Photo of the Day, 1/13
Month: January 2026
Americans Hate Everybody
Americans are some miserable bastards right now. The President? We hate him. The last President? Yeah, him too. Leaders in Congress? Congress itself? We despise them. Cabinet members? Members of the judiciary? Yeah, we hate them too. Some are hated so badly (Schumer) that they’re underwater with their own party’s voters. Almost all of them are hemorrhaging a significant number of voters in their own parties, relative to how many Americans even know who they are (View Pew’s numbers here and Gallup’s numbers here).
The truth is that both political coalitions that have ruled the country essentially since Buchanan have cracked, and we’re all just prisoners in the skeletal remains of the two parties. The old Reagan/Bush Republicans are now a minority in their own party, while MAGA runs the show, with a small smattering of Libertarians somewhere in their coalition. The Obama coalition still essentially rules in the Democratic Party but about a third of the party is somewhere between European social democratic (big government) politics and flat out Marxists and Anarchists. The only unity between these groups is essentially their desire to win Presidential and other office nominations for themselves. A lot of Mamdani backers have nothing good to say about Joe Biden, and can barely be considered a member of a similar political party, let alone the same one. When you consider both political parties are fairly unpopular, and neither can really be assured of getting a majority of the popular vote at this point, it’s hard to see a national figure any time soon that reaches 50% approval for a sustained period of time. People would rather cheer for literal terrorists than a leader from the other party, and that includes some segment of your own party.
A few weeks after the 2016 Election I was drinking in DC with some friends from the Obama days, and I said we were entering a 20 year period of darkness in the politics and government of this issue. Basically I said we’d have four or five Presidencies in that period (numerically we’ve had two people serve three individual terms so far), Congress would swing regularly (we’ve had four Speakers since, and the Senate has swung twice), policy would swing wildly (kind of became obvious in 2025), and political rhetoric would get even more adversarial than it was in 2016 (I underestimated the violent element). My theory was we’d get to the end of that and either be good (so still a functioning, sane democracy) and fine, or bad (I’m pretty sure right now we’re closer to whatever the fuck this is) and fine. Maybe I should not make predictions about the future on a December weekday in a Russian bar anymore. The voodoo really woke up on this one.
I have no idea who or what would be the unifying figure to lead us out of this mess. No one will be well liked enough. As is, I don’t think you can put “the old way” back together in DC after Trump. There may not even be anyone liked enough by our population to even make us stop calling each other scumbags and Nazis on social media.
Phillies and Hall-of-Fame Update
The Phillies reportedly met with Bo Bichette today. I don’t know if they planned to be in this position from the start or not, but here they are- Bichette is the clear best choice of all the offensive players on the market for the Phillies at this point. The only players who might be better, Tucker and Bellinger, are left handed. Bregman is gone. Eugenio Suarez is good, but considerably older. Okamoto and Murakami went elsewhere. Bichette might have always been the best option, given his age, what side of the plate he hits from, his potential positions, and how good of a player he is. Bichette is the guy the Phillies need right now.
The Phillies have not moved one dime of salary yet this off-season, and probably won’t until after Bichette is off the market and teams know what they need. Castellanos ($20 million), Walker ($18 million), Bohm ($10.2 million), Stott ($5.9 million), Marsh ($5.2 million), and Sosa ($4.4 million) are all still here, despite varying degrees of markets probably available. In fact, the Phillies payroll sits at a projected $302,705,437, including pre-arbitration contracts, deferment money from past contracts, player benefits, minor league payroll, bonus pool money, and all settled contracts. Bichette will have a very active market of big market teams interested in his services. Given that Bregman got $35 million a year for the next five years, it’s not unfair to think Bichette will get $30 million a year for the next ten, or damn close to it. Think of Trea Turner’s $27.273 million a year as a baseline here. The Phillies will also still need to do something about catcher and would really like to bring back Ranger Suarez. In other words, if Bichette is going to happen, expect a lot of creativity to happen fast.
Expect the Phillies to try to dump as much of Castellanos, Walker, and Bohm’s salary fast as they can. Of course, that is relative to them signing Bichette first. They are probably lining up the moving parts even as they figure out what they are able to offer to Bichette. Either this will be a quiet ending to an off-season that ultimately ends up largely with them running it back, or it will be a franchise altering roster shakeup that will resonate for years to come.
No big deal though.
*********************************************************************
Chase Utley is apparently gaining steam in Hall-of-Fame voting. Look, I’ll believe it when I see it. Each year he has wildly over performed his actual vote share among voters who release their ballot publicly when they vote. Those voters tend to be younger and tend to be more driven by advanced metrics, the two characteristics that coincide closest with voting for Utley. As of the last I read, he needs about 71% of all the remaining ballots to be for him to get in this year. I do not think he will.
