Category: Politics, Religion, and Social Commentary

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no, seriously. fuck you, Google Maps. fuck all the way off. start fucking off over here, and then just fuck yourself all the way to over there — and then keep on going, until you’ve fucked yourself right to the very edge of the universe.

and when you get there, eat the yummy bowl of fuck that’s waiting for you.

if those previous two sentences seem familiar to you, that’s because it’s how I opened my July 20, 2025 post, ‘CBS can pretty much fuck all the way off.’ I then used it a second time, in my September 18, 2025 post, ‘ABC can pretty much fuck all the way off.’ 

and now I’m using it a third time, because, in fact, it’s now Google Maps’ turn to pretty much fuck all the way off.

Google Maps has changed the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” for U.S. users to reflect President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the lake, according to ​a Google statement.

that’s right, Google is the latest den of corporate shitweasels to kowtow to the childish whims of Preznit Fuckwit. if you’re in the US and you type ‘Lake Ontario’ into Google Maps, what you’ll get instead is ‘Lake America.’

it’s so fucking embarrassing. the Mad King has commanded that all his royal subjects are forever forbidden from acknowledging that anything named Ontario exists, all because Ontario Premier Doug Ford had the temerity to suggest that Donny might ought to kiss his ass.

how immature can one person be? you’re eighty years old, Donny, it’s time to grow the fuck up.

Google wants to you believe they had no choice in the matter but to comply.‘boo hoo hoo, pity us’ they blubbered. ‘we get our mapping data from the government. we have no control over that shit.’

“Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in ​official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,” Google said in a blog post ​Saturday.

that’s a stinky pile of horse manure. the truth is that Google was so horny to appease Dear Leader that they didn’t even wait for the government to update its official maps. they went ahead and swiftly implemented their own change.

Google was even quicker to switch over to Lake America than the US government. While the GNIS database acknowledges the name change in a summary report, the base map layer still reflects the internationally recognized name of Lake Ontario. A message across the top of the USGS-operated website notes that the change to official maps is still pending.

cool story, Google, about how you had no choice in the matter. tell it again.

what Google Maps should have done, was nothing.

let me remind you, Donny’s infantile royal decree came in the form of an executive order. it can not be overstated that executive orders are not laws. only federal employees of the executive branch are required to abide by them. private citizens don’t have to do shit. corporations don’t have to do shit.

remember ‘don’t obey in advance’? that was historian Timothy Snyder’s sage advice, after Donny somehow managed to slither his way back into power.

“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

obeying in advance is how fascism wins.

the answer to every one of Donny’s childish pronouncements should eternally be, ‘fuck you, make me.’

be this guy.

we don’t need any more corporations rolling over and doing whatever Donny demands.

what we need are heroes.

here’s what I wrote last year, after CBS appeased Dear Leader by canceling the Stephen Colbert’s show. let’s just replace ‘CBS and Paramount’ with ‘Google.’

Google Maps and Google are being cowards — and we don’t need any cowards right now. we’re all stocked up with cowards. we’ve got cowards up the yin-yang.

heroes, that’s what we’re in desperate need of.

no one ever went to bed with fascism and came up smelling like roses.

no one ever said gee, I’m so glad that faceless corporation collaborated with fascists.

fascist regimes come, and fascist regimes go. when this current nightmare finally runs its course, no one is going to say ‘wasn’t it awesome how Google slobbered all over Dear Leader’s shoes?’

the people we’re going to look back on with admiration will be the ones who stood up said ‘take your fascist bullshit and stick it where the sun don’t shine.’

but of course, the real issue here is that Google wants fascism to win.

why? data centers, that’s why.

Big Tech needs more and more data centers, to feed the insatiable and ever-growing need for power to run their janky, six-fingered plagiarism robots.

the thing is, data centers totally fucking suck, and voters hate them. no one wants to live next to one — nobody, not Republicans, not Democrats. it’s a true bipartisan issue.

they’re huge. they’re ugly. they’re oppressively noisy. they pollute. they jack up everyone’s electric bills sky high, and destroy property values. if one of these abominations goes up in your neighborhood, it’s game over, man.

data centers have become such political liability that even Texas’s razor-wire-booby-trap-loving psychopath governor, Greg Abbott, is now pretending to be against them.

despite massive opposition to all of Big Tech’s fuckery, there’s one stupid shit who loves him some data centers and doesn’t mind saying so — and of course you know who it is: Donny. he somehow manages to be on the wrong side of every issue.

