So Jack Welch is dead. Sorry to speak ill of the dead, but no big loss. Remember when he retired? And then he fell in love with some younger woman, and his wife spilled the financial beans during the divorce proceedings? It turned out that in addition to being paid 10 king’s ransoms in his retirement package, General Electric’s stockholders then put themselves on the hook to pay for everything in his life, and I do mean everything:

Following disclosure of his affair with the editor of the Harvard Business Review, the captain of capitalism has been painted as a ruthless womanizer who let his shareholders pay for just about everything–right down to the GE light bulbs in his numerous homes. Jane Beasley Welch has emerged as the modern model of the savvy corporate wife: so clever that she thought to include an expiration date in her prenuptial agreement–and stayed married long enough to pass it.

With perhaps $1 billion at stake, the Welch divorce is a primer on how wealthy couples uncouple. The case also affords a window into the benefits that corporations lavish on retired top executives–everything, in Jack Welch’s case, from sports tickets to the lifetime use of GE-owned jets, with charge accounts at flower shops and one of New York’s most expensive dining establishments thrown in as well. Mostly, this is a story about how a man who routinely crushed adversaries when he ran a Fortune 500 empire was stopped in his tracks by his own wife.

…Despite Welch’s intentions to keep things private, Jane Welch filed an affidavit in Bridgeport, Conn., outlining the couple’s “extraordinary” standard of living–much of it compliments of General Electric. The next day, the New York Times ran a long article describing how GE pays for the apartment the Welches occupied on Central Park West, membership fees at five country clubs and full staffs and services at homes in Florida, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

By Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun an informal inquiry into Welch’s compensation agreement. Welch himself penned a column in Monday’s Wall Street Journal revealing that he offered last week to give up many of his retirement benefits–and the GE board accepted.

In other words, this titan of capitalism was…a welfare queen, basically. Light bulbs. Imagine the amount of cheek it takes to do whatever one must do to accept light bulbs from the people who thought they were investing in your company. Do you place an order? Does your household manager do it? Do they send over an assorted case? Or do you put in for reimbursement?

God, I remember that era – the ’80s, ’90s, around in there? Every third book in the bookstore was by one of these guys, delivering their secrets of success. (In airports, it was every other book.)

As the Washington Post’s Helaine Olen notes, Welch was really even worse:

Welch popularized the concept known as “shareholder value,” the idea that the primary duty of a company’s management is to increase its stock price for the benefit of shareholders. In pursuit of this goal, he bought and sold companies, shedding huge numbers of employees along the way. GE’s share prices soared. For this, Welch was celebrated: imitated by competitors and lionized by the fawning business press.

Never mind the fact Welch routinely closed GE’s Rust Belt factories and moved the jobs to Third World locales, where workers labored for less — much, much less — than the former GE employees. Never mind the fact that he cut funding for research and development, something that can undermine a company’s long-term health. And never mind the fact that the humane postwar arrangement between corporations and their employees — give us your loyalty and we’ll take care of you as best we can — ended in part because of Welch. He made money for shareholders, and that was the important thing.

So no, I will not be shedding any tears for Jack. Suzy Wetlaufer Welch – the woman he left Jane for – will come out ahead, no doubt. I’ve always said the best job in the world is to be the ex-wife of one of these goons. Maybe the second-best one is the widow, especially when you’re still young enough to enjoy it. The widow Welch is 61; she’ll be fine.

Oh, wait: There’s one more book on the stand. From 2006:

When Jack and Suzy met almost three years ago, they had much that seemed good in their lives. They traded it-his wife, her job, both of their reputations-for what they say is true love. The result was a storm the size of which neither one had ever seen. And now reporters are calling again. Jack and Suzy are writing a book about business strategy. Jack and Suzy have bought a house on Beacon Hill. Jack and Suzy are getting married. Jack and Suzy are in the news.

…Suzy Wetlaufer is not an easy woman to pigeonhole. She’s a Harvard-educated novelist, a brilliant thinker who some say was the best editor the Harvard Business Review ever had. She’s a devout Christian who attends Bible study regularly, but she’s also a woman who is partial to French manicures and shopping for designer clothes. She can expound on the situation in Iraq in one breath and blurt out things like, “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs,” or, “Get out of town!” in another. When complimented, she may even exclaim, “I love you!” punctuated by a giant kissing sound. And yet, says Jack, “She’s the smartest person I know. I told her that on our second date.”

