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Bringing the Trump-Corrupted Presidency to Heel

We will de-Trump America when he is gone. Tearing down all the monuments, taking his name off places it never should have been, unfucking the gaudy vomit he has put all over the White House will be easy and relatively fast.

All the other stuff he has destroyed is going to take the rest of my life to rebuild. The open corruption, lying during confirmations, and naked political actors in SCOTUS, all the relationships with America’s 20th century allies, the empowering and protection of the Epstein Class… it’s a lot. And I we haven’t even mentioned the DOGE destruction.

The rest of my life, at least, and I do know one thing: if we can do it, we can’t just roll it back to 2015. We have to rebuild everything, and we have to punish the absolute fuck out of this entire criminal organization. I’m talking prison for life, nationalizing of assets. We need to ask ourselves, “What would John Brown or Sherman do?”

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I fear that rebuilding what has been destroyed will take longer than I’ll be alive, even optimistically giving myself another 20 years…

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One Of Two Films This Year That I’m Actually Going To A Theater To See

Backrooms is one of two films I’ll be venturing out to actually see in a theater this year. (The other being DUNE3.) I purchased my ticket today, not that I fear I’ll have any trouble getting in…

I first stumbled across The Backrooms on YouTube back in 2002. Posted on the Kane Pixels channel, at the time the initial video terrified me because I hadn’t run across anything like it previously. Was this real? Rationally I knew it couldn’t be, but the environment was so damn convincing.

In the intervening years, The Backrooms has become somewhat of an internet sensation, with multiple videos being produced by dozens of creators. Some of the videos are really good, expanding upon this strange universe and some are…well…not.

There were rumors last year that a feature-length film was in the works, even though I couldn’t imagine how this story would be brought to the big screen. Well, apparently it was more than just a rumor. Kane Parsons—the original creator of The Backrooms—is directing this A24 production, which is being released later this month (on my birthday, no less!).

If you’re curious, Kane’s original videos can be seen here,

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I Could Live There

Beautiful.

I can smell these pictures. Over the course of my life I’ve spent enough time in homes of this vintage to recall that very specific smell produced by wood, old plaster, and time…and it’s wonderful.

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Who Remembers?

I can close my eyes and taste it like it was yesterday…

I haven’t been to a Taco Bell in nearly two years. The last time I was there I ordered the (reintroduced) Mexican pizza (one of my favorites) and it was horrific. And then I learned they’d discontinued the Taco Salad and the regular, plain ol’ tostadas—and saw no reason to return after that.

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One Of My Favorite Short Stories

Many years ago (I believe it was a year or so after my first cancer) my ex (of twenty years at that point) and I were wandering through a mall, and as we made our way through Crate and Barrel, I happened upon this yellow vase.

While not a bowl, it still immediately reminded me of The Potters of Firsk and I casually mentioned this to Bernie and how beautiful I found the color. He immediately grabbed it off the shelf and said, “Happy Birthday.”

I’ve somehow managed to go through multiple moves with it remaining unscathed, and to this day I look at it and think of that story—as politically incorrect as parts of it may seem today.

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The Week In Stupid

as another stupid week comes to a close here in America, let’s look back at the dumbest fucking shit that happened.

monday: he likes them what?

frankly, I think it’s nice that our piss-drunk Secretary of Death was able to take some time off from his busy schedule of gleefully dropping bombs on Iranian schoolgirls to have a playdate with that noise-adjacent caterwauler, Too Old To Be A Kid Too Impaired To Rock.

the question must be asked: what in the actual small-batch artisanal fuck?

who thought this was an acceptable idea? why is it that our government never has any money when people need healthcare, or when children need a simple hot school lunch, but whenever some shrieking washed-up never-waswants to take a seven-thousand-dollar-an-hour joyride in an attack helicopter, the Donnysphere bends over backwards to accommodate him?

fix America’s actual problems first, you shit-kazoos. then you can waste all the money you want on performative dumbfuckery.

now tell me this: what wisdom could Piss Right Off, You’re Not A Kid possibly be imparting to the assembled crowd in the Pentagon press room?

maybe he’s reciting the lyrics to his charming song, Cool Daddy Cool.

young ladies, young ladies
I like ’em underage
see some say that’s statutory
but I say that’s mandatory

I’ll bet Jeffrey Epstein fucking loved that ditty.

I have a suggestion: if Not A Kid is so horny to do warmonger cosplay, let him enlist and go off to fight in Donny and Petey’s don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran.

no, wait. that would require actual courage.

oh and, Not Even Close To Being A Kid, can we talk? the next time Piss-Drunk Pete rings you up and asks you if you want to hang, tell him you’ve always wanted to go skateboarding with him. trust me. will be wild.

tuesday: kai yi yi

folks, pour one out for Preznit Fuckwit’s granddaughter Kai. she’s going through some things right now.

