The other day I saw this amusing item in my Axios newsletter. I’d normally link to the story, but can’t find it with a casual Google, so accept this screenshot:

God, Barry, we all miss you so much. The other day someone posted the video of Aretha Franklin singing “Natural Woman” to Carole King at the Kennedy Center Honors. The cutaway to Obama wiping away a tear almost made me cry, too, but not because the music was beautiful. It’s because I didn’t get up every day of the Obama presidency and thank God for him. I had no idea that his successor would be a pig who can barely string a sentence together, with a sex-worker third wife and a nightmare family, all of whom would end up supported by American taxpayers, one way or another. I didn’t — none of us didn’t — know how bad it would get.

Sigh. How about some levity?

Ha ha ha ha ha. The proper answer to that question is: I would choose to live somewhere else. Because, if you read the story, you find that their budget is, no shit…

…around $850,000, but even with $450,000 saved, high mortgage rates meant that most single-family homes were out of reach. So they began to seriously consider a manufactured-home park about seven miles west of the city. “There were no good options,” Mr. Zero said. “Except for this place.”

I gotta say, though, those are some pretty sweet looking trailers. They look like double-wides, and once you get into double-wide territory, they don’t feel so much like trailers. Santa Barbara doesn’t get hurricanes or tornadoes to speak of; I could probably live there. But not for most of a million dollars.

God, the real estate market is a ticking time bomb. How is any normal person supposed to afford these prices? It’s insane.

What else happened today? I had an insane one, that’s what. I missed my morning swim because I overslept, then got buried in an avalanche of work. I didn’t brush my teeth until 11 a.m., but yes, I still found time to post on Twitter, because that’s how life today is.

One more funny screen cap? OK. Here’s Kim Guilfoyle, raising money on the hustings:

If you want, you can tuck a check for $2,500 into her cleavage.

OK, then! Happy Friday, happy weekend, happy life.

One of my most treasured former colleagues is Bill McGraw, who spent his career — virtually all of it — at the Detroit Free Press, and now, in retirement, contributes weekly flashback stories for readers who either never knew, or forgot them. This week’s was a corker:

He was an outgoing guy. He introduced himself as Tony Jones.

But Detroit police found him suspicious, with his fancy cameras, British accent and habit of jumping out of a rented orange car to shoot close-up photos of cops arresting suspected criminals. He had no current ID.

It was January 1974. Crime was a big problem in Detroit. Cops were jumpy. So they hauled him off to the old 1st (Central) Precinct, and there they discovered the truth.

His full name was Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, the Right Honourable 1st Earl of Snowdon. He was a global celebrity, the husband of Princess Margaret, the younger sister and only sibling of Queen Elizabeth.

Yes, the very same. Tony Jones wasn’t really arrested, more like detained. He was in Detroit taking pictures for a Times of London assignment on the American “urban crisis.” We know Lord Snowdon as a portraitist, especially of the royal family. He did a set of Princess Diana late in her life that was really smashing, and I can’t find it now; I seem to recall her hair was wet and slicked back, and she looked amazing, but oh well. But he was also a good photojournalist, with the right instincts to get in close and be fearless.

He tried to stay Tony Jones, but the secret got out, and it got a little silly:

The Free Press saw an opportunity. It assigned a young female reporter, Detroiter Toni Jones, to take Londoner Tony Jones out for a night on the town. Toni Jones brought a friend, and Aris came along, too. Jones, err, Snowdon, was a good sport. Toni Jones described him in her story as modest, easygoing and witty.

They hit several long-gone night spots. At Lafayette Orleans in Lafayette Park, Snowdon met Kenneth Cockrel, the famous attorney, and appeared not to notice when a patron began heckling the band. At Watts Club Mozambique on Fenkell, Snowdon was introduced to Pistons forward Don Adams.

