MONDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: BETWEEN A REICH AND A HARD PLACE EDITION.

Let's have a little soothing jangle-bell rock.

Yeah, it’s normally Friday ‘Round-the-Horn – but I am told on social media that the period between Christmas and New Year’s is a sort of a collective fugue state, so I’ll cut myself some slack and you’re welcome to join me. (In truth I felt the fugue more keenly this year than previously because I had nearly all of last week off from work, and for whatever reason it pushed me right the hell out of my everyday reality. I didn’t go anywhere, I just dissociated. This week I had to go back and it was wrenching, like being caught by the marshals after an escape. When will my goddamn Living National Treasure status come through?)

Anyway, not much to offer in the way of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – last week was short rations, though we did have a year-end Received Opinion with Bolt Upright that I think is funny, anyway. Speaking of Prestige Press putzes, maybe you saw Semafor got a bunch of them to talk about “The things we got wrong in 2024,” and as you would expect if you share my poisonous cynicism it’s a chortlefest: Fascism won, whoopsie! But I still have a six-figure job so fuck it:

Young white women, that is – but really, is there any other kind? As an apparently intentional worsener Semafor also includes Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Bari Weiss:

Reader demand? So long she keeps stroking fascists (“Join Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon as they sit down with guests including Michael Knowles, Rod Dreher, and Geoffrey Cain”) the funding will keep rolling in and her media pals will keep pimping The Free Press, attracting soft-brained people who can sort of read and don’t like he-shes or blue-hairs nohow. 

A few words about the late Jimmy Carter: Like everyone else except total scumbags, I greatly admire his post-presidency. But while his term of office had some admirable features, you can’t just ignore its many foreign and domestic fiascos. The most charitable interpretation is that he was trying to split the difference between what seemed like unsustainable legacy policies, such as client statism and a heavy regulatory state, and new ones that were challenging to sell to voters, such as energy conservation and “human rights” (which from our current perspective, and undoubtedly that of many Central Americans, Southeast Asians, and Iranians at the time, was pretty selective). It didn’t work, and his successor simply ran full-tilt in the direction of evil, which struck voters as energetic and virile even as his goons looted the treasury and their future. A lot of people act as if neoliberalism has only recently come a-cropper, but it’s been a loser for a long time and I hope we find another way to go before our mortal enemies make it impossible to change course. Meantime it is something to consider that Carter may be the last POTUS who had human qualities worth mourning. 

Oh yeah, today I review A Complete Unknown, which has the traditional biopic limitations but works fine within them.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: SITUATION NOT-NORMAL BUT STILL ALL F***ED UP

For a long time I could only find a weird remix of this, so I stopped looking. 
But it's here!

It’s the last month without Tubby for a while – though in an important sense (namely the inability of the Prestige Press to ignore that piece of shit) we’re not without him now, because he continues to yap orders at his toadies in Congress. In the case of the current funding legislation, he didn’t get what he allegedly wanted – but from his perspective that doesn’t matter at all, because it kept his blustering presence in front of the public and also got people used to seeing his Nazi asshole buddy Musk treated like a fourth branch of the U.S. Government. 

I don’t think I’m particularly perceptive, really, but these days a lot of people seem incredibly invested in misreading what’s going on. Like, for example: why would coverage in the paper owned by Jeff Bezos be tilted heavily against the union striking the company also owned by Jeff Bezos? HMMMMM IT’S A PUZZLER ALRIGHT. It's as if the shock of the election got the Prestige Press peeps clinging to their ancient templates as a coping mechanism and they just can't let them go.  (I mean apart from the ones that are just straight-up bought off, which probably accounts for all of them over a certain stock valuation.)  

Fooey. Nonetheless, this is the last Friday ‘Round-the-Horn before Xmas so as my gift to you all here are two recent editions of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that I’m making free to non-subscribers…

… but not before this advertisement:

Now’s a great time to give the gift of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down! Click here.

OK, now the freebies: First, what to expect as the follow-up to that drone bullshit. You didn’t think that was going to be the last stupid panic Republicans would use to rile their rubes? The next four years are gonna be like Green Acres except without Oliver to sputter in protest as Mr. Haney delivers him an unwanted fascist dictatorship. Second, if you heard about the New York governor’s announced plans to soothe frightened execs after the UnitedHeathcare hit, and wondered what that might look like… wonder no more! 

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: IRON LUNG REVIVAL EDITION.

