The first was for “9 to 5”, where she was fine, but I’m sorry, Jane Fonda was the queen bee and Dabney Coleman stole the show as the ladies’ lecherous boss. The next time was for “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, co-starring with Burt Reynolds, then at the top of his celebrity trajectory.

With her passing, it’s striking — and reassuring — to see how much affection people had for Dolly. Clearly something about her essence registered on a deeper level than your average fan adoration.

Interviews with Dolly and Reynolds took place down in Austin, Texas. Along with the usual screening hoopla I remember a barbecue at some outrageously manicured “ranch” outside of town.

But the main takeaway from the weekend was the difference between the two stars.

In 1982 Reynolds was a decade past the best serious acting of his career, in John Boorman’s “Deliverance”, and was pocketing serious Hollywood mega-money on the box office strength of those “Smokey and the Bandit” movies, of which he eventually did three, two of them before signing on for “Best Little Whorehouse.”

There’s a diplomatic way to put it, but Reynolds was riding high and feeling every inch of it.

Dolly on the other hand projected about as much “I’m Kind of a Big Deal” vibe as the cheery gal behind the counter of your favorite bakery. Even today, I have no idea what she looked like without all the hair and makeup and sequins. But the sense she gave off in person, as so many others noticed over her long career, was of a … real human being. The show biz cosmetic stuff was purely for “the show”, the silly-fun gimmicks of persona creation and entertainment. She and everyone out here got the joke.

Like the classic genetically-coded politician, shaking hands with Dolly and exchanging pleasantries made you feel like she too was enjoying the experience and really was interested in whatever you had to say, even if it was usually, “Dolly, I just love you”, from her most devoted fans.

Burt though … .

In her memoir, (which I haven’t read but saw quoted yesterday), Dolly described her “Best Little Whorehouse” experience opposite the business’s reigning ticket-selling king as not particularly pleasant. Certainly a lot less fun than she had with Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Coleman on the “9 to 5” set.

As I recall, there was some fresh gossipy scuttlebutt about Reynolds roiling the tabloids over that Austin weekend. I don’t remember what precisely, but it was the rare week back then that he wasn’t front and center of “insider talk” in the supermarket checkout lanes. That kind of thing kinda comes with the territory. As most learn to accept.

But Burt didn’t see it that way. Anything less than, '“Hollywood’s greatest, biggest star” seemed to annoy him.

There were four or five of us in a hotel room with him, mostly asking anodyne questions about shooting what had been a Broadway musical, working with Dolly, yadda yadda. But someone — not me— went there, asking him if in the context of building a career to the stature he was then enjoying didn’t require an actor — him — playing the tabloid, all-pub-is-good-pub game, flaming it up a few weeks before the premiere of his next film and pretending to be offended by the tittering and paparazzi?

Point being, wasn’t it all just part of the game? Not really that much different than Dolly’s eyeglashes, lipstick, jewelry and epic bosom?

It was, IMHO, a fair and provocative question that an honest actor might play with, do a bit of humble-bragging and acknowledge the not so well-hidden subterfuges of the show biz publicity machine. But Burt didn’t see it that way.

“Are you calling me a flack star?,” he snarled back at my startled compatriot.

He followed that with a pretty defensive defense of some of the films he had done, i.e. “Deliverance”, (where he played a macho-marinated Southern dude not entirely unlike himself), while notably skipping over the Smokey and Bandits in the room. The rest of the interview was a bit strained as you might imagine, since none of us could think of a line of questioning that would be worth printing without risking a fistfight with Hollywood’s biggest star. A brawl that most certainly would have made the tabloids.

So yeah, thank god for Dolly. Most successful show biz players have the talent and composure to play interviews like another scene in a movie. Smile. Affect friendliness. Show interest. Be gregarious without being too self-absorbed. Flash a touch of humility at their good fortune.

Maybe Dolly learned that early. Or maybe, as it seemed shaking her hand and chatting with her for an hour, that was genuinely who and how she was. Whatever, I said “good-bye”, “nice meeting you” and “thank you” pretty well convinced that she was as sweet and endearing as she seemed.

Thing is, it seems thousands of others read her the same way. Her passing has so many, in and out of show biz, reminding the world of her generosity, her standing as a good citizen, and as prime an example of how a person can live as big a life as any of us can imagine and not lose touch with the humanity of a once dirt poor girl from the deep, deep South.

RIP, mam.

This particular suit follows a recent ruling in New Mexico that handed Facebook/Meta a nearly $1 billion bill for similar impacts on children there and portends quite badly for a dozen (or more) other suits, all charging essentially the same thing. Namely that Facebook consciously engineers its algorithms to grab and hold highly impressionable young users by steadily exposing them to more and more “potent” content, to the point that some of those young users engage in self-destructive behavior. Behavior that while detrimental to them — to the point of including suicide — further fattens Facebook’s immense shareholder value. (This all comes as a shock to you, I know.)

Facebook’s settlement is a pretty unequivocal admission that they’ve got no case — “no cards”, as one of their most famous client politicians likes to say — with which to defend itself. The jig may well be up.

Looked at from a couple steps back, it’s fair to see these judgments as proof that after a decade and half of ever-accelerating influence over the fears, prejudices and ids of its consumers — most of whom have little to no awareness that what they’re seeing on their phones is being fed to them with invasive specificity — the hammer of retribution is dropping.

As part of the settlement, “Meta [must] make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

“Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls.”

Some us may laugh at the idea that geezery old Facebook has that much appeal to kids these days.

In my experience very few kids are hanging out with mom, dad, grandma and gramps trading pictures of hip surgeries, lake vacations and adorable pets. Most have long since migrated to other “cooler” platforms, all of which though operate with the pretty much the same business strategy: namely, assess each user’s pastimes/fears/prejudices, etc. and feed them a steady diet of more, and usually more extreme topics and personal contacts, all marinating in the same pool of “interests.”

The happy face on this is “community building”. But the now widely-viewed downside is that this fantastically profitable business strategy has no social conscience, no regard whatsoever for it’s divisive cultural impact and no incentive to re-orient its code to reduce the obvious negative impacts of its “service.”

I don’t think there’s an intelligent, honest person alive — adult or otherwise — who isn’t exhausted and suspicious of the effects of social media. I’m hardly alone in asserting that Donald Trump and the MAGA idiocy the world is suffering under wouldn’t exist with the influence it has today without social media algorithms feeding the not-too-bright and self-destructively credulous constant, feedlot troughs of misinformation.

I should pull over and write down the links to stuff I hear while driving. But I don’t. So … well, take my word for it … that some tech expert I was listening to the other day, (maybe this guy), was talking about Facebook’s concession to reality in these lawsuits. In his opinion, Facebook, the biggest, fattest target for anti-social media activism, knows that it’s salad days of “reader engagement” are over. He also believes Mark Zuckerberg and crew have priced in the demise of the wild west days of unimpeded algorithms and that this explains their sudden, aggressive pivot to a future based on AI.

In June the company laid off 8000 Facebook employees as it turned it’s focus toward developing a “personalized” AI companion for it’s 3.5 billion users. A dream/nightmare scheme that has the company allotting at least $135 billion on the … out of control? — AI data center/GPU build-out/bubble.

For all the salutary effects of vox populi … grandma and grandpa’s cruise photos, cute dogs and cats, not to mention self-important crackpots like yours truly ranting and raving about god knows what — I dare you to find any thoughtful observer of cultural evolution who doesn’t regard the social media era we’re living in as one of the most impactful in human history. Gutenberg never reached 3.5 billion readers.

Furthermore, what we see in these lawsuits and defeats of heretofore monolithic, impregnable fortress entities like Facebook is a correction — the correction — that most civilized societies eventually demand in their marketplaces.

I could be wrong about this. I usually am. But right now I’m feeling good about something … for a change.

You may already have heard Maggie Haberman, “third rate writer and intellect” for “the failing New York Times” and co-author of the best-selling expose, “Regime Change”, which is, “mostly made up, Fake News and largely fiction”, describing the following scenario. The one where foreign leaders and other prominent government officials have had to call … Natalie Harp … in order to get a word in with Trump, a vain-glorious incompetent ever more sealed away from reality and increasingly unmoored from the obligations of his oath.

That’d be the same guy described by Haberman (and co-author Jonathan Swan) as spending, “70% of his time” on his self-memorializing vanity projects. His ballroom. His arch. Gluing gold chintz to the Oval Office walls. A guy so checked out from reality he was clueless about the appalling draw down of hi-tech defensive weapons as a result of … a war … that he started and immediately and catastrophically bungled.

It’s a fair guess that “the human printer” culled out weeks worth of reporting about that depletion before the teetering geezer who is “everything to me” finally heard about it and blew up at Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Pomade. I mean you gotta blame someone, and it couldn’t be Natalie’s fault.

My point, in the previous “Natalie” post and here again, is that it is a mistake for the Trump opposition — now showing indisputable vigor — to under estimate the potency of this tabloidy-seeming story.

Where a majority of potential voters vaguely understand that Trump has botched the war with Iran, spiked inflation and shows no real interest in anything that doesn’t line his pockets, they all understand, as I said previously, that they’re stuck with a fat old dude. A guy faking that he’s still got it going on with a much younger woman who regards him with cultish obsession. It’s sit-com level stuff.

By now everyone has heard Jon Ossoff’s line in the speech that set this whole thing off. (Arguably it was the Trump White House/echo chamber’s “outraged” reaction to the line that really ignited the afterburners.) But if you’ve heard it, did you notice the immediate, instantaneous reaction from Ossoff’s audience to the word, “Natalie”?

It sure sounded like everyone in that room knew exactly who she was. Which to me means they have also processed … the farcical, pervasive cliche of her … and Trump.

