I wrote a short note about Jerry Springer on my Facebook page. It ran like this:

So Jerry Springer has moved to the undiscovered country. Huh. The obituaries will focus on “Jerry Springer,” host of the televised pro-wrestling show that made him famous, but before that, he was a lawyer, mayor of Cincinnati, and one-time primary candidate to be governor of Ohio. And before even that, he was a Cincinnati city councilman who resigned in disgrace after being exposed as a man who paid prostitutes with personal checks. Which is to say, Jerry was a man whose TV and political careers were chronologically the opposite of Donald Trump’s, and also that he had a functional sense of shame, unlike you-know-who. I interviewed him when he was running for governor, and even then he seemed to see himself more as a court jester than a policy maker, but what the hell, it takes all kinds. RIP.

As I was making lunch I remembered something else about his gubernatorial run, in 1982. Springer washed out of the Democratic primary field pretty early. On the other side, the eventual GOP nominee was Bud Brown, a former congressman, attorney general and all-around Republican public servant. He lost in the general election to Dick Celeste (who had his own issues related to his sex life, i.e., a zipper problem second only to Bill Clinton’s, but we never talked about that outside of the bar, back then), who went on to serve two terms. But! Bud Brown was the father of Clancy Brown, an actor perhaps best-known as the heaviest (in the menacing sense, not his weight) of the prison guards in “The Shawshank Redemption.” He’s also a well-known voice actor, and if you have a kid my age you know him as the voice of Mr. Krabs on “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the owner of the Krusty Krab restaurant, where SpongeBob works.

So that’s two weird connections to showbiz out of one election. In Ohio. Funny little world we live in.

If you want to know more about Springer’s 1974 downfall, here’s a good history from the Cincinnati Enquirer. It serves to remind me of my low-grade contempt for Ohio’s Queen City, which for years was run by stick-up-the-butt German Catholics, all of whom were happy to outsource their vice to Kentucky, and maybe cross the bridge themselves to misbehave (or buy bourbon by the case). Not that Springer was that sort of German, but you know what I’m talking about.

I remember the first time I saw the Springer TV show. I’d awakened in the middle of the night, and turned on the TV to anesthetize myself back to sleep. It didn’t work, because they were showing an episode of a talk show where people were twerking and throwing chairs, hosted by the former MAYOR OF CINCINNATI?!?

Like I said: A funny little world.

OK, then, it’s nearly Friday, so I’m-a hit Publish and start thinking Weekend, why not. Everyone have a good one, and maybe pour one out for Jerry, a man way ahead of his time.

The more we learn about Tucker Carlson, the more astonishing it is that he lasted five months at Fox, let alone however long it was. Once those texts were subpoenaed, it was all over. He called a top executive a cunt in one of them.

Also, this unpaywalled column by Jack Shafer at Politico gets it right, I think. Even superstars at Fox are just like those Fisher-Price people who can be plugged into, and pulled out of, holes in a child’s toy:

Roger Ailes, the original architect of Fox, who founded the network in 1996 with Murdoch, explained its show-making philosophy to Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard in 2017. The subject was the early evening news-talk program, The Five, which in recent months has outperformed even Carlson’s show. Ailes explained how he filled the slot vacated by solo artist Beck with an ensemble of pundits — building a sort of Archies talk show for the Fox audience. The Five would be performed by five commentators at 5 p.m. Get it?

“Go around the table,” Ailes told Ferguson. “Over on this end, we’ve got the bombshell in a skirt, drop-dead gorgeous. … But smart! She’s got to be smart, or it doesn’t work.” Next, he said, “We have a gruff longshoreman type, salty but not too salty for TV. In the middle there’s the handsome matinee idol. Next to him we have the Salvation Army girl, cute and innocent —but you get the idea she might be a lotta fun after a few pops. On the end, we need a wiseguy, the cut-up.”

When Ailes finally cast the show with his types, Ferguson writes, he summoned them to his office and had them stand in a semi-circle around his desk to explain why he was calling the show The Five. “‘I’m calling it The Five because you are types, not people. You all are about to become very famous, and you’re going to make a lotta money. A lotta money. But don’t ever forget. Right behind you I’ve got somebody exactly like you ready to take your place. So don’t fuck up.”

