GoodMorning!

Still waiting for Christmas Spirit to kick in, because I need it…

1 Plus it gives too much power to John McCain...No major tax bill, indeed no major bill at all, should be passed without at least some bi-partisan participation and support. This isn’t democracy, but some kind of freakish distortion of it, created by incremental irresponsible acts over time by too many politicians to name. I have my own favorite culprits, Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid prominent among them, but assigning blame can be left to objective historians, if there are any. Right now, what the U.S. desperately needs is a leader with sufficient courage and credibility to force both parties not merely to a table but to a serious and dedicated colloquy, with the objective of signing the equivalent of a peace treaty.

I cannot imagine who such a unifying figure might be, or if one can even exist in a culture where the likes of Jimmy Kimmel is accorded moral authority by a disturbing large segment of the population.

2. Bart Simpson would be proud…no, confused, actually. The latest effort to poison every last public refuge from toxic politics comes from the Right, which is encouraging the jerks among them to troll Starbucks in a variation of the old House of Pancakes gag we used to pull in college when we were drunk. (It also was a running bit on “The Simpsons.”) Starbucks writes the customer’s name on the holiday cups of their ridiculously priced concoctions, so the idea is to force the baristas at the openly progressive coffee shops to place the phony name TRUMP MAGA in view and actually announce it OUT LOUD.

At least the IHop prank names were funny, if you had the sense of humor of a 12-year old. ” I have a reservation for a Hugh Jass!” Bart used that one on poor Moe, too.

Supposedly this is payback from conservatives for Starbucks eliminating religious Christmas imagery from their cups, and this year adding what have been called “lesbian hands,”

….further defiling the holiday. I’m not kidding. People are actually complaining about the hands.

I think I’m going back to bed.

3. RIP, you idiot. And you thought Bowe Bergdahl was bad. Yesterday Lifetime Ethics Dunce Charles Jenkins died at the age of 77. In January of 1965, when he was  a 24-year-old army sergeant, Jenkins got drunk and went AWOL while on patrol near the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea. His idea was to avoid service in Vietnam, so he decided North Korea was a good place to go. Good plan! As his New York Times obituary reports with amusing understatement,  “He quickly realized he had made a terrible mistake.”

Jenkins  finally emerged from his self-imposed hell in 2004, after being abused, tortured and beaten. While being held in North Korea, he married a Japanese woman who had been kidnapped by North Korean agents, and had two children. The family lived in a Pyongyang home that usually had no heat during the cold Korean winters, growing their own vegetables and raising chickens to supplement their meager food rations. Jenkins never got back to the U.S., though he was court martialed by the U.S. military in Japan. As Roy Hobbs says in “The Natural,” some mistakes you never stop paying for.

And some mistakes are so stupid that this is completely appropriate and just.

4. Climate change porn from National Geographic.  Last week National Geographic distributed a video of a skeletal polar bear staggering across a snow-free field, encouraging viewers to see the suffering animal as a victim of climate change and a harbinger of horrors to come. The video set off a viral wave of anger at “climate change deniers,” who obviously hate polar bears.  Unfortunately for everyone, this is the dishonest, deceptive and emotional level at which climate change advocacy is being waged now. Not that it will dissuade the weeping hoards, but several arctic scientists have criticized the video as misleading as well as manipulative.