For what?

If we had a functioning press corps in this country, after Trump calls for the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago to be jailed, every reporter in the country should be asking the President, "jailed for what?" Make him name the crime that he thinks Pritzker and Johnson committed.

I realize this is a radical idea, but people are supposed to only go to prison if they commit a crime, not just because they say something that pisses off our toddler-in-chief. It's astounding to me that no one asks Trump the most basic follow-up question. If we are going to pretend that Trump's rants are not the incoherent ramblings of a person slipping deeper into dementia, then try to get him to clarify the seemingly insane things he says. If he still has a functioning mind, he should be able to handle a simple question.

ADDING THE BELOW VIDEO: Putting aside the fact that people should be asking the President about what he said, not a sniveling Congressional "leader" whose only act of leadership has been to completely surrender all independent powers of Congress, that is not the right question! Don't ask "should they be in prison." Ask why they should be in prison. For what crime?

Q: Do you agree that the mayor of Chicago and governor of Illinois should be in prison? MIKE JOHNSON: Should they be in prison? I'm not the attorney general. I'm not following the day to day on that

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) October 8, 2025 at 10:29 AM

Everything is Awful

It is not just awful in the Middle East. But because of the date for a lot of people, that is where the focus is. And Robert Farley convincingly (to me at least) argues that the Hamas attack set stuff in motion that made our current awful situation even worse:

And so for two years the worst people in the world have played out the script that was written on October 7, and everything is worse for the Palestinians. Everything is worse for the Iranians, and everything is worse for Americans, too; one need not invest too deeply in the factional conflicts around “Genocide Joe” or the continuing debates on swing-state polling to recognize that the Democratic coalition was badly fractured by October 7 in ways that were difficult to redress by November 2024. And today horrible people are in charge in Jerusalem, deep in the tunnels under Gaza, and in Washington DC.

I looked at my archives to see what I wrote about the attack two years ago. The first post I wrote after it was this one, which ended with this:

I don't know how this new war (or new iteration of an old war) is going to play out, but I do know there is no plausible scenario where it isn't awful.

This is less about my prognostications than the fact that "this will lead nowhere good" was obvious two years ago. And yet, the world marched right into nowhere good without much hesitation.

What Jimmy Kimmel said to get himself pulled off the air

I really don't give a shit about Kimmel or any celebrity, but it is utter madness that his show would be pulled off the air "indefinitely" for that.

Emoluments

It's weird how the word "emoluments" has completely disappeared from the discourse even as the President is openly courting corrupt deals to enrich himself.

The New York Times story behind that link (about how Trump is giving the UAE our country's cutting edge chip technology in return for the country paying off Trump for her personal enrichment) is very detailed. You'd just think that the fact that the Constitution specifically forbids the President from doing this would be fit to print.

Don Trump Quixote

We should all take a moment to marvel at the fact that all of us* are going to pay higher electric bills just because our demented President has an irrational hatred of windmills.

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* Well, by "us" I mean United Statesians, or at least most United Statesians. Mrs. Noz and I just got solar panels installed on our house so I'm hoping we mostly escape the energy-price-apocalypse.

Dear Leaderism comes to America

Back when I used to travel more, I would often take photos of what I called "dear leader" images. By that I mean public displays of the face of the country's leader which was, I dunno how to characterize it, hagiographic? Devotional? Something like that.

Anyway, here is Bashar Assad in Syria in 2005:

And here is Bashar's father, Hafez (the former Syrian president) from that same trip:

Here are various Shi'ite leaders (the only one I can name these days is Hassan Nustrallah on the left) in South Beirut, Lebanon in 2005:

Here is Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2007:

And here is Nursultan Nazarbeyev in Kazakhstan in 2010:

The reason I would take those photos is because I thought they were funny. There's a certain ridiculousness in a leader that needs his image all over the place to get people to love him. It speaks to a certain degree of insecurity. Like it is supposed to project strength, but by the fact that the images are posted, in actually projects weakness.

I think another reason I was so amused by them was out of certain feeling of cultural superiority. The U.S. is the most powerful country of the world. Our leaders don't need to make their lackies post images of themselves around the country. Only a narcissistic asshole would think images like that make them look good. My country's leaders, even the ones I did not like, were simply too smart to think that posting their big smiling face would do anything other than make them look desperate and insecure.

Fast forward 15-20 years. The U.S.A. in 2025:

I sense a pattern

The above photo are the four members of the National Labor Relations Board in 2023. Lauren McPherran's (she's the white woman who is second from the right) five year term ended on December 31, 2024. Thanks to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the seat was vacant when Trump came into office and there were only three members of the NLRB: the two guys on the left, and the woman on the right. Of those three, David Prouty (the last one on the left) and Gwynne Wilcox (the last one on the right) were the two Democrats, giving the board a democratic majority.

When Trump came in, he fired one of of the three (which is illegal, but the Supreme Court doesn't give a shit), which under the Noel Canning Supreme Court decision meant that the NLRB cannot enforce certain labor laws at the moment. Which one of the three did he fire? Obviously, it was going to be one of the two remaining Democrats, but would it be Prouty, the white guy, or Wilcox, the black woman? The question answers itself.

That's what I thought of when I first heard that Trump illegally fired a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors yesterday. Any guesses which one he canned?

I'm also fairly certain that if Lisa Cook were a white guy, Trump would have fired Philip Jefferson last night.

The big question now is whether the Supreme Court will give a shit about this illegal firing because it may spook the markets. Because unlike workers rights, due process, or the rule of law, spooking the markets is something that our corrupt court might actually care about.