The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening! President DJT

that’s right — if you object to having your quality of life destroyed by a data center, it’s because you’re a fucking loser who’s backwards and poor. what the fuck is wrong with you?

the thing is, Donny’s too demented to actually understand the issue, and too sociopathically unfeeling to give a shit about what the poor schmucks who have to live next to one of these infernal things have to endure.

all he knows is that tech companies like Google are lining up to bribe him into letting them do whatever the fuck they want.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Big Tech companies have spent at least $653 million cozying up to President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress, according to a new report from Public Citizen. This funding is part of a deliberate effort by tech CEOs to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration by heaping excessive praise on the president while going along with his unpopular and authoritarian policies.

oh, and Donny and his felonious sons have a personal stake in the success of data centers, because of course they do.

Just weeks after their father announced a major push to expand the country’s artificial intelligence infrastructure and loosen regulations on the industry, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump invested in a new company aiming to build data centers “to address the growing demand for high-performance computing infrastructure.”

these corrupt fucking goniffs have to have their fingers in every pie.

so there you have it. of course Google is going to bend over backwards to accommodate the whims of our easily-bought-off Toddler-in-Chief, and fall all the fuck over themselves in a mad dash to rename Lake Ontario to anything Dear Leader wants.

meanwhile, as always, We the People are cordially invited to go fuck ourselves. if we didn’t want data centers befouling our towns, we should have had the foresight to donate $653 million to Dear Leader.

personally, I like AOC’s solution to the issue of where to build data centers.

PabloReports: “what do you make of Trump saying Americans who oppose data centers are backwards and poor?”

AOC: “I mean, how about we put one in Mar-a-Lago? I love that. let’s put a data center at Mar-a-Lago, and we’ll see how backwards and poor he is in response to that.”

seriously, I’m fucking loving this idea. let’s build a noisy, pollution-belching data center right on that green area, above the tennis courts. let’s see how Donny likes that.

in fact, I’m going to go one better.

yesterday, Donny held another one of his dog-and-pony shows. as usual, he slept though most of it.

you know what? it’s put a data center right in the Oval Bordello.

the ungodly noise will keep the stupid shit awake.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Everything Trump Touches Dies

femininstnewsnow: Everything this man touches turns to manure.

As if wrecking the economy weren’t enough. As if launching an unauthorized, disastrous war in Iran weren’t enough. As if picking a trade fight with Canada weren’t enough. As if planning a $200 million ballroom bunker weren’t enough.

Now, the destruction has come for the trees.

The majestic weeping willows outside the Kennedy Center—part of the beauty of Washington’s public landscape—have reportedly been destroyed. It comes just weeks after iconic cherry trees were cut down near the National Links to clear space for a larger golf course where private tournaments could be held.

This is the pattern: public treasures sacrificed for private vanity. Institutions hollowed out. Alliances strained. Nature bulldozed. And always, somehow, the priorities seem to lead back to spectacle, self-enrichment, and a bigger stage for one man.

Our country’s landmarks, public spaces, economy, and relationships with allies are not props. They do not belong to any president’s ego.

He won’t stop until he’s destroyed the entire country.

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JoJo Has Such A Way With Words

In case you missed it the other night, Bill Maher, the oleaginous, unctuous, supercilious, smugly self-satisfied septuagenarian sleazeball with the permanently pursed expression of a man who genuinely enjoys the smell of his own farts, who has spent decades steeping in stale dissent and the accumulated fumes of his own self-regard, stood on the Real Time stage in the middle of his own comedy show and decided that with wars raging, Donald Trump wreaking havoc and all manner of genuinely important shit happening in the world, Americans were spending entirely too much time talking about the death of Dolly Parton.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

He actually complained that “all America could really talk about” was how sad people were that we lost Dolly, ticked through some of the extraordinary displays of love appearing around the world, the Empire State Building glowing pink, the Santa Monica Ferris wheel covered in hearts, tributes stretching from London to Las Vegas, and then arrived at the Sphere and announced that it had “added a nipple.”

