Bingo: “I don’t think there is any way to regain that trust other than have the viruses do the education, and the bacteria do the education, and then people will realize they paid way too high a cost.” Babies dying of whooping cough is already too high a price.
Those mesmerized by anti-vaccine propaganda may notice the problem of dead babies if there are more dead babies from their own circle of acquaintances.
For me, the bigger scare is the plan to stop vaccinating newborns for Hepatitis B. The effects of a childhood infection last a lifetime, liver cancer being one. Vaccination at birth reduced childhood Hep cases by 99%. The liver cancers come later, which makes them seem irrelevant to these guys.
The Common Sense crowd knows that parents hate for their babies to get shots, especially newborns, and older babies to get several shots at one time. It feels cruel, to make babies cry and maybe get very cranky for a few days. This feeling even makes sense to people who never had babies. Excuses/reasons to skip vaccinations are welcomed enthusiastically.
RFK, Jr. and his people are determined to find vaccines harmful, somehow. Autism MUST be the result of vaccines. Let’s see, could it be thimerosol as a preservative, or maybe aluminum, the new suspect. Could it be this, could it be that? Which vaccines? All of them! No, wait, especially mRNA vaccines!
Meanwhile, all other factors which may contribute to autism must not be studied. DOGE found it unnecessary.
Being a grandma who had to take infant grand for shots, it is painful. So was taking a three-year-old who knew enough to be scared. But as a parent, one should learn that doing difficult things is a big part of parenthood. What evil wuss would expose children to unnecessary risks. Grow up…
JDinTX, I’ve been there.Three-year-old in my lap for three bottles of blood drawn. Her mama was next to her ear with words of support. The screaming stopped the second it was over, it was fear. The baby sister had 2 or 3 shots in each thigh. No distress at all.
We grandparents used to understand about doing difficult things. Later generations, maybe not so much. I remember mothers determined to protect kids from “uncomfortable” masks during Covid. Another woman, supporting her child in a difficult experience, thought she should sit with her newly-graduated son during his first job interview after college. No, he wasn’t hired.
They should see some of the child sections of cemetery’s that I saw doing genealogy research. My mom took us for polio vaccine at first possible moment. Still have smallpox vaccine scar.
I knew some of those mothers (and a dad or two). I called them professional parents, the kid was their “project.” It rarely ended well, as you not red. My psychologist friend said benign neglect was preferable to excessive parenting.
“Florida is lifting school mandates for some vaccines, including the shot to prevent hepatitis B despite state Department of Health data showing cases have risen sharply over the past two decades.”
JoJo’s paragraph is a neon-lit fever dream of accuracy — a verbal Tilt-A-Whirl where three disgruntled possums run quality control inside the man’s skull while ego, confusion, and erectile insecurity grind under a flickering Motel 6 sign. She nails it, as always. She could vaporize a battleship with a single metaphor.
But here’s where my heart sags:
I’m tired.
Not “I need a nap and a vitamin gummy” tired — I mean democracy-tired, marrow-tired, the kind of tired where you stare at this country like it’s the worst rental property ever listed: mold in the walls, roof buckling, toilet stuttering like a man on camera without his cue cards. And outside? A whole army of writers and artists — righteous, blistering, back-breaking — pressure-washing the filth day after damn day… and the grime just regenerates like it’s unionized.
Trevor Stone Irvin brilliantly draws another cartoon of the same decomposing character doing the same stupid thing for the 4,000th time and writes with a mythic hacksaw.
Jeff Tiedrich fires off another sermon from the Church of How-the-Hell-Is-This-Our-Life™.
Every political cartoonist in America sharpens their pencils into dust trying to sketch one more angle on the same rancid circus.
It’s like watching brilliant people bail out the Titanic with vintage teacups — gorgeous, valiant, utterly doomed.
We’re all churning out the same take on the same vileness, over and over, as if language itself might finally deliver the country from madness. As if one more searing metaphor will wake up the masses who keep hitting the snooze button on fascism.
And the heartbreak?
None of it is moving the needle.
Not one trembling millimeter.
Some days it feels like all of us — the JoJos, the Trevors, the Jeffs, the Toms, the poets, the cranky old scribes sharpening their sentences like machetes — are shouting into the same cracked canyon, and the only echo that comes back is America mumbling, “Try louder.”
We’re documenting the collapse with such gorgeous fury that future archaeologists will think we died doing slam poetry.
We’re sweeping back the ocean with a broom.
We’re writing on the walls of Pompeii five minutes before the sky goes black.
And, I hate admitting this, but today I feel it like a bruise:
It shouldn’t take a nation of exhausted writers to explain why a man with possums for neurons shouldn’t run the free world.
