This is funny, in a sad-funny-because-they’re-bigots kind of way: The Michigan GOP is attacking Abdul El-Sayed, whom they have come to call Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, because someone found a clip from an eight-year-old documentary in which he is heard to mutter that he “hates” Mackinac Island.** The nerve! They spread it to their hand-picked idiot media outlets, which is to say, Michigan Enjoyer and Facebook, and it spread from there.

No one seems to consider that others might feel the same way. I, too, am not fond of Mackinac. Let me sketch my experience with our famed resort island.

As a high-school sophomore, I and two girlfriends were visiting our friend Paul in the Les Cheneaux Islands, 11 miles away across the open water of Lake Huron. It was a three-week visit, and we were looking for things to do besides lounging on the lakeshore and smoking pot. Their boat was a 1941 wooden Chris Craft, roughly 20 feet or so, and it was stressed to us over and over that we could only take it out on “the big lake” if the weather conditions were perfect, flat calm. Plus we were all 16, 17 years old, not an age to make smart decisions. Paul’s mom vetoed the boat, so we drove to St. Ignace and took the ferry, aka the fudgie boat. I think we walked around downtown a little, then caught a departing ferry and returned to Cedarville. An unmemorable trip.

On subsequent trips, we arrived via private vessel. You can smell Mackinac’s distinctive odor, a mix of horse manure and fudge, before you get there. On these trips, we would go to the Pink Pony, one of a handful of infamous bars there. One thing about operating a boat drunk — while bad things can happen, and sometimes do, the fresh breeze in your face has a sobering, or at least awakening, effect. We never worried about Paul or his brother being drunk behind the wheel of that Chris Craft. Although on one trip, which I wasn’t on but heard about later, Paul was really overserved. He and our friend Jeff pulled out of the harbor and Paul drew a bead on some landmark in the far distance, then turned the wheel over to Jeff.

“Go straight to that mark, and do not deviate, no matter what,” he said, then went to the rear seat to lie down. Sometime later, Jeff called back, “Paul? I know you told me not to change course, but are we getting a little close to that freighter?” Ha ha ha. A 90-degree course change and another Mackinac story in the books.

Anyway, I’ve been to the island three times since then. Once to cover the end of the Port Huron-to-Mackinac sailing race for a book I was editing. Once to attend the Mackinac Policy Conference, the annual throwdown hosted by the Detroit Regional Chamber. And once with Kate and Alan because visiting Mackinac as a family is something every Michigan resident is required to do. I stayed in St. Ignace for the first trip, at some other hotel for the conference, and at Mission Point resort with the family. My takeaway from all visits: The food is bad almost everywhere, and everything from lodging to cheeseburgers is insanely overpriced. The place extracts the lint from your pockets before you leave.

There were some charming moments. Alan bought a kite for Kate, and they flew it from the wide front lawn of Mission Point. Every time a freighter passed by, happy hour prices prevailed for drinks. The place is pretty; supposedly lilac season there is wonderful, and once you get out of the hot, smelly downtown, it has the northern-Michigan charms of blue water, blue skies and low humidity. You can rent a bicycle and ride the 8-mile perimeter road, which is very pleasant.

The Grand Hotel is the place everyone talks about as the ne plus ultra of Mackinac, and it’s where the policy conference is held. If you can afford a starting in-season rate of $700 a night for a room, and don’t mind the dress code to visit the restaurants, and think “Somewhere in Time” is the most romantic movie ever made, well: It’s for you. If you can’t afford to stay there, and just want to amble down the famous porch, it will cost you $14, or $8 for kids. A one-time NN.c correspondent, Dave Bell, has, or had, a house there, on the bluff beyond the Grand. He said to tell the snoots at the gate that I was visiting the Bells, and they’d let me pass by free of charge. So I did. He wasn’t there, but the caretaker allowed me to wander the area and the barn. He bought a house that came with a horse and several absolutely lovely horse-drawn conveyances, including one made entirely of wicker. I don’t know if he’s still there; he dropped out of sight a while back.

The island runs on seasonal immigrant labor, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn this means pretty white European boys and girls in the customer-facing jobs, and Jamaicans everywhere else.

