Midweek Tiedrich


fuck the usual daily dose of doom and gloom. good news is out there — let’s take a look.

first off, Eileen Higgins was elected mayor of Miami, Florida.

this is fucking huge, and here’s why:

it’s been twenty-eight years since Miami last elected a Democratic mayor — and Higgins didn’t just squeak into office. she crushed it, getting nearly 59 percent of the vote.

the Republican brand is growing ever more toxic by the day.

the last Democrat to run for Miami mayor, in 2021, lost by 67 percent. Higgins’ victory represents a pro-Democratic swing of— hang on, math is hard, and I just ran out of fingers. okay, that’s a swing of 26 percentage points.

Higgins even significantly outperformed Kamala Harris’ 2024 numbers.

In the Miami mayoral race, Higgins (D) is outperforming Kamala Harris by 42 points in Wynwood and 25 points in Little Havana.

pour one out for presidential sidepiece Laura Loomer. she’s experiencing a Ginormous Sad right now.

“A bright red city in a bright red state just went blue tonight. Eileen Higgins is a socialist. President Trump’s Presidential library will now be constructed under the control of a rabidly anti-Trump Democrat who supports soft on crime policies. Midterms will be a bloodbath.”

wait, the midterms are going to be a bloodbath? don’t threaten me with a good time, Laura. let’s hug it out.

this is the kind of twaddle that Laura Loopy worries about, that Dear Leader’s ‘presidential library’ is going to be built by a radical leftist commie pinko socialist. oh noes!

let’s get real, Donny’s presidential library already exists. it’s in the shitter of his tacky Florida golf motel.


here’s another significant victory. Democrat Eric Gisler flipped Georgia’s 121st House District from red to blue. that’s a district where Donny Convict won by double digits last year.

here’s why Gisler’s victory matters: it wasn’t supposed to happen. Georgia’s 121st district had the living shit gerrymandered out of it, in order to ensure Republican victories forever.

A Republican gerrymander just backfired in Georgia. Despite splitting Athens into three conservative-leaning districts, Democrats flipped Trump+12 GA HD-121 — turning one of those engineered red seats blue tonight.

if Republicans can’t even gerrymander their way to safe seats, Laura Loopy just might be right about that bloodbath.


Democrats are on a roll. they keep they keep racking up off-year wins. Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey. Prop 50 in California. Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. Mary Sheffield in Detroit — on and on, while Republicans keep racking up bupkis.

here’s why this keeps happening:

“Posted anonymously to Reddit this morning… ‘In the longest line I have ever seen at our local church food bank, been standing here for an hour, its 34 degrees. A small town in Kentucky with a population of <4800. Basically 10% of the population is waiting at the food bank.’”

food lines in a deeply-red state are the direct result of Republicanomics. this is what happens when incoherent and arbitrary tariffs raise the price of every fucking thing. this is what happens when the Donny’s beloved Big Beautiful Bill makes healthcare more expensive while giving the morbidly wealthy another tax cut.

Republicans aren’t doing shit for their base, and everyone knows it.

blaming everything on Sleepy Brandon only goes so far.

Obamacare subsidies are just about set to expire, and Republicans continue to fumble healthcare.

Fox: “what do you say to those who say to Republicans, ‘where is your plan?’ where is the plan that the American people can kind of get their hands around and say ‘well, if I’m not going to get my subsidy, I’m going to pick option B.’?”

Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick: “in the short term, we’re still wrestling with how to deal with this.”

in the ‘short term’? oh really? come on, Republicans have been trying to replace Obamacare since the day it became law fifteen years ago — and in all that time, they haven’t come up with shit. Republicans aren’t going to have a plan in two weeks, or two months, or two years.

the GOP did this to themselves, by shitcanning Obamacare subsidies without first coming up with a way to keep insurance affordable. they had to have known this was going to blow up in their faces. what did they imagine was going to happen, that the Health Insurance Fairy was going to swoop down at the last minute and wave a magic wand that would fix everything?

hang on, that’s actually a better plan than anything the Republicans have managed to come up with.


and, lastly, Dear Leader’s brain continues to leak out of his ears. oh, look — Donny Two-Dolls is back!