Tucker Carlson got too big for his britches, and by the time he started talking like an evangelist, even Rupert Murdoch knew he was living on borrowed time. By the time the texts dropped and the Dominion business reached a crescendo, he had a target on his back. This is an old story. Bette Davis made a movie about it.

Ultimately, though, I want to not think of Tucker Carlson after this week. It’s almost fly-fishing season in Maine; let him go get his lines wet and wonder if people will remember who he is when his non-compete expires.

Kate came over last night for her fortnightly laundry date and told some hilarious work stories I wish I could relate here, but they’d probably get her fired. She makes part of her living doing live sound engineering at a number of venues, and had a memorable gig recently. That’s all I can say, other than that I’m still chuckling.

I’m writing this in between gigs, so to speak, myself. Have an interview scheduled in about 20 minutes.

Would you like to se some real bullshit? How about this, Floridians?

A pair of bills making their way through the Florida Legislature could fuel a deluge of property sales and demolitions of historic properties in coastal cities, including Miami Beach and Palm Beach.

If the bills become law, Florida Senate Bill 1356 and House Bill 1317 would strip local municipalities of their authority to determine if certain structures can be demolished, and what could be built in their place.

…The proposed legislation would be a boon for developers.

It would allow owners and developers to demolish “non-conforming” properties within a half mile of the coast and within specific flood zones — regardless of whether the buildings are in a historic district. Non-conforming buildings are any that do not meet new construction requirements under the National Flood Insurance Program.

Sure, those Art Deco hotels in Miami Beach are pretty, but they’re so …short. We need to clear them out and make room for some more glass high-rises. As for Key West, I shudder to think.

Fucking Florida. It’s not going to be worth a fiddler’s damn once DeSantis and crew are done with it.

OK, nearly time for my phone chat. It’s Wednesday, and after it’s over, we’ll be on the downslope of the week.

I didn’t blog yesterday because I spent most of Sunday — the whole weekend, really — trying to find the errors in my 2021 tax return that had the IRS asking us for an extra $14,000 including penalties and interest. The good news is, we found the errors. The bad news? We’ll still have to write them a big check, but for way less than $14,000. For the first time in a decade, TurboTax failed me. Or maybe I failed TurboTax. I don’t know. All I know is, our taxes have become too much for me to handle, and next year we’re hiring a pro.

Then Monday arrived, and in my last round of abs work at the gym this morning, I ripped a loud and completely unexpected fart in the vicinity of perhaps the only other person there who wasn’t wearing earbuds. I said “excuse me” to the air and then added, “OK, Monday, I see you.” It was almost literally the cherry on a shit sundae of a few days.

But then I came home and showered, dried off and learned woo-hoo! Tucker Carlson was fired! I mean, it won’t free us from the menace — people that evil always land on their feet, often with a raise — but the humiliation has to be worth something. I mean, for a little while, it freed me from thinking about taxes and that fart.

I don’t really have a take, at least not yet. He’s not done yet; he likes the power too much. And make no mistake — he wasn’t fired for being a terrible person, he was fired for saying mean things about Fox management in private text messages. (You all know that you shouldn’t do that by now, right? Confine your shit-talking to the open air, preferably after a scan for parabolic mics.) So it’s not like the world is a better place with his voice temporarily silenced. It’s just reorganizing itself. But when he resurfaces, it’s likely to be on a much smaller platform than the mighty Fox News, much as Megyn Kelly went from spaghetti-strapped blonde hottie to terrible daytime talk-show hostess to…whatever she is now. The media landscape is a crowded, cutthroat place; someone is always willing to step into your shoes, once they’ve been taken off your feet.

Honestly, though, I have to say that the decision to cut the cord is one I’ve never, ever regretted. It amazes me when people bitch about “the media” and think it consists entirely of cable news. I haven’t missed it for one day since we went all-streaming a few years back. Outlets like the NYT have gotten very good at breaking news, and when it happens, I open my laptop. Who wastes time on Don Lemon and Sean Hannity when they can watch something good on Hulu or Netflix or HBO or Amazon Video? Not I.

OK, then. Time to put this day to bed and consider whether I need to resign my membership to the gym. Probably not, but hey — it was a loud one.

I’ve read several pieces in recent years about how LinkedIn has gone all soft, with people posting about their emotions ‘n’ stuff, but honestly, I haven’t seen it. LinkedIn was the first social network I joined and the first one I quit, because as far as I could tell, it was utterly useless.

