Suggested new nicknames for the NFL team in Washington

Redskins is out, or likely will be. So what should replace it? Herewith, a baker's dozen suggestions:

Washington Gridlocks (per Benster)
Washington Red Tape
Washington Assistant Deputy Undersecretaries
Washington Orange Man Bads
Washington Weasels
Washington Ivy League Masturbation Society
Washington Deep States
Washington J. Edgars
Washington Swamp Thangs
Washington Strzoks
Washington Fanne Foxes
Washington Dirty Painted Whores*
Washington Fighting Hasterts

Vote for your favorite choice in the comments, or certainly suggest your own.

*per a certain former colleague of mine

Full display

Readers of this feature will remember that I was, during the 2016 election, in the NeverTrump camp. I hated being there, because I did not want Hillary Clinton to be president, either, but I had serious misgivings about Trump's demeanor and assumed he was going to do irreparable damage to the conservative cause.

Once he was elected, I took a "wait-and-see" stance. I also stopped being a NeverTrumper, because what was the point? In the 2+ years of his presidency, he's really helped to clarify a few things, to wit:

• His opponents on the Left are unhinged
• His opponents on the Right range from unhinged to cynical, sometimes both (a good trick, by the way, but watch Bill Kristol some time if you doubt this assertion)
• Nothing that the mainstream media says about Trump can be taken at face value

A liberal college-era friend of mine made an astute comment about Trump. My friend, who has struggled with mental health issues, objects to the "Trump is mentally ill" tropes that seem to be back in the air, now that Mueller looks to be a disappointment. He said this:

Apparently, [George] Conway thinks diagnosing Trump will some how confirm or nail down some "secret" about him. Trump is already on full display. We don't need psychiatry.

And that's spot-on. Trump has been on full display his entire adult life. What you see is what you get. So, having viewed the display of Trump, and the circus that surrounds him, what do you make of the display? 

Peter Tork, RIP

I remember watching old episodes of the Monkees television show in reruns, usually on Saturday mornings, but I was a bit too young to see them when they originally aired in the 1960s. Even if you've never seen an actual episode, the music was ubiquitous and you can easily hear a Monkees song any day on an oldies station.

Peter Tork was generally the bassist for the group and would occasionally show up on keyboards. Tork died yesterday, at the age of 77. Tork and guitarist Mike Nesmith were both talented musicians on the L.A. scene; Tork hung out a lot with Stephen Stills and it wouldn't be difficult to construct an alternate history in which Stills passed his screen test and had been a Monkee instead, with Tork becoming a member of Buffalo Springfield.

The Monkees were, as a band, pretty good. They had some of the era's best songwriters at their disposal and often had the services of the Wrecking Crew, the great L.A. session musicians, to help fill out their sound. It's easy to bag on the Monkees for being the creation of television producers, but their music is really a triumph of craft. Consider one of their better songs, "Pleasant Valley Sunday," written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin:

After a while, the Monkees tired of being mostly actors and eventually started doing more of the actual performing. And they did some nice work later in this later period as well:

 

Was it brilliant? Not particularly, but it was always tuneful and fun. That's an element of 60s music that's often forgotten; even the schlock was often well-done. A contemporary of the Monkees who had a lot of hits in the era was Johnny Rivers. He did a lot of covers, including this cover of a Willie Dixon blues standard, which includes some fun musicianship and a weird milieu of beautiful California girls carrying odd cargo:

At least in my own mind, I tend to add another group of 60s hitmakers to this collection. That would be Tommy James and the Shondells, who came out of Michigan and hit the charts repeatedly, always pressing the fun button:

This music lives on, and will continue to live on, because craftsmanship has its virtues.

Or don't

At the new Portillo's in Roseville, a suggestion you might not heed:

Dam

Separated at Birth/Putz Deluxe Edition

Separated at birth. First, smug fascist character from Animal House, Greg Marmalard:

Greg, honey, is it supposed to be this soft?

And Congressman Eric "We have nukes" Swalwell:

Legit

The Honorable Mr. Swalwell wants your guns and well, he's prepared to do whatever is necessary to get 'er done:

It's the only way to be sure

So talk to Swalwell. Or get nuked. Your choice, really. It is a dialogue, after all, although you may have trouble enunciating with his shoe on your throat.