So that’s my Mackinac experience. I have had my fill of it, and if I never see or smell it again, that’s fine. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that anyone who had the typical hoi-polloi Mackinac experience didn’t care for it. You come north to get away from it all, not to dodge manure shoulder-to-shoulder with a bunch of tourists from Lansing.

** Finally, I should note that the exact quote was “I hate Mackinac,” and given that’s what a lot of people call the policy conference — “Are you going to Mackinac this year?” — it may well have been what he was talking about. But this is a silly, silly charge to make, and having already given it this many words, why go on?

Here’s a picture of Paul at one of our parties in the Les Cheneaux. RIP, old friend:

Election Day was…long. Report time was 5:45 a.m. We dropped off the memory cards and assorted supplies back at the Board of Elections around 9 p.m.

Then I went home.

Working an election is not what you’d call fun, but it does make one feel like you’re part of the solution. When you’re that tired, the drama of certain races just becomes a blur. I went to bed learning Abdul el-Sayed had a comfortable lead over Haley Stevens, and woke up learning the lead had shrunk, but was still probably solid. And it was.

Given that was really the only race where the result wasn’t a foregone conclusion, I’ve been reading the reaction pieces today. The race was tighter than anyone thought it would be — the Stevens camp thought she had it in the bag, and vice versa. It turned out to be around 1 percent. So now we’re gonna have think pieces for a few weeks, and then the polling will start, and yadda yadda, etc.

All I know is, it’s gotta work. Abdul has charm, intelligence, a touch of arrogance yes but a thousand times more charisma than Stevens. And how long have progressives been holding their noses and voting for moderates? A very long time. It’s for some favor returning.

I will be getting a new congressman. The extremely weird Shri Thanedar fell to a primary challenge from Donavan McKinney, a DSA candidate for sure. By the end of the campaign, we were getting two anti-McKinney mailers a day, but I voted for him anyway. Thanedar wasn’t much of a rep, and I’ve of a mind it’s time for a change.

As for the gubernatorial race, it’s Jocelyn Benson vs. John James. Of James, he puts me in mind of Jon Stewart’s line about Rudi Giuliani: His campaign consists of a noun, a verb and 9/11. In James’ case, it’s a noun, a verb and a helicopter — he’s one of those guys who looks like he was grown in a lab designed to produce the ultimate urban Republican. Brown skin, white teeth, insincerity seeping from him like water from a sponge. West Point, Iraq war (that’s where the helicopter comes from) and it gets mentioned constantly. He’s like a Harvard grad who figures out how to tell you they went to Harvard in the first 10 minutes of meeting you. When I was flying helicopters in Iraq, etc.

For now, I’m taking a break from caring until Labor Day. Still tired, still want to enjoy what’s left of summer.

In the meantime, even though it’s irrelevant, here’s an amusing story about Haley Stevens’ Meeechigan eeahhhcent. Thick as Mackinac Island fudge.

Still tired.

As the internet continues to transform into a collection of walled gardens and AI slop, I find myself more often on Reddit, which still seems to be mostly human-generated content. A few weeks back I was in the Fort Wayne subreddit, reading a post by a person who said their father had recently been busted coming back from Michigan on I-69, where he’d bought a quantity of marijuana. For some reason six ounces comes to mind.

The traffic stop was bullshit, one of those non-offensive offenses police deploy when they want you for something else. The post author said they know their father, and that he is a weed smoker, but not a dealer; the hefty amount was so he wouldn’t have to make so many trips from Indiana to Michigan. But in Indiana, where cannabis remains illegal, six ounces is felony weight, and so it sounds like dad is well and truly screwed.

How did they know he’d be holding? Another poster offered this observation: The freeway between Fort Wayne and the Michigan border has Flock cameras, the AI-enabled license-plate readers that have become popular with cops and municipalities hungry for traffic-violation money. Over time, it’s easy for the AI to speculate on who’s driving to Michigan purely to buy weed — frequent trips, short turnaround time, etc. It’s entirely possible the police were waiting for this moment, and seized it.

I thought of this when I read this WashPost story (gift link) about how the Flock camera network has become a so-called rogue cop’s best friend:

JEFFERSON, Ga. — Marci Bakely couldn’t understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was.