And that was basically it.

No tenderness. No affection. No meaningful acknowledgment of what she gave the world, what she created, what she meant to millions of people or why they might be gutted that she was gone.

Just this dry, drive-by little cheap shot tossed at a woman three days after she died, and then on to the next joke.

Fucking hilarious, Bill.

Really.

And I know exactly what some people are going to say.

Jesus Christ, Jo, don’t be so dramatic. Dolly made jokes about her tits all the time.

She sure did.

Dolly joked about her boobs, her body, her hair, her clothes, her face, her makeup and practically every visible inch of herself that some tedious man had already scrutinized, underestimated or decided was available for public inspection, because she had that magnificent ability to grab whatever cheap shit somebody intended to use against her, bedazzle the bastard, turn it inside out and make the joke hers before the other person even realized she’d stolen the weapon out of their hand.

And I guarantee you Dolly wouldn’t have cared what Bill Maher said about her on his stupid show.

She was a better person than I am by a factor of a thousand, to say the very least. She probably would’ve laughed, waved one perfectly manicured hand and gone on with her day.

I, on the other hand, am a petty, vindictive bitch who relishes any opportunity to eviscerate a sexist little hobbit with a superiority complex, so here we are.

Because it pissed me off.

And I know I’m not the only one.

The thing is, if a different comedian had made the exact same joke, I might’ve laughed.

This isn’t about the boob joke.

It’s about the fucking asshole telling it.

Context matters. History matters. And he did not materialize on that stage Friday night freshly hatched from some politically incorrect chrysalis, shiny and innocent and unburdened by decades of his own bullshit about women.

He has spent a career pawing through women’s bodies, beauty, brains, boundaries, bedrooms, breakups, beliefs and basic autonomy with the proprietary disgust of a man who thinks female existence is a defective appliance he alone has been burdened with troubleshooting, turning every woman who displeases, defies or simply declines to flatter him into another recurring exhibit in his personal Museum of Why Everybody Else Is Wrong About Everything Always.

So no, I’m not clutching my pearls because somebody joked about Dolly Parton’s fun bags.

I don’t even own fucking pearls.

I’m saying that when this particular man, dragging this particular history behind him, looks at the death of this particular woman, surveys this immense eruption of grief and gratitude, complains that she’s getting too much attention and then points at her chest, the punchline arrives with a long, greasy receipt attached.

Because Dolly was warmth and wit, humor and heart, bawdy and tender and glamorous as hell, deeply rooted in her faith, ferociously ambitious and astonishingly generous, with this uncanny gift for making people feel welcome in her presence instead of inspected by it.

The whole fucking world stopped when she died.

It stopped in pink light and porch flowers and church pews and beauty shops and bars and kitchens and parked cars where people gripped steering wheels and cried into sleeves because Dolly had been there for so long, in our kitchens and cars and childhoods, in our mothers’ record collections and our grandmothers’ living rooms, on movie screens and radios and in books arriving in little kids’ mailboxes, that somewhere along the way we stopped imagining a world in which she wouldn’t be here.

Stories poured out about mothers and grandmothers, childhoods and first dances, long drives and hospital rooms and terrible years made softer because somewhere in the middle of all that shit there was Dolly, all bouffant, brilliance, bedazzled benevolence, and boobs, cracking filthy jokes one minute and putting books into children’s hands the next, writing songs people would carry for the rest of their lives, giving away fortunes, showing up after disasters and remaining unmistakably, gloriously herself through every bit of it.

I’m still not over her passing, and I don’t honestly expect I ever will be.

Losing her felt like somebody removed one of the load-bearing beams of human tenderness, something so constant that millions of us had forgotten how much weight she was carrying until she was gone.