Ossoff isn’t stupid. Far from it. He understands what the public, or certainly his voters understand. As well as what they are paying attention to — for all sorts of pervasive cultural reasons that usually have nothing to do with politics — and that the story and imagery of “Natalie Adores Donny and Donny Loves Being Adored” adds significantly to the exhaustion and disgust Americans have with the corrupt old fool.

Trump’s polling is nightmarishly bad if you’re a Republican. I have yet to hear any Trump apologist offer even a fantasy vision for how he turns this around. And the thing is, they may all know … he doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to.

His crypto accounts are getting fuller by the hour. The Supreme Court shows no inclination to obstruct the monuments he’s building to himself — whether on the dime of taxpayers or crypto gangsters. And, as Haberman and Swan report, Trump regularly announces to everyone in range that, thanks to the Alito court, “I’m immune! I’m immune!” He can do (or not do) anything he wants. Moreover, all of his cultish toadies, blonde and otherwise, have assurances that whenever he leaves he’ll issue blanket pardons to everyone within 250 feet of him, a range which obviously includes the adoring Ms. Harp.

Ossoff’s “going there” on the comely blonde aide thing seems to have startled everyone. Until he said it and the White House/echo chamber validated its potency by wildly over-reacting to it, few had computed just how much attention was focused on the Natalie-Donny “relationship” and how the general public is processing it. But now that it has, it’s political malpractice not to exploit it further.

To put a point on it, the exploitable factor lies in relentlessly litigating against Trumpist Republicans for enabling a louche, corrupt old fool. A self-evident fraud never qualified for the job and now devolved into an aged dunce who has checked out so thoroughly he’s started and lost a war. A war that has pushed the debt past $40 trillion, has bond rates spiking to 20-year highs, taking mortgage rates up in the 7% range in a housing crisis. And all that simultaneous with the same “leader” taking an untold number of multi-million dollar bribes and plastering DC with more banners and monuments to himself than Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.

It’s stupefyingly bad. And nuts. Not that Natalie will ever tell him.

Spoiler alert: high quality information about really important stuff that I, and maybe you, think of as vital — breakthroughs in cancer research and the like — don’t matter nearly as much as you think.

Trying to get a handle on the emotionally-rooted Freudian factors that deliver Average America’s viewer eyeballs — i.e. Nielsen-measureable eyeballs — to local (and national) TV news led me to a stop in San Francisco back in the mid-90s and lunch with Don Fitzpatrick, then running a go-to shop for research on TV-ready talent. Stations from across the country tapped Fitzpatrick for advice on who to hire to read their station’s news as well as what news the public really wants to see.

Somewhere in our lunch the conversation turned to … blondes, and the mysterious-to-damned-near-irresistible allure of blondes … both reading the news and as stories in the news. As Fitzpatrick explained to me, and as I never forgot and told everyone over drinks for years after, only Phoenix out did Minneapolis-St. Paul when it came to viewer appeal for blondes reading teleprompters. If you were running a station in a ratings war your best move was … hire a blonde.

And after that, with your blonde in an anchor chair, never fail to fully exploit any story involving a blonde. Any story. Missing or dead. In fact, the deader the better in most cases.

I’d have to find the tape, but I remember Fitzpatrick wandering briefly into the mythological underpinnings of blonde-ness. Into the sex appeal of blondes and, most implausibly, their heightened credibility for wisdom. Something about being special. Something about being comparatively unique, and valued more than your garden variety brunettes and redheads. Something as well about the mystique inherited from Hollywood. Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak and on and on.

As they say in show biz, blondes are box office.

This all comes back to me watching the fascination and excitement as well as the palpable, ooky cringi-ness of the on-going Natalie Harp story. (My wife, The Lovely Mrs, is fond of “ooky” as a descriptor for stories about obese and incontinent old men trying to reignite their masculine bonafides by gluing a young blonde to their porcine flanks.)

This blonde/Harp episode we’re swimming in is ideal for the dog days of August. These are days when many of us are just trying to savor the waning days of summer and ignore as much depressing Trump-related corruption and chaos as possible. At least until Labor Day when we know we’re going to have to endure 90 days of numbing campaign blitzkrieg.

Like so many old, cruel jokes about blondes themselves, a story about a blonde and a fat old man isn’t complicated. Everyone gets it. Everyone understands immediately and exactly what’s going on.

But the Natalie Harp story happens to also come with a twist. A bit of reverse obsession.

We all get the part about another pathetic old horn dog refusing to concede his long-lost virility by keeping a much younger blonde in his orbit. But this one comes with the blonde’s bonafide, near religious obsession with the fat old geezer. And this isn’t Anna Nicole Smith playing some skeletal billionaire already at death’s door for a chunk of the estate.

Huh uh. This poor young woman, Natalie the Blonde, has full-on handmaiden/cult fever. I don’t know about you, but if Maggie Haberman reported that Ms. Harp left a note for Trump telling him she was willing to die for him, was willing to take an Iranian assassin’s shoulder-launched missile for him, I’d believe it. The whole thing is that ooky.

It’s tempting to write the whole the thing off as just the latest example of Trump’s adolescent id run farcically amok. But there’s political potential here that Ivana and Marla Maples and all the Epstein-era blondes he chased never had.

The story of sad, obsessed blonde Natalie, is playing big and long at the same moment that two-thirds of the public has finally decided that fat orange Donny doesn’t give, excuse my language, two shits about them. And by “them”, I mean “us.”

The sight of a such a laughable, mock-worthy cliche — the young, trophy blonde — fluffing a fat old man’s ego, reassuring him of the grandeur of his ballroom, his arches, his reflecting pools, his Qatari jets and gilded offices is like throwing another log on the fires of retribution.

Our retribution against him.

So let’s hear it for summer blondes.

1: Our Commander-in-Chief, talking to reporters after lumbering off Air Force One, “We have total control over the Hormuz Strait right now. They [the Iranians] don't have control. We have total control. We own it.” A day later he mused about declaring the very much closed and Iranian-controlled strait an American territory.

2: Standing in front of a couple hundred uniformed cops, many of whom applauded everything out of his mouth, the same guy — a guy still whistling past the Epstein graveyard, told the following story, “Every day I come to the White House, people are thanking me: ‘Thank you, sir. Thank you, thank you, sir.

“You know these young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls in the White House. You know they come in. Now I’m not supposed to say beautiful, but what the hell?

“These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls — they want to be safe, and they come,’ ‘Mr. President, may I speak to you? Thank you, sir. Thank you’ — I said, ‘Why are you thanking me?’ ‘Because a year and a half ago, I was afraid to leave. I was afraid to open the door of my apartment, and now I walk to the White House every morning, and I have absolutely no fear.’.”

And 3: Senator Jon Ossoff, running for reelection in Georgia, “While the sailors on the [U.S.S. Abraham] Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do his job.”

“He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie [Harp, his young, blonde gofer] on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

On the one hand the first two are just samplings of all-too familiar gibberish from an incompetent old man utterly lost in his delusional grandiosity. A career fraud now in deep denial of his impotence and the near-universal loathing he’s inspired.

On the other, in Ossoff, we have a barely purple-state politician “going there”, and betting there are millions (ravenously) hungry for someone to grab control of the battering ram and begin laying final siege.

I’m not jumping on anyone’s 2028 bandwagon. But Ossoff is clearly having moment. As Gavin Newsom had before him and may again, and others will in the months to come, especially after November 3.

But Ossoff’s tactic of degrading Trump and therefore Trumpism with digs at his most personal absurdities — i.e. lazy, befuddled Trump’s pathetic delusion that he’s still a magnet for hot blondes — suggests a strategy broadly useful to Democrats everywhere. The Grand Objective control of Congress this year by tying Trump around the neck of every Republican complicit in his obscene, delusional charade … which of course is pretty much all of them, from state legislatures to city councils.

IMHO, the test for Democrats like Peggy Flanagan and Amy Klobuchar here in Minnesota is in demonstrating, like Ossoff, that the best defense is good offense.

Both can waste time and energy explaining, rationalizing and deflecting shrieks and howls of “fraud!”, or … or … they can attack by directly linking Demuth to Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and football reporter Tafoya to the vast, morally vacuous “bro culture” that has both explicitly and implicitly undergirded Trump’s reign of corruption and incompetence. A reign that includes, but is hardly limited to, starting war that has strengthened the enemy he set out to destroy and has American drivers spending on average, $500 more annually than a year ago.

The question becomes one of tactical tone, and a willingness to “go there.” For all her nuts-and-bolts competence, Klobuchar has always been an “across the aisle” politician, a creature rooted in a now fast-fading era. And Flanagan has never performed in this big a circus before.

Poll after poll and survey after survey reaffirms wide and deep acceptance that Trump is a self-serving failure, (arguably of epic, historic proportions). At this point, his wildly-to-catastrophically out-of-touch delusions have been fully digested by a significant majority of the voting public. That strongly suggests the moment is ripe for an offense that “goes there”. A response that wraps Trump like a garrot around the neck of every Republican on every ballot everywhere. Not one that dances around and away in hope of restoring some wishful Obama-era “balance”.

Balance isn’t going to happen in 2026. Maybe in 2029. But not now.

By chance, after hearing Trump and Ossoff, I caught historian Timothy Snyder doing an interview with Katie Couric. His point was much the same. This isn’t the hour to yearn for garden variety comity and earnest appeals for “more democracy.”

“My view,” says Snyder, “is that for these elections, [emphasis mine], the pragmatic is the radical, and the radical is the pragmatic.”

People! Can we have a laugh here? It’s Mike frickin’ Lindell. Still! And he’s running for governor! What’s not funny?

