Affable Hitlers and Blockades That Aren't

Those and other stories from the circus in the Swamp on your For Funk's Sake Friday.

Before we get to the DC version of Ringling Bros, a little bit of good news . . .

Disney is said to be delaying its upcoming Snow White remake in a bid to overt ‘financial disaster’ – with producers reportedly fearing it will bomb at the box office and ‘cripple’ any chance of future spin-offs.

You know what I loved about old Hollywood. You might get a sequel (which was never better than the original), but no one was trying to figure out how to “spin-off” fairytales. How would you even begin to give Snow White her own TV show?

Last week, the studio announced it had pushed back the film's release until March 2025 - a whole year after the scheduled date - citing the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike as the driving force behind the decision. 

But an insider has exclusively told DailyMail.com that Disney is said to be ‘figuring out what to do’ after making a $330 million turkey - and is looking to Tom Hooper’s widely panned Cats as a guide on what to avoid.

The decision comes after Rachel Zegler, 22, who plays the titular princess, launched a woke tirade at the original ‘weird’ plot with a ‘stalker’ Prince - despite having only watched the 1937 animation once as a child.

And the dwarves are back . . . sort of. Instead of hiring actual dwarves, they made up some creepy CGI versions.

I think they should just take the hit, let the Daily Wire release their version, and pretend this ever happened.

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Speaking of munchkins, it was Halloween, and we have one twisted secretary of state.

Not only is the little boy Zelensky (only taller) but the little girl seems to be the Ukrainian flag.

Those kids are going to need some serious counseling.

On the other hand, the outfits are absolutely true to life. The real Zelensky panhandles just like that.

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Meanwhile, if you hear the gnashing of teeth and howling in agony, it’s because the WaPo had to print this . . .

The season’s first snows have frosted the Rocky Mountains, the northern Plains, the Great Lakes and northern New England over the past week, resulting in the most extensive early-November snow cover in at least two decades. . . .

The current abundance of snow was made possible by a powerful early-season outbreak of cold air. It brought a handful of record lows in the northern Plains on Halloween and in areas to the south and east of there on Wednesday morning.

About 119 million Americans began Wednesday at or below freezing; the temperature averaged over the Lower 48 was 31.3 degrees — more than 10 degrees below average.

So much for global warming, you say.

All this may leave one wondering if this early blast of snow and cold will stick around. Judah Cohen, a seasonal forecasting expert with Verisk Atmospheric and Environmental Research, said probably not.

“I expect a pretty hasty retreat of snow cover back into Canada,” Cohen told The Washington Post. “It will be interesting to see how much snow can last until the next buildup of Arctic air.”

Computer models suggest that warmer-than-normal conditions will replace the wintry weather over the next week or two. A lot of the snow outside the mountains will probably melt away pretty quickly.

“Probably not” and “will probably.” Now there’s some serious precision.

I’ll stick with my Norwegian weather rock.¹

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Linda reached her breaking point when all the books were removed from her daughter’s elementary school library. Ashley got there when her twins were taught in sixth grade that Manifest Destiny referred to Native Americans who’d decided to move away from their homelands. For Jessica, it happened after the passage of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, often described as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Kate made the decision when she and her husband learned that teachers were being discouraged from using the word “slavery” in units about US history. For Emily, it was when she found out her trans son wouldn’t be able to use the boys’ bathroom.

A show of hands . . . who believes that every one of these stories happened exactly as presented without qualification?

Well, except for that last one, and thank goodness. What kind of parent sends her daughter into a boys’ bathroom. Trust me, the boys know the difference, even if she and her confused child don’t. The school did her a favor.

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Reaping what you sow . . .

Dozens of students walked out of a class taught by Hillary Clinton in New York on Wednesday in protest at their university’s alleged role in the “shaming” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

It gets even funnier. That isn’t the only problem the students have with this attention-seeking has-been.

Some expressed frustration at the logistical impact of her presence, complaining that about 500 students in one of Columbia’s most popular computer science classes were evicted “to put up a nice stage for [Clinton’s] high-profile lecture series”.

[Dean Keren] Yarhi-Milo interrupted one of Clinton’s first lectures to allow students with cellphone cameras to take photographs of their celebrity teacher. “This is like the paparazzi,” Clinton said.

