It seems Lauren Boebert has lost her race to represent Colorado in congress. At least until they scream about voting irregularities, or someone says her name three times.

May he never enjoy the pleasure of a woman’s company ever again

Here’s an excellent story to illustrate the difference between pro-choice and pro-abortion, even if it is a horrific injustice to the woman involved. I have to wonder what kind of moral monster this guy is.

She wanted to have the baby. Suh didn’t. Instead, he told the judge, he impersonated the woman to open an online pharmacy account, ordered abortion medications, got Xanax from a friend to use as a sedative, and duped his girlfriend into drinking what she thought was just a prenatal protein shake. After waiting until she fell asleep, he administered the abortion pills orally and vaginally.

According to the woman’s lawsuit, Suh left her alone and incapacitated and ignored her attempts to contact him after she woke and realized she was bleeding. She called 911 and was hospitalized.

Jesus. This isn’t a moral dilemma at all — consent is essential, and Suh was ignoring the woman’s consent and putting her at risk medically, all so he could ignore the consequences of his actions. But he’s a man, so he blithely went on to university — two prestigious universities, no less — as if he hadn’t deeply harmed a woman he’d had sex with.

A onetime West Point cadet drugged his then-girlfriend in her barracks room, administered abortion pills to her against her will and caused a miscarriage. Then he went on to study at two Ivy League universities, starting at one of them after he pleaded guilty to assault, according to court records and a new lawsuit.

The man, Caleb Suh, graduated from Cornell University this year…

Oh, Cornell. Can Cornell’s reputation sink even lower? Have they no standards?

At least Suh pled guilty, although he hasn’t yet been sentenced. He’s also been hit with a lawsuit. Throw the book at him, please.

I know that museums everywhere are struggling to stay afloat, but you’d think there would be limits to their tactics, There’s a museum — no, museums, note the plural — called St Joseph Museums that has a remarkable lack of focus. They incorporate a doll museum, a black history museum, a native American gallery, the Wyeth-Tootle mansion, and a psychiatric museum. To diffuse their expertise even more, they sponsor bus tours that are even worse. They run something called The Brothel Bus, which is not a porn video channel, and which should be punished for false advertising. We’re fortunate that The Murder Bus isn’t what it sounds like.

But worst of all, they’re running tours to…the Creation Museum and Ark Park! No legitimate museum is going to support that heap of lies and misinformation.

I guess the $2000+ payments to pack ignorant people in a bus was just too tempting.

It might be harder to purge that white asshole next to him

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, poised to become majority leader, said on Sunday that he strongly supports impeaching defense secretary Pete Hegseth as a Republican lawmaker prepares to force a House vote.

The top Democrat made his position clear during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, declaring himself a “hard yes” on the impeachment resolution targeting Hegseth.

“I’m a hard yes on the Hegseth resolution. The so-called secretary of defense has abused his power, undermined our national security, and engineered this reckless and costly war of choice in Iran, which has skyrocketed prices on the American people and made the country less safe,” Jeffries said. “Pete Hegseth has got to go.”

But Chuck Schumer still has to step down from leadership of the senate.

Trump has appointed Stephen Miller, acolyte of Satan, to be his new chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles and declaring his deeper commitment to supporting Nazis. I don’t think he plans on being more accommodating and sensible in the last half of his term. He’s firing a warning shot across the Democrat’s bows.

What is fascinating are Miller’s remarks about his appointment.

Despite the GOP’s catastrophic losses Tuesday, Miller praised Trump, saying he saved the Republican party from the ash heap of history and has made it stronger, more popular, and more resilient than ever before.

If it wasn’t for President Trump, the United States of America would not exist right now, Miller added.

None of that is true. A little exaggeration as repayment for his reward is to be expected, but that is stepping outside of actual accomplishments to making up effusive lies. None of that is believable.

But then we get Miller’s pledge.

I swear to you, and I pledge to you, Mr. President, my absolute loyalty, my unwavering commitment, and my total devotion to your success and the success of this country.

Jesus fuck. That’s way too obsequious. Has any presidential appointment before been so desperate in swearing their fealty to a president? Most people would pledge their loyalty to the Constitution rather than slobbering over an individual. I guess the Constitution is irrelevant now.

Put that man higher on the list of enemies of the state, and put him first in the queue to be issued a blindfold and a cigarette.

