The kids are alright, the rest of us not so much

 One day after Boeing agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with the two 737-Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, a 757-200 operated by United Airlines lost a wheel on takeoff from Los Angeles.  It landed safely in Denver and the wheel was recovered.  

James Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who used to bring a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that there's no such thing as climate change, has died at 89.  His family says he had a stroke.  I wonder if it was heatstroke. 

Who was on Trump's Supreme Court list should Sonia Sotomayor accidentally slip and fall out a window?  Probably Joshua M. Kindred, since the felon already appointed him to the U.S. District of Alaska.  His elevation just got complicated as Kindred was forced to resign for sexually harassing his clerks.  Apparently discussing women's "fuckability" or talking about blowjobs is now considered inappropriate in the workplace.  Thanks, Anita Hill.

(When I wrote this I was unaware of the man who approached Justice Sotomayor's house last week with a gun and was shot by her U.S. Marshal bodyguard.  Eerie.)

After Brexit most people are reluctant to take advice from the side of a bus ("We send the EU 350 million pounds a week" etc.) but these ads speak the truth:

They'll be greeting conventioneers in Milwaukee next week.  Where the forced birth hardliners were outraged to find no national abortion ban in the platform.  "They rolled us.  That's what they did."  Welcome to the vast and growing crowd of people defrauded by Trump.  Over seventy million sold.

The whole pile of platitudes is here, with authentic, TRUTH SOCIAL punctuation!  Number three, "end inflation," sounds familiar.  I wonder if my Jerry Ford WIN (Whip Inflation Now) button still fits.

Citing an impeccable authority (Sean Hannity) Trump assured reporters with "one hundred percent certainty" that there will be a terrorist attack this year because of all the migrants pouring in from "mental institutions, jails and prisons."  Thinking like the brilliant businessman he used to play on television, he explained that it's a cost-cutting measure:  "Why would somebody running a country where it costs so much money, why would they keep the people?"  He's so anxious for another 9/11 he needs an hourly diaper change.  He couldn't hate this country more.

With so much shit to process, it takes an incident like yesterday's missile strike on the Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital in Kyiv to remind us that the war in Ukraine goes on.  This is genocide without question -- denying Ukraine a future by killing or kidnapping its children.  But Russia is suffering, too -- it can't afford the casualty numbers it's putting up in men out of the workforce through death or permanent disability, men who will be a drain on the economy, an estimated 450,000 casualties to date.  Putin has emptied his gulag of murderers and rapists and now seeks mercenaries from Africa and whatever he can get from North Korea.  Some TV host named Sergei Platonov brags of his ability to boost morale by assuring soldiers that "death does not exist."  He's not talking Christian dogma, either -- Russian conscripts are told they will be physically resurrected right on the battlefield.  It's like a scene out of Nicholas and Alexandra, illiterate peasants lining up to kiss an icon and receive the tsar's blessing before marching off to Tannenberg.  Moscow admits its mindless violence is intended to make Ukrainians overthrow their government; it might well happen in Russia first.

We can be glib about freedom of the press and the often unworthy people who represent it.  But freedom has a price.  Think of Linda Tirado, who was covering the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in 2020 when she was hit with a police projectile.  ("Rubber bullet" makes it sound almost playful.)  She lost an eye and suffered a brain injury, and has now entered hospice care.  Tirado is 42.

 The public has raised nearly a million dollars for Stormy Daniels.  If you want to help out with Tirado's expenses you can do so at Venmo: Linda-Tirado-3.