I was foolish enough to think I’d wake up Tuesday ready to resume my swimming routine, but at 2 a.m., once again, it was cough-cough-cough-cough for a couple hours. At 5 I gave up and thought maybe something bland and soft on my stomach might help me drop off, and began the day with Raisin Bran.

It didn’t really improve from there, but I went out in the driving rain to buy some OTC cold remedies. I’m going to nuke my body with Nyquil tonight and get seven hours come hell or high water.

And I actually feel fairly OK. Except for the lack of sleep.

But never mind. Confined to soft chairs as I was today, I read this thing in Politico, exploring why the MAGA right is so obsessed with sex trafficking.

Well before MAGA, I’d noticed how these lurid sex-trafficking (but never labor trafficking) stories flowered among the Karens and Kens of America, who may or may not be MAGA but were MAGA-adjacent, shall we say. The stories about girls being abducted from malls, and their mothers from mall parking lots. The “Taken” films. This idea that women, anywhere, and sometimes children, can be snatched off the street or some other public place, never to be seen again. When anyone who’s even noddingly familiar with the issue knows the trafficker is almost always someone known to the victim, and isn’t likely to end up on a sheikh’s (or Jeffrey Epstein’s) jet, bound for a Qatari nest of prostitution. But you all know this.

The Politico piece is a Q&A with Mike Rothschild, who wrote “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything” and (this is my fave title) “Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.”

As is usually the case, the Clintons live rent-free in these dolts’ heads:

What is it about the Clintons that captivates far-right conspiracy theorists like this?

Part of it is that it’s already been three decades of this: The Clinton conspiracy industry started in the early 90s. It started with stuff like Whitewater, Travelgate, stuff that is ancient history now. But there was a really well-funded, very organized and popular effort to bring the Clintons down. And then of course, it resulted in the impeachment, it resulted in the dump truck full of conspiracies about Hillary Clinton when she ran for president. And even though they’re not really in the public eye much anymore, it’s so prolific that conspiracy theorists have stuck with them because they know what works. They’re just like a classic rock band playing the hits.

Which reminded me of a photo I took in a Detroit used bookstore a while back:

My brother had asked for a loathsome Clinton book for Christmas, and I was determined to look for a used copy before I paid the writer for one. Check out that chunk of reprinted Wall Street Journal reporting on Whitewater — remember that? And that was only one shelf. There were at least 20 different books on the Clintons, nearly all of them cut from the same cloth. As Rothschild says, the hits.

But it’s the salaciousness of the pedophilia accusations that always squicked me out, and I think Rothschild is right again here:

There’s always been a certain amount of salaciousness in these conspiracy theories, and there are theories going back about the awful sexual depravity of the Catholics or later on of the Jews. So you’re always going to find a certain amount of attention paid to any kind of conspiracy theory involving sexual proclivity of trafficking. And if it involves children, people immediately just lose their mind — even if these children don’t exist. There are no children who have been trafficked because of Pizzagate because Pizzgate isn’t real.

But if you just put out the suggestion there, it grabs ahold in a way that is difficult to dislodge. I think a lot of it has to do with antisemitism. I think a lot of it has to do with fear of the occult and Satanic panic. So you get all of these things that are mixed together: the anti-Jewish sentiment, the fear of Satanism. And, of course, now it extends to social media. So you have these powerful figures, in media, in politics, in culture, academia. It’s very easy to kind of put these people together as part of this vast conspiracy. And if there’s a conspiracy of them, well, they’re probably doing horrible things to children, too, because that’s what evil people do.

I hadn’t considered the ancient roots of antisemitism being the universal solvent here, but he’s right. One of the oldest hatreds, still a classic.

But this is the most important part, and why it’s pointless to try to change their minds:

Disinformation and conspiracy theories spread so quickly and so readily on social media, while the rest of us are doing our research and writing our articles and doing our interviews, trying to figure out what this actually means. The people who believe this stuff have already decided what it means. And they don’t want to be told differently.

Twitter and people like Alex Jones and people like Steve Bannon, they have an alternative media ecosystem. These are not fringe people anymore. This is not the guy standing outside the football stadium waving a sign about the end is coming. This is a massive industry. You’ve got billions of dollars being pumped into misinformation, into these products, into these podcasts, into these books. It’s a job for a lot of these people, and they’re very good at it. They spread this stuff very quickly. They know it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not, their audience doesn’t care.

So, good news: You can give up trying. And enjoy the midpoint of this miserably gloomy week.