Yesterday, I practiced being retired. I slept in to 7am. I read a book. I took a nap. I went to a movie. I set aside my usual lecture prep (I have to catch up on that today). It felt good. Taking my work obligations off my shoulders for a day and setting them aside felt wonderful, and I’m ready for retirement. Can I start tomorrow? No, I’ve got about 6 months more to go.

The movie I saw was You Can See Everything, and it was a horrifying experience. It was a documentary about two narcissistic sociopaths, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans, as they prepared for Liz to go off to prison. They clearly thought this was a redemption display, but it came across, rather, as a subtle indictment of two frauds.

The case was settled for me at the beginning of the movie. Holmes spends a lot of time on the phone talking to people — investors, I presume — about her plans to revive Theranos. She has convinced herself that the technology can actually do all the things she promised. She refuses to acknowledge wrong doing. She thinks she will be able to guide development of a new blood-testing machine from her prison cell.

Everything she says about the technology is vague and delusional, and listening to her talk about the machine she says she invented convinced me that she knows nothing about biochemistry and has no insights into the process. She’s glad-handing public relations flacks and trying to impress business people with sciencey-sounding words. She’s a college dropout with no background in or comprehension of her field, and she’s still running a grift. I was convinced that she was a fraud and a liar from the outset.

Her husband, Billy Evans, was just as bad, maybe worse. He’s portrayed several times as staring intently into a laptop playing videos of introductory biology. It’s all a show. That’s not how you learn about cutting edge, advanced biotechnology — it might be how uninformed dilettantes think smart people do science. He promises to implement Holmes vision in one year. Cut to two years later: the documentary shows us a room full of electronics junk, small lasers wired into circuit boards, and he’s still handwaving about how they’re going to be able to miniaturize shelves of gadgets into a magical device. It’s all lies.

He’s also a creepy controlling manipulator, and left me feeling a touch of sympathy for Holmes. Except that she was enthusiastically enabling him. The whole movie builds effectively to increasing the evidence that these people are devious fraudsters. Nathan Fielder builds this with good questions, and was a marvelous inquisitor who didn’t divorce himself from his own feelings while probing his subjects and letting them hang themselves with their own rope. I enjoyed that.

I did have misgivings when I heard that Amanda Seyfried, the actor who portrayed Holmes in a movie. Did we really need a level of artifice in this movie? That’s not what we got, though — she was insightful in discussing what Holmes was going through, and it wasn’t done as an acting exercise, but as an informed woman discussing what she saw in Holmes’ reaction, and was outraged at the manipulative sleazebag, Billy. She made a substantive contribution to the documentary.

Elizabeth Holmes will be out of prison in 2030. Billy Evans is actively trying to scam money for a biomedical gimmick right now. This movie does not redeem anyone.

Go see it. I was disappointed that attendance at the Morris Theater was so low, about 10 people last night, so preferably you should drive to Western Minnesota to watch it. I’ll be at the ticket counter tonight, come give me money.

I remember that feeling, the first month or six after the delivery.

I’d share a picture of the mother, too, but I’m aware that women don’t care to have their picture taken immediately after the extreme stress of childbirth. Maybe next week.

Also, she directly challenges the ineffective leadership of the current Democratic party.

This is going to be great.

He’s afraid. Trump looked at the election results and was terrified that in two years, at most, his legacy was going to be demolished, and his legacy, of course, is the tacky gold geegaws he has glued to the walls of the oval office. That’s his precious. He thinks of himself as a builder, an architectural genius, and that he will be remembered for his gifts to the American people: his stupid ballroom that no one asked for, his line of presidential portraits that mock his predecessors, his helipad, his tasteless golden decorations, his arch, his insufferable efforts to put his name on every cultural landmark. They’re all going to be swept away as one of the first and easiest act of his successor. He knows it. We all know it. Whoever takes the oval office someday, we’re all going to be disappointed if they don’t erase that stupid man’s ugly efforts to mar a historical place.

We know that is what he fears, because he rushed to his office to sign another executive proclamation to say they can’t do that.

In the days since his party suffered historic defeats in the midterm elections, the president has seemingly turned his attention to the many renovation projects he has begun across the nation’s capital. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday, Trump declared the Oval Office a national monument.

I’m going to be signing a document which will make them into a landmark for the ages, he told reporters in the gold-covered Oval Office.

According to the president, the proclamation would ensure the West Wing rooms would not be touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people, in order to build something in a slightly different shape.

I just thought it was very important that nobody be allowed to come and take it down and try and do something with it, he said.