It’s Watts Club Mozambique that kills me. The long-gone, but spectacularly named spot burned to the ground a few years back, after appearing in an Elmore Leonard novel (“Unknown Man #89”) and playing a major role in black Detroit’s street culture. I’d love to know who came up with the name, and how they settled on it, and let’s ask the internet, and whaddaya know:

The Watts Club Mozambique was established in 1969 by Detroiter Cornelius Watts. Since the early 1960s, the African country of Mozambique had been fighting for independence, Mr. Watt fell in love with the exotic sounding name. By the late 60s, African consciousness had swept to the forefront of American culture and Mr. Watt named his latest venture Watt’s Club Mozambique. He carried the theme on and decorated the interior with bamboo wallpaper and had banana leaves draped around the ceiling. It was a hit from day one.

Never mind whether the guy’s name was Watt or Watts. I think we can all agree that “Mozambique” is a very cool-sounding name, and entirely appropriate for Detroit; the country had an AK-47 on its actual flag for a time, since removed.

The club started with jazz, but it couldn’t turn a profit, so it eventually switched to sort of a black Chippendale’s, with hot-dude dancing for women. There was a legendary dancer named Hawk, who was very popular but decided he could make a lot more money in Vegas, and bought a one-way ticket.

So many crazy stories in this crazy town. This is only one of them.

It was a good Tuesday. The centerpiece was being the guest speaker at my ex-colleague Julia’s class on feature/biographica/memoir writing at Notre Dame. I did not go to South Bend, alas — it was all via Zoom. And although I was dreading spending an hour looking into my webcam, the time flew by and it was a great class. For me, anyway.

And now I’m looking at the results of the Ohio primary, and? Ugh. We’re doomed. Ohio is, anyway.

This was an interesting story in Politico the other day, about how raw milk became politicized. Raw milk is unpasteurized milk, of course, popular with certain foodies, but mostly with you-cain’t-make-me anti-government types.

Truth be told, I only had it a couple times. I’ve probably told this story before, but: In college, my boyfriend Bruce rented a house a couple miles outside of town, and it abutted a small dairy operation. The farmer would sell Bruce gallons of raw milk for something like $2. Being a New York City boy, he thought this was the coolest thing ever, and to be sure, the milk was something, with an inch of cream on the top of the jar and the milk below nearly as thick. It was nothing like supermarket milk, but I don’t remember it being an orgasmic experience or anything.

When I mentioned it to my mother, she turned as white as the milk. “Don’t you dare drink that!” she said, and explained that she’d had a classmate who contracted brucellosis from raw milk. She was sick for weeks, and returned to school looking close to death. I came back to Athens and conveyed this news to Bruce, who said, absurdly, “The cows look fine.” But I stopped drinking it when I was there, and that was the end of it.

You all know me. Generally speaking, I favor western medicine, progress and scientific advances. I get vaccines, swallow Big Pharma’s product line when it’s called for, trust doctors when they give me advice. I see pasteurization as a great leap forward in public health. And while I appreciate that milk-borne disease is less common today, and people who sell raw milk claim to be diligent about having their herds tested, etc., ultimately I don’t trust them enough to take a chance, especially for something like milk. Supermarket milk is just fine for something I don’t drink a lot of anyway.

But because everything these days has to be politicized, now it’s raw milk’s turn. From another Politico story:

Loosening regulations on raw – or unpasteurized — milk, which the Food and Drug Administration believes poses too many health risks, has been gaining steam on the state level in recent times, with at least half of states now allowing the sale of raw milk directly to consumers and several more seeing raw milk-related bills being introduced in the previous two sessions.

Now, with the introduction of two new bills in Congress by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), proponents of legalizing raw milk are making strides on the national front, too. Massie’s first bill, the “Milk Freedom Act of 2014,” would overturn the interstate ban on raw milk, and his other bill, the “Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2014,” would allow interstate shipment of raw milk only between two states where raw milk sales are already legal.

The Milk Freedom Act. Jesus wept.

The swing in momentum can, in part, be attributed to a transformation of the argument that advocates are using. The debate used to be centered on the health and nutritional benefits of raw milk versus the safety of pasteurized milk, but the likes of Ron Paul — who mentioned the issue in several speeches during his 2012 presidential run and introduced similar bills when he was in Congress — have turned it into one about freedom of choice.

