You Can't Spell Leave Without Leavitt

 Karoline Leavitt is stepping down from her post as Information Dispersal Officer for the Second Trumpreich. To her credit, she has outlasted Kristi Noem and Tulsi Gabbard. Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Pam Bondi. If these names don't ring a bell, you may not have been paying attention to the exodus of people leaving the White House. Or what's left of it. Jeanine Pirro has taken to walking around with most of the stuff in her office boxed up just in case she "chokes" again. Once again I feel the need to point out the similarities behind all of these departures: A Y chromosome. 

Ms. Leavitt says that she is ending her tenure as the Orange Worst's mouthpiece because she wants to spend more time lying directly to her family. The family she started back in the dark days before the election of 2024, and added to in May of this year. The demands of generating a steady stream of fabrication while raising a toddler and an infant seems to have become too overwhelming for Karoline. 

If you're a fan of the way the convicted felon treats the press, you're going to miss Ms. Leavitt. Like the time she argued with Associated Press reporter Josh Boak about her boss' focus on tariffs, culminating with, "I think it's insulting that you're trying to test my knowledge of economics, and the decision that this President has made. I now regret giving a question to The Associated Press."

Or maybe it was the time she went after reporter Jasmine Wright's inquiry regarding protests, asking Karoline to "clarify what kind of protest President Trump does support or find acceptable." Karoline shot back, "Of course the President supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question."

How about the time she abruptly ended a press conference after being asked about the former game show host's support of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The same guy who earlier that same day told a Senate panel that he had visited the private island of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2012de, spite the fact that he had previously claimed to have ended his relationship with Epstein years before. Ms. Leavitt wound things up by insisting, "I will just point out that there are a lot of wins in the news this week that people in this room have not asked about because you continue to ask questions about the same subject so let me point them out for you." After mentioning gains in the stock market and a few other trifles, she closed her big book of lies. "So," she said when she walked off the stage, "we're going to get back to business. The President is very busy today and you will see him all tomorrow at the event in the East Room touting his Administration's energy policy."

In January of this year, a week after Renee Good was murdered by ICE goons, a reporter questioned how this could have happened if the ICE goons had been "doing everything correctly." Karoline's respsone? "Okay, so you're a biased reporter with a leftwing opinion. Because you're a leftwing hack. You're not a reporter, you're posing in this room as a journalist. And it's so clear by the premise of your question. And you and the people of the media who have such biases but fake like you're a journalist—you shouldn't even be sitting in that seat. You're pretending like you're a journalist, but you're a leftwing activist," she continued. "The question that you just raised and your answer proves you're biased. You should be reporting on the facts."

The facts.

Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job. That's a fact. My opinion is that the weight of all those lies were finally too much. Woman. New Mother. Man. Doesn't matter. That sort of thing will crush one's soul. 

Pop Goes The Culture

 I understand that I am a victim of my own feed. 

I eat what I click.

If, for example, temptation gets the best of me and I am curious which "Friends A-Lister" has "amazing chemistry with David Harbour," I will end up paying for it in loads more celebrity tea being dumped into my stream. To save you the somewhat inglorious suspense, I will tell you now that it was none other than Courtney Cox who showed up on the set of the movie "Evil Genius" which is currently in production and hit it off immediately with the "Stranger Things" star. Insiders would like us all to know that this is merely a "talent crush."

And that should be enough quotation marks for now. 

So I understand that I was gifted this bit of Hollyweird gossip because of some previous dalliance with articles about showbiz. Shocked as you might be to find out that when I am not tracking all the nefarious schemes taking place in our government and boardrooms across this great land of ours, I am more than just a little curious about who is dating or breaking up with whom and who will have to go to movie jail because their blockbuster underperformed at the box office. This can make for lively banter out on the playground with my fellow teachers. 

It can. 

And sometimes these conversational gambits fail miserably. They tend to fall into the somewhat soulless vein of "did you know?" Apologies for that brief return to quotation marks. I live at what could be considered the far end of the demographic when it comes to elementary type teachers. In order to stay current, I have found that keeping up with Tom Holland and Zendaya makes it easier to communicate with this younger generation. Attempting to stay current in an endless river of pop culture is no easy task, and I want to believe that I am doing my absolute best. 

But did I really need to read that whole article about Courtney Cox and David Harbour? And why do you suppose I found it necessary to bore you with the details here? I suppose if you've made it this far, I can tell you that I believe that it is a direct result of the genetic connection between my mother, who used to pore over every movie magazine in her parents' drug store, and even though she would eventually go on to be a voracious reader of all manner of literature, she still had one foot in the scandal sheets. Clark Gable's halitosis was legendary. He used to chase Vivien Leigh around the set of "Gone With the Wind" with his false teeth in his hand. 