When she went to buy groceries or on a date or to the doctor, he’d text her about it, sometimes within minutes, despite working 15 miles from her home as a police chief in a small town in the Atlanta suburbs. One day in 2024, when he incorrectly suspected that she’d gone to see a man against his wishes, he messaged her, “I didn’t think you would slip up,” according to texts she shared with The Washington Post.

Bakely, 50, began to feel like she was constantly being watched. She says she installed three cameras around her home and on her patio, to see if he was staking out her cul-de-sac. She bought a hidden-camera detector and nervously waved it down every wall. Three times, in desperation, she says she drove her Kia to a mechanic’s shop, asking them to scan for trackers on her car.

But it wasn’t a tracker on her car. It was Flock, and the database her cop ex could easily consult:

Like thousands of other law-enforcement agencies across the United States, his police force could follow cars spotted by Flock’s sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras, which record passing license plates into a mappable database that officers can search while investigating crime.

Bakely’s ex was one of at least 50 LEOs to use the network for non-crime fighting reasons, about half of those to stalk or spy on women. I really, really hate the surveillance state this country is becoming, especially when it’s so easy for bad actors in uniform to use it for nefarious ends.

Where I live, these cameras have been donated by a public-safety nonprofit, and their website is full of happy statistics about all the crime they’ve prevented, the lost children recovered, etc. It’s not hard to envision a future when police spend less and less time on actual patrols or developing intelligence, and more looking at screens and responding to alerts generated by AI analysis of who’s driving where.

And stalking exes, of course. Can’t forget that.

Folks, my week of hell is pretty much over, but Election Day awaits on Tuesday, so we’ll see how it goes. I figure by Wednesday I can finally truly relax. Of course, it didn’t help that I stayed out late Saturday night to see the Gories in Detroit, but it was a very fun show, and I’m entitled to enjoy my life in the go-go phase of my retirement. Slo-go is only a few short years away.

First things first: Many apologies. I have been sprinting through the days since the weekend. My main freelance client moves into red-zone mode around this time, and I’ve been workin’, friends. Plus, the primary election is next week, and I’m set to be a poll worker again. So a few minutes here feels precious, although it’s not really. Today will be chill. I slept in and plan to hit the gym in a bit. But first: A blog.

Did I mention I was trying to break out of my NPR bubble? A few months back, I started making more of an effort to seek out what I consider alternative media, i.e. conservative media, just to see what I was missing. I set radio dials to two AM talk stations, roughly divided, content-wise, along the fault lines of the current GOP. Which is to say, one is stupid and the other, crazy. I spend most of my car time listening to the stupid one, because the crazy one has a signal that goes in and out. Plus, very poor station identification. I can’t even tell you what the call letters are. But I can recognize an also-ran, D-list station by its lineup: Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Scott Jennings. Dead giveaways.

The stupid station is all local during the day, although that makes it boring as hell, too. Nothing like a live remote broadcast from a charity golf tournament to make you change back to NPR.

Anyway, back to content: Yesterday I was on my way to the grocery (another neglected duty) when I heard Linda McMahon, yes our secretary of education, on the stupid station, talking about a policy in Ann Arbor public schools, to not inform parents when a child starts asking to be addressed by another name, and shows signs of gender transition. This policy is wrong, vile and should be illegal, the former pro-wrestling executive said.

What’s the world coming to? was the gist of the questioning and caller response. Parents have a right to know!

Reader, I have changed my thinking on this issue: No, they don’t. If a child is keeping this from their parents, they have a good reason.

First of all, kids, especially teenagers, are crazy. They try on new identities like T-shirts. These range from small things — changing the spelling of their name, experimenting with being the kind of girl who dots their I’s with little bubbles, hitting the bathroom first thing to apply truly heinous eyeliner that will be rubbed off at the end of the day — to more serious matters that may or may not have anything to do with gender dysphoria. I went to school with a girl with a very unfortunate name — Melva. She was a little gawky, and in the hands of the mean girls, this moniker inevitably became Melba, then Melba Toast. One day she told all her teachers that forever after, she wished to be addressed as Mike. The new name didn’t last long — once a Melva, always a Melva — but I can only imagine the shrieking at her home if this change had been shared with her parents. So there’s that.