I hope you all had a pleasant Insurrection Anniversary Weekend. The observances around here were minimal, mostly a lot of coughing, mostly on Alan’s part. Me, I think I may be over it, but as always, more will be revealed. Probably Monday. (On edit: It is now Monday. Still sick, but not terribly so.) We watched “Maestro” and were underwhelmed. Made salmon. Did the laundry.

Now I’m killing Sunday night scrolling through Golden Globes photos. Some astonishingly ugly turnouts, even considering it’s the starter event for awards season and often a little off-the-wall. Tom and Lorenzo liked this, but OMG no, Bella Ramsey, I don’t care if you’re nonbinary, this is not a goddamn bowling league banquet:

They also loved this, but I’m a hard no on peplums pretty much everywhere:

That’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph, from “The Holdovers.”

We’re in full agreement on Meryl Streep, however:

(We both loved it.)

Moving on to my new Monday hate-read: Paul W. Smith, who’s a local talk-radio host published by The Detroit News, where he files no more than six or seven paragraphs of prose so slight it barely qualifies as elevator small talk between the 10th and 25th floor. What’s more, they put it behind a paywall, because lord knows only the readers who pay for the paper should have the privilege of reading this:

Aside from many religious related exclamations of “miracles” over the years, one of the most famous such exclamations/questions of our lifetime had to be on Feb. 22, 1980, when extraordinary sportscaster Al Michaels blurted out, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” at the end of the United States’ 4-3 upset of the USSR in the 1980 Olympic hockey semifinals in Lake Placid, New York. The U.S. then went on to win the gold medal.

I have a new miracle. In fact, I am proclaiming it the first one of 2024.

The miracle at Japan’s Haneda Airport. Japan Airlines flight 516.

That long windup in the first graf makes me chuckle, it’s so full of cheese — “exclamations/questions,” the precise date, “extraordinary” Al Michaels, the full quote, the score, the date again, the city, the medal. Because lord knows this obscure moment from sporting history needs to be fully illuminated in the opening sentence. I’m surprised he didn’t mention the movie, too.

Then, the technique I’m calling the Albom Drop: But I have a new one. [new paragraph] The new thing.

More cut-and-paste from the wire services follows, detailing the crash in Japan, etc. etc. And he still manages to get the miraculous escape, in which all the passengers survived, wrong:

The well-trained crew of 12, along with a veteran pilot with 12,000 hours of flight experience, led to a relative absence of panic while passengers remained seated awaiting instructions.

See, I differ on this. I’m sure the crew did their jobs. But what saved the 379 people aboard wasn’t the crew. It was the fact they’re Japanese, raised in a culture where following instructions for the greater good of the collective is a bedrock value. If Japanese passengers in a clutch situation are told to get up, leave everything behind and swiftly exit via the inflated slides, they’re going to do it without an argument.

Anyone who’s flown on an American airline knows exactly how this would have ended at one of our airports. Fifty people might have made it off, and the rest would have been barbecued in jet fuel as passengers clawed at the overhead compartments, trying to rescue their laptops, wallets or favorite shoes, angrily pushing back at anyone who tried to hurry them toward the exits, screeching I HAVE A WORK PRESENTATION ON THAT COMPUTER AND MY BONUS DEPENDS ON IT.

Eight paragraphs, due to the Albom Drop. If it took him 10 minutes to write, he took a bathroom break in the middle.

More photos? Yes. Here’s one for my Columbus readers. I was telling Alan some Dispatch stories the other day, and recalled the Bonhams, a married couple who presided over the Sunday books page. We only saw them one day a week. Fridays were payday in the newsroom, and in those days before direct deposit, it meant everyone came in on Fridays — all the regional correspondents, the farm reporter (who wore bib overalls, and was hilarious), and the contributors like the Bonhams, who assembled and proofed their Sunday page. They were…well, “old-fashioned” would be the polite adjective. They took over from another weirdo, whose singular accomplishment of note was keeping books he considered “dirty” off the paper’s best-seller lists. I don’t remember how he did it — it was before my time — but Marge, our bridal reporter, said he was furious when “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” sat atop the lists for months at a time. I don’t know if he asterisk’d or simply ignored it, but if you had a book that did unexpectedly well in Columbus during the 1970s, that might be the reason.

