How Can We Miss Him if He Won't Go Away

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Testudines) has announced he will not be seeking another term, though he will wander around the Capitol through 2026 which really seems a lifetime away at this point. The linked piece indicates he is experiencing some not-unusual-for-his-age cognitive issues, which is unfortunate for all concerned and not least for himself.*

McConnell's legacy is of course the destruction of the Senate, in the same way that Newt Gingrich's is the destruction of the House of Representatives. The Senate in particular has become merely a reactionary obstructionist roadblock for Democratic administrations and a braying rubber stamp for Russia's new best friends. I have little use for the upper chamber in any case but its current iteration is worthless for any practical purpose.

More specifically, McConnell could have voted to convict, and directed his caucus accordingly, on either or both Trump impeachments. Even out of his position as majority leader he could have used his considerable tenure to influence the Senate's vaunted advise and consent privilege. In response to a Jay Nordlinger piece in National Review lauding McConnell's "lonely" votes against nominees (what performative horseshit - the votes and the NR piece) I wrote this:

Someone who told the truth about the 2020 election and 1/6, and who “backed Ukraine to the gills”, would have voted to convict Trump twice. If the GOP had only 50 Senate seats McConnell’s a yes on all confirmations including Gaetz.

— Roy Batty’s Dove Wrangler (@dmslattery.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 9:00 AM

The apotheosis of Reaganism in Trump is as much on him as on anyone else. I wish the Capitol had a screen door so it would hit his sorry ass on the way out.

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*I truly try to avoid wishing ill health/death on others although some people are really testing this. With regard to cognitive decline I want my enemies to be of absolutely sound mind when they go, roughly analogous to Wesley/DPR's plan as outlined to Prince Humperdinck, minus the amputations (but I am willing to listen to reason). This applies especially to those whose comfortable optimism may be wildly misplaced.

My Definition of a Boombastic Theology

As many of my friends know I was raised Roman Catholic and was by most metrics a "good Catholic" through high school. Hell Heck, I was even an altar boy for six years or so and appear to have dodged a bullet in the process, perhaps the only benefit of profound acne in those years. The worst side effects for me of being an altar boy were crushed hands and often successful attempts to make me laugh during the shake-hands part (they changed the liturgy in the last 40 years so I have no idea what they call it now) on the part of my friends, several of whom were themselves altar boys so see you next Sunday Mike. I'll be sure to be on the aisle.

Toward the end of that time, though, I was on the way to lapsedness, with Father Orlando's sermons centered primarily on our temporal shortcomings in re the weekly collection. College got me the rest of the way, although my last confession was to the Bishop of Rochester at my confirmation so I feel that carries some weight.

All of this is to say that I carry a fair amount of vestigial theology with me, at least a frame of reference if not its actual contents of belief, faith etc.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO MY POINT. (Parishioners shift expectantly in their pews, prodding their neighbors who have nodded off)

I do not personally believe in the existence of Heaven or Hell, but I sincerely hope that they exist for those who do:

• Heaven for those who deserve it through their words and deeds
• Hell for those who think they deserve Heaven

I don't think that's too much to ask or even pray for.

Here now receive the inspiration for the post title. Go in peace.

What He Said

A hearty handshake to CRH on his triumphant return to posting. (Laurel wreaths are in tariff limbo.) I want to add to what he wrote with a couple additional observations.

We have to remember that Democrats are not the only group in the country with agency. Nobody was forced to vote for Trump; those voters made their choice and are somewhere on this handy hierarchy of hoo-boy. The terrible thing (OK one of the terrible things) we have to come to grips with is that a lot of people in this country, for a variety of reasons, want to see others hurt, and will even absorb a certain amount of punishment as long as Those People are seen to be getting it worse. The Republicans have run on this since at least 1980.

The political media, meanwhile, is all about the horserace, who's up, who's down, who's leaking. This is PRECISELY why they HATED the Obama and Biden years: quiet competence is boring. This tends to distort, to say the least, coverage of current events.