Also, and this is more serious: As you all know, I worked as a census enumerator in 2020, calling on addresses that didn’t do the form online. One day I knocked at a house in Detroit, and it was answered by a rather obviously transitioning teen (M to F). She told me it was a group home for kids like her, and to come back later to speak to the person in charge. You know what happens to kids like her when they tell their parents they think they were born in the wrong body? The lucky ones — the lucky ones — get kicked out of the house and end up in a safe place like a group home. The unluckier ones are kicked out and end up on the street, and selling sex is the easiest way to survive. (You’d think the people always fretting about child sex trafficking would be aware of this.) Others may stay at home, with parents who call them “mentally insane” and badger them into running away or hanging themselves.

So if your kid is gender dysphoric and doesn’t want you to know? Check yourself. It’s never too late to transition to being a better parent.

OK, that rant over, it’s time to tend to myself a little. I’m way behind on this issue, but two items of note in bloggage:

A really good piece about the stupidity of the MOAR TESTOSTERONE attitude raging through Pete Hegseth’s Department of WAAAARRRRR:

As a urologist, I’ve witnessed the mythology around testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) growing for years. Some of it is warranted. TRT can genuinely help appropriately selected hypogonadal men — those with consistently low morning testosterone levels and signs or symptoms of testosterone deficiency, such as fatigue, erectile dysfunction, and low libido. It can improve sexual function. It can strengthen bone density. It can cure anemia and increase lean body mass.

But it can’t make them brave. Some studies show small, highly context-dependent effects of TRT on risk-taking and competitive behaviors. In many analyses it doesn’t change behavior meaningfully above baseline at all.

People treated with testosterone may show a preference toward status seeking, which could be beneficial in a hierarchical military context. It may increase amygdala activation, a part of the brain that processes intense emotions, such as fear and rage, and decrease communication between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, the neural seat of impulse regulation. If TRT does result in a slight increase in reactivity, a tendency toward higher threat recognition, and lower inhibition, I’m not sure it would be an improvement for our military, either on the battlefield or the base.

And finally, a years-old, but still fantastic, This American Life episode on testosterone. I remember hearing this way back in 2004, on a long drive. I so wanted to hear the whole episode that when it started to fade, I pulled into a rest stop for the last 10 minutes. It is fascinating, and they reposted it when the Hegseth story broke. I highly, highly recommend it.

OK, then. Once more unto the breach, and I should come out in one piece after the weekend. Fingers crossed.

I spoke too soon, last week, fingering gubernatorial candidate John James as the sole Republican to lash out at Canada for daring to have forest fires with border-crossing smoke. I wrote that early in the day on Thursday (because that’s when I had time), and by the end of the day and into Friday, any number of Michigan Republicans, and one Ohio senator, also a Republican, had issued statements of their towering outrage over the smoky-air situation.

It was eerie, how alike they all were, almost as if someone had sent a memo around, y’know?

They all mentioned “Canada’s failure to manage its forests,” thereby leading to these wildfires. Pretty cheeky, considering how many fires start on this side of the border, and rage with minimal containment. (Some of the dumber posts on the subject claimed uncontrolled U.S. fires only happen in the leftist hellscape of California.) And the Canadians lecture us about climate change! Yes they do, because they accept reality, whereas here we just pretend otherwise.

Anyway, it’s good to see all the self-taught epidemiologists who gained their knowledge during Covid have found new employment as forestry experts.

Also anyway, on Saturday the wind picked up and the air was clean again — or at least down in the low part of the Moderate range, which is about all I expect in an urban area — before climbing back a bit on Sunday. We’re currently at Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, which I can live with. But we’re keeping the a/c on.

All plans for this weekend fell through at the last-ish minute, which ended up being a gift. I finished one book (Lifeguard: A Love Story, by Janet Fash), started another (Outside Looking In, T.C. Boyle) and otherwise enjoyed having a clean-enough-for-company house and a stocked pantry. We did check out the Concert of Colors in hopes of catching the Don Was set, saw the line to get in was about an hour long, and noped out.