That’s Hillary Clinton. A woman of the people if there ever was one.

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So hear me out: I have an idea about how to fix our “ruling class.”

Team members from Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Pacific BioSciences, used techniques called RNA tomography and in situ hybridization to build a three-dimensional map of a sea star’s gene expression to see where specific genes are being expressed during development. They specifically mapped the expression of the genes that control the growth of a sea star’s ectoderm, which includes its nervous system and skin. 

They found gene signatures associated with head development almost everywhere in juvenile sea stars. The expression of genes that code for an animal’s torso and tail sections were also largely missing. . . .

“It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor,” study co-author and Stanford University evolutionary biologist Laurent Formery said in a statement. “It’s not at all what scientists have assumed about these animals.” 

I know where we can find a whole lot of bodies without heads, well, brains, and they’d be a lot more harmless if all they wanted to do was crawl along the seafloor and eat. We can just do a little surgery . . . and voila!

And if you don’t like that idea . . .

“The rat can indeed activate the representation of places in the environment without going there,” Chongxi Lai, a co-author of the study and engineer and neuroscientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, said in a statement. “Even if his physical body is fixed, his spatial thoughts can go to a very remote location.”

Members of Congress have no imaginations, other than how to spend money. Rats would be an improvement.

Just think of it this way. Your average rat lives—what?—two to four years. No need for term limits, we can pay them in cheese, and no need for pensions.

I think it’s a win, and “governance” might improve.

And if it doesn’t, well, we knew what we were getting already.

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I call BS on this story. Unless the man was an elf, there’s not enough skin there to make a tank top much less a whole outfit.

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Speaking of elves . . .

This poses many issues, not the least of which is whatever the hell did Montana ever do to that man.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), under Dr Anthony Fauci's leadership, infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with a ‘SARS-like’ virus called WIV1 at a lab in Montana in 2018.

The WIV1-coronavirus was shipped from the Wuhan lab the FBI believes caused the Covid pandemic and was tested on bats acquired from a ‘roadside’ Maryland zoo.

The research - revealed this week by a campaign group - determined the novel virus could not cause a ‘robust infection’.

But the research is more evidence of ties between the US government and the Wuhan lab, as well as the funding of dangerous virus research across the globe.

In another article . . .

Well, of course he does. He’s the one infecting the freaking bats.

You know, I have an idea about how to prevent the next pandemic. Let’s go capture a bunch of bats and give them—I don’t know—leprosy.² And then we go to Anthony Fauci’s house, and we put them in his attic.

Hopefully, by the time he realizes they’re there and figures out what he has, pieces of him are falling off.

Again, this is my daydream. Don’t rain on my parade with facts. It’s my state he was experimenting on bats in with the same virus that later got loose and made people lose their minds.

But if you don’t like that idea . . . the bears are hungry this time of year.

I mean, abandoning him to be filtered through the digestive track of the local ursine population doesn’t quite have the same poetic appeal as his losing body parts to leprosy contracted from a bat, but . . . beggars can’t be choosers.

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Don’t look now, but CNN is attempting to do journalism . . .

For more than a decade, California Senate hopeful Rep. Adam Schiff has claimed his primary residence is a 3,420 square foot home he owns in Maryland, according to a review of mortgage records.

At the same time, Schiff has for years taken a homeowner’s tax exemption on a much smaller 650 square foot condo he owns in Burbank, California, also claiming that home as his primary residence for a reduction in his tax bill of $7,000. He did not take an exemption on his home in Maryland.

While Schiff has signed documents asserting both the Maryland property and the significantly smaller Burbank condo as his primary residences, tax records indicate that he paid his California property taxes in 2017 with a check featuring his Maryland address – the only year he paid with a personal check. And a review of past comments, pictures shared on his public social media, and records indicate Schiff makes his full-time home in Maryland.

The point is Schiff doesn’t really live in California, but he does try to keep up the pretense, even if he’s not so good at it.

On June 7, 2022, on the day of Democratic primary in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, Schiff posted a photo of himself wearing an “I Voted” sticker on Twitter in front of his Maryland home.

Meanwhile, the person second in line is Katie Porter, of this Katie Porter fame.

