Buttermilk Sky

 Fast away the old year passes, but not fast enough.  I hate years that raise your hopes and then serve you a pie like the one in The Help. You know what I mean and if you don't, see the movie.  I'm trying to swear less in the new year. Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi  is having a happy new year.  Since 2002 he has been locked up in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp without being charged with a crime.  The Biden administration has transferred al-Yazidi, now 59, to the custody of the Tunisian government.  He could sue, but it wouldn't do much good.  Fifteen prisoners remain; they were never charged either.  Remember the War on Terror?  We lost. Colorado state representative Matt Soper is seeing the old year out the way he saw it in -- hateful and semiliterate: This load ran unopposed.  Delta must be a hemorrhoid on the ass of Colorado.  Soper apologized after sobering up from his "Champaigne" binge, so he gets to have it both ways. ...

  Jimmy Carter died peacefully at his home yesterday after a hundred years of military service, political achievement and international renown.  He was only allowed a single term as president but his achievements on the world stage endure:  Israel is still at peace with Egypt after forty-six years and Panama controls all its own territory as of this writing.   His successes and failures will be hashed over elsewhere.  What gives me joy is the literal shadow he will throw over the second Trump disaster, as flags fly at half-staff on inauguration day.  I'm sure the felon's first act will be to order them back up.  Nothing petty or mean is beyond him, nothing selfless or brave within his grasp.  Read about how Lt. Carter, USN, and his team risked their lives in 1952 to repair the  Chalk River nuclear research facility  in Canada.  It's not hard to imagine Trump's reaction:  "What was in it for them?" followed by another taunt...

 More than three weeks until his inauguration, Trump has already achieved one of his goals -- making NATO countries spend more money on defense.  One NATO country anyway.  Defense minister Troels Lund Poulsen announced that  Denmark  has increased its budget for the defense of Greenland by $1.5 billion.  In addition to airport upgrades and enlarged staffing for Arctic Command, Greenland will get two long-range drones, two new inspection ships and (I love this) two extra dog sled teams.  Poulsen called the timing "an irony of fate," but I think we all know better.  Trump should now threaten Monaco, which spends virtually nothing on defense.  How much is Prince Albert willing to invest to keep him from taking over and bankrupting all thirteen of the principality's casinos? Here's some happy talk for the new year:  "Even if there's only a five percent chance of a bird flu pandemic happening, we're talking about a pandemic that probably look...

 I like to relax by watching YouTube videos about the Second World War.  No matter how awful the events, I know how it came out.  The victory was imperfect, especially for people in eastern Europe, but at least the identifiably evil Nazis were defeated.  A few of them were even hanged like the common criminals they were.  For a short time the world was a hopeful place. This is not a hopeful world.  In 1945 America really looked like what Lincoln called it in the still uncertain midst of another war, the last best hope of earth.  Let's see what Lincoln's successor thinks of it now. That's his Christmas message.  I can't wait for the second inaugural.  We'll want to learn if by heart like Lincoln's, semi-literate capitalizations and all.  Lincoln didn't live long enough to experience his dotage, which is what they used to call Alzheimer's, but I doubt if it could have been this demented. Instead of the usual litany of name calling he doubl...

  It's a Festivus for the rest of us but not for poor little rich boy Donald John Trump.  He will come into office with only three federal prisoners awaiting execution because mean old Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of the other 37.  Donny wanted a big killing party on Day One and now it's all ruined, like the times nobody showed up for his birthday parties.  "I will direct the  Justice Department  to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families from violent rapists, murderers and monsters," the adjudicated rapist declared.  "We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!"  But he could not hide his frustration.  Three!  Other Leaders kill that many people before breakfast.  Prince Bone Saw is laughing at him right now.  To make matters worse, two of the three, Roof and Bowers, are heroes to a significant portion of  MAGAworld , like the J6 monsters he has promised to pardon.   As if that...

 Joe Biden is quietly having a good time depriving Trusk of opportunities for malice.  He has confirmed more federal judges than the orange one appointed in 2017-21 and he has commuted 37 death sentences.  The formerly condemned will now serve life without the possibility of parole, which I would consider worse.  "I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,"  Biden wrote.   "But guided by my conscience and my experience...I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level."  The commutation leaves just three inmates on death row:  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber; Dylann Roof, who killed nine members of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston; and Robert Bowers, who shot eleven people in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.  All were convicted of terrorism as well as mu...

  Gaie Delap,  a 77-year-old environmental activist from Bristol, England, will be spending Christmas in prison.  She was jailed last summer for taking part in Just Stop Oil protests in 2022 and was given home release last month.  But the private company which provides security could not attach an ankle monitor because of a medical condition and was unable to find one small enough for her wrist.  Her offense was helping to disrupt traffic on the M25, the motorway which circles London.  Drivers were inconvenienced but nobody was hurt or killed.  Delap is only one of many climate activists in prison --  Anna Holland  shared her experience with the Guardian. When a Saudi man drove a car into the Christmas market in  Magdeburg, Germany,  killing five people and injuring hundreds, Elon Musk immediately proclaimed him an "Islamist."  It appears that America's unelected ruler jumped the gun:  he's a 50-year-old doctor who turned ...

 Based on the last week, MAGA voters have given us a vexing four years to look forward to. I'm not even sure who's in charge now, much less in January.  Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries agree on a government funding bill and then some South African tells Trump to tell the Republicans not to vote for it.  In return, Margie Greene and Randy Paul demand the South African be appointed Speaker.  Ex-con  Steve Bannon  calls Johnson "a Democrat.  He holds the Bible."  He goes on with a weird rant about "no Social Security checks...Granny's going to freeze...NORAD not going to track Santa Claus...the media...big old shotgun to your head..."  Sounds like PTSD.  Did they force him to shower in prison? Trump now insists the looming  shutdown  "is a Biden problem to solve," because it's December.  Everything was perfect four years ago and now it's shit.  Apparently the  Federal Reserve  disagrees as it cuts interest rat...

Search "unelected bureaucrats" and you'll be swept away on a flood of Rightzi screeds complaining about regulations and restrictions meant to discourage the Plain People of America from doing everything they love, from driving over 55 to home-schooling their young to owning more guns than they could possibly fire in a month.  All the rights that God enshrined in the Constitution are at risk because some geek with an accounting degree crunched the numbers and decided that gas stoves or high-flow toilets are bad for the environment.  Accountable to no one.  Outrageous.  Unacceptable. Earlier this week it looked as if rapidly aging Speaker Mike Johnson had organized another continuing resolution to fund the federal government for a few months, because that's how the world's most powerful country conducts itself now.  This was unacceptable to the utterly unelected  Elon Musk,  who spent yesterday threatening MAGA members of Congress with  annihilation...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that on the lunatic fringe of politics, there's always someone more fringe.  Introducing  Rep. Victoria Spartz  of Indiana, anti-choice fanatic and border hardliner.  The Ukrainian-born Spartz established her quirky credentials last spring when she voted against $61 billion in aid to Ukraine.  Now she says she won't caucus with the Republicans so she can put all her energy into the fictitious Department of Government Efficiency.  Nobody would care except the people who elected her but this leaves MAGA with a wafer-thin House majority.  If a member is out sick or drunk or otherwise unavailable, they might have trouble passing a resolution that Trump is the greatest American of all time, or even a budget.  Thanks, Congresswoman! MAGA continues to lose its hive mind about drones and  President Biden's assurance of "nothing nefarious" will certainly spur it to new levels of nuts.  (He would say that, w...

 Abundant Life -- it's almost too easy.  That's the name of the Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, where a 15-year-old girl named  Natalie Rupnow  wounded six people and killed three, including herself.  "How does any fifteen-year-old get ahold of a gun?" asked Police Chief Shon Barnes, rhetorically, I assume.  Since only three percent of mass shootings are done by females, the rumor that Rupnow was transgender began to circulate, i.e., not a "real" girl.  There are many layers to this, complicated by a manifesto she supposedly wrote.  None of the dead ran a corporation, so nothing will change. Sorry to be so cynical, but I just read that New York Governor  Kathy Hochul  is meeting today with 175 corporate executives as well as officials from Homeland Security and counterterrorism to "ensure that state resources are focused on being supportive, sharing information."  Gun violence is a public health issue, according to the CDC, ...

  Are we crazier than our grandparents? Show trials in Moscow, Japanese troops in China, fascism surging through Europe, the world of 1938 was an anxious place when the Mercury Theater and its 23-year-old director presented a dramatization of H.G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds on the CBS radio network.  The extent of the panic this caused has been a subject of study ever since.  A. Brad Schwartz suggested in Broadcast Hysteria:  Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Invention of Fake News that it was largely invented by newspapers which saw radio as an existential threat to their news monopoly.   A lot of people did grab the kids and head for the hills, but at least as many wrote to CBS to tell them how much they enjoyed the show once they realized it was a play.  (Welles's instantly recognizable voice was a giveaway.) We may be in the "second time as farce" stage about threats from space as reports of nocturnal drones over New Jersey -- ...

 Of all the post-election post-mortems I have read, this in the December 19  New York Review of Books  is the one that resonates with me: "I feel we've been circling the drain for months and now are being rinsed down the plughole.  Hello, darkness, my old friend.  I'm nauseous and have difficulty breathing...I'm sorry for the rest of the world for having something as rancid and pampered and apparently resistless as America in it.  Who ever thought male suffrage was a good idea?  Come on in, the water's boiling in this reddened and ever redder and reddening state...If only it were some small and out of the way place.  Make Armorica great again...But no, this is that shining city and that last best hope.  Gone, all gone.  Stick a fork in it.  There is only money, barefaced lies, and evil intentions...No overstatement is possible.  I feel species disgust..." If you want to get to the heart of the matter, forget the pundits and ask...