Every once in a while they’ll look and they’ll say, oh, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll put some glass up that’s a little bit better or something, and I say no, you’re not going to do anything. We’re going to leave this as it is, he continued.

If anyone ever decides to come and start knocking down walls, you’ll call me wherever I may be, and I will come back here and I will make sure it never happens.

Right. The president who ignored laws and planning regulations to take a bulldozer to the East Wing now thinks his signature is all it takes to keep his petty treasures in the face of all future presidents. He’s stupid.

He’s not King Arthur, who will rise from his tomb to restore his kingdom when it is threatened. He’s going to be rotting in his grave, where the only gold he’ll see is the trickle of urine from all the visitors there to revel in his defeat.

It’s getting close to the end. We had a biology discipline meeting today — 9 faculty sitting around a table and over zoom — to discuss teaching load and classes for the 2027-2028 school year. That’s normally an interesting meeting, where we propose new classes and assign faculty to required courses, a lot of compromise and discussion. But guess what? I have nothing to contribute since I’ll be fully retired then.

It was a mix of oh boy, relief, I don’t have to teach that course, and oh no, that’s my course, I’ve been teaching it for 25 years. This peculiar disconnect is going to get worse as this year proceeds.

Russell Brand has been getting increasingly weird and desperate — he has become frantically Christian. It may be that the motive driving his bizarre religiosity and political extremism may have been guilt, or maybe fear of getting called to account.

Pray harder, and chant harder, Russell. He’s been convicted of rape and three counts of sexual assault, and while he hasn’t been sentenced yet, and the judge has said, “I therefore have to remand you into custody.” He’s going to jail!

This ballot measure would prohibit biological males from competing in school sports reserved for females and require students to provide a signed statement from a healthcare provider verifying their biological sex based on reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup or natural testosterone levels.

The practical results of that would be that young girls who wanted to participate in sports would have to pull their pants down and get their genitals inspected.

It passed.

For shame. At least King County, where I grew up, rejected it. The rest of the state is just full of panty-sniffing peeping perverts, I guess.

Ted Cruz was crying on Twitter. He dumped a long post on Twitter decrying the “bloodbath” of the recent election, which I’ll spare you, because he really had nothing to say, other than to describe the Republican collapse. Yeah, we noticed. We don’t need a hack to explain it to us.

He just had to admit a glorious fact.

Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas.

And if he had been on the ballot for re-election, he would have been one of the casualties. Maybe next time.

He quotes an exit poll that summarizes the Republican failure, but don’t be surprised — he won’t admit to being one of the contributors to the disaster.

Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas.

Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
The Canada trade war, 7.6%.
The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%.
Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%.
Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.

Exactly. The cost of living, corruption, and the Iran war are the top 3. The fourth point, the candidates are terrible, is something Ted Cruz has no ability to alleviate. He called the Iran War exactly the right decision when it started. He is totally wrapped up in the most corrupt administration in American history, and endorsed Ken Paxton, the terribly corrupt candidate for Senate. And he’s done nothing to reduce the cost of living.

But OK, I consider the Kansan’s complaints to be valid and something every politician should consider. Does he propose anything substantive to address any of those issues? No, he does not. He instead falls back on the failed strategy Republicans have been following for years: attack the Democrats and lie about what the Democrats are, hypothetically, going to do.

We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.

And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed.

He knows nothing about their tax plans; any increase in taxes should be accompanied by an increase in government services, and keep in mind that the current administration has bloated government spending with personal perks for the rich.

There is no radical transgender agenda. I would hope that the only thing on that agenda is tolerance and respect for equality.

There are no communists and Islamists in the Democratic party.

His concerns are unfounded, but familiar — these are same nonsensical culture war issues the Republicans have relied on. They’re dead boring.

When it comes down to specifics, he mentions only two things, neither of which are going to beneficial.

And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record.

Trump Accounts — seriously, do you want to attach your brand to Trump even more — are a bit of a boondoggle. They’re like other investment accounts, but with more strings, and the experts are advising that you shouldn’t use them, with one exception.

Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian public policy research firm, thinks there are better ways to set money aside for children, such as in a 529 or standard IRA account.

“Generally speaking, parents should not put their own money into a Trump Account,” he told CBS News. “The primary use case for the accounts is to receive free money from sources like the government or private donations.”

For example, Michael and Susan Dell on Tuesday said they would donate a total of $6.25 billion — or $250 apiece — to millions of kids in Trump Accounts.