And then there’s Barbara Lee who was angry at Gavin Newsom for vowing to appoint a black woman if Dianne Feinstein decided to stop down (this was while we were still pretending Feinstein was alive and functioning and not a breath away from being a corpse).³

Why? Because Lee herself wasn’t the black woman.

Amid questions about the health of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) outlined a plan to appoint a caretaker to fill her seat if she leaves office before her term ends — a notion that one of the candidates running to succeed Feinstein promptly blasted as “insulting to countless Black women.”

The assessment from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the only prominent Black candidate in the 2024 Senate race, came hours after Newsom appeared Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he renewed a pledge to fill any Senate vacancy with a Black woman — but said it wouldn’t be Lee. . . .

Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, called on Newsom to tap Lee.

“The CBC stands with many others when we declare that Rep. Barbara Lee remains the most eminently qualified to serve in this role should an opportunity to appoint someone come to the Governor’s desk,” Horsford said in a statement. “His commitment to appoint the best-qualified Black woman in California to serve in the U.S. Senate shouldn’t be to a temporary placeholder, but instead, someone who can immediately get to work.”

Appointing Lee to Feinstein’s seat could give Lee a boost in the Senate race, in which polls have shown her trailing Reps. Adam B. Schiff and Katie Porter, two Democrats also representing California in the U.S. House. But Newsom made clear that’s not in the cards.

So she essentially wanted him to interfere in the election for her by making her the de facto incumbent.

Can California pick them or what?

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The stupidest thing you will read today . . . and it’s Friday on this Substack . . .

A top Senate Democrat said that the Marine Corps commandant’s recent medical emergency may be due in part to the fallout from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold on top military promotions, which has forced several top officers to hold down multiple jobs.

Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.) leveled the accusation a day after the service disclosed that Gen. Eric Smith, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was hospitalized on Sunday. There was no immediate word of when Smith would be released or return to work.

“One of the reasons, I think contributed to his condition was he was doing two jobs at once,” Reed said in a brief interview. “I’ve read where he was working from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. As a result, if he had, as is normal, an assistant, he could switch off.”

The New York Times, citing people familiar, said Smith had an apparent heart attack while jogging on Sunday. The service has declined to go into specifics, citing the family’s privacy.⁴

Did you hear that? This man had to do the job of two men because this rat Tommy Tuberville is stopping the Senate from promoting top military brass.

Except he’s, um, not.

I know, you’re thinking, “What the swampy hell is going on here?” Can they promote them or not? Is Tuberville actually blockading appointments or not?

The answers to the questions in order are “of course” and “absolutely not.” Welcome to the show!

Driving the news: Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Todd Young (R-Ind.) and others stood up to try to pass promotions through unanimous consent, but Tuberville continually blocked them.

• “I'm as pro-life as they come. I strongly disagree with what [Defense] Secretary Austin, President Biden have done,” said Sullivan, but “the military has a huge readiness and retention problem. These holds are not helping.”⁵

• Graham, who’s trying to push through a promotion for Maj. Gen. Laura Lenderman, said: “Holding her hostage doesn’t help the pro-life cause, it hurts the military.”

You see, it’s not that Tuberville is “blocking” these promotions so much as not letting the Senate do it the easy way. He’s not holding anything hostage but Graham’s ability to go back to his office and play with his GI Joe figures and pretend he’s General Patton.

The other side: “The disagreement we’re having today is about tactics,” Tuberville said. “I cannot sit idly by while the Biden administration injects politics in our military,” he added.

• “I’m going to keep my holds in place. If senators want to vote on these nominees one by one, I’m all in. But I will keep my holds in place until the Pentagon follows the law or the Democrats change the law.”

Between the lines: Tuberville’s hold on the promotions has forced Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to go through the time-consuming process of holding roll call votes to confirm nominees.

I can conclude two things from this discussion:

(1) If this is what passes for a “blockade” these days, then I think I’ve figured out why we haven’t won a war since World War II. It’s only a “blockade” in the same way our border with Mexico is “secure.”

(2) I like it this way. I hope there’s always a Tommy Tuberville around. The Senate has to actually work, has less time to spend money and make ridiculous new laws, and has to go through each appointment one by one. If they’d had to do that years ago, we might not have ended up with Thoroughly Modern Milley, Jack “Mad Lapdog” Kelly, or Lloyd “Raytheon’s B—h” Austin. Think of all the trouble we could have been saved. It’s brilliant!