I did get to the market to re-up on eggs and blueberries, was thrilled to find the first corn of the season, and drove home in time to hear a fragment of an interview with Hunter Biden. It was…impressive. So much so that I looked up the whole interview online and read the transcript. (Bonus: Reading the transcript spares you having to listen to Scott Simon’s smarminess.) It’s worth a few minutes of your time:

SIMON: Did that open the door for President Trump to pardon some of his supporters, including the January 6 gang?

BIDEN: I think that that is an insane argument. Do I think that pardoning me opened the door for Donald Trump to pardon people that engaged in an insurrection, beat police officers, and then, since they’re pardoned, many of them have gone back to commit crimes, including sexually abusing children. I don’t think that the two are the same thing.

If my dad had won, he would have kept his word. He would not have pardoned me. And the reason that he would not have pardoned me is because I would have told him I have complete and utter faith in the fact that, No. 1, I think that I will win some of this on appeal. But, No. 2, as a first-time offender for a nonviolent crime without a victim, I’m not going to spend any time in jail. And I know that between the Department of Justice, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Probation, I have absolute faith in our system that I would be treated fairly like any other person that had been convicted.

When my dad woke up after Thanksgiving, after the election occurred, and he read that Donald Trump had just appointed Matt Gaetz to be the attorney general, I think that he made a decision then that Donald Trump had made a decision not to actually adhere to the Constitution, the rule of law, and that he intended to take out and mete justice through his own Department of Justice, in his Department of Corrections, in his department of probation.

Duh. Good for the Bidens, father and son.

With that, I’m back to my book, as well as pizza for dinner. Happy Monday, all.

On Wednesday, I was asked by a friend to do a favor that involved sitting in her house for a few hours. So I did. It was very hot outside, and she had robust a/c. When I arrived, the sky was clear and the sun, punishing. When I left around 6:30, the sky was overcast, not with clouds, but with smoke.

And now it’s Thursday morning, and Michigan has the worst air on the planet. Not the Midwest, not the entire country, the whole damn world. A quirk of the wind has swept wildfire smoke from Canada and Minnesota into our state, and the map footprint is eerie; of course there’s bleeding into other states, but the worst of it seems to stop at the state borders. Good news, Toledo! All the air-quality scales are pegged in the Hazardous zone. As bad as it is in Detroit, it seems to be even worse in the U.P. Here’s the Mackinac Bridge:

Another view:

We have our own a/c on, with the fan running constantly. Morning swim was cancelled. The lakefront park is closed. But never fear! John James, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination for governor, the emptiest suit that ever did empty, the man whose whole campaign is, to steal a phrase from Jon Stewart, “a noun, a verb and a helicopter*,” had this to say:

As Governor, I’ll put Michigan first, demand answers, and push Canada to take real action.

As the quip goes, tell me you know nothing about wildfires without telling me you know nothing without wildfires.

* James was a helicopter pilot during the Gulf War, or “Desert Storm,” as he patriotically calls it, every time. He brings it up…a lot.

In other news at this hour, while I was sitting at my buddy’s house yesterday, I did some rabbit-hole moseying, and came upon the latest from the Indiana Policy Review, which exists as a sinecure for the former opinion-page editor of my alma mater in Fort Wayne. He’s been there since roughly 1990, so that’s a pretty good sinecure. The fact the organization barely exists at all speaks more to the pity the wealthy founding families have for their pet mouthpiece, but never mind that.

This week’s column by him (the lower-case “tcl” at the end stands for T. Craig Ladwig) is remarkable for its naked bigotry and elevation of Indiana’s lieutenant governor, right-wing Christian scold Micah Beckwith, to something resembling relevancy. (It’s a quirk of Hoosier politics that the governor and lieutenant governor don’t necessarily run as a team, as they’re independently nominated by the party faithful. The gubernatorial candidate can make their wishes known, but the delegates don’t necessarily have to do their bidding. So in this case you get a more or less normal Republican serving with a lunatic wingnut like Beckwith.) Lately, Beckwith, a pastor of sorts, has been on about the Muslim Menace, and tcl is right there with him:

The need to confront the Muslim scourge in our cities is dividing the Republican Party — or so you would expect. In Indiana, however, only Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith is speaking out while other GOP leaders sit silent for fear that Julia Carson’s grandson, Andre, will call them bigots.

