FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Former colleague Rob Harvilla made a great case for Twenty One Pilots; They make a great case for themselves here.
• Here's your new talking point, wingnuts: The San Francisco Court of Appeals! Reliable propagander Jim Geraghty at National Review:

For Trump Foes, San Francisco’s Court of Appeals Is Cloud Nine
The Trump administration’s loss in the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit — it might as well just be called “the San Francisco court” — isn’t surprising, and the tone of the decision isn’t really a surprise, either...

Cuz they's Sanfrancisgy sissy-men! Jeanne Kirkpatrick, greybeards may recall, got a lot of mileage out of "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. A few things have changed since then -- notably, Russia's the Republicans' buddy, and the number of people you can set off with Cisco as a perjorative has declined drastically -- in fact, that population may overlap substantially with the readership of National Review.

• So much of my humor is of necessity grim these days, so how about a genuine ray of sunshine? St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones is running for mayor, and as is customary was offered an interview with the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which she declined, sending instead a letter which she shared with the St. Louis American, and oh boy:

Two weeks ago, you used some of your ink to outline what questions you would be asking of mayoral candidates. You complained that “decades of sustained, abject neglect by city leaders have allowed a bombed-out graffiti-covered, war-zone image to prevail.” You said you were afraid to walk your dog at night and you called for a plan to “address blight and abate the graffiti that’s killing our city.”

You just moved here. It isn’t your city, yet. And graffiti is not what’s killing it.

What is killing our city is poverty. Since you’re new and you live in a great neighborhood, you probably don’t know that the poverty rate doubled during Mayor Francis G. Slay’s 16-year tenure.

What is killing our region is a systemic racism that pervades almost every public and private institution, including your newspaper, and makes it nearly impossible for either North St. Louis or the parts of South St. Louis where African Americans live to get better or safer or healthier or better-educated...

The whole thing is good and may just bolster your faith in the future of this country.