Then I got fired and started looking for work, and the first thing I learned was, if you’re looking for a job in any field other than journalism, it’s essential to have a LinkedIn profile. I’d had dozens of contacts, even some nice endorsements, on my first one. Which I’d nuked. Ah well. I started a new one, and have studiously ignored it ever since.

But I finally read something there that made it seem worth having one: This account by a cybersecurity expert on going to Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” in 2021. Lindell offered a $5 million prize to anyone who could prove his “evidence” of election fraud in 2020 incorrect, and this guy, Bob Zeidman, a Trump voter, thinks he did.

Lindell, of course, refused to pay him. He took it to private arbitration and won. Maybe you read about it.

Anyway, Zeidman writes serviceably well for a civilian, although I doubt he was going for chuckles in some passages, like this one:

I was a little surprised when Lindell called up a minister for an opening prayer that referred to Jesus multiple times. As a Jew, I was a bit uncomfortable, but more comfortable when the entire crowd rose to proudly and loudly recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the National Anthem.

But there were laffs galore coming:

We asked to see the “proof of fraud” that had been promised to us, and were pointed to 5 files on the network. We had been told that these files showed data flowing from China and other places over the Internet to the voting machines on the day of the election. We each downloaded them, one of which was over 22 Gbytes, but found that they contained no recognizable data in any known data format. We were stumped.

At some point, I performed a simple transformation of the files and found something surprising. I quietly packed up my things, said goodbye to my fellow experts, went back to my hotel room, and called my wife. “I have some good news,” I whispered to her on the phone. “All I want to say is that you should start thinking about how you want to spend five million dollars.” The transformations I had performed showed that these files were actually simple Microsoft Word documents containing numbers and gibberish. There was no way for this to be network data or any data related to the election.

You can figure out the rest: The entire “symposium” was a shitshow, much to the disappointment of Zeidman, $5 million notwithstanding. But this graf kinda pierced me:

But the most disappointing result is that this symposium will sow even more doubt among the undecided and give more ammunition to those who hate Trump and despise Republicans and who have no desire to reform or safeguard the voting system in America.

He’s right about ammo for the Trump-haters, but maybe because his brain is so full of code and computer knowledge, he can’t see the forest for the trees: We don’t need to “reform or safeguard” voting in America because it already works pretty well. The fact it’s so atomized, covering the nation with thousands and thousands of precincts, each with their own way of doing things, does wonders for protecting it from widespread fraud. Yes, you’ll always have some isolated cases, onesies and twosies here and there, but large-scale fraud, enough to swing a significant election, is just too hard to pull off (Chicago in 1960 notwithstanding).

That’s not to say an election can’t be influenced by bad actors. Russia most surely did interfere in 2016, but as a wise man said, they didn’t hack the election, they hacked the electorate, with the help of scoundrels like Paul Manafort, et al.

So while it’s amusing to imagine Mike Lindell having to pay this nerd $5 million — and I devoutly hope he does — it’s important not to draw the wrong conclusions from his silly symposium.

In more comic news, this week the Michigan state senate voted on repealing a law that makes it a crime for adult couples to live together without being married. You can have a roommate, but no shack-up, as we used to call these relationships. Speaking against its repeal was a U.P. Republican who previously distinguished himself by chairing the committee that looked into the 2020 election and concluded no fraud occurred. He was called the usual names by his fellow party members, but held his ground, and maybe he felt he had to get a little of his own back:

Two GOP lawmakers who voted against the proposed repeal argued that keeping the law on the books would encourage marriage and strengthen families. Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, said the reasons for the longstanding policy “are clearly not obsolete.”

A law that virtually no one even knew existed had to be kept in place, to encourage good morals.

Another weird thing that virtually no one knows: Ed McBroom and his brother ran a dairy farm together, until the brother was killed in a traffic accident in 2018. The McBroom brothers were married to a pair of sisters, and all four of them were/are the parents of 13 children. After his brother’s death, they took the widow and her flock under their wing. And they all live — I doubt under one roof — on the farm together. What would the law make of that? Hmm. Lotsa farm hands, anyway.

OK, then. The weekend is threatening to kick off one of these days, and I might need to pour a gin and tonic to welcome it. Have a good one.

