New Bands for Old Heads is great, and here's a reminder
that not all the bands there are some punk-hyphenate.
A day late and -- well, they always say “a dollar short” but, one, what’s a dollar worth anymore and, two, this website is free so I don’t feel like I’m shorting you, exactly. (Subscribers to ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN don’t pay for days I don’t publish, so that’s not a “dollar short” either; even if they did pay, since the per-issue price is between 27 and 35 cents depending on the plan, they wouldn’t lose a dollar!) But I do try to keep to the schedule, so sorry about the delay.
Anyway, I regret to report almost everything is still awful. For example, Trump’s mouthpiece Todd Blanche was approved by the Senate to serve as U.S. Attorney General, which is like approving John Mitchell after he got out of the pen. Senator Whitehouse has a good rundown, but you mainly need to know that Blanche was literally Tubby’s criminal defense lawyer and nothing in his behavior as deputy and acting AG shows his perception of his role to have changed with his title. He will continue to use the DOJ to prosecute people Tubby considers his enemies for imaginary crimes with at least as much enthusiasm as did Pam Bondi (not to mention liberal political groups as “terrorist organizations” as well) and is probably so steeped in Trump’s criminality that he has no reason to hold back in hopes that people will give him a pass when Trump’s gone. In other words he’s up there with the most hardcore, nothing-left-to-lose creeps and crooks like Miller and Rubio.
Oh, and as a little fillip for those of you who still think there’s any such thing as a decent Republican: Here’s a letter of support for Blanche by John Ashcroft.
But there are some glimmers of hope, among them the good showing by DSA and other progressive candidates in last week’s primaries, particularly the Democratic nomination of Abdul Al-Sayed for the Michigan Senate race. Naturally the MAGA types are going berserk over it, and my first past-paywall-promoted free ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN post of the week is about that, along with what I consider to be a complementary phenomenon: The tendency of conservatives to attack Democratic men and women of the cloth as false to their faith. I think their characterization of decent and accomplished Muslims like Al-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani dovetails with their characterization of decent and accomplished Christians like the seminarian James Talarico and Rev. Lindsay James (also mentioned in the post) as threats to their own very un-Christlike version of Christianity -- not to mention conservatives’ tendency to call liberal Jews either false to Judaism or actually antisemitic. It says a lot about what they think religion is (i.e., a fraud with which to grift the suckers).
Oh, and here also for free is my review of The Odyssey movie. Everyone else had one, so...


