A few days ago, I opened my Threads feed and was greeted by the post of a young woman, featuring a couple of resolute carseat selfies, along with the caption:

 

I AM….. PRO ICE PRO Military Pro Law Enforcement Pro Trump Pro Charlie Kirk Pro Voter ID Pro Accountability [sic]

Immediately below that post was another, absolutely identical to the first, except for a different account handle.

I continued to refresh my feed, greeted again and again by the same image, the same quote, yet from different accounts. (I’m currently at 26 and counting, by the way.)

Scrolling through my timeline, this morning alone, I encountered, not only five more greetings from my now ubiquitous brunette, shapeshifting female MAGA warrior, but at least four other different versions featuring other white women, supposedly also declaring their love for their Predator-In-Chief, his barbaric ICE foot soldiers, and MAGA’s anti-immigrant, anti-Black, Anti-Democracy agenda.

A cursory glance at my newsfeed, and no one would blame you for thinking a massive number of young white women are inexplicably assembling around a court-adjudicated rapist and likely serial predator, whose misogynist regime is trying to take away women’s body autonomy and voting rights.

And it’s all a mirage, just like everything about this President, his Administration, and their barbaric, yet rapidly shrinking white supremacist movement, but it’s an exhausting mirage.

Being gaslit will wear you the hell out, which of course, is the plan.

I think we all need to collect ourselves and understand what’s really happening here.

We need to inventory the emotional and mental toll of being inundated throughout our waking moments with an endless stream of gaslighting nonsense, Right-Wing propaganda, bot proliferation, and Conservative algorithm manipulation.

It’s critical that we don’t allow ourselves to be defeated by an alarming, terrifying, and infuriating fiction. We are not outnumbered.

Donald Trump’s current approval rating is hovering between 28 and 36 percent, depending on the source, and his support is never going to rise from here. This is his absolute ceiling.

His covering up of the Epstein Files, the lawlessness of ICE’s domestic terrorism, his starting of an unnecessary, sickeningly expensive war with Iran, stratospheric gas prices, and a cratering economy that has been in a tailspin ever since his disastrous tariffs began—these are mortal wounds to Trump and his party, and they know it.

Republicans have known since 2024 that the window was going to be incredibly short; that their policies have been wildly unpopular, their base has been dwindling, and that their quickly-collapsing, cognitively-addled, lame duck wanna be dictator has been steadily losing his capacity to bulldoze criticism and manipulate reality.

Trump’s broken campaign promises regarding transparency around Epstein, his vow to end wars, his asinine boasts to bring gas and food prices down, his wasteful ballrooms and national mall desecrations are not playing well with the former faithful who can barely keep the lights on or put food on the table.

The MAGA arrow is pointing down and nothing can prevent that.

Friends, what this all means is that we are the majority and it ain’t even close.

Well over two-thirds of this nation despise this Christo-fascist regime, their assaults on black and brown people, their endless persecution of the LGBTQ community, their attacks on the free speech and the Arts and diversity.

A massive portion of America is disgusted with their coddling of the wealthiest one percent, their pillaging of the Public School System, their poisoning of Health and Human Services, their polluting of the CDC, and their absolute refusal to address affordable healthcare or housing.

We have the numbers. All we need to do is start acting like the majority.

If we can all transcend our wars of preference, our purity politics, and our relatively superficial differences, we can defeat this minority movement. If we wield our collective power and unify our voice in November, it won’t matter how much they gerrymander, how difficult they make it to vote, or the violence they resort to in order to try and intimidate us.

The United States isn’t in hopeless peril; we’ve all just been fooled into believing the myth of our impending doom curated and amplified by those who have nothing else but lies, spin, fake followers, and paid rally crowds.

Donald Trump’s entire life, his supposed success as a businessman, and his disastrous presidencies have been fool’s gold; the smoke and mirror illusions of disinformation and media malpractice.

Beneath the partisan propaganda and the prolific gaslighting, MAGA is in its last days. It is a crumbling, self-devouring, rapidly evaporating niche movement of a small percentage of this nation who are being swallowed up by time and progress.

Don’t be disheartened by your newsfeed or distracted by the bombast of the propagandists.

The vast majority is anti-MAGA, anti-Trump, and pro-Democracy.

Let’s act like we know.

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For Those Of You Who Didn’t Grow Up In Phoenix…

For those of you who didn’t grow up in Phoenix in the 60s and 70s this may not mean anything, but for those of us who did, when Ben pointed out that the Phoenix Public Library was issuing these Wallace and Ladmo library cards, I knew I had to grab one.