Of course. Because lord knows we must all be given freedom to make ourselves sick unto death.

EDIT: I just realized I linked to, and quoted from, the wrong story. I fixed the link, but the quoted portions above are from a 2014 Politico story on the same topic. Here’s something from this year:

Long a fringe health food for new-age hippies and fad-chasing liberal foodies, raw milk has won over the hearts and minds of GOP legislators and regulators in the last few years. (The Iowa vote broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side.) And it’s not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.

To be clear, raw milk is still a niche product. According to an FDA study relying on 2016 and 2019 data, 4.4 percent of Americans report consuming raw milk in the past year, although the number has almost certainly grown since then. Though raw milk’s appeal remains small, its increasing popularity among Republicans nevertheless demonstrates a scrambling of the political poles in which the American left-of-center, long associated with anti-establishment sentiment, has become more deferential to institutions as the right-of-center, long associated with the establishment, has seized the iconoclastic fervor inherent in America’s DNA.

I hope your weekend was a good one. It got cold again here, but we had a date night of sorts on Friday. Had dinner, then dropped by Greektown to visit the casino. Didn’t spend a dime, but the people-watching was great. It was disappointing to see how joyless gambling seems to be these days. With the exception of the craps tables, no one was smiling or laughing or doing anything other than pushing a button on a screen. So many games have been converted to computers. There’s video poker, video blackjack, even video roulette, although that one has a real wheel under a plastic dome. I’d think people who make the effort to go out to the casino might want to interact with other humans, but I guess not. We did a walkthrough of the floor, had a nightcap in the puzzlingly named Urban Cocktail lounge, and went home.

It’s Monday, then. And I have a load of work to shovel. Best get to it.

This week is Covid Anniversary Week, depending on how you figure it. This was the week, four years ago, that we finally started to realize how deep the shit we were in really was. It’s when Tom Hanks revealed he and his wife were sick, when the travel bans, restaurant closings and other shutdowns began to happen. The cruise ships full of sick people were anchored offshore. You were there, you remember.

Not long ago a Detroit media personality said, “Why did we have to shut everything down, when we were just trying to protect old people?” How soon we forget that we were trying to protect everyone. Certainly, older people were the bulk of the deaths, but lots of people under 65 died, too. In Detroit, there was a 7-year-old girl who died. A state legislator, 44 years old. Lots of people, over 44,000 Michiganians, over 1 million Americans. Seven million worldwide. Dead.

I wrote a one-year anniversary story for Deadline Detroit, and I’ve reread it around this time of year for the last couple, not because it’s great journalism but because I don’t want to forget the details. The way Woodward Avenue looked in the middle of a weekday (empty). The doctor who had food delivered for ER workers, because there wasn’t time to go out for any, and PPE was in such short supply that they couldn’t afford to do a complete change. The funeral director who had to spend time he didn’t have sourcing gloves, because without gloves, he’d be out of business, and then how would he pay for the refrigerated truck outside keeping the overflow from decomposing? The mom trying to coordinate schooling for all her children, plus care for her ailing father, back in New York. All of it.

The funeral director said this, and it stays with me:

The real trouble started when government offices closed. We couldn’t get death certificates. You have to have an official cause and manner of death to bury, and especially for cremation. I rented a refrigerated truck. My holding room was overflowing. Hospital morgues were overflowing. It was late May to June before I could finally catch up.

Without death certificates, families can’t collect insurance. And because people were dying so young, nobody had a will or plan. Some people had their living wills, medical power of attorney, all those things in order, but that wasn’t the majority. Then you had households with multiple Covid cases, like a husband and wife in the ICU at the same time. If one died and the other was on a vent, no one could speak for them. So someone had to get emergency guardianship. It complicated all the situations.

