Volume 270 | No. 25

Trying to Avoid Giving Up

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by W.D. Ehrhart I have to confess that I have been struggling mightily for the past few months to resist giving in to utter despair. There’s no future in that. But increasingly I find myself thinking that there’s really no future worth bothering about. I just can’t shake the feeling that things in this country are not going to get any better. Remember when we thought no president could possibly get any worse, be any more evil, than Richard Milhous Nixon, whom I took to calling King Richard the Milhous? And then we got empty-headed George W. Bush, who dragged us into not one but …

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Time to Jump-Start Congress

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Another fortnight has come and gone—and not just any fortnight. Continuing a trend that began in 2015—and mirroring, in the political realm, the ratcheting up of global temperatures and resultant climatic catastrophes—this has been the 290th consecutive fortnight to have been worse than the one before. Appropriately, this one kicked off under cover of darkness. In the early morning hours of Saturday, August 8th, the full Senate voted, in effect, to combine the offices of Attorney General of the United States of America with that of Mr. Fixit of the Trump Organization. So, your mother was right: nothing good happens after midnight. Nine years earlier, …

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Volume 270, No. 25

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How bad is it? So bad we’re betting we don’t need to define “it.” “It” is everything you can think of, and a whole lot more that you never thought required your attention, all of it being intentionally made worse by a horde of trolls and cretins who should never have been given power over anything more dangerous than a marshmallow. Things have gotten so rotten that, for this fortnight, anyway, we’re dropping our ritual pretense of detachment to make a suggestion. You can read about it by clicking on this link right here.