“I mean, hey. people— some people don’t like me, I mean 50 % of the world doesn’t like me because of my last name. one time I was out in public and someone literally walked up to me to tell me that my grandpa sucks.”

folks, how sad it is that the grifting grifter who has gone into the family business of selling merch and profiting off her famous name is catching shit for it?

Mayor Mamdani, can you and Ms. Rachel step in here for a moment and do us a solid?

thanks, guys.

now let’s do a quick fact check: does Kai’s grandfather suck?

apparently, yes.

I see two paths forward for Kai Trump at this point. one would be to do what Josef Stalin’s daughter Svetlana did — she solved that ‘your dad kinda sucks’ shit in a hot second by changing her name to Lana Peters and moving to Wisconsin, of all places. I shit you not.

or wait — even better, Kai could be like her first cousin once removed, Mary. when strangers come up to Mary Trump and tell her that her uncle totally fucking sucks, she high-fives them and is all ‘you don’t know the half of it.’

wednesday: she should have turned him into a human being

Christofascist hate-factory Joel Webbon is such a charmer.

“you look at Paula White, the chief faith advisor to Donald Trump, you look at some of the clips of her rolling on the ground, waving a coat and trying to slay people in the spirit, and ‘riririririririri’ speaking in tongues, she’s a witch. she’s a witch. she’s not just a Christian with some bad theology. she’s a wolf, she’s a false teacher — but even more than that, as a woman, I think that it is technically accurate to say she is … a witch.”

okay, let’s grant that Mister Stopped Clock here is right about a few things: Paula White is in fact a grifting charlatan who pretends to speak in tongues and has Donny Convict totally bamboozled.

but is she actually a witch?

well, Wytchfinder Joel has proof of Paula White’s witching witchery: she turned him into a newt — but don’t worry, folks. he got better.

thursday: all that glitters

wingnut screech-monkey Lance Wallnau has a few things he needs to get off his somewhat sparkly chest.

“let’s face it, most of the media’s left. it’s not evenly divided. you got, I saw Politico, and The New York Times—”

wait, wait, hang on. I’m sorry, I drifted off and stopped listening to Lance almost immediately, because I got distracted by— dude, what on god’s green shit-tangle are you wearing?

did you crash your car into a glitter factory on your way to the studio? have you been moonlighting at drag queen story hours?

bro, I’ve got Liberace on the phone. he says to tone it way the fuck down.

you’re giving him a headache.

friday: the further adventures of Some Fucking Idiot™

for once in his chaotic, look-at-me-look-at-me life, some fucking idiot actually had a quiet morning. there were no public appearances on his official schedule, and the feed on his crappy app stayed relatively free of batshittery.

it wasn’t under later in the afternoon that the fucking idiot popped out of his spider hole to inflict himself upon the world.

at 3pm, the fucking idiot addressed an audience from the Florida retirement community The Villages.

he played ‘Live and Let Die,’ which is a totally appropriate song to play for the extreme elderly.

the amost-80-year-old, gripping the podium for dear life, both hands visibly rotting, blithered about being ‘young, vital and vibrant.’

the fucking idiot bragged about being the shittiest boss ever.

the fucking idiot also committed a racism, because of course he did.

fact check: Ilhan Omar did not marry her brother. that’s a racist lie that racists like to tell because racists suck.

once again, the fucking idiot bragged about acing the test they only give you if they have a good reason to suspect you have brain damage, by successfully pointing to a drawing of a camel — oh no, wait, this time it was a bear.

tell me, were percentages on the fucking idiot’s dementia test? I’m guessing not.

finally, the fucking idiot cautioned against his own presidency.

trust us, homey, we all understand what it’s like to be stuck with a president who’s a moron.

mere mortals would have been exhausted after all that — but the fucking idiot isn’t like you or me. he still had some gas left in the tank. between eleven pm and midnight, the fucking idiot started shitting lunacy onto his crappy app.

what kind of fucking idiot would think it appropriate to joke about swimming in the Reflecting Pool? the fucking idiot kind, that’s who.

also, in your dreams you’re that svelte, you floating sack of shit.

oh look, the losing loser who’s lost his war in Iran is imaging he’s a winner.

the only cards you hold are jokers, dumbfuck.

and of all the things that are never going to happen, this next one is never going to happen the most.

now, because it was the middle of the night and the fucking idiot was holed up all alone in his vermin-infested Florida golf motel, not one reporter was around to stand up and ask ‘what the fuck is wrong with you?’

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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Can We Fix The Broken System?

Brian has some ideas:

When I saw this week that the Supreme Court had taken a hatchet to the Voting Rights Act, I was – depressingly – not surprised. Because of course they would. This conservative court has by now pretty much declared their fealty to Trump over the Constitution. So the ruling was – in my opinion – a foregone conclusion.

