It's so easy to pick out one aberrant case and smear a whole group with it

if the perp is a member of a group that's already the other. An Afghani who was hired to do wet work for the CIA for the US loses his shit and commits murder for who knows what reasons, so now all Afghanis are terrorists and out they go. A troubled trans kid loses his shit and shoots up a church so all trans people are dangerous lunatics. But a white guy loses his shit and kills a state legislator? Or a white guy blows up a federal building? Or a white guy murders a doctor or bombs the Olympics or murders everybody at a prayer meeting? Oh, that's just that one guy, we can't judge other white guys by the actions of a few disturbed people.

Apparently there were no lapses; that is, nothing is actually missing.

But it looks like Lindsey Hooligan might have lied about the manner in which she presented the indictment to the grand jury.

What happened is that the prosecutor had presented the grand jury with two inconsistent indictments, the first with three counts and the second removing the first count. Both indictments were fully executed by grand jury foreperson and the prosecutor. After questioning the GJ foreperson the magistrate judge accepted the return of the second signed indictment, which was a new indictment that would have been presented to the GJ before being returned in open court. It now appears that may not have happened. The prosecutor stated that after the grand jury was left to deliberate on the first indictment at approximately 4:28 p.m., she had no further contact with the grand jury, and that about two hours later the acting assistant USA notified her that the grand jury returned a true bill on only two of the three counts of the first indictment. The prosecutor then went to the courtroom for the return of the indictment. The hearing on the return of the indictment began only about 7 minutes later.

The ACA subsidies were passed in the first place as part of the pandemic relief measures

included in the American Rescue Plan, and they were scheduled to expire this year unless extended. But there was never any way in Hell the GOP was going to agree to extend the existing subsidies past their expiration date; they've been trying to kill the ACA one way or another since it was passed. Was the reason for the shutdown to hold the GOP's feet to the fire they've always been willing to burn theselves up in? It's much harder to take away an existing benefit than it is to provide it in the first place, but evidently they would have been willing to keep the government shut down indefinitely, notwithstanding all the inevitable harm to millions of people and the economy in general. My question is, why did that handful of Dem senators finally agree to the funding bill? Was it the recognition that the GOP would gladly set the economy on fire and starve a few million children before they'd extend the ACA subsidies? Do they think some compromise extension can be negotiated? Some other reason? Cui bono? I'd like to understand, if someone can enlighten me.

The young ones just haven't developed filters.

I think we can be pretty sure that the same epithets and sentiments are bandied about in private conversations among older GOPers; they just have managed to erect filters that prevent them from saying such things in public or posting them on internet message boards. The younger ones, who have grown up with the internet, are used to its being their primary means of communication, and haven't figured out that the internet is forever and that anything they post is out there for discovery. I recall incidents years ago where some politician or public figure got in trouble for an off-color or racist joke or comment spoken in private but overheard and reported, or picked up by a hot mic.

Anybody remember Earl Butz, a Secretary of Agriculture during the '70s? He was forced to resign on account of remarks he made, which were so over-the-top awful that I won't quote them here, but they're at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz if you want to look them up. I'll bet the "grownup" GOPers say the same kind of things all the time these days, but they'd never have to resign because now it's the norm.

Almost every successive immigrant group was treated as inferior interlopers.

The Irish, the Italians, and the eastern European Jews probably got the worst of it at first, but even German and Scandinavian Protestants were frequently treated as ignorant and culturally backward. Many immigrants actually ended up returning to whatever their old country had been because America the Beautiful wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be. Once they or their descendants assimilated, though, formerly despised immigrants started pulling up the drawbridge behind them to keep out newer immigrants - Chinese laborers in the early 20th century, Japanese immigrants who were treated appallingly during WWII, and now it's Hispanic people from Mexico, central and south America. Everybody has to have someone to hate, I guess. Not to mention all the African "immigrants" who were kidnapped and "immigrated" involuntarily.

And then there's Trump, who - obviously having no idea of the history or original purpose of Columbus Day, decides it can't also be called Indigenous People's Day, as it still is in many states. Because who cares about the people whose land was stolen by the immigrants who then successively discriminated against each other?

Who thought evil despots could look so ridiculous?