OK, where was I? Oh, right.

We may all have agency, whether we acknowledge it or not, but one thing that seems to be lacking on the other side (indeed its absence seems to be actively encouraged) is empathy. It does not matter (in this sense, and pardon me CRH) that CRH has a trans sister; I know that he would support trans rights regardless because he can empathize with that. The ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes without reference to personal experience is one of the greatest attributes of humanity if only we would let it, and there is no reason it should not influence our politics.

But fuck Elon Musk.

Opinions Are Like Assholes

 

This isn’t what I thought my first blog post would be about. The insane clown posse running the new administration is trying to take a hammer to the liberal consensus of the 20^th century, endangering people’s lives without care, and there is an almost infinite supply of topics to rail against, but I want to level my first broadside against my allies.

I was hanging out with half a dozen fellow Ultimate players yesterday during a pickup game, and the talk turned to politics (I lie, it never left politics, this is Washington DC). We agreed that it is was likely nobody in our pickup group was a Trump supporter, and we all hated what was happening. Paul, a player I don’t know well, then told us, with heat, that the Democrats screwed up the election. The Democrats should have dumped Biden in the primary season, should have arranged a snap convention after Biden dropped out, and made a huge a mistake by backing trans rights and using “pronouns.” The only people expressing an opinion on his opinion agreed, except me (but nobody (literally) listened to me).

I object on a factual basis to the first two points of his thesis, but that’s not the reason for this post.

The Democrats are a big tent party. Their strengths and shortcomings are a product of the coalition of disparate interests, none with sufficient political clout to advance their goals (an overstatement, but bear with me). If a guiding philosophy comes out of this, it seems to me that it should be this: Democrats will work to protect and support the disadvantaged. I think this ought to work because many Americans end up disadvantaged by our system at one point or another in their lives, whether they realize it or not, and 90+ years of mostly Democratic lawmaking has helped make our lives more secure.

This is why I am enraged, incandescent, that such a large share of election post-mortems has focused on exactly who the Democrats should have thrown under the bus to secure a victory. If only they had admitted how awful trans people are (my sister is trans) they would have won easily. Maybe to be sure they needed to agree that all illegal immigrants should be deported. And nobody wants unqualified women and minorities getting jobs ahead of white males.

It is trivial to carve out a minority in the Democratic coalition with which a majority is uncomfortable. What’s left when they finish jettisoning undesirables?[i]

If you find it easy to look at a group and say, “I don’t want to fight for them,” you’re on the road to joining the fascist program. And somebody might be looking at your group.

 

 

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[i] Even though none of our three readers will do this, I’m going to go ahead and respond to the wiseass who comments “what about child molesters? Should the Democrats support NAMBLA?” My response is go fuck yourself.

Knowledge is Good, Also Beer

In the midst of (WA)EE it is heartening to know that you can still drink beer at the Library of Congress.

Laura, the erstwhile Blog Collective and I gathered there last week in the Great Hall, which along with the Main Reading Room is my favorite interior space in Washington DC. Thanks to the BC's visit to the Morgan Library last month we have now seen 9.5% of the remaining complete Gutenberg Bibles in the world.

Here's to knowledge!

Never was good at reading signs

Enemies Domestic and Foreign

Big couple of days for the latest iteration of America First.

On the international front:

• We now have a Russian asset (at least) in charge of our intelligence apparatus.
• Our abusive alcoholic Secretary of Defense has disavowed the concept of NATO and essentially acceded to Russia's negotiating demands in re Ukraine even before the negotiations' start.
• Our definitely genuinely stupid and likely cognitively impaired president king has suggested it was a bad idea for Ukraine to get involved in Russia's invasion. He also continued to pitch timeshares in Gaza, but I suspect the (checks notes) King of Jordan isn't on board.
• Some dumbass GOP Rep (redundant and I double dog dare you to prove me wrong) has introduced a bill calling for the annexation of Greenland and its subsequent renaming to Red-White-and-Blue-Land. (Google Maps is probably all over that, the collaborationist cowards.)