Utley is a polarizing Hall of Fame candidate for a lot of reasons, but I do expect him to get in someday. I’m not sure he should, and I would vote for Jimmy Rollins first (I find analytics great for predicting future performance and awful for judging the final product at the end of their career), but the group think around baseball’s Hall voting is changing. Career milestone numbers and awards are being largely cast aside in favor of more in depth analytics and consideration of a player’s peak years in the league. Of course this new bias is largely driven by voters who view WAR (wins above replacement) as one of the better ways to judge a player, so guys with an even better peak five seasons (Ryan Howard), who played at a position with more elite offensive players (first base, outfield), and had less defensive value than middle infielders aren’t getting as much benefit here. I’d definitely have been a “no” on Utley two or three years ago, his peak just wasn’t enough for me. My mind is opening to this new way of thinking though, provided we take a longer look at a lot of other players who got passed by on the ballot.
Utley getting in will end up being really good for his 2008 teammates in the end. If Utley’s five year peak is enough to put him into the Hall, Ryan Howard’s also will now have a lot better chance than a lot of us would have thought when his career ended. Jimmy Rollins case is more based on his career milestone numbers (all time hits leader for his team, over 2,000) and his hardware (the MVP, gold gloves, All-Star Games, and ring), but I am not sure future veterans committees would pass over Jimmy if Chase is in. And if we’re putting in both, I’m suddenly a lot more alright with either one of them individually.
The Left-Wing’s MAGA Folks
Hamas is bad. Hezbollah is bad. Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Regime in Iran are bad. Maduro is bad. North Korea is bad. Cuba is bad. There’s a lot of bad with China. Russia’s government is outright rotten bad. Osama Bin Laden was bad. January 6th was bad. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were bad, and real. Ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavian Republics is and was bad. African militants, both national armies and terroristic groups, seeking to commit atrocities and ethnic cleansing, are bad. Pinochet and Pol Pot were bad. I could go on all day. Bad people and groups are bad people and groups. There is no “but” after any of them.
Of course who is good is a lot more complicated and requires caveats often. The Western World is largely a free and safe place today because the United States sacrificed literally millions of our sons and daughters to the cause of freedom. We also had slavery for our first eight decades, committed the Trail of Tears, and built Japanese Internment Camps. The British and French fought side by side with us in keeping the world from fascism, but their colonial pasts aren’t great. Germany is probably one of the best two or three countries in the world today, and for that matter so is Japan, but we’re eighty years removed from the worst war in the history of man being fought to stop them from raping and killing huge percentages of the Earth’s population. Hell, Stalin’s Soviet Union and even Mao’s forces in Russia fought on the right side of that conflict, before killing tens of millions of their own people. Lincoln and Johnson both held deeply racist views on a number of matters, and did more for the cause of Civil Rights than any President in American history. Good can be a very, very relative term, in a way that bad just can’t be.
There is no world though where whitewashing away the Holocaust and declaring Hamas and Bin Laden as freedom fighters is in any way, however minor, good. October 7th was pure evil, period. So was Pearl Harbor. So was Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The Iranian Revolution was not justified by the removal of Mossadegh, it was just outright evil too. Down is not up. There are red lines. Even if previous Presidents and Administrations didn’t enforce them, Assad was a very bad guy for crossing the red line and killing his people with chemical weapons. Yes, ISIS fighting against him was also bad. Some things are really just unequivocal.
Many of us have criticized MAGA and Republicans for accepting trash people and moral relativism in the era of Trump simply because it’s from people “on their side.” We would be remiss to accept these people on our side while criticizing them. AOC criticized protestors in a Jewish neighborhood of Queens for voicing support for Hamas. So did Mamdani. She was criticized by those on the far left. So was Mamdani. Now look, there’s plenty of reason to say she’s full of shit, and so is he, but I think any morally responsible person at least has to defend them here. Part of why I hate the far left is their inability to say up is up and down is down, so it’s nice to see they’ll do the absolute bitter minimum when forced. Bad is bad.
We all need to realize though that we are housing some folks in our “camp” who will literally side with any crazy terroristic organization or government if they are against the United States. These people are completely unacceptable. Making a joke about the Holocaust and Iranian protestors being killed isn’t a “moderate” or “reasonable” position, it’s absolute cosmic levels of freak politics. Taking the side of a murderous, hard line lunatic regime that is killing it’s own people by the thousand, while denying the Holocaust used to get you relegated to the fringes of American and Western politics, right along side of the moon howling crowd. It still should. These people are rotten to their core.
Bad is still bad. You can question plenty of things about America and our allies while still acknowledging that some people are outright bad who stand against us. Putin’s war in Ukraine is wrong. Hamas needs to be eliminated. The Iranian regime is bad. It is a minimum to understand this, even if you are criticizing Netanyahu and the Israeli government, the conduct of the war in Ukraine, or the ability of the Shah’s son to lead. If you can’t tell the difference between the troubled but civilized and the murderers and zealots, you should be cast out of acceptable democratic politics. The Democratic Party should stop equivocating on whether we want these people around. Any decent party should not.
