I’m a baseball fan, and baseball is absolutely lousy with statistical measurements. Plenty of people will complain about Sabermetrics — and I’m occasionally one of them — but they can help strip away all the noise and cruft and extraneous factors to really focus on what you’re talking about.

So I’d like to start doing the same for politics. There is so much (fully intentional) chaos and confusion and misinformation going on that it’s hard to take it all in, even if you actually want to. And you very much do not want to.

For instance, Trump is a first-ballot hall-of-famer for his “WPD” or “Watergates per Day” alone. How many Watergate-level, Constitutional crisis-inducing crimes and abuses of power is Trump committing every single day? Two? Three? Let’s say he’s got a 2.5 WPD in just his first month. Sure, he’s been getting a ton of corruption-assists from his team, and he’s likely juiced up on Adderall and narcissism, but his record is incredible by any measure. If he was actually President, imagine how high it would be. Imagine how high President Musk is.

Contrast this with Trump’s record 0.96 9PD, or “9/11s per Day,” that he achieved during COVID.

He’s really stepped down his game, and will stop at nothing to be the absolute worst. You have to not admire that.

President Musk gave a press conference in the Oval Office yesterday, flanked by a bored four-year old and his son X Æ A-Xii.

With Trump having successfully rebranded the Gulf of Mexico as “The Gulf of America” — and tech companies happily following along like eager puppies, tripping over themselves to be first — it’s only a matter of time until he starts auctioning off the naming rights to other things that aren’t his: the Jeep Grand Cherokee Canyon; Mount Rushmore Extreme, brought to you by Doritos; and UsaX, Elon Musk’s “everything government” where nothing works, but you can say slurs.

The second Trump Administration is only three weeks old, but it’s already committing treason at well beyond the four-year level.

The California DMV has rules for custom license plates — specifically that they cannot “carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency.”

It occurred to me to check on this, because I recently ran across a photo I took fifteen years ago:

How this license plate got approved is raising questions already answered by this license plate.

There’s not much point in accusing Republicans of hypocrisy because they treat it as a compliment and sign that they’re headed in the right direction. But when conservative lawyers — graduates of Ivy League law schools, including Vice President Couchfucker — pretend that the separation of powers and checks and balances built into the core of the Constitution don’t mean what they clearly mean, and have meant for almost 240 years, well, I don’t think they get to call themselves strict constructionists any more. Their claim to being Americans is now limited to geography.

This ground (and head) softening is in service of justifying the inevitable executive disregard for valid judicial orders. Extra-executive busy-body Elon Musk is already calling for the ouster of the judge who told him to maybe slow down a little with the government-breaking, like, maybe we should look to see if this is actually, y’know, legal or something.

What happens when the executive branch simply ignores these orders and the Republican majorities in Congress cheer them on? When happens when the “leaders” of this country stop pretending they don’t understand its founding documents and simply decide they don’t matter anymore? Trump loves Andrew Jackson for his racism, but would undoubtedly agree with “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” if he could read.

The tree of liberty is looking pretty parched.

As long as Taylor is happy.

No, you’re creepy.

Yesterday, Trump said he had fired several members of the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and would be naming himself as chairman. For the record, he did not attend a single event at the Center during his first term.

This is, of course, insane. Caligula’s horse was more qualified.

The upshot, I presume, is that one of America’s premier arts organizations will now feature an endless parade of concerts by the shambling, reanimated corpse of the Village People, noted lite-beer assassin Kid Rock, and the shambling, reanimated corpse of Lee Greenwood.

I’d say Trump is drunk with power, but he doesn’t drink. So I guess he’s stupid with power.

Three things:

1. The Wiltern Theatre is an iconic music venue, and an architectural masterpiece. Along with the likes of the Pantages Theatre and Griffith Observatory, it represents Los Angeles in its 1930s art deco prime.

   The bottom floor of the venue has removable seating, so some concerts can have seats on the orchestra level and some can open up the space for standing room only. When I was buying tickets for Bright Eyes, the ground floor was SRO, so I opted for the mezzanine. My rock-and-roll knees and my rock-and-roll lower back — even with my rock-and-roll orthopedic inserts — no longer allow me to stand in one place that long, and a Bright Eyes show isn’t going to have a mosh pit.

   So I get a seat and a view — front row, baby — because the mezzanine is, I’d assume, a balcony.

   But I’d never been upstairs at the Wiltern before, and it turns out that the mezzanine is the back half of the second floor, with the loge taking up ten or twelve rows in front of it, and an aisle running the width of the theatre between them.

   This means that my front-row seat was actually perfect for viewing people using the aisle during the show, which seven thousand of them did.

2. My wife can now add “rock concert” to the list of places she’s fallen asleep because it’s after 8:00pm and she’s sitting down.
3. Conner Obrst dances exactly like you’d expect.

Elon Musk — the Hitler-saluting, white-supremacist, drug-addled, top clearance-denied, meme-begotten private citizen and richest person in the world, who has said in the past that he is in regular contact with Vladimir Putin — is now in unilateral control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the General Services Administration (GSA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the computer systems at the Treasury Department.

He has full access to every detail the government has on millions of people, companies, and organizations, including his competitors and perceived enemies.

He and a group of a few young acolytes / co-conspirators — who may or may not have clearance and may or may not be US citizens, but who are definitely not government employees or bound by an oath to the Constitution — are deciding which programs that have already been approved and funded by Congress will get their money and thus continue to exist. Taxes wishes it had that kind of power to destroy.

Meanwhile, the ostensible President is golfing, declaring economic war on allies, and blaming sexual harassment seminars for plane crashes, in that order.

Just as the Founders intended. Quoting Hamilton in Federailst 420, “Duuuuuude.”