“you can give up certain products. you could give up pencils. under the China policy, you know, every child can get thirty-seven pencils. they only need one or two, you know. they don’t need that many. but you always need, you always need steel. you don’t need thirty-seven dolls for your daughter. two or three is nice. but you don’t need thirty-seven dolls. so, uh, we’re doing things rights.”

that was Donny, in Pennsylvania last night, on the first leg of what he’s calling his ‘affordability tour.’ in the middle of a speech where Donny was supposed to be praising his fictitious awesome economy, the monkey in his head started crashing the cymbals a little too loudly, and out came gibberish about how no one needs more than two dolls.

even the Washington Post had to note how dumb-as-fuck this messaging was.

what in the hallowed name of Tone-Deaf Jesus does Sundowning Grandpa Befuddlepants imagine he’s accomplishing, telling his cultists to be happy with their government-approved two pencils — all while he’s wasting three hundred million dollars on a vanity project to boost his own ego, in the form of a gaudy dance hall where the White House’s East Wing used to be.

keep it up, Donny. keep telling those people lined up in the freezing cold for that food bank in Kentucky all about how they only need two pencils. you go down there and say it right to their faces.

do let us know what happens.


here’s what I wrote one month ago, after the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill sweep. every word of it still holds true today.

the lesson in all this for Donny and his Republican enablers is that none of their fuckery is popular.

We the People don’t want masked and armed Gestapo thugs terrorizing our neighborhoods and teargassing our children. We the People don’t want incoherent economic policies that send prices ever upwards. We the People don’t want a broken government that works only for billionaires.

We the People don’t want an unhinged and deteriorating 34-count narcoleptic fart factory ruling over us. yesterday’s election results made that clear.

President Pudding Cup wasn’t on the ballot, but yesterday’s election was a referendum on his presidency — and the results were not pretty for him.

will Republicans learn anything from the drubbing they took yesterday? of course fucking not. expect them to double down on the lunacy — and the oppression. it’s all they know how to do.

we’ve got battles ahead of us that will need to be taken on, and won.

but for today, let’s congratulate ourselves. tomorrow we return to the fight.

’twas ever thus.


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.

Are We Finally In The “Find Out”Phase?

Mr. Smith, who spent more than two years aggressively collecting evidence to prove Trump mishandled classified documents and tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, appears eager to publicly challenge Trump. Smith has made it unmistakably clear that he will not only defend himself but take a hammer to Mr. Trump’s exaggerated and false claims. There’s “tons of evidence” Smith said, that Mr. Trump had willingly retained the classified documents at his residence in Mar-a-Lago and tried “to obstruct the investigation.” Some Republicans have privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump’s quest for vengeance could backfire by giving a credible anticorruption investigator an open mic. Jack Smith still has the capacity to inflict significant political damage by discrediting the MAGA narrative that Trump did nothing wrong.

Tuesday Tiedrich


the legal career of ace parking garage lawyer Alina Habba has been one fucktacular disaster after another.

she’s been lectured, berated and reprimanded by judges for being unaware of basic courtroom procedures. she did such a terrible job of defending Donny in court that he was found liable for rape, and fined 83.3 million dollars. and a lawsuit she filed on Donny’s behalf against Hillary Clinton was so patently frivolous that Alina wound up being sanctioned for a million dollars.

but it was on January 4, 2024, that Alina secured her spot in the Dumbfuck Hall of Fame. that was the day she appeared on the PBD podcast and shat out these legendary words:

“somebody said to me ‘Alina, would you rather be smart or pretty?’ and I said ‘oh easy, pretty. I can fake being smart’.”

fact check: oh please, fuck straight off. every day of her life, Alina proves she can’t fake being smart. nor can she fake humility, or competence. she can’t even fake being a lawyer.

now we’re learning that she can’t fake basic professionalism.

yesterday, Alina Habba resigned as Acting US Attorney for New Jersey — and she did it in the most MAGA way possible: by going onto Elon’s Nazi Bar and tweeting a pissy statement in which she rehashed every grudge and grievance.

have you noticed that everyone in Donny’s orbit is as petty and childish as he is? this is the lesson they all learn by watching Dear Leader, as he pisses and moans his way through life: that it’s perfectly okay to be a malignant diaper-baby who never stops whining about every fucking thing.

