The good news is that Conor Lamb has officially won a special election against a fervent Trumpkin in Pennsylvania.

Voting for Saccone is exactly what the president wanted his supporters to do. Trump cared enough about Saccone winning that he joined him on the campaign trail multiple times and sent Vice President Mike Pence and members of his family, including son Donald Trump Jr. and daughter Ivanka Trump, to stump.

He even pushed a controversial announcement on steel and aluminum import tariffs so it would land a week before the special election.

None of it worked.

Trump voters ended up either staying home or proving they could just as easily cast their votes for a Democrat with the right message, especially when Trump wasn’t the candidate on the ballot.

It’s a loud clear sign that Trump’s influence with the electorate is waning. However, I still worry — the Democratic party has a tendency to get over-confident and blow it in the long run. I don’t want us to be thinking we can sail to victory. I want Democrats to be worried.

Students all around the country are staging a school walkout at 10:00 this morning, including those at our Morris area high school. I approve. Unfortunately, this is just a protest with training wheels, tightly circumscribed by the powers-that-be — the students are only walking out for 17 minutes (in memory of the students killed at Parkland), and school administrators have hedged them in with stern warnings about how they will be penalized if they skip school.

It’s a start, though. Look at it as the school’s allowing a little bit of practical learning that will serve the students well in these Trumpian times.

Next step: make your parents and school officials intensely uncomfortable, throw off the chains, and fight for changes they dislike. Vote. March in the streets. Say rude words to old white men in power. Flip the bird at the president of the United States — he does not deserve respect. Question everything.

It’s the only way we’ll make this country better.

Baby steps today, but it’s a rehearsal for grander progress tomorrow.

Donald Trump has fired his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, but we’ve known that was coming for a long time, and this kind of chaos is standard operating procedure in his administration. I was more surprised by his firing of his personal assistant, John McEntee.

McEntee was one of the longest-serving aides to Trump and his position dates back to the early days of the campaign. Prior to that, it was mostly the president’s family that surrounded him, along with Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino and Hope Hicks.

He wasn’t well known in public but was constantly beside Trump for the last three years. His responsibilities consisted of having markers for Trump to sign autographs, delivering messages to the residence and ensuring the clocks in the White House residence were adjusted for daylight-savings.

Or rather, I’m not surprised at the firing, I’m rather more surprised that this job even existed. I could do those things! Maybe I’m more capable of a job in government than I ever expected. I’m honestly trying to imagine holding a position where my duties involve only being presentable, having a selection of pens in my pocket, and being able to carry pieces of paper. Of course there was the terrible twice yearly stress of having to cope with time changes.

I’m also impressed that someone could fall short in his performance of such a job.

I wonder if White House HR will be posting an ad for his replacement? I’d be curious to see the job requirements.

No, you don’t. But here’s video of the terrible, awful, hypocritical people attacking Revolution Books.

How often have you heard those fiercely principle free speech activists say that? Too often. How often do they actually mean it? Rarely.

Here’s a perfect example.

On March 3, a small team of conservative activists converged on Revolution Books in Berkeley, Calif. live-streaming their actions on Facebook with this description: “Infiltrating Berkeley’s Marxist Hive.”

“Fucking Commie scum,” shouted one conservative activist, taunting the bookstore employees who met them at the door. He wore an American flag on his shoulders and a “Make America Great Again” hat. “We’re gonna burn down your bookstore, you know that right? he said.

I’ve been to Revolution Books in LA, and they also have stores in New York and Chicago that I know of. I like the people there. They also have a thoughtful and wide range of books, and they’re about more than just selling books — they’re community activists, and they work hard to support the poor, ex-cons, anyone. They’re about as Christ-like an organization as you’ll find anywhere, far more so than most churches. So it’s shocking/not shocking at all to see the MAGA crowd threatening to burn them down, and actually making prolonged assaults on their right to exist.

Marxism is at the heart of the bookstore, founded upon the ideals of Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party and author of The New Communism. These values make the store a favorite target of conservative activists, and 2017 brought a wave of intimidation and confrontation. Last September, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos made a brief visit to Berkeley, an event that drew police from around the region. That evening, a band of between 30 and 40 right-wing activists stormed Revolution Books. The attackers also recorded that episode on video, rattling windows and confronting patrons.

Following that initial incident, activists orchestrated eight more visits to the store—posting their exploits in online videos. In one clip, a protester elbows a bookstore supporter in the face, smashing his glasses.

The harassment extends beyond physical confrontations. Right-wing activists also “dox” their targets, sharing opponents’ personal information online. In digital forums, these activists have released contact information for bookstore employees, patrons, and supporters. Revolution Books has received up to 60 calls a day from people mocking or threatening the store.

