I started in the newspaper business in January 1979, during the Carter administration. I was still finding my way when the Reagan administration came in. Between these two points, I would occasionally have to edit the inside copy for the big, bloated Sunday women’s section of the Columbus Dispatch. We ran buckets, warehouses of wire copy to fill it all up, one of them being a feature called “Washington Letter,” or something like that, by Betty Beale.

It was a society column about the nation’s capital. Why the people in the rest of the country wanted to know which senators and socialites attended some party at the Italian embassy was and remains a mystery to me, but it was syndicated and we weren’t the only newspaper that bought it.

And from the first time I read it, it was clear that Official Washington despised the Carters. I was young and stupid, and couldn’t understand it. I came from a house where we turned the thermostat down and put on sweaters when it got cold, where we faced hard times by doing prudent economizing. Betty Beale would have despised the Nalls, too:

Betty Beale, a spunky Washington Star Boswell to the capital’s power society, declared recently that in her affluent and respectable precincts there was consternation over Jimmy Carter’s dress and his insistence on carrying his suit bag. “If the American people had wanted their President to be a bellhop,” she decreed, “they could have found one without all that concern about issues.”

Bravo, whispered the traditionalists behind their white gloves. But from somewhere “out there,” as they say in the drawing rooms, came an avalanche of letters to the Washington Star supporting Carter. Miss Beale was even upbraided by phone callers, which convinced her more than ever that Carter was a threat to propriety and excellence.

Naturally, they hated Rosalynn, too. Her dress was frumpy — and used! She wore it to her husband’s gubernatorial inaugural ball! Can you believe this white trash the idiot public has sent to town?

From the beginning, this was the overarching narrative: They’re just so…ordinary. And they had to be broomed four years later for the Reagans. Betty Beale started writing about how “elegant” that walking broomstick, Nancy Reagan, was, and what a beautiful couple they made, and all that bullshit.

We all know how the last few decades went. Reagan had Alzheimer’s in office and the Carters left to become maybe the best ex-presidential couple in American history, modeling all that self-effacement official Washington hated so much. Helping others. Building houses. Embodying true Christianity, while the Republican Party went the other way.

And they stayed married, for 77 years. Seventy-seven years — do they even have a gift for that, a gem? Seventy-five is diamond, and hardly anyone gets that far. Maybe, at 77 years, you get a spaceship or $5 million or whatever.

So farewell to Rosalynn Carter, who died today at 96. Jimmy will follow her sooner or later, probably sooner. You don’t stay with someone that long without having almost a supernatural bond; he’ll go to his reward — and if there’s a God at all, that’s what it’ll be, a reward — and leave this world behind.

Trump was mocking Jimmy Carter on Saturday, because he’s such a piece of shit:

Trump, criticizing Biden at a rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, told a crowd of supporters that “the happiest person anywhere in this country right now is Jimmy Carter because his administration looked brilliant compared to these clowns.”

“Compared to Biden, Jimmy Carter was a brilliant, brilliant president,” Trump said.

What will the world say about Trump, when he dies? Think about that one. Happy Monday.

You guys, I know I’m late on a new blog, but things have piled up early in the week – two doctor appointments (checkups only, no need for alarm), a bad-news bomb about a local friend (an aggressive cancer that sounds like something out of a horror movie), the usual work obligations, PLUS I’m trying out a new book club tonight and still have reading to get through.

But! Another thing I had to get off my plate early was this Free Press op-ed, which I’ve posted on my social channels already, but if you haven’t seen it, I’d appreciate you giving it a click. It’s not paywalled, and I think it has, y’know, a message that goes beyond my community.

Oh, and the takeaway from at least one of the checkups? “You have the cardiac rhythm of an elite athlete,” my PCP said. This week, I’ll take it.

Later this week, let’s shoot for something longer.

And justlikethat, we’re into birthday season. The birthday twins will be celebrating later today, and I have to get up and start cooking in a bit, so until then, let’s have a little fun.

And play Connections!