Good lord, imagine writing that crap. Why are all these little home wreckers devout Christians who attend Bible study regularly? Mrs. Gingrich, all the rest of them.

So now it’s Super Tuesday evening, and I’m watching the returns come in with the same blankness I’ve had all season. Just tell me who I’m voting for in November.

I guess we’ll know soon. Have a good hump day, eh?

I feel like I spend more time apologizing here than actually writing anything of interest. Last week was about as bananas as weeks get for me, at least one that didn’t involve some sort of tragedy or truly bad luck. No, it was all plain old work, just work, plus an extracurricular event on Friday night that I was involved with executing. Everything went well, but it was just one of Those Weeks — never ahead, always juggling 10 different things, dropping lots of balls but scooping them back up and trying to get them aloft again.

At one point Friday, I realized I had two text conversations going, a Google hangout, an urgent email dangling in reply, and, AND, a third separate text conversation with the cable company, which left me vowing that this time, no kidding, I am fucking DROPPING cable internet because Xfinity sucks so bad.

Long story short: I carried a bag of trash out to the cans and found the cable line drooping to about the level of my chin. Some utility crews have been in the neighborhood trimming trees away from power lines, doing their usual job, which is to say, not quite the work of a trained arborist. A limb must have knocked it loose. We still had cable, but probably not for much longer.

Xfinity makes such a mockery of customer service. I can feel my chest tightening just thinking about Friday. It used to be, you called a number, made your way through a decision tree, and ended up speaking to a heavily accented woman in a call center far away across the Pacific. I would ask where they were, and they would always deflect, but from their accents I deduced: The Philippines. But those days, those crazy days of yore, are gone forever. Now you must communicate with these individuals via text message. And because they aren’t using Apple’s iMessage, this means thumb-typing, not my strong suit. Fortunately, there’s a workaround, I forget what they call it in the OS, where you can type on your screen, cntrl-C, and then paste it manually on your phone. Laborious, but effective.

Are the people you are texting with in the Philippines? No idea. They could be on the moon for all I know. Based on their replies, which ranged from perfect answers to a standard question — no doubt copied and pasted from a script — to broken English on non-standard ones, they’re almost certainly not in the U.S.:

Comcast Care Chat: Rest assured that once the technician goes there, all your frustrations will stop so you will finally have your peace of mind.

Long story short, the line was fixed, but the guy restrung it differently, so it’s probably going to come down again when we have the giant dying oak tree removed from the back yard tomorrow. Speaking of things that tighten my chest. There’s losing a tree that’s probably close to a century old, for starters, and then what it will cost: The price of a decent vacation.

So at the start of a month, when the stock market is tanking and public hysteria is rising and Rush Limbaugh, that ignorant pile of crap, is telling people that it’s the common cold and anyway, that doctor talking about this disease like she knows something? She’s Rod Rosenstein’s sister, you know:

Rush Limbaugh and right-wing fringe sites are attacking Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official handling the coronavirus response, because she is Rod Rosenstein's sister. They're spreading the lie that she's part of the deep state and trying to tank the markets to weaken Trump.

— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) February 26, 2020

No wonder I’m in such a foul mood.

But by this time Wednesday things should have slowed down considerably, so look for more then.

In the meantime, here is a very strange story that I kept expecting to go in a different direction than it did. The headline is Miranda’s Rebellion, but it’s really about the agonies of a southern homemaker who can’t stop the bells clanging in her head:

It is white women in the Deep South who have remained [Republican] loyalists, the research showed, giving Trump 64 percent of their vote in 2016, a figure that did not include Miranda Murphey, who had first started reevaluating her politics after the election of Barack Obama, even though she had voted Republican.

“It was all the comments I kept hearing, like, ‘Change the channel, I don’t want to see that black face,’” she said. “It was always that he was black, not that he was liberal, not that there was a problem with some policy. I always thought being a Republican meant supporting the military and lower taxes, not being racist and ignorant.”

Then came Trump, who Miranda found so morally repugnant that for the first time in her voting life she wrote in the name of the Libertarian Party candidate and went to bed expecting that good and decent conservatives would do the same. She woke up realizing she was wrong. Church members had voted for Trump. Her parents had gone for Trump. Phillip [her husband]: Trump.