And if that's not a "conversational gambit," I don't know what is> 

Courage Under Fire

 Discretion, we are told, is the better part of valor.

What I am about to relate to you is what some of us in the business refer to as "irony." I would also encourage you to listen to Lalo Schifrin's theme to Mission: Impossible as you contemplate the events of July 8, 2026. 

Under the veil of threats from Iran, the convicted felon boarded Air Force One as usual in Turkey. Then he proceeded to head out the door on the other side of the plane into a waiting catering truck. You know, the ones that rise up on on a scissor lift to load an aircraft with nominally edible refreshments before your flight takes off to destinations known and unknown. But mostly known if you're a real person. The former game show host does not fall into that classification, so in order to save the Orange Worst from potentially being shot down in that big blue and white plane, they snuck him off and put him and Pistol Pete Hegseth on another, smaller military aircraft that was neither the old blue and white version of Air Force One nor the fancy-schmancy Qatari upgraded version. 

Once back in the United Kingdom, the adjudicated rapist was loaded back into the old version of the 747 he had narrowly avoided riding in from Turkey to Suffolk, England. Reporters and other staff were told they needed to make the four hour flight with the blinds pulled on the plane "for security reasons." When asked about this strategy after the decoy flight had landed, the MAGAt in chief reminded us that in spite of his outward indifference to the death threats from the country he started a war with to distract from his nefarious dealings back home: "Well, yeah, because you’re probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleaze bags that we have to deal with."

Dangerous? Not for catering trucks. But certainly for the members of the press on board that big blue and white target up in the sky. 

Which brings me to my lingering question: If this was supposed to be such a big secret, how is it that a month after the fact it becomes worldwide news? What gaping hole in military intelligence allowed the details of this bait and switch that saw the twice-impeached "president" taken off his hyper-secure Oval Office in the sky and stuffed in a bin with Chex Mix and cans of V-8 juice? Is there a need amongst us all to know just how limited this buffoon's authority really is? 

Coming from the guy who has repeatedly called for the extermination of an entire country, dating back to April when he issued his version of a fatwa: "a whole civilization will die tonight." He's also the guy who blew up a school full of little girls in February. All that tough talk has him hiding in catering trucks.

And golf courses around the world. 

Boom!

Someone on social media recently asked if we would all be so kind to let them know when it is safe to eat lettuce again. 

From what I have been reading, this won't be anytime soon. Explosive diarrhea would be the consequence for finding out that perhaps you may have rushed that transaction. I don't know about you, but it's the explosive part of that phrase that gives me the most pause. "Explosive" anything seems like a bad idea in general, but if it involves your gastrointestinal tract, especially so. 

So, if eating lettuce has become a chance operation, what sort of alternatives does that leave us with? Well, if you're concerned about where your daily allowance of fiber is coming from, you might want to steer clear of products from Taylor Farms. For a good long time.

You might remember Taylor Farms from their company CEO's White House visit earlier this summer. the one that came just before the report that was going to be issued linking Taylor Farms with the previously mentioned explosive diarrhea. Somewhere in there a very large donation was made by Taylor Farms to MAGA Inc. Large to the tune of one million dollars. If you are not a gastroenterologist, you may not have pieced together the effects of a million dollars on explosive diarrhea. It doesn't make it any less explosive, but it can make it seem like less of a big deal to the consumer. Which didn't keep them from recalling all their iceberg lettuce this summer.

And now this same company, Taylor Farms, is recalling a dozen more of its products, including salsa and guacamole, for concerns about possible salmonella bacteria. If you're still curious about all things gastronomical, salmonella is the bug that can give you painful food poisoning. This time it wasn't the lettuce, but rather the jalapenos that were to blame. 

Or maybe that visit to the White House should have included a little negotiating with the Food and Drug Administration. The Second Trumpreich saw fit to cut thousands of positions within the FDA, including many who were overseeing food safety. Eliminating their jobs did not have the magic effect of making our food more safe. Instead, it would seem that the result was, in a couple words, Explosive Diarrhea. 

For now, I'll just skip the lettuce. And the jalapenos. Let me know when I can have Taco Bell without Explosive Diarrhea. 

If ever. 

Futility

 It is an exciting time. 

Back to school. 

I can remember how upset my son would be the first time he saw a reminder from retailers that it was time to stock up on binders and glue sticks. Or one of those snappy adverts reminding everyone it was time to go out and grab the latest cool looks for the return to the classroom. This eventually transferred to, in his senior year of high school, one of the more amusing things he did as the student in charge of the reader board stationed outside his last stand in public education. In the two weeks prior to classes coming back into session, he posted a reminder of the dates along with the warning: "Resistance is futile." 