A thousand times yes to this splendid summation of the split second when the patient known as USA began its flatline, historically speaking. If enough hearty DNA survives and can be cloned like Tom Brady's dog, we may be able to resurrect those qualities that once made us pretty darned good as a people.
C'mon, trumpstein is "never there" for anything. He didn't know who the cocaine dealer was that he just pardoned. He didn't know who the Chinese black market drug money mover guy was after he pardoned him. He didn't know what part of his body was MRI'd. He doesn't know anything, apparently, even though he seems to keep doing things like pardoning more and more criminals.
Herd Immunity is a term that has only been used as an after-effect of vaccine based immunization - i.e. enough people are immunized so that the disease is no longer a concern (like we used to be with measles). Using it in the context of not immunizing means people simply get sick, and many die. If we did their version of "herd immunity" during Covid, millions more would have died.
JoJo’s paragraph is a neon-lit fever dream of accuracy — a verbal Tilt-A-Whirl where three disgruntled possums run quality control inside the man’s skull while ego, confusion, and erectile insecurity grind under a flickering Motel 6 sign. She nails it, as always. She could vaporize a battleship with a single metaphor.
But here’s where my heart sags:
I’m tired.
Not “I need a nap and a vitamin gummy” tired — I mean democracy-tired, marrow-tired, the kind of tired where you stare at this country like it’s the worst rental property ever listed: mold in the walls, roof buckling, toilet stuttering like a man on camera without his cue cards. And outside? A whole army of writers and artists — righteous, blistering, back-breaking — pressure-washing the filth day after damn day… and the grime just regenerates like it’s unionized.
Trevor Stone Irvin brilliantly draws another cartoon of the same decomposing character doing the same stupid thing for the 4,000th time and writes with a mythic hacksaw.
Jeff Tiedrich fires off another sermon from the Church of How-the-Hell-Is-This-Our-Life™.
Every political cartoonist in America sharpens their pencils into dust trying to sketch one more angle on the same rancid circus.
It’s like watching brilliant people bail out the Titanic with vintage teacups — gorgeous, valiant, utterly doomed.
We’re all churning out the same take on the same vileness, over and over, as if language itself might finally deliver the country from madness. As if one more searing metaphor will wake up the masses who keep hitting the snooze button on fascism.
And the heartbreak?
None of it is moving the needle.
Not one trembling millimeter.
Some days it feels like all of us — the JoJos, the Trevors, the Jeffs, the Toms, the poets, the cranky old scribes sharpening their sentences like machetes — are shouting into the same cracked canyon, and the only echo that comes back is America mumbling, “Try louder.”
We’re documenting the collapse with such gorgeous fury that future archaeologists will think we died doing slam poetry.
We’re sweeping back the ocean with a broom.
We’re writing on the walls of Pompeii five minutes before the sky goes black.
And, I hate admitting this, but today I feel it like a bruise:
It shouldn’t take a nation of exhausted writers to explain why a man with possums for neurons shouldn’t run the free world.
God damn, this is the truest thing I’ve read. I find it difficult to watch Stephen Colbert anymore. Not because I don’t like him- I love him and his comedy has been a lifeline through these past 10 (holy shit 10!) years. But it’s not funny anymore because it’s too much and It’s too fucking real.
First, JoJo is merely reporting the results of 47's cranial MRI without any hedging. Pure poetry that would make Ferlinghetti and Hubert Selby Jr. envious.
RFKjr's agency is now a haven for all the medical misfits of this century--so far. If lives and well being were not at stake, the place would be a site for a TV comedy/horror show where the calls are all coming from inside the OR.
As for those slurpfests called cabinet meetings, I urge parents everywhere to quickly change the channel to the weather if there are children or innocent pets in the house. All that groveling sets an example that if followed will make all future pools of military recruits totally unfit.
Tom, I don't know how you can keep producing all this info and commentary without going outside and running around your house a few times between each frightful but illuminating paragraph. Absorbing the debacles of the day under this regime is enough to make me want to shake my fists at the birds, but I don't because they know things.
Bingo: “I don’t think there is any way to regain that trust other than have the viruses do the education, and the bacteria do the education, and then people will realize they paid way too high a cost.” Babies dying of whooping cough is already too high a price.
Those mesmerized by anti-vaccine propaganda may notice the problem of dead babies if there are more dead babies from their own circle of acquaintances.
For me, the bigger scare is the plan to stop vaccinating newborns for Hepatitis B. The effects of a childhood infection last a lifetime, liver cancer being one. Vaccination at birth reduced childhood Hep cases by 99%. The liver cancers come later, which makes them seem irrelevant to these guys.