50 years ago you’d mail in a postcard with your name and address on it to the show, and if it was one of the ones randomly drawn, you’d be invited down to the studio to appear live on television. You’d also be able to pick a toy (courtesy The Toy Cottage on 7th Avenue) off the shelf to take home with you. (This was before they started giving out “Ladmo Bags” as prizes).

Unbeknownst to us, sometime around my 9th or 10th birthday, my mom sent our names in and one afternoon—in the midst of a screaming match I was having with my five-year-old sister—our card was drawn. Mom heard our names called out over the cacophony and yelled at us to STFU—we were winners!. There is no photographic record of this momentous day since Mom didn’t think to take her Instamatic with her when we went down to the studio several days later—and probably wouldn’t have been allowed to use it even if she had—and of course this was LONG before the days of household VCRs, so all I have is memories.

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Two Servants Rooms And A Boudoir! Oh My!

⁠In their earliest years together, Marston and Van Pelt⁠ would become renowned for their Arts and Crafts style homes, such as the 1913 Residence of Mr. and Mrs. ⁠Henry Newby, Esq. The home was constructed by John H. Simpson as the first house for the Arroyo Park Corporation’s Arroyo Park tract. By 1915 Henry Newby, a prominent Pasadenan who would serve as president of the First National Bank of Pasadena for 15 years, would purchase the home as his family’s private residence. ⁠

The home is a prime example of the English-influenced Arts and Crafts style, with a parred down stucco exterior, carved wooden details, a prominent chimney, and a steeply pitched roof. I’m a particular fan of the home’s gracious porches on either side of the ground floor, which allow increased access to the out of doors. ⁠

The home’s ground floor plan is arranged around a central stair and entry hall, with the living room and library to the left and dining room, breakfast room, and service spaces to the right. I appreciate how the living room’s fireplace is located within a generously sized inglenook and how the dining room’s fireplace is delightfully off center, forwarding the home’s charming Arts and Crafts air.The upstairs includes four bedrooms, a boudoir and two bathrooms in addition to the staff quarters. ⁠

Located at 1015 Prospect Boulevard, the home is extant and has been well maintained. ⁠

Project: Residence of Mr. and Mrs. ⁠Henry Newby, Esq., 1913⁠
Architect: Marston and Van Pelt⁠
Location: Pasadena, California⁠
Source: ⁠The American Architect⁠, Google Maps

[source]

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Released 46 Years Ago Today

Grace Jones: Warm Leatherette (1980)

My favorite—or maybe second favorite—Grace Jones album. I can never definitively say if this or Nightclubbing is my favorite, followed closely by Slave to the Rhythm in third place. Both Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing are so good they could easily have been released as a double LP.

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I Could Live There

3d Printed Concrete House.

I don’t like that you have to walk through the entire house to get from the bedroom to the bath. I’m sure there was some logic as to why they put it there, but it escapes me.

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Quelle Suprise!


hey, folks? I’m not sure how to break this to you, but it’s looking more and more like the guy who lied about bone spurs and lied about hush money and lied about his dead pedo bestie and lied about how tariffs work and lied about being able to point to a camel and lied about his weight and lied about his golf scores and lied about his wealth and lied about a hurricane and lied about a pandemic and lied about his taxes and lied about a million other things has been lying to us about just how swimmingly his don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran is going.

oh, and his piss-drunk Secretary of Death? the shouty one with all the Christofascist tattoos, who gets off on bombing schoolgirls? he’s been lying, too.

I know, right?

remember all that blather from Preznit Fuckwit about how Iran’s military has been smithereened to death and how they have no navy and can’t fight, and how the whole country is on the verge of complete collapse, and how Iran has no choice but to open up that Strait of Epstein, like, any minute now?

yeah, well guess fucking what.

that’s right, the Washington Post got its hands on a leaked CIA report that basically contradicts every word that’s seeped out of Dear Leader’s rancid anus-mouth.

The analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, whose secret assessments on Iran have often been more sober than the administration’s public statements, also found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment, three of the people familiar with it said.

oh, so not totally obliterated, then.