Easy Rider

It's been almost 50 years since Peter Fonda was relevant, but I give him this much -- as an incoherent raging SJW, he's got mad skillz. His now-deleted tweets, for the record, with apologies in advance for the language:

Posterity cuts both ways, pal

He had more to say:

Not a particularly helpful suggestion

But then he had his best idea yet:

The Secret Service will take your suggestion under advisement

He's a charming man.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match

This amuses me:

The CD8 DFL had a very long convention on Saturday,  After ten ballots, everyone promised to go to the primary.

Nothing especially unusual htere.

The unusual thing?  The DFL trucked a bunch of Latino activists from the Twin Cities to canvass for the Metro DFL’s chosen candidate.

CD8 is pretty vast -- it extends from the far northern suburbs all the way to the Canadian border. But it's primarily a place where the local politicians that matter are from Duluth or the Iron Range. So, of course you'd want Alondra Cano to pick the candidate. Hit the link for more -- it's Mitch Berg, so you know it will be a fun read.

Game on

Ace Commenter Gino had the idea:

time for a Perve Pool. name 5 creeps who are going down before the end of the year.

i'll go...

Anderson Cooper
Roger Goodell
Geraldo Rivera
Chuck Schumer
Rahm Emmanuel

I'll play. I must say Gino has taken the favorite in the clubhouse. Geraldo doth protest too much lately. I would be more surprised if Geraldo wasn't one.

My five:

Stephen Colbert
Bill de Blasio
Joe Biden (hanging curve ball, amirite?)
Bill Nye
Ted Lieu

You can play, too, in the comment section. Pick your five. We'll post 'em and see what happens. Have at it!

Are you not entertained?

Le Grand Orange goes back to his favorite medium, yet again. To get the message you have to read the tweets in sequence from the bottom up:

God Save the Queens

The Leader of the Free World is not going to get an apology, but I'm pretty sure he's enjoying this development:

Three CNN journalists, including the executive editor in charge of a new investigative unit, have resigned after the publication of a Russia-related article that was retracted.

Thomas Frank, who wrote the story in question; Eric Lichtblau, an editor in the unit; and Lex Haris, who oversaw the unit, have all left CNN.

"In the aftermath of the retraction of a story published on CNN.com, CNN has accepted the resignations of the employees involved in the story's publication," a spokesman said Monday evening.

An internal investigation by CNN management found that some standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published, people briefed on the results of the investigation said. 

The story, which reported that Congress was investigating a "Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials," cited a single anonymous source.

I mentioned last week that I saw a fair amount of CNN coverage while I was traveling. That particular network has gone all in on Russia scandal-mongering and once you go single-source, you're essentially reporting whatever crap someone told you. It's not journalism, for sure. At best, it's gossip. And, as has happened before, I find that the Outer Borough Marmalade Man has weighed in yet again on that very topic, even as I am writing this post:

Shootin' fish in a barrel

I'm not even sure how to blog a guy like Trump. He's an internet troll with the nuclear launch codes. Amazing.

America's Sweetheart

Can you feel the love:

An exclusive

We've seen this sort of thing before:

It's only a movie

We've also seen Kathy Griffin with Trump in a different context, on his Apprentice television show a few years back:

Maybe he'll help my career

It's really not worth our time to try to understand the revenge porn tendencies of our moral instructors on the Left. I'm just putting the images down for the record. We're going to see and hear much worse.

Special counsel

We'll have to see how it goes. Chuck Schumer won't be satisfied unless he gets Trump's giant head on a pike. Can't control any of it, so for now we'll just keep watching.

Back in town

We were out last week looking at colleges. It was an enlightening trip. A few brief observations:

• If you want to know why colleges have become so expensive, go visit a few. The amenities at the schools we saw were top-notch. The dorm rooms at the schools were nicer than many hotels and the food service is quite good. You might see deferred maintenance and crappy food in some places, but the collegiate experience is quite pleasant these days. It's also unrealistic, because the real world isn't nearly so well scrubbed.
• I'd never been to St. Louis before. You can see the trouble from the highway in some places, but the areas around Washington University and and Saint Louis University were really quite nice. The prices for food and drink were also noticeably cheaper than in the Twin Cities. 
• On the other hand, Chicago looks worse for wear. The roads were terrible in certain areas we traveled, especially in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the far north side. Touhy Avenue is a major east-west thoroughfare and it had huge gouges in the pavement all the way to the border in Skokie. Make sure you get your shocks fixed before you attempt your passage.
• The Illinois Tollway system is really annoying. But you already knew that. The latest issue is that you are expected to pay, but there's no way to pay at certain entrances unless you have an I-Pass. I'm expected to go on to their website and enter my credit card to pay a 70 cent toll because I was on I-294 for all of three minutes. Sheesh.

