I sure hope someone took a snapshot of the country before the new administration was installed and is storing it off-site, because reversing this level of corruption is almost impossible.
On January 27, 2025, the White House announced an executive order ending the recognition of transgender soldiers in the American military, just 75 years too late to make a difference to Klinger.
The EO — and, no, I’m not linking to it; gross — states that to be part of a “lethal and effective fighting force,” each service member must be “selflessness,” “honorable,” “truthful,” and “disciplined.” They must have “honesty,” “humility,” and “integrity.”
It does not say why someone’s gender identification — or lack thereof — has any impact on these qualities, save for a unsupported and blanket statements that “a man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent” with effective service. This, after earlier noting that “pursuit of military excellence cannot be diluted to accommodate political agendas or other ideologies.”
That no one involved with this document saw any contradiction in those two sentiments says a lot about it, and them.
On January 24, 2025, Pete Hegseth and his hair gel were confirmed as the new Secretary of Defense. He has an ongoing history of alcoholism, accusations of sexual assault, derisive views of female soldiers, and multiple tattoos associated with white nationalism. He is a former television host with no experience running a large organization. Three Republicans — including Mitch Fucking McConnell — voted against him, requiring dewy-eyed Vice President Beardo to break the tie.
Hegseth, by any reasonable definition, is not selfless, honorable, truthful, or disciplined. He has not shown honesty, humility, or integrity. He does, however, use he/him pronouns, even if he wouldn’t tell you that.
On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump was sworn in as President of the United States. He is an insurrectionist, a rapist, a felon, a liar, and a cheat. Like Hegseth, he is not selfless, honorable, truthful, or disciplined; he is not honest, humble, or remotely familiar with even the concept of integrity. As he signed the order, the pen he was holding burst into flames. He uses he/him pronouns, though I suspect he doesn’t understand what a “pronoun” is.
Within a week, the American military acquired a Commander in Chief and a Secretary of Defense who cannot meet any of their own stated requirements for effective or honorable service, save the arbitrary claim that they are “men,” in the purely chromosomal definition of the word.
Hegseth has already launched a crusade against life-long service member, four-star general, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley because he had the temerity to find fault with Trump’s first-term abuse of military personnel and symbolism for political theater. Honor and Integrity were not available for comment.
When further outrages come — and they will, ordered from the top — Trump and Hegseth can at least be assured that every atrocity, every horror, every nauseating shame they demand will be committed by someone whose uniform matches their birth certificate.
And that fewer people with true self-knowledge and the courage to declare it will be around to stop them.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack on the American federal government, thousands of vital services remain shut down, including all public medical research, school lunch programs and Head Start, aid to foreign allies, and on-line Medicaid portals in all 50 sta—
Oh, wait, never mind. It’s just Republican policy.
It’s hard to tell the difference.
Pableux Johnson died yesterday, at the age of too-goddamned-young, photographing a second line in New Orleans. He was part of an old-school late-1900s Web cabal that I was lucky enough to be tolerated by. To say he was beloved is too timid.
I got to meet Pableux in person only once. We were on a mailing list together, back in the days before social media and private Slacks and group chats, and when I mentioned I was passing through Louisiana on a vacation with my family, he said that, if we liked, he could show us around a few places to eat.
Which, if you knew anything about Pableux, you took immediate, full, and greedy advantage of.
The day after we arrived, he took us to what are still the best oysters I’ve ever eaten. You paid for tokens, and stood at a bar, and when you dropped a token down, a man with a very sharp knife would pull a fist-sized oyster out of a tank and cut it open and hand it to you. You’d put Tabasco or horseradish or lemon on it, and tip it back into your gullet. And then you’d do it again, and again, and again, while laughing and drinking and just having the best damn time.
In the following days, he sent us to New Orleans landmarks that deserved the designation, avoiding touristy nonsense — a classic lunch restaurant near Jackson Square, a spectacular breakfast house, even a fledgling burger place that was unexpectedly terrific, for our way out of town. He told us about a second line to visit, and it still defines New Orleans for me, the chaos and joy of a parade springing up in the middle of a major urban center like a confetti explosion in an Ingmar Bergman film.
Of all the things we did on that trip — we went to a Saints game, and spent New Years Eve on Bourbon Street (speaking of touristy nonsense), and walked cemeteries and old neighborhoods, and saw museums, and ate, and ate, and ate — the thing that stands out the sharpest in my memory is the simple kindness and abundant generosity of a man who best knew me as an e-mail address, and still took the time to show me and my family the city he loved.
Rest in peace, Pableux.
I guess Trump really is President again.
Though, technically, we are spending less on eggs.
You can add “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to the list of plain-language Constitutional phrases that conservatives pretend not to understand, right next to “a well regulated militia.”