Which may be entirely unknown to those of you who don’t have NYT subscriptions, but let me just say: The Times is killing it in their Games section. It’s not just the venerable crossword puzzle anymore, but an expanding array of phone-friendly games like Wordle, Tiles, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed and Sudoku.

But Connections is my new fave. It looks simple: Take a tiled array of 16 words and divide them into four groups. Here’s a recent one:

The groups are color-coded: Yellow, green, blue, purple. Yellow is the easiest level, purple the trickiest. You get four mistakes, after which you’re locked out until the following day. I almost always solve it, and as I’ve gotten better at it, I’m starting to hold myself to my own standards — zero mistakes, maybe, or getting blue or purple first. But as you can see looking at these 16, you have to consider which words might have more than one meaning, and might belong in multiple categories. “Waffle,” for instance, could belong with “waver,” as the two are synonyms in one sense of the word. It might also go with “hedge,” when you think about it — they’re all ways of putting off a firm decision.

But that’s for the easier levels. The key to getting a difficult level first, I’ve found, is to pick a word that seemingly has no similarities with anything else, and then bear down. On this one, I did pretty well once I started thinking about the apparent outlier “Russian.” Once I connected it with “bloody” and “mule,” I was home free. This is how I solved it:

As you can see, “hedge” and “waver” did go together, but not with “waffle.”

Anyway, it’s a fun thing to knock out over your second cup of coffee. Always the second — I’m still fuzzy until the first hits home.

Since we’re nearing the end of the month, let’s do some gift links to other NYT content. Here’s an interesting column about the why-aren’t-people-marrying-anymore conundrum that looks at it from the ground level:

On the rare occasions that women are actually asked about their experiences with relationships, the answers are rarely what anyone wants to hear. In the late 1990s, the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed 162 low-income single mothers in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia to understand why they had children without being married. “Money is seldom the primary reason” why mothers say they are no longer with their children’s fathers. Instead, mothers point to “far more serious” offenses: “It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity, and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.”

But it doesn’t take behavior this harmful to discourage marriage; often, simple compatibility or constancy can be elusive. Ms. Camino, for her part, has dabbled in dating since her partner left, but hasn’t yet met anyone who shares her values, someone who’s funny and — she hesitates to use the word “feminist” — but a man who won’t just roll his eyes and say something about being on her period whenever she voices an opinion. The last person she went out with “ghosted” her, disappearing without warning after four months of dating. “There are women that are just out here trying, and the men aren’t ready,” she told me. “They don’t care, most of them.” Who, exactly, is Ms. Camino supposed to marry?

With that, I gotta get cookin’. But first, today’s Connections. Happy week ahead, all.

So I see the Nashville mass shooter’s “manifesto,” or parts of it, has been leaked. From what I saw, it’s a bunch of misspelled rage-scribbles in a spiral-bound notebook. I hope the people who have been panting for its release are happy now. Ever since it was revealed that the shooter was transgender, right-wing hysteric Rod Dreher in particular has been baying for it, doubtless hoping it would be full of trans cooties he could point to as evidence he’s not the crazy one, you are for thinking these people are actual human beings.

But no. It’s just horrifying and pathetic:

Dreher pivoted immediately:

(Nashville police) likely suppressed this because Audrey Hale killed those kids on account of their whiteness, with all its “privilege.” The little “faggots.” We can’t know for sure why they suppressed it until they tell us, but I’d bet it’s because of the white angle. If the public saw that the end result of the ruling class’s obsession with condemning “whiteness” is the weaponization of that ideology by a savage tranny, who shot and killed white children — well, maybe, just maybe, white people would understand that we have been systematically set up for racial discrimination, even murder.

For the record, the police and others have been pretty clear about why the document wasn’t released: The parents of the slain children didn’t want that to happen, and police were waiting until the investigation wrapped anyway, and there were lawsuits, etc. But you are perhaps not driven by trans mania like Rod. And anyway, that isn’t what this is about. Rather, it’s one of my regular dead horses: Do words mean anything anymore?