Indeed, the governor upbraided Beckwith for not choosing his words more carefully, for not thinking before he speaks.

OK, if the governor wants a careful word choice, how about “seditious”? That’s when you demand that your religion exempts you from a society’s norms, mores, laws and core beliefs to the degree that you would overturn them to be replaced with your own.

Freedom of religion? Do you think the Founders had in mind someone like Genghis Khan, a devout follower of Tengrism, the shamanic religion that worships “the Eternal Blue Sky.” His armies killed as many as 40 million people, estimated to be 11 percent of the world’s population at the time.

It is terrifying to realize that the leading minds of our GOP are willing to abide an openly hostile, globally controlled Islam as a benign curiosity.

To use a not-that-great internet witticism twice in one blog, tell me you know nothing about American Muslims without, etc.

And no, I don’t know what Genghis Khan is doing in there. But I chuckled when, later in the column, he mentions “the unassimilable Muslim population.” I’d like to escort this elderly hayseed on a tour of Dearborn, Michigan. He’ll see some assimilated Muslims, oh yes he will. They make delicious hummus.

OK, gotta clean the house today. Company’s coming for the weekend.

Is it just me, or has it been an even crazier summer, news-wise, than we’ve seen before? So much for the dog days and boredom and lazy-hazy-crazy. Between the shenanigans in Washington and everywhere else, it seems like half the durn country has gone nuts. It’s hard to keep up, but we try.

I keep a list of books read throughout the year, and after noting how appallingly short it was this year, I resolved to double down. I normally read fiction, but found that nothing mid-list would satisfy; I abandoned a Andrea Barrett short-story collection before finding Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece,” everything about the book summed up in the title. It’s as noir-y as noir gets, and my only problem now is, I have to find another one.

But never mind that! On to the day’s — not even the week’s — craziness. All links gift unless otherwise noted.

Here in the Macomb County exurb of Romeo, the school board’s gone buck-wild

When teachers in a southeastern Michigan school district decorate their classroom walls this fall, they will be limited to 32 preapproved phrases, part of an effort to “keep non-curricular ideologies and partisan politics out of the classroom,” officials said.

Classrooms can display messages including: “Everyone is welcome,” “You matter,” and “Choose kindness,” according to the list of acceptable statements. They must be printed in red or black ink, the school district’s colors, according to an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post.

Yes, it’s Moms for Liberty on the march up there in Romeo. A similar movement was active for a while in my own school district, but seems to have been soundly defeated in the last board election. However, a Pride parade got them up in their feelings again, and so I’m sure they’ll be back.

The near-death of Mitch McConnell — I’m not 100 percent sure he isn’t lying in a vat of green goo somewhere, illuminated by an eerie light accompanied by disturbing gurgling and hissing sounds — calls for some pre-obituary summing up of a truly smelly legacy:

The first key moment came when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Though Obama had won a sweeping victory and the country was in the midst of a catastrophic economic crisis, McConnell told his caucus they had a path back to power: Obstruct everything Obama tried to do, regardless of whether Republicans had any substantive objections to it. Only if they forced Obama to fail could they retake power.

If it seemed like the parties were working together, he explained, Obama would get the credit; if all the public saw was gridlock and nasty infighting, the president would get the blame.

“If [Obama] was for it,” said former Ohio Sen. George Voinovich about McConnell’s strategy, “we had to be against it.” Every procedural tactic would be deployed, including turning the filibuster from an occasional tool used to stop major legislation to a weapon fired at almost any legislation the majority party proposed.

Ah yes, I remember it well. And eventually, Obama got tired of banging his head against the wall and started writing executive orders. Oh, how they howled about that. The president isn’t a king or a dictator! Times have changed.

Finally, a short essay getting lots of the wrong kind of attention, in my alma mater, the Columbus Dispatch. Behold, the miseries of the MAGA man:

I recently entered the online dating scene and have met nice women for Columbus-area lunches or dinners in the process. After I thanked one, I got a thanks back with an additional note:

“I never asked you about your political views. I have no problem with Republicans, but if you are a MAGA Republican, it would be difficult for us to develop a friendship.”

