Today was a weird day.
For one thing, SCOTUS heard oral arguments on Colorado’s decision to strike 45 from the ballot because of a disability of eligibility incurred from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment barring morons who, having taken an oath to defend the US Constitution, engaged in, or aided and abetted an insurrection against it, are barred from holding government office again. To a non-lawyer like me, the questions posed by the conservative justices lay bare that textualism is just a fig leaf for doing whatever you think is best for the conservative cause. When being a textualist lets you justify a particular position (the Dobbs decision or various gun rights decisions, for example), you use it. When being a textualist takes you into the briar patch, you just jettison it in favor of the political and philosophical exigencies and realities of the day, and fuck textualism! Alas, the conservative justices speak with forked tongues – they look like political operatives and little more.
For another, President Biden held a press conference that reminded me of the 1992 movie Sneakers. In the movie, David Strathairn aka Whistler, a blind phone hacker, identifies what sounds like a large gathering of people all talking at once. It turns out that it is a large gathering of sea birds – seagulls most likely. And that reminded me of a talk that a colleague gave many years ago at the Texas Geriatrics Society meeting.
The physician was a Hospice specialist and nursing home medical director. His talk was about End-of-Life care – an important topic in Geriatrics. In his talk, he described the worst-case scenario for a Hospice doc. “Family that hasn’t seen the dying patient in decades, fly in from distant cities like seagulls. They squawk a lot without contributing anything, crap all over everyone and everything, and then fly away,” he lamented.
The Biden press conference today was a bit like that – reporters squawking only to aggrandize themselves taking cheap shots at the President based on a stupid Special Prosecutor’s report that should have just said that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, but instead included some derogatory language for the sole partisan purpose of smearing a little seagull shit on him.
Like I said, it was a weird day.
I found this in an article on decluttering and where to give your stuff away or sell it:
tip no. 3: If you want to give away an assortment of things online, stipulate that the winner takes all. Otherwise, someone will cherry-pick the Makita cordless drill and leave you with the rusty files, mauve bed skirt, and avocado slicer.
Nobody on Craigslist, I discovered, cared to pay five dollars for three rolls of Trump toilet paper, still in the package. Over on Freecycle, there were seven requests within two days of my posting, plus one inquiry about whether I had any Biden toilet paper.
The Trump fans were apparently incensed that Trump toilet paper would be offered and wanted to get a few digs in at Biden with their response for Biden toilet paper. I thought it was funny that there was actually Trump toilet paper available somewhere.
Yep. The Trump faithful are a fragile lot.