I'm an old crank but you know what? This is Xmas music I can get with.

To paraphrase the old Chinese, we are now Living In Interesting Times every goddamn day. One of the latest wacky bits is the lawyer/accomplice of HHS-Secretary-nominee RFK Jr. petitioning the U.S. Government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. It’s something I’ve joked about over the years and now it’s – well, still a joke, though obviously the lunatics promoting it don’t know that. This would seem to be a nadir in the epic insanity of Tubby’s appointments, though I’m sure they’ll find a way to dig deeper. 

By the way, do you wonder what mainstream conservatives (you know, Conservatives with Good Taste) think about this? You will be unsurprised to learn that Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal absolves Tubby of all blame, and pins it on other people who aren’t working hard enough to make him look good. Doesn’t make sense? Here, read it yourself:

It seems not to have occurred to Senate Republicans—who ought to have learned a little bit about Mr. Trump by now—that he needs a rescue here. No insider believes this is a heartfelt pick. Even political naïfs understand what happened: This agreement was entirely transactional. Mr. Trump saw an opportunity to gain RFK’s endorsement. The price was a promise of a big post. The president-elect is holding true to that deal as a businessman, so he won’t dare whisper misgivings for fear of leaks.

“Holding true to that deal as a businessman” yeah, that’s Trump, alright – his word is his bond! 

Instead Senate Republicans are playing monkey-see-monkey-do to an extent that even Mr. Trump must be exasperated. 

“Why is no one wiping my ass? They must have smelt it by now!”

Nearly every GOP senator looks at Mr. Kennedy with wincing concern—knowing the havoc the anticapitalist big-government regulator can and will wreak on a Trump agenda. 

(Oh, yeah, the problem isn’t that Worm-Brain will kill us all – the problem is he’s against capitalism.)

Yet no one steps up to save the president. If Joe Biden chose Hulk Hogan to be Treasury secretary, does anyone think Democrats would have let him step into that trap? 

Maybe there was an upside to electing a President you can’t imagine doing any such thing. (Oh, right, Biden was supposed to be senile!)

But so desperate right now are Republicans to nod along that they are abdicating the real job of advice and consent—and protection.

Normally I’d say that sounds like a “you” problem except the “you” problem has been made an “all of us” problem by the shitheels and grifters, Strassel not excepted, who condemned us to this madman’s whims and wiles. 

Oh, the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – yes, this week we have two (remember, it’s a five-day-a-week publication and absurdly cheap to subscribe, so why don’tcha): First, my gloss on Adam Serwer’s essay on conservatives’ inability to tell heroes from villains in fiction and what it means for their politics; second, that rich asshole who runs the L.A. Times plans to give MAGA readers Trump-friendly alt-versions of the paper’s news stories, so I created an example of what they would look like. 

Special blast from the past edition now that celebrity murderer Daniel Perry has gotten away with killing a black guy and Tubby is taking him to a football game: My original statement still stands. 

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: SICK, SICK, SICK EDITION.

Five, four shots, I be ready to splash.

Sorry I missed you last week! Holidays are frickin' rough around here. But I pledge that if I live I'll deliver through Christmas. That's the alicublog pledge! 

It’s pretty weird watching the death of democracy roar down the track, its glowing Sauron eye getting bigger by the moment and Tubby's fat face darkly looming in the cab, while most of the information on the bearing-down is coming from a completely bought-off Prestige Press that talks about it as if it’s a fun TV drama like “Succession” that we can switch off when we’re bored. 

This weirdness is informing my “Received Opinion with Bolt Upright” sketches at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (my Substack newsletter! Surely you’re heard of it!). This week’s is one of three (3) REBID editions released to nonsubscribers.  In this one, the gang considers the latest Trump appointment: Fox News celebrity Poopmouth to chair the National Endowment for the Arts. A lively discussion ensues! 

The other news-related item has to do with the death of a health insurance CEO and why a lot of people aren’t crying over it. I was raised a Christian (well, Catholic, close enough) and I don’t like to take pleasure in the death and suffering of others. Nonetheless I’m a lot more angry about our fucked-up health care system, and how it depraves us -- so much so that this murder puts us less in mind of the victim's bereaved family and friends than of the bereaved family and friends of “beneficiaries” whose suffering and death his parsimonious policies hastened along. I would also mention that the incoming administration promises to heavily promote the fraud-rich Medicare Advantage program, UnitedHealthcare’s primary scam, by appointing one of its shills as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and (as outlined in Project 2025) making MA the default choice for new Medicare enrollees.  