As of Thursday morning Lindell, anointed by the reliably poisonous hand of Donald J. Trump, has not conceded. He’s seeing “irregularities” and “anamolies”, and his crack team, likely himself and his pet schnauzer, are going over the numbers with a broken-toothed comb. It’s what he does. It’s all he does. And 134,000 of your neighbors voted for him. Think about that the next time you ask any stranger for directions.

I’m sad I won’t have an Amy Klobuchar v. Mike Lindell series of debates to lighten up my fall event schedule. But until the returns come in this afternoon, I still have Count Binface, the comedian with a trash can over his head, running against Nigel Farrage, Britain’s Brexit-pandering, Trump-lite, crypto-sucking, once and future member of Parliament. (Please Lord, I repent my constant state of sinfulness, but let a guy wearing a trash can defeat a transparent fool … just once … even if it’s in a place thousands of miles from Minnesota.)

With Lindell out of the picture, the scenarios for November get a bit greyer.

All polling says Klobuchar is a walk to beat Lisa DeMuth, the profoundly cynical Republican Speaker of the House. The joke about Rudy Giuliani when he was a candidate for president, (think about THAT for a second or two), was that every sentence out of his mouth was, “a noun, a verb and 9/11”. And so it is and will be, both with DeMuth and professional jock watcher, Michele Tafoya, now running against Peggy Flanagan for US Senate.

My hope is that Klobuchar resists thinking she can coast into the Governor’s office and instead regularly reminds voters of the direct line we can fairly draw from rage-baiting DeMuth … to “videographer” Nick Shirley’s highly-targeted “exposes” of Somali fraud … to Stephen Miller/Trump firing up Operation Metro Surge … to three masked and barely-trained thugs murdering Renee Good and Alex Pretti in a history-making rampage through our state last winter.

I don’t doubt there are 134,000 Minnesotans still loving every bit of that. But there’s at least a couple million who aren’t.

As for Flanagan, who won by a much larger percentage than I expected, she’s going to have to prove, hour after campaign hour that she can deflect and dissipate Tafoya’s only “policy” mission, which is shrieking “fraud!!!” while wearing primetime-ready makeup.

FWIW, in the end I voted for Angie Craig with the thinking that while both of their campaigns were noxious and semi-disqualifying, a vote for the clearly more experienced and combative Craig might keep the final vote close enough that Gov. Klobuchar wouldn’t think twice about appointing Craig to her Senate seat. But at a 20% blow-out, Klobuchar might now mull other options. (Activist Nekima Levy Armstrong is already out with a barely-veiled suggestion that Klobuchar defy tradition and appoint someone a lot like … well, Nekima Levy Armstrong to the job.)

Widening the aperture just a bit, I hadn’t spent a lot of time following Wisconsin’s follies until the past couple weeks. First, there were the weed-hunting State Patrol doofs who used Flock cameras and taxpayer resources to track some guy who drove to Michigan and back to replenish his stash. OMFG. Stay classy, ‘Sconnie!

But then there was Francesca Hong, the bona fide DSA candidate for Governor over there in SudsWorld. She had a fat lead until about 10 days ago, despite being on record chirping about abolishing Thanksgiving and the police, and fretting about her bi-racial son perpetually struggling with his identity. By Tuesday night Wisconsin decided it wasn’t quite ready to put that much red meat on the plates of MAGA attack dogs and voted instead for … a black guy from Milwaukee.

I don’t associate Peggy Flanagan with Hong-level DSA, but she’s going to be attacked for it regardless. With no Lindell for farcical diversion, Team Flanagan has to step up and not just deflect, but show some muscular offense against yet another in Minnesoa Republicans’ artesian well of unserious, as-seen-on-TV gimmick candidates.

The United States’ instant karma defeat by a bunch of psychopathic religious nutjobs in Iran may be Example “A” of this. Who doesn’t look at Donald J. Trump, failed casino operator-turned-reality TV “billionaire” and Pete Hegseth, ex-cable TV weekend anchor and say, “Of course they f*cked it up. F*cking up is what they do. It’s the one thing they’re actually good at.”

The mullahs know this, if MAGA-world doesn’t.

But as much the Donny & Pete Iran f*ck-up has millions more now realizing we have a government run by people who are not only in wildly over their heads, with zero training and aptitude for what they’re doing … and on a not-so deep level know this about themselves … we have a nest of fools who always have something new and outrageous to offer.

It’s kind of an a la carte thing. Pick any topic of interest to you and these … pardon my harsh language … morons … have another obscenely expensive farce up their sleeves.

Personally, I like the deserts of the American southwest. I like hiking, camping, kayaking … the whole get-out-in-the-peace and-quiet thing. So the story of bulldozers and heavy equipment suddenly showing up in Big Bend National Park the other day caught my attention and sent the spleen into spasms … yet again.

Armed with a $47 billion dollar budget increase, thanks to that 51-50 vote on The Big Beautiful Bill last year, our current gummint, which as already added close to $10 trillion to the national debt in its two misbegotten terms, has peeled off $1.7 billion … that a “B”, folks … to, I don’t know, stop the surge of cats-and-dogs-eating, fentanyl running, face-tattooed gangbangers flooding across the Rio Grande. Never mind that by that same gummint’s actual numbers no more than six homicidal wanna be roofers and chambermaids take the swim each week.

The locals way down there in Texas have been told precious little about what’s really going on. (They can guess Mexico isn’t paying for it). The bare outlines suggest the $1.7 billion, which BTW equals half … half … the Trump 2.0 budget for the entire national park system, is going to clearing roads/carving up a pristine desert for high-tech surveillance installations and eventually building man-camps just outside the park for crews to build the hulking 30-foot walls Donny threatened to build years ago.

National priorities, man.

That $1.7 billion number sticks with me. I think of it when I read about the reality of the DOGE-rampage in early 2025 when Elon Musk was claiming to have saved taxpayers $110 billion by gutting USAID, The National Gallery and on and on.

After some basic Googling, non-imposter researchers have found no proof at all for 97% of Musk’s bullshit. That reduces the “value” of that rampage to almost exactly what they’re wasting carving up up a starkly beautiful desert landscape for no good reason, other than its appeal to sullen goobers in Idaho gun shops stocking up to stop “the invasion.”

But I add this to the near total absence federal response … hell, even comment … on the drought draining Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the now routine summer fires choking the country with smoke and dozens of other climate change-related disasters. And I return again to the indisputable fact that we are currently being led not by the Best and Brightest, but by The Worst and Most Incompetent Among … at the Worst Possible Moment. When we most need the deeply educated and experienced, we have absurdist performers. Fools and fakes. (And let’s not even get into the hands-off, Wild West approach to managing AI and crypto.)

Quick story about Big Bend.

I made one of my desert runs down there a couple years ago. Dallas-to-artsy Marfa-to-Big Bend-and-back. All of west Texas is enormous. Big Bend is the seventh largest park in the lower 48.

While making the long drive to the Rio Grande and scenic St. Elena Canyon I was followed by one of those giant I’m-more-Texas-than-you’ll-ever-be King Ranch pickups. A diesel. Blub, blub, blub. Belching clouds of exhaust every time it climbed a hill. I couldn’t shake it. I pulled over take in a view. It pulled over. I took off. It followed.

Finally I get to the Santa Elena parking lot and set out walking out over a wide, muddy flat to the edge of the Rio Grande. I hear the blub, blub, blub. Doors shut and footsteps follow mine. There’s no one else for a hundred yards in either direction. No one else admiring the spectacular, steep-sided canyon in front of us.

The footsteps stop, barely ten feet beside me. I look over. A tall guy in a Stetson with his much smaller wife. Both staring up at the canyon.

After a moment of silence he says to me, because there’s no one else around, not even a tattooed MS-13 gangbanger with a sack of fetanyl, “Do you suppose that stupid fucker even knows there’s already a wall down here?”

Don’t think so, dude. And that’s just a slice of what “he” doesn’t know.

No. I bought fried chicken from Jerry’s, insisting as I always do that I made it myself, slugged a couple Kolschs from my Playmate cooler and caught up with people I spend most of the year waving to as I drive past. But among the newbies this year were three young guys, mid-Thirties, new-ish residents of a better slice of the ‘hood surrounding a wetland. The first works in commercial real estate, which in Edina is so common it’s like saying, “I breathe.” The second slipped away before I could interrogate him. But the third, in a quarter zip pullover on a warm night, lavished me with the story of his AI-powered start-up software business.

The details of his staff-of-one operation are less important than the sales pitch fervor of his belief — his proof — that thanks to AI, Claude to be specific, he was accomplishing more on his own than he had seen in offices of dozens. Being in the middle of Cory Doctorow’s latest book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”, and with my YouTube feed choked with Bloomberg talk shows, many lately featuring a guy named Ed Zitron, AI is on my mind more than usual. (Here, btw, is the ever-voluble Mr. Doctorow talking to Ezra Klein.)

But AI is on the alleged mind … mostly because of the numbers. But also, hand-in-hand, because of the crowd that’s supposed to be paying attention to those numbers but aren’t.

We live in a time when warnings of apocalyptic catastrophe reliably sell tickets, or at least social media clicks. Got an appetite for foreshadowings of world-ending peril? I can get you 30 credible-sounding experts assuring you that every terrifying scenario you can imagine is coming true. Who can handle all the gloom? So most of us soldier on. Screw it. Pop another Kolsch. Have another chicken leg.

But there’s a different between credible-sounding and actually credible, which is where Bloomberg comes in, and The Economist, and Fortune and Forbes, and Scott Galloway, and Paul Krugman and this guy, Patrick Boyle, and the aforementioned Mr. Zitron.

Not being someone any of you wants stock tips from, I won’t wander into the deep weeds explaining the common thread in what all these people … and more … are seeing. But they are very concerned.