A friend of mine, another columnist, once observed that a doctor’s mistakes get buried; a lawyer’s go to jail, but a journalist’s run on Page One under the headline: Correction:

Due to a reporter’s error — or an editor’s, or whoever — the something of the something was misstated in Tuesday’s story. The actual facts are, etc.

It’s humiliating. No one likes to admit a mistake, particularly a careless or stupid one, let alone have it displayed to the world, usually on the front page, or at least on the page where the original boo-boo was published. But that’s how we roll, or did. You can’t expect the public’s trust if you can’t admit when you make a mistake. So we do, publicly. Mea culpa. It’s a strong motivator to get it right the first time, although it happens to everyone. To err is human, etc.

This, I should mention, is not true at Fox News. Alan has been monitoring how the fair ‘n’ balanced network is admitting their settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and calling out how far it’s falling off the main page: “Ten pages in! After Gisele Bundchen doing something!” But that’s what we expect, right? Terrible people are terrible, and their terrible audience doesn’t give a shit that they’re going into the second quarter $800 million poorer. I’m a little disappointed; I was hoping for a settlement with a B in it, if they had to settle at all. I was, truth be told, hoping for a jury foreman who asks, like the one in “The Verdict,” “Are we limited to the amount the plaintiff is asking for, or can we go higher?” On the other hand, I know shit rolls downhill, and one of my former students works for the Wall Street Journal, and a squeeze at the top usually means a bigger one down below, so.

But it’s generally a very good day. Fox News had to take it in the shorts, and that’s just fine, because they’re terrible. A pox on all their houses. And I’m sure they all have several.

I was thinking of Fox before the settlement, reading about the old man in Kansas City who shot a black kid for the crime of knocking on his door. I said on Facebook that Fox, and others, many others, have made their profits on scaring the shit out of old people. For decades. I am absolutely no fan of Michael Moore, but the part in “Bowling for Columbine” where he points out the way TV news relentlessly, endlessly deals in fear? That part was dead-on. And Fox is the worst of the lot, so when that old man saw a black kid on his porch and just assumed he was there to do harm? That is something that can also be laid at the doorstep of Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and many others.

Almost everyone I’ve ever known who keeps a loaded gun next to the front door? Lives in the country, where violence almost never happens, except when it’s perpetrated … by them.

But by and large, this was a good day. So let’s enjoy it.

I was reading this column in the Sunday paper — in an oddity of the joint operating agreement here, the Freep produces nearly all of the Sunday paper, except for one page, which is the News’ editorial page — and it’s paywalled, so sorry. But it’s so strange. Headline: Finley: Biden loots treasury for parks and trails

Finley is Nolan Finley, the News’ long-serving (as in, he’s spent his entire career there, nestling in the bosom of long-term job security, union protection and a salary that is no doubt a soft, soft featherbed) editorial-page editor. He’s local journalism’s Most Respected Conservative, which means he generally has a few more brain cells to rub together than the talk-radio clowns, and gets tapped to moderate panels at conferences, stuff like that. He’s been a pretty consistent Never Trumper, so he has that going for him, but then, every so often, he craps out something like this:

Joe Biden threw a brick through the window of the U.S. Treasury, and states and cities across the country followed him inside to cart off parks, libraries, gleaming new civic buildings and shopping baskets full of other stuff their own budgets could have never paid for.

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act has created a fantasy land where local politicians can spend as much as they want on whatever they want without having to worry about waking up with a fiscal hangover.

…Canton Township is getting the downtown the suburb has always wanted. The Joe Louis Greenway is getting a leap ahead on building out 27.5 miles of trails. Taylor is getting an action park. Wyandotte is getting an upgraded post office. Melvindale is getting a boat launch and Trenton is getting rid of an old hospital. A dozen more place-making projects will sprout throughout the county.

This is, I expect, a continuation of what we talked about a few days back, more evidence that Biden is no longer trusting block grants in the hands of red-state governors and is instead writing checks directly to municipalities. To which any reasonable person who isn’t a multimillionaire might say: So? What’s the problem? Better a greenway than another tax break to buy more Porterhouses at their private clubs. The problem, Finley says, is?

And what do taxpayers get? The worst inflation in 40 years, and interest rates hikes that have been slow in turning it around largely because the furious federal spending continues.