Miranda made a new friend at the start of the administration, and I kept waiting for her to leave Phillip for Liz, but that didn’t happen. But it’s a very good story, and I recommend it.

Also: Mayor Pete is out. So there’s that.

As for me, here’s to an easier week for me, you and everybody else. Wash your hands.

I see you guys have hashed out the Bernie Question in the previous post comments. I have little to add, since no one listens to me and I can’t change history. It’s looking better than ever that he’ll be the nominee, and as I am on record as saying I’ll vote for whoever opposes Trump, up to and including the Exhumed Corpse of Charles Manson (campaign slogan: Not me. Us. Plus whoever wants to hang at the ranch.)

But I am a worrier, and I expect I’ll be worrying up to and through Nov. 3. I have allowed a small crack of optimism to push through, thinking that with the right running mate and messaging, it might be possible to pull off a miracle. If Trump pardons Roger Stone, that won’t help. If there’s an undecided voter left in this stupid country, there’s no way he or she will be swayed by the idea of mercy for that smirking douchebag in his very elegant homburg, or whatever he was wearing over his hair plugs the last time he had his picture taken.

Speaking of which, Mitch Albom phoned in another one this weekend, about pardons. Like his Kobe Bryant tribute, it smelled of a quick Wikipedia scan. And like most of his non-sports columns, it was crafted to not exactly say anything that might actually be an opinion. After noting that “perhaps” it’s time to “rethink” the whole idea of the presidential pardon, he goes way out on that limb and says:

Now, before you scatter to your political corners, know that I say this not because President Donald Trump has used his pardon power largely as a means of rewarding supporters or getting back at enemies, but because other presidents have as well, and more are likely to do so in the future.

No, it’s not because a president is obviously abusing the power of the pardon, it’s because Marc Rich and Barack Obama, who “used his pardon power nearly 2,000 times, more than the previous five presidents combined.” Too bad he didn’t read deeper into that Wikipedia entry, where he might have learned that Obama’s pardons were overwhelmingly weighted to help people who had been convicted of non-violent drug offenses, most of them people of color. Marc Rich I won’t defend, but who’s still upset about that one?

That guy. I can’t waste another minute with him.

Anyway, a very nice weekend here. The sun came out and stayed out, and at the moment it’s quite warm. I’m considering a bike ride. Last night I took myself out on a me-date to the Cat Video Fest 2020. It was a me-date because I couldn’t find anyone else to go with me. Not sure why I wanted to see it; I don’t have a cat, have never had a cat, but cats are cool. My favorite cat videos of all time are the ones collected by a Tumblr blog called Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn, but I haven’t been able to look at that since Tumblr required an account to look at anything on that platform. Needless to say, none were in the Cat Video Fest. Although Henri was!

Then it was home early, and what the hell, a rewatch of “Up in the Air,” a fine movie that shows off George Clooney’s laugh lines but brought me abruptly back to 2009-ish, when the film subsidies had lots of crews here — no duplicating that flat overcast winter sky. Also, where better to shoot a film about the collapse of the economy than here, where a film crew can get an entire abandoned skyscraper to shoot in? God, what a terrible time that was, and yet. I remember reading about credit swap defaults, then looking out the window to wonder why people weren’t rioting in the street. Then I’d make dinner. I ran across a line in a book review recently, about how we live in multiple timelines simultaneously, with history happening on one level, and what-to-have-for-dinner happening on another. That’s exactly right, and captures the strangeness of living through an era like that. Or like the one we’re in now, for that matter.

What else happened this weekend?

An important lesson was taught: If anyone offers you a ride in their homemade rocket, suddenly remember an urgent appointment.

I think that’s all. Good week ahead to the lot o’ youse.

OK, well, I guess we’re done now:

Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him.

The day after the Feb. 13 briefing to lawmakers, the president berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place, people familiar with the exchange said. Mr. Trump cited the presence in the briefing of Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, who led the impeachment proceedings against him, as a particular irritant.

During the briefing to the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Trump’s allies challenged the conclusions, arguing that he had been tough on Russia and strengthened European security. Some intelligence officials viewed the briefing as a tactical error, saying that had the official who delivered the conclusion spoken less pointedly or left it out, they would have avoided angering the Republicans.