Let’s ask my laptop’s dictionary the definition of “manifesto,” shall we?

a public declaration of policy and aims, especially one issued before an election by a political party or candidate: a manifesto for gay liberation | [as modifier] : manifesto commitments.

That sounds about right. You can find the world’s most famous manifesto, the Communist Manifesto, online. I just spun my way into its middle and captured three paragraphs at random:

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, had a manifesto, typed out on his manual typewriter in his Montana cabin. It, too, is online. Titled “Industrial Society and its Future,” let’s again just dive in at random and copy/paste:

A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional.

Not your cup of tea, most likely, but still: An actual manifesto by the definition.

Other manifestos: The Declaration of Independence, MLK’s I Have a Dream speech, The Road to Serfdom.

Not a manifesto: Wanna kill all you crackers!!!! The most accurate term for this might be a “statement,” although “a notebook with writings suggesting the killer’s state of mind” would be better.

That is all.

Happy November 7 to all, and I was reminded, after I posted Sunday/Monday’s blog, that it’s also the anniversary of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press event, and I can’t believe I forgot to mention that. Because that might have been reason alone to have hope for a brighter future, and also hysterically funny, so.

Happy midweek, too. And remember: Words have meaning. Use them wisely.

Tuesday is November 7. For the rest of my life, I expect I’ll remember another November 7, the one in 2020, three years ago.

It was a beautiful day, soft and warm and sunny, a perfect Indian summer morning that only improved as it went on. Before noon, the AP, CNN and other national media outlets reported that the counts and recounts were over in Pennsylvania, and it was official: The state belonged to Biden, and so did the presidency. Immediately, and I do mean immediately, the celebration started. Within a couple minutes, a friend in D.C. posted a video of the celebrations spreading through town. I recall the sound of cowbells and banging pans from balconies on high-rise buildings, the way we greet the new year, which it was. And it only went on from there.

My friend Dustin called and suggested we play some miniature golf, the exact sort of activity such a day called for. The course at our local park was closed for the season, so we ended up in Clinton Township, Trump country for sure. (“Metro Detroit’s Donbas region,” another friend calls it.) There was no open sobbing, so we played two or three rounds, checking our phones for reaction as the news settled in. One friend kept texting the highlights, mostly video snippets from Twitter. One showed people dancing in the street in New York City, singing “Heeeeyy, Donald Tru-ump! I want to knooo-ow why you’re such a cunt!” Laughter and hugging was the order of the day.

In 2016, I walked the dog early the day after the election, still shell-shocked by the result. I passed a man on the street who beamed at me with a note of smugness on his face, and I decided to pay it back four years later. But either the Detroit Donbas hadn’t heard the news yet or no one would let it ruin a perfect day, so I didn’t get to smug-smile at anyone, but still, I couldn’t stop smiling. Our long national nightmare was over. We’d be getting back to normal. The fever had broken. It’d be OK again.

Three years later, it’s useful to remember these feelings, and curse my naiveté, and remember another beautiful November day that didn’t turn out the way it promised to. That was November 4, 2008, the day Barack Obama was elected president, in an election with results no one contested. I watched from my couch in Michigan; I was working nights, from home, as an editor, and often kept the TV on to keep from falling asleep. All the channels were carrying Obama’s speech in Grant Park that night, the cameras panning the faces of ecstatic people, black and white but mostly black, tears running down their faces. Neil Steinberg was there, with his son, then 13, and wrote movingly about the mood that night:

All the vantage points were taken, so I went up to a group crowding around a gap in the fencing, pushed Ross ahead, and said, to no one in particular, “Could this boy take a look, just for a moment?” A large black woman turned, regarded him, and then commanded those in front of her, “Let the baby through!” and they parted, affording Ross and me a momentary glimpse of the future president, a tiny figure, far away. I thought of that famous photo of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, a distant, barely recognizable speck in a multitude.