Anyway, the Bonhams were cut from the same cloth. One of my colleagues described their ideal volume as “Twenty Years of Steam Trolleys,” and that’s pretty close. But they also hankered to be authors themselves, and when the Dispatch agreed to print a collection of their columns in book form, they came up with the perfect title:

I didn’t buy it, or even nick it out of the library, no. I told Alan this story, which he found hilarious. A few days later, UPS delivered it to our doorstep. The used bookseller was clearly so thrilled to get this dog out of her collection, she threw in another small-press volume, something called “Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction.”

I’ve been paging through the Bonhams’ prose for a few days. My fave so far is “Some Books That Press My Anger Buttons,” which I’ll summarize for you: Books that tell the reader how to succeed with no thought of others; books that run down America; books with “vulgar scenes and bad language”; and “books that exploit celebrities.” This column contains my favorite line so far: An author I know, who is a good writer and is working on a book, is being pushed by his publisher to put a homosexual scene in the manuscript. “Never!” says the author. “Even if it means my book will never be published.”

Seeing as how I’ve gone on at length beating up on three writers, let me finish with some praise: This biblioholic received Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud” for Christmas, and is enjoying it very much. Happy Monday, all, and send healing vibes this way.

All of a sudden, the young people I know are having babies. Not Kate’s crew, but the slightly older ones, the ones in their 30s. I went to a baby shower in the spring, a more casual one this fall, and now there’s one on the calendar for this month. I want to give all the parents what they ask for on their registries, but also my gift of knowledge, and uppermost in mind is this:

You won’t need most of this stuff.

Not that I am stingy, but it’s hard not to be awed by the sheer quantity of stuff new mothers are told they have to buy, a truth when I was pregnant, and one that persists today. And so much of it – so, so much – will be used little, or not at all. You need burp cloths, yes, but any old cloth will do; I found a six-pack of cheap cloth diapers did just fine. You need clothing for the little shaver, but shoes are entirely optional until they start walking. And while it pains me to say this, say it I must: Give up the dream of being an eco-warrior and using cloth diapers for anything other than spit-up cleanups: There’s a reason this is Pampers’ world and we’re all just living in it. If it scratches too hard at your conscience, find a brand that isn’t an environmental disaster and stick with it.

One modern trend I approve of: The one where guests are asked to bring a book and sign it to the baby. I can never disapprove of books. But after they’ve gone through all those infant board books, again I whisper: The public library is an excellent resource. Not all parents have the outstanding Allen County Public Library just down the road, but “move to Fort Wayne” isn’t an option for most of them.

Anyway, I know a lucky baby who’s getting a Poppleton book. Advanced for reading on their own, but fine for reading to them, once they can sit up and appreciate Poppleton’s world. It was between that and the McDuff books. And everything by Rosemary Wells. And so, so many others. No one embraces reading to a child as enthusiastically as an older mother.

OK, just added “Good Dog Carl” to my Amazon cart. You can’t get a good start in life without a copy of “Good Dog Carl.”

There’s much going on in the world, but today my interest is drawn to something I wrote a couple of years ago. I only recently learned that a Michigan U.S. representative traveled to Uganda — fucking UGANDA — to do this:

U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Tipton) traveled to the African nation in October for that country’s National Prayer Breakfast, during which he encouraged Uganda to “stand firm” in its Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was signed into law in May by President Yoweri Museveni, and includes the death penalty for those who are determined to be “serial offenders.”

Walberg began his remarks by applauding Ugandan Member Parliament Cecilia Ogwal, who he said came second only to God, after earlier in the prayer breakfast she compared support for LGBTQ+ individuals as an attack on God.

It so happens I know a gay Ugandan. He’ll be an American eventually, but the last I checked on him, he still had permanent asylum status, and was waiting out the year before he could apply for a green card. That’s when I wrote about him, after having known him casually/socially for a few years.

As I pointed out in my column, Alistair enjoyed many advantages people coming in on the southern border don’t have, mainly education, language skills and a certain amount of money. But even so, I was struck by just how hard it is to drive to an airport with the clothes on your back and whatever you could fit in a suitcase, but a one-way ticket and say goodbye to everything you’ve known. Make no mistake, he grew up with the sort of advantages an upper-middle-class child enjoys in modern Africa, but he still had to flee his home and country. Meanwhile, this Moody Bible Institute grad strokes the people who drove him out. Disgusting.

OK, I’m going to try to navigate a shower with my seasonal crud (not Covid, yay) and then take Wendy for a mani-pedi.