This is just the fucking cherry on the sundae, isn’t it? What a way to start the weekend. Have a good one, all.

So Kaitlin Bennett, aka Kent State Gun Girl, went to my alma mater Monday. It was Presidents Day, so she came to campus with her crew from …:::checking:::… “Liberty Hangout,” a subsection of …:::checking:::… ah yes, InfoWars, to do one of her fun videos. You know, just fun stuff! Presidential trivia! Fun!

Soon she was surrounded by a hostile mob and driven off campus, along with her security, rolling away in a big pickup truck with a TRUMKIN license plate.

Reading the WashPost rewrite of the student-newspaper story rather steamed me. It referred to Bennett, a young woman so nakedly ambitious that she launched her “career” by posing with an assault rifle in her cap and gown, as a “conservative gun rights activist.” She is in fact what the kids would call a fameball, a rolling thirst-trap train wreck trying so hard to get a gig in some Fox-type carnival that the dollar signs actually show in her eyes. She begs on her videos for Patreon supporters while she tries to push people into video confrontations that will get the wraparound-sunglasses crowd to throw her a few bucks.

She’s working the grift hard, that she’s just another humble merchant in the Marketplace of Ideas and not a third-rate provocateur on the order of Milo’s second assistant or maybe Ann Coulter’s luggage-carrier. But this stunt got a fair amount of publicity, and yet again, the fake-news MSM has treated a terrible person with more respect than they deserve.

Go, Bobcats. We know bullshit when we see it.

Speaking of people undeserving of respect, I see we’re upending the rule of law yet again. Besides the news about Blago and Milken, et al, there was also this woman, Judith Negron of Hialeah, Fla.:

Negron, now 48 years old, was sent to prison for aiding in a $200 million fraud case in what was then the country’s biggest mental health billing racket.

Negron was the only defendant in the case to refuse a plea deal and go to trial. She was convicted by a jury in August 2011 on 24 counts of conspiracy, fraud, paying kickbacks and money laundering in collaboration with the owners of a Miami-based company.

The scheme centered around American Therapeutic Corp., a seven-clinic chain that billed Medicare for group mental-health sessions that were either unnecessary or not provided to patients. The group’s patients, meanwhile, could not feed themselves or control their own bodily waste, according to prosecutors’ filings. Many lacked the mental capacity to respond to counseling and simply stared at walls or watched TV instead, raising questions about whether they were eligible for treatment.

Such a good woman shouldn’t be behind bars, don’t you think? She should have been on a chain gang.

The week feels 10 days long and it’s still only Tuesday. Grr. And so our republic continues to delaminate.

N.

Big weekend here. Kate’s band’s record release party was Friday night. The event was held in a bar with two other bands, and it’s safe to say the place was packed. Because it was. You could hardly move, what with their fans and those of two other bands all smashed into a not-very-big room.

And so eventful! The opening act had barely started its set when the lights went on and the music stopped. Apparently some guy, an older one, went down. I couldn’t see anything (crowded), but fortunately there was a registered nurse in the audience. He – the nurse – plays in his own band, Caveman and Bam Bam. The nurse is the caveman, and performs in an Alley Oop getup, and Bam Bam is the drummer. Anyway, Caveman is a pretty big guy, definitely the sort of nurse you want around when a patient of some size needs to be moved, or if someone collapses at a rock ‘n’ roll-type of event. I couldn’t see over the crowd, but his voice came through loud and clear: PETER CAN YOU TELL ME WHO’S THE PRESIDENT. PETER. MOVE YOUR RIGHT LEG FOR ME. And so on.

Here’s Caveman. He’s the one with the guitar:

So the paramedics were called, and they took the guy out, and I’m not sure what the outcome was, but the ambulance stayed at the curb for a while after the show started back up, so I have to assume he wasn’t in grave danger, or they’d have rushed him to the hospital.

Very exciting start to the show. The girls went on last, of course, it being their party, and they did well. They finally made a bit of money, too — a nice take at the door (did I mention how crowded it was) and about $800 worth of merch. A good night. They leave on tour in a couple weeks, and will stop at SXSW, if anyone is in the neighborhood. They’ll be at the Burger Records showcase; Shadow Show’s the name.