But the whole freaking argument is just plain stupid. If the promotion is important, the Senate will take the time for a roll call vote. And if most of them are not that important . . . heck, we’re saving money already.

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And now it’s time to enter the big tent. Get your popcorn. Get your gallon of soda. Get your glow stick and your paper crown.

And let’s welcome the trick elephants and donkeys to the main ring . . .

The House got a new speaker this week, a relative unknown unless you’ve been following certain hearings.

I thought it would be fun to take a little tour of the sober analysis that came out of the media after the House Republicans elected Johnson.

Just joking. The chickens were startled and feathers and bird droppings went everywhere.

Let’s start with the New York Times’s Charles M. Blow, who tells us he doesn’t know anything about Mike Johnson but because Blow grew up in Johnson’s district, he can tell you exactly who Mike Johnson is, because, you know, all white people be alike.

In an interview last week on Fox News, Johnson said: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”

OMG, a Christian Republican. Whatever will we do?

You know, I long ago left my Nazarene upbringing behind, but one could do worse than loving his neighbor as himself. Just saying.

Johnson tried to create some daylight between his zealotry and his politics, saying that not all lawmakers’ deeply held beliefs can become law. He also said that when the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was constitutionally protected it became “settled” law and “the law of the land,” and as a constitutional lawyer, “I respect that.”

But does he? . . .

On another occasion, he said the court had decided “to usurp the authority of the people and force same-sex marriage on all 50 states by judicial fiat.”

Does that sound like respecting a ruling to you? Of course not. It’s an example of Johnson’s fundamentalism in action: his Captain Ahab-like obsession with opposing L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

Respecting rulings? How selective we are. Does the following sound like a group of people who “respect” SCOTUS rulings?

Totally no hypocrisy there.

This patina of piety affords Johnson a sense of cheerfulness, the sense that he’s a harmless, happy warrior in the conservative Christian cause: After Johnson’s bill was killed in the State Legislature in 2015, he smiled for photos with two of the activists who had helped kill it.

Witness the photo and a bit of corresponding text, from the WaPo:

Whatever is that? How horrific! It’s . . . it’s people who disagree, who are on opposite sides of an issue . . . getting along . . . smiling. That’s . . . not right I tell you. It’s not natural.

Where he and I are from, even would-be oppressors can be affable. It’s not just good manners, it’s the Christian way, the proper Southern way. And it is the ultimate deception.

So Mike Johnson is an “affable oppressor,” as if Josef Stalin coauthored a book with Emily Post on how to be a nice murderous totalitarian who never wears white after Labor Day.

But is Mike Johnson really a bigot? Well, he did at one point seem to champion conversion therapy. That’s kind of disturbing.

But you know who else champions “conversion therapy”? Anyone who pushes “gender-affirming care,” especially for minors.

Gay-conversion therapy is a thing of the past. It comprised psychological interventions intended to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals. Critics denounced gay-conversion therapy as dangerous and homophobic. It’s considered unethical by many, and has even been banned in some states and municipalities. Gay-conversion therapy is thought to be defunct. But is it?

Over the last few decades, a modified form of gay-conversion therapy has emerged under the progressive sounding label: gender-affirming care (GAC). GAC is being used to treat those with gender dysphoria — a psychological condition of distress related to one’s biological sex. Of particular concern, and the focus of this article, is the use of gender-affirming care with minors. Since most gender-dysphoric youth are prehomosexual, GAC treatment is tantamount to gay conversion — it’s literally converting prehomosexual children into trans.

Call me crazy, but the lesser of two evils might be convincing a gay boy named Johnny he’s straight rather than cutting off his bait and tackle, giving him boobs and estrogen, and calling him Janet.

But not only is Mike Johnson an “affable oppressor” and an enemy of the alphabet crowd, he’s “Trump’s puppet.”⁶

So would it be a great leap to suppose that, as unassuming as the new Speaker seems, his pivotal role in trying to give Trump what he most wanted makes him a mere MAGA puppet? Should the American people be concerned that Johnson’s Speakership is akin to Trump being a “Shadow Speaker”?