It’s basically a one-time opportunity to grab a little bit of money from a ridiculously wealthy couple.

As for the school choice tax credit…that’s only a benefit to people who are wealthy enough to send their kids to a private school. All of these schemes to benefit private schools hurt public education. It’s only going to help the investor class, which Cruz apparently considers the foundation of the future electorate.

Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.

We are already the most capitalist country on the planet. We don’t need more capitalists, we need more people willing to put limits on the excesses of the investor class. But you go ahead, Ted, keep appealing to the Musks and Andreesens and Thiels for help. They’re the next gang going up against the wall.

This guy will be haunting MAGA for a long, long time

It’s going to be a fun time in January, and the MAGA leadership is beginning to sweat as the consequences of this week’s elections begins to sink in.

As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Democrats “are laying the groundwork for an array of inquiries into President Donald Trump, his family and his administration.” Various business and political leaders are meeting with their lawyers, worried about what Democrats could uncover with this new power.

“I haven’t seen this much investigative activity in anticipation of a change in control of a house of Congress ever,” Michael Bopp, who runs a congressional investigations division for the law firm Gibson Dunn, told the Post.

There are plenty of signs that it’s dawning on people around Trump that he will be out of office in two short years and that, as the latest Epstein report indicates, the statute of limitations has not run out on many possible crimes committed under the White House’s protection. A recent Zeteo profile of Stephen Miller showed that the White House deputy chief of staff is worried about going to prison if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028. Congressional Democrats keep talking about impeaching Pete Hegseth, and the defense secretary is clearly anxious, reportedly making calls and begging Sen. Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat if, as expected, she wins the Tennessee governor’s race this week. Having a Senate seat would not only prevent impeachment; it could make prosecuting him for alleged war crimes much harder as well.

Miller is worried about going to prison…I hope he is sleeping poorly right now. Hegseth is aware that he is guilty of war crimes — that he is a murderer — and is frantically looking for an escape hatch.

Another major target for investigation is the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. He threw so much money at Republican candidates, because he knows they are his only buffer sheltering him from prosecution. But they all lost.

On Monday, Trump himself also told the New York Post that widespread pardons are on the table, not just for his staff, but for allies like Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk has good reason to be worried. His brief tenure running DOGE has raised a whole host of questions about what laws were broken by him or by staff carrying out his orders. He’s also under suspicion of messing with Ukraine’s Starlink access, crippling its defenses against the invading Russian military. This may explain why Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars — more than any single donor in history — trying to tilt the elections in the GOP’s favor.

We really need to put massive constraints on presidential pardon power. The current corrupt president is demonstrating that the pardons can be massively abused, and it definitely needs to be throttled (I don’t understand why our constitution gives the president a power that belongs more in the hands of an absolute monarch).

It would be delicious to see a man with hundreds of billions of dollars stripped of all his wealth and getting tossed into prison, even a luxurious country club prison. That’s got to make all the people worth mere tens of billions of dollars worry.

And don’t forget the entire goddamn Trump family!

Trump and his family members should also be sweating. Trump has often interpreted the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity as all-encompassing, but as Raskin told the New Yorker, he doesn’t see it that way at all. He outlined how the president has made billions in office, roughly $1 million a hour, and that there’s a great deal to learn about where that money is coming from. The Supreme Court’s decision technically only covers crimes committed during the commission of official presidential duties. By definition, Trump’s external money-making enterprises aren’t that. His children are deeply involved in the family business as well. And as the Epstein report made sure to note, some of the crimes Trump and his associates have been accused of committing with his old friend Epstein carry no statute of limitations.

Epstein is still looming over this whole rotten dynasty. We can hope that will all be finally split open and exposed.

My one worry is that the Democrats will continue to be timid — no, cowardly — and fail to take advantage of this opportunity. Let’s hope they notice that the electorate is getting feisty. We’re looking for justice, and if the Democratic leadership is unwilling to deliver it, they’ll be next in the crosshairs.

(Actually, he’s got a little bit of jaundice and is being treated with light therapy, in addition to being a cool baby from the future.)

CNN

Susan Collins is out at last, as is Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, and there’s been a general sweep of most of the Trump fanatics getting booted out of office. Unfortunately, my local representation is still Republican, not even a blue tsunami against the patent corruption of the ruling party can dislodge ignorant farmers clinging to the rock of their conservative churches.