OK, I can’t get into Bob Avakian myself; if you don’t either, fine. But that shouldn’t matter. How can you use free speech to such an extent that you demand that Nazis be given free reign, while threatening and harassing people who sell books? The alt-right has killed people; Revolution Books offers them employment, help, and information. Yet I’ve heard almost nothing until now about this kind of abuse.

The “free speech” pretense is all a lie.

This morning, my wife and I went to the gym, and because the weather the past few days has been the worst — there’s a thick layer of slick ice beneath all the snow — we decided to walk rather than take the car. That may have been a mistake. It’s dangerously slippery for feet as well as wheels, and Mary did take one unpleasant fall (but she’s OK!). It was slow plodding, but the one good thing is that it took us long enough to do the hike that I caught up with my podcasts.

So, as I was picking my way carefully across the glaciers that are our sidewalks, I listened to this episode of Serious Inquiries Only, “Are We Headed for Another Depression? with Dr. Robert S. McElvaine”. Spoiler: the answer is probably, by the way. But they were talking about the history of our two political parties, and how even, over a hundred years ago, the Republican economic policy was all about rewarding the rich and allowing the benefits to trickle down, while the Democrats were all about rewarding the poor and middle class and allowing the benefits to rise up. They cite Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech, which is mostly about monetary policy and is ineffably boring to me, but does include this paragraph:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Reagan didn’t invent trickle-down economics, it’s been the nasty heart of the Republican party for a long time. They’ve been wedded to evil economic policy for a long time.

But then they also pointed out that the Democrats of that time, especially the Southern Democrats, endorsed wicked social policies, being against civil rights and equality, but then as we all know, in the Sixties, thanks to the infamous Southern Strategy, the Republicans adopted the regressive civil rights stance of the Southern Democrats, and there was a major recombination event. Before 1960, the Republicans had bad economic policy + better (at least, neutral) social policy and the Democrats were better economic policy + terrible social policy. After the Recombination Event of the Southern Strategy, Republicans were bad economic policy + terrible social policy, while the Democrats were better economic policy + better social policy.

OMG, I thought, this was elementary genetics. This is bog-standard theory for one of the benefits of recombination — it can combine deleterious alleles at different loci into single individuals who can then, by their elimination by natural selection, purge the gene pool of multiple bad alleles at once. For example, as mentioned in this recent paper.

Current theory proposes that sex can increase genetic variation and produce high fitness genotypes if genetic associations between alleles at different loci are non-random. In case beneficial and deleterious alleles at different loci are in linkage disequilibrium, sex may i) recombine beneficial alleles of different loci, ii) liberate beneficial alleles from genetic backgrounds of low fitness, or iii) recombine deleterious mutations for more effective elimination.

Cool beans! Now the Southern Strategy makes biological sense to me, at least.

All we need to do is purge the country of the Republican party, and we clean out two deleterious traits at once. That’s something to look forward to, anyway.

The frontrunner is Democrat Tim Walz. I scratched him off my dance card long, long ago: he’s got an A+ rating from the NRA. That ought to be the kiss of death for any politician any more.

On the other hand, Rebecca Otto has the recommendation of environmentalists and climate scientists like Michael Mann, along with an excellent record as the state auditor. She’s pro-democracy and pro-environment.

An A+ from climate scientists vs. an A+ from the freakin’ NRA. This one’s an easy choice. I want Rebecca Otto for governor of Minnesota.

The liberal media is a myth. It’s been bought and sold by the rich. Take a look at this critique of the editor of the NY Times editorial section, James Bennett.

By now, there’s a somewhat prolific repertoire of writings critical of Bennet’s tenure. The beef is primarily with the op-eds as opposed to the editorial page, which remains a champion of progressive values, especially on urgent issues like gun control, climate change and, of course, opposition to the policies pouring forth from the Trump White House. It’s not surprising that some of the most blistering assessments have come from anti-establishment precincts. Here’s Glenn Greenwald: “If your goal were to wage war on media diversity in all of its forms, and to offer the narrowest range of views possible, it would be hard to top the roster of columnists the paper has assembled . . . Beyond the obvious demographic homogeneity, literally every one of them fits squarely within the narrow, establishment, center-right to center-left range of opinion that prevails in elite opinion-making circles . . . None is associated with or supportive of the growing populist left or the populist right; they all wallow in the vague, safe, Washington-approved middle ground, members in good standing of the newly overt neoliberal-neoconservative alliance.”

It’s all got the same flavor, whether it’s the Sunday morning news shows or the op-eds of most of the elite newspapers: wealthy old white guys droning on to support failed ideas backed only by tradition. It’s agonizing to watch.