Normally we only have two freebies but I’m also opening up this week’s Fun Friday because it’s about old-school bloggers (my classmates, as it were!) who are still stoking the boilers. (This has also served as a reminder to refresh my blogroll here. Shadowproof, which had taken over from Firedoglake, is discontinued and its slack picked up by The Dissenter; Gin and Tacos has turned into a podcast; I don’t know what happened to ThinkProgress. The “Forget About Politics” section has several discontinued sites, but that’s OK, because they’re mostly not about current events and worth a peek. Also, I’m sentimental about Lance Mannion and Terry Teachout.) 

In this edition I mention Atrios, Blue Gal, Driftglass, Vagabond Scholar, and Sheila O’Malley in the body copy; commenters have kindly added the Grade-A work of Digby at Hullabaloo, Nancy Nall, Joe My God, Lawyers Guns & Money, Nuclear Diner, Scripting News, The Daily Howler, et alia. It’s good to be reminded that, as the Prestige Press gets shittier by the minute at their job, we can rely on them just for the basic facts and then offload the analysis to guys like these.  If only America would take the hint! (Note: Some of these blogs don’t even user Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, that’s how old-school they are, so be careful!)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: AN AGE OF CLODS AND MONSTERS EDITION.

I have never heard a bad Desmond Dekker record.

Not gonna push it too hard here as this is only Friday 'Round-the-Horn technically -- it's after midnight but I ain't been to bed yet. Anyway the atrocities continue: Pam Bondi is the new Matt Gaetz, and if anything it's even worse because she's actually been an AG at the state level and a stupefyingly corrupt one at that -- as Charlie Pierce explains -- whereas Gaetz was never more than a stunt appointee, a bit of chum to keep the Prestige Press putzes bobbing and Republican elected officials trembling lest they be forced to show loyalty and embarrass themselves by praising an obvious freak. From the moment Tubby tapped a checked-out oil executive for Secretary of State in 2016, anyone who was paying attention would have seen the game: Trump chooses flunkies based on whims and chits rather than ability. So it's a trip to see reporters asking how his people could have failed to "vet" Gaetz and fellow sex criminal Pete Hegseth et alia when everyone knew they were shit going in.  As Tom Tomorrow attests, this is not how things are done when you give a shit about the country you're gonna run:

Time for the REBID freebies! I'm very pro-Bluesky these days so go see me there and also read this about what got me to stop lurking and go whole-Alfhog. (It's at least partly because fash fucks get no traction there.)  And here's my most recent episode of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, in which Peoni, Chafe and the gang are, like their real-life counterparts, obeying-in-advance to beat the band. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: BRINGIN' IT ALL BACK HOME EDITION.

Never out of fashion.

Another week into the over-the-cliff phase of the death of democracy! The appointments Tubby’s trying to push through the lame duck are all insane, but the one that especially pisses me off is RFK Jr. I’m typing this from the National Institutes of Health, my long association with which has literally saved my life; the global importance of its research and its extraordinary care and treatment of its patients are something I’ve been seeing first-hand for decades. That the lunatic my fellow Americans are sending back into power intends, out of hatred for the very idea of good government, to install this insane, malign quack to destroy the NIH (and the FDA, and Medicare, etc.) is making me all First Reformed. 

For the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, tell you what, let’s have the three-part “I Swear This Isn’t Like All The Other ‘What Is To Be Done’ Essays” with which I lay a path forward through Smarmageddon for the enlightened. Here they are in order: One. Two. Three. Best read in series, but you can mix and match. I’m told they’re brilliant, but maybe the smartest people in the world are all wrong! See for yourself and maybe subscribe while you’re at it. 

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: PEOPLE JUST GET UGLIER AND I HAVE NO SENSE OF TIME EDITION.

What we are looking at is good and evil, right and wrong.

Hard week to feel good about! After a campaign in which the Republican candidate daily demonstrated himself not zero-fash nor 2% fash but 100% full fash (also stupid and crude), the voters returned him to office. This would lower my estimation of the sanity and decency of my fellow Americans if I weren’t such a goddamn little ray of sunshine. 

