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Lake Trump

Dear Sir, Effective immediately and in perpetuity, I hereby officially rename the water in my toilet bowl Lake Trump. William D. Ehrhart Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania William: Well, that’s settled. Neatly done. We notice that you make no claim to exclusivity. Given the near-ubiquity of such facilities in separate and distinct real estate parcels all over the nation—and the world—we see no reason why others who may be so inclined should not emulate your exquisitely appropriate designation. The Editor –=≈=– Shaheen is a Pragmatic Democrat To the Editor: Having run in and been elected to local and state offices we know the effort that is needed not just to …

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Ruining America as a Business

Interesting: on Tuesday, “The Grey Lady” caught up with us. Ever since we snuck into Lord Kenneth of Fleet’s stable of newspapers and rode away on The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper,™ we’ve been sounding the same barbaric yawp. Our more recently established colleagues went on reporting as if governance was proceeding more or less along the lines laid out centuries earlier on parchment. In contrast, our assumption, from the start of our stewardship, has been that journalism, as it was being practiced, mostly served a prop to hold up the façade of a Potemkin reality. The opinion section of The New York Times for September 1st …

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Volume 270, No. 26

It is easy to see how a reasonable person keeping up with the news might conclude that the people in charge of this country are hell bent on destroying it. Either that, or we’ve been underestimating the destructive power of collaborative incompetence. Whichever it is, it’s distressing as hell. We, however, have gone to considerable effort to put ourselves in a position which obliges us to read and write about what more and more looks like the dissolution and degradation of a flawed but promising attempt by a bunch of evolutionary flukes to govern themselves. Normal persons grappling with such a task might be tempted …

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Fri, Sept 4

2019—To prove that his Hurricane Dorian prediction was perfect, Donald J. Trump displays a fake map. 1997—Bombs explode in four Havana hotels. Perp and ex-CIA asset Luis Posada Carriles later enters the U.S. illegally and lives openly in Miami. 1992—Ex-South Vietnamese fighter pilot Ly Tong hijacks an Air Vietnam Airbus out of Bangkok. As it flies low and slow over Ho Chi Minh City, he drops revolutionary propaganda, then safely parachutes—but into captivity. 1976—George W.[MD] Bush is arrested for DUI in Kennebunk, Maine. 1973—R. Nixon’s flunkies John Ehrlichman and G. Gordon Liddy are indicted for felonious burgling. 1967—“I just had the greatest brainwashing … [in] …

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Thurs, Sept 3

2003—Because life is sacred, Florida poisons Paul Hill, who shotgunned Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard because life is sacred. Rinse & repeat. 1991—Locked doors, dead phones, and a lack of fire alarms kill 25 workers in a North Carolina chicken plant. 1971—As Richard Nixon speaks at a Milk Producers’ convention in Chicago, an aide pockets his fee: a $5,000 bribe, which will pay the Plumbers who are, this day, breaking into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist—at Nixon’s behest. 1955—Mamie Till Mobley holds an open-casket funeral for her murdered and mutilated son Emmett. 1950—American advisors arrive in Saigon to support NATO: France wants Vietnam, …

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Wed, Sept 2

1983—Mississippi’s execution of Jimmy Lee Gray goes poorly; executioner T. Berry Bruce is drunk. Officials clear the witness room after eight minutes, as Gray gasps, moans, and bangs his head on a steel pole. 1945—V-J Day—Japan surrenders to General “Dugout Doug” MacArthur aboard a battleship named after Pres. Harry S Truman’s home state. 1945—Cribbing freely from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam to be sovereign and independent. 1939—G-Man J. Edgar Hoover creates a “Custodial Detention Index,” a list of left wingers to detain without trial in case of “national emergency.” 1935—Recently rousted from Washington, D.C. by General Douglas MacArthur, 259 veterans …

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