Charles Pierce forecasts the future.

You can almost taste the flopsweat from the elite political media. They’re warming things up in case there really is a Democratic wave in the fall. Experience tells us that, if that happens, the elite political media will immediately engage the dampers on anything a Democratic majority might want to do that is in anyway Democratic or (horrors!) liberal. Expeditions to the Trumpish hinterlands will depart immediately. Appeals to “bipartisanship” will deafen the gods. This is what happened in 2006, when the country revolted against George W. Bush and his many crimes and failures. This is what will happen next fall, too.

You’re seeing it with the hilarious contortions of James Bennet regarding how he’s putting together his Opinion staff, and this obvious ratings extravaganza is another indication that all the old tracks are being set down again. In 2006, this phenomenon helped with the efforts to toss the Avignon Presidency down the memory hole so that people wouldn’t notice how it was the logical end to 30 years of conservative politics. It’s going to take even more of an effort to do that with this disaster. No wonder they’re starting early.

I’m afraid that’s a safe prediction. Trumpistani’s win: we get stories about sad, stupid people who are unhappy that we don’t respect their self-harming opinions. Trumpistani’s lose: we get stories about sad, stupid people who are unhappy that they don’t get to inflict their self-harming opinions on the rest of us. The media will do whatever they can of the myth of the Golden Age of Trump, just as they’re resusciating George W Bush’s reputation, and as they’ve always enshrined the myth of St Ronald Reagan.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a reality-based media that was less interested in pampering the opinions of the yahoos who still buy their papers and more concerned with reporting facts? Bret Stephens should never have gotten a column, not because he’s conservative, but because he rejects the facts of climate change.

Drew Magary lets the NY Times editorial page have both barrels. It’s great stuff prompted by David Brooks recent excremental whine that we need to be nice to gun owners and Republicans in MAGA hats.

So let’s talk about rudeness for a moment, because we live in rude times. The president is a pig. His underlings are nothing but a bunch of opportunists and enablers. And the rest of GOP is staffed by a wide range of scum, from camera-friendly establishment monsters like Paul Ryan to outright crackpots like this guy. When the president’s own little pukeson decides to endorse a conspiracy theorist truthering the motives of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas teenagers, I feel like that’s a much greater sign of the end of civilization than someone rightfully telling a lady at the Times that she should take the L.

None of these people deserve civility. In fact, civility only serves to enable them. The fact that Trump can go party at his fucking country club on the same weekend 17 teenagers were slaughtered inside a school, and have NO ONE surrounding him say an unkind word to him, is damnable. And when Brooks cries out for “respect” for the coterie of stubborn gun owners who lap up the NRA’s propaganda, he is tacitly maneuvering to blunt the momentum of the Parkland kids who, with a welcome brashness, have kickstarted a very real and potentially effective anti-gun movement. He would like everyone to calm down. He would like everyone to think things over.

But this is not a time to calm down. Kids are fucking dead. Their friends are rightfully, and loudly, pissed about it. David Brooks has no right to tell people who are mad as hell to stop being mad as hell. He can afford to be calm and collected because he is so wealthy and sequestered that nothing truly awful can happen to him. His civility is a luxury. He only wants to talk about this shit in civilized terms because he lives a civilized life. His words are those of a man whose foremost experiences in life have happened inside his own rectum. He deserves to have his ass dragged every time someone hits PUBLISH on his behalf.

Oh, yeah. The NY Times has been scorned by Trump, so instead of seeing that as an opportunity to be free of any need to suck up to power, they’ve been frantically trying to appease the Republicans. This is the opposite of what a good newspaper should do.

We should be engaged in revolution right now, but Magary feels that violence isn’t the answer (I agree). So what can he do?

That leaves me with words. That leaves me with rudeness and the power to SHAME. In the real world, I do my best to be nice to people. I say “please,” and “thank you,” and I try not to be an inconsiderate prick. Sometimes I fail, because I am a big goober, but I do try. And I have tried my best to make sure my children aren’t rude, either. People who are rude all the time suck. You and I both know that. As a baseline, rudeness is bad.

But as a weapon, it’s vital. Rudeness is the proper option when polite entreaties for sanity are ignored. I am very rude online to people. I have regrets about how I’ve deployed this rudeness, but I do not regret being rude to those who have continually demonstrated that they do not deserve such courtesies. Ivanka Trump shouldn’t be able to fly in public without getting an earful from her fellow passengers. Your local GOP Congressman shouldn’t be able to stage a town hall without residents openly telling him to go fuck himself. And the Respectable Conservative arm of the Times deserves every non-threatening piece of hate mail they get.

All hail rudeness. It is the appropriate mode of interaction in rude times.