Domestically:

• RFK Jr is one step closer to getting a bunch of us unnecessarily sickened and/or killed. Of all the madness around us, the Republican fluffing of a Kennedy stands out for its sheer unexpectedness, although to be fair the spectrum of unexpectedness has been stretched like Silly Putty lately.
• President Musk wore a baseball cap in the Oval Office (thank God it wasn't a tan suit) and continues to use his son as a human shield while spewing drug-addled nonsense.
• The Vice President and others, including a professor at Harvard Law (oh that conservative intelligentsia, what WILL they think of next), have suggested that the executive can just ignore judicial rulings at will. Except I guess when it involves student loan forgiveness.
• (waves arms) EVERYTHING ELSE

We are now 1/52 of the way through this, assuming the Constitution ever gets consulted again.

I really hope all of this will have been worth it just to own the libs.

And Now, Sports, More or Less

 I don't have a favorite in the Super Bowl, although it would be nice if Saquon Barkley had his way with the Chiefs' D-line.

Trump attending the game is not surprising, although I was surprised to learn he is the first sitting President to do so. Narcissists gotta narcissize, ya know. With the game on Fox we should expect frequent reverent cutaways to his location and if they show Taylor Swift more there will be hilarious hell to pay. You know he'll have someone keeping count. Not Hegseth obviously as he has been tailgating since Wednesday.

How will CFDT be greeted by the crowd? One one hand SB tickets are pretty pricey so you would think a better-off crowd might be more in line with his supporters. On the other hand, he got a delightfully negative reception at World Series Game 4 in Washington back in 2019, and I can personally attest to the cost of those tickets.

Bryan and I went to Game 3 so instead of booing Trump we got to boo Roberto Osuna which was its own kind of awesome. As Osuna trotted from the bullpen to the mound, amidst the cascade of regular booing (which started as soon as the bullpen door opened) a spectator in back of us yelled "OSUNA! YOU SUCK BECAUSE YOU BEAT WOMEN!" Bryan looked at me in surprise and I said "He's not wrong" before returning to lustily booing.

OK, off to make eggplant parm. Stay safe everybody.

Is America Going Fascist?

Short answer: Yes.

Slightly longer answer: Yes, afraid so.

For a more complete answer, read this piece by Umberto Eco and ask yourself how many boxes the current (not to mention past; this is not entirely new) events in the US are checking.

The problem is that too many people want this, aspiring to be either participants or spectators. That they will be victims as well may not have occurred to them, although as long as Those People get it worse it may be worth it for them.

It has been only three weeks but we are well along in the Finding Out phase.

Took a Day Off, but I'm Still Really Angry

Hi, I'm back, did you miss me? Aww, that's sweet.

For the first week back on the blog I got in the habit of writing between the end of my work day and the beginning of dinner prep if I am cooking, or dinner eating if Laura is cooking. Yesterday work stretched out a bit longer than usual, and for dinner I was making Michael Ruhlman's super easy, super delicious tomato sauce, as found in Ruhlman's Twenty, which Laura got me for Christmas a few years back. I've barely scratched the surface of the recipes but there have been no duds so far. When I made his French onion soup via all-day onion caramelizing (my fault, not the books; I take "low and slow" SERIOUSLY) for the first time, a taste test near the end revealed a restaurant-quality dish. 

Anyway, the recipe does take some simmering so time constraints kept me away from the keyboard, not to mention being worn from a long day of uncertainty as the administration of convicted felon Donald Trump inches closer to our livelihoods from any number of directions.