The new year — Eve and Day — is one where a certain amount of reflection is almost required. Doing laundry yesterday, I started thinking about the turn of the millennium. In…I think September 1999, a major water main in Fort Wayne ruptured, cutting off service to a big chunk of the city. And how did the affected customers respond? By fleeing to grocery stores to buy up all the bottled water, and yes, I think there were shoving matches here and there over the last case on the shelves.

It didn’t bode well for the feared Y2K bug, coming at the end of the year.

Remember that? Millions of words of fear-mongering, warning that nuclear reactors could melt down, business records disappear (including your life savings), and yes, infrastructure that keeps life going – like municipal water systems – would similarly fail. Advertising for survival goods like dehydrated food, water purification filters and 24-hour candles soared. It was a big topic.

We had a recently turned 3-year-old, wonderful neighbors, and cable television. When the new year began arriving in the Pacific, the celebrations, yes I said celebrations, started. And it was beautiful. CNN covered the rolling party, and as the day wore on, we watched fireworks, bell-ringing and parties breaking out, hour after hour, as the disaster failed to arrive. Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, across Asia to Moscow, Eastern Europe, Western Europe (Paris’ fireworks were particularly wonderful), Africa. That was the night I learned that Canada’s Maritime provinces have this weird half-hour time hiccup, but that just meant another batch of live party video at the bottom of the hour. Finally it was our turn. A neighbor detonated 2,000 firecrackers in the street, which I feared would awaken Kate but didn’t. We went to bed and got up early to learn what we already knew – that those who had crouched in their basements fearing the worst had been wrong. Life would go on. The computers didn’t fail. The center held.

We had not quite two years of believing that life would get better and peace would reign until al-Qaida changed everything, but it was fun while it lasted. I think of that New Year’s Eve from time to time as kind of a platonic ideal. We made a nice dinner, we drank champagne, we kissed at midnight, we went to bed, we woke up happy and safe.

I hope yours was like that.

As for the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere, this year we went out. For the first time in years. Kate’s band was playing with two others we like at a local club. The theme of the evening was Playboy After Dark, an excuse to get dressed up, and we did. Alan leaned all the way in with a smoking jacket, captain’s cap and gold chain. I just wore a nice dress. Kate, as a performer, went a little further:

The other bands that night were pretty hard core, and they sounded great and loud, but not so loud we couldn’t have a conversation at our table in the back. Here’s Will, Kate’s high-school friend, who plays in the Stools, hoisting his instrument high while the crowd goes wild:

No good shots of Shadow Show, sorry — it was elbow-to-elbow crowded, and we could only see them from way off to the side. If we don’t get Covid it’ll be a miracle. But I’m not sorry we went. It was the polar opposite of 2000, but NYE 2024 was worth all the trouble. And I got a Stools T-shirt.

P.S. I just remembered a detail from 2000-ish: A Fort Wayne man died and the contents of his house were auctioned. He’d been a Y2K paranoiac, and his basement was stacked to the ceiling with canned goods, freeze-dried food and other supplies. If you needed 200 rolls of paper towels, cheap, that was your stop. A colleague wrote a story about it.

So! What else is going on in the world? Nikki Haley steps in it again:

On the heels of a very bad week for Nikki Haley, the Republican presidential candidate said she would pardon Donald Trump if he’s convicted of federal crimes. “I would pardon Trump if he is found guilty,” she said at a campaign event in Plymouth, New Hampshire, on Thursday.

“A leader needs to think about what’s in the best interest of the country,” Haley went on. “What’s in the best interest of the country is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail that continues to divide our country. What’s in the best interest of our country is to pardon him so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”

Yeah, Nikki, ask Gerald Ford how that worked out for him. Of course, I think it would be excellent for the country to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail, proving we actually have a rule of law and it applies to everyone, but I’m a crazy dreamer.

Otherwise, I’m going to spend the day doing a whole lot of nothing — maybe taking down the Christmas tree — and eating leftovers. Happy New Year to all of our little community, and fingers crossed we’re still standing a year from now.

So Nikki Haley was asked directly, at a New Hampshire town hall, what the cause of the Civil War was. Her answer:

“I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

Pressed to go a little deeper, she answered, again:

“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley replied.

A few years ago, I did a story on black Republicans in Michigan, and one of them spoke movingly of “under the oaks,” the founding of the Republican Party in Jackson, Michigan. It was founded by abolitionists, for crying out loud. When black Detroiter James Craig was doing his get-to-know-me tour before he announced his cursed run for governor, he gave a speech at Under the Oaks park. But Haley, former governor of a southern state, and at least a nominal person of color, can’t bring herself to even speak the word “slavery” in discussing a historical question a fourth-grader could answer. I know, I know — the southern states cling to their war-of-northern-aggression mythos, and love to get misty-eyed over states’ rights and all, but come ON. The “rights of the people” she was tacitly defending was the right to own other human beings.