We barely heard about cases like these, but they happened everywhere. And I want to remember it all, because time erodes memory, and bad actors are still lying about so much of it, especially vaccines, but other stuff, too. “Don’t say ‘died of Covid,’ say ‘died with Covid’ because that’s more accurate,” for instance. I still see “pureblood” in online bios.

When we talk about long-term changes to American society, we’ll need books to examine it all. The loss of respect for institutions. The cost of having an idiot president in charge, who casually suggests hospital workers are selling PPE “out the back door,” and wondering how we might get “a light inside the body.” The still-being-sorted effects of white-collar work-at-home. The way the governors of Ohio (male) and Michigan (female) ordered virtually identical business restrictions, and the Michigan governor endured great blowback for it, but the blowback in Ohio was directed at the state health director, and I bet you can guess what gender that person is.

Now, of course, many of us have had Covid, some multiple times, and this is offered as “proof” that the whole business was overblown, that it was self-inflicted punishment, never mind that viral outbreaks become less deadly as the virus mutates, that each wave that followed the initial one was less deadly. That’s in part because doctors knew what they were dealing with, but mostly because of vaccines. Which few people are keeping up with, many because they “feel they’re ‘done’ with Covid.” Huh. I’ve had six shots so far, and may yet get the spring version, because we’ll be traveling in a few weeks and why risk a spoiled vacation. P.S. Still a No-vid here, as is Alan.

So.

Like many of you, we’ve had a spectacular run of pleasant, warm weather. It perhaps portends a truly hellish summer, but that’s just more reason to get out and enjoy it. I hope you are. I intend to. Happy midweek.

Notta lotta time this morning. I’m debriefing myself on the State of the Union, which I did not watch, because I never watch. I read the text the following day, absorb several different stories about it from reputable news outlets, and consider myself informed. I gather the laugh lines landed, and the GOP response was even worse than Marco “gimme a sip of water” Rubio’s, way back when.

I just watched a couple clips from Katie Britt’s community-theater-audition response. It’s worse than I thought.

Instead, come with me down my latest media rabbit hole, i.e. photos of people taken at Mar-a-Lago. Why does everyone there look like they are residents of the Capital in the Hunger Games movies?

This one ⬇️ is so weird I wonder if it’s real, but apparently it is. And to think these people have a problem with drag queens.

Kim Guilfoyle, looking practically normal in this gang:

The one on the right here is the same as the one on the left in the first photo. Not sure about the other one.

These two could be a mother/daughter pair. “People are always getting us mixed up, it’s so weird!”

It must be a condition of membership that every woman wear the same hairstyle. This one is giving me “Russian mistress,” how about you?

This must have been the No Strapless Bras luncheon. Second from left is the older one of the mother-daughter pair above. Not sure about the others.

And there you have it, just a glimpse into the membership of America’s trashiest country club. Feel free to make merry, but I have to get ready for the day.

An acquaintance back in Fort Wayne has taken to sending me Tim Goeglein columns, which are appearing with increasing frequency in the Journal Gazette, the surviving daily newspaper. The latest one was the usual cliché-strewn mess, a reminiscence about his childhood piano teacher who gave him his love of music and once played the most beautiful piece he’d ever heard or ever will hear, etc. (It’s not paywalled, unless you’ve reached your three-article limit for the month, so hey — enjoy.) I read it twice, then drafted a letter to the editor, which I let marinate through the day. I don’t think I’m going to send it, but in the interest of not letting 250 words go to waste, I’ll paste it here:

I haven’t lived in Fort Wayne for nearly 20 years, but given the role I played in the loss of his White House job, I’ve since taken a particular interest in Timothy Goeglein’s writing, appearing occasionally in the JG’s opinion section. As a writer myself, and as one who wants everyone to be a better one, sometimes this is painful; I’ve rarely seen such floridly composed word salads, to use a phrase Tim might employ. I won’t call them “hate reads” — I’m trying to be a better person in my dotage — but my fingers often twitch toward an imaginary blue pencil to strip the lard, the filigree, and especially the adverbs out of his rhapsodical tributes to whatever misty water-colored memory is striking him today.