Like our country circling the drain, I keep coming back to a main theme screaming in my head:

We all know people who wanted this and are thrilled at the disruption and chaos. Take that, government! No matter that here and abroad careers and livelihoods are wrecked, economies cratered, authoritarians emboldened, and sickness and death multiplied. They either didn't realize the extent of the ongoing American Carnage (turned out to be a campaign platform as opposed to a problem statement) or don't care, or wanted all of the above. That last category are sociopathic assholes, by the way, lest there be any confusion on the matter.

At the very least they're OK with all of this as long as it gets their policy preferences enacted, directly through the destruction of government regulations and functionality and/or indirectly through the larding of the judiciary with reactionary Catholics that will rubber-stamp whatever CVDT* wants under the guise of "originalism". (Lest this be seen as an anti-Papist screed I am pretty sure these folks think the current Bishop of Rome is the Whore of Babylon.)

We have to remember that abolishing the Department of Education, ending touchy-feely foreign aid and shredding any kind of regulatory authority has been the GOP platform since basically forever. They said they were going to do this and people either didn't believe it or were on board with it.

And to be clear, the way they are going about fulfilling the longstanding promise of the GOP is via the most destructive path possible, one that ignores quaint niceties like "norms" and "processes" and "the Constitution." We are not coming back from this, by which I mean that if we defeat these bastards we will find ourselves in need of a new (waves arms) everything to manage the end of the First American Experiment.

OK, enough for now. Back sometime with a post for which I have the title and ending but need to figure out the middle part.

*finally got tired of typing that out

Layout Update: Let There Be (Better) Light

One thing with which I have continually struggled is layout room lighting. When I first began construction I installed two 5-light IKEA track lights with "soft white" halogen bulbs, and those have been mostly adequate with the exception of a major dark spot in the rural section.

Last week a couple of lights in our front room went out so I went around the corner to our local hardware store. Given that getting precisely what you went to the hardware store for in the first place - no more, no less - almost never happens, I came back with the front room bulbs AND a package of LED "daylight" track-light bulbs. The difference is clear in this in-progress photo. New bulbs on the left, old bulbs on the right:

Today I finally got the remaining bulbs and installed them, and am very pleased with the results:

In addition to the "cooler" light improving color perception both in person and in pictures, the new bulbs seem a bit brighter than the old ones. This is partly (I think) caused by the LED bulbs being a bit taller than the halogens, so the light doesn't sit as deep in the fixture. Compare the light on the wall behind the back two bulbs in both pictures.

You may notice the light from an older bulb to the left. It illuminates the staging area behind the scenery so I figured I would leave it there, otherwise I would have to get another package of three bulbs.

This does not really solve the problem of the dark spot but I'll get to that someday.

Coming up next I plan to do some concentrated work on the engine terminal area:

Stay tuned!

If It Walks Like a Coup, and Talks Like a Coup, and Seizes Power Illegally Like a Coup...

 ... then describe it like you would a coup.

You read that piece and you desperately want to say "Gee that's a bit over the top," but it's pretty spot on.

It is happening here.

UPDATE: Added Doomsday Scenario to the blogroll.

Friday WTF

Here we are at the end of a very long week of what turned into a very long month and the hits keep coming. As the ripple effect of the flailing sociopathy of convicted felon Donald Trump's administration makes its presence felt in wider and wider circles, remember:

You know someone who wanted this.

Who voted for this.

Who is enjoying this.

As a resident of DC and its environs for 35 years, for me they may be a little farther toward the front of the human centipede, but they are everywhere as it turns out (although we really knew that all along and that will be covered in a future post).

Keep them in mind as elected and unelected maladjusted children rampage their way through our country, cratering our economy, giving aid and comfort (and secrets) to our adversaries, causing the deaths of untold numbers here and abroad, all to own the libs.

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Tomorrow the Blog Collective will gather to toast friendship and our absolute goddamn determination to get through this with dignity and empathy. E Pluribus Fucking Unum, baby. I only hope the tariffs won't immediately jack up the price of margaritas.