Then there’s some blah-blah about the national debt, which is never blah-blah’ed when we’re doling out something the right wants, particularly the aforementioned tax cuts.

I no longer try to understand people like this, but I never stop wondering at the meanness required to complain about public money going to public amenities like parks and improved town squares.

But that’s just me.

OK, then! The week ahead: Fox News goes on trial, and who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and a new park will fall in our laps.

It’s been a week. Long, sweaty and with a fair amount of work, at least as “work” is defined at this stage of my life. Read/edited a chapter in a friend’s book, did a bunch of social media for one of the two clients I handle, and attended two live events in the course of that. Thought I’d unwind with a bike ride today and got a flat tire at my turnaround point.

Plus today, Gov. Whitmer signed into law a package of what any normal person would call sensible gun laws (safe storage, background checks). I just looked at The Detroit News story, and it has close to 900 reader comments. Not wading into that swamp, no fucking way. I’m going to close out the week with a cheeseburger, not the hot bubbling bilge of angry Cletuses.

So. Thanks for this little taste of summer, which was sorely needed, although I’d have preferred to lounge around the house under the ceiling fans, not go to two large buildings which haven’t gotten the a/c memo yet. That always happens when the weather changes abruptly; it’s like turning a battleship. But all the trees are suddenly budding or flowering, and my eyes are watering.

The state legislature is also considering a so-called red flag law, and that will likely be signed next. The wingnuts already hate Whitmer with a burning passion, but they keep handing her the material to build her brand. Last week’s abortion-pill decision gave her the opportunity to stand up and declare, once again, that reproductive freedom is constitutionally protected in Michigan. She’s considering building a stockpile of mifepristone, so there’s a second-day story. Please, don’t throw her into the briar patch, etc.

I suppose the biggest news of the week, however, is this preposterous leak case. I listened to the NYT podcast on my foreshortened bike ride, and I still don’t understand how the hell this happened. How does a 21-year-old airman get access to such highly classified material, and how does he get it out of the building to post online without anyone finding out for weeks and weeks? We had to find out from our intelligence sources who were finding it out from the Russians, for crying out loud.

So weigh in.

The weather will continue through half the weekend; by Sunday, rain and falling temperatures. Perfect for tax-filing season. See you next week.

We had a good Easter. I hope you did, too. We invited Kate and her boyfriend, then thought hell, make it a party and invited four more people, which is just about the limit for my entertaining-indoors skills. But it turned out great; the secret is always in getting the right mix of guests, and it was a fantastic four-generation mix (Boomer, X, Millennial, Z). We had ham and biscuits and eggs and fruit and lox and pumpernickel and all the fixin’s, including my effort to make a frittata for the vegan guest, that which collapsed, so it was rechristened a tofu scramble and it tasted fine. Plus cake. Can’t go wrong with cake for Easter brunch.

The weather finally broke, and it was sunny all day, so we repaired to the back yard, and that was fine, too. Alan bartended, and made killer daiquiris, bloodies and all the rest of it.

I needed one day of joy, after the news of the weekend. First Clarence Fucking Thomas, then Matthew Fucking Kacsmaryk. Every time I see that smug mug on Thomas, I think unkind thoughts, things like you look like a frog and I hope you die on the toilet. Kacsmaryk is another breed of cat, far, far younger, but like Thomas, he has lifetime tenure, so we’ll have to hope for judicial isolation in whatever shithole in Texas he currently occupies. I saw some defenses of Thomas’ sugar daddy, Harlan Crow (god, what a name, right out of Faulker, or Dickens) over the weekend, mostly of the he’s-a-really-decent-man-and-only-collects-Nazi-memorabilia-out-of-love-for-freedom variety. But I’d ask you: If for some reason you felt that way, would YOU keep such items in your HOUSE? Of course not. These people are awful.

You knew the high from Janet Protasiewicz couldn’t last. I only hoped for a few more days.

So here we are at the beginning of the week. Temperatures ABOVE 70 predicted by Wednesday, so we should celebrate, at least a little.