Alina is sooooo aggrieved. doesn’t the Third Circuit understand that Alina’s been fighting the good fight against lawfare for literal years and years? why is everyone being so mean to her? it’s so unfair!

none of this unprofessional twaddle belongs in a resignation letter. this is the kind of letter you write when you’ve been kicked off the high school cheerleading squad.

and this, by the way, is the face Alina makes when she demands to speak with the Third Circuit Court’s manager.

now, here’s the beauty part: the Acting US Attorney job that Habba ‘resigned’ is one she’d already been removed from months ago. that ruling was upheld last week by the Third Circuit.

so basically, since last August, the parking garage lawyer has been pretending to be an Acting US Attorney.

‘pretending to be acting’ — I can’t even believe I just typed that surreal string of words. welcome to life in the shittiest timeline ever.

now Alina has to go out and get a real job, for once. maybe she can learn to play the tiny violin.


here are two more homeys who can’t fake smart — Sean Duffy, the Secretary for Hoping Planes Don’t Fall Out Of The Sky, and Bobby Brainworms, the head of the Department Of Dying From A Preventable Disease.

these two ass-clowns have been putting their heads together, and they’ve come up with some awesome ideas for improving your airport experience.

“maybe I want a workout area where people might get some blood flowing doing some pull-ups or step-ups in the airport.”

oh yeah, I’m loving this idea. this is exactly what we need: a way for dumbfucks to get overheated and sweaty before they sit next to you on a crowded plane.

oh look, they brought an actual pull-up bar with them for the dog-and-pony show. let’s watch Bobby make a complete ass of himself.

what kind of weak-ass nonsense was that? oh come on, Bobby! those aren’t even real pull-ups. where is the effort? put some fucking muscle into it, dude.

we definitely have to gif that shit for posterity’s sake.

Brainworms and Duffy are overgrown and emotionally-stunted children.

it’s as if you took two eight-year-old boys, pumped them full of sugar, and set them loose making national policy.

‘you know what airports need? whale heads! when I grow up, I’m going to have a chainsaw! won’t that be awesome?’


now let’s watch Little Donny Fuckface finally win the Nobel Complete Piece of Shit Prize, as he once again insults and berates a reporter who is a woman of color.

a little background first. last week, reporter Selena Wang asked Donny if he would consider releasing the video that shows those two shipwrecked Venezuelans clinging to the wreckage of their boat, and getting murdered to death by the US military.

here was Donny’s exact answer: ‘I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.’

got that? now here’s Donny being a complete fuckwad yesterday.

ABC reporter Rachel Scott: “Mr. President, you said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth now says—”

Donny: “I didn’t say that. that’s— you said that, I didn’t say that. this is ABC fake news.”

fact check: yes, you did say that. here’s the link again, you doddering old shit-for-brains.

later on in the clip, Rachel Scott asks once again if Donny will release the full video. here’s the Mad King’s charming response.

“didn’t I just tell you that? you are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place. let me just tell you— you are an obnoxious— a terrible, actually a terrible reporter. and it’s always the same thing with you. I told you.”

you’ll be shocked to learn that Rachel Scott is a woman of color.

and you’ll be shocked to learn that not one of Rachel’s colleagues spoke up in her defense. they all just stood there like the useless lumps they are.

in the last month alone, Donny has insulted seven reporters — all of them women.

why is it always the women who have the courage to ask Donny the uncomfortable questions? what the fuck is wrong with you men? stand up for your profession. stand up for your colleagues.

this is probably a good place to note that my What The Fuck Is Wrong With You Challenge™ is now in its 2,079th day.


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.

 

IT: Welcome To Derry

Pleasantly surprised!