The nut of it tough is that the current AI boom, seen most in the astonishing multi-multi-billion dollar build-out of gigantic data centers, is far beyond the scale and cost of any other tech revolution in human history. Waaay beyond the railroad expansion of the late 19th century. And the financing of it is inscrutable, at best. Which would be bad enough if tens of thousands to millions of retirement funds and other middle class investments weren’t exposed to it, often via index funds their pension plans are obligated to use.

The pervasive worry is that the tech giants engaged in a race to assert some sort of proprietary-to-monopolistic control over fully-bloomed AI, having committed an estimated $1.65 trillion at this point (and are out shopping for more “investment”) have very little margin for error if their final product dosn’t produce the trillions in regular, reliable revenue needed to pay off all that debt.

Put another way, as Mr. Boyle does quite well in his piece linked above, the Metas, Googles, Oracles, Anthropics, OpenAIs and SpaceXs playing this game, need hundreds of thousands if not tens of millions of monthly subscribers paying prices currently unimaginable not just for you and me, homebody nerds searching for how to repair an old propane stove, but serious businesses already underwhelmed by the promised productivity of the Claudes, ChatGPTs and Groks they’re paying for today.

Moreover, as all the folks above ask, “What happens if the Chinese just play basic business competition and undercut the market with their open source AI products, like DeepSeek and Kimi?” Are you, Mr. Fledgling Entrepreneur, going to pay $200 a month, or whatever for the red, white and blue version of AI instead of $20 for the commie version, just out of your raw patriotism? I don’t think so, and neither do the pros.

Then … of course … there’s … Trump. And his federal government. A ship currently being steered by and riddled with a near-lethal mix of frauds and fools, almost none of whom — here’s looking at you Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent — appear to have the slightest concern about the very 2007-style circular financing of the “Magnificent Seven”. And why should they? With a little insider trading here, some crypto manipulation there and short selling for dessert they’ll be fine.

Pensions and 401(ks), not so much.

I say again, for all that the average American talks about money, the general obliviousness to these AI numbers is not just astonishing, it borders on terrifying.

Craig’s got reason to worry. Only a fool would fail to see where the energy is in this election cycle. And it isn’t with anyone still sexting with Chuck Schumer.

But, hope-inducing results from New York to Denver and polling from Ohio to Texas to Iowa withstanding, only the most deluded believe a (very narrow) primary victory is the same thing as smacking down a MAGA counter attack in November.

Over the weekend The Lovely Mrs. and I ran into, shall we say, a prominent local politician working the streets for Peggy Flanagan. Told I still haven’t made up my mind between her and Craig, the ready response was that Amy Klobuchar likes what she’s seen in Craig and is very likely to appoint her to replace her in the Senate once she, Klobuchar, is sworn in as our next governor.

I’ve heard that scenario often enough. But never so explicitly from someone who ought to know.

Along with yesterday’s Michigan results, the past week brought a long New York Times editorial “conversation” with a handful of Minnesota observers on the Flanagan-Craig race. Spoiler alert: There was no bottom line endorsement. The chatter pretty closely mimicked my thinking. Which is: either will suffice.

Flanagan in DC will hew closer to where the energy du jour is taking the party, while Craig is more likely to push actual legislation across the finish line. But the first and most critical question is this: which of the two is best positioned to fight off the siege-of-Stalingrad-like bombardment of “FRAUD!!!!!” and the torrent of ugly dog whistle vows to clean our streets of brown-skinned migrants … from an ex-football sideline reporter?

Next came a full-on takedown of Craig’s coziness with the crypto industry from the local alternative newsroom, Racket. Much of the piece is built off her support last year for the so-called Clarity Act, which Craig has defended as … at least … a modest, first-line of defense for ordinary consumers against the Trump-enabled crypto bubble.

The Racket story sees it a bit differently.

Says the author, Matthew Cunningham-Cook, “Showcasing her commitment to bipartisanship, Craig worked with a noted fascist, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), to introduce the Clarity Act, serving as the only high-ranking Democrat on the original bill. … Craig’s role as the high priestess of the Clarity Act epitomizes our nation’s pay-to-play activities. In 2024, crypto-backed super PACs spent $1 million on bribes advertisements backing Craig’s reelection; she earned an ‘A’ grade from the Stand With Crypto Alliance. Instead of championing SNAP with her legislative energy as the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, she’s championing crypto. Why? Poor kids don’t have a super PAC.”

Thanks to Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas et al we have no real idea how much money the indisputably sleazy crypto world has donated to Craig or any other candidate. Basic campaign finance reports show Craig picking up $15,000 from Kalshi, the on-line betting market … that Flanagan’s Native American gambling supporters regard as a direct threat to their established businesses. Earlier reporting showed $1 million in Super PAC crypto-industry money flowing into Craig’s 2024 House reelection race. I have yet to see a figure for how much Native American gambling operations have shuffled to Flanagan.

Not a good look. For either. But thanks to Citizens United, we have a government of 340 million people dependent on pay-outs from casinos and deeply opaque crypto schemes.

And that’s just how James Madison wanted it, dontchaknow.

I’ve mentioned before that historian Jon Meacham likes to remind his audiences that radical swings like Trumpism, into flagrant self-dealing, corruption and shameless incompetence often result in the pendulum reversing dramatically back in the opposite direction. If that holds, it’s better to have Flanagan reliably voting with what you might call The Bernie Bloc.

But if the still vital, astoundingly well-funded die hards of old school corporate Republicanism and MAGA corruption sell fear of “socialism” as effectively as they always have, Sen. Angie might be the better move to navigate something — anything — through the next two years of the Trump dystopia.

Or hell, as the prominent pol believes, vote for Peggy and we’ll get both.

I’ve still got few days to unmuddle my alleged mind.

As of this summer Monday there’s plenty yet to unravel in Ms. Her’s misadventures. But besides wondering, “What in hell did she think she was doing?”, a lot of people are curious about the month-long cone of silence over the complaints against Madam Mayor, which leads to some of those same people speculating on the tactical advantage that that month gave her opponents both visible and as yet-to-be-revealed.

All that withstanding, along with the Mayor describing her locker room “compliments” to other women and girls-will-be-boys wiener jokes with the city’s cops as failed attempts at humor, this is one where some of us — yours truly — look around and ask, “Are we really talking criminal charges here?” Has the system jumped the rails that badly?

It’s 2026. Anyone working for a company with an HR office is aware of the prohibitions against “sexy talk” in the workplace, as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat would say. Only the most clueless dudes are still making “flattering” remarks about female co-workers’ shapes and fashions. And that’s several rungs down the ladder of offense from threatening their jobs if they don’t stop by the boss’s hotel room for late night “strategizing” on business trips.

Obviously the system isn’t written with two sets of rules. One for men and one for women. Both are required to behave in equal manner. Never mind that the preponderance of bad behavior comes from the boys.

But it would be, um, what’s word?, “refreshing?”, to see what I dare call a “common sense” perspective in matters like the one Mayor Her is in, again, as we understand it today.

As far as we know there were no sexual demands made of anyone, and she hasn’t threatened anyone’s employment if they refused to submit some physical violation of some sort. As it’s told to us today she made a few odd comments … and taped photoshopped photos over some cops’ photos.

If that’s it, while odd, where’s the common sense harm? The (presumably) adult woman in the locker room complimented on her breasts? The Chief of Police of a large American city exposed to a comment about someone getting “wienered”? Good god! Call 911! Set up triage for trauma counseling!

Not knowing much about St. Paul’s new mayor and how she operates, my initial reaction was that she seems inexcusably naive. Any contemporary politician, especially one elected in a big, diverse city has to arrive equipped with the hard-earned understanding that somewhere out there every day, among all the people you’re going to meet, greet, appease and or disappoint, is going to be someone with a figurative knife out for you. That’s the fundamental nature of the political game.

You’re not paranoid. They’ll really are out to get you.

And … it may well be true that being both the first woman and first person of Hmong ancestry to serve as Mayor of St. Paul, there are more knives out than normal. Point being, she should operate as though that’s the case until proven otherwise. Which means making wiener and boob jokes is like handing your inevitable adversaries a high-speed whetstone.

So we now have an “on going investigation” by an outside law firm billing the city a reported $290 an hour for the attorneys, plus $180 an hour for their paralegals. Great. That work will fill a lot of potholes, before they decide if we need a criminal trial for making wiener jokes to hyper-sensitive cops.

To reiterate, things are far better with the clampdown on the cliched sexist doofuses and bonafide predators making working life miserable, primarily for women. Good riddance to all that, and tip your HR department for sussing it out. But what’s also true, IMHO, is that same clampdown can be weaponized for political reasons over the silliest offenses, if the word “offense” even applies in this case.

Now, let me repeat. If we find out Mayor Her threatened to fire the police chief if he didn’t submit to her explicit, pagan sexual demands, that’s a whole other story.

While I suspect this is due in part to so many people desperate to talk about and discuss anything … anything … other than You Know Who and his bottomless pit of stupidity and mendacity, it says something encouraging about our moment here in this hot summer that so many people find arguing the pros and cons of a serious new retelling of a classic story — maybe THE classic story — a worthy use of their time.

As I’ve said often over the years, being both a lifelong movie fan AND a movie snob, I’ve been amused by several prominent perspectives on Christopher Nolan’s, dare I say, monumental blockbuster. Primarily the umbrage over the lack of purity in his adaptation of Homer’s 2800 year-old tale. I haven’t made a count, but my guess is the “adaptations” and “reimaginings” of “The Odyssey” number in the hundreds of thousands, if not more. Meaning that it’s tough making the argument that there’s only one way to tell the tale … again.

Recently, The Lovely Mrs and I took in a reimagining of “Macbeth”. In that adaptation Banquo is murdered by the witches. So much to fidelity to the original text.