Wow. That comment threw me for a loop, but it made me reflect on the bitter divisions within the country. It is literally a civil war.

No, it is not. You’d think a writer identified as a “former college professor” would know what literally means, but I guess not. More:

…I guess I could ask a return question.

“I have no problem with Democrats, but would be difficult for me to develop a friendship with one who has blindly been to a No Kings rally, suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, uses the biased legacy media as their only source of ‘truth,’ wants Israel to be put in its place, requires unlimited immigration and voting without an ID, desperately aims to completely abolish ICE, allows biological males in women’s sports, and denigrates all MAGA as fascists or Nazis, without understanding the real meaning of those words.”

Dude, maybe volunteer to pass out leaflets for some candidate? You’d have better luck, but you must also accept that you look like Captain Kangaroo and unless you have a pile of money, you might have to settle for women your own age. WHICH IS FINE. Not all older men can be Jeff Bezos.

The heat wave is unrelenting. About to go out in it in a bit. Pray for me.

Well, OK, Lindsey Graham. Not on my bingo card, and not necessarily the obituary I most wanted to see this weekend, but I’ll take it. His legacy has already been well-pawed-over, and I don’t really have anything to add. I’m reminded of a line from a Martin Cruz Smith novel, describing two informers whose handler had died suddenly, something like, “Confused, they looked for a new hand on the leash.” Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic has written two excellent pieces with Graham at their center, this one, from 2020, about the nature of collaboration and his final obit, written Sunday, here.

Both should be gift links; I hope they work.

I won’t spend any time snarking about his obvious homosexuality and his refusal to acknowledge it; that’s between him and his…whoever. His God. His constituents. None of my business, except if perhaps some terrible kompromat was behind his cleaving to Trump. But honestly, I don’t think so. In pursuit of “relevance,” however he defined it, he wanted a hand on his leash. And he got it, and it destroyed him.

And speaking of the dead and near-dead, I see Mitch McConnell is claiming his lengthy absence from work is no biggie, that he suffered a fall and was “briefly unconscious,” blah blah blah. Eyewitnesses say he EMTs were doing CPR on him, and you don’t do CPR on the unconscious, but someone who has no pulse. He — or the people trying to pass this off as the truth — needs to take that bullshit elsewhere.

Let’s talk something else: The columns on the White House portico, which are now tarped off, allegedly for “restoration.” More bullshit, if you ask me. I think this story, filed back in March, is closer to the truth:

For nearly two centuries, the White House’s main entrance — framed by a row of graceful Ionic columns — has been a signature image of the seat of American power.

Now the Trump-appointed head of a federal arts commission is proposing to replace them with a more ornate style favored by President Donald Trump. Those more decorative columns, a style known as Corinthian, are considered the most luxurious in classical architecture and appear on buildings such as the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. They have long been deployed on Trump’s properties, and the president has handpicked them for his planned White House ballroom, too.

If you don’t know the difference between ionic and Corinthian columns, look it up. The latter are fancier, more pimp-style, and I have no doubt they’ll be gilded, too. Where are the British when you need them? Burn this sucker to the ground.

What a weekend of news. My head is reeling, but maybe that’s just the heat dome, approaching to blow out the rest of the week. Stay cool, y’all.

The other day was the anniversary of the first mainstream media mention of what we’d come to call AIDS. Forty-five years back, on July 3, 1981, the NYT ran a story headlined, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” It wouldn’t be long before editors at the Times and other media outlets would be having meetings on how, in a G- or maybe PG-rated way, to describe certain sexual practices and why they might be relevant to this new disease.

I’m talking oral sex, anal sex, PIV sex, the gamut. Believe me when I tell you people sat around conference tables discussing anal sex. I was in a few of those meetings, or heard about them afterward.

Then came Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. She performed oral sex on him in the Oval Office! (“Oral in the Oval” — did anyone write that headline? If not, they missed an opportunity.) And she did that thing with the cigar! More meetings, more letters to the editor from parents mad because they had to explain a blowjob to their middle-school children. And I’d bet anything the kids already knew about them, but enjoyed seeing their parents stammer through the explanation.