Back to regular programming tomorrow.

Gravy

In the Star Tribune, a guy who is taking things very well:

Somewhere around 1:30 a.m. the morning after the election — an insurgency of white, rural Americans lacking college degrees having taken its revenge upon itself and the rest of us by granting power to a self-styled strongman with a long record of race-baiting, tax-dodging, creditor-stiffing, self-dealing, model-chasing, lie-disseminating and the hosting of rallies where journalists were confined to pens and subjected to taunts and promises of death printed on T-shirts (please, commenters, do tell us again about the Hillary Clinton e-mails) — I staged the only act of protest left in my immediate control.

I sent an e-mail to an in-law, telling him that his genial hockey buddy and Trump supporter friend Johnny was no longer welcome on Thanksgiving.

I’m not a hater. Johnny’s a good guy. He means well and has done nice things for me. I’ve known him 20 years. But I can’t feed him any more of my potatoes. 

It's a shame -- I understand the bile gravy he serves with his potatoes is quite tasty. We'll come back to that. There's more:

I made it to 3:30 the next afternoon before embarking on my next round of social housecleaning. By text, I put the question to a different relative, a note that read, let’s see, oh yes, here it is: “Please tell me you guys didn’t vote for that monster.”

Before the election, I had developed a vague inkling that this relative and her significant other — generous, warm, and good parents the both of them — might possibly have been considering a vote for the strongman. When six hours passed and she hadn’t replied, my forebodings only grew stronger — we trade texts about our kids in a heartbeat. At some point I sent over a curt follow-up: “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”

“Don’t get hostile,” she shot back. “I didn’t vote.”

And then you read on, and you start to wonder if it's a put-on:

On the third and final night of this reckoning by text, it was time to engage with a young cousin by marriage:

“Did you vote for Trump?”

I had been primed for confrontation with the young man, whose head is harder for me to impale on a spike because I have known him since he was a child. But he’s 30 now. And more to the point, when he arrived in my home last year for Thanksgiving and began pelting me with Sean Hannity talking points on the subject of police shootings of unarmed motorists, a thought suddenly occurred to me: Why was I making this guy such delicious gravy?

It's all gravy, fella. Then we get to the point:

Trump did us all a favor by showing exactly what would happen if an opportunist and political parasite with a compliant host party normalized the American subtext of racism, then brought it to a vote. Some of us see that as a vote to be subjected to a million small acts of social correction, not engagement.

So you don’t have to make the Trump supporters dinner, or remain their friends on Facebook, or keep sending them holiday cards. In fact, it’s probably better that you don’t, not if you don’t want to normalize the election of a man who seems poised to penalize his critics, run a hotel business with the national Treasury, bunker down under the counsel of blood relatives as all tyrants do, and foment anger within his base. Some of us have pushed away family over far less. And once you’ve taken a stand, they might have to think about what matters more to them — their fondness for the strongman, or you.

The choice might be easier than he imagines.

Primary Day

There really isn't much happening in our immediate area, but there are a few primaries worth mentioning in Minnesota, especially in the 2nd CD, where a number of candidates are vying to replace the eminently replaceable John Kline. I don't have a horse in this race; I used to listen to Jason Lewis back in the day, but I'm not certain he's appreciably better than John Howe or Darlene Miller. The fourth candidate running, Matt Erickson, claims to be a Trump supporter but in fact he has been doing an extended performance art piece in lieu of a campaign. I've seen some of it play out on social media. I'm amused:

Matthew Erickson is always one for a fight. In September 2004, like a scene out of Gran Torino, the 17 year-old heard a honk outside his home. Five young Hmong men had broken the window on his Ford pick-up. Without a second thought he raced out the door in stocking feet, unarmed, and chased them down the block. After trading blows, the police arrived to help subdue the perpetrators before they could get away. Matthew’s brother called the cops while bringing up the rear. The thieves were caught with the stolen property of a dozen other neighborhood vehicles. They had been terrorizing the city in this way all summer.

There is always a man who is hot for a fight and, ladies and gentleman, Matthew David Erickson is that man.

That's the intro on the "About" page on his website. The most amusing part of his campaign has been watching the MSM attempt to tiptoe around his candidacy. You're not going to Congress, Matt, but you might have a future at the Brave New Workshop.