I’ll take it. I have avoided looking at the news until just now, fearing disappointment, but it looks like I should be generally optimistic. Progress has been made.

Now the Democrats have to consolidate their wins and accomplish good things. Sure, impeach Pete Hegseth and end the war with Iron, and cripple Trump so that he has nothing to do but play golf, but also pass laws to lock in gay and trans rights, start rebuilding the NIH/NSF, restore health care, repair the economy by finally stripping the rich of their selfish gains, you know, all the easy stuff. There is a daunting amount of work to do.

I’ve been huffy about it for over a decade, but no one cares, no one listens. But maybe you’ll listen now: Eric Betzig, winner of the chemistry Nobel in 2014, is saying exactly the same thing.

There is a place for simplified illustrations of biological processes. I use them all the time, to get across the specific interactions I’m trying to explain. But there is no place for hyper-detailed animations that portray the interior of a cell as a vast cavernous space with a scattering of robots carrying out missions along precisely engineered pathways.

I’m still trying to figure out why we should care — what soft tissue they find is grossly degraded and very little information can be extracted from it. It’s also contentious because of that great degradation. The blobs they identify as red blood cells are seriously deformed, and make me wonder how they identified them as cells in the first place.

(A) SEM image of 24 h HCl treated bone; and ii to xiii, SEM images showing selected RBC-like structures (Scale bar, 10 μm); (B) Photogrammetric 3D reconstruction of a selected RBC-like structure, generated from 72 SEM images

OK, those could be red blood cells. Maybe. I could be persuaded. But the CNN article also consulted Mary Schweitzer, the one person most associated with finding soft tissue in dinosaur bones, and she has reservations.

It’s also possible that the structures might not be remnants of red blood cells at all.

The findings do not meet established standards for identifying fossilized blood cells, said Mary Schweitzer, professor emeritus in the department of biological sciences at North Carolina State University. She was not involved in the study.

She questioned whether the structures’ shape and size sufficiently match red blood cells in living relatives of dinosaurs as well as the significance of hausmannite, the type of manganese oxide the study authors predominantly found. Schweitzer noted that this substance is not detected in living red blood cells.

So it’s a big maybe, but still, these are issues worth pursuing. The authors of the source paper are similarly cautious in their conclusions.

Mineralized RBCs from dinosaurs have not previously been reported, and their fossil morphology remains unknown; this work provides evidence for their appearance in this preserved form. These findings support the identification of the oldest known mineralized dinosaur RBCs containing molecules derived from heme.

Saying “containing molecules derived from heme” is a rather weak interpretation. It’s not surprising that there were chemicals in the living bone (of course!) and that they deteriorated over many tens of millions of years into modified chemical products — they didn’t evaporate or dematerialize — which is exactly what anyone should expect.

What do we do next with this corrupted information? I don’t know yet.

I now expect that Peggy, Eric, Kari, Talitha, Amy, Steve, Zack, Keith, Naomi, and all members of Minnesota school districts to be my good friends and invite me to their house for the celebration. It’s the least they can do for my vote.

The Far Side

(This cartoon would be more accurate if all the clowns were evil.)

murderer and his murder weapon

Too many years ago, I was a die-hard bicyclist who pedaled everywhere. That habit died here in Minnesota, where we’re buried in snow for 6 months of the year, and half the remaining time is non-stop prairie winds. Some people do manage it, though, and I was thinking maybe I should start up again in my retirement, for those months when it is practical.

On second thought, though, the real daunting concern is all the assholes in cars.

Simon Richardson, 35, crashed into headteacher Michael Mullins, 56, who was cycling home from work at Stretford grammar school, Greater Manchester, on the evening of 20 April. Mullins hit the bonnet and windscreen of Richardson’s Volvo XC90 and then went under the car, becoming entangled in the suspension.

Richardson continued to drive for more than a mile, knowing that the trapped cyclist was just inches under his feet, a trial at Manchester Minshull Street crown court heard.
…
Richardson’s front-seat passenger, his cousin Gabrielle Debotte, told the trial they both heard “moaning” from outside as he drove away from the collision scene. Giving evidence for the prosecution, she said Richardson went on to say: “He’s under the car.”

The collision happened in the village of Warburton. The court heard Richardson drove to a secluded farm track in Lymm, 1.3 miles away, in an attempt to dislodge Mullins.

After he stopped, Richardson twice tried to pull Mullins out, before returning to the car and driving sharply and deliberately from side to side before mounting a grass verge, the court heard. Mullins was finally released but was then driven over again as Richardson reversed and drove away.