I still plan to see “The Odyssey” in IMAX, but the futile search for anything other than front row tickets left me throwing up my hands and settling in at the always comfy Edina Theater the other night for a standard presentation. (It was over 90% full on a Tuesday night.)

Bottom line: I was pleased. The film snob in me, the lifelong nerd who savors the craft of filmmaking nearly as much as the storytelling, enjoyed the hell out of “The Odyssey.” (I bought the Blu-Ray of Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” and have rewatched it five times for the camerawork, the music, the editing and performances by Brad Pitt, Jean Smart and Margot Robbie).

“The Odyssey” is immense when it needs to be. (Like Denis Villenueve’s “Dune” films, Nolan understands the impact of scale.) And it’s intimate when it’s required to be. Moreover, if we’re talking broad cultural value, director Christopher Nolan has a point when he argues The Odyssey is the foundational story of western imagination, and his ambition was to bring that story to an audience that most likely has never, and never will, ingest the epic in its entirety any other way.

As even non-nerds know, Nolan is in an elite class of movie directors, rivaled only by James Cameron of “Terminator” and “Avatar” fame for delivering the “business” end of “show business” with nearly every film. (COVID-afflicted “Tenet” being an outlier.) Hollywood genuflects to his ability to put butts in seats and sell popcorn.

Personally, much as I enjoyed his Batman movies, I always thought the guy was slumming it until he committed himself to “Dunkirk” and “Oppenheimer.” Films with something else on their minds than masterfully-produced comic book mayhem.

But Nolan, his narrative audacity and technical precision withstanding, is no one’s idea of a sensualist, a quality that a different director, like Chazelle for example, might have brought to Homer’s epic. He’s a pretty formal guy. Sexuality has never really reared it’s head in his films. In the New York Times, the ever-flirty Maureen Dowd was on to something with her column, “Nolan’s Zero-Eros ‘Odyssey’.”

As an example, we have recurring scenes with Matt Damon as Odysseus, our wandering hero, hanging out for years on a sun-drenched desert isle with Calypso, played by Charlize Theron. But where you and I might think, “Hmm, what else could I possibly spend my time here doing with the beautiful Calypso other than moping back and forth on the beach being miserable for losing my buddies?” that’s all Nolan gives us. Moping.

Come on, dude! Let’s have some fun.

But in terms of business, and guaranteeing return on a $250 million budget, Nolan doesn’t have to be reminded that his films have to play in places like China, where pagan notions of sex and nudity routinely earn the wrath of party censors. Ditto Saudi Arabia and dozens of other wretched, dictator-regimented hellholes.

As others have, I could quibble on for another 1000 words about this scene or that and what I would have done differently had Universal written me a check for a quarter of a billion dollars. But what’s the point? Other than provoking a discussion over something other than the dystopian whirlpool we’re all being sucked in to?

That all said, it’s worth noting that Emily Wilson, the translator of the version of “The Odyssey” Nolan drew much-to-most of his cues from, has viciously panned his film. (But then today Joyce Carol Oates has come to his defense.)

To Ms. Wilson I say, with all due respect, let’s not overlook the fact that your translation, the latest of so many before it, is itself a reimagining of “The Odyssey”, an adaptation built upon your tastes and your interpretations.

Many years ago in the mid-90s, two back-to-back races between a couple forgettable dudes named Tad Jude and Bill Luther ranked — for me — as the most hamfisted, adolescent and obnoxious I had ever endured. And I remember Dick Nixon. The two were fighting it out for a congressional seat abandoned by ex-TV anchor Rod Grams on his way to the Senate. (So don’t ever let me hear you say Minnesota doesn’t produce Michelin star political talent.)

Jude v. Luther was a 24/7 media bombardment of barnyard name-calling, insinuation and mouth foam viciousness. It was so bad that you looked around for any kind of wing nut alternative.

It’s that way now with Flanagan and Craig. And people … people! … these are two ladies who in my old school way I like to think are gender-obligated to set a better example for all the bristling attack dog males. But apparently, like so many other things, that kind of dignity is now out of fashion as well.

People have asked and I’ve continued to say, “I haven’t made up my mind between the two of them.”

I’ve joked that, “Tafoya is looking better every day”. But that is a still, at this moment anyway, a joke. Because Tafoya’s a joke.

Because hell, unlike Rod Grams, who at least read about the news on TV every day, Tafoya has no connection to anything factual other than the injury report on the wide receiver who got clotheslined in the first half of the football game she was covering. But then as we see every day, having any kind of credible background in public affairs, economics, history, science, you name it, not only doesn’t qualify you for political office, it’s a goddam dealbreaker in the eyes of all the low-information lunkheads suspicious of “elity” candidates who sound like they know more than they do. … because they do.

Flanagan and Craig debated again yesterday at MPR. I assume they both had to pass through a metal detector before being let into the studio.

The debate hardly settled anything.

My fundamental problem with Flanagan is the old Gertrude Stein line about Oakland. “There’s no there there.” From what I know of her and her (thin) bio I don’t see anything substantive in terms of legislative accomplishments. I get that uber-progressives and the Indivisible ecosystem are 100% supportive of her, but mainly for what she’s said … much less than what she’s done.

In contemporary liberal politics it’s pretty easy to read from the basic Bernie script. Hammer the billionaires. Rail against ICE. Condemn Trump at every turn. All worthy sentiments.

But a Senate job, circa 2026 amid the floundering Trump dystopia, comes with an obligation to be an active, aggressive and imaginative player not just in jamming a wrench in the spokes of the stupidity and corruption playing out every day, but in propelling a narrative around a broader, deeper reckoning of the damage MAGA has done to this country, internally and externally. Think: Jon Ossoff.

Other than being a reliable anti-MAGA vote, Flanagan doesn’t fit any of that criteria.

As for Craig, her “support for ICE” in the context of voting for the Laken Riley Act, was a blunder. No question about it. And I get the tricky demographics of her exurban district. But moments like that say a lot about whatever moral courage you have.

In straight political calculus, and in a head-to-head with Tafoya (and her PAC money), Flanagan’s connection to “Somali fraud” is a legitimate concern. Other than riding on corporate jets with Al Michaels and being on a first name basis with NFL quarterbacks, Tafoya has one issue and one issue only: FRAUD!!!!!!

And were not talking legalized UnitedHealth-style fraud.

Tafoya pounding all-fraud-all-the-time on her big bass drum from Luverne to International Falls creates problems for Flanagan with the out-state crowd that it doesn’t (as much) for Craig.

On the other hand, if issues aren’t your thing, the cheery-looking, gal-next-door Flanagan gets a few cosmetic points over Craig, who so often looks like she’s being served a suspicious fish taco.

Personally, back even before the Tad Jude-Bill Luther cage match, I gave up judging politicians by whether I wanted to be friends with them. Have them over regularly for BBQ, or go on a weekend vacation.

No. Not interested in getting cozy.

My view is strictly utilitarian and transactional. Vote the way I want you to vote and, as I say, show me you can be someone, someTHING, bigger than just a seat-filler in DC.

Convince me you can do that. Sell me … that you’ve got the energy, that you’ve got the chops and can demonstrate the moral courage to take heat from scoundrels and fools, no matter how well funded.

In the context of Flanagan v. Craig, I’m still waiting.

The latest for me, in the news this past Tuesday, was Delaware superior court judge Calvin Scott “dismissing”, aka throwing out, a suit Minnesota’s own UnitedHealth filed against The Guardian news organization. The nut of it was that self-acclaimed corporate community leader UnitedHealth didn’t much care for a Guardian story reporting that — and I know this will shock you — America’s largest health insurer was “secretly” paying nursing homes not to transfer residents to hospitals where, along with getting vital medical treatment, they would also run up the tab on their UnitedHealth policies. A perilous move that could at some point impact the annual $61 million compensation package for CEO Stephen Hemsley.

God forbid. Far better to let grandma ride out her seizure at the Golden Sunset Retirement Home than endanger UnitedHealth’s quarterly earnings report.

Quoting from the story, “Scott granted the Guardian’s motion to dismiss. And he dismissed all six defamation claims in the lawsuit. [‘Defamation’! Of UnitedHealth?] ‘The article’s reporting of the bonuses as ‘secret’ or made ‘secretly’ or ‘quietly,’ is substantially true’, Scott wrote in one part of the ruling. In another part, he added that the Guardian is not required to publish facts just because United would have preferred more favorable facts’."

So a good day for the sheep and a bad day for the wolf in America’s outrageous brawl with its “care providers.”

But on a more macro scale what interests me is not just that UnitedHealth lost this one simultaneous with on-going pre-trial legal proceedings for Luigi Mangione, but that it dovetails so well with an easily detectable bi-partisan populist resistance to so many forms of mega tech and AI.

Mangione’s December 2024 assassination of UnitedHealth‘s CEO in Manhattan was a startling moment for many Americans. Not so much the brazen shooting. Hell, that’s business as usual in The Land of Second Amendment freedoms. But rather our first pass reaction to it.

If you remember the public response upon first hearing of the murder, a truly remarkable percentage of the public registered the shooting in terms of an act of vigilante justice. Soon of course the modulated response became more, “Of course we don’t want lavishly compensated executives executed on public streets. But, I mean, can we have a conversation about how many people that executive and his company have consigned to premature death to protect their profits and pay packages? Can we at least do that if we’re never going to seriously challenge the idea that vital medical care must first be run through a computer program to assess if you living or dying negatively impacts shareholder value?”

There are precious few issues that unite both MAGA Republicans and what passes for the sane majority beyond them. But the hellish cost and exasperating bureaucracy followed by the brutish, Darwinian rescission/denial computations of health insurers and now the energy/environmental impacts of AI and its data centers appear to nearly overlap in Venn diagrams.