But that wasn’t the moment that lodged in my heart. That came afterward, when a quarter of a million people flowed from the park to Michigan Avenue, buoyant with victory, intoxicated with promise and possibility and hope, filling the street from curb to curb, from Roosevelt Road to the Wrigley Building. They were in their new Obama t-shirts and in church clothes, whole families, including wide-eyed toddlers, some cheering, some walking in quiet, careful formality.

Promise and possibility and hope – that’s what I was feeling that night, too. We’d dealt a serious blow to racism; it wouldn’t die, because no evil that entrenched can die with one election, but the United States, a country with racism as its original sin, had turned its back on it, decisively. It felt like a curse had been lifted.

Within days, we started hearing about the grumbling in the Republican Party about Obama’s election, which you’d expect, but the nature of it was disturbing. Memes showing the White House lawn turned into a watermelon patch. Obama in Tarzan-movie tribal gear, a bone through his nose. And these didn’t come from some sewer on the far right. These were memes forwarded with LOLs from county chairs and other party officials, who when confronted protested with hey-it’s-funny-can’t-you-take-a-joke? Soon we’d learn about the election-night meeting of congressional Republicans, where they vowed they’d simply dig in their heels and make Obama a one-term president. Michelle Obama made some comment about living in a house built by slaves, and Republicans roared in protest, even though she was right. Soon, another of these charmers would call her an “ape in heels.” And upon that they’d build the he’s-gay-and-she’s-a-man libel, and go on from there.

You guys were all there. You know.

I’m remembering all this…not sure why. The calendar, yes, but maybe because these are exceptionally grim times, and it’s easy now to see the bad that was waiting just behind the good. As Steinberg also wrote a while back, Trump is the whistle on the tea kettle; you can take the whistle off, but the water is still boiling. I recall another story I heard about election night in 2008, how as John McCain prepared to make his gracious concession speech, his staff had to practically put his running mate, Sarah Palin, in a straitjacket, as she too wanted to speak, to “her people.” Her people would eventually gain critical mass and be the MAGA base. She was the wicked fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, with another curse, one that wouldn’t be felt for a few more years.

I spend a little time, many days, googling the realities of expatriation. I doubt we’d ever do it, but if these recent years have taught me anything, it’s that we don’t know yet how bad things can get. Who’d have ever thought the Senate majority leader could flat-out steal a Supreme Court seat? And yet it happened.

But today and tomorrow, I’ll think about November 7, 2020, the jubilance, the literal dancing in the streets, the perfect weather. We don’t have to fret all the time.

Here’s a picture I took that day, of Dustin with his spirit animal on the giraffe hole. The dead leaves and yellowing plants reveal the time of year, leading into winter. But if winter comes, as the poet asked, can spring be far behind? Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Let’s close out the week with a few snickers, shall we, and I’m not talking about the leftover Halloween candy. Julie Robinson sent along pix earlier this week, of decor in a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Florida. I assume they’re AI. They look like it, anyway. In one of my earliest art-history lessons, at the Columbus Museum of Art on some school field trip, the teacher said every culture makes art of Jesus in their own image. I guess Seventh Day Adventists are all keyboard players in ’70s rock bands:

Here he is healing a crippled woman, who cannot seem to look him in the eye.

But this! This is my favorite, as I’ve seen the pose on every hairdresser who turns the chair around and gives you the big reveal in the mirror:

“Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you a shorter look would frame your face better?”

OK, then. Happy retirement to Alex, and I leave you with a great column about Bob Knight, by my friend Dave Jones, with whom I was partying just a few days back. I think many of you will like it.

So, Bob Knight is dead. I guess I have to say something about that. And I have rarely felt less qualified to say anything about anybody.

When I first moved to Indiana, I found the discussion and static around Knight to be oddly familiar. “Same coach, different sport,” I told people in Columbus, noting the resemblance between Knight and the somewhat-recently departed Woody Hayes. Both of them old-school guys, the sort who talked with his fists as much as his voice, popular with the knuckleheads in the fan base, less popular with the people who valued their degrees and paid attention to changing times. Woody famously hated the forward pass, as the forward pass was becoming a much bigger part of the game. Knight disliked showtime ball, preferred boring ol’ teamwork. And both were coming to the end of their respective lines when things changed and they couldn’t change with them.