Neil Steinberg has a good column today, which you can read, paywall-free, at the Sun-Times. It’s about a man living with HIV, among many, many other obstacles to a good life, including mental illness, autism, recent homelessness and at least some gender dysphoria (he uses male pronouns but is planning to live as female at some point in the future. But he’s also benefiting from a wide array of social programs, too. I always appreciate the twists Neil’s columns often take:

Since I know that readers can take a Victorian view of philanthropy — those benefiting from social service agencies ought to somehow earn their support by cleaving to a hazy puritanical ideal — it’s worth pausing to ask how the city would be better if Cox were being ravaged by AIDS in Grant Park rather than living his best life, healthy in an apartment in Forest Park?

He’s certainly better this way. And, it’s fairly clear, so is Chicago.

OK, so it’s on to the Monday grind. In the words of our sex-working former First Lady: Be best.

I used to work, at a couple layers of remove, for a man who believed, deeply, in bipartisanship. All of our problems could be solved, he contended, if we could just sit down at the Table of Brotherhood, square in the middle of the Marketplace of Ideas, and reason together over our shared situation. He’s an old man now, and I doubt he’s changed his mind at all, although maybe it’s dawned on him that, as scores of others have pointed out, that we no longer have two parties dealing in good faith, but OMG we’ve been over this so many times I’m already bored.

Anyway, I thought of him when I read this story in Washington Monthly, which is about how the Biden administration is sending money intended for cities directly to the cities themselves, not going through the usual block-grant process, in place since the Nixon administration. Why? Because that’s how red-state governors like to punish blue cities:

When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017, city lawmakers expected the state to pass along the more than $1 billion Congress had appropriated for emergency aid. Instead, they received nothing: The entire package was doled out to largely white, inland communities less affected by the storm. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner accused Abbott of a “money grab.” The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development later found that the stunt put Texas in violation of the Civil Rights Act. “Let me just tell you, that remains a sore spot,” Turner recently told me.

Of course, until fairly recently, the block-grant system worked passably well. I don’t want to over quote from what is a very readable story (for such a nerdy one), but this stood out to me:

Then, as now, tensions existed between urban and rural interests over spending and other decisions. For instance, politicians representing cities wanted funding for projects like mass transit, whereas those from more rural areas wanted money spent on roads. But back in the 1970s—indeed, for most of U.S. history—disagreements between rural and urban interests weren’t necessarily partisan in nature. Rural lawmakers (depending on the state) were as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, and spending battles typically involved bipartisan dealmaking—for instance, urban Democrats aligning with suburban lawmakers, who were largely Republicans, to get money for metro-wide bus service.

Only in the past 20 years, as the parties sorted more starkly geographically—with metro areas becoming overwhelmingly blue, and rural and exurban areas becoming overwhelmingly Republican—have the battles over the funding of local communities become reliably partisan and ideological. In 2011, for example, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the Ron DeSantis of that era, signed legislation preempting the ability of local governments to mandate that private businesses in their jurisdictions offer paid sick leave, as Milwaukee had done. Soon after that, 15 more states passed similar statutes. In 2012, Barack Obama took 69 percent of the vote in cities with more than 500,000 residents while winning just 22 percent of total counties, the lowest share in history. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was methodically consolidating power over state governments: Between 2010 and 2013, the number of states with a Republican ruling trifecta jumped from nine to 25, their largest state lawmaking majority since the 1920s. Governors and attorneys general launched an endless barrage of lawsuits against Obama’s government.

This, more than anything else, is what drives me nuts about today’s GOP: They still contend that they are the party of the smallest government, the most local government, until they aren’t. When Washtenaw County, home of Ann Arbor, proposed banning or otherwise discouraging the use of plastic grocery bags — the kind that end of blowing in the breeze and getting tangled in tree branches, not the sturdier multi-use ones I tote to Kroger — the Michigan legislature passed a law forbidding such local ordinances, because Meijer and other representatives of Big Grocery kicked about it. Here’s the story on what’s happening in Texas:

Over (Gov. Greg Abbott’s) two-plus terms, he and his GOP-controlled legislature have overridden the ability of local governments in Texas to, among other things, mandate paid sick leave, require COVID-19 vaccines for workers, expand voting options, and regulate oil and gas drilling within their own borders.

You can’t sit down in the marketplace of ideas with people like that. You can only burn them to the ground. Fortunately, they’re doing a pretty good job of lighting their own fires.

