The latest is that Nikki Haley is within 4 points of Trump. Maybe things will take care of themselves after all, though Haley is nothing to write home about. She’s a drawly conservative who, one might think, would still need to be mindful of keeping the old Trump base happy. So in some ways it’s just going to be SSDD, just a different talking head.

A variation on the attitude that prevailed in 2020—“at least Biden isn’t Trump…”

As for Trump, the clown who has shamelessly taken up way too much of our time? Maybe people will finally take the hint that his “greatness” is truly a figment of his imagination, all in his head. And Stephen Miller and the rest of the Legion of Doom will have to look for other coattails to hang onto.

Holiday gluttony. Marketing blitzkrieg… starting in October, or maybe even September anymore. How about August?

The job of remembrance, of focusing on true meaning, is left to the faithful who have to navigate and stay the course, ignore the distractions and the temptations and the all-out assault on belief.

Christmastime translates to income and profits and the year-end chance to climb out of the red and into the black. Commerce and faith are unlikely bedfellows, though the dependence is a one-way street. Faith ends up being co-opted for the sake of commerce, the bottom line.

I’m just sayin’ stuff. Maybe I should call a timeout and try to lighten up for a day.

We had our good years, the magical years early on, before the inevitable awakening. The extended family would gather at our house for the traditional Christmas Eve feast and the first round of gift-giving and getting. Christmas music would be playing in the background.

We’d go to the late (11pm) candlelight service at church, which meant that by the time it was over we’d be able to greet each other with a bona fide “Merry Christmas” before heading home. We’d get home, probably take a while to fall asleep, then Mom would settle into the role she relished—wrapping and putting gifts under the tree until 2 or 3 in the morning (I know—I caught her in the act when I was 7 or 8).

And then we’d awaken at 4am and start our reconnaissance runs out to the tree. Not every gift was wrapped, but I’ll always remember that feeling of anticipation and discovery. I’ll always remember the aroma of fresh balsam, or whatever kind of tree we got.

It was a time like no other, but I don’t remember thinking about Jesus very much.

Sometimes it’s more noise than anything else. Pick your network, if you must, and don’t get yourself in a tizzy over worrying about “fair and balanced.” Fair and balanced is a myth. Everyone has a slant– not just Fox, though Fox stands out. If you have to make “fair and balanced” part of your byline, then chances are you’re not fair and balanced.

Fox News is the nation’s subversive counter-narrative, its loud, cackling voices dispensing a steady stream of audible pablum, vocal diarrhea. Definitely another county heard from, but populated by anchors and pundits who have operated in an oxygen-starved environment for way too long.

Watched A Charlie Brown Christmas last night. I’m feeling a lot like Charlie without the change of attitude after Linus’ recitation of Luke 2.

I want it to mean something, even if Jesus was born in May or whenever. It used to mean something, but maybe what I was feeling growing up was just the filling of senses and anticipation of gifts under the tree.

I don’t think such shallowness was all I was feeling, though. There was something else, something deeper and more difficult to explain. Not magic, maybe mystery, most likely hope, and a need to know that the Greatest Story… was more than just a story.

Still waiting for confirmation.

The Dodgers have committed a billion dollars for two players—Ohtani and Yamamoto. The pressure’s on, LA. No excuses now. One might expect that you should win a lot more than you lose.

Is anyone gonna be able to afford coming to a game, though? Like much of everything else, professional sports are going the way of polo and royal parlor games—a real stretch for the average fan.

No biggie—you can get a decent experience watching from the comfort of your living room on a 75” flat screen with a boffo sound system.

At a bare minimum, the headlines themselves are enough to raise blood pressure and trigger a gag response. I don’t really need to read the body of the articles.

The firestorm over the Colorado Supreme Court decision is predictable, but the argument being made for Biden to criticize the decision mystifies me. I guess Fox News hotheads and other critics are taking this route because it seems obvious (to them) that we should all be outraged by this “overreach” or “misread,” i.e. this legitimate reading and interpretation of Article 3 of the 14^th Amendment.

Of course the Right is incensed, but they’re supposed to be. That’s their role here. They’re also blinded by their mindless support for Trump, who clearly incited an insurrection on January 6. The provision in Article 3 applies to him. It has to. He gets no pass because he was President. He has created this situation himself, because he just can’t help himself.

If anything, the statute or rule or provision should apply to Trump in a more forthright way because of the position he held—he was entrusted with the highest office in the land. He promised to uphold the Constitution and he clearly decided not to do that.

And furthermore, a majority of us know he’s an incompetent blowhard, a puppet who had no business being POTUS the first time, never mind running for the office again!

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I guess I’m a glass-half-empty guy most of the time. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s just that I see what’s happening in the world and find myself less than optimistic about outcomes and trends.

History has taught me that bad players often enough get their way, if only for a time. They get to have their moment, even if eventually they are stopped or stop themselves when they see the walls closing in. They get to wreak the damage and the suffering they seem so keen on dispensing, their warped ideologies carrying the day for too long, reluctantly embraced by people too afraid or too desperate to question the propriety of it all.

The internal resistance is there, but it is easily controlled because it’s deprived of the tools that would make it a force to be reckoned with. Of course I’m talking about people like Vladimir Putin and maybe Xi Jinping, but especially Putin. It seems he has mastered the strategy of crushing dissent before it has a chance to spread too far and deep. He has mobilized the military to fight Ukraine and eventually prevail, emboldened to set his sights on the next target, maybe a NATO member.

I’ve been looking at everything differently lately—the minutes and moments in my daily life that I cherish and have mostly taken for granted. The interactions with family, the simple pleasures of electricity and internet and running water and food availability and all the creature comforts that contribute to making this life bearable and even enjoyable.

The insidious and maddening and frightening part comes when I realize that someone like Putin and his cohorts would love nothing more than to take away all those things, sabotaging them, fomenting panic, turning us against each other and creating chaos. We know that Putin and people like him hate us with a burning and blinding passion. He will stop at nothing to destroy us. This is what bothers me every day—that there is someone out there with the growing means to destroy our way of life, someone who dreams of doing exactly that.

It’s both rage-inducing and troubling, that we find ourselves needing to address this threat, distracted from tending to other needs that one might think should be more important.

The Colorado Supreme Court took the bold step, the one the lower court judge couldn’t take for fear of reprisals? I hope the precedent has been set and others follow.

There is no earthly reason for Trump to have gotten as far as he has—other than certain Constitutional provisions and political assumptions which are now, finally, being questioned; also the aforementioned fear, and legal processes that can be slowed to a snail’s pace by appeals and creative jurisprudence—i.e., lawyers pulling out all the stops, doing and saying whatever it takes to keep their troubled client happy and one step ahead of the jailer.

Chances are better than 50-50 that Trump has never read Mein Kampf, or any other tome with a dictatorial essence. I’ve never been convinced that the slurry emanating from his pie hole at a rally has originated in his own brain.

When he’s reading from a teleprompter, he’s reading someone else’s venomous sludge, happy to say it out loud only because he likes the sound of it. Trump believes, or at least speaks, whatever he thinks will land and stick with his diehard and woefully misguided fans. As Rachel Maddow reiterated the other night, he says stuff and assumes a persona simply because it keeps working for him. There are still plenty of easy targets out there who keep responding to the dog whistle, and Trump is only too happy to oblige them. He’s like a fifth grader who gets egged on by his classmates.

On the other hand, have you ever listened closely to the reaction of the audience when he offers up one of his outlandish proclamations? It’s often less than whole-hearted. So, maybe there are people in attendance who just come for the spectacle, and who end up uttering, more than once, “Wait, what did he just say?”