I’m also an editor, and know that self-editing is difficult. So can’t anyone at the Journal Gazette take a little hot air out of these balloons, perhaps by paring Tim’s “tall and willowy, thin as a rail” piano teacher down to just “willowy,” as that word literally means tall and thin?

To Tim, I offer my services as a writing coach. My email’s easy to find. Give me one paragraph, 100 words tops, on…something you dislike. Make it tight. No adverbs. We’ll start there. You know what they say about a journey of a thousand miles, but as a gesture of goodwill, I’ll take it with you.

The offer stands, if he happens to read this. I doubt the JG would have run it, and ultimately, I suspect Tim thinks he’s really a pretty great writer. You can’t solve a problem until you admit you have one, right?

If you live around here, you know how insane the weather has been this week. Yesterday it was nudging 70 degrees. Today the wind is howling and the temperature is plummeting. It’s 28 as I write this; it was 56 when I worked out at 6 this morning. Do you guys have the wind map bookmarked? You should; it’s a lovely presentation of how the breeze moves across the continental U.S., and on a day like today, especially so.

So, the Michigan primary came out pretty much as expected. The big story today is the declare-uncommitted vote against Biden, which is being spun as danger-Will-Robinson to the president, and perhaps it is, but I doubt it. I heard, before the voting began, that the uncommitted movement was hoping to get 10,000, an absurdly low number. Dearborn is a city of roughly 100,000, more than half of them Arab immigrants or native-born Americans. And it’s only one of several municipalities with significant Arab populations expected to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Then fold in the young voters of all ethnicities who are appalled by the Gaza war, and you come up with something closer to the actual count last night: 101,436.

Others have pointed out that it’s disingenuous to assume all these voters are Democrats to begin with. Arab Americans around here are socially conservative, and recent culture wars have driven many of them back into the arms of the GOP, which is where they were before the Gulf War(s). There is a significant Dem presence there, but it’s not a solid wall. My hope is that these people decide, in November, that a no-choice vote at the top of the November ticket is one for Trump, and as bad as things are in Gaza now, they will be 10 times worse with Bibi’s buddy back in the White House.

As always, we will see. And P.S. Nikki Haley stole 3x that many votes from you-know-who.

OK, gotta suit up for lifeguarding swimming lessons. I hope the natatorium heat adjusted to the plummeting temperature.

I am running out of steam to talk about you-know-who, but goddamnit, the Detroit News stuck this fucking paywalled piece of crap into my face this morning, and OK then, I’m taking the bait.

A rare double byline, for starters, the longtime editor and his current underling go on a Cletus safari to the latest Trump rally, last weekend in Oakland County. What is yet to be learned about Trump disciples? I haven’t a clue, but the headline tells us: Trump’s messianic message resonates with the forgotten and I nearly spit out my coffee. Forgotten? Forgotten? I feel like these people and their mystifying beliefs have been shoved in my face on a near-daily basis for years. But OK, let’s read on:

Three buddies are sitting in an Irish bar in Waterford Township, drinking beer and talking politics.

It’s Saturday night, and one of the trio is waiting to go to Donald Trump’s fly-in rally at nearby Oakland International Airport. The other is killing time while his wife attends the event. And the third is not sure where he stands on Trump and would like to hear what the former president has to say. But he doesn’t have a ticket.

“You wouldn’t happen to have an extra one, would you?” he asks us.

That’s our first indication of what the night ahead holds. Most politicians have to bus people in for their appearances to make the venues look full. For Trump, the crowd is scrounging for tickets.

Ooh, a scene-setter. And shoutout to the dude who still — still! — isn’t sure where he stands on Trump and would like to hear what he has to say, but alas, there’s apparently no way to find out short of standing in an unheated airplane hanger for a few hours. But here’s the part that sent the top of my skull into the rafters:

“He’s endured untoward suffering on our behalf,” said Ed Chandler, a pastor and bus driver from Grand Blanc who arrived early and found a place to stand right up front. “The least I could do was to show up in person to support him. It’s important for all of us to take a stand for what we believe is right.”