My point here is that in beating back … and beating down … either or both … lies a righteous war with palpable political benefits.

Among liberals the usual suspects are leading the data center fight. Bernie. AOC. Elizabeth Warren. However, among “centrists” and “moderates” criticism barely registers above a whisper. Neither Amy Klobuchar or Tina Smith have made much fuss over the data center boom just as neither has ever said anything too caustic about UnitedHealth’s long … long … record of dare we say “aggressive restriction of benefits”.

And, as best I can find, neither Peggy Flanagan or Angie Craig has complained about data centers. And while Flanagan has mentioned UnitedHealth in her criticisms of ‘Murica’s best-in-the-world health care system, Craig has given vocal support to a public option, without actually poking the bear that is UnitedHealth.

In the 2023-2024 election cycle UnitedHealth, via its PAC and individuals, donated almost 2/3 to Democrats. Craig received roughly $24,000.

I’ve told the story before of working the crowd at an Edina DFL fundraiser and being struck by the number of self-identifying proud liberals … employed by UnitedHealth. Working the gears as it were in support of shareholder value. Lending their life talents to exceptionally well-paying jobs that pay for nice homes, good schools for the kids and memorable vacations.

So the challenge for populist-baiting politicians is this: how to excite the growing mass of voters who want some kind of vigilante justice for tech overlords — in healthcare, in AI and where the two are now rapidly merging their sinister abilities — without killing the goose putting all those golden eggs in their campaign accounts?

I had to assume that meant that the war he started, immediately screwed up, quickly got bored with and offered to resolve by giving the enemy billions in cash, ignoring their ballistic missile stockpiles and letting them keep the “dust” they could use to build the nuclear bomb he said was poised to drop on us like last week had been fixed. Along with the problems of $4 gas, $5 diesel, the nearly depleted Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the “vandalized” Reflecting Pond, the Epstein files and the rampage of masked, lardass ICE thugs with long rap sheets of domestic abuse still murdering innocent civilians.

All fixed, right? Nothing left on the old to-do list for this POTUS. So it’s either a free day for yet another afternoon of golf, or a soccer game where he could savor the thunderous cheers of fans as he lumbered across the pitch and pretended for the estimated 1.8 billion TV viewers that he had the first clue what he was doing or even where he was.

It was of course a given that Donald Trump would show up wherever 1.8 billion people would see him. Hell, he’d be out there in the middle of MetLife Stadium if the Iranians had just finished nuking Manhattan. Attention being the only thing — after crypto grift — that he really cares about.

The man lives for eyeballs, or ratings, however you want to describe it. But I doubt even his latest blonde aide-de-camp dared tell him how bad the ratings were for his Mad King primetime rant about communists rigging our elections a few days before.

I have searched up and down for Nielsen numbers on that 25-minute descent into whining dementia and found this from a Daily Beast story: “The livestream of Trump’s speech only garnered about 580,000 views on the White House’s YouTube page as of Friday at noon. In contrast, at 9 p.m. on Thursday [the previous] week, 2.69 million viewers tuned in to ABC’s Press Your Luck, 2.64 million people watched NBC’s The Americas, and 1.14 million followed Fox’s Best Medicine. This means Trump drew only about 8.9 percent, or roughly 1/11, of total viewers in the same time slot last week.”

Please tell me none of the 580,000 who dialed into the Trump White House YouTube page are living within 500 yards of me. But whatever … those numbers … those ratings … those “cards” … are really bad. It may be summer. People have plenty better things to do than listen to an aged, morbidly obese fraud rant and moan about how badly he’s been treated and that … communists, communists! … are coming to make things worse for us than what he and his C- posse of wannabe looksmaxxers are already doing.

And let’s not even get into Orange George III’s approval ratings.

As poll after poll is telling us, he’s steadily closing in on the so-called “Bush line”, (generally regarded as 30-33%), the point where even his most delusional cultists start looking around for a new avatar of their despair and greivance. Point being that as with all things in American culture, we’re tired of this act.

But that doesn’t mean it’s on it’s last legs (with edema-afflicted cankles.)

I have yet to see any reason to reappraise my view that Trump is the distraction. As we saw at the World Cup award ceremony, he is the sponge for all available attention. A sponge that leaves us with too little brain space to track the progress and resilience of the plan behind the painted clown in the ill-fitting suits.

I caught Pete Buttigieg on a podcast last week. Smart guy, Buttigieg. (He was my choice in ‘24, but that didn’t happen.)

His constant reminder is that what we think of as Project 2025, the highly-disciplined and comprehensively integrated plan unfolding around us since January 20, 2025 is not the product of a couple stray incel cranks wingin it after Trump lost in 2020. As Buttigieg argues convincingly, the control of the judiciary with reliably conservative ideologically-vetted judges at every level, particularly the Supreme Court, is a process that commenced in earnest back in the Reagan era.

Meticulously disciplined conservativestrategists and intellectuals calculated and maneuvered to assure that their standards for American culture would not only be reliably advanced but resolutely protected from any conceivable liberal counterattack. And so it is, at this moment.

Buttigieg argues that progressives have to counter with a long-term plan of our own. Supreme Court reform. Term limits. A code of ethics. More than nine justices. Electoral college reform. All of which take decades.

My takeaway, listening to Trump rant into the wind about commies rigging our elections, and liberals growing ever more concerned about the Project 2025 “play” on the November elections, is this … again, (because it’s worth repeating).

What has been methodically planned, coordinated and implemented over the past 50 years, arriving with full force vengeance in 2025, is not designed to fail.

Trump is a circus act. The crowd using him, enabling him and immunizing him are not.

The pass-ee being of course Lindsey Graham. A man who as he slides into history will be remembered most as one of the most vivid examples of a person who surrendered every remnant of their dignity in pursuit of status, attention, or as he himself described it, “relevance.”

Graham’s 180-degree reversal of principle in pursuit of relevance to Donald Trump, MAGA and regular invitations to Fox primetime and Sunday political talk shows was so naked and shameful I cringed every time I saw him. It was so sweaty, needy and pathetic. If he were a personal friend debasing himself so publicly I’d have a hard time looking him in the eye.

The protocols of professional journalism require a moment of respectful eulogizing. Thankfully, I’ve left that shtick behind.

In sum, Lindsey Graham was a disgrace. An object lesson in not having immutable values and the courage to defend them come what may. A man so desperate for “relevance” that he proved incapable of resisting a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot”. Not when abject subservience meant you could be on the green with him when your master wants his 40-foot putt called a gimme.

In the hours since his passing the usual hysteria has broken out. One guy has floated the idea that the Russians poisoned him somewhere between Kyiv and his home in DC. Others simply agree with what I’m saying here. Namely that Lindsey Graham, for all his collegial bon hommie, was an archetype of a broken man, the kind of character every good parent admonishes their children to avoid becoming.

But in the Trump era, where so many adults, in and out of elected office, have locked away everything they ever learned about moral judgment out of deference to an obvious and flagrant fool and fraud, Lindsey Graham is hardly alone.

My thoughts on self-abasement in shameless pursuit of relevance quickly connected with Minnesota’s most flagrant example of Graham-ism, namely Tom Emmer. A bit like Graham in that he is not a drooling moron along the lines of a dozen or so MAGA congress critters, ex-Texas representative Louis Gohmert being a prime example. Like Graham, Emmer is bright enough to knows better. That makes his guilt more resonant.

I doubt anyone reading this missed Emmer’s pep talk to the (very) ironically titled “Faith and Freedom Coalition” town hall in DC a couple weeks back.

Purposefully oblivious of any Constitutional definition of “freedom” or “faith”, Emmer whipped up the hair-trigger bigotries of his audience — the religiously sanctimonious — raging on about his state’s Somali immigrants.

Said the U.S. Congresssman, “… (as) I tell people regularly, Minnesota did not create passive-aggressive behavior, but we did perfect it. I happen to be more on the aggressive-aggressive side, which doesn’t always work in Minnesota. ... Sometimes Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re going to call us a racist, you’re going to call us an Islamophobe, you’re going to call us some name that we just don’t want to get into that fight. You know what, I would argue that I never did care, but I’m done being careful, even the least bit careful. ... If they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”

Good god, man. Talk about swearing off any connection to intellectual or moral integrity.

As with Graham, and Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and literally hundreds-to-thousands of once garden variety Republicans who transitioned from excoriating the flagrant corruption and stupidity of Trump to nuzzling their noses into his butt cheeks, I read Emmer’s rant and thought, “Where do you go, dude, when this ends? Is there a safe harbor, any protected space anywhere where no one remembers what you said and did? Is there a comfortable, welcoming place for someone who has so thoroughly abandoned any pretense of Constitutional propriety and common decency?”

Like Graham, Emmer has made his utterly craven play for relevancy in the Trump dystopia. Once a failed gubernatorial candidate and talk radio sidekick, Emmer’s willingness to disgrace himself (and his state) with “aggressive-aggresive” racist demagoguery has elevated him to House Majority Whip in the MAGA era.

But once it ends, or when he passes on to his final reward, has Emmer or any of the others given any thought to the two paragraphs that’ll top off his unofficial obits?

Put another way, is Tom Emmer truly down and fine with being compared to a broken sycophant Lindsey Graham?

They were all train wrecks not just waiting to happen, but in my experience wrecks that eventually did happen. Had I said something earlier about Platner I’d at least have the sweet satisfaction of saying, “I told you so” now. But I didn’t.

A guy I read occasionally, Ken Klippenstein, had a post up a couple days ago refusing to go all mea culpa for his early defense of the type of candidate Platner embodied.