I liked the two part theatrical release of IT a few years ago. I kept seeing screencaps from Welcome To Derry appearing in my Tumblr feed but it looked like a cheap knock-off of the films. Still, they intrigued me enough that I finally sat down last night and started watching, and it was only the late hour that prevented me from binging the entire series to date. Yeah, it’s that good.

I really pulled me in without reservation was when the character Dick Hollerand was introduced. Does that name sound familiar? If you’re familiar with The Shining, it should. And then it all clicked. Same character. Same abilities. Both Welcome to Derry and The Shining are part of the same universe. Knowing this—and King’s running theme of government experimentation in areas it shouldn’t be—I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if references to The Mist as well as Dreamcatcher pop up as the series progresses.

Nina Simone On A Sunny December Day

Bit Club!

What will I record on these? No idea, but something special. They were an absolute steal and I had to have them.

Back in the day (the early 00s—as I’ve mentioned before I was a late bloomer to the MiniDisc format) I had a ton of the zebra stripes. I picked ‘em up at Fry’s Electronics as I remember. I don’t think they were any more expensive than the more common solid color discs at the time but I may be wrong. I got ‘em because they were quirky, and we know I like quirky.

Nowadays, unless you stumble upon a seller who absolutely has no idea what he’s sitting on (like I did) you’ll pay an arm, leg, your first-born, and have to take out a second mortgage—especially if you want one of the rarer varieties like Mona Lisa or the Power/Light Poles shown below (screencap from minidisc.pics). I’ve seen those go for over $100 each.).

None of mine fall into that “rare” category. Even if I were still working, there’s no way I would pay that kind of money for a single disc! There’s collecting, and then there’s madness.

Sunday Tiedrich


Holy Mike Johnson, the limpest dick ever to wield the House Speaker’s gavel, is in grave danger of losing his grip on that hammer.

by way of explanation, let me commit a metaphor. everyone loves a metaphor, right? especially when it’s this one.

Piss-Drunk Pete Kegstand is, of course, standing in for Holy Mike Johnson. the skateboard represents four Republican Congresswomen who are furious with Holy Mike right now. and the nuts are, well, literal nuts. not everything has to be a metaphor, okay?

the women who are the four skateboards of the nutpocalypse.

the first is Marjorie Three Toes Greene.

the Republican majority in the House right now stands at 220-213.

with Madge sporking her way out of Congress next month, the Republican barely-a-majority in the House will drop to 219 — making it that much harder for Holy Mike to inflict his Christofascist fuckery on We the People.


the second is America’s self-appointed bathroom panty inspector

attention-starved Nancy Mace — currently running to be South Carolina’s Governor, and probably jealous of all the headlines Marge got after announcing she was quitting — has also been making noises about retiring early. per The New York Times,

Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina has told people she is so frustrated with the Louisiana Republican and sick of the way he has run the House — particularly how women are treated there — that she is planning to huddle with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia next week to discuss following her lead and retiring early from Congress.

pay particular attention to Nancy saying that she’s sick of ‘how women are treated’ by Holy Mike — because here’s a super-fun headline from The Hill.

get ready for the least-surprising thing you’ll hear today: apparently, Holy Mike Johnson — a Christofascist from a southern state — has a problem with women in power. as a result, he’s been sidelining and ignoring them the entire time he’s been House Speaker.

I know, right? knock me over with a feather.

you have to love the way the Times dances around the issue.

Some [Republican women] said privately that the speaker had failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues, suggesting that doing so was a cultural challenge for Mr. Johnson — an evangelical Christian who has often voiced firm views about the distinct roles men and women should play in society.

‘often voiced firm views’ is doing a shitload of heavy lifting in that paragraph.

what the Times is afraid to come right out and say is that Holy Mike is a raging misogynist who would prefer it if the ladies would get the fuck out of the halls of Congress and back into the kitchen, where they belong. those sandwiches aren’t going to make themselves.


the third skateboard of the nutpocalypse is Florida Rep. Ann Appalling Lunatic — who for once in her weird, interdimensional-entity-obsessed life, is not being an appalling lunatic.