The messianic undercurrent ran through the evening, and Trump played to it. After a lengthy diatribe on the litany of legal attacks on him by what he called crooked judges and corrupt prosecutors, Trump told his devotees, “I’m being indicted for you. Never forget.”

Intentionally or not, it brought to mind Christ’s communion promise, “This is my blood, shed for you.” Trump’s new covenant sounds much like the old one, built on promises to build a wall, put criminals in jail, derail the green agenda and bring China, Russia and Iran to their knees with just the sound of his voice.

I’d say Pastor Ed needs to go back to divinity school and learn a few things about Jesus. But I’ve read this before — he says it every time he opens his mouth — and what’s more, I’ve heard it repeated by idiots. A woman in my Facebook network quoted her husband saying just that, after the Stormy Daniels hush-money indictment came down, and I replied that as long as her husband wasn’t paying adult-film actresses for their silence, they’d probably be OK, and yes, this is coming from a public Christian and what the hell has happened to American Christianity, that they’ll swallow this bullshit so eagerly? You tell me. More:

While Saturday night’s crowd was still mostly White, we noticed it was a lot younger than in the past. A generation that came to age during the upheaval of the COVID pandemic is also looking to Trump to save it.

“My generation is most concerned about housing,” said Christian Armstrong, a 21-year-old Wayne County Community College District student from Detroit. “We want to be able to buy a house to get a start in the capitalist system, and we can’t.”

Armstrong also is sympathetic to Trump’s claims of persecution. “They’re trying to keep him off the ballot, and that’s not right,” he said.

When I was 21, I was in no position to buy a house, either, but at least I have some sympathy for this plaint, because it’s legit. I have no idea what Trump is going to do about it, but if he wins, there may be an explosion of inventory that will drive prices down, as millions of Americans flee to Canada or Mexico or Costa Rica or Europe. But this, this, was the coup de fuckin’ gras:

Rola Makki, a young woman from Livonia who showed up in a red “Arab Americans for Trump” shirt, explained her attraction to the enduring figure.

“He’s never dismissed the suffering of the Palestinian people,” she said. “He’s always highlighted that yes, it’s both sides. To me, that’s someone who has humanity and compassion for people no matter what their background is.”

Her perception of Trump’s empathy can’t be dismissed. Trump speaks directly to the frustration and fears of a large portion of the electorate. President Joe Biden hopes to convince voters they’re not really as bad off as they think they are and has ignored their worries about inflation and immigration. Trump gives voice to their angst. He hears people who believe no one else is listening.

This must be what happens when legit news operations die, that an Arab American can believe this when Trump has said right out loud that he would reject Gazan refugees, impose a religious and ideological purity test for immigration, and said of the war in Gaza that “you have to let it play out,” not to MENTION his relationship with the Israeli prime minister — I mean, I’m just speechless. (Of the Abandon Biden movement gathering steam in Dearborn we will not speak. Yet.) Oh, and a little Googling revealed that this “young woman from Livonia” holds a vice-chair position in a state GOP outreach committee, so this column wins a bonus Salena Zito Jes’ Folks award, too.

I don’t know why I let this stuff bug me, but I do.

And now it’s Thursday, the weekend is right around the corner, and I intend to enjoy mine. I hope you enjoy yours, too.

I was a few minutes late for my part-time job the other day (lifeguarding for swimming lessons), and explained my tardiness thusly: “I’m dog-sitting for a medically fragile schnauzer.” And that’s why this is the first blog of the week. My life’s been disrupted a little bit.

This is my dear friends’ dog, and I don’t mind watching her, but hoo-boy. She’s diabetic, and blind as a consequence, so caring for her is not just a matter of taking her to the boarding kennel and waving goodbye, or even taking her to my house. I have to go to her. She needs insulin injected twice a day, plus two more meds. And letting her outside is a matter of snapping your fingers so she’ll follow the sound, then watching so she doesn’t walk into the swimming pool, which she has done, although not on my watch. She did walk smack into a wall yesterday, however. Poor dear.