Said Klippenstein weeks ago, “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council”. And, “Ruling out anyone with Reddit post-level flaws bars millions of otherwise decent people from politics. The only people left are the exact kind of squeaky-clean, McKinsey consultant politicians that was the entire point of my Platner article in the first place.”

To be clear, Klippenstein is explicit that the kind of rough-around-the-edges characters he was referring to stopped at, you know, sexual assault. That’s where the line gets crossed and you’re shown the door — if not a jail cell.

My point though, based on my spidey-sense for “working class heroes” who look like the Brawny paper towels dude, is that the “sell” is a little too “on point” for comfort. The rough edges that are visible strongly hint at worse to come. Which obviously is exactly what it turned out to be with Platner.

But the Platner “type” is in vogue among (some of) us lefties. It’s a heavy-footed liberal response to the Trump phenomenon. Where – it is believed – deeply disillusioned voters have a kind of reptilian emotional response to candidates with “authentic” qualities. A “non-politician”. An “outsider” viscerally impatient with the grey, stultifying process of politics. A process that we can all agree has failed badly in stopping both Trumpism and the grotesque, escalating imbalance of wealth over the past 30-40 years.

As the Platner story is told, a Philadelphia-based trio, Dan Moraff, Leanne Fan and Morris Katz “discovered” him and concurred that he checked all the hot boxes for a working class populist. Or at least he could be sold as one. All apparently without ever asking themselves, “How sharp and deep do these relatable rough edges actually go?”

Well before we heard about Platner’s barstool Reddit rants and (merely) boorish dating antics, it took about 60 seconds on Google to reveal that the hard-scrabble oyster farmer was, oh snap!, the privileged, private-school educated son of a prominent attorney and a mother well enough off to own a couple upscale restaurants. In other words, not exactly some kind of barnacle-covered Chauncey Gardiner.

At that point, to me, all I could think was, “The sell is on.”

But it’s not that the Philly trio or Klippenstein, in his early defense of the Platner type, are completely off track.

Genuinely committed, passionate people with messy, unflattering personal histories should not be barred from public office. At least not until they’re credibly accused of rape. Apologizing and asking for forgiveness are admirable human virtues that should, and usually are, rewarded by the general public. Perhaps more so today amid Trump’s corrupt idiocracy than ever before.

There’s a demographic, (you and I may among it), exasperated and impatient with — as Klippenstein calls them — your “McKinsey-class” Democrats. People so groomed and managed, so palpably unfamiliar/uncomfortable with ground level/dirt level American culture, that, in the colorful and apt phrase, “They wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful.”

It doesn’t appear that “The Platner Phenomenon” has any current relevance to Minnesota’s statewide Democratic races. Neither Peggy Flanagan or Angie Craig seem likely to flash Teutonic tattoos and grow a scruffy Fu Manchu anytime soon. Although it might help the tad-too-perfectly-scripted Flanagan if she did. (I haven’t made up my mind between the two of them.)

And god bless her, Amy Klobuchar truly is a walking embodiment of the perfectly modulated, always-on-point, McKinsey-type politician Klippenstein believes voters are sick of. And true as that may be, no one has ever credibly disputed Amy’s competence. Competence, the ability to operate the lumbering machinery of government, being something I personally value quite highly when assessing politicians.

For me the problem in the Platner-type context is the authenticity factor.

The imagery of a “blue collar populist” can’t be taken as presumption of fact that a candidate actually embodies the, shall we say, “essence” of blue collar heroism. And by imagery I mean not just the bro-culture look but the ability to get up at town halls and mouth the now familiar Bernie-esque talking points of the progressive agenda. All that is too easy to game.

The Democratic Socialist movement is drawing attention and bringing vital energy. Great. But with disruption comes a fair amount of peril. Not least in terms of candidates seriously out of the norm when we gauge life experience and acceptable standards of misbehavior.

To be glib if I may, looking back on the Platner episode, he’s a good example why Democrats trolling for blue collar bonafides should stick to women.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt that they were just jacked up on pride in our 250th anniversary of Independence Day, it did make me wonder a couple things.

Such as: How many Americans have even the vaguest emotional connection to the, um, “foundational concept” of independence, freedom and a country conceived — by a bunch of land-owning white dudes, some with slaves working their fields — as a refuge from tyranny? And then, given our current situation, how many of us are routinely embarrassed by what we look like today? To the point that the sight of flags fluttering over Fourth of July pontoon parties, brewery patios and high school marching bands comes with a guilty gnaw of hypocrisy to it?

Trying to remember the last time I felt a kind of unequivocal pride in the mythical American story, I couldn’t get past the fall of 1963. At age 12 it struck me that all was not so righteous and brave in my homeland … as it would later come to be called. The rest of the Sixties, Vietnam, Watergate, Kent State and on and on up to the corroding capstone moment of MAGA and Donald Trump hasn’t improve my estimation of America’s inherent virtue.

But again, maybe that’s just me. A sour bastard who just can’t see the good in … in … well … the grinding stupidity, cancerous corruption and flagrant abuse of all those lofty values we’re supposed to be celebrating.

A couple days before leaving town I was invited to speak to a group of a few dozen seniors, members of a local DFL activist group. The very nice lady who invited me suggested a talk balancing out the good and the bad … as best I could.

I gave it a shot. Because there is cause for optimism.

Some.

I mentioned the view of historian Jon Meacham who continues to remind listeners that human nature has often responded to cruelty and corruption in leadership with a pendulum-like swing back in the opposite direction. In this case suggesting that there could — possibly — be an anti-authoritarian, anti-corruption and I guess, an anti-dumb-as-a-f*cking-stump reaction to the Trump dystopia. The one disgracing us and our heritage this particular Independence Day.

In that context I mentioned the recent victories of Democratic Socialists in New York City and Denver. And as I rolled toward Montana — reasonably and prudently — mostly listening to favorite road tunes and trying to repair the psychic damage of too much time marinating in Trump’s cesspool of vulgarity, I settled on a view that supports a faint whiff of optimism.

(And in the context of road tunes, maybe it was the first sight of the unusually green eastern Montana badlands and the blissfully empty road ahead, but goddam! Joni Mitchell’s version of “Coyote” at The Band’s Last Waltz show is soooo good.)

The DSA “movement” may be driving centrist, pothole-filling politicians like Jacob Frey nuts, and they are like an artisanal butcher shop carving out thick slabs of red meat for retrograde cynics like Minnesota’s Center for the American Experiment, but as fringy as they may seem — and some are out there — there’s no question they are bringing the game — the energy and the fight — a lot of voters, not just fringy lefties want now and have wanted since the distribution of wealth in this country got so completely out of whack.

The 10% of the voting public that swings back and forth from Obama to Trump with a flirtation with Bernie Sanders in between, doesn’t give a damn about “socialism.” Most couldn’t give you a definition of it if you covered their bar tab for a year. But they don’t like the way the house is dealing the cards against them and they want change. More to the point, as we see in (ultra-blue New York City and Denver), they see no hope in another round of old, stale, personality-deficient, performatively emotional candidates.

The case the DSA victories is making — in two very blue areas, mind you, but is visible in Texas and elsewhere — is that they’re willing to take their risk this time with (much) younger people. People with bonafide fire in their bellies. People as nauseated as them by Trump’s corruption, official Republicans’ gelatinous complicity and established Democrats unfathomable belief that another round of traditional remedies and policies are going to reverse the course the ship of ‘Murica is taking into a fatal seamount.

So see? Optimism!

NPR’s go-to for high court hijinx had her name on a story saying Sam Alito was announcing his retirement. But very quickly she pulled it back, with the official explanation being that it was just something she “overheard” and somehow got attached to the kind of pre-written news announcement reporters often have filed in expectation of, um, “age-related” issues affecting people they cover.

But the antennae are up and twitching that Ms. Totenberg may only be guilty of being premature in this “Alito to retire” thing.

Which brings us to something on my radar ever since 77.3 million of our friends and neighbors voted Donald Trump back into the White House … with the expectation that … in no special order … he would cut the price of gas and eggs, keep us out of stupid wars and host a cage match on the White House lawn.

Well, I don’t know about you, but one of the very big, if not the biggest reason I voted against the fat, flatulent fraud and grifter was to prevent him and his handlers from stocking the Supreme Court with any more noxious ideologues. Six is enough and six is too many.

Ever since election day 2024 my alleged mind has been imagining BOTH Alito and Clarence Thomas bowing out before the 2028 election and being replaced with the moral and intellectual equivalents of Matt Gaetz or Aileen Cannon.

This is a serious possibility.

Alito was appointed by George W. Bush 20 years ago. (Four Democrats voted for him. And do note the states they represented: Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.)

When Ms. Totenberg or whoever writes the history of this current court they will have a hard time convincing me that Sam Alito has not been the court’s signature malignant ideological driving force. His partisanship is that naked and overbearing.

Alito is – say I – a force that has over-powered the woefully underpowered (Bush-nominated) John Roberts and has arguably undermined the credibility of the court in ways unseen since … well, since forever.

Bizarrely reasoned decisions withstanding, the scandals floating in the septic tank around Alito and Thomas dwarf anything

and everything since hapless old Abe Fortas back in the Sixties.

And the less said about Clarence Thomas the better.

That guy was appointed by daddy Bush, and excuse my language here folks … thirty five f*cking years ago! And he’s been a non-entity all that time.

I doubt even the courtly Ms. Nina could summon an example of a less impressive jurist than sullen, grievance-ridden Thomas. A guy too busy sopping up free jet rides and sweetheart housing deals from tycoons with business before the court to ever compose a decision that couldn’t be synopsized by an eighth grader on a 5x7 card. In a job without lifetime security he wouldn’t have made it past his first annual review.

But let’s get to the nut of the matter.