Oh, and the album is now streaming on all platforms. Call your local radio station and condemn it as injurious to today’s youth.

I drank two beers that night, and felt icky half of Saturday. On Saturday, however, I had an Aperol spritz, a nice glass of pinot noir and a manhattan to finish the night and feel capital today. So maybe it’s not all over between me and alcohol, it’s me and beer. Or just terrible beer.

A big week ahead, that I hope won’t be too ridiculous. I want to keep my weekends free of work, which means finishing it by 5 p.m. Friday and pushing back on any efforts to encroach on Saturday and Sunday. I have a hard enough time fitting my personal life and chores into the weekend; shouldn’t there be at least 15 minutes for recreation?

In the meantime, I leave you with two stories from our deteriorating republic.

This one is a lovely rumination on the fading star of Elizabeth Warren, by Monica Hesse, who usually has something interesting to say about gender in the early 21st century:

Loving Elizabeth Warren means planning for America to break your heart.

It means watching her tweet out an optimistic message after Iowa, and then watching how all of the early replies instruct her to defer to Sanders and drop out.

It means making sure to preface your pro-Warren statements with “I don’t have anything against the male candidates,” as if the act of supporting a female one was somehow misandrist in itself.

It means listening to people complain about her schoolmarmishness and quietly wondering what was so wrong, exactly, with sounding like a schoolmarm. What’s so wrong with sounding like a grandmother? What’s so wrong with her animated hand gestures, her cardigans, her preparedness, her laugh, her husband, her brain, her work, her femaleness, her voice?

It means hoping things will break your way but accepting that they probably wouldn’t, because America never quite seems to work that way, does it?

We’re gonna nominate Bernie and we’re gonna lose. I see it plainer every day.

Remember when Russia was our enemy, and we worried about propaganda slipping in under the door? The genius of Vladimir Putin may be that he figured it out. All you have to do to get Russian propaganda into this country’s bloodstream is write a big check:

In January, Radio Sputnik, a propaganda arm of the Russian government, started broadcasting on three Kansas City-area radio stations during prime drive times, even sharing one frequency with a station rooted in the city’s historic jazz district.

Sputnik’s American hosts follow a standard talk radio format, riffing on the day’s headlines and bantering with guests and callers. They find much to dislike in America, from the reporting on the coronavirus epidemic to the impeachment of President Trump, and they play on internal divisions as well.

On a recent show, one host started by saying he was broadcasting “live from Washington, D.C., capital of the divided states of America.”

Critics in Kansas City called Radio Sputnik’s arrival an unabashed exploitation of American values and openness. Those behind the deal defended it as a matter of free speech, as well as a simple business transaction.

Amazing.

OK, then. Off to enjoy an afternoon of soft sunshine and what’s left of my weekend.

What a terrible day. I could have won a $100 million lottery purse today, and on the way to cash in the ticket I would have flipped on the radio and heard even part of the president’s “celebration” of his impeachment acquittal and it still would have ruined the day. It was so crazy, it was chilling. And maybe there’s something about hearing this stuff alone in the car, in winter when most people are not on the street, in the middle of the day when lots of people can’t hear it in the first place, all of this — that makes you feel incredibly alone. You think: This is it. This is the way our country ends. This and all the terrible shit, opening up national monuments to mining and sending Ivanka around the world so she can pose with pens and pretend to be important, and Don Jr. calling Mitt Romney a pussy and all the rest of it. This is it. This is the end.

I try not to get too discouraged, but what a terrible day. It’s hard not to despair.

Despair, my childhood religion tells me, is a sin. On the other hand, God must really be pissed at us. Who wouldn’t despair?

After I turned off the radio, I experimented with different animal voices for the coyote and the badger in this video. It was a way to take the pressure off.

So. It’s been a long week. Lots of work, still another day to do it. Let’s go to the bloggage, shall we?

After reading as much as I could handle about the Iowa fiasco, I think this piece sums it up best: Welcome to the bullshit economy. And how:

But the spectacle has highlighted a much more consequential problem in America, something I have coined the bullshit economy. We’ve seen elements of it all over the place. When MoviePass offered unlimited screenings for ten bucks a month, when Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on, when WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny into its numbers, that’s the bullshit economy at work. We have seen the farcical bullshit of Juicero and the consequential bullshit of Theranos.