I thought of this bit of chicanery as I worked long hours in the week leading up to this year's back to school day. Moving furniture. Lifting boxes. Repairing desks. And putting brightly colored and border up on the acres of bulletin boards that line the hallways of my school. Being a teacher has a great many long days, sometimes without breaks or respite from the grind, but these days of preparation bring their own level of stress and strain. 

I would have loved a chance to head out to Target to take advantage of all those Back To School values. 

Instead, I was honor bound to make sure that our school was ready for that moment when the front gates open and first graders would magically morph into second graders. Last year's fourth graders would suddenly find themselves at the top of the food chain in fifth. Would they notice the way the border on the bulletin board outside their classroom complemented the color of the paper behind it? Or would their attention be drawn to their friends' new backpacks and sneakers? 

I was once again surprised by the accordion folds in time and how close each one of these first days seem to cram together. I expect that those long weeks before Winter Break will still tempt me to rethink my understanding of infinity, as will the days preceding those Last Days of the year. Each of these countdowns will have meaning for me as what will be most likely the last to impact me in the same way as I waltz toward retirement. 

It is a force I may never be able to ignore.

Resistance is indeed futile.  

Big Deal

 I know. We're supposed to stand in awe of the deal-making prowess of the convicted felon squatting in the ruins of the White House. He got elected, twice, on this illusory power of negotiating and generating transactions that would create the kind of economy that only seems to exist in his tiny little mind.

That being said, the most recent revelation of the twice-elected and coincidentally twice-impeached very stable genius' business acumen caught me a little off guard. German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the United States after reaching a 1.2 billion dollar payout deal with the Second Trumpreich's  Department of the Interior. Pardon me for just a moment as I muse briefly about the fact that the department that deals with the stuff in our country that is outside is called "Interior."

I digress. 

Instead of wind, RWE said that it will now reinvest that great big wad of cash  into conventional gas projects, including nine hundred million dollars in a liquified natural gas export terminal project in Louisiana. This switch will no doubt please the knuckle-draggers in the fossil fuel business, who have been ever-so-pleased to rake in record profits as a result of the Epstein Files distraction disguised as a war with Iran. 

More opportunities to make money from dead dinosaurs. Meanwhile, China continues to embarrass us with their willingness to build and switch over to renewable forms of energy. Their onshore and offshore wind farms currently supply ten percent of their country's energy. 

The former game show host is paying companies not to do just that for the United States. RWF is not the only being paid to switch from wind projects to more "conventional" forms of energy such as liquified natural gas. Coincidentally, those massive data centers that seem to be popping up everywhere are often run on (wait for it) natural gas. As of 2017, gas emissions from stationary sources led to more deaths than coal in at least nineteen states. 

While we're struggling to gather the seventy dollars it takes to fill our gas tank, and watching as our utility bills continue to spiral out of control, the Orange Worst is paying companies to make our lives more expensive. That's what the tiny brain that bankrupted his own casinos four times came up with. High crimes and misdemeanors? I'd say this is yet another batch of evidence for the third impeachment. 

BOTD

 Born on this day:

My wife

The mother of my child

Writer in residence at Joaquin Miller Park

Daughter of Jan and Louise

Sister of Felix and Damian

Cousin to seemingly countless more

Speaking of countless, the number of personas and pen-names inhabiting this one soul defies easy accounting. 

But mostly, she's America's Friend, Polly Polka Dot. 

If you're planning a brief stroll or a visit to the local mall, you can expect to stop and chat with a great many human beings. Some she knows. Some she has met before. And then a great many who happen to fall within that great ray of interest that emanates from her. She wants to know what you're up to. She wants to be, as her title suggests, your friend. 

Now, this can make progress toward a goal difficult at times. Don't expect that getting from point A to point B to be a quick change. If you're along for the ride, you will be introduced because this is the way we grow a community. She will, on occasion, approach a person who she believes is already on her list just to make sure that the contact remains intact. "Do I know you?" 

If she doesn't, she will after she's done. 

Once upon a time, I gave an interview about this blog and suggested it existed to connect with strangers who were friends I haven't met yet. I said this was a quote from Fred Rogers. As it turns out, I was actually referencing a quote from Will Rogers. Such a tangled web of Rogers out there. Now that I have set that record straight, I would like to wish America's Friend, Polly Polka Dot, a happy birthday and appreciate her for all those strangers she has turned into friends. Sometimes it slows us down, but it's all worth it.