Ladies and gentlemen, the GOP’s “moderate” wing.

So. The holidays are nearly over; just a few more days until we can drag the tree to the curb and vacuum up what it left behind. I trust you all had a pleasant Christmas? We did, although, as always happens, I ate to the point of gluttony and feel like I have gained 500 pounds and never want to see sugar again. Making a nice vegetable soup later, and will eat as much as I feel.

Short one today, but I’m in the interregnum holiday period where I’m questioning all my choices, and thinking about cleaning a few closets. So this is low on my list.

Carry on. I’m off to the gym for people to point and laugh at the fat lady.

Sometime in the summer of 2020, I ran across a quote from Hillary Clinton that I cannot for the life of me find again. And yet, I know I didn’t hallucinate it. It was immediately after the August 2020 Michigan primary, when the Wayne County Board of Canvassers made a big to-do at their certification meeting, and whaddaya know, I wrote about this once before, and here’s what I said in 2021:

I wish I could find a quote from Hillary Clinton, something she said after the August 2020 primary here, when there was, again, a hoo-hah raised over unbalanced precincts. It’s true that too many were unbalanced, but again, most were by very small numbers, attributable to human error, and didn’t affect any races. Having worked the polls now for three elections, I can tell you the procedures are filled with fiddly bits and little details and detours and side roads to cover every conceivable voting situation, and when the people working the precinct are doing it once, maybe twice a year, it’s a miracle that any of them come out balanced. In August, I caught two or three errors in my own precinct that were caused by nothing more than confusion or assumptions made in error. We easily corrected them, but still. It happens.

And Hillary said something to the effect of, “You watch, this unbalanced-precincts thing was a test run. They’re going to try it again.” And what do you know, they did. I have Googled and Googled, and can’t find the source, but I clearly remember her talking about it.

As the world knows, that was precisely the argument made against certification in November 2020, when the Wayne County board deadlocked over the results from Detroit. Unbalanced!* OMG! The meeting went on for hours, with the chairwoman of the board actually offering to certify the rest of the county, i.e. the white part, but not Detroit, i.e., the black part. The meeting was held on Zoom, and dozens and dozens and dozens of voters howled their outrage over this. Toward the end of the meeting, the two GOP canvassers changed their votes, but left without actually signing the certificate and, a day later, tried to call backsies.

* The total number of votes in unbalanced precincts was fewer than 500, fewer than four in individual counting boards, and wouldn’t have affected the results of a single race. Source.

It was upsetting for everybody, and someone did indeed call/text threats to one of the canvassers, Monica Palmer. We also knew that the president, the orange one, called Palmer after the meeting, to express “genuine concern for my safety,” which is what she said then.

These days, she says she “can’t remember” what was said on the call. You know how it is: The president of the United States calls you, and the deets slip your mind.

Well, in these days of a recording device in every pocket, a recording of that very call has emerged:

Then-President Donald Trump personally pressured two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to sign the certification of the 2020 presidential election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News and revealed publicly for the first time.

On a Nov. 17, 2020, phone call, which also involved Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Trump told Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two GOP Wayne County canvassers, they’d look “terrible” if they signed the documents after they first voted in opposition and then later in the same meeting voted to approve certification of the county’s election results, according to the recordings.

“We’ve got to fight for our country,” said Trump on the recordings, made by a person who was present for the call with Palmer and Hartmann. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”

McDaniel, a Michigan native and the leader of the Republican Party nationally, said at another point in the call, “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.”

To which Trump added: “We’ll take care of that.”

You can read the rest of the story, which is not paywalled. On the one hand, nothing about this is surprising, except to learn that 1) it wasn’t just Palmer he called, but Palmer, the other canvasser, Ronna McDaniel and a few other people who were sitting in a vehicle parked outside the TCF Center the night of the certification vote; and 2) whatever was said about her safety, there was a lot more said, too; and of course, 3) today Palmer testifies that she can’t recall what, exactly, was said on the call.

But bottom line, once again, Trump was caught on tape asking for crimes.