Trump, and by “Trump” I mean Leonard Leo of The Federalist Society, Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation and whoever else meets for Thursday night gin rummy on Alito’s patio, CAN NOT BE ALLOWED to slide another creature from the 14th century into a 30 year run on “the highest court in the land.”

(I have no proof of that gin rummy business. But it fits.)

This is a court that, as presently configured, is the principal legislative force in the country. It is pushing laws and culture in ways a feckless Congress has abdicated and forgotten. Virtually all of the cruelest, least “American” values imposed by Trump 2.0 have the fingerprints and Cro-Magnon logic of Alito and this court on them.

Should either Alito or Thomas resign, Democrats – roundly ridiculed these days for “having no game” – have to go Full McConnell. Have to. As in … jam a wrench in the spokes.

No one new gets on the court until after the election of 2028.

I suspect Alito is contemplating whether to resign this summer, before the mid-terms, while the Senate is still in the hands of MAGA squishes. Democrats, Chuck Schumer et al, and every liberal legal activist have to have a plan for this.

Have to.

Team Trump – the whole Project 2025 apparatus – are gold standards for brutalist judicial delay and obstruction. So take a cue, Chuck. Every game, every stunt, every absurd mobius-twisted theory of law has to be applied to stall out another Trump – excuse me, Leonard Leo – nomination to the Supreme Court.

This crowd, with their unitary executive total immunity bullshit, among 30 other appalling, devolutionary decisions cannot be allowed to metastasize for another 30-35 years.

So there.

But with all eyes on The Reflecting Pool, and that same boss – the President of the United States mind you – raging on his ersatz Twitter account about the threat posed by a girl in an inflatable frog suit, little attention was paid to Vance. (Something, as with his boss, we all wish were even more possible.)

Here’s the takeaway quote from Vance on Nixon: “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance — but I think deservedly so. As I joked … backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.

“And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people — the same institutions — tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”

Now, as a geezer, I have to remind myself that a majority, probably a vast majority of Americans today, don’t remember Nixon or what Watergate was all about. Most, I suspect, have never even seen the movie.

So other than pointing out that Vance’s description of the “deep state” would have to include indignant, exasperated leaders of Nixon’s own party – all elected Republicans, yet again – there’s no point in wasting keystrokes here re-litigating much less re-explaining Richard Nixon’s crimes. Other than to say that Vance, a classic example of the stopped clock school of accuracy, is right about the “12-hour news story” thing.

By comparison, the pile-up of scandals today is so far off the rails the train of logic has crashed through the fences and is plowing through fields and streams toward some inevitable as yet unseen cliff.

Unlike poor embattled, charmless Dick Nixon, the age of Donald Trump, MAGA is under-girded by a Supreme Court that has immunized Vance’s boss from any crime he commits “in furtherance of his official duties”.

Obligations that, knowing what we know about Sam Alito and the cast of ideologues The Federalist Society has selected for Trump to appoint to the high court, likely include accepting a $500 million crypto bribe from an Arab sheik, a $400 million jumbo jet for his private use, (renovated of course at taxpayer expense), innumerable other bribes via Trump’s nakedly sketchy World Liberty Financial crypto scam, pardoning a Latin American drug lord convicted of importing $400 million in dope into the U.S, and on and on and on and on.

Compare that rap sheet to a jowly, charisma-free career politician perpetually soaked in feverish ambition sweat, a sad sack who never hosted a reality TV show or partied with super models and no, Nixon hiring a bunch of stooges to raid some Democrat’s offices wouldn’t make it ‘til dawn in today’s news cycle.

Not when you’ve got tourists in frog suits making fun of green, Trump-induced scum in a big pond.

But my interest today is Vance, and a story from last week’s news cycle that screamed “deep state” in ways no Congressional investigation ever will.

And that was the story of Dialog, the uber-insider society of obnoxious techno-oligarchs, politicians and influencers revealed in a Wired story about a hacker who pulled the tycoons’ privileged information out of the shadows and onto a side stage … to Trump’s Iran surrender and algae blooms. (Wired, edited now by Katie Drummond, a woman far, far better suited to running a legacy news organization than CBS’ Bari Weiss, is doing very interesting work these days, and is well worth a subscription.)

The visionary behind Dialog, with its Bohemian Grove-meets-”Succession” creme de la creme opacity and exclusivity, is Peter Thiel, the apartheid-raised South African multi-billionaire, (I know, “yet another”), who dropped $15 million – the most ever by one person for a Senate candidate – on Vance’s 2022 race in Ohio.

Moreover, teamed with fellow apartheid-raised multi-billionaire South Africans with daddy issues, David Sacks and Elon Musk, Thiel maneuvered Vance back into Trump’s good graces and a veep spot on the 2024 ticket. (Just guessing here, but I’m thinking there was a World Financial crypto taste for Donny Jr. in that deal.)

One of these days I’m going to tee up a fresh rant solely on Thiel, the Palantir monster he’s created that is sucking up all of our personal data for “national security” purposes, and his gob-smacking bizarro thoughts on Darwinian evolution in the age of AI.

But for now – and because I really do try to keep these eruptions of bile to 800 words – I just want to reiterate my favorite grand conspiracy theory.

If we’re talking “deep state”, it is this: Trump is the distraction. Thiel, Sacks, Musk in coordination with the Federalist Society, the Project 2025 white nationalists and the stooges placed on the Supreme Court are who are holding the reins, or steering the runaway train.

And should Trump be removed, like a cancerous wart, JD Vance is pre-groomed and in place to be exactly who and what that crowd needs to retain and expand authority in the fast-rising dawn of AI.

Have a nice day.

Also on my list are Minnesota’s so-called corporate “leaders.” The UnitedHealths, the EcoLabs, Land O’ Lakes, Targets and on and on who trembled and dithered and buried their heads in the frozen snow last winter rather than stand up alongside neighbors and customers getting bludgeoned and murdered in a rampage of legalized thuggery.

That grudge roared back to mind with the latest round of hamfisted harassment via Trump administration toadies in the local U.S. Attorney’s office.

With much performative fanfare the office announced indictments last week of 15 more scary “antifa” activists. Real crazed, ISIS-like terrorists. Blood-lusting lunatics accused of – I hope you’re sitting down – shouting bad words at ICE agents, “impeding” their patriotic work of pulling dangerous Guatemalan roofers and short order cooks off the streets, as well as, horror of horrors!, “stalking” ICE’s absurdly over-armed lard-asses on the freeway back over to Wisconsin.

The language of the DOJ release oozed a Stephen Miller wet dream played through Todd Blanche’s mouth and into our guy, Daniel Rosen’s ear. “Organized” antifa agents! Some very likely armed with conceal-carry cans of spray paint and bullhorns. Savages! Accused of endangering the life and property of ICE’s overpaid rent-a-thugs. Some of them may never recover from being called a “motherf*cking scum bucket” in -5 weather.

Almost instantly the Trump DOJ’s wholly political and 99% baseless cases began falling apart. Along with subpoenas for prominent state and city Democratic officials, whose sin was not rolling over and letting Kristi Noem’s Walmart security guards-turned-storm troopers kick them in the stomach.

Back in the deep freeze and rampage last winter, as our CEO class cowered and over-consulted whether to risk saying something about the mayhem and murder, I suggested the Targets and Land O’ Lakes and 3Ms and Best Buys should make an effort toward redeeming themselves. How? By directing a healthy slice of their in-house firepower to defending immigrants and protestors being beaten and jailed by ICE.

If they didn’t then, and I see no evidence they risked anything of the sort, (“But, but, what if Pam Bondi sues us????”), they could now.

Some pro bono strategizing and paper-shuffling on behalf of this latest cast of ICE victims would give those of us disgusted by their cowardice last winter reason to think well enough of them to consider buying a pound of their butter, so to speak.

Now, a few of the new indictees/antifa terrorists are hard core. Some got so radical they dented the fenders of ICE’s rented SUVs. And you know what a miserable paperwork hassle scratches on a rentals become.

But, like it or not, we are living in an era of intensely politicized “justice”. A justice in name only with, at best, a passing relationship to actual law.

And in this context, as in so many others, we find liberals and progressives and anyone still respectful of Constitutional norms at a tactical disadvantage against Trump-era thuggery.

There are dozens-to-thousands of exceptionally shrewd-to-cunning legal strategists in this town. Most days they devote their talents to contract schemes protecting ROI, EBITDA, and their annual bonuses, rather than the pesky nuances of the Bill of Rights. But folks, quality grudge-holding is psychologically linked to shame. And I say our legal and corporate elite should be shamed into “adjusting their focus”, on the down low if they prefer.

If not concocting a defense strategy to pull Trump-Miller-Blanche attack dogs off the remaining “antifa” indictees, Minnesota’s legal talent, corporate and otherwise, should start building a strategy to swing the “politicized justice” klieg light around and focus it back on the three murderers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And hit the switch on it a couple weeks before the November elections.

Trump/Miller/Blanche are no doubt confident that any attempt at a state indictment against the three killers, Jonathan Ross, Jesse Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, will get slapped down by Sam Alito and his bobble-headed Supreme Court acolytes.

But that doesn’t mean Minnesota can’t reinvigorate a big public stink over the slaughter. If only to play the attention cycle and remind voters everywhere that if you want “change” you have to vote out everyone who was complicit and kowtowed to homicide last winter.

If there was a way to vote out the boards and executives of Minnesota’s 60 largest corporations for gross capitulation and abdication of community responsibility in an unprecedented local crisis I’d go straight ticket on that election.

But that would diminish my righteous fury. It would calm a grudge that gives me reason to live. It’d be like the neighborhood pasta bar knocking on my door and offering my mother free linguine alfredo for the rest of her time on earth.*

*Too late. Mom has since passed away.