That grief crossed generations, politics, religions and cultures because people weren’t mourning a résumé.

They were mourning Dolly.

And watching that ocean of affection scratched something raw in two sexist birds from the same rotten feather pile.

Donald Trump tried to jam his grubby little snausage fingers into her story by posting a fake AI image of himself walking arm-in-arm with her at the White House after she died, manufacturing a moment that never happened with a woman who spent her entire career being extraordinarily careful not to let politicians claim her for themselves.

Think about how fucking grotesque that is.

Even in death, he couldn’t leave a woman’s image, boundaries or legacy alone. He had to insert himself into the frame, manufacture an intimacy she never publicly gave him and paste his own face into her history after she was no longer here to tell him to get the fuck out of it.

The man has plenty of authentic photographs and archival footage of himself hanging around Jeffrey Epstein.

But Dolly?

He needed AI.

One grasping, glory-guzzling egomaniac tried to counterfeit closeness to her.

The other tried to cheapen the mourning.

Same fucking sickness: a beloved woman dies and two swollen male egos immediately start clawing at what she left behind, desperate to wedge themselves into a story that was never about them.

And the irony of Maher complaining that everybody was devoting too much attention to Dolly while IMPORTANT THINGS were happening could choke a python.

He was delivering a monologue on a television comedy program.

This wasn’t the chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupting a briefing on troop movements because somebody wanted to discuss Dollywood. Nobody burst into the Situation Room waving a sequined butterfly and screaming that the Empire State Building had gone pink. He was standing under studio lights being paid an enormous amount of money to make jokes about current events while scolding ordinary Americans for caring too much about the death of one of the most iconic and beloved entertainers this country has ever produced.

The intellectual ouroboros here is fucking magnificent.

A snake eating its own asshole while explaining that everybody else has lost perspective.

I used to watch him a lot. Many, many years ago, I watched his show constantly because I thought he was sharp and willing to say the uncomfortable thing.

Now I can’t stand the sound of his fucking voice.

That resin-reeking, booster-bitching podcast pustule has the ineffable aura of a man who has been sitting on the same steakhouse barstool since 1997, slowly pickling himself in Maker’s Mark, stale aftershave and the sour backwash of his own bullshit while explaining to a succession of increasingly alarmed cocktail waitresses that women used to have a sense of humor.

He’s a human oil slick of smugness, scotch breath and unsolicited opinions, a pocket-sized, pontificating prick with the puckered little face of a man who’s been sucking Warheads through a cocktail straw since breakfast, carrying himself with all the swaggering, sneering self-importance of Lord Farquaad while radiating the unmistakable energy of somebody standing furious beneath the little wooden hand that says YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO RIDE THIS RIDE.

He has calcified into the ageing, pretentious pub bore he would’ve mocked thirty years ago, mistaking irritation for intelligence, contempt for sophistication and chronic obnoxiousness for some rarefied capacity to perceive truths unavailable to the rest of us slobbering civilians.

And spare me the mythology that all this sanctimonious shit makes him some fearless fucking truth-teller.

George Carlin was.

Richard Pryor was.

Joan Rivers could verbally skin somebody, salt the hide and have the poor bastard laughing while she did it.

They were adored.

Being incisive doesn’t require being insufferable. Saying something shitty that makes everybody groan doesn’t automatically turn you into Lenny Bruce because you leaned backward afterward and looked pleased with yourself.

Sometimes a prick is just a prick.

Dolly will outlive all of this.

Her songs will still be playing. Her movies will still be watched. Children will still open books because of something she started long before they were born. Families will still tell stories about her generosity, her one-liners, her ridiculous hair, the places she showed up, the people she helped and the particular way she made kindness look less like sainthood and more like common fucking sense.

Fifty years from now, people will still know Dolly Parton.

Bill Maher will be a grainy thumbnail somebody scrolls past while trying to remember why the fuck anybody ever cared what he thought.

He has spent his life acting like the smartest man in every room and still gets aggrieved whenever the spotlight lands somewhere he can’t slither underneath it.