The Common Sense crowd knows that parents hate for their babies to get shots, especially newborns, and older babies to get several shots at one time. It feels cruel, to make babies cry and maybe get very cranky for a few days. This feeling even makes sense to people who never had babies. Excuses/reasons to skip vaccinations are welcomed enthusiastically.
RFK, Jr. and his people are determined to find vaccines harmful, somehow. Autism MUST be the result of vaccines. Let’s see, could it be thimerosol as a preservative, or maybe aluminum, the new suspect. Could it be this, could it be that? Which vaccines? All of them! No, wait, especially mRNA vaccines!
Meanwhile, all other factors which may contribute to autism must not be studied. DOGE found it unnecessary.
Being a grandma who had to take infant grand for shots, it is painful. So was taking a three-year-old who knew enough to be scared. But as a parent, one should learn that doing difficult things is a big part of parenthood. What evil wuss would expose children to unnecessary risks. Grow up…
JDinTX, I’ve been there.Three-year-old in my lap for three bottles of blood drawn. Her mama was next to her ear with words of support. The screaming stopped the second it was over, it was fear. The baby sister had 2 or 3 shots in each thigh. No distress at all.
We grandparents used to understand about doing difficult things. Later generations, maybe not so much. I remember mothers determined to protect kids from “uncomfortable” masks during Covid. Another woman, supporting her child in a difficult experience, thought she should sit with her newly-graduated son during his first job interview after college. No, he wasn’t hired.
Many of us are old enough to remember polio. Would these parents prefer their children get the disease that's preventable? Good grief.....
Some young people are allergic to history. The 20th century is ancient history.
They should see some of the child sections of cemetery’s that I saw doing genealogy research. My mom took us for polio vaccine at first possible moment. Still have smallpox vaccine scar.
I've got more than 1 smallpox scar. I'm one of those people that the vaccine didn't last from infant to 6...
No escape from the responsibilities of being a grown up parent. Or grand, but one must
I knew some of those mothers (and a dad or two). I called them professional parents, the kid was their “project.” It rarely ended well, as you not red. My psychologist friend said benign neglect was preferable to excessive parenting.
“Florida is lifting school mandates for some vaccines, including the shot to prevent hepatitis B despite state Department of Health data showing cases have risen sharply over the past two decades.”
https://www.wusf.org/health-news-florida/2025-09-12/hepatitis-b-rising-florida-vaccine-soon-optional-infants
"Don Snoreleone." Priceless.
JoJo’s paragraph is a neon-lit fever dream of accuracy — a verbal Tilt-A-Whirl where three disgruntled possums run quality control inside the man’s skull while ego, confusion, and erectile insecurity grind under a flickering Motel 6 sign. She nails it, as always. She could vaporize a battleship with a single metaphor.
But here’s where my heart sags:
I’m tired.
Not “I need a nap and a vitamin gummy” tired — I mean democracy-tired, marrow-tired, the kind of tired where you stare at this country like it’s the worst rental property ever listed: mold in the walls, roof buckling, toilet stuttering like a man on camera without his cue cards. And outside? A whole army of writers and artists — righteous, blistering, back-breaking — pressure-washing the filth day after damn day… and the grime just regenerates like it’s unionized.
Trevor Stone Irvin brilliantly draws another cartoon of the same decomposing character doing the same stupid thing for the 4,000th time and writes with a mythic hacksaw.
Jeff Tiedrich fires off another sermon from the Church of How-the-Hell-Is-This-Our-Life™.
Every political cartoonist in America sharpens their pencils into dust trying to sketch one more angle on the same rancid circus.
It’s like watching brilliant people bail out the Titanic with vintage teacups — gorgeous, valiant, utterly doomed.
We’re all churning out the same take on the same vileness, over and over, as if language itself might finally deliver the country from madness. As if one more searing metaphor will wake up the masses who keep hitting the snooze button on fascism.
And the heartbreak?
None of it is moving the needle.
Not one trembling millimeter.
Some days it feels like all of us — the JoJos, the Trevors, the Jeffs, the Toms, the poets, the cranky old scribes sharpening their sentences like machetes — are shouting into the same cracked canyon, and the only echo that comes back is America mumbling, “Try louder.”
We’re documenting the collapse with such gorgeous fury that future archaeologists will think we died doing slam poetry.
We’re sweeping back the ocean with a broom.
We’re writing on the walls of Pompeii five minutes before the sky goes black.
And, I hate admitting this, but today I feel it like a bruise:
It shouldn’t take a nation of exhausted writers to explain why a man with possums for neurons shouldn’t run the free world.
⇊⇊⇊⇊
And yet… here we are.
I’m with you feeling that we are screaming into a void
This one gets printed and saved in my time capsule. I pray the language survives so future readers will know what 21st Century DESPAIR sounded like.