The reality is that this is just going to keep happening until we’re left with a hollowed out shell of a democracy. Even in an ideal scenario, where Democrats have full control of government and can finally pass a new Voting Rights Act, the Roberts Supreme Court will always be waiting in the wings with a machete to break down whatever Democrats build up.

But there is a solution. This is the clearest way I can explain it, in this excerpt from my book:

To restore democracy, to restore integrity to the judicial system, we urgently need to reform the Supreme Court. Those reforms need to be based on principle, not politics, to have any legitimacy or public support. The first order of a filibuster-free Congress should be reform of the Supreme Court. Not the second or the third or the fourth, or it will be too late to save the republic and our independent judiciary. If any subsequent reforms are to stand a chance at surviving, we cannot leave in place a rogue branch of government with the power to strike down anything that doesn’t comport with its far-right ideology.

The first reform should be to expand the Court, in line with the principles that determined the number of justices in the early years of the republic. The first Supreme Court had six justices, reflecting the six federal court circuits. The Court grew to seven justices in 1807, after a seventh circuit was added. It grew again to nine after two new circuits were added in 1837. Today there are thirteen federal court circuits but only nine Supreme Court justices. The Court should reflect the size of the country and the scope of its legal challenges, as it did more than a century ago.

The second reform should be to limit the term of new justices to eight years, allowing newly elected presidents to choose their own nominees regularly. This would reduce the opportunities for the kind of procedural delays that stymied Obama’s appointment of a justice in his final year in office. The regular flow of new appointments would help remove the national drama from each nomination by diluting the novelty of each new appointment. Once again, there is widespread public support for term limits for Supreme Court justices: 75 percent of Americans agree with term limits, according to a PRRI survey in 2025.

The third reform should be to establish an enforceable code of conduct, with a Supreme Court panel mandated to investigate allegations of wrongdoing and impropriety. The panel should have the power to force the recusal of justices in cases where they have personal ties and even force the removal of justices in cases of conduct unworthy of the Supreme Court. Public polling suggests that there is huge support for such reforms as well: 76 percent of Americans are in favor of a binding code of conduct, according to a USA Today poll in 2024.

The final reform should be to retire any justice over the age of seventy from the Supreme Court, regardless of who appointed them. The Constitution says that judges “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” which has been interpreted as lifetime appointments. That is one way to interpret the phrase but by no means the only one. A retired Supreme Court justice could be moved to a lower court and still stay within a reasonable interpretation of the constitutional language.

In fact, there’s widespread public support for retiring all public officials over a certain age, and there’s a surprising degree of consensus on what that age should be. As many as 79 percent of Americans favor age limits for elected officials, and 74 percent favor them for Supreme Court justices, according to Pew Research Center. Polling by the Benenson Strategy Group showed that a clear majority, 63 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans, support an upper age limit of seventy for anyone to be sworn in as president. (The Constitution does not set any age range for the Supreme Court but does state that the presidency has a lower age limit of thirty-five.)

Mandatory retirement at seventy years of age would lead to four immediate vacancies on the Supreme Court: three conservatives and one liberal. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito would leave, along with Chief Justice John Roberts. So would Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by Barack Obama. All three Trump judges would remain, along with one Obama and one Biden appointee.

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt tried and failed to expand the Supreme Court, Washington has shied away from reforming the highest court in the land. However, FDR’s plan was the product of another political era, almost a century ago. The Court had struck down several pieces of his New Deal plan to revive the economy from the depths of the Great Depression. FDR also proposed to retire judges at age seventy, but if they refused to leave, he would be free to add an additional justice, potentially expanding the Court to fifteen. Congress defeated his plan, but FDR ultimately prevailed; within five years, seven of the nine justices were his own appointees.

Today’s Supreme Court has weakened itself by its political activism, repeatedly disregarding the Constitution and its code of conduct. It is populated by older justices at a time when the American people are yearning to reform the status quo. If we want to revive our democracy, we need to revive our Supreme Court. If that seems extreme, consider an alternative that is already upon us: a Court that undermines the very Constitution it’s supposed to uphold.

This week’s ruling was not a one-off. It’s the logical endpoint of a decades-long effort to disenfranchise minority voters and keep minority representation to an absolute minimum.

The three longest-serving conservative justices on the court right now have a combined 75 years on the bench. This is their pet project. They own it. And the other three conservatives, all Trump appointees, are comparatively young and spry. Gorsuch doesn’t even have a full decade under his belt. Without court expansion, we’re stuck with this right wing majority for another couple of decades at least.

We need to normalize ourselves to the idea of court expansion, so that when we have power, we don’t waste our time negotiating what we should be doing, but rather spend our time doing it.

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