But they’re still dangerous. In the cheering over Janet Protasiewicz’ victory, one dark detail was overlooked, and thanks to my cheesehead friend for pointing it out. North shore Milwaukee voters elected a Republican to the state senate, giving them a supermajority there, and guess what?

The Wisconsin Constitution allows lawmakers to remove state officials “for corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors,” but Knodl has said he would consider launching impeachment proceedings for criminal justice officials “who have failed” at their jobs.

Knodl said he would support invoking the that power against Janet Protasiewicz, the Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge who won a race for a vacant seat on the state Supreme Court. Knodl did not immediately say he would consider voting in favor of impeaching Protasiewicz if she is elected.

State law allows a two-thirds majority in the state Senate to hold impeachment trials for state officials accused of corruption or crimes and misdemeanors if a majority of Assembly members vote to introduce impeachment articles, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.

Yes, we could see an impeachment of a justice who hasn’t even assumed her office yet.

So that’s where we are. I’m reminded of a line from the Doors: They got the guns but we got the numbers. Let’s just hope we don’t have to call upon Shakespeare by the end of this: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead. I’d rather be a modest-living expat in some European capital than have to fight for my own country.

My plan to cram all my work into one day a week didn’t work, this time, but I got my taxes done, so there’s that.

And thus explains my absence this week. However, I slept terribly last night, so I expect a day of sitting and staring gloomily into space. Which is to say, happy arraignment day!

I won’t be complaining about the inescapableness of it all, because it turns out cutting the cord was the best thing I could have done. Just seeing the screen grabs on Twitter of the O.J.-like coverage of it all disgust me. And after reading the stories about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s snow job of Lesley Stahl Sunday night, I’m pretty down on all legacy media these days.

With some exceptions.

But from what I saw of the Greene/Stahl encounter — clips, mainly — suggest it’s time to retire “60 Minutes,” or at least retire the elderly correspondents stinking up the room. When a lunatic calls Democrats pedophiles, the correct journalistic response isn’t “wow.” But that’s what the “60 Minutes” crew does — looks down its aristocratic nose and thinks a well-placed insult will do the trick. It won’t. She was unprepared. We are unprepared.

Yesterday I read Neil Steinberg’s column about Israel. It’s…not cheering:

Israel, a democracy-loving country, at least when it comes to Jewish people — non-Jews, not so much — has been convulsed with unprecedented protests, and unprecedented shocks like military reservists vowing they won’t serve a dictator.

A stable democracy sliding toward civil war over the return of a judiciary-wrecking would-be autocrat. Hmm, as with Brexit, there seems a subtle warning here to those of us in the United States.

…Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But as with any good horror movie, the monster you thought was buried in the yard is actually moving around the house somewhere. Republicans who hope Ron DeSantis shows up and saves them forget: a) DeSantis is a stiff and b) should it happen, they’ll be stuck with Ron DeSantis. Queen Elizabeth II dying did not mean the end of monarchy. Putin is in every sense a one-man ruler. Netanyahu is trying.

I was feeling pretty good after the elections last fall. Now I’m gloomy again. Part of this is a lack of sleep, as well as the near-certainty that the pool where I swim twice a week is going to close next year, thanks to budget cuts due to falling enrollment.

So let’s move on to the gloomy news, then, eh? Maybe this is more smug news, but you can’t beat Paul Krugman when he’s pointing out the obvious, in this case the drop in life expectancy in the U.S., but particularly in red states:

Now, Covid killed a lot of people around the world, so wasn’t this just an act of God? Not exactly. You see, America experienced a bigger decline in life expectancy when Covid struck than any other wealthy country. Furthermore, while life expectancy recovered in many countries in 2021, here it continued to fall.

And America’s dismal Covid performance was part of a larger story. I don’t know how many Americans are aware that over the past four decades, our life expectancy has been lagging ever further that of other advanced nations — even nations whose economic performance has been poor by conventional measures. Italy, for example, has experienced a generation of economic stagnation, with basically no growth in real G.D.P. per capita since 2000, compared with a 29 percent rise here. Yet Italians can expect to live about five years longer than Americans, a gap that has widened even as the Italian economy flounders.

Yeah, funny how that works.

OK, enough doom and gloom for one day. The good news: The rain may end today — we’ve been getting cats and dogs’ worth — and I’ll get a bike ride in. Hope your day is sunnier.