Sheltering in places

 I awoke to news of America's slow-motion nakba.  It takes so little to sweep two full-scale wars and a sharp turn toward fascism from our screens -- eighteen dead and at least a dozen wounded in Lewiston, Maine, a "person of interest" still at large.  There are good pictures of him and his assault rifle because he didn't even bother to put on a mask in the bowling alley.  He couldn't wait for the Australian prime minister to go home, he had to embarrass us in front of company.  Australia famously banned big guns in 1996, buying back 650,000 of them from a population that is now a lot less murderous and suicidal.  Sorry to "politicize" it, but I keep missing the hour-long window between "too soon" and "old news."  The discussion usually ends when Ted Cruz tweets about how "Heidi and I" are praying on it.  

Eighteen families planning funerals and flags at half-staff -- this is something I'm used to.  The bottomless corruption of Clarence Thomas -- I'm comfortable with that.  Justice Gimme "borrowed" $267,230 from HMO entrepreneur Anthony Welters in 1999 to buy a luxury RV, and the entire loan was forgiven because Mr. Welters is a swell guy.  He's worth $82 million so he could buy RVs for the entire Court and never ask for special favors.  

God has been busier than usual, which is probably why the Big Guy hasn't had a minute to sort out His Holy Land.  New York is now only the third most rat-infested city in the US after Chicago and Los Angeles, and it's all because the voters agreed with the Almighty that Eric Adams needed to be mayor.  Establishing a city office of "faith based" initiatives just like the one Dubya installed in the White House (and neither Obama nor Biden has closed), Adams told a prayer breakfast, "God told me, 'Eric, you're going to be mayor.'"  Then He got the Republicans to nominate Curtis Sliwa, who arguably would have been worse.  Calling his vigilantes "Guardian Angels" was clearly blasphemous.  That'll get you smitten every time.

Shifting His focus to the national level, God has turned "Who the hell is Mike Johnson?" to "OH JESUS NO I DON'T BELIEVE IT WE ARE SO SCREWED!"  The smirking Louisianan and gift to SNL writers is a Trumpoid election denier/insurrectionist who founded the "Honor and Civility Caucus" and -- I'll just wait until you stop laughing.  It's your own time you're wasting.

All right.  He's one of these aggressively Christian types you move away from in the airport waiting room.  Anti-LGBTQ to the max.  Hates women, too (many anti-choice bills), equates Islam with terrorism, doesn't believe in climate change, HUGE fan of Amy Coney Barrett, also Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.  Gender-affirming care?  What do you think?  Public schools should be required to proselytize for Jesus.  Trump thinks he's "gonna be a fantastic Speaker."  

Points of light:  1.  Kamala Harris will preside when the vote is certified on January 6, 2025, not this germ.  2.  The "motion to vacate" rule is still in effect.

I close with a Johnson quote that Evan Hurst of Wonkette shared today:  "If you were shocked by the moral lapses at the Super Bowl, you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic."  That was the 2004 halftime show, when America was shaken by a half-second glimpse of Janet Jackson's nipple.  Sure enough, we soon lost the war in Afghanistan.  How he got from there to marriage equality is a path I refuse to trace.  (I haven't discovered any of his statements on race but I suspect the allusion to Jolson and The Jazz Singer is revelatory.  Prove me wrong.)

But wait!  Hurst also has video of Johnson in December 2020 saying that Trump "has to" concede to Joe Biden.  Has Trump seen it yet?

Motion to vacate!

Forty-five years ago the American Civil Liberties Union took a lot of heat and lost a lot of members when it filed suit on behalf of some Illinois Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie, a suburb of Chicago with a sizeable community of Holocaust survivors.  (They won the suit but the parade was moved to Federal Plaza in Chicago.)  So I was less surprised than most to find the ACLU representing Fulton County Inmate #P01135809 a/k/a Donald John Trump in his effort to overturn the gag order imposed by Judge Tanya Chutkan on First Amendment grounds.  (They're his kind of lawyers in that they won't bill him.)  I'm not sure why they bother, since Trump doesn't respect court orders of any kind; he got another fine yesterday for continuing to slander Judge Arthur Engoron and his court clerk.  A better use of resources might be to represent Students for Justice in Palestine, a campus organization that Governissimo DeSantis has ordered Florida state universities to shut down.  DeSantis was (allegedly) a devotee of waterboarding while stationed in Guantanamo as a JAG, so he's making up for it now by applauding Israel's decision to withhold water from Gaza.  And still Republicans prefer Nikki Haley.  It's hard to understand.

Last year Maryland enacted the Juvenile Justice Reform Act, which prohibits charging anyone under thirteen with a crime unless it involves violence.  Word gets around, and this month a twelve-year-old made a series of bomb threats to schools in Montgomery County knowing they would not be charged.  This kid has a future in the GOP.

"Wake up!  We are sleepwalking into a totalitarian regime!" says British artist David Shrigley.  He collected six thousand copies of The DaVinci Code, pulped them and used the paper to print an edition of Nineteen Eighty-four, now out of copyright in the UK.  Nothing against Dan Brown, Shrigley says, it could have been any trashy novel.  I like the cover art.