When we think of evil despots we think of people like Hitler and Stalin and their henchmen. Scary, menacing people surrounded by more scary menacing people in black trenchcoats or military uniforms with scary insignia. But when we finally got our own despots, what did we get? Clowns. TV comedy villains. Dr. Evil with a whole cadre of Mini-Mes but without Mr. Bigglesworth because they're either afraid of animals or they shoot them. We didn't get the king, we got the court jester. We got a fat, demented old man in a baggy suit who paints his face orange and dyes his hair urine-yellow and swoops it into a weird, sorry combover. We got a smug, pudgy beardo who's been memed for having carnal knowledge of upholstered furniture and he's such a creep that it's believable. We got a preening drunk with delusions of manhood; a squeaky little simulacrum of a Secretary of State; our own version of Ilse Koch but with Mar-A-Lago Face, the body of a stick insect and the personality of a pit viper but dumber; an Attorney General whose only useful attribute seems to be the ability to be the Karen who demands to see the manager but a lot more loudly and imperiously; a press secretary whose lies will eventually cause the ostentatious cross around her neck to burst into flames; and an icky, Gollumish little caricature of Josef Goebbels. I didn't think the arrival of fascism would be more like the circus coming to town, complete with the freak show.

I have no doubt Trump and AG Barbie are counting on Democrats' dislike of Comey and Bolton

to reduce the fury that we should all be expressing about their entirely baseless, retributive prosecution. I'm not a fan of either of them. But I no longer give a single fuck about Comey's mishandling of the Clinton investigation or Bolton's awful foreign policy entanglements, and I'd be more than happy to be out in front of DoJ HQ with a torch and a pitchfork screaming about these absolutely outrageous, downright Stalinist efforts. If you're still holding a grudge against these guys, drop it right now, because "our" people are next: Adam Schiff and Letitia James are in the crosshairs now, and God knows who else - probably other members of the January 6 committee, Jack Smith, Fanni Willis, E. Jean Carroll and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. Maybe some Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom. There's the judge in Milwaukee who's already being prosecuted on a bogus obstruction charge. It doesn't matter that they've never done anything wrong; like despots everywhere they start with the target and sift through their lives until they find something that could be twisted into something prosecutable. Stick up for Comey and Bolton as if they were "our" people, because with respect to what's happening now, they are our people.

Yup. Not our circus, not our monkeys.

We have our own problems, and they are much bigger (and much more orange) than Britain's antiquated royal ceremonies, which they mostly seem to enjoy. They have a constitutional monarchy (like many other European countries, including "socialist" Scandinavia) which gives the monarch very little actual power. He's their symbol, a kind of mascot. We, on the other hand, somehow managed to elect a malevolent doofus who thinks he's a king and strives for the kind of power Charles doesn't have, and that his predecessors haven't had for centuries (the first Charles was executed by Parliament for treason).

Even the odious Ted Cruz just pointed out that hate speech is protected speech.

Are you kidding? The Martyrdom of St. Charlie is *all about* political points.

If Kirk had died in a more conventional way - a car accident, a sudden illness - I doubt very much that we'd be seeing this much commotion over his death. No doubt there would have been a lot of attention and many loving tributes from Trump and MAGA. Vance probably would have gone to his funeral. But a guy who gets accidentally run over by a bus or croaks due to a peanut allergy when he can't find his Epi-pen doesn't get to be a martyr - that's just a sad case of someone who died too young. The martyrdom is the big deal. The narrative is that Kirk was foully murdered by the evil Left Wing and not just the victim of yet another disturbed, gun-obsessed young white guy. This time the disturbed young white guy was one who was raised by gun-loving Republican Mormons in gun-loving Republican Mormon Utah, and who fell into some weird world of ironic Internet memes that he couldn't distinguish from real life and decided it would be the ultimate act of memedom to shoot Charlie Kirk, whom he disliked for yet-unknown reasons. But he might have had a trans roommate/girlfriend, which means he must have been a leftist, since "trans ideology," which doesn't exist, is leftist. Of course. That was enough to make Kirk a martyr to the evil Left, and we are told we must consider only the way he died and not talk about the way he lived. Hang him up there on the cross along with Jesus. You must worship St. Charlie, but whatever you do, don't quote him. Don't quote Jesus, either.