Her brother dog is a spoiled-rotten but charming Morkie (Maltese/Yorkie cross) who does not hesitate to ask for attention whenever he feels a lack of same. So I’ve got my hands full. Upside: They have a luxurious bathroom — the shower squirts out of multiple heads, it’s so fabulous — and one of those new Dyson hair dryers, so there are compensations. And I’m always willing to do a favor for friends.

Happy Fat Tuesday, by the way. No, I will not be looking for paczki today. They’re jelly donuts, and I fail to see why I have to drive to Hamtramck, or even Kroger, for jelly donuts.

In my solitude, I’ve been reading. Looking back over the last few years of this blog, I’m starting to wonder at the damage you-know-who is going to my psyche, because it seems like every FUCKING day there’s something to be outraged about, and that can’t be good for one’s cortisol levels. But being an engaged citizen is part of one’s duty in a democratic republic, and so on we plow. Today’s outrage is this piece in Talking Points Memo, about what document discovery is revealing about the 2020 election aftermath:

Donald Trump’s months-long effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election culminated on a single, now-infamous day: Jan. 6.

But there was an alternate scenario gamed out by Trump’s lawyers — one that would have expanded the hours of indecision caused by the Trump campaign’s efforts and stretched out the process for weeks, all the way until Jan. 20, 2021, the Constitution’s ironclad deadline for the transfer of power. If their scheme succeeded, these lawyers hoped, Joe Biden would never take office.

…The plan would have seen the Trump campaign pushing Republican lawmakers to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win not just on Jan. 6, but for days afterwards. GOP legislators would have feigned confusion over competing slates of electors, paralyzing Congress as the Trump campaign brought increasing pressure on the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the election in their favor.

Is it wrong to want to see these people not just in court, but in federal prison? Maybe gen-pop at Leavenworth? I don’t think so.

Hate to cut this short, but the morning is slipping away and I have some work to do, i.e., thinking about lunch. If Lent is upon us, can spring be far behind? I don’t think so.

You guys, I am shocked this story hasn’t gotten more attention from the prestige media. It’s based on a government report, not “sources.” The revelations – that the White House has its own pharmacy, and under Trump, it handed out prescription meds like Smarties on Halloween – are startling. And yet, it seems to have bloomed and withered in one news cycle, and what stories were written concentrated on the cost, mainly of the use of name-brand drugs when generic equivalents were available.

That the White House has its own medical unit and pharmacy isn’t surprising at all – we’re talking about the commander-in-chief and support staff. But in the Trump administration, it sounds like it operated more like your skeezy cousin who knows someone who works night shift in a hospital pharmacy, and in some cases the guy at the end of the bar with a backpack who keeps going in and out, but not to smoke and the bartender keeps his stool open.

The pharmacy freely dispensed over-the-counter meds, no big deal, every office I’ve worked in has an unsecured cache of Tylenol and so forth. But they also liberally prescribed sleep aids like Ambien (defensible, but a somewhat bigger deal). And narcotic pain medications, including oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine and so on. (Bigger deal.) Also, Provigil, and now I’m paying attention. Provigil is described as an “anti-tiredness” drug, but generally speaking you need a diagnosis of narcolepsy to score it, although I’m sure the dealer at an Ivy League dorm can hook you up during finals week. Also. Also! Ketamine, a highly abused sedative. And Versed, a serious benzo, given to people about to go into surgery, for crying out loud.

I mean, I can understand why someone working in the Trump White House might want to be high all day, every day, but this is ridiculous. Provigil for jet lag at a G20 summit? I get it. But ketamine? Who the hell you planning to date-rape, Stephen Miller?

Roy Edroso, over on his excellent Substack, has been writing very funny short scenes featuring you-know-who ever since he noticed the constant sniffing during the first debate. He (Roy) has concocted a running gag about “the Formula,” the inhalable mix of crushed tablets that none of us would be surprised Trump consumes all day every day. It’s always fun when a Formula scene arrives in my morning inbox. And now we know: It probably wasn’t much of an exaggeration at all.