And that’s about all I know about the sports part of their careers. It’s not much, I know. I wasn’t a columnist in Ohio, but I was in Indiana, and Knight had a way of blocking out the sun, to where even if you were a basketball-ignorant derp like me, you had to say something about him, at least sometimes. When he threw the chair. When he yelled at a bunch of professors watching a practice, although that’s when I learned that some people laugh when someone else says, “PhD? That just stands for ‘piled higher and deeper.'” There was a story about how he got along with some woman who was writing a book, and that book was flattering. Mostly, what bugged me about him was, I.U. basketball inevitably disrupted the Thursday-night prime-time lineup, when I didn’t give a fat rat’s ass about I.U. basketball.

He also personified a certain kind of Hoosier, the ones who teared up over the insurance-company ad that portrayed a young Larry Bird shooting baskets because he had nothing else to do in French Lick, the ones who would stand in the checkout line at Meijer and leaf through whatever book about Knight was on the nearby rack, and sometimes buy it. In Michigan, they call the U-M fans who didn’t go to school there “Walmart Wolverines,” which is bitchy and classist and all that. In Indiana, I’d guess it was the majority of the fan base, people who didn’t care about the music or the business school or anything else, just the basketball team. I’d imagine it’s the same for most big schools. Knight was the I.U. representative for those fans – pushy, profane, a winner.

Much of the time, anyway.

But he couldn’t change, because why should he? And so the new university president came to town and indicated Knight’s standard behavior would no longer be tolerated. What happened? The inevitable: Some kid made a mildly disrespectful comment to him, he flipped out, and that was game over.

Who blows their life up like that? People like Bob Knight. Who is now dead, the winningest coach in college basketball for a while. He looked a lot like Mike Pence; let’s give him that.

What’s your Bobby Knight memory?

On my drive back and forth from Columbus last weekend, I passed several signs for an attraction called “Haunted Hoorah,” which was a little puzzling. Zombie cheerleaders?

No. It’s a reference to the Marine…cheer? Don’t know what you’d call “hoorah” as it applies to U.S. Marines, and I bet Jeff Gill will set us straight presently. But the website offers more clarity:

Haunted Hoorah is a 15,000 square foot, ten acre facility located in Marion, Ohio. You become part of the story, in this unique, interactive, Military/Sci-fi themed haunted attraction!

Attacking your senses and fears with every twist and turn. The Haunted Hoorah’s fright begins on a military transport as recruits travel to the first haunted destination – Joint Research Base Hoorah. Each recruit comes face to face with the doctor as he determines whether or not you have the substance necessary to be used in his super soldier creation program. Do you have what it takes? Come to the Haunted Hoorah for an experience that you will never forget.

Um, no thanks! But thanks for clearing that up. A few days later, I caught a Marketplace segment on the business of “scream parks,” which is what haunted houses — and they’re much more than houses — are called.

Haunted houses are so 20 years ago. If a building can be commandeered for a month, almost anything can be haunted. When I was in college in Athens, the haunting was at a vacant hospital. (“Wait until you see the maternity ward,” one of the builders confided.) Here in Detroit, they’re cashing in on the decades of scary stories connected to the Eloise Psychiatric Hospital, closed 40 years ago but still OMG CREEPY. One of my great regrets was never visiting the — I love this name — Haunted Scary Building in Detroit, on Mack Avenue in Detroit. I couldn’t find anyone to go with me. They had a barbecue barrel set up across the street doing a brisk business. The following year, the Haunted Scary Building had been sold and demolished. Damn. There’s also a haunted car wash somewhere nearby. The Haunted Garage, at the end of my street, does a land-office business. On November 1, they strike the set and put up an over-the-top Christmas display, of course.