A Great Season

The final results from WGI:

A great season

Hundreds of high schools compete in drumline. Sixty were good enough to come to WGI this year. We'll take that result for sure. Our kids worked exceptionally hard for months; winning a state championship and finishing 7th at the national competition is a great result. We're proud of all of them. And in about three weeks, marching band season starts.

Irondale Drumline -- 3rd Place after prelims

The top five schools:

Victor J. Andrew High School (IL)               92.900
Oak Grove High School (MS)                       91.125
Irondale High School (MN)                          90.925
Zionsville Community High School (IN)     90.888
Norton High School (OH)                             90.650

Long and the short of it -- we are doing great! We will perform again tomorrow afternoon and if we make the finals, we'll perform late on Friday night as well. Our outstanding season continues.

World Tour

Well, at least to Ohio. We're off to the WGI Percussion World Championship today. Our beloved Irondale Winter Drumline will compete in the preliminaries tomorrow at Wright State University in Dayton, with additional competition on Friday. As a result, posting will be a little light over the next few days.

Give the drummers some!

We are state champions, but we'd like to bring home some bigger hardware.

One big trophy hardly seems enough

Meanwhile, a whole lotta windshield time. More soon!

Vagaries of weather

As far as I can tell, it did not snow at all at my house yesterday. Near my office, about 25 miles away as the crow flies, almost a foot of snow:

The National Weather Service says an estimated 12 inches of snow fell on Savage by early evening Wednesday, before it began to taper off in the south metro. That total stood up at 11:56 p.m., when the National Weather Service updated the storm's totals.

Other reports include 11.5 inches of snow in Burnsville, 11 inches 2 miles south of Lakeville and 10 inc inches in several locations.

By contrast, as of 7 p.m., 3.7 inches was recorded at the airport, with 3.2 inches at the Weather Service's office in Chanhassen.

In downtown Minneapolis, snow was swirling through the taller buildings late in the afternoon but failing to coat the streets and sidewalks below thanks to temperatures holding above freezing. It stopped downtown in the early evening, and the northern suburbs largely escaped the early spring reminder of Minnesota’s reputation.

It was bizarre driving home yesterday. As I slogged through the streets of Burnsville, the snow was falling fast and hard and the commute was slow -- the plows could not keep up with it. As I made my way north, it looked like a particularly malevolent snow globe throughout Bloomington, Richfield and into south Minneapolis, but as I approached downtown Minneapolis, the snow was minimal. Once I crossed the Mississippi River, it was gone. I've never seen anything quite like it.

Bring Out Your Dead Pool -- Back for 2016

Fun for the entire family!

Because we were traveling in California last year, I didn't get around to renewing the Dead Pool for the previous year, so we just let the 2014 Dead Pool picks ride through 2015. As the year quickly comes to a close, let's take a look at where we ended up:

Benster's picks:
Jimmy Carter
Ralph Wilson -- RIP (3/25/14)
Pope Benedict XVI
Bashar Assad
Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Fantasy Football Superstar Gino's picks:
George H. W. Bush
Bob Dole
Betty White
Zsa Zsa Gabor
George Zimmerman
Angelina Jolie

My picks:
Eli Wallach -- RIP (6/24/14)
Theodore Hesburgh -- RIP (2/27/15)
John Kundla
Al Molinaro -- RIP (10/30/15)
Harper Lee
Rob Ford

Ace Commenter Brian's picks:
Dick Cheney
Fidel Castro
Billy Graham
#3 guy in Al Qaida
#2 guy in North Korea -- RIP (4/30/15)

First Ringer's picks:
Jerry Lewis
Kirk Douglas
John McVie
Valerie Harper
Frankie Muniz

The obvious conclusion? Celebrities who wish for longevity should find a way to have this distinguished panel select them to die. A second conclusion? Some people who were on these lists aren't in the news much any more. Does anyone think of Rob Ford these days? And the final conclusion: I kicked all y'all's butts.

So, here are the rules:

• Pick 5-6 people who you believe are going to begin the long dirt nap in the coming year. Five should be people who are old, infirm or notably reckless (the Amy Winehouse model), while the bonus sixth pick should be someone who no one would see coming.
• Previous competitors, should they choose to play, can carry over up to two of their previous picks to 2016. For the record, I am carrying over John Kundla, the former Minneapolis Lakers coach who is still hanging on into his late 90s.
• Send me your picks in the comments section by no later than the end of the day on January 3, 2016 to enter. First come, first serve!

One bit of housekeeping; other than Kundla, I'll have the rest of my picks made by end of day today; I need to speak to my elite actuarial advisory team first. Have fun!