The Fortnightly Rant

No Cause For Alarm

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Eight days ago a criminal defendant, currently out on $200,000 bail, sent a funny video to millions of his social media followers. For the benefit of those who have not seen it, the video shows a huge black “dually” truck, with two wheels on each end of the back axle. The front wheels are secured by special lugnuts sporting long, chrome, gladiator-style spikes, the better to intimidate other drivers and pedestrians. The truck is so big it’s got its own flagpole, carrying a 3 x 5 foot “Thin Blue Line” flag. Black and white, with a single blue stripe, it’s meant to signify support for …

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Looking Back and Looking Forward

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Let us begin with a brief look back, and end with a concise look forward. It’s the only way we can imagine making the middle—the present—tolerable. We are approaching the quarter-century mark for our appearance in this format: a fortnightly tabloid, broadly distributed for free, and available for subscription by First Class mail. We hope to continue in this form… well, basically forever. It works so well for us that a casual observer might think it was arrived at by design. Such was not entirely the case; we found our path mostly by stumbling in the dark. We acquired the legal rights to this newspaper …

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One Nation Under a Golden Calf

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Super Tuesday gave voters just what everyone expected: a general election almost no one wants. Vermont was the only state whose Republicans rejected the GOP’s inevitable nominee. We can expect any day now to be hearing spurious tales about health hazards associated with maple syrup produced by illegal Cuban migrant workers on Communist communes. In another outlying result, Nikki Haley trounced the former president in Washington, D.C. over the weekend, by a margin of nearly two-to-one. In doing so she handed her opponent a win, if he should choose to accept it: “I wouldn’t take those 19 delegates if they came crawling out of The …

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Hate Means Never Having to Admit You’re Wrong

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It was a stunningly predictable revelation: those $5 million bribes we’ve been hearing about for years? The bribes from Burisma that went to the “Biden crime family”? The bribes Republicans say are the reason why Biden needs to be impeached? Yeah, those bribes were just a fantasy, cooked up by a guy with a wardrobe full of flammable trousers, who has just been arrested by the FBI. In a more perfect world, one might think that the indictment of star informant Alexander “Hot Pants” Smirnov might cause Republicans, and their cheerleaders at Fox, One America News, and, on the radio, Rush Limbaugh’s pale replacements Clay …

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Eagle Pass: the New Fort Sumter?

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Had we known where things were headed, we might have set out with a better plan. It did not seem unduly ambitious: distill each passing fortnight into a comprehensible rant. Now, here we are, like Wile E. Coyote: covered with bandages, explosive residue, and chagrin. Looking back it’s easy to see that this plan was doomed to failure. The warning signs were clear enough. Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC memo defined the battleground in 1990: Language: A Key Mechanism of Control—the Communist Manifesto of the resurgent reactionary right. “To victory, through the shameless debasement of language!” Hobbled by corporate demands for “balance” [i.e., profit], respectable media refused …

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Is Anybody Happy?

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Well, at least that’s over with. By “that,” of course, we mean the 2024 First in the Nation™ Presidential Primary Election®*—the least satisfying iteration to date of our state’s raison d’être. The nightmare, no doubt, will continue. How weird was this go-’round? Let us count the ways. On the Democratic side, the incumbent President won. So far, so normal—except he wasn’t on the ballot. Four years ago, New Hampshire Democrats picked Bernie Sanders and put Joe Biden in fifth place, just ahead of the long-forgotten Tom Steyer. A big win in South Carolina rescued his candidacy and put him on the path to the White …

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