At 5:16 am, the internet died. Not for you, perhaps, but at Casa de SJ. No reason. It was just gone, which wasn’t exactly shocking as it disappears three or four times a week, for an hour or so, regularly. It’s been this way since Altice USA purchased Cablevision in 2016.

They still call the service Optimum, but the name is aspirational. It’s not a matter of a cable company being callous toward its customers, as was the hallmark of Cablevision’s service, but that they no longer deliver. The downside of a connected world is when the company you pay to provide the connection simply fails to deliver regularly, there isn’t much to be done. Continue reading →

At the end of The Candidate, Robert Redford, playing Bill McKay, who wins an improbable election, turns to his campaign manager and asks the question, “What do we do now?” For many who spent the last four years obsessed with hating Trump, this isn’t their concern. After all, Trump lost, which was enough. For others, there’s still a nation to deal with, and among a great many concerns, we’re still in an again-increasing pandemic.

So Joe Biden, what do we do now? Continue reading →

In Great Britain, they call it “an heir and a spare,” the queen’s duty to produce two boys, just in case something bad happens to the elder. We don’t birth our spares in America. We elect them, although we do so in tandem with the main event, so unless they’re Sarah Palin, so wholly unfit for office that the spare can be an unbearable weight on maybe the last statesman in our lifetime, they are more suffered than chosen.

The other big news of Joe Biden’s election is that we elected the first woman, and as it happens, a Woman of Color, that awful phrase that obscures the person behind the identity. Continue reading →

There are good cops. There are bad cops. They are often the same cop, but not always. But there is a deeper problem embedded in cop culture, dealing with what they perceive as society’s “mutts,” and it causes cops to perceive their fellow Americans, neighbors, human beings, as something less than human.

This has been thrown around as “systemic racism,” but it’s a worthless phrase that contributes nothing to finding a solution. It reinforces, instead, the “all cops are bastards” view, which is not only wrong and simplistic, but furthers the divide between police and the public they exist to serve. Is the objective to improve the relationship between police and the public? Is the objective to remind police that we’re all citizens, humans, neighbors? Continue reading →

Eventually, the cries of the rights will peter out because they’ve already lost, they have no hope of changing the outcome and their Fearless Leader will, after instructing Stephen Miller to trash the West Wing, slink away before the Secret Service unceremoniously assists his exit. Let it go, kids. He’s gone. The war is over. Trump lost.

But the next war has already begun.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) went ballistic on the party’s left wing during a conference call Thursday, blaming her unexpectedly narrow reelection on calls to “defund the police” and “socialism.” “We do not need to use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” she said. Spanberger is right as a matter of political strategy, but she’s delusional if she thinks the party’s left is going to go quietly.

Continue reading →

Tuesday I turn 40. I’ve finally reached a point in life where I resemble my spirit animal, Terry Funk: Middle-aged and crazy.

In celebration of this occasion I’m going to indulge myself and hand out some Unsolicited Advice from a self-professed middle-aged crazy man on the Internet who you should probably never listen to.

Unless, of course, you agree with me. Continue reading →

Assuming, as pretty much everyone does, that Trump will lose the election, then what? No, not whether he gets a talk show on Fox or fills his presidential library with classic comic books, or merely slinks back to his Trump-branded hotbed motels with gold-plated toilets, but whether he ends up a criminal defendant.

On the one hand, to the extent a sitting president cannot be prosecuted for a crime, he won’t be a sitting president anymore, and is as indictable, and prosecutable, as anyone else. Whether there is probable cause to do so, either on a state or federal level, may be unclear, although ham sandwich, of course. But assuming there is a basis to prosecute Trump, should we? Continue reading →

Much as Republicans sold their soul to Trump, the New York Times sold its soul against Trump. After 17,436 (estimate) editorials, columns and op-eds denigrating their nemesis, what do they have to show for it?

A larger percentage of every racial minority voted for Trump this year than in 2016. Among Blacks and Hispanics, this percentage grew among both men and women, although men were more likely to vote for Trump than women.

For Charles Blow, this must have been devastating. But it gets worse. Continue reading →

When a candidate’s primary pitch is that he’s not the other guy, expectations are created that his supporters will buy his stump speech. The problem for Joe Biden is that, while he most assuredly wasn’t Trump, were the people who would vote for him his supporters, or were they merely people who despised Trump more than Biden? It was all speculative until the election, but the answer to those who used the hashtag #SettleForBiden is becoming clear.

As Biden appears, at least for the moment, to have eked out a win, the anti-Trump kids might be happy about it, or at least calmer about the future than they’ve been for the past few years. After all, if they don’t riot for a night, if they give their guy a break just to make him not look like a total chump for courting their support when they despise him too, just slightly less than Darth Cheeto, they can always take to the streets next week. Nope. They had work to do. Continue reading →

It’s hard to be brave, so it only makes sense that Dahlia The Fierce would feel the need to redefine it down.

But it was Scalia, tag-teaming with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who insisted that much as we might wish otherwise, “The fact is that running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage.” He went on to point out, rather presciently, that “the First Amendment does not protect you from criticism or even nasty phone calls when you exercise your political rights to legislate, or to take part in the legislative process.” He went on, more or less shouting that “you know, you can’t run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known!” And—no surprises—Ginsburg had his back throughout. Continue reading →