Whatever I think about the hoi polloi, it’s nothing compared to what I think of most of the bigbrains telling us What The Democrats Must Do, especially the alleged liberals-or-whatever telling us to sell out minorities so straight white America will love us:

“PC police,” lol, why didn’t he throw in “feminazis” while he was at it. I guess the very concepts of morality and principle are vague to some people who see everything as some sort of bagatelle – like “exalting the humble and humbling the exalted” is just some added degree of difficulty they think Democrats perversely assumed, as one might tie one hand behind one’s back to show off, and must abandon to succeed at The Game.

As after a rainstorm, the brain worms have been out in force. Check out this guy:

He’s supposed to be some kind of progressive thinker, but apparently believes adopting the standard rightwing bullshit about cities in “chaos” that must be made “livable” represents some opportunity for the Democrats. A bunch of people to whom I showed this told me I had him all wrong, he just wants more housing and better transit; if so that was an interesting way to ask for it, because unless you’ve just arrived on this planet you know that when you say “What can we do to solve the chaos and unlivability of our cities” the voters, whom the Prestige Press have marinated in Crime Panic for decades even as actual crime plummets, will demand certain people (hint hint) be stopped and searched and locked up and put on Workfare Not Welfare. Miss me with that Clintonian bullshit.

This isn’t even to speak of the overtly-conservative side. Peggy Noonan is actually trying to sprinkle her Reagan dust on Tubby:

As for the Republicans, we always feel now we’re picking a government to manage our decline. But when Mr. Trump met with the Journal’s editors last month, he spoke for a moment with excitement about how America “can be so rich and so successful.” He described watching the arms come out and catch the SpaceX rocket. “It was good old Elon. It was him, he’s amazing.”

That chord he was trying to hit—and tried to hit in late rallies—is one America yearns to hear. They want the old sense that their kids are being launched into a society and culture that’s healthy and vital. Exuberance, expansion, Musk to Mars, drill, baby, drill—we’re going to be exciting again!

Ronald Reagan was a piece of shit, but compare his “Morning in America” routine to the ravings of Trump, whose signal promise (which he affirmed right after the election) is to deport millions of immigrants and whose goons are already vowing to arrest his enemies.  I think Noonan has achieved peak wetbrain. 

Anyway. Most of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entries I could release to gen pop would probably depress you, so here’s one serious-but-not-superbleak one – about how we might yet save America by showing its young citizens how to tell shit from Shinola – and today’s Fun Friday, in which we talk about tech innovations, from ARAPNET to the present, that readers, when they first found them, really felt were, as Arthur C. Clarke said, indistinguishable from magic. Hang in there, babies, Monday’s comin’! 

SUNDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: CHAMPAGNE OR HEMLOCK EDITION.

I'm old and I was old then too but how did I miss this?

The title comes from not-yet-governor-elect Mario Cuomo on election night 1982. And I doubt he was any more nervous than millions of your fellow Americans are in these closing hours of this campaign. My final thoughts about the closing and the outcome will be in Monday morning’s edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – which will be FREE to everyone on the mailing list, paying subscriber or not, so now is an excellent time to sign up! 

I won’t say too much about that here and now. But I will say that in a campaign full of totally insane moments – can you believe “they’re eating the dogs… they’re eating the cats” was less than two months ago? – Tubby’s reaction to RFK Jr.’s plan to take fluoride out of drinking water is kind of a watershed:

Former President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed tentative support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to order the removal of fluoride from water supplies during a potential second Trump term, saying that it “sounds OK to me.”

“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”

It’s really wild that in 2024 a major presidential candidate is giving the old okey-doke to a straight-up Cold War era, John Birch, General Jack D. Ripper conspiracy theory. I mean, I didn’t think this was a thing with even most of what I guess we have to call mainstream crackpots — the sort of anti-vaxx, Pizzagate nuts who are now a major part of the Republican coalition. I expect most of the people who were railing about fluoridation in the 1960s are dead. Maybe it’s their version of retro — you know, like That 70s Show. 

But what’s even more depressing, in a way, is Trump’s sure-why-not response. We know he’s not at all interested in policy as such (any more than ordinary Republicans are, any more) and will say anything to rile his rubes. We expect him to, for example, spread racist and misogynist fables like Haitian pet-eaters and post-birth abortions; that’s standard operating procedure for conservatives, which he mainly just makes more lurid. But if he and his minions are going back eighty years to fish out crazy ideas we’d all forgotten about, what’s next? The theory of the Four Humours? Spontaneous generation of disease? Phlogiston? If it’s retro anything it’s the Dark Ages.