I'm Not Sure What You Were Expecting

I'm not really talking about last night's terrible accident in which an Army helicopter collided with a commercial airliner on final approach to DCA. (Although on a side note I was enraged by nearly every news outlet stating the airliner collided with the helicopter, implying the former was at fault. The airliner appears to have been on a correct approach so presumably had right of way, and at ~400 feet off the ground/Potomac, approaching the postage stamp that is DCA, no real options other than to proceed.) The DC airspace is incredibly complex given the combination of flight restrictions and civilian/military flight activity, and it is frankly surprising - and a tribute to pilots and traffic controllers - this had not previously happened. Were it not for Congress wanting a quick scarpering out of town the airport would have been closed and become a great location for the Air and Space Museum expansion, except they would have had to float the SR71 and Endeavour into the venue given runway length.

I am of course referring to convicted felon Donald Trump's press conference in which, to no one's shock, he blamed Emmanuel Goldstein DEI.

One of the dangerous elements of where we are and where we are heading is that from a certain angle, i.e. as someone outside the immediate list of targets of state power, to a certain extent this is incredibly boring and predictable. OF COURSE Trump is going to blame everyone but his world historically brilliant self. OF COURSE it's all DEI's fault. And so on. Any of us could have scripted out a reasonable transcript of the presser in advance, or fed a prompt into ChatGPT if your taste runs to exploiting others' intellectual property. Speaking as a cynic it is incredibly hard to avoid slipping into cynicism on this.

Our only hope is that NTSB can resist the penetration of its structure by Project 2025 types, at least long enough to determine what happened with all the evidence at its disposal.

Our only consolation is that this absolutely minimal observation of official duty - it may even have been preferable to have foregone it - probably messed with Trump's tee time and possibly Hegseth's G & T time.

Fedex Day 2021: Scenery!

Friend of the blog J asked the immediate obvious question when I announced my triumphant return to blogging: Will there be layout progress pictures? My answer: Of course! Much more fun than bemoaning the state of the 1:1 world.

For those of you just entering, a brief background: I have been a model railroader for over 45 years, working in N scale, where the scale (1:160) works out to about thirteen feet to the inch. My layout is set "somewhere in New England" during the "transition era," the period in the 1940s-50s when diesel power supplanted steam locomotives. My goal is not just to run trains around (though that is fun, not gonna lie) but to actually simulate the operations of a railroad as it delivers goods and people from one place to another, which is really the whole point of a transportation system.

The next question (you people are asking a LOT of questions today) is "What is 'Fedex Day?'" Fedex Day was originated by Atlassian as a team activity designed to achieve some kind of goal in a 24-hour period. (Get it? You may not be surprised to learn that they had to change the official name; please don't rat me out.) Significantly, the goal does not necessarily have to be work-related. At the conclusion of the 24-hour period, you present your work via a short video.

In early 2021 my company announced that we would be doing such an event. As it happened, I had taken advantage of working from home for the preceding year to skip down to the basement every so often to make a lot of progress on basic layout scenery work such as painting* and ballasting** the track, and completing the basic shape of the mountains on one part of the layout. I took the opportunity to tackle what is always a time-consuming activity in model railroading:

I had to skip the next couple of years for schedule reasons, but participated again in 2024. That will have to wait until I get that movie file ported over to my home computer, so stay tuned for that AND my 2025 entry, coming toward the end of February.

All aboard!

*Model track is almost always shiny out of the box, so even a quick coat of brown/rust paint on the side (web) of the rail can improve its look or at least not immediately draw the eye to its shininess. You leave the top of the rail unpainted as that is almost always how electric power gets to the engine.

**Ballast is the crushed rock used as a roadbed by railroads, holding the ties in place. There are several purveyors of model ballast, the best of which is, yes, you guessed it, Frank Stallone crushed rock. It's held in place by diluted white glue. I should have bought stock in Elmer's.