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Especially the few good people he's hired. But yeah—Americans despise competent people who make them feel inadequate about themselves. That's why America is like a big middle school: the bullies are in charge, and when that happens, the people who work hard and get good grades get bullied.

As three wise men in a collective called Rush once opined, "We need someone to talk to and someone to sweep the floors." That's how our educational system has been and will continue trending: one system for people of means to train their children to become critical thinkers and the leaders of the future; and the other for people to learn just enough so they can run the machines, do the paperwork, and sweep the floors.

Yeah, so, so many missed opportunities to ask my parents about an era I’m semi-obsessed with now.

Awwww! How’s he gonna get anything from Malek al Kabob now??

Not true to anyone who voted for the trumpublicans for “run the country like a business”, which I take to mean eliminating as many departments as possible, firing the entire workforce attended to them, and diluting the quality of the product from the remaining departments as much as possible in the service of maximizing profits, which the shareholders on the inside can then pocket as dividends, while the rest of us customers pay as high a price as they can manage to get away with setting it at. That’s how businesses run. Microeconomics 101.

You and I are old enough to refer to the late 1970s in terms of “as recent as”, while most people alive today refer to it as literally ancient history. I occasionally have to remind myself how long ago the 1970s that I lived through and totally remember is by remembering that when I was in my 20s, the 1930s was a long ago as the 1970s is today, and in no way would I have thought of anything that happened during the 1930s as being any flavor of “recent”.

It’s the fragmented media environment that leads a hundred million-plus people to be Trump fans and supporters and voters, because they never hear a thing about his bankruptcies, business failures, or any of the rest of it. All they hear about is how the price of gas and eggs were a lot lower when he was president, and how he did a great job with the border and no wars and keeping scary transsexuals out of girls’ bathrooms. Everything else reported everywhere else is fake news, and these failures never happened. What’s killing me is how he gets credit for things he is actually trying to destroy, such as overtime pay and other protections for the very working people in thrall to him. He’s like evangelical God in that very basic way: credit for all the good things, no blame for any of the bad things. Which totally tracks.

Been there.

I remember on the old board pegging Bondi to be his VP pick back in 2016 because she looked so damn ****able.

They have what is arguably a Hall of fame catcher and what is already one of the greatest shortstops in history, barring catastrophic injury, and they loaded up in the offseason specifically to make a run at the playoffs. They didn't exactly come out of nowhere.

Losing your dad to an assassin's bullet will do things to a teenage boy.

Even greater than tulips?

I was directly replying to a post here contemplating Republicans as the antiwar party. My post is relevant.

Part amnesia, part delusion.

The guy definitely needs a friendlier Suprema Corte down there.

If they do, it'll be Elon kicking Trump to the curb, since Trump looks up to people more wealthy than he.

Yeah, that's true, but not what my post meant.

Better yet, recommend marrying them off to get them out of the workforce.

Fun fact: the antiwar president-elect ordered seven bombings of other countries during this tenure.

Anyone else putting a dime on Putin announcing a ceasefire right on January 20th, a la Iran 1981?

I went to Bluesky because I got sick of blocking political firebreathers showing up on my baseball feed, and that includes people who use their baseball cred to slip in political commentary, and I don’t mean Baseball Crank.

What I’m trying to put across is Trump putting cronies and lackeys in jobs of running departments they have zero knowledge or understanding of. Without anything as inconvenient as experience getting in the way, Trump can direct them to do the worst things possible that will lead to perdition, and the cronies and lackeys will have neither the expertise nor the inclination to reject such directives. As for J.D.: if he shaves the beard, he risks looking like the poster boy for incels.

Lack of experience is the big feature here, not just at the VP level but also at the cabinet and departmental levels. It will substantially reduce pushback on harebrained executive directives, due to the inconvenient application of technical expertise. With that removed, it’s full steam ahead on moving fast and breaking things.

Not so easy to install AI surveillance at employees’ homes. Wait until the ladies go to the bathrooms …

For the moment …