Trump’s Department of Justice is attempting to muscle a new, wildly bad-faith interpretation of the 14th Amendment past the objections of eighteen states, Washington D.C, and San Francisco in order to eliminate “birthright citizenship,” a long-standing American tradition that has suddenly become a dangerous threat, like newspaper owners exercising their independence or the Posse Comitatus Act.
Passed in the wake of the Civil War, the first sentence of the amendment reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The DOJ is claiming that “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” does not mean what those particular English words assembled in that particular order clearly mean, and have meant for the past 159 years. Trump is asserting that people born in the United States “and not subject to any foreign power” are the only ones who get citizenship. This would exclude the children of people here illegally or temporarily.
The justification for this claim is that another law passed in the aftermath of the Civil War — the Civil Rights Act of 1866 — said it, though the Amendment itself doesn’t include that language. It’s a century-and-a-half old typo, is the thinking, where the authors of the 14th just, y’know, forgot. Oopsie.
This also means that the phrase “I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller” are also possibly part of the 14th Amendment.
This, clearly, is insane. It’s ahistorical and makes a mockery not only of the plain text of the Constitution, but of text not actually in the document. A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling “Fuck it, let’s blow some shit up.” Strict constructionism, my ass.
Thankfully — and I’m having trouble believing I’m typing these words — there are still Regan judges out there. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour has put a stay on the implementation of Trump’s executive order, saying it “boggles the mind” and that “[t]his is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”
“I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear,” he said. “You fucking dipshits,” he very likely thought but didn’t actually add.
And, OK, sure, you’d expect something like this from Trump. I sincerely doubt he has (or even can) read the Constitution much less the couple hundred executive orders he scribbled all over his first day back in office. He doesn’t know what any of this means, save that he’s able to wield arbitrary authority to hurt people he doesn’t like or that people he wants to like him don’t like.
But the argument was presented by Department of Justice lawyers, and they certainly have read the EO and understand the nuances of the argument being made.
Brett Shumate, the DOJ attorney making the argument before Coughenour, was asked, “In your opinion, is this executive order Constitutional?”
“It absolutely is,” Shumate said.
“Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the Bar could state unequivocally that this is a Constitutional order,” answered Coughenour. “You fucking dipshit,” he again very likely thought.
Other DOJ employees who signed on to defend the EO include Branch Directory Alexander K. Haas, Special Counsel Brad P. Rosenberg, R. Charlie Merritt, and Yuri Fuchs. Haas, Rosenberg, and Fuchs have all been at the Department of Justice for either over or going on two decades.
I mean, some of these knuckleheads were at the DOJ during the Obama Administration! All were for Biden! Were they just biding their time until someone came along who was man enough to fundamentally misinterpret the clear and historical meaning of those six words (while adding a bunch of other words that aren’t actually there)? How do you go from working within the system for two decades to trying to smash it to pieces inside of a week?
This is not an uncommon trajectory for Trump lawyers. Some of them — not all, but plenty — have had respected, even mainstream, careers, before they get caught up in the spin of Hurricane MAGA. And — more often than not — they’re left picking through the wreckage of their lives after the storm has moved on, distracted by windmills or insurrection or a jangly set of keys.
Lawyerin’ is a “profession,” in the strictest sense of the word. “Professionals” have special training, usually extensive educations, and there are often administrative bodies that enforce licensing and ethical standards for the group as a whole — doctors, lawyers, absolutely not computer programmers, thank God. There is no little irony in the fact that this body, for lawyers, is called a “bar.”
The various state bars are the entities that punish lawyers with suspensions or disbarments, if they skid too far off the road. Sometimes it’s for addiction or fraud or just being a massive dickhead. Sometimes it’s for all three.
Speaking of Rudy Giuliani, when the Washington D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility permanently pulled his license, they said, “Disbarment is the only sanction that will protect the public, the courts, and the integrity of the legal profession, and deter other lawyers from launching similarly baseless claims in the pursuit of such wide-ranging yet completely unjustified relief.”
Rudy is 80 years old, and a sticky, broken husk of what he once was. He went from a 75% public approval rating in 2002 to 15% in 2023. He is bankrupt, a laughing stock, and will be widely remembered as a pathetic sex pest who’s hair coloring dripped down his face as he held a press conference at a landscaping business.
This ignominious, career-mutilating end isn’t uncommon for people who fall into Trump’s orbit. John Eastman, the architect of Trump’s Plan A to keep the Presidency (where Plan B was “Kill Mike Pence and smear poop on the walls”), was disbarred in California. L. Lin Wood surrendered his license. Nearly half of the 22 lawyers Trump used to fight the 2020 election result where indicted, and Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro, and Sidney Powell all pled guilty. Most faced disciplinary proceedings of one form or another from their respective state bars, including suspensions of their law licenses and sanctions.
Do I think that these DOJ lawyers are endangering themselves by going before a judge and claiming that a critical part of the Constitution is actually a Magic Eye poster you need to cross your eyes to be able to see? No, I don’t.