They should. But Trump was always likely to be controlling the strings of any GOP Speaker elected with zero support from Democrats.⁷ The moderates in the Republican conference lack backbone and couldn’t find the courage to work with Democrats to elect a Speaker more in the mainstream of American values. Instead, they gave the country someone extreme — and not just because he denied the 2020 election.

But there’s a problem that Maria Cardona neglects to mention. Were it not for the Democrats, Kevin McCarthy would still have the gavel, and they would have a nice pliable little speaker “more in the mainstream of American values,” which is to say one that knows his place in the Elephant and Ass Show and knows none of it is for real.

Instead, the donkeys helped eight Republicans depose McCarthy, and in his place, they now have to deal with the affable Hitler.

But do you know what seems to be the most disturbing thing for Democrats about Mike Johnson?

He’s poor (well, relatively speaking).

Or as Vanity Fair puts it . . .

He has no money! Who ever heard of a lawmaker with no money?!?!

The Daily Beast reports that in financial disclosures dating back to 2016, the year he joined Congress, Johnson never reported having a savings or checking account in his name, his spouse’s name, or in the name of any of his children. In his latest filing, which covers last year, he doesn’t list a single asset either. Which, given that he made more than $200,000 last year—in addition to his wife’s salary—is more than a little odd. . . .

[T]he most probable explanation is that the Speaker lives paycheck to paycheck, and the money he does have in various accounts doesn’t meet the reporting threshold set by the House Ethics Committee.

The New Republic has a series of theories . . .

It is, of course, possible that Johnson really has no bank accounts and just keeps all his money in sacks of cash hidden under his mattress. Another explanation could be that he has selective amnesia and has forgotten to disclose his assets for seven years. But several ethics experts offered another reason: Johnson is terrible at managing the money he makes and may be in massive debt.

I don’t know why they’re worried about a single legislator, even a Speaker of the House, being in massive debt.

These people en masse haven’t been able to balance a budget in twenty plus years and we’re so far in debt as a nation that if you took every penny from every one of the 730 billionaires in the country, you would only pay it down about 13.5 percent.⁸

Mike Johnson should feel right at home, and since he understands debt on a personal level, he might be more likely to extrapolate that experience to the whole.

But it’s not just the donkeys that have a problem with Johnson.

From Charlie Sykes at the Bulwark:⁹

As expected, Mike Johnson is refusing to link funding for the two wars, but on Monday he announced that he also intended to play a stupid game with aid to Israel.

The aid package for Israel has broad bipartisan support and was expected to pass both the House and Senate easily, but the fifth-string speaker announced that the $14 billion in funding would have to be “offset” by rolling back funding for IRS efforts to go after wealthy tax cheats.

Because deficit reduction or something.

Okay, so aid to Israel? We give a lot of aid to Israel, already. What do I mean by “a lot”?

According to USA Facts . . .

The United States committed over $3.3 billion in foreign assistance to Israel in 2022, the most recent year for which data exists. About $8.8 million of that went toward the country's economy, while 99.7% of the aid went to the Israeli military.

Israel received the second-largest amount of US aid in 2022 after Ukraine, where the US committed $12.4 billion. The two countries received 4.8% and 18.1%, respectively, of all foreign aid granted that year.

Adjusting for inflation, US aid to Israel from 1946 to 2022 totaled $243.9 billion, making it the largest recipient of American foreign aid since World War II.

I think we can safely say we’re tried throwing money at the situation in Israel. It didn’t work. Throwing more at it won’t help.

Back to Sykes . . .

Slashing the funding for the IRS does not actually reduce the deficit at all for the quite obvious reason that it will reduce revenue. Via the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

[Paying] for new spending by defunding tax enforcement is worse than not paying for it at all. Instead of costing $14 billion, the House bill will add upward of $30 billion to the debt. Instead of avoiding new borrowing, this plan doubles down on it.

Funding the IRS to reduce the tax gap has a long history of bipartisan support and has been proposed by every President from Reagan through Biden. It is one of the few ways to raise revenue without raising taxes.

The claim is that the IRS will only go after wealthy tax cheats. But you and I both know that’s not true. They go after little people.

That’s from Syracuse University, by the way.