Photo of the Day, 1/12
Photo of the Day, 1/11
Phot of the Day, 1/10
Photo of the Day, 1/9
A New Candidate, Crosswell’s Pile of Money, and Bob “Crooksy” Brooks’ Shady Finances Highlight the PA-7 Race
It’s 2026 now. The race for the Democratic nomination to face Ryan Mackenzie will begin to heat up now, and it appears to be expanding. According to Bernie O’Hare, we have two new candidates in the race- Independent Michael Ramon Granados Jr. and Democrat Aiden Alexander Gonzales are entering the fray. Bernie writes of Gonzales:
Gonzalez already has a website that sticks to bread-and-butter issues like jobs, the economy, housing and healthcare. He supports the American Health Act, which places all US citizens in a single-payer system. He also wants to incentivize real estate development (can you say tax breaks) and make it more difficult for foreign buyers to purchase real estate.
I don’t have word yet that he is running on David Hogg’s Super Pac’s slate, but that is a rumor. He is running on “Medicare for All,” a currently unfinanced plan to put all Americans on a single health care plan together. So that’s possible. As for Granados, the word is that he’s a Republican hatched Trojan horse to crack the Latino vote in the Lehigh Valley even more than it already is. That’s also just a rumor for now.
What’s more than a rumor is Republican Ryan Crosswell’s Q4 fundraising numbers- he reportedly raised $440k in the fourth quarter. That will put him at $1.1 million plus raised to date, an impressive number. Crosswell had been spending almost 40% of his money though, so figure he spent around $160,000 in Q4 and should have around $610k on hand after this. That’s going to be the most money in the field. Is that enough to protect him from Crooksy’s oncoming attacks on Crosswell for being from out of the area and being a Republican? Maybe. Maybe not. Crosswell might be a Republican, a union buster, and- oh just forget it.
Then there’s Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. I have no idea what he raised yet, but he’s going to be substantially behind Crosswell in cash on hand is my bet. Bob’s not very good with money, especially other people’s money. He may not be very good with his own either. Bernie O’Hare reports on his very shady financial disclosure report, and boy, it fits the pattern-
Robert Brooks. – reports assets and unearned income of at least $963,000. This includes a residential rental property valued at between $250,000 and $500,000 and the stocks in multiple mutual funds. He reports salaries of $20,000 from Bethlehem and $50,000 from the Pa Professional Firefighter’s Ass’n, as well as business income of $15,000 from his lawn care business.
He reports debt of between $380,000 and $850,000 based on a residential mortgage, an investment property mortgage, and outstanding debt to Darrell and Linda Crook. He failed to list a $130,000 judgment owed to Carol Wiley, his former mother-in-law, since 2022.
A title search of Northampton County records reveal that Brooks owns no real estate under his own name, nor is there any recorded mortgage in which he is listed.
Something is very fishy about Brooks’ disclosure.
Ok, so the guy who stiffed his mother-in-law out of $55,000 owns no real estate and has no mortgage, but he reports both a mortgage and a residential rental property in his report. He also doesn’t list the court ordered debt that he still hasn’t paid back to his former mother-in-law, but you know, that’s just a divorce gone bad, right? There’s always an excuse…
This guy is a ticking time bomb. If Democrats nominate him, Mackenzie and the NRCC will crack his entire life open and leave all of the worst parts out in the open for the public to see, with tens of millions of dollars of spending to make sure you see them. This would be an epic “own goal” of political malpractice.
The race continues…
“Honeypot Minneapolis” Just the Escalation of Pointless Violence in America’s Cities Under Trump
If you build it, they will come. That’s the old saying from “Field of Dreams,” and it is true. In normal times, law enforcement agencies don’t announce the places they are going to go and target for action, because it makes no sense to do that. In President Trump’s current America, ICE and Homeland Security announce when they are going to go into major American cities to conduct sweeps and raids. Does that make any sense? Of course not, they are tipping off actual criminals they should catch, and making the job of their officers harder. They do it though, because they openly want the attention. Not shockingly, their announcements attract people- supporters and protestors- who either want to make their voice heard or openly engage the action. This is reckless, dangerous, and stupid, of course. It’s asking for violence and engagement between extremists, agents, and civilians. It has had predictably terrible results.
A woman is dead in Minneapolis. Renee Good should not be dead. By now if you’ve seen the video, you know that J.D. Vance is full of shit as usual, and she certainly wasn’t making an attempt to kill the officer who shot her. Perhaps she was fleeing arrest, or just afraid, or even maybe trying to use her vehicle to intimidate the officers- all of which aren’t great things under the circumstances- but none of them would carry a death sentence, even on conviction (In fact, even if she drove at the cops and did try to hurt or kill them, she’d almost certainly not get a death sentence.). I really don’t know what she was doing there, or why she was there, and I don’t really care. I saw the video. The officer was never really in danger or hurt, and by the time he shot her, she was no longer a threat to any officer in any way. Renee Good didn’t need to die. This was absolutely stupid, inhumane, and pointless.
Kristi Noem and her trolls at the Department of Homeland Security are going to get a lot of people killed with this behavior, be they members of the public, illegal immigrants, or actual agents in the field. This serves absolutely no public or policy objective. If anything, this even makes raids to capture actual threats to the public harder. This is stupid and heartless to the core, and no one should be cheering it.
By the way, for those of you cheering this on and blaming the victim- here is your “injured” agent, who shot her.
Apocalypse Vibes 