Tweet It won’t be fun, but I urge you to think HARD on this one. As y’all know, all I want to happen with regard to the presidency is for Joe Biden to win reelection comfortably, and remain alive and healthy for four years, during which someone — I have no idea who — as suitable as he is emerges to succeed him. But as the philosopher said, you can’t always get what you want. (See video clip below. Or this one, if you prefer.) All sorts of things can happen. And it’s not just a matter of Joe’s age — look up “Kennedy, John” or “Garfield, James” or “Harrison, William Henry” — although his age m ..read more

Tweet Normally, I go to dump No. 9 (“number 9, number 9…”). But Saturday, I cranked it up to 11 (thank you, Nigel Tufnel)… It started with the B-12. I had been dragging recently in the mornings, so I thought I’d take some B-12 my wife had in a kitchen cabinet, but had quit taking. I let one dissolve under my tongue on Saturday, and it seemed to work. I loaded up my truck with stuff from our garage that we needed to get rid of, and set out to rapidly accomplish a series of tasks: Went to the pharmacy to pick up a refill. Wanting to give away anything charity might accept before going to the ..read more

Tweet This tweet from Mandy prompted a memory: Nice. And it reminds me of someone we encountered in Ireland in 2019: the Goat Man of Sneem. He sits on that stone wall along the Ring of Kerry, and lets tourists pose for pictures with him and his rather impressive goat… pic.twitter.com/tKUHzB0w50 — Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) June 5, 2023 I mean, I don’t want to outdo Mandy or anything, but that is some goat the Goat Man of Sneem has. Of course, her goat man has a great gimmick with the kayak and all, but still… He’s sufficiently impressive that I was fairly sure I’m not the first to write ab ..read more

Tweet After I posted last night about the debt limit deal, the Senate did as I had hoped and passed it. So that’s done. No thanks to Lindsey Graham or Tim Scott, who were among the 36 — all but five of them Republican — who voted instead for the United States to default on its debt, plunging the U.S. and world economies into turmoil. Graham, for his part, offered an excuse that gave us a glimpse of his old self, the senator we knew before he lost his mind in 2016 — he said it was about national security. But that doesn’t wash. I’ve seen nothing on his vote since it happened, but hours before ..read more

Tweet Thanks, Joe, for doing that grownup thing you do… Not to mention, of course, the little ol’ national economy. Those who voted against the deal Joe and Speaker McCarthy came up with to avoid the completely unnecessary spectacle of the United States defaulting on its debt were: Russell Fry Nancy Mace Ralph Norman William Timmons None, of course, were Democrats. There were some Dems who voted against the measure scattered across the country, but since all we have is Jim Clyburn — and Clyburn is a responsible grownup, the man who saved the country in February 2020 — we were spared that h ..read more

Tweet Well, here I go again — urging you all to read something that you probably can’t see because you don’t subscribe. But I don’t know what else to do. Once communities across the country were tied together by common narratives. It was cheap to subscribe to the local newspaper (because the cost of producing the paper was born by advertisers, not readers — and that’s gone away). Their local journalists generally weren’t necessarily oracles of wisdom (I just said “generally,” mind you), but they had little trouble agreeing on basic facts of what had happened, and report it. And a calmer readi ..read more

Tweet I was reading something in The Washington Post this morning, and I saw dese two mooks in a picture, and they looked familiar. My next thought was, When did THEY get so old? I mean, Marty looks like he could be Joe Biden’s dad! Johnny Boy’s not quite as bad, but can you believe he’s the guy on the left down below? The one below is from 1973, and I realize that was a couple of years ago, maybe a little more, but this is ridiculous! The dames aren’t gonna go for the guy in the picture above, no matter how many Seven and Sevens he buys them! On the upside, maybe Johnny Boy’s calmed down a b ..read more

Tweet Leslie Knope Twitter urged me to celebrate my “Twitter anniversary” today. So I guess I started doing that in late May 2009. Anyway, silly as it was, I complied: Twitter brings to my attention the fact that this is my “Twitter anniversary.” And I don’t have a speech ready, or anything… #MyTwitterAnniversary pic.twitter.com/wBRJDF5ZKW — Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) May 23, 2023 I got one “like” — from Mandy Powers Norrell. Maybe I should ask her to write the speech for me. After all, I wrote a speech for her once. Once. It was back during the campaign. James never asked me to write a s ..read more

Tweet I meant to post this over the weekend. But here you go… Our friend Lynn Teague retweeted this from up in the Midwest: Diocesan schools hiking tuition to cash in off the #schoolvouchers subsidy, other private schools taking it out of employee tuition discounts. #IAed adding more data to what we’ve long known from other states as vouchers kick off this month.https://t.co/nA3kXl7ldt — Josh Cowen (@joshcowenMSU) May 18, 2023 Her comment was to say this was where South Carolina was headed, what with those folks finally managing to pass their bill to pay parents to abandon public schools. (A ..read more

Tweet And after THIS, you were supposed to go to Papua New Guinea… NPR One has been driving me nuts. I listen to it (and Pandora, and podcasts) whenever I go out to walk, and I always start with their most recent hourly National Newscast. And every time I’ve called it up this week, it has started with a bunch of nothing about these alleged debt limit talks. Fortunately, it’s easy to wait for other news, because there’s never anything to report, so it only lasts a few seconds. But it makes me mad anyway, as I mutter, “Get back to me when it’s resolved, and when you do so, sum it up in a sente ..read more