So finally, New Rule:

Trying to diminish Dolly Parton doesn’t make you daring, dangerous or defiantly unconventional. Taking a cheap shot at a legend three days after she dies because the scale of everyone else’s grief annoys you isn’t intellectual courage. It’s just cheap, sour little cruelty dressed up in the moth-eaten costume of rebellion.

It makes you look like a bitter, brittle, boozy, blowhard little loser, marinated in misogyny, embalmed in ego and pissed off that a woman whose kindness, talent, humor and humanity dwarfed yours by several fucking zip codes received the kind of love you could spend another hundred years chasing and never catch.

Dolly Parton will be loved long after all of us are gone.

You weren’t too intellectually superior to grasp that.

You weren’t too edgy to understand why the whole world stopped for her.

You were just pissed off because you’re a small, spiteful, smug, sexist, solipsistic, sententious pseudointellectual little excuse for a man, and you know goddamn well the world will not pause, let alone stop, for one single solitary second when it comes to you.

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When I was a kid, my big brother Nick, who I’ve missed every single day since we lost him suddenly in 2020, wore a gold chain with an Italian horn charm and told everybody he was Italian.

Nick was not Italian.

At all.

He wasn’t a little Italian. He wasn’t Italian-adjacent. He wasn’t Italian sprinkled, Italian infused or produced in a facility that also processed Italians. As far as I know, he had never even rubbed up against an Italian hard enough to leave trace amounts of DNA on him, although this was my big brother Nick, so honestly, anything was possible.

He was half Lebanese and half Irish.

That’s it.

To be fair to Nick, he could pull it off. He had these big, thick, bushy eyebrows, a full shock of black hair and a face that could absolutely pass for Italian, because it turns out when you mix Celtic with Arabic, every once in a while the genetic slot machine spits out a guy who looks like he has cousins in Bensonhurst.

But Nick WANTED to be Italian because Italian was fucking cool. Rocky Balboa was Italian. Tony Manero was Italian. The Italian guys had the gold chains, the Cadillacs, the hair, the unbuttoned shirts and the whole fucking operation.

This was the early eighties, when a Members Only jacket zipped to exactly the right altitude and enough Drakkar Noir to violate local air-quality standards could make a teenage boy feel like he had important business at Satriale’s, and no matter how many times Nick practiced that De Niro stare in the mirror, our family tree remained stubbornly, inconveniently Lebanese and Irish.

So Nick did what any determined adolescent would do when confronted with the immovable obstacle of his own DNA.

He ignored the fuck out of it.

And because I was a kid and he was my big brother, I genuinely wondered whether there was some secret Italian annex to the family tree nobody had bothered to explain to me. Nick was older. Nick knew shit. Nick could drive. Maybe there was a branch from Naples wedged between Beirut and County Cork.

There wasn’t.

Nick was just full of shit.

And God, I miss him.

But Nick accidentally taught me something extremely useful all those years ago.

You can say something over and over and over again. You can dress it up. Accessorize it. Embroider it on a fucking pillow. Have it notarized, laminated and announced by a marching band.

It still doesn’t make it fucking true.

I’ve been dyeing my naturally brunette hair since I was eighteen years old. I can buy every bottle of blonde hair dye at CVS, bleach myself until I’m visible from the fucking International Space Station and demand everybody call me Goldilocks.

Upgrade to paid

I am still not a natural fucking blonde.

Elizabeth Taylor could have walked down the aisle at her eighth wedding in a white dress, carrying lilies and wearing a veil long enough to cover Rhode Island.

It would not have made her a fucking virgin.

Joe the Plumber can slap a sign on the side of his van tomorrow morning that says COLONOSCOPIES $99, put on a white coat, snap on a pair of latex gloves and start introducing himself as Dr. Joe, Board-Certified Ass Specialist.

He is still a fucking plumber, and for the love of God, keep your pants on.

Because wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true.

Calling something by a different name doesn’t make it become whatever the fuck you decided to call it.