Luna has authored a bill that would ban members of Congress from stock trading — and I think we can all agree that preventing Congress members from enriching themselves off the insider knowledge they hold as lawmakers is a great idea.

it’s fucking heartbreaking.

the problem for Luna — and the rest of us — is that Holy Mike thinks banning stock trading is a shitty idea, and he’s refused to schedule a vote on the bill.

Luna was all ‘this aggression will not stand, man,’ and has filed a discharge petition to force a vote on her bill — much like the one Tom Massie used to force a vote on the Dead Pedo Bestie files.


the fourth skateboard is New York’s Elise Stefanik, best known for having a name Dear Leader can’t pronounce.

“how great did Elise Steppanack do?”

Steppanack Stefanik is hella pissed at Holy Mike right now.

“He certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow,” the New York lawmaker, who is running for governor, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership. It’s that widespread.”

Elise and Holy Mike have been slap-fighting for years, but it recently came to a head when Mike balked at a provision she wanted inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act — one that would ‘require the FBI to alert Congress if it opens a counterintelligence investigation into an elected official or candidate.’

according to Punchbowl News,

Stefanik has gone absolutely ballistic on Johnson in the most public way during this dispute, saying the speaker was lying about her and instructing him to “fix this” – in other words, get the provision into the bill. Stefanik said Johnson was “blocking” her policy and the speaker was getting “rolled” by Democrats.

slow the fuck down, Elise — America is in danger of depleting its National Strategic Reserve of Popcorn.

I have a better idea for Stefanik. instead of some dumb-ass provision to require the FBI to rat on itself, how about Elise’s Republican colleagues stop being such lawless fucksticks, and maybe they won’t have to be investigated by the FBI in the first place?

now here’s where the Elise-vs-Holy Mike feud gets weird — because as almost always is the case when it’s Republican-on-Republican violence, both sides fucking suck.

recall that back in the early days of the Mad King’s second reign, Donny nominated Steppanack Stefanik to be Ambassador to the United Nations — and then, a couple of weeks later, withdrew her nomination. who even remembers why? it’s impossible to keep up with the firehose of fuckery that’s being sprayed in our faces, twenty-four-seven.

anyway, when no-longer-a-nomineeElise slunk back the House to resume being a Rep, Holy Mike named her ‘chairwoman of House Republican Leadership,’ as sort of a consolation prize — and, apparently, she wasn’t grateful enough.

A senior Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of prolonging an intraparty feud, said that after Mr. Johnson had provided Ms. Stefanik with office space and a budget for what the aide described as “a fake job and a fake title,” he would have expected her to be more gracious.

it cannot be stressed enough that all of these Republicans fucking suck. Elise Stefanik is supposed to fall all over herself in gratitude over being given what the anonymous aide admits is ‘a fake job and fake title’?

these people are all ill-tempered children, and they deserve each other.


shed not a tear for Holy Mike, should he lose the House Speakership. he’s been a fucking nightmare. he’s weak and ineffective. he’s an evasive liar. ask any question about some fuckery of Donny’s that’s been all over the news, and he’ll claim to have never heard about it.

worse than any of that, Johnson has completely abdicated the House Speaker’s Constitutionally-ordained role as a check on the presidency. he’s let a fluorescent tangerine Mad King run wild, never once blocking any of his fuckbrained schemes. whatever Donny wanted — no matter how obviously ruinous — was fine with Mike. incoherent tariffs? go for it, Dear Leader. unconstitutional executive orders? you do you, bro. fire all the experts and replace them with morons? sounds good to us. prosecute political enemies? knock yourself out. kick millions of people off their healthcare so that gazillionaires can have another tax cut? what could possibly go wrong?

the end of Holy Mike’s grasp on power — whether from being stabbed in the back by his own party, or by Republicans losing their majority after the likely Blue Tsunami midterms — can’t come fast enough.


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.

“The Socialite”

I guess that’s one way of getting around the copyright algorithm…

(BTW…this is my go-to movie whenever I need a pick-me-up.)