Years later, it was #MeToo, and stories about forced sex, bad sex, guilty sex, and erections. So many erections, young women pulled down onto the lap of some creep and his boner, or having it rubbed up against her at a drinking fountain, or wherever. I was largely out of the game by then, and the previous meetings had taken away some of the scandalousness of describing sexual orientations and practices in what we always called “a family newspaper.” But I’m sure there might have been a few more meetings.

This week I saw a headline and thought, my how things have changed:

File that one under Things That Make Me Feel Old. And Platner is out, so his future sex crimes will be between him, the women involved and law enforcement.

What else today? Here’s Bret Stephens and his problem with democratic socialists:

A would-be U.S. senator, the Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, offered an alternative take on Michelle Obama’s famous line about going high when your opponent goes low: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” he said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.” (El-Sayed is a doctor.)

Heavens to Betsy, let me clutch my pearls! When will these comfortable opinion-havers figure out that this is exactly what Democrats want to hear, after two years of the Trump administration? They don’t want Chuck Schumer’s strongly worded letters, they want choking in the mud, because that’s what the administration has already done to the Constitution. I swear, these people.

OK, then. The week, it limps to a close and a pretty good weekend awaits. Enjoy yours.

I think I’ve briefed you all on the Gordie Howe Bridge, the new piece of infrastructure that is now officially finished and ready for its ribbon-cutting, but said ribbon-cutting hasn’t happened. Why? Because the president is a c*nt, that’s why.

Seriously. The opening ceremony was actually set, then cancelled, because the two sides — the Canadians and the Americans — couldn’t come to terms. The president is said to “want a better deal.” And I remind you, the deal that got the bridge built was about a good a deal as they come. The Canadians covered 100 percent of the costs, allowed the U.S. to do 50 percent of the labor, using American steel and materials. In return, they’ll take 100 percent of the tolls until the debt is repaid (which will, admittedly, take decades), at which point the split goes to 50-50.

It’s safe to say everybody wants the bridge to open except for one party — the Moroun family, which owns the existing Ambassador Bridge, and would certainly see its revenue slide, but that’s what happens when monopolies are challenged.

So we wait.

Meanwhile, today, a story dropped that quoted our “ambassador” to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, well, let him tell it:

U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra is calling claims that Canada paid for the Gordie Howe Bridge’s construction “a big myth,” even as the Canadian government insists it bore the full cost of building the span.

The former Michigan congressman appeared last week on “The Food Professor” podcast to discuss trade between the U.S. and Canada and food security.

The topic of the Gordie Howe Bridge came up. Hoekstra asked the hosts, Sylvain Charlebois and Michael LeBlanc, if they could tell him who paid for the new crossing between Detroit and Windsor, which still hasn’t opened.

…He explained that the Canadian government loaned the authority behind the bridge $4.5 billion to $5 billion.

“Canada is serving as the bank for the bridge,” the ambassador said. “The expectation is that over the years, as the bridge generates revenue, the bridge will be paid back. So the bridge will actually be paid for by the folks who are using the bridge. It will not be paid for by the Canadian government.”

What an asshole.

During the blast-furnace heat last week, I watched a few clips of this or that person in the administration, doing their part to fluff Tubby. And I wondered, do they think we have the memory of a single-celled organism? Do they think we won’t remember, oh, Usha Vance smirking through an interview with Trump about what he quote reads for fun unquote? Do they think that when the tide turns, they can just slither out onto the shore and wait for it to come back? Pete Hoekstra has always been a piece of crap. (Besties with Mark Souder, Hoosiers.) And he’s growing long in the tooth. But Caroline Leavitt, Natalie Harp? A lot of these folks are still young, and if there’s any justice, they’ll be in the wilderness for a long damn time, well after Tubby is finally planted.

It’s depressing, thinking of the recovery ahead, assuming it can even happen.

What else? The victory of the Belgian soccer team was sweet, coming as it did after you-know-what. And now we’re back at it with Iran, so expect a nice stock market hit today. Happy goddamn Wednesday.