Part of why this is so important is there is literally no depth to which these people will not sink and take us with them. 

Anyway, last week’s REBID freebies – well, events proceed so rapidly that the premises of these items might seem untimely to some; however, as the saying goes literature is news that stays news and literature is what I’m dishing out here, see! 

So even though no one probably remembers the difference between Biden saying “garbage” and that dipshit at the Trump rally saying “garbage,” the Prestige Press rolling in it is still funny. And on a more serious tip, in my view the WaPo/Bezos bullshit is just about an isolated in-kind campaign contribution from a billionaire to a fascist, but about the way normal people – that is, not just rightwing soreheads -- are coming to view the press and what they may expect from it in the future. Meantime, good night and good luck!  

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: JEFF BEZOS IS A PARASITIC PIECE OF SHIT WHO SHOULD BE TAXED INTO OBLIVION EDITION.

I love Jill Scott and this song but had never before heard this live stretch-out. Nice!

It’s just barely Friday, still, but I’m coming in under the wire to tell you fuck that piece of shit Jeff Bezos. In a way, he and his fucked-up interference with the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement – that is, blocking it because the board wanted to endorse Harris and Bezos, as a client of the federal government (or is it vice-versa?), obviously felt it necessary to suck up to Trump because he knows if that fat fuck wins then sucking up is the whole game – is just a symptom of the parasitic hypercapitalist infection that is literally destroying our democracy.

But saying Bezos is “just a symptom” is like saying Hitler was just a symptom of fascism because there were other fascists running around and he was just one man. Sure, the problem is bigger than Bezos, but he’s a pretty fucking big problem all by himself. He’s the second richest person in America next to Musk, who is also a fascist piece of shit who should be taxed into oblivion, just as all these hyperrich democracy-hating supervillains should be taxed into oblivion. At least. 

That we allow such a small group of freakish men whose primary qualification is luck (in the genetic lottery and/or investment decisions) to hoard so much wealth and the power that comes with it has had an absurdly distorting effect on democracy – as is ably shown by this one rich cunt smacking down the board of the newspaper he bought to prevent them from making their endorsement. No wonder FDR taxed their asses off. Not only did (and, God knows, does) America need the money, we have to stop allowing rich straight-up fascists to create power bases in direct opposition to democracy. 

I mean look at these goddamn people – the deranged apartheid clinger Musk, the literal vampire Thiel, and Bezos who blows his incalculable wealth on trips to space (fawned over by his WaPo lickspittle Megan McArdle) and, we now see, collusion with the dark forces we thought we’d seen an end to in World War Two. They’re at least as much of a threat as Tubby and it’s about time the people who profess to speak for the rest of us did something about it. 

I will only add: It's really something that the MAGA creeps who are forever yelling about "Big Tech" "Censorship" (like JD Vance) are getting the election handed to them by guys like Musk, Thiel, and Bezos.

Anyway, here’s this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies (yes, only one – quit being such cheap bastards and pony up the $7/month for a full subscription to this FIVE DAY A WEEK SERVICE -- unlike fucking Bezos I can use it!): The hot new trend among serious people who were just recently telling us not to call a fascist – namely calling Trump a fascist!  If anything I think I was late in applying the f-word, myself, but if anything can make a man look prescient it’s being surrounded by idiots.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: T-MINUS-18 DAYS AND COUNTING EDITION.

The pride of Cabo Verde.

Really barreling into the election now, as you can tell by the kind of crap rightwing papers are trying to put over. The Washington nee Moonie Times keeps shooting me “news alerts” like this:

It’s all Mad Libs at this point: Harris FLIP-FLOPPED on TRANS RIGHTS in BORDER CRISIS.  Oh, and if you aren’t convinced Jill Stein is working to elect Trump, maybe you’ll notice that Trump supporters are sure working to promote Stein: 

All more or less normal ratfuckery, and neither as important nor as sinister as the GOP’s push to suppress Democratic votes by any means necessary. Meanwhile Tubby is visibly off his nut, yammering like some escaped mental patient; his handlers are trying to get him out of the public eye, and it figures that his own people are more aware of his decline than our Prestige Press, which barely acknowledges it.

Anyway, it’s late, so here are the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: Two fun scenes – first, Bari Weiss piloting her fake university through seas of donor money; and second, a peek at how things are going with Trump and the gang in the Eagle’s Nest. Look, if we can’t laugh, what’s the point?