Three years later, Palmer has divorced her husband (a neighbor of mine) and moved back to west Michigan. The other canvasser, William Hartmann, died of Covid in 2021, a proud #pureblood. Palmer’s phrase to describe those who threatened her (and of course there were threats), “Grosse Pointe Antifa,” enjoyed a brief moment in the sun, and I regret I didn’t snag one of the T-shirts that clever merch salespeople came up with, especially the ones with the crossed lacrosse sticks. Both have been replaced on the canvassing board by even-crazier MAGA types. Ronna McDaniel has led her party to an ever-lengthening string of defeats, thanks to her fealty to Loser McLosington himself.

So. It’s nearly Christmas, and I wish you all a merry and peaceful one. I’ll be back sometime next week.

Topic for today: Is there a bigger hypocrite on the public stage than Clarence Thomas?

The latest ProPublica look at his fishy finances starts out with a banger:

In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.

The gist of the story is, Thomas’ poor-mouthing at conservative events was what led to he and Ginni becoming the latter-day Duke and Duchess of Windsor, freeloading their way across the world, swinging from one rich friend’s guest house to the next. They vacation with billionaires, they take (forgiven) “loans” for shit like recreational vehicles, and so on:

The full details of Thomas’ finances over the years remain unclear. He made at least two big purchases around the early ’90s: a Corvette and a house in the Virginia suburbs on 5 acres of land. When Thomas and his wife, Ginni, bought the home for $522,000 a year after he joined the court, they borrowed all but $8,000, less than 2% of the purchase price, property records show.

Public records suggest a degree of financial strain. Throughout the first decade of his tenure, the couple regularly borrowed more money, including a $100,000 credit line on their house and a consumer loan of up to $50,000. Around January 1998, Thomas’ life changed when he took in his 6-year-old grandnephew, becoming his legal guardian and raising him as a son. The Thomases sent the child to a series of private schools.

I think I may have mentioned last summer, on a long drive, listening to a podcast interview with the director of a film about Thomas’ life. It was impossible not to feel empathy for him, a parent-less boy raised by his terrible grandfather, abused by virtually everyone in his life. His classmates called him “ABC,” i.e. “America’s blackest child.” His grandfather pushes him, hard, in the direction of the priesthood, for his own status-seeking reasons, but the blatant racism of his fellow seminarians drives him away. Law school at Yale exposed him to people who had been coasting on greased skids their entire lives, and Thomas thought at least here he’d graduate into some damn money, but that didn’t happen, either, and he entered government service in the Reagan era, distinguishing himself as a huge asshole at a time when there was real competition for that level. This was at the EEOC, an agency that Reagan would want a huge asshole running.

In short, hurt people hurt people, and Thomas was very good at it.

But what would Thomas, with his famous bootstrap philosophy, think of a person who bought sports cars and houses with practically no money down? He was earning around $176,000 at the time, or $300K in 2023 dollars. He would call that person fiscally irresponsible. And he would be correct. But money seems to be the bass line of so much of Thomas’ resentment. He was delivering big for the nation’s conservatives, and he expected tribute for it. Well, he got it. No one will remember him as a keen legal mind, but rather, as the fat man who rarely spoke, but always ruled predictably.

Breaking Detroit journalism news this afternoon, as local podcaster Charlie LeDuff was arrested last night for domestic violence against his wife. I’m watching the reaction unspool on Twitter. It’s interesting to see how many people are behaving, and commenting, exactly as you’d expect. The guy who loves a shiv when you’re not expecting it has deployed his own. The guy who now works for a right-wing policy shop points out the judge in the arraignment was a protege of the Democratic attorney general. There’s a lot of “not surprised,” which is Duh, because no one who knows, or even heard of, LeDuff should be even mildly surprised by this development.

Not two months ago, he was fired from his contributor’s gig at The Detroit News for calling the aforementioned attorney general a cunt on Twitter. At the time, I described him as “a downward-spiraling journalist who fancies himself a Jon Stewart/Hunter Thompson mashup and desperate to ‘go national,’” and I’ll stand by that. But I won’t do an end-zone dance; it’s sad when someone throws their career away, and he’s been doing so with both hands for quite some time.

If I were his friend, I’d tell him to follow the path of Neil Steinberg, arrested in very similar circumstances 18 years ago, who sobered up and has stayed that way ever since. But we’re not, and he didn’t ask. It’s up to him.

OK, then. Tomorrow is cleaning day. Cleaning and wrapping. As the days tick down.