The various hauntings put on by evangelical Christian concerns were almost all terrible, inviting laughs, not screams. Oh look, a girl is having an abortion. Someone else is facing the fires of hell. Inevitably, you’ll hear someone in the crowd say they’re just not stoned enough for this bullshit.

Even worse was a haunted…something. Maybe it was a vacant Sears store? It was put on by the Fort Wayne police, and it was just terrible. A friend and I did a tour of several of these places for a column, and in that one, even the police couldn’t get into it. “Here’s a guy who made some bad choices,” one said, turning on a light that illuminated a skeleton lying in a coffin, still wearing his gang colors. So lame. I think the worse choice was trusting the FWPD to do justice to his story.

Back to the Haunted Hoorah, it’s a wonder they had to blend “sci-fi” into their military attraction. From what I’ve heard about Parris Island, it sounds scary enough just by itself. Battle a ghoul with pugil sticks! March for 25 miles before you’ve had coffee! Watch the rest of the platoon laugh at your girlfriend’s nudes!

Oh well, happy Halloween to all who celebrate.

Not much bloggage today, but here’s a gift link to an insanely long and even crazier story about the relationship between Kanye West and Adidas from today’s NYT. It is NUTS:

Just weeks before the 2013 swastika incident, The Times found, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment, ostensibly to spark creativity. In February 2015, preparing to show the first Yeezy collection at New York Fashion Week, staff members complained that he had upset them with angry, sexually crude comments.

He later advised a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a picture of Hitler every day, and he told a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a seven-figure settlement to one of his own senior employees who accused him of repeatedly praising the architect of the Holocaust.

This is what it’s like to work for an unmedicated manic-depressive, evidently. Amazing.

Have a great week, all.

One thing my trip to Columbus did was stir up a bunch of those early-career memories. I recalled, but didn’t mention, the example Gary Kiefer used to teach me the difference between further and farther: “I can drive your car farther down the road, but I drive you further toward the brink of insanity.” I not only remember it, I use it when I have to teach it to someone else.

Then, today, in Axios, came this, about the return of the pandas to China:

I can still see the paper I extracted from my mailbox the day Kirk Arnott schooled me on this distinction after I turned in copy with the phrase “panda bear”: A cartoon panda with a dialogue balloon, saying, “I am not a bear!” Never forgot it.

Someone tell Axios.

Speaking of teaching, I went to see one of my former students play in his band last night, at a dive spot in Hamtramck, the kind of place where I, a 65-year-old grandma-ass looking woman, had to show ID AND open her purse for weapon/smuggled liquor inspection. As soon as their set ended, he came off the stage to see how the Ford-UAW settlement story his bureau was working on ended up. It’s a job that never ends. And that reminded me of the geezers who used to lead newsroom tours in Fort Wayne, who never failed to point out that some reporters might be reading the paper, and “that doesn’t mean they’re goofing off,” but that we were checking to see “how their stories look in print.” Ai-yi-yi.

Wait! :::touches earpiece::: We have this breaking update:

Well, I got that cartoon well before 1985.

Once again, I’m avoiding the news because it never seems to improve. I’m just reading about the mass shooter in Maine, and came across this uh-oh detail:

Lt. Cmdr. Ryan Koroknay of the U.S. Coast Guard said a 29-foot response boat was searching the Kennebec River for Robert Card, the suspect in the Lewiston shooting. A car linked to Card was found at a boat ramp in Lisbon, Maine.

And a boat linked to him is unaccounted for. We all know by now that Maine has virtually zero gun control, which we’re told over and over is the real solution to gun violence. Clearly the answer is, we have to harden our targets. So metal detectors, bag searches and maybe cavity searches in every bowling alley.

Which reminds me, this is something I think about a LOT:

Corporate media seems to lack the vocabulary to accurately describe the modern Republican Party.

Duh.

But consider how poorly the words they choose describe the reality of the Republican Party and its current leadership.

In their lead stories, Johnson’s political views were summed up with words like “staunch conservative,” (AP) “conservative hardliner” and “religious conservative” (New York Times), and “lesser-known conservative” (Washington Post).