And having the president of the United States throw a tantrum and scrawl a new fucking name across an international body of water that was called Lake Ontario before this country even existed does not make it Lake America.

It makes him an asshole with a Sharpie.

But, inexplicably, cartoonishly, beyond fucking parody, here we are, because grievance-glutted, geography-groping, gold-plated gooch stain Donald Trump has decided that being pissed at our closest ally now requires dragging one of the Great Lakes into his latest small-dicked little power trip and ordering the federal government to participate in his hissy fit.

Lake Ontario has managed to exist in my life with remarkable fucking unobtrusiveness. I cannot remember the last time before this week I said its name out loud.

Daily? No.

Weekly? Fuck no.

Monthly? Please.

Yearly? I honestly don’t know.

It’s been sitting up there minding its wet Canadian-American business while I have gone about mine, and we were doing just fine.

Now it has been unwillingly conscripted into the geopolitical equivalent of a jilted ex-girlfriend entering hour seventy-two of a breakup, mascara dried into black skid marks beneath her eyes, one acrylic nail gone, hair glued to the strawberry lip gloss on her cheek, a Virginia Slim drooping from the corner of her mouth, his old T-shirt hanging to her knees, no pants, room-temperature pink screw-top wine wedged between her thighs, surrounded by shredded Walgreens photos, a cracked iPhone, his toothbrush snapped in half, one hoop earring she can’t find the mate to and a damp Kleenex adhered to her calf while she changes his contact name to LYING SMALL-IN-THE-PANTS FUCKFACE IMPOTENT CUNT, blocks him, unblocks him, deletes his number, retrieves it from Recently Deleted and checks every eleventy minutes to see whether he has somehow had a change of heart and wants her back.

He has not.

He’s ghosted her completely and at this point is probably accordion-folded into the back of a fucking Citroën the size of a toaster in the middle of a full-blown NATO gangbang with Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Pedro Sánchez while she’s still on the bedroom floor with one tit hanging out of his old T-shirt, refreshing Find My Friends and firing off a succession of slurry voice memos.

FINE. I CUT YOUR FACE OUT OF THE NIAGARA FALLS PICTURES.

I RENAMED THE LAKE WE SHARED.

I WANT MY VCR BACK.

I NEVER EVEN LIKED YOUR MOTHER.

I’M DOING AMAZING.

CALL ME.

This is what currently passes for “diplomacy,” except our rancid little breakup banshee has nuclear codes.

And can you fucking imagine traveling back to 1996 and telling Republicans that within thirty years they’d be red-faced, vein-throbbing, foam-flecked and bellowing CRY HARDER, LIBTARDS because the reality-TV game-show host they put in the Oval Office TWICE had managed to find more warmth for North Korea than Canada and was punishing our closest northern ally by rage-renaming Lake fucking Ontario?

Bob Dole would’ve stared at you like you’d shit in his briefcase.

Pat Buchanan would’ve assumed the Soviets had won.

Rush Limbaugh would’ve checked the label on his painkillers to make sure he hadn’t swallowed the whole bottle before breakfast (again).

And somehow the stupid keeps finding new basement levels.

Because Lake America sounds less like one of the world’s great freshwater bodies than something conceived during a methamphetamine brainstorm behind a shuttered Kmart by the washed-up kid who played “Boy #2” on a 1984 sitcom and now owns three storage units full of stolen copper wire.

It sounds like somebody bought every slide, tube and medieval spinal-injury apparatus Action Park was legally required to dismantle, reassembled the whole tetanus trap somewhere in the Oklahoma Panhandle and started charging five dollars admission, cash only, waiver mandatory.

It sounds like a Foghat cover band playing the Thursday-night grand opening of a daiquiri barn/transmission shop in Slidell, Louisiana, while a guy named Duane sells loose Marlboros beside the Porta-Potty.

It sounds like an educational initiative launched in conjunction with Be Best.

Lake America.

Upgrade to paid

Jesus fucking Christ.

It sounds like something your insurance refuses to cover.