Continuing the theme of earlier this week: I don’t know about you guys, but just looking at the news these days is either enraging or depressing. Biden at last night’s White House Hanukkah party, ignoring the elephant in the room. (On edit: Yes, there was a shift in tone today.) Tommy Tuberville, the idiot senator with the cartoon-mouse name. Trump collecting resumes for his next reign of terror. J.D. Vance, helpfully spreading the nation’s cheeks for a giant screwing by Vladimir Putin. The Texas abortion case alone about sent me through the fucking roof.

Fortunately, I have some diversions.

This afternoon, in our very own backyard:

Fuzzy pic, but you can watch the sharper short video here.

That’s a Cooper’s hawk, I believe, and lunch was an unlucky mourning dove. But boy, that raptor didn’t waste a bite — there’s a pile of feathers there now, and not a hint of flesh. Alan captured this moment of nature drama, and said the hawk started on the breast and went straight through to the guts, gobbled the whole thing up.

I find birds a solace at times like this. They’re up there in the sky and trees, living their lives, and so far they haven’t elected Donald Trump president. Maybe one will shit on his head in a public place sometime soon.

Otherwise? Check out these girls:

New Shadow Show rekkid (as they say on the east coast) in February! Is there a taste? Yes there is, another video. Which you can watch here. Girl-group psychedelia.

Anything else? Sure. Guess where I read this interview with Johnny Rotten:

The AARP Bulletin, that’s where.

And is there more? There is more! Another paywalled story, but the gist: A Metro Detroit local, described as an “amateur porn personality” was charged in the January 6 Capitol attack. Tee-hee:

The case against Paul Caloia, 33, shows him wearing a Detroit Red Wings hat and a white mask inside the Capitol during the siege and include screengrabs of surveillance footage of Caloia and a video he posted online showing him inside the Capitol, talking about being in the “wrong room at the wrong time.”

The Caloia case describes the colorful backstory of a Macomb County man who is among approximately 25 people from Michigan — and more than 1,100 nationwide — charged with crimes related to the siege that involved supporters of former President Donald Trump breaking into the Capitol, ransacking offices, overwhelming and assaulting police officers and sending lawmakers into hiding as Congress tried to certify the 2020 Electoral College vote count. The group includes former Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley, who is serving a 60-day federal prison sentence in a low-security prison in Wisconsin.

While I had hoped that being a porn personality meant you were an extra who maybe stood around while the stars provided the action, maybe the guy who waves a feather fan in the Roman-orgy scene, but I guess he just does some amateur porn. Alan found a picture of his testicles online. Not very impressive.

And now it’s just past 5 and the sun has set. Cocktail hour, I’d say. Fortunately, Alan has mixed up an excellent margarita. Talk later, eh?

Well, that was a strange semi-illness. Not sick enough to be sick, not well enough to be well, just sorta in-between. I’m grateful I have the leisure now to fully indulge my little complaints, and not have to drag ass to work in spite of them. In any event, by Thursday I was fine. Took my boxing class on Saturday morning and made the heavy bag whimper a little. All better.

Otherwise, we spent the weekend chasing wild geese, trying to see “The Holdovers” and getting the time wrong, which led to a mediocre Thai meal in a strip mall in Sterling Heights (locals may shudder at this point) and no movie, but at least we got out of the house. So we came home, watched two episodes of “Fargo” and went to bed, only to learn the very next night that “The Holdovers” was available to stream all along, so we did. It was very good, and with “May December,” “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” already under our belts, we may actually be able to form our own informed opinions on the Oscar race next year.

Speaking of movies, this morning I read a column in The Detroit News about the Israeli film that’s making the rounds of, as we say, opinion leaders and other big shots. It’s a compilation of atrocity videos seized after October 7, from security cameras and prisoner captures. I won’t link (paywall), but I’ll quote a bit more liberally than I generally do:

“Bearing Witness to the October 7th Massacre” was presented to a small group of Metro Detroiters by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Israeli Consulate to the Midwest. Much of the film was compiled from the cell phones and body cameras of the Hamas terrorists as they rampaged through Jewish settlements butchering civilians.

The footage is terrifyingly graphic. It is a reminder, as if we needed one, of the depths of inhumanity to which hatred can sink human beings.

What we saw Sunday night was excruciating to watch, harder still to discuss. When it was over most of us walked to our cars barely speaking.

Imagine watching the most gruesome horror flick, without the benefit of knowing the gore on screen is make-believe. In this movie, the blood is real. The bodies are real. The evil is real.