We have a nice stationary exercise bicycle in our house. I think maybe that would be a better alternative.

Richardson has been found guilty of murder.

I must express my gratitude to Hayley Stevens. She lost a primary election for the Michigan senate to Abdul El-Sayed, but promised to endorse him anyway, and then over the weekend, just before the midterm elections, changed her mind and endorsed the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers. It was a breathtaking betrayal. A stunning stab in the back moment for Democrats. She has killed her political career.

And I love her for it.

She has single-handedly destroyed the slogan “vote blue no matter who”, tearing it into tatters, spitting on it, and wiping her ass with it. Establishment Democrats are dismayed — they rely on that knee-jerk party loyalty and hatred of Republicans to coast into re-election without having to actually do anything, and Hayley Stevens just made a vivid demonstration of the fact that you can’t simply trust someone because there’s a “D” after their name. The electorate needs to actually think and assess the merits of their candidate? That’s anathema to the Chuck Schumers and Joe Bidens of the Democratic party!

Thank you for your service, never-to-be-senator Stevens.

Of course, she never intended to blow herself up to advance enlightened democracy. As Jamelle Bouie explains, she was just a self-centered marginal democrat who lost her damn mind.

The midterm elections are tomorrow, and now you must take these candidates seriously (although you should have done that in the primaries) and vote for the best one who will improve your life in the years to come. It’s all weighty serious stuff, and no more of this reflexive “vote blue” nonsense.

Vittorio!

We’ll learn more when his limbs have extended and his wings have inflated and flattened. Right now we’re just happy that the ordeal is over and everyone is healthy.

There’s a sleepy little town, Appleton, just a few miles south of Morris. I’ve visited it a few times to check out the spiders there — there’s no other reason to go there, it’s not much of a tourist attraction. Population 1400, no particular businesses there, they had a defunct prison that was shut down 16 years ago, and many residents were concerned about the loss of employment opportunities. I’d like to see more good jobs there, too, but reopening a prison, or setting up concentration camps for immigrants isn’t high on my list of “good” jobs.

But right now if I look at broadcast tv or TUBI, they’re saturated with ads for GOOD JOBS in Appleton. They want nurses and educators and guards that they’ll hire with good pay, and the ads run annoyingly non-stop. The Appleton prison is open for business! Yay?

CoreCivic, the private prison company that owned the place, had previously offered to sell the prison to the state of Minnesota for the price of $75 million. The state turned it down. It was too pricey, required too much renovation, and would require far too much investment in building housing for workers. It was impractical.

The state ultimately decided against the deal at the time on the basis that it might be difficult to staff Prairie Correctional given its remote location – a nearly three-hour drive from Minneapolis-St. Paul – and costly to build new homes to accommodate the approximately 500 employees required to run it, concerns seemingly not shared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Hey! I live 3 hours from Minneapolis-St Paul! Looking at it from my perspective, that’s rather insulting, that this side of the state isn’t worth the investment, but OK — I should see this as a declaration that prisons aren’t worth spending money on.

So who bought it now? It was sold by CoreCivic to ICE. For $495 million.

Cool business strategy bro. It turns out that CoreCivic had donated half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee, and then ICE turned around and gave CoreCivic a half billion dollars for an old neglected building in a remote part of the country. So in that sense it was good return on investment, just corrupt and criminal.

It’s ironic that Minnesota has been the focus of a corruption scandal — $250 million was skimmed off pandemic recovery funds. That corruption benefited Somali people, though, so clearly bad. Benefitting wealthy white Republicans is not a crime. Minnesota investigated our local scandal and found that the chief perpetrator, Aimee Bock, was guilty and sentenced her to 40 years in prison. One can only hope that the instigators of the Appleton grift get an equivalent sentence.

Three little kids, the youngest no more than 3 years old…and our evil cat tried to kill them. Seriously: hissing, spitting, snarling, clawing at them, and I just managed to intercept the attack with my foot. After they escaped, she was prowling by the door, evil in her eye, waiting for her next victim.

She has now been locked in a back room. No candy for her. If I should die tonight, warn any people who come to my house that there is a dark wickedness lurking behind one of the doors, and to beware.

I’ve been telling you for years that this cat is literally evil. Do you believe me yet?

By the way, I’ve added potatoes to the candy bowl this year. Some kids are incredibly excited about getting a potato for Hallowe’en.