And the red-white-and-bald-eagle ethnonationalist genius caucus polishing its collective knob over the supposedly pristine Americanness of America might enjoy learning that Amerigo Vespucci was Italian, and the German cartographer who put “America” on his 1507 map was working in what is now France.

So this whole freedom-fapping patriotic bukkake is being performed by a flotilla of forehead-forward, cortex-deficient, cerebrally undercapitalized, chromosome-challenged, patriotism-pickled fuckwits defending a European christening honoring an Italian while acting like Canada just took a dump on Betsy Ross.

Fucking magnificent.

Meanwhile, the Epstein files still haven’t been released in full, and Trump’s name is all over material that has come out. People are getting financially flayed at grocery stores and gas pumps. Food is being recalled. Measles is spreading. Critical weapons reserves have been chewed down frighteningly low. And we are six months into an illegal, unconstitutional motherfucking endless war in Iran.

Those are the fucking stakes.

Not some ancient shared expanse of freshwater most of us hadn’t thought about since Christ knows when.

And no, I am not giving Donald Trump credit for some diabolical master plan. He is not Machiavelli. He is impulse in an adult diaper. Appetite without brakes. Ego without a governor. A peckish, perpetually pissed-off emotional hemophiliac with the self-command of a cocaine-addled retainer salesman at a three-day dental convention in Reno.

This isn’t genius.

It’s muscle memory.

Trump has spent his entire public existence marinating in spectacle: tabloids, feuds, bullshit boasts, fake grandeur, ratings, cameras, conflict, attention at any fucking cost. When the audience starts looking elsewhere, make some fresh preposterous declaration and drag every eyeball back toward him.

And somehow the jingoistic, jizz-brained, flag-fondling freedom fetishists are acting like this is OWNING THE LIBS instead of what it actually is: a loud little paperwork stunt the rest of the planet is free to ignore.

That is the whole fucking achievement.

He ordered his own government to play along while Canada keeps calling it Lake Ontario and Trump stomps around on this side of the border like a sunburned, snack-deprived, sippy-cup-slinging toddler who just found out the other kid gets to keep the blue shovel.

He can issue orders.

He can change federal maps.

He can tell every bootlicking, bobbleheaded, brain-dead beneficiary of his bullshit to call it whatever he wants.

Ottawa is not losing sleep.

Nobody is trembling.

Nobody in Paris is clutching their pearls because Donald J. Trump conquered a Microsoft Word document.

And there is something he will never understand because everything inside him is built around possession, permanence and putting his mark on whatever surface happens to be nearest.

You can build a fucking arch. It doesn’t make you Caesar.

You can tear down the East Wing. It doesn’t make the White House yours.

You can slap your name onto the Kennedy Center. It doesn’t make Kennedy disappear.

You can stand beneath a chandelier, shellac yourself in gold and announce a resplendent new epoch of unsurpassed national glory with all the bombast of a bankrupt casino owner unveiling a marble bidet.

It still doesn’t make this a fucking golden age.

We still know what we’re looking at.

And when you’re gone, and that day will be here sooner rather than later, every cheap little territorial scar you carved into this country will be scrubbed, scoured, chiseled, sandblasted and power-washed the fuck off.

The signs will come down.

The plaques will be replaced.

The maps will be corrected.

The names will be restored.

And aside from whatever antibiotic-resistant STD they eventually name after your sorry ass, you will be forgotten.

So enjoy the attention while it lasts, you bloated, blustering, bargain-bin Bonaparte, you spray-tanned shitheel, you grandiose gargoyle, you pustular prince of performative patriotism presiding over another irrelevant little atlas aneurysm.

Because the world is not watching in awe.

It is watching you make an ass of yourself in increasingly larger font.

What the fuck else is new?

And to our friends in Canada: elbows up.

A plurality of the dumbest dumbfucks who ever dumbed inflicted this fucking reality on all of us.

But we will get through it… together. 🇨🇦

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Person holds an american flag, smiling and happy

For the love of God and all that’s good and beautiful, haven’t you had enough, America?