Now it’s snowing, way more than I expected when I checked the forecast this morning. A good day to stay inside and watch the fat fluffy flakes, maybe read a book or three. Think I will.

I neglected to mention one detail of my Miami trip: Passing along the causeway to Miami Beach, we had an excellent view of Royal Caribbean’s brand-new Icon of the Seas cruise ship, in the Port of Miami, just days away from her maiden voyage.

You don’t know what the Icon is? Well, check it OUT, friends. It’s only what appears to be the world’s largest cruise ship, “the largest waterpark at sea,” with a fact sheet that must be read to be believed:

20 TOTAL DECKS
18 GUEST DECKS

2,350 CREW
(INTERNATIONAL)

2,805 STATEROOMS

5,610 GUESTS
(DOUBLE OCCUPANCY)

7 POOLS AND
9 WHIRLPOOLS

6 RECORD-BREAKING
WATERSLIDES

1,198 FEET, 365 METRES LONG

BUILT AT
MEYER TURKU, TURKU, FINLAND

It’s all caps because I copy/pasted it off the fact sheet, sorry. Also: There are eight separate “neighborhoods” onboard, which I suspect is designed to make this enormous floating city seem smaller, somehow, although if small is what you’re after, why not book a smaller ship? Dumb question, I know. Cruising on this vessel is all about what you’ll tell the folks back home upon your arrival.

It’s as long as the longest Great Lakes freighters, and as tall as…can’t say. It looks weird and top-heavy, but that’s probably my uneducated eye. I can only say that, judging from the view from the causeway, I’d rather be towed behind in a dinghy than go aboard. I recall too many stories about norovirus, Covid, and what was the one that went dead in the water somewhere off the coast of Alabama a few years ago? CNN covered it like the Hiroshima bomb, and maybe that’s to be expected, as surely some of the passengers stranded aboard longed for the sweet fiery release of a nuclear explosion. I remember looking at the long-lens video shots of the ship shimmering in waves of heat coming off the Gulf of Mexico, and thinking: Fuck it, I’d go overboard and swim for it.

But people who cruise purely love cruising, and if that’s what they want, bless ’em. I wonder what the Finnish shipbuilders thought of this thing as they assembled it.

As I write this, the voters of New Hampshire are making their wishes known. This guy is surely one of them, and his story has been a minor social-media topic the last few days, and why not:

BEDFORD, N.H. — “This,” Ted Johnson told me, “is what I hope.” We were here the other day at a bar not far from his house, and we were talking about Donald Trump and the possibility he could be the president again by this time next year. “He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”

“For everybody?” I said.

“Everybody.”

“For you?”

“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”

As the story goes on, it’s plain this guy is lying. It’s not going to be hard for him to watch, whatever scenario this Northwoods idiot has in his head. He’s going to love it, plainly love it, because it’s going to punish everyone he dislikes, and that is a very long list.

It starts with his brother, from whom he is estranged, because what is family compared to Donald Trump, avenging angel?

Johnson started talking about “Russia-gate” and “Biden’s scandals” and Hunter Biden. What, I wondered, did Hunter Biden have to do with Nikki Haley? “She’s not going to hold anybody accountable for what they’ve done,” Johnson told me. “People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”

Don’t want to over-paste here, but there is plenty-plenty more, and lest you think this guy is a trod-upon Deplorable, think again. He’s well-off, retired military with a great work-from-home job, a big house worth about three-quarters of a million, and more anger than you’d expect from a man living so well.

I used to think the people who said that MAGA was all about Trump giving people permission to hate others were a little bit dramatic. They weren’t. They flatly despise people they don’t understand, and it makes them feel good to do so.

And so they do.

OK. It has rained, drearily and near-freezingly, all the livelong day. School was cancelled last night, so no morning swim for me. So I’m feeling puffy and thinking I should maybe scrub a bathroom or something.