But there is nothing “conservative” about insurrection. That’s radical extremism.

Yep. What’s more:

Johnson, like the party he now represents, is an extremist and a reactionary. By calling him a conservative – a “staunch” one at that – the mainstream media coverage normalizes him. It even glamorizes him.

Exactly. When this country marches itself right off the cliff — the brink of insanity, if you will — it’ll be with the best-intentioned people leading the way.

I should wrap this up. The weekend awaits! Enjoy yours.

I try to front-load my week, i.e., getting as much done on Monday and Tuesday as possible, as we’re in the season now where I’m less likely to get pop-up tasks, and that makes for a very festive four- or five-day “weekend,” but you know how all weekends end.

With Monday. And more work.

Monday I slept badly, which means the work dragged into Wednesday, but now I’m …kinda free. And isn’t all this just FASCINATING?

So let’s move on. The United States House of Representatives is leaderless no more! What do we know about this Rep. Mike Johnson (whose name I find unsettling, because I worked for a man of that name for some time)?

Mr. Johnson, a lawyer and former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, played a pivotal role in congressional efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

An evangelical Christian, he has voted for a national abortion ban and co-sponsored a 20-week abortion ban, earning him an A-plus rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. On the day the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, he celebrated, calling it “an extraordinary day in American history that took us almost a half-century to get to.” He hosts a religious podcast with his wife and considers Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, a mentor.

Last year, Mr. Johnson introduced a bill that prohibited the use of federal funds for providing sex education to children under 10 that included any L.G.B.T.Q. topics — a proposal that critics called a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Mr. Johnson called the legislation “common sense.”

Wonderful. Just wonderful. A retrograde coonass religious hysteric from one of the most backward states in the union? Sounds like smooth sailing ahead. Meanwhile, the man they all look up to:

Donald Trump surprised his own national security adviser and a group of Republican congressmen and women when he interrupted an Oval Office briefing to ask why he should “give a fuck” about the fate of Kurds in Syria.

“Nothing we said worked,” Adam Kinzinger, until this year a Republican representative from Illinois, writes in a new book.

I’m left with the desire to look out the window at the pretty-pretty fall color and wonder how many more autumns I might get to see it. Crazy to think that only three years ago we thought out long national nightmare was over. And it was only the end of the prologue.

And my god, it gets worse:

“Once we got to the Oval Office,” he writes, “I could see that Trump was impatient, and Bolton was desperate for someone to get through to him.

“A plain-spoken intellectual, Bolton strained to remain polite even as Trump seemed uninterested. The Kurds had fought and died for us in Iraq, said Bolton. They were continuing to provide great insight into politics in the region. Nothing we said worked.”

Trump eventually ordered the US withdrawal. Justifying his abandonment of the Kurds, he said they “didn’t help us in the second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example – they mention the names of different battles, they weren’t there”.

I’m feeling a little short-tempered today, which I think means I need to go for a long walk every afternoon after lunch, settle the ol’ nerves and try to withdraw from a media community where a fair portion of the highest-profile voices act like it’s no biggie to call a woman a cunt. Presumably because they’re cunts, too. Whatever.

I need to get something posted. So let’s move on.

In iPhone photos of the day, I was leaving my boxing class at 6:50-ish this morning and said, “Wow, look at the sunrise coming up. Seems early!” The other women I was with said no, that’s the east-side glow. So I altered my route home to check it out, and sure enough, they were right:

The photo is a little misleading. It was full dark at the time, with sunrise not for another hour. What looks like twinkle lights on that tree is the reflection of my four-way flashers, as I had to stop in the roadway to get the photo. But that is, indeed, the glow of the hundreds of thousands of square feet of greenhouses on the other side of the water, in Leamington. People around here like to call them “the pot farms,” but I drove through this district last fall, and they’re mostly tomato and vegetable operations. The price we pay for fresh produce. The actual sunrise comes several degrees to the north, this time of year.

OK, then. Hit Publish!