Cockburn

What is Washington to make of the President’s efforts to “make DC safe again?” If you’re only capable of measuring Trump’s actions by how authoritarian they appear, then, sure, his declaration of a state of emergency, seizure of control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilization of the National Guard must seem scary. Cockburn empathizes with the small number of DC residents – and larger cohort in other cities and around the world – who see Trump’s use of the powers granted him by the Home Rule Act as concerning. On his Monday evening constitutional around Northwest DC, Cockburn saw a number of arrests taking place, more MPD cars on the street than usual and heard a chorus of sirens cascading into the night.

Bride and prejudice As a great philosopher once said, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl. American womanhood is at an inflection point this summer, according to Cockburn’s nieces. Can a white girl wear denim and avoid being called a Nazi? Is being hot and an adequate dancer and in a Southern sorority allowed again? (When was it banned?!) Perhaps most crucially: what passes for decorum these days? That’s what Cockburn finds himself wondering after witnessing a rather unbecoming display of the American right’s finest female minds duking it out on X this week.

There’s no small irony in the fact that Texas Democratic state legislators, fleeing a congressional redistricting attempt by Texas’s Republican majority, have sought shelter in Illinois. They’re acting like political refugees in what is, in fact, the most gerrymandered state in the country. Look at Illinois District 13, which snakes up from the Missouri border nearly to the gates of Indiana, bisecting the state (and District 15) like Illinois’s small intestine. Chicago is a very populous city, but the state has carved up its Congressional districts like a turducken, giving us as many (D-Chicagos) as humanly possible. The Illinois Democratic machine has had an outsized influence on American politics, much less Illinois politics, for decades.

Kamala Harris reappeared last night, making a 30-minute guest appearance on the now-canceled Late Show with Stephen Colbert, to deliver this message of hope to the American people: The country is irretrievably broken and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. Hilarious! Momala said that everything terrible that was going to happen if she lost to Donald Trump has now happened (relatively strong economy, world peace) but the worst thing is that her fellow Democrats have “capitulated” to Trump’s fascist program of trade protectionism and renaming everything after himself. Harris, who recently announced that she’s not running for California governor, said she probably won’t run for President in 2028 either.

Street sweepers The Trump Administration’s plans to completely reshape the nation’s homeless policy got lost in last week’s tidal wave of news. They intend to address the “root causes” of homelessness by enforcing prohibitions on illegal drug use, urban camping and squatting. “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order,” the White House announced. This is  a curious order. It’s a reverse of a Reagan-era policy of emptying out the asylums and also a harsh rebuke of the policies of progressive cities, who offer safe consumption sites and Narcan vending machines.

In the surest sign of the permanent decay of Cockburn’s mind and soul, he spent all yesterday waiting for the President to post about the size of his appendage. The fact that Donald Trump has yet to do so fills Cockburn with sadness and ennui. This weekend doesn’t offer much promise either, as Trump is in the air on his way to Scotland. Maybe he’ll take some time to ponder his nether regions on Air Force One. The impetus for Cockburn’s hope comes from the season premiere of South Park, which portrays Trump as a selfish, horny imbecile, as it used to portray Saddam Hussein more than 20 years ago. Also like South Park’s Saddam, Trump has a homosexual love affair with Satan, who notices the resemblance.

The Republican majority in the House is down to +7: Representative Mark Green of Tennessee’s 7th congressional district officially resigned on Monday. Green was the subject of a rather messy scandal in his final term: his wife of 35 years initiated divorce proceedings last September, wrongly accusing the congressman of having an affair with a 32-year-old female Axios reporter in the filing. He was, in fact, cheating on her with a different young woman, who exonerated the reporter. “We’ve all had to basically grieve the loss of the person that we thought was our father,” Green’s daughter Catherine told local press at the time. “My dad sells himself in politics as being a Christian, conservative family man... His actions in the last, whatever, year have not been that.

The exclusive WSJ letter Cockburn nearly drove his roadster into a ditch when the Wall Street Journal broke news in the early evening that Donald Trump had written a letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday, which Ghislane Maxwell collected into a “leather-bound album.” According to the WSJ, the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair….The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.’” In an interview with the WSJ, Trump said the letter was fake.