The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates – five and a half times virtually everyone else – were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit. This credit is provided to offset the taxes for the lowest wage-earners in the country. As we previously have reported, this group of taxpayers have historically been targeted not because they account for the most tax under-reporting, but because they are easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions. 

Now one might posit, if one were being generous, that the reason Mike Johnson is trying to tie reduced IRS funding to funding for Israel is that he knows, being a man of limited disposable income, that the IRS will come after people like him, people who don’t have the extra funds to pay accountants and tax attorneys and instead just pay the fines and “owed” tax and go on with their lives. Meanwhile, Mr. Sykes, being of the more flush wallet crowd, knows the IRS probably won’t come after him and his kind because they can in fact afford accountants and attorneys, like Mittens Romney who wrote off his wife’s dressage horse, had a net worth of somewhere around $250 million, and paid an effective average tax rate of 13.4 percent while accusing 47 percent of people if living off the government and therefore being prejudiced against him.

Those kind of people have lawyers on retainer. The IRS knows that. The cost-benefit analysis is easy.

Or Johnson could just be pandering because the 87,000 new IRS agents were about as popular as a pig roast to celebrate a Jewish wedding.

But the reality is someone’s got to pay for all that money we’re sending overseas, and more IRS agents means more poor, working-class, and middle-class people on the hook for taxes, whether they’re really owed or not.

But the real reason to have hope that Mike Johnson might turn out to be okay?

This woman ↓↓↓ hates him.

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How can a week be so long and so short all at the same time. I’m going to have to branch out a bit. I want to steer clear of the Middle East on Fridays. Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty that’s funk-ed up about the situation, but I don’t have the heart on Fridays. So I’m trying to compensate other ways (expansive expounding on other topics being one if you hadn’t noticed. Sorry.).

I was so proud of my niece this week. I hate movies based on books. I just don’t watch them. I’ve been so disappointed, particularly by anything Ron Howard touches. (There’s a special place in hell for Opie just for all the books he’s ruined.)

My niece doesn’t read, but she does like her video games, and she’s in love with Five Nights at Freddy’s (as evidenced by the Halloween costume). Her mother got Peacock so she could watch the new movie.

The next day, I asked her, “Well, how was it?”

She shrugged and her mother rolled her eyes.

“All the way through, I heard about how this character wasn’t like that in the game and that character would never do that and on and on. She wouldn’t just watch the movie.”

I cried a little tear of joy. My niece is already a film critic.

We lost Matthew Perry this week. I was never a Friends fan. In fact, I can honestly say I’ve never seen a single episode. But I might have enjoyed Chandler. For part of your spoonful of sugar, a montage of one-liners:

We also lost “Bull” from Night Court, a show I loved but haven’t seen in years.

Does it seem to anyone else like we seem to be losing a lot of people all at once?

But as the other spoonful of sugar . . .

I don’t typically post over the weekend because I figure everyone needs a break, but I have an article so close to being done I’m going to break that “rule.” It will be out on Saturday or Sunday. It’s about what’s going on in the Middle East, so if you’re trying to stay away from those sorts of articles or you’ve gotten a pretty good bead on where I stand and you’d rather not read my take, then I will see you next week. But if you’re interested in a discussion of what a man can do and what a man can’t do, a la Captain Jack Sparrow, and how that applies to the current situation . . . I’ll see you sooner.

1. Glad you asked.

2. Can bats get leprosy? I don’t care. This is my fantasy.

3. I shouldn’t be so snarky. I think she’s going to be remembered as a stateswoman of Winston Churchill proportions next to whoever replaces her.

4. Smith is fifty-eight and, if he’s jogging, in good health. So I’m guessing the hypodermic elephant in the room that rhymes with “fax” or “tax” might have had something to do with this. But why ruin a good narrative, amirite?

5. I also really doubt they’re hurting either.

6. And since Trump is Putin’s puppet, is Johnson a third-string Putin lackey? Paper on my desk by end of class tomorrow.

7. Which would be literally all of them?!?! Why are we even pretending? Oh, that’s right. I forgot, Elephant and Ass Show.

8. The 730 billionaires have a combined wealth of $4.5 trillion, and the national debt is at $33.6 trillion.

9. I’m loving the Bulwark.