A snuff film, basically, prepared to counter the it-didn’t-happen propaganda coming from the other side. The sponsors are showing it here and there, to small audiences, with strict rules: Phones surrendered at the door, no notes taken, but you’re free (obviously) to write about it later, and given that many of those invited are journalists, that seems to be the intent. I wish this columnist had thought to write a better story, like this one in the L.A. Times, explaining more of the context, and the protest over it, but oh well.

The writer has certainly internalized the intent of the screening:

But the atrocities are why Israel is in Gaza, and why it can’t and won’t be deterred in its mission. The snake of fanatical jihadism must be killed, or it will strike again and again.

That is no doubt satisfying to write, but ignores the how of that statement, and that’s the problem. I don’t even listen to those who throw around terms like colonialism and resistance; Israel has a right to exist and defend itself. But the question that makes so many of us wince is this: How many dead civilians does it take to kill that snake? How many children? Because so far, it doesn’t seem to be going so well, and never mind the whole Netanyahu question, among about a million others. Of course Hamas committed terrible atrocities on October 7; this has never been in doubt. It’s whether those atrocities warrant the response so far that’s in question.

When I was a Knight-Wallace Fellow (’03-’04), we had a seminar one day, a discussion with the father of one of our international fellows, who was Palestinian, and a professor at the university at Ramallah. It went well until one of the others, who was Israeli, asked a question in a rather impertinent tone. The professor didn’t explode, but the temperature rose sharply. He angrily spoke about the destruction of vital highways in the Palestinian areas (which made it impossible for those employed entirely within those areas to get to their jobs, or anywhere else) and other Israeli actions. He talked about the crush at the checkpoints, where the few who could pass into and out of Israel were pushed by soldiers into tight spaces as they waited for their credentials to be checked; at one of these, an Israeli soldier standing on an elevated platform over the crowd unzipped his pants and urinated on them, moving in a wide arc to hit as many as possible.

That’s not an atrocity. It’s not a suicide bombing. But imagine being underneath him.

At the time, I knew much less about the conflict than I do now. A few months after this, I had a tryout for a job in public radio. Talking to the producer to plan upcoming shows, we threw around some topics, and something about the conflict was in the news, and hence, a possibility. “I hate those shows,” she said. “You end them despising everybody, on both sides. It’s so depressing.”

That’s kind of where I’m at now. I’m also kind of agog at how wars will be conducted in the future, when every soldier and civilian will carry a cheap video recording device in their pocket, when artificial intelligence reaches the point that virtually anything can be deepfaked. And legit journalism is shrinking-shrinking-shrinking, and fewer and fewer professional journalists will even be near the fields of battle.

I wasn’t invited to the screening of the Israeli compilation. At the very least, I wanted to know who else was, and I didn’t learn that from the column, either. Maybe even that description was verboten, too.

Don’t know how to wrap this, other than to say keeping up with the news is hard and depressing, but I’m not opting out.

If there’s a God, Henry Kissinger is being tortured in Hell by being beaten for eternity with the severed limbs of all the Cambodian civilians he bombed to pieces. But maybe there isn’t a God, and if there is, we can’t know Their ways. All I know is, the world is a better place with him gone. It feels like it’s been a long time since we had the satisfaction of watching a genuinely evil bastard check out. So what does the may-or-may-not-be-God do next?

Kill Shane MacGowan. St. Patrick’s Day won’t be the same without him.

The other day I saw something — an op-ed, a tweet, can’t remember — that said every world event didn’t need to be reacted to by official bodies. The Detroit City Council has no dog in the Israel-Palestine war, but passed a resolution “supporting” a ceasefire, as well as hostage release. Which leads me to this:

First reaction: Oh, of course it would be the goddamn Yankees. Second reaction: Who the hell cares that George Steinbrenner and Henry Kissinger were friends? Final reaction: Not wanting to be one of those shut-up-and-sing people, I beg off of this dispute. But I think about what that op-ed/tweet/whatever that started this said: Not everything has to be reacted to, especially when it’s a baseball team reacting to the death of a war criminal.

What other assholes are in the news today? Elon Musk, telling Disney’s CEO to go fuck himself — in that language — if he won’t advertise on Musk’s moth-eaten social platform. Man, I hope Linda Yaccarino has an excellent exit package for when she finally gets fed up trying to put lipstick on this pig. Actually, no I don’t. She went into this deal with the devil with her eyes wide open. Well, shit happens, especially entirely predictable shit.

Sorry to be such a grouch today. I have a new library book I’d like to get to, and the day outside looks suitable for a walk, both things I’d rather be doing. So best zip this up and hope for better things.