Even at the highest levels, bullshit pervades, in fraudulent advertising metrics and fake numbers peddled to convince the world to siphon cash through Facebook and Google’s dominant platforms. So many counterfeit goods pass through Amazon that the site might get listed on the U.S. Trade Representative Office’s “Notorious Markets” list.

And:

The story of Shadow, makers of the app that utterly failed to deliver in Iowa, is a perfect example of the bullshit economy. It starts by being a tech solution to a non-existent problem. Iowa counties are compact; the largest one has a landmass of 973 square miles, and it’s close to twice the size of the average county in the state. Even there, no major city is more than a 30-minute drive from the county seat, Algona. Even with that ancient technology of the car, you could have each of the 99 counties report final results within a couple hours of the end of the caucuses.

Somehow, the Iowa Democratic Party got sold that they needed to improve upon this, to “disrupt” the caucus reporting. Already, the party had to increase what they would keep track of and tabulate, reporting the first set of results before the 15 percent viability threshold, the second set afterwards, and how that translated into delegate counts. It wasn’t clear why anyone needed to adding another layer of complexity into this with the app. But the app’s backers must have been persistent, getting $60,000—really nothing for the purposes of app development—to design a tool to forward the results to a central repository.

Yep yep yep. You know what this reminds me of? A story I read in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” the account of how the Bush administration totally screwed post-invasion Iraq. It was about the Iraqi stock market, which ran on a paper-and-pencil system until a bunch of ambitious young Republicans swept in after the war to inflict computers on the place. Computers, in a place that had electricity only a few hours a day. Great idea.

OK, I gotta go. Big day tomorrow, with a chance of 30 percent less despair. See you on the other side.

I spent the day trying not to think about the Iowa caucuses, other than what you guys were saying in the comments. Honestly, what would the point be. And now the results are in and I’m not sure what to think, other than WHOA MAYOR PETE. On the other hand, my current-events alternative is the State of the Union, and I tried, I really did. Lasted 45 seconds.

The 45 seconds I caught featured the line, “The years of economic decay are over.” It imperils the health of my TV, so I’m out.

A better alternative: The joy of cooking naked, a real story in the New York Times:

It’s one of those jokes people can’t help but make about nudists, and to Ms. McMullen, who has been cooking naked for more than two decades, it shows how misunderstood nudism is. Many people think only about the pitfalls — spattering fat, minor burns — and not the benefits.

“Embracing the nudist lifestyle has given me permission to feel my feelings,” she said one morning as she sautéed bell peppers while wearing nothing but a glittery manicure in her home kitchen at the Lake Como Family Nudist Resort in Lutz, about 20 miles north of Tampa. She lives here with her husband, Jayson McMullen.

“But if you want to know the truth,” she added with a resigned sigh, “I buy precooked bacon, and I microwave it on a paper towel.”

The pictures alone are worth one of your clicks.

Nudists v. SOTU? No contest.

Boy, this really says it all about the miraculous Middle East peace plan, doesn’t it?

“My vision presents a win-win opportunity for both sides, a realistic two-state solution that resolves the risk of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security,” the president said at a White House ceremony that demonstrated the one-sided state of affairs as he was flanked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel but no counterpart from the Palestinian leadership, which is not on speaking terms with the Trump administration.

We are truly living in the stupidest of all possible worlds, with the exception of the one that will arrive tomorrow.

So let’s get stupider, then, shall we? Mixed grill!

If you have boobs like this, you shouldn’t wear a neckline like this. Actually, no woman should wear this neckline, ever, unless you have something underneath it. Cleavage is one thing, but these are mashed pancakes. Shudder.

I will never, ever, ever understand Sandy Hook truthers. Every last one belongs behind bars. This one should be there for life:

We're not supposed to appearance-shame, but rarely does a mugshot so perfectly match the crime and the individual charged with it.https://t.co/JZbkQoWQ0l

— Nancy Nall Derringer (@nnall) January 28, 2020

There’s been a lot of smart stuff written about Kobe Bryant in recent days, but this is the best I’ve seen to address That Incident:

Why would we find the need to ignore a piece of Bryant’s biography that reflected and shaped our entire culture? If the argument is that we’re not ignoring it, we’re just postponing it out of respect — what are we doing to make sure the postponed discussions actually happen, and happen in a way that’s respectful not only to those who were inspired but also anyone who was harmed? How can we become more empathetic if we insist that only evil men do bad things, and thus our heroes must be perfect, and thus we must punish people who want to talk about the ways in which they were not?