But neither did I think that you could gather a couple of dozen learned professionals and have them set their careers and reputations on fire for the sake of a serial liar who has never failed to push literally anyone in front of a bus if it meant he could get another round of golf in.
Trump is going to ask a lot of DOJ lawyers to do a lot of stupid things in the next four years. They will be required to violate their oaths and ethical promises to do them. On the off-chance that the country doesn’t collapse into the dictatorship of a Diet Coke-addled man-baby, there will be consequences for those that take up that particular flag.
They might want to look at how the last batch of useful idiots ended up.
“Hello, Sharks. Our product is called class war. We’ll use ‘Mr. Wonderful’ for our demonstration.”
[Screaming.]
Shark Tank, but with the roles reversed: Minimum wage workers sit in judgement of billionaires, who have to grovel and scrape for clemency and a stay of execution.
“What are the numbers? How many children could have been fed and educated for the taxes you dodged this year?”
“It’s compli—”
“I’m out.”
I’m not going to make everything on here about Trump, but sometimes you have to step back and marvel at what we’ve done to ourselves. Ape historians will sift through the remains of our once-great society in the far-future of 2027 and ook at each other, asking how this was possible.
I’m going to print a bunch of these out and put them under the windshield wipers of trucks with Trump flags, assuming I can climb that high.
(If you want a copy, you can download a PDF.)
I’ve been blogging since before blogging existed. Thirty years ago (!), I used to write silly little stories about silly little things, and e-mail them to friends.
Just to prove that everything is circular, several people angrily demanded that I stop doing this and I ignored them, anticipating modern algorithmic content — I was shoving things in people’s face that they never asked for and don’t want in 1994, man. The line between “irritant” and “visionary” is awfully thin.
At some point, Jason Snell took all of these e-mails and put them on-line, and my nonsense joined the first wave of “personal narrative” sites that had sprung up, where people wrote silly little stories about silly little things.
Of course, by then people were already expanding the form. I was too stubborn and too stupid to see its full potential, and so blogging sailed right past me, into journalism and art and cultural criticism and a thousand other things. There are too many people to mention who saw this coming, and made it happen, and (please take this as complimentary or derogatory, as appropriate) you know who you are.
Meanwhile, I continued steadfastly on the silly little story front, through jobs and getting married and having kids and generally charging towards a sedate middle age.
And at some point, I… stopped. I got busy — see above, re: marriage and kids, etc. — and was getting paid to do some other writing and, well, if you’ve ever had a blog, you know. Literally everyone who has ever had a blog knows.
I’m only posting now because I was blackmailed by Jeff Atwood. He threatened to do something nice for me, and I certainly can’t have that, so I promised to blow the dust off this stupid thing here and see how it goes, if he’d just take his kindness somewhere else.
Back in the beginning, I’d always wanted to keep this blog mild. Like me! No profanity, little if any politics, certainly nothing to cause controversy or upset or — and here’s the real reason — give anybody any reason to not like me.
Well, fuck that.
The history of the past three decades is not going to be kind to milquetoast white guys who thought they could just muddle through without offending anyone or, worse, didn’t think about it at all. I got more forthright when posting on Twitter and then Mastodon, but my own space, here, has always just been fundamentally about silly little stories. I want to change that.
I’m still on the silly story beat, of course. That’s just part of my nature. But I also want to put my full self — my aspirational self — up on the Internet as well. And anybody who doesn’t like me as a result can suck it.
Things are going to be very hard in this country for a very long time, and if there’s anything that I and people like me can’t afford to be — not if we have an ounce of belief in this country, what it could be, and all the people in it — it’s silent.
This is not a new idea, of course. Plenty of people are walking away from Twitter and Facebook and Omelas, and setting up (or re-vivifying) their own sites. In a world where vast swaths of the Internet are controlled by the men (always the men…) who run trillion-dollar companies, and who are willing to glad-hand and kow-tow and genuflect to an authoritarian for the sake of a buck, having a place free of them — as free as it can be, anyway — is vital.
I just turned 57, and there’s an outside chance that I’ll still be around in thirty more years. I hope this site will still be here, too, filled with new posts — some angry, some funny, some thoughtful, some really dumb; just incredibly, embarrassingly dumb. I mean, wow.
But those will be posts that say what I really think. Posts where I get things wrong and correct myself. Posts that track a person (and a country) getting better, or at least trying.
And posts — eventually, hopefully, possibly — where all the memories of Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and their ilk are just silly little stories.
At some point during the first Trump Administration, I thought that Republicans had painted themselves into a corner. How were they going to find someone worse than Trump? I mean Reagan was charismatic, but awful and dumb, Bush II was uncharismatic and awful and dumb, and Trump was uncharismatic, awful, dumb, and actively criminal.
How could the GOP find someone even worse for whoever the next Republican was going to be?
Oh. OK.
I get it now.
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