Donny has been presenting us with a version of his merry little war that bears absolutely no resemblance to reality.

either Donny’s been lying to us, or someone like Piss-Drunk Pete has been lying to Donny — or, more likely, everyone is lying to everyone, because that’s all these shit-kazoos do all day long, tell one lie after another like it’s going out of style.

remember how Donny keeps telling us he holds all the cards? he never shuts the fuck up about holding all the cards, because like any toddler who’s been dropped on its head, Donny thinks a stupid joke gets funnier the more often he repeats it.

well, it looks like Iran still has about three quarters of their cards.

Iran retains about 75% of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70% of its prewar stockpiles of missiles. There is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles, and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.

basically Donny isn’t even anywhere close to winning this war, because Iran still retains most of its weapons stockpile, and is rebuilding its military infrastructure faster than Donny can blow it up.

Iran is laughing at Donny, as they eat his lunch.

how is that any kind of victory? look at that, even Obama can’t figure it out — and he’s a smart dude. he went to Harvard and everything.

now take that story, and add to it the one we got the other day, about how Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began,” to the point where some bases have had to move their staff elsewhere.

it’s just one ginormous shitpile of lies.

this is why I go fucking ballistic when I see a newspaper headline that begins with ‘Donny says…’ — because Donny says a lot of shit, and almost none of it is true.

telling us that ‘Donny says he’s winning’ without also noting that his claim is without evidence is not reporting, it’s worthless scribbling.

it fact, it’s worse than worthless. it’s outright dangerous, because a democracy cannot survive without a fully-informed populace.


so anyway, there we were, minding our own business yesterday afternoon, when out of the clear blue, The New York Times informed us that a possible deal to end the war and reopen the Strait was imminent.

after all, it’s nearly the end of the week, and those markets aren’t going to manipulate themselves.

but then like 30 seconds later,

The U.S. military said it struck Iranian military facilities and other targets after, it said, Iran fired on U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz.

what the fuck is going on in the Middle East? ‘exchanging fire’ doesn’t sound very ‘truce-y’ to me — and it didn’t sound very truce-y to a reporter who caught up with Donny later in the day.

reporter: “after these strikes is the ceasefire with Iran still on?”

Donny: “yeah, it is.”

the ceasefire is still on, because words stopped having meanings in the Donnyverse years ago. I’m so old, I remember when a ‘ceasefire’meant that all parties ‘ceased firing.’

Donny: “they trifled with us today. we blew ’em away. they trifled. I call that a trifle. I’ll let you know when there’s no cease— you won’t have to know. if there’s no cease fire, you’re not going to have to know, you’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran. and they better sign their agreement fast.”

excuse me, a big fucking glow? did Donny just threaten to nuke Iran? he did, didn’t he?

what the fuck is wrong with this maniac?

this is all so incoherent. one minute we’re told that a deal is imminent — and then the next minute, missiles are flying everywhere. could everyone please stop getting shot?

and then to top it off, here comes Donny, and he’s all ‘Iran’s gonna be glowing. get it? get it?’

I know that Donny imagines this makes him sound like the ultimate tough guy, but it doesn’t. he just sounds weak and stupid, and his threats accomplish nothing. every time the fucking idiot says something like this, Iran just gets up and walks away from the negotiating table. it’s how they’ve reacted to every one of Donny’s infantile threats — and Donny would understand that by now, if the demented imbecile had any capacity to learn.

has anyone checked the prediction markets? I’ll bet there’s someone out there who’s going to make a total killing on any nuclear conflagration.

we def need a palate cleanse after all that. I don’t know who created this image, but they just won the entire internet.


meanwhile, good news, everyone! we’re all going to die of hantavirus.

reporter: “can I ask you about the hantavirus? have you been briefed on the virus?”

Donny: “yes, I have.”

reporter: “can you tell us what you’ve learned in these briefings?”

Donny: “well, I think you’re going to be told everything, and you already have. uhhhh, it’s very much, we hope under control. it was the— ship. and I think we’re gonna make a full report about it tomorrow. we have— a lotta people. it’s a lotta great people, are studying it. it should be— fine. we hope.”

reporter: “are you concerned it’s going to spread?”

Donny: “I hope not, I mean I hope not.”

oh joy, Donny hopes not. rest easy, everyone — the guy who tried to wishful-think a pandemic out of existence six years ago is on the case.

Donny’s got a ‘lotta great people’ who are ‘studying it.’ big, strong, teary-eyed virologists, who are definitely in the room with us right now.

why does hearing this from Donny this fill me with zero confidence?

I don’t know about you, but I’m so glad that I have boxes and boxes of masks and gloves left over from the covid era.


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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