Can you find Ukraine on a map? I could, but only on the second try, because I accidentally clicked the map in trying to expand it.

And now, for a second crossword of the day, followed by bed.

So I guess Kobe Bryant is dead. This is sad news for his family, for Lakers fans, for NBA fans. Beyond that I have little to say, other than this: I hope I never have occasion to fly in a helicopter, because those things freak me the hell out. It’ll be interesting to see who was flying the aircraft and who else was on board. Beyond that, I can only say: Condolences.

It appears his adorable teenage daughter was one of the others. How awful.

So, remember the state senator I talked about last week, the guy who was called out as handsy perv? A third woman has come forward, and said he interacted with her exactly the same way he did the second woman who reported him — hands on lower back/butt, the up-and-down body leer, etc.

And yes, the same reactions. WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE WHY DIDN’T SHE SAY SOMETHING WERE THE POLICE CALLED? NO, YOU SAY? NO? THEN SHE MUST HOLD HER TONGUE FOREVERMORE!!!!!

One day in the future, we’ll figure out how to dust a woman’s butt for fingerprints, and cross-check her story against the always-on body cameras we will all wear, Black Mirror-style. Until then, you’ll have to take our word for it. And just consider that when three separate women tell the same story, maybe there’s something to it.

(And yes, I believe the women who said Bill Clinton perved on them.)

There was a guy in Columbus, a sportswriter who was ancient 40 years ago, and is no doubt dead by now. Eddie Fisher. He was a leerer, a gross-remark maker. I don’t think he ever touched anyone that I know of, but that might be because the saliva-soaked cigar butt he kept clenched in his jaw was an effective repellant; he was hard to stand close to. But we heard what he said just fine. I think he was one of the two or three men who raced from one part of the newsroom to another to spy on a young female reporter who was committing the unspeakably erotic act of eating a banana with her lunch. Every year he would write an appreciation of Mitzi Gaynor — she passed through town in summer-stock theater — that pegged the needle for creepy old-man slavering over a woman’s legs; I think he actually typed those with his penis.

Now that we have social media, we must also not leave out an important voice from the female side of the discussion, that of the ballsy babe who insists that if anyone ever did that to her, why she would absolutely speak up, and in fact she has. (Long anecdote follows.) I just read one writer who claimed she was threatened with death — actual death — if she didn’t sleep with a male superior, and her response was to rear back and plant a high heel in the middle of his chest “so hard he probably still has the mark,” and it never came back on her and why doesn’t everyone do that? Why won’t women stand up? Etc.

OK, rant over.

All of Michigan is decidedly not like this, but I’m breaking my three-paragraph rule to bring you this anecdote from the Cletus safari to end all safaris, in Politico this weekend, datelined two counties away from me:

“It got to be so bad when Obama was in office, it felt like we were going to have a civil war,” Mike said.

In what way?

“I didn’t realize until Obama was elected that I’m supposed to be a racist,” he said, throwing up his hands.

Confused, I asked Mike to clarify.

“I’m a white man, so I must be a racist. Right?” he said. “That’s what they say about people like me. But one of my best friends is a black guy. And I’ll just say it, you know, he’s my n—–.”

I glanced around us, but Mike didn’t bother. He seemed to know what I’d already observed: There were very few black attendees to be found.

He continued, “We joke around all the time about race. We constantly tease each other. We went to a restaurant, Buffalo Wild Wings, and he asked me, ‘Mastah, can I have me some chicken wangs?’ And I said, ‘Yes, boy, you’ve been a good Toby this week.’ And the waitress, her jaw hit the floor! She’d never heard anyone joke around like that. That’s the problem. Nobody can take a joke anymore.”

Mike, by the way, is quoted by his full name: Mike Krupnek. I bet he’ll hear a few funny jokes in the next few days.

OK, then. Monday awaits, and more impeachment. But please no more helicopter crashes.