even seen him take Sen. Hansen Clarke back to his grandparent’s village in Bangladesh. But the meat of his job is helping native-born Americans understand that immigrants aren’t invaders, in fact, they’re most often the victims of racism and bigotry. He tells of a Bangladeshi family who bought a house near Hamtramck High School and found it vandalized with the message, “You are not wanted here.” The family sold the house and never moved to Hamtramck.

“I think the fear is mostly of the unknown,” Rahman says. “People aren’t familiar with the new culture.”

These are the sorts of patently obvious things Rahman has to say over and over. Though he can do it articulately, you wonder why it’s necessary to explain that people fleeing sectarianism and terror would embrace America’s secular culture and ballot-oriented politics.

“Those who experience conflict, those who experience suffering, they tend to not to want to repeat it,” he says. “The Muslims that are coming here, most of them have suffered through war, through terrorism, through everything. They know what to avoid. It’s highly unlikely that someone would like to be in the same situation as they were before.”

These days, after seeing media people bring up Sharia Law again and again, he doesn’t even care to joke about it.

It’s a very good story. Recommended.

Because I don’t follow sports, I wasn’t very familiar with the Erin Andrews story. I find my old friend Jones’ story about it very compelling, though. God, what a horrible experience to go through; I hope she recovers everything she’s asking for. And when she testified that it never stops, she was right. It never stops.

On to the proofing.

If you haven’t read the link MichaelG posted in comments yesterday, from Talking Points Memo and about Trump, you should read it, if not for the analysis then for this excellent metaphor about projects and doing things the right way vs. the wrong way. (I’ve done it both ways, so I feel like I know this from experience.)

When I read the Times article (about the GOP’s failing effort to stop Trump), observe recent weeks as they’ve fluttered by and think about how things got to this point, I come back again and again to conversations I have with our chief tech, Matt Wozniak. Matt uses the metaphor of debt to describe the inevitable trade off we face building and maintaining the software that runs TPM.

If we do a project in a rough and ready way, which is often what we can manage under the time and budget constraints we face, we will build up a “debt” we’ll eventually have to pay back. Basically, if we do it fast, we’ll later have to go back and rework or even replace the code to make it robust enough for the long haul, interoperate with other code that runs our site or simply be truly functional as opposed just barely doing what we need it to. There’s no right or wrong answer; it’s simply a management challenge to know when to lean one way or the other. But if you build up too much of this debt the problem can start to grow not in a linear but an exponential fashion, until the system begins to cave in on itself with internal decay, breakdowns of interoperability and emergent failures which grow from both.

So here we are, on yet another pivotal Tuesday, and who knows? In 36 hours we may know with near certainty it’s a Trump-Clinton ticket, come fall. And then the fun really begins. As this is a politics day, and I’m getting a late start on this, a few linky hors d’oeuvres for y’all:

Nothing about this analysis, about why Ted Cruz will not drop out to save his party, surprises me. Especially this part:

It’s very possible that, if he becomes the Republican nominee, Trump would get shellacked in November, setting off a period of anguished introspection for the party. Conservatives would vow never again to nominate a non-conservative for the highest office. “This is Ted Cruz’s ace card,” says Steele. “Going back to 1996, conservatives in the party have always felt that we’ve lost these presidential contests because we’ve not been true to the cause by nominating someone who will fight for the cause.”

For a large segment of the party, the savior would be obvious. And Cruz, having never wavered, would find himself right where he wanted to be, once he realized, in March 2016, that he wouldn’t be the 2016 Republican nominee: at the front of the pack to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2020.

I hear this over and over from Republicans — don’t move to the center, move further right! And as bad as a Trump-Clinton race would be, I can’t imagine how awful a Cruz-Clinton race might play out. I may have to emigrate for 2020.

Says Slate, “To save itself, the Republican Party must finally put the working class ahead of the donor class.” Like that’s gonna happen.

Finally, here’s a Storify of David Frum tweets on the collapse of the GOP — you know, the Canadian-born RINO from the Bush administration? I think he nails it, though.

Off to work.

Last week, three young men, all African immigrants, all purportedly Muslim, were found shot to death in a house on the southeast side of Fort Wayne. There’s not a lot to know right now, except that the house they were in was known as a party/hangout pad, the owners having relocated to Indianapolis and left the house open to…someone.

I don’t know anything more about it than what I’m reading in the local paper, but to me, having lived in that city for 20 years and observed dozens of homicides there, both big and spectacular and small and sad, nothing about this one sounds like a hate crime. Young men hanging in an unsupervised house, with people coming and going at all hours? Yeah, that doesn’t really sound like the setting for a latter-day lynching to me. A triple-H with three people shot in the dome suggests an assailant or assailants with accomplices, which sounds like a gang. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Of course, I’m only speculating here. But I think I’m speculating fairly close to known reality. I wish I could say that for the various lefty aggregators, who are starting to pick at the story in ways that make my head hurt. ThinkProgress yelled at the governor for not saying anything about it yet. Vox scratched together some links (from TV stations — hasn’t anyone heard of newspapers? do any of these aggregators know the average age of a TV reporter in a past-100 media market? I’ll tell you: It’s about 10.) and all but pronounced it a hate crime, because Muslims were shot execution-style, so what other explanation could there be? It’s an excuse to run the few sketchy facts we know, pad it out with clips about other Islamophobic incidents, and surround it with rhetorical questions. This passage about made me hurl:

It is important to caution against assuming that whatever happened this week in Fort Wayne, whatever chain of events led to the mysterious “execution-style” murders of three young men, must necessarily be part of the rising wave of Islamophobic violence in America. Police are presumably cautioning against that conclusion for a reason, and it may well turn out that their deaths are entirely unrelated.

Still, it is difficult to ignore that three apparently Muslim young men have been murdered, for no immediately obvious reason, just as indiscriminate violence against Muslim Americans is growing out of control.

It is thus concerning that these murders have received so little attention, if only for the possibility, however remote, that they could be part of this trend of religious violence against American citizens.

Count the qualifiers and weasel words in just three paragraphs. They can’t even say for sure that the victims were Muslim. But hey — let’s scrounge a few clicks out of it.

This is what I was talking about a while back, about the importance of drilling down for original, local sources, and not relying on aggregators, particularly ideological aggregators, too much. The ThinkProgress piece quoted Vox, for Christ’s sake. So now you have aggregators of aggregation.

Think for yourselves, media consumers. In the lefty blogosphere, there’s an inside joke around the phrase, “Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.” That bit of self-congratulatory bullshit was written by none other than Peggy Noonan, wondering if the raid that returned Elian Gonzalez to his Cuban father in 2000 was ordered by President Clinton, because he was being blackmailed about his sex life by Fidel Castro. This is the same thing.

And I’ve got $20 on this homicide being drug-related, if anyone wants to take the other side.

Another beautiful weekend, which will be followed by another horrible week — two fresh inches of snow expected on Tuesday. Sigh. I just paid my mortgage for March. Sometime in March, spring will arrive. There was Easter candy in the grocery today. The blueberries I bought were Chilean, but they were blueberries just the same. It’s coming.

Jolene Sherri, one of our most diligent link-hounds, found this one over the weekend, and you should read it: Jon Favreau, the POTUS’ former speechwriter, on Hillary.

And I’ve been struggling to write a piece the last few days, about political tribalism. Maybe that’s why I was so impressed and moved by Sherri’s comment late Sunday, about trying to get to the bottom of the feelings in a local planning-commission dispute. Just try talking, people! It works! Read it, though. It’s good.

And let’s all get through the week ahead, whether it’s snowing where you are or not.