JFC. It’s hard to tell who’s a bigger twat, Karoline Leavitt or Steven Cheung.
The Mean Girl Division of the White House communications office is some next-level shit. Good thing Vinnie Barbarino isn’t in the press corps. Dude wouldn’t last two rounds with these bitches.
You will recall that Professor Marvel, a.k.a. the Wizard of Oz, traveled by gasbag.
His very distant cousin in humbuggery, the Wizard of Ooze, likewise gets around on hot air, with an assist from other people’s money.
But I don’t expect we’ll see him at the 2025 Albuquerque International Balloon Festival, which begins today. Oh, sure, there’s a golf center at Balloon Fiesta Park, with a driving range and a six-hole pitch-and-putt course. But there is a distinct lack of screening foliage and even the most myopic of Repuglicunts could see him improving his lie.
The Great and Powerful Ooze might send the ICEholes in his stead (darn those bone spurs!). What a fine addition to the spectacle that would be — fats with tats in masks and battle-rattle snatching up brown people and stuffing them into locked baskets beneath unmarked black balloons, to be spirited away to Kansas or someplace even worse, flanked by escorts of flying monkeys.
But I expect those boyos are busy too, lumbering after nekkid bike riders in Stumptown or the more easily caught deep-dish pizza in Chicago.
Eat up, fellas! And don’t worry about the legs on the black olives. Ramón says they’re free-range. Organic.
Apologies to Johnny & The Distractions, whom I saw many a time whenever I invaded Portland back in the Eighties.
And yes, I have this album. More on Johnny & The D’s here.
“Tin soldiers and dipshits coming.”
Thus spake Charles P. Pierce about the governors of Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia sending National Guardspersons to “help police” the crime-ridden hellhole that is* Washington, D.C., which escalates the performative bullshit to DUMBCON 3.
Charlie further notes that Philip Bump, late of The Bezos Post, has assembled an interactive map “illustrating all the places in Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina that are actually more crime-ridden than Washington,” yet somehow muddle along with nothing heavier than the local coppers.
Parody throws its arthritic paws in the air and says, “Chieu hoi! I give.”
* Or is not.
I have no idea where or when I made the acquaintance of Tom Lehrer, who has gone west on us at the ripe old age of 97.
But I was immediately enthralled. What a mind!
I couldn’t do math at gunpoint. What few resources I possessed were directed at trying (and often failing) to make people laugh.
But Tom Lehrer could do both, and seemingly with ease. Numbers and words alike danced to his merrily sardonic tunes.
In the end, he chose academia over comedy. I expect his GPA was a wee bit more impressive than mine. At the age of 18 he received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard; at that age I was a freshman on drugs and academic probation at Adams State College in Alamosa, Colo.
As Lehrer’s obit in The New York Times recounts:
His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.
I never caught his mathematical act at those venues. But I saw him perform on TV a time or two, and heard him now and then on FM radio, both freeform and public. My faves were “Wernher von Braun,” “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “The Vatican Rag,” and “A Song for World War III,” which I suspect may have inspired Randy Newman’s “Political Science.”
And five years before he left us on Saturday, he remembered us in his will. Well, on his website, anyway, where he announced that:
[A]ll the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.
In other words, he relinquished the rights to all his songs, except for the melodies of a few that used his words but someone else’s music.
The curtain may have rung down, but his satirical legacy survives. So long, Tom, you never dropped a bomb.
Mad Blog Media 