A thousand times yes to this splendid summation of the split second when the patient known as USA began its flatline, historically speaking. If enough hearty DNA survives and can be cloned like Tom Brady's dog, we may be able to resurrect those qualities that once made us pretty darned good as a people.
C'mon, trumpstein is "never there" for anything. He didn't know who the cocaine dealer was that he just pardoned. He didn't know who the Chinese black market drug money mover guy was after he pardoned him. He didn't know what part of his body was MRI'd. He doesn't know anything, apparently, even though he seems to keep doing things like pardoning more and more criminals.
Herd Immunity is a term that has only been used as an after-effect of vaccine based immunization - i.e. enough people are immunized so that the disease is no longer a concern (like we used to be with measles). Using it in the context of not immunizing means people simply get sick, and many die. If we did their version of "herd immunity" during Covid, millions more would have died.
JoJo's summary reminds me of a Tom Robbins novel.
Gloria and Jojo take the day! Thank you.
Thank you, TC...we need to start calling him "Sleepy Don". He sleeps more than Joe ever did!
His accusations are all confessions
Nap-oleon. Don Snoreleone. My new favorite, Bull Dozer. It's not his napping and sleeping that is such a pain; it's that he keeps waking up.
No, we are def not the crazy ones, but the whole lot of them are most dangerous the more desperate they get. Watch your back.
JoJo’s paragraph is a neon-lit fever dream of accuracy — a verbal Tilt-A-Whirl where three disgruntled possums run quality control inside the man’s skull while ego, confusion, and erectile insecurity grind under a flickering Motel 6 sign. She nails it, as always. She could vaporize a battleship with a single metaphor.
But here’s where my heart sags:
I’m tired.
Not “I need a nap and a vitamin gummy” tired — I mean democracy-tired, marrow-tired, the kind of tired where you stare at this country like it’s the worst rental property ever listed: mold in the walls, roof buckling, toilet stuttering like a man on camera without his cue cards. And outside? A whole army of writers and artists — righteous, blistering, back-breaking — pressure-washing the filth day after damn day… and the grime just regenerates like it’s unionized.
Trevor Stone Irvin brilliantly draws another cartoon of the same decomposing character doing the same stupid thing for the 4,000th time and writes with a mythic hacksaw.
Jeff Tiedrich fires off another sermon from the Church of How-the-Hell-Is-This-Our-Life™.
Every political cartoonist in America sharpens their pencils into dust trying to sketch one more angle on the same rancid circus.
It’s like watching brilliant people bail out the Titanic with vintage teacups — gorgeous, valiant, utterly doomed.
We’re all churning out the same take on the same vileness, over and over, as if language itself might finally deliver the country from madness. As if one more searing metaphor will wake up the masses who keep hitting the snooze button on fascism.
And the heartbreak?
None of it is moving the needle.
Not one trembling millimeter.
Some days it feels like all of us — the JoJos, the Trevors, the Jeffs, the Toms, the poets, the cranky old scribes sharpening their sentences like machetes — are shouting into the same cracked canyon, and the only echo that comes back is America mumbling, “Try louder.”
We’re documenting the collapse with such gorgeous fury that future archaeologists will think we died doing slam poetry.
We’re sweeping back the ocean with a broom.
We’re writing on the walls of Pompeii five minutes before the sky goes black.
And, I hate admitting this, but today I feel it like a bruise:
It shouldn’t take a nation of exhausted writers to explain why a man with possums for neurons shouldn’t run the free world.
⇊⇊⇊⇊
And yet… here we are.
God damn, this is the truest thing I’ve read. I find it difficult to watch Stephen Colbert anymore. Not because I don’t like him- I love him and his comedy has been a lifeline through these past 10 (holy shit 10!) years. But it’s not funny anymore because it’s too much and It’s too fucking real.
Comic relief still is welcome since it’s the only kind I get
First, JoJo is merely reporting the results of 47's cranial MRI without any hedging. Pure poetry that would make Ferlinghetti and Hubert Selby Jr. envious.
RFKjr's agency is now a haven for all the medical misfits of this century--so far. If lives and well being were not at stake, the place would be a site for a TV comedy/horror show where the calls are all coming from inside the OR.
As for those slurpfests called cabinet meetings, I urge parents everywhere to quickly change the channel to the weather if there are children or innocent pets in the house. All that groveling sets an example that if followed will make all future pools of military recruits totally unfit.
Tom, I don't know how you can keep producing all this info and commentary without going outside and running around your house a few times between each frightful but illuminating paragraph. Absorbing the debacles of the day under this regime is enough to make me want to shake my fists at the birds, but I don't because they know things.