Lost weekend

 

"People seem puzzled as to why Trump kept the documents.  That's easy.  To feel important.  To pretend to be the president.  And to have something to sell when the other scams failed."  (Timothy Snyder)

And the horse he rode in on:  Nebraska rodeo athlete and horse die after being struck by lightning

"Yevgeny Prigozhin will never be discussed again"  -- Russian media to erase all traces of mutinous warlord.  The lights burn late in the Ministry of Truth.

Required reading:  "Unrepentant Pence," The New York Review of Books, July 20, 2023.  Fintan O'Toole deftly dissects the born-again weasel as only he can.  A few tastes:

"In a letter to the New York Times in 2005 Donald Trump wrote that 'some people cast shadows, and other people choose to live in those shadows.'  Mike Pence went a little further and chose to be Trump's shadow.  He has ended up as a gray man of no substance, who has to insist ever more emphatically on his own godliness because he has no soul left to sell."

"All that is left is a washed-out imitation of his former master's showmanship.  Pence's current pose is Uriah Heep pretending to be Bill Sikes...Perhaps it was this deep need to ape an alpha male that made Pence such easy meat for Trump."  

O'Toole pounces on Pence's statement that Trump's anti-immigrant policy would not have kept his grandfather from immigrating because "Ireland is not compromised by terrorism."  In fact, Richard Cawley came here in 1923 specifically to escape the civil war that followed Irish independence.  "The policies that Pence helped to implement...would certainly have blocked their earlier Irish equivalents like his grandfather, unless a specific exemption were made for those who were white and Christian."

Just read it.  Not much left of Mike when O'Toole is finished wielding his scalpel.

Several states have a law that prohibits a business from discriminating against LGBTQ people, and at least one attorney general, Kris Mayes of Arizona, says she plans to enforce it and the "Supreme" Court can gather up their robes and take a flying jump across the Grand Canyon.  This will be interesting.

Another approach.

Michael Imperioli wrote on Instagram:  "I've decided to forbid bigots and homophobes from watching The Sopranos, The White Lotus, GoodFellas or any movie or TV show I've been in."  Could be difficult to enforce, but I wish him luck.  Big can of worms Les Six have opened.

Love and rockets to all who still celebrate the Fourth.