Enough book bans,
culture wars,
bathroom bills,
family separations,
poisoned food,
renamed lakes,
unrelenting surveillance,
tax-funded genocides,
and wars of choice,

Haven’t you had enough of terrorized refugees,
billionaire techbros,
hospital room ICE raids,
protected predators,
ignored lynchings,
kleptocratic malpractice,
legislated religion,
and of being helmed by a lecherous, drug-addled, vile, barely literate serial predator and career criminal?

Haven’t you had enough of brutal assaults on the rights of women,
on immigrants,
on transgender teens,
on unarmed black men,
on affordable healthcare,
on free speech,
on our Military?

Have you had enough of relentless attacks on the poor,
on the disabled,
on the environment,
on peaceful protestors,
on the electoral process,
on the US Postal Service,
on objective truth,
on diversity as an idea?

Haven’t you had enough nonsensical conspiracies,
denials of Science,
mockery of expertise,
ignored climate change,
silencing of doctors,
stoked racism,
polluted courts?

Haven’t you had enough cruelty,
enough bigotry,
enough criminality,
enough divisiveness,
enough malevolence,
enough hatred,
enough ugliness?

Haven’t you had enough needless suffering,
enough unnecessary death,
enough Constitutional crises,
enough curated conflict,
enough manufactured emergencies,
enough presidential tweet tantrums,
enough intentional chaos?

Maybe it’s just me.

Maybe you’re fine with it all; maybe this is good enough for you; maybe you’ve resigned yourself to this dystopian white nationalist fever dream as inevitable. I sure as hell haven’t.

I’ve had enough of this frenetic circus of sociopathy over the past ten years to last a thousand lifetimes. I’m sick to my stomach of the nation we are, and I’m in-the-marrow-of-my-bones tired of being embarrassed of and grieving over the place I call home.

I want something better.

I want equity pursued.
I want bigotry shouted down.
I want justice escorted in.
I want compassion to trend.
I want kindness to go viral.
I want diversity to be celebrated.
I want the poor, tired, huddled masses to breathe again here.
I want ceremonial American “greatness” to give way to actual common goodness.
I want to stop being at the mercy of sadistic, hateful human beings who have contempt for everything and everyone.

What the hell do you want for this place, and are you willing to do whatever is necessary to get it?

November is coming, and there’s no way to overstate the reality that this is the last stand for all of it, for all of us. What we do over the coming weeks will initiate our rebirth or write our epitaph as a Republic.

You and I have this moment to end what we’ve had enough of and to usher in what we want to see more of; to demand what we cannot live without and to condemn what we will not abide.
We have this moment to create a home for ourselves and our children, and for other people’s children, for everyone who lives here and for all those who dream of living here.
We have this moment to leave something for the vast multitude on the horizon of history who will inherit this place; this moment, between the America that is and the America that could be—and for better or for worse, will be.

And it is all in our hands.

Regardless of their gerrymandering and suppression and intimidation and lawlessness, We The Pissed-Off People can wield our numbers to defy and defeat them. 

We simply have to decide to put aside our purity tests and our excuses and our infighting and our minor differences and our apathy, and do the damn work together instead of bickering, complaining, and distracting ourselves into fascism.

No politician is likely to move people who are still inexplicably undecided; those still stuck in laziness, hopelessness, or ignorance; those who still aren’t planning to use their voices.

Only you can do that.

Only you can reach people in the trenches of your relationships with them: in your home and your neighborhood and at your school and at work and on your timelines. You can be the difference in the day.

What have you had enough of over the last ten exhausting, disorienting, heartbreaking years?
What do you want to leave for those who will follow us?
What will you do in the coming days in response?

America is not in the hands of a politician or a preacher or an athlete or a celebrity; it’s in our hands. Yes, it’s true, no one is coming to save us. The only question left is, will we save ourselves?

In the weeks ahead, may you leverage your voice, your time, your resources, your circle of influence, your network, and your community, and may you do all you can to transform the America that is into the America that could be.

This will be the dawn or the death of the nation we dream of making.

In November, may we wake up in that hopeful, beautiful, glorious place of possibility again.

I